Year of Darkness - Part 8 - 2286 by Owen Townend

 

Tor padded along the blood-drenched walkway. Bodies lay strewn against the white steel walls, missing limbs, but he refrained from temptation and hunger pangs.

            When he boarded the ship a month ago, the motion sensor overhead lighting had proven a useful feature but now it was just relentless; an artificial stalker pursuing him through unexplored shadow. He could hear every slight click as a new bulb flickered into life. If he stood still too long, some even whined.

            He raised himself onto his hindlegs and turned to a starboard window to marvel at the perfect dark beyond. Deep space, approaching galactic central point. The SS Chieftain was nearing its destination, a planet with inhabitable conditions. As soon as Ulrich had confirmed that the voyage was two months from arrival, Tor had ordered the attack. Not so much a massacre as a targeted depletion of the ship’s human crew and passengers. Only 40% had been slaughtered. He had learned restraint in his old age.

            Tor used a black claw to pull out a chunk of anaemic ensign from between his yellow teeth before continuing to the observation deck. He was captain of the ship, after all, and his pack would be awaiting further orders. Captain of the SS Chieftain. If only old One-Eye could see him now.

            In his way, Odin had inspired Tor’s life’s work. The god had made meddling in mortal affairs look such fun, not to mention tactically astute.

            To think, when Odin had tried to spear Tor back in 536 for turning one of the Allfather’s bastards into a werewolf, Tor thought the wise deity had become cock-eyed. When you have spread your seed throughout Midgard, why rage when one son succumbs?

            Still William must have been uniquely precious to warrant the old fool hunting Tor in human form. Odin could have just cast Tor out while he was still at the height of his power. However this vendetta was personal and so Glad ‘o’ War was doomed to fail. Spying the warrior Bjorn nearby, Tor suspected a fresh play for blood and so smote down Odin’s champion before the ambush.

            Tor then hid William from his father for five hundred years, feeding the boy’s bloodlust and preparing him for a further clash with the God of Wisdom and Death, or rather his pet mortals. This suspicion proved correct when Bjorn’s bloodline continued and yielded fiercer sons than each previous generation. When Bjorn the Second and his brother Erik came into their own, Tor took a chance. Using false prophecy, he turned the lad and waited for bestial rage to pit brother against brother.

            Of course that was when Odin revealed his hand. He kept the brothers alive and united long enough to set sail for Northumberland ,and laid protection on Bjorn the Second and his wife Helga. Tor retreated for a while but used that time to line up the next skirmish.

            Ships crossed and William was ‘discovered’ by Erik, Bjorn and Helga. When the moon shone the following night, wolf met wolf in terrible combat. Bjorn and Helga did not last long, too foolhardy to leap overboard while they still had the chance. Then again, neither wolf stayed the course either, Erik using his last vestige of sanity to drown William in the murky depths of the sea.

            This broke Odin. Already made frail by his followers abandoning him for Christ, the god crawled off to wherever condemned deities fade away. There was no answer to Tor’s ingenious strike or even the pain of a rediscovered child being snatched away from his heartsick father for good. So it was that Odin the Hooded One retreated into complete obscurity. All that was left of him now was a ship named the SS Chieftain and a few library books telling his tale as myth. Meanwhile Tor remained more real than he had ever been. Of course, his fallen enemy had inspired that. Without Odin’s passion for family, Tor would never have become a father himself.

            Tearing his gaze away from the beautiful, unbroken absence of light outside, Tor fell to all fours again and ran the remaining distance to the observation deck. From the artificial wind resistance against his thick grey pelt to the tandem clatter of paws bounding across the metal grill floor, he revelled in the run though it passed in less than a minute.

            He turned to the reinforced titanium doors which now shined with spittle. His betas had apparently licked the blood off it while he had been away. Tor smirked. Though the thumbprint scanner had been smashed, the doors slid open at the slightest gesture of his muzzle.

            On the other side, the observation deck stretched in all directions, each wall replicating the same curve as the huge main window. Out of every deck and room of the SS Chieftain, Tor knew that this space was the only one that had barely been touched. No-one was allowed to handle the controls aside from Ulrich and even he knew to wait for the arrival of the new captain.

            Tor glanced around him at his gathered pack, beta males to port and mates and runts to starboard. Only one stood beside the captain’s chair at the centre, his long-ago chosen life mate Erica. She glowered at him as he approached.

            “Husband,” she said. Her appearance was more humanoid than the rest, with a fine down of brown fur over a small nose. She affected this sometimes to frustrate him.

            Tor grinned. “Erica, my love.” He settled into the captain’s chair without taking his eyes off her. “I trust everything and everyone is in place?”

            “The pack is ready for your next bloodbath.”

            “And the remaining mortals?”

            “All safely sealed in the cargo hold.” Erica pointed to a bank of monitor a few metres behind the chair. “Lorelei and Sasha are watching them, primed for their next attempt at escape.”

            “Next?” Tor’s eyes flashed.

            “There have been two attempts so far. The first involving an unexpected staff override and the second an improvised explosive which failed.” Erica smirked. “You know humans better than any of us, husband. Always striving. Never accepting the closing maw of fate.”

