It's the middle of World War One, British planes are being shot down in droves. Can a reluctant young werewolf flier save the day?

Today’s story is the first of two parts of “Jaeger” by Anhedral, a musician and writer whose short stories have appeared in ROAR and in Werewolves Versus. Most of his work can be found at http://www.furaffinity.net/user/anhedral/

Today’s story will be read for you by Crimson Ruari, the Mountain Smith.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.

Today’s story is the first of two parts of “Jaeger”

by Anhedral,

a musician and writer whose short stories have appeared in ROAR

and in Werewolves Versus.

Most of his work

can be found at http://www.furaffinity.net/user/anhedral/

Today’s story will be read for you by Crimson Ruari,

the Mountain Smith.

Please enjoy “Jaeger”

by Anhedral, Part 1

of 2 For thousands of years –

really, for as long as any histories of wolf or man could relate –

werewolves had lived by two sacred rules.

Avoid all of the affairs of humans.

And never – ever – harm a wolf.

The result had been an uneasy, but apparently stable, co-existence:

humans, the numerous ones,

the clever, warlike ones,

the ones with nimble minds and fingers forever bending the world to their whims;

and the wolves, bigger,

quicker, stronger,

nature-tied and fur-clad, casually aloof and supremely uncaring of the lure of gold. In 1917,

in the midst of what men would later call the war-to-end-all-wars,

that frail edifice finally came tumbling down.

And may the Great Sky-Wolf herself forgive me,

it was this poor narrator who played a part in bringing the world as we knew it to an end. *******

Royal Flying Corps aerodrome,

Biggin Hill Surrey,

England April 22, 1917

My wolf ears pick up voices from behind the heavy door;

a moment later the handle turns, and the two military policemen who flank me snap smartly to attention.

The door swings open to reveal a weasely, balding man wearing a captain's stripes

and the unmistakable air of an Eton toff

born to privilege,

just another jumped-up something-on-the-staff who's never going to get his boots dirty in a trench.

"Ah." This ‘something' clears his throat.

He won't quite meet my eye. "Cooper.

Please come in."

His scent is heavy with disdain and fear.

I know I probably shouldn't,

but I can't quite stop myself:

I give him a quick glare and a flash of fang,

just like the cur he thinks I am.

He gasps and stumbles back;

behind him I glimpse bright bay-windows,

dark-panelled walls,

and an enormous table standing four-square in the centre of the room.

Fresh scents, now: a pungent reek of wood polish,

overlain with the stale smoke of oak logs and cigars.

The two MPs, unbidden, shadow me through the door.

The one on my left has a twitchy finger that's altogether too close to the trigger-guard of his Webley for my liking.

Heaven help him if he tries anything...

But next, it's my turn to be surprised – because damn me if the other person waiting quietly in the room isn't Trenchard.

Not a 'something', not this one.

For this is Brigadier-General Sir Hugh Trenchard,

gaunt and stern and sporting that trademark close-trimmed moustache that I recognise immediately from the broadsheets.

The Commander of the Royal Flying Corps,

come to meet personally with a wolf.

I don't give a shit about his highfalutin title – the knighthood and those silly military ranks matter to humans, not to wolves –

but the wings sewn to the olive-green of his tunic mark him as one of my own.

The serial number of his aviator's certificate is 270,

if memory serves.

The number stamped onto my own is 312.

I feel my nostrils flare; he's a pilot, and that's enough for my respect.

Although I still won't call him 'sir', I do hide my fangs and perk my ears up tall, giving him a curt nod.

The smile I get in return is firm but not unfriendly.

To his credit, the man seems unfazed to be this close to six-foot-six of muscled, grey-furred wolf

who's wearing not a stitch of human clothing.

He doesn't smell scared of me at all.

"Cooper. Thank you for coming.

coming." We've never met before,

but even so I could swear there was an undertone of genuine remorse carried in that single phrase.

And then, to the two MPs:

"Thank you, gentlemen. You can go now."

"But, sir!" Captain Something is all a-fluster. "Cooper here, he's a trained killer!"

Trenchard is mildness itself.

"Yes. Yes, he is. But he only became that way by human hands, no choice of his.

his." He nods sharply to the two MPs, who this time do not hesitate.

As the door clicks shut

he turns back to his subordinate, who's stood there rooted to the spot

and looking appropriately aghast.

"The army's guard-dogs are not needed here right now, Captain;

I'm sure that we can all be civil.

Please be so good as to brief our guest." "S

-sir!" The idiot actually clicks his heels and does his best to recover.