            Tor grunted. “Ulrich handled it?”

            Erica gritted her mildly sharp teeth. “Yes. Our grandson remains a wonder.”

            It never failed to amuse Tor how embittered Erica was about his pride in Ulrich. Though she never voiced it anymore, Tor knew she still blamed him for letting their much less impressive son Meric die. The only remarkable thing that the would-be monk had ever done, was sire a child with aristocracy. Everything else about Meric had not been worth saving from his fate at the guns of Robert Newton.

            Meanwhile Ulrich was a marked improvement on his father. Tor saw a ferocity in the boy’s eyes from the day Agnes Newton released him to the wild. Scooping the babe up from an overgrown crossroads, Tor set his mind to bestowing Ulrich with all his grim knowledge and survival tactics. And from there, the boy gained some new ones. It had been his idea to revisit the Newton family in the 18^th Century. Tor watched with pride as Ulrich lured Georgina Newton outdoors and tore her apart.

            Ulrich approached the captain’s chair now and bowed his head. He held a tablet device in his auburn paw, manipulating it with human fingers on his other hand. This aside, Ulrich looked the very epitome of a dignified wolf, with his thick mane and tall ears.

            “Ulrich!” Tor said. “Your grandmother has been singing your praises. Well done for keeping the humans in their pen.”

            “Thank you, sir,” Ulrich replied. “Our course remains clear and our destination is now less than one lightyear ahead. With the Chieftain’s hyperdrive, we should close that distance in mere seconds.”

            “Good,” Tor said with a toothsome grin. “I will give the order.”

“Of course.” Ulrich lingered a moment. His ears twitched. “Sir, I have received requests from the other beta males to extract a portion of the remaining humans so we may feed when the planet is in sight.”

            “Denied,” Tor growled, turning to stare down each of the beta males. “We must keep our food supply in good number till landing. The prey on this new planet may be few and far between while we establish our colony.”

            “I understand, sir,” Ulrich replied in a slightly petulant tone. The cur might well be hungry, but he had helped plan the crew's depletion. Only 40% of the population were to be slaughtered while aboard the SS Chieftain. Ulrich had worked out this percentage himself.

            Greediness aside, he was a canny lad, keeping pace with advancing technology. Though he had struck a severe blow to the Newton family, he made sure their name and reputation became synonymous with scientific development. Returning to Agnes’s descendants, Ulrich used his birth right to the Newton wealth to invest in ambitious projects involving the study of dark matter and artificial intelligence. When the computer program named Newton triggered an artificial year of darkness in 2036, that was at Tor’s behest. He had done his best work under cover of uncommon shadow and would do so again. When the 21^st Century fell dark, he, Erica and Ulrich had used it to bolster their numbers ahead of the inevitable journey to a new home.

            In the hushed quiet of the observation deck, fatigue and impatience clashed within Tor. His empty stomach grumbled and he yearned for earth between his paws. No more artificial light pursuing his every move; only a natural glow would suffice.

            He turned to Ulrich. “Activate the hyperdrive.”

            Without a word, Tor’s grandson set about this. Swiping a human finger across the tablet screen, Ulrich then stepped aside to check that his instruction had in fact gone ahead. When he returned to the captain’s chair, the SS Chieftain shunted forward at a nauseating rate that rattled Tor’s pronounced canines. He watched as several of his betas regurgitated half-digested digits and eyeballs onto the clean tiled floor.

            “Apologies, sir,” Ulrich said. “The hyperdrive was only intended for use when the crew entered cryo-stasis.”

            Tor nodded. “It is a good thing that we have the stomach for such surprises.” He turned his snout up at the bent-over wolves. “Well, the best of us.”

            “The oldest of us,” Erica added with snide emphasis.

            Tor’s claws dug into the captain’s chair armrests. He was about to firmly dissuade his life mate from making further remarks when the observation deck window was filled with light. Natural light.

            The new planet was glorious, more conical in shape than the Earth, like a gigantic green serpent’s tooth. According to scout reports, their new home was almost entirely forested. The canopies were so thick in certain places that it almost seemed like day was night. A perfect hunting ground when it came to it.

            However that was not what made Tor and his pack gasp now. The planet was ideal, but that which orbited it was better. Three moons, each three times larger than Earth’s modest solo satellite. It was these that reflected the light of the SS Chieftain tenfold.

            Tor did not know which of his kin bayed first but the rest soon followed. Ulrich’s howl rose high above all others. Even Erica could not suppress her yowl for long. At last Tor matched his own voice to the celebration, and showed his pack the timbre and power of their alpha.

            When all fell quiet, he announced, “After centuries of tooth and claw, survival and hunting, our kind has finally gained its dominion. No longer do we kill when called to, we now eat at any time and forever. My pack, Midgard is well behind us. I welcome you to our new promised land. Fenris.”

            And so the wolves returned to their howling as they entered the planet’s atmosphere. Ulrich maintained a steady entry, Erica finally bowed her head and Tor salivated over the future.

            The triplicate moonlight broadened before them.