He reaches for a fancy wooden swagger-stick that's propped against the table.

"Here's the thing, Cooper.

Got a bit of a show brewing up in northern France."

I sigh, and feel my tail hang slack until its bushy tip

brushes the parquet floor. 'Bit

of a show' is British Army-ese for 'massacre', I'm guessing.

They must be desperate if they're calling in the likes of me.

And so I amble over to the map that's splayed out there, its edges curling and corners dog-eared.

The baseline cartography is a spiderweb of Flanders villages,

fields and roads;

some of those settlements have,

I know, been obliterated by countless high explosive shells fired by one side or the other.

Overlain, the coloured hieroglyphs of military symbols:

the zig-zags of trench on trench,

men by the tens of thousands reduced to so many pretty little codes and squiggles,

the choreography of carnage.

Captain Something turns up his nose and sniffs, disdaining. "The Kaiser's gone and found himself a brand new hotshot.

Some Baron apparently, name of Manfred von Richthaven –" "Von Richthofen, Captain; let's at least do the good Baron the courtesy of getting his name right.

Manfred von Richthofen."

I can't help but grin as Trenchard takes over the briefing.

"A bloody good flyer, and a brilliant tactician to boot.

Been reorganising the Jastas, picking up right where Immelmann and Boelcke left off;

he's cherrypicked the best of the German pilots for Jagdstaffel 11,

turned it into a sort of highly mobile killing unit,

shifting between different airfields all around the front.

They've got those new Albatros D.III vee-strutters, painted up in every colour of the rainbow.

rainbow." Trenchard huffs, grimly. "Von Richthofen's Flying Circus is what they're calling his outfit –

and his planes are tearing our squadrons to shreds.

shreds." ******* RFC Arras, northern France

April 25, 1917 4:38 am

Douai, sixteen miles east of Arras:

that's where the Circus is flying out of right now.

According to the latest intel, anyway.

If the top brass haven't got that right – well, there's not a lot that I can do.

They've

trained me, trained me well to do their killing,

knowing I have not the slightest choice in the matter.

At least they've given me the best damn crate in the RFC with which to it.

It's a brand new model, this SE5,

not even out to the squadrons yet.

Biplane, painted black as pitch from radiator to rudder.

A tweaked Hispano-Suiza V8 for a powerplant,

pushing out two hundred horse;

a beast. Big ol' two-bladed prop right up front.

To left and right, the upper wings reach out above me like some monstrous raptor mantling its prey.

My fur prickles. Even just sitting here quietly on the lush pasture of the Pas-de-Calais my plane feels dangerous,

a death-bringer made incarnate in doped fabric and taut steel wire.

The very air seems to quicken around her.

In the faint eastern glow an hour before the dawn she seems high-strung,

impatient to get on with the single task for which she was designed:

the prosecution of wholesale

airborne murder. She will never shirk from her task – not in the right hands.

Or in the right paws, in this case.

Some airmen will tell you the SE5 is an ugly plane, all boxiness and awkward angles,

but if they know what's good for them they'll make sure I'm out of earshot before they say those things.

Ugly she may be, but she's my sort of ugly, and I love her to distraction.

Probably just as well.

If I'm going to die inside a cockpit, it ought to be the cockpit of a bird I love.

The shadowy form of Wainwright emerges from around the nose. The man pats the manifold as if the engine were a well-loved pet, and glances up at me.

"All fuelled up. Ammunition’s topped off, every round's been checked;

you shouldn't have any jams.

The Lewis gun up top has incendiaries. The Vickers, standard ammo, tracer every fifth."

Daniel Wainwright,

Yorkshire born and Rolls-Royce trained,

still only in his thirties yet already lined and greying.

His right eye has recently acquired a persistent tic,

some mornings his hands won't stop shaking,

and I know he only sleeps at night by drinking till he's catatonic.

Just one more casualty of war,

dying a little more with every shot-up pilot he eases from a cockpit,

with every seared and blackened relic – a

cigarette case, perhaps a loving parent's letter –

he retrieves from a charred corpse.

But despite all the horrors that he's seen, he's still the best mechanic-fitter in the RFC.

I'm a lucky wolf to have him.

"Convergence on the guns?"

"Thirty yards, just like you asked for.

Adjusted it myself by the hanger's lights, just a half an hour ago."

He had. Standing a good two feet from the Vickers I can feel the heat still radiating

off the barrel's cooling fins.

"Cooper, I still say thirty yards is awful close –"

"No, no." I shake my head at him, athough here in the darkness his human eyes probably don't pick up the gesture.

"Gotta get close. Thirty is spot on."

"Yeah, well..." He hesitates for a moment, shoulders dropping, that classic English reticence.

"She's all ready, she's as good today as I can get her –"

On impulse I reach out to clasp his arm.

He knows full well my grip could crush him, but he doesn't flinch.

Instead he takes my furry forearm in his own hand,

and his hold is every bit as firm as mine.

"You take care up there, you damn furball.

furball." There's a minute tremble to his voice;

a stranger wouldn't pick it up, but it's there.

"And please try to bring the crate back in one piece."

"I will." Dammit, why can't there be more humans like Wainwright?

But we both know the unspoken truth:

there's a very real chance we'll never meet again.

"You're a good man, Daniel, always looking out for me.

Best human friend a wolf could have.

have." I flick my ears; now that he's closer I can catch his brown eyes with the amber of my own.

"In a different lifetime,

you'd have made for a good wolf."

A half-serious, half-joking comment just between the two of us,

just something to lighten the mood of the moment.

When he grins back at me, eyes flashing, I know I've said the right thing.

"In a different lifetime," he blurts out quietly,

"perhaps I'd ask you to bite me."

I blink back at him, not quite believing his words,

but the moment's already passed and gone.

Time's a-wastin'.

I clamber into a cockpit that's been heavily modified to suit a werewolf's larger frame,

pressurize the fuel tank,

zero the altimeter.

I pull on my goggles.

Over by the hanger, a blackbird starts to sing.

"Clear?" "Clear." "Contact!" *******

Who could have predicted that werewolves would make for such good pilots?

But we do. And I think I'm in a good position to understand exactly why –

because you see, I wasn't born a wolf.

Twenty-two I was, as naïve and fresh-faced as they come and determined to squander all of my lawyer's training –

training which had eaten through most of my parents' savings –

to immerse myself in my newfound fond obsession. Flight. 1912 was the year, and Farnham was the place,

the airfield a pocket-handkerchief of flat grass

amid a sea of Surrey heather-heath.

Pusher-biplanes were what they gave us to learn on in those early days,

ridiculous excuses for aircraft;

the ungainly things were little more than flimsy filigrees of wire and fabric,

unseemly creatures for the sky.

We loved 'em anyway.

Our instructor, dear, patient Gassinger,

was scarcely any older than we were;

still, no parents ever doted on their children more than this kindly Austrian did his fledglings.

We'd sit there cross-legged on the grass as he drilled us in the basics of lift and drag, the poetry of yaw and angle of attack,

dreaming of the time when we too would swoop and sing just like the swallows high above.

The best of us – and the only wolf among us

– was a tan-furred female of some nineteen tender years.

Sylvia was sweet and svelte, and a dancer in the sky.

Her soul resided somewhere in the clouds,

and her laughter could bring me rapidly to joyful tears.

She was the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen.

It was a full twelvemonth before I finally persuaded her to bite me.

She held me gently as my body changed,

whispered sweet nothings as my world shuddered into a bright new focus.

Her fey scent mingled in my muzzle with the distant tang of high-octane petroleum spirit and dope.

"Now," she murmured to me, nuzzling my ear.

"Now you'll see what flying's really like."

Caspian, our cub, was born in March of 1914.

By July of that same year, much of the human world had turned to war.

The wolves of all nations were resolute:

they would have no truck with an insanity that was never of their making.

Instead, they agreed to a kind of voluntary internment. Werewolves by the thousands entered purpose-built camps,

reluctant but stoick,

ready to suffer the indignities of locks and keys and high barbed-wire fences.

In their eyes it was by far the lesser of two evils.

Surely, they reasoned,

humanity would return to its senses within a year.

And so there we were,

Sylvia and young Caspian and I all together with two thousand other werewolves in the Croydon

Lycanthrope Facility,

doing our level best to get on with our lives.

My days of flight settled slowly into memory, the stuff of happy dreams;

firmly grounded as I was,

I kept the wolf from the door by doing paralegal work through correspondence,

carefully navigating the fraught legalities with which humans like to complicate their lives.

None of my clients needed to know I was a wolf.

None of them even thought to ask.

And that might well have been the story of my war – except that one day,

late on in 1915,

a little posse of hired thugs from MI5 came to see me.

It had become a dangerous world for werewolves, they were careful to point out.

Humanity was bleeding out, while wolves sat back and watched;

there was no shortage of men who'd like nothing more than to exact some bitter vengeance.

And it was an especially dangerous time for a young female wolf, one with such a helpless, vulnerable charge.

Who could say what might come to pass?

Of course, some sort of protection might be put in place – if,

in return, a certain pilot-wolf would only render some occasional...

services. I'd always been a proud wolf, had never once regretted my decision to take the fangs and fur.

Even so, I still counted plenty of humans amongst my friends.

I'd always resisted the siren call of misanthropy –

Right up until that day. *******

Human pilots tend not to fly at night;

their eyesight really isn't up to it.

Werewolves, on the other hand...

The luminous hands of the cockpit clock read 4:55.

I glance down, and sure enough,

from a hundred feet my wolf eyes pick out the tents,

the petrol bowsers, the vee-strutters, ten, fifteen and more: the Flying Circus, caught unawares and at repose.

I'm about to give them a very bad start to their day.

I sigh, and nudge my plane into a shallow dive.

The engine roars as I open up the throttle;

streaks of bright flame spear from each exhaust.

The airspeed hits one-ten,

and as my thumbs shift to the triggers the wind starts screaming through the rigging-wires.

My bird, she always did love to sing. *******

A dozen biplanes blaze in fiery ruin.

Something very flammable inside one of the tents suddenly blows up, and there's a wash of heat across my face.

Upon the instant,

the entirety of the devasted airfield is bathed with an infernal light.

Light enough for their anti-aircraft gunners to get a glimpse of me, if they're looking in the right direction.

It's time to go. I pull around for one last pass – –

and suddenly there's that all too familiar 'tak-tak-tak', the quick staccato chatter of twin Spandau machine

-guns synchronized to fire through a propeller’s arc.

Some brave sod's managed to get up in the air.

His guns are loud; he's close.

In a blink, a spatter of neat round holes appears across my starboard lower wing.

I yelp out a curse, jam the stick hard over,

and boot the left-hand rudder bar.

My plane responds,

and as we slew wildly to port I crane my head around, glimpsing not one but two vee-strutters maybe fifty yards behind.

I'm not entirely surprised to find that the lead Albatros sports a bright crimson paint

-job; that's Richthofen all right,

the Red Baron, and of course if anyone was going to get off the ground it would be him.

His companion's plane is painted in a bold harlequin

of diamonds green and blue, and he's flying a little higher and further back in a classic combat spread.

I'm way too low for serious manoeuvring;

I need distance, and I need height.

My bird may not be quite as agile as the German craft, but she's got a considerable edge in speed.

I level out and slam the throttle open wide.

The two hundred horses of the Hispano-Suiza bray wild and loud,

and for the time being

the guns of my adversaries fall silent.

Another glance behind.

Three hundred yards;

that's enough. I pull back on the stick,

and the engine, coming under load, takes on a harsher, deeper edge.

The altimeter dial spins up.

Can they make me out, well enough to follow?

There's certainly a chance; the sky is brightening all the time.

At a thousand feet I start to hit some patchy cumulus, and just before the vapour fogs my windshield I take a final look behind.

The other planes are well below.

It strikes me that they've never fought an SE5 before –

and never any pilot with a werewolf's reflexes and spatial awareness.

I can use these facts against them.

I fix the last positions of German planes in my mind,

make my best guess as to what they're likely to do next,

and aim for the thickest clouds that I can see.

Fifteen seconds more of blind climb in the shroudlike pallid grey,

and then I throw my craft over on her wingtips and hurtle back the way I've come.

I punch out of the bottom of the cloud –

And there they are, still climbing as hard as they can and coming straight towards me, about two hundred yards away.

I have the airspeed and I have the height advantage, so they make a defensive split,

which is pretty much their only choice.

I can only follow one of them. I plump for green-and-blue, lining up the shot in the Aldis sight; the pilot knows I'm there and starts to jink that nimble little craft of his, first to left and then to right.

I watch him carefully, but I can't wait long –

because somewhere, out of my sight,

his friend is circling back around to intercept me.

My target is a damn fine airman. But his jinking, it's just a little too predictable. If I time it right... I close to thirty yards, judge the deflection, and give him a

two-second burst from both my weapons.

The guns awaken in a din of death;

cordite smoke burns in my muzzle, the spent casings spew and tumble before me and above.

And I watch, I watch,

as with an appalling inevitability the tracers converge,

and the fuselage of my foe drifts right into their path.

My first rounds hit home between the cockpit and the tail;

I see the plywood splinter, shred and fly.

But then my bullets scamper forward,

and find a surer mark.

The flyer's body jolts up and backwards as he's hit,

and in his final spasm he jerks rearward on the stick.

His pretty blue-green plane pulls sharply up – and then stalls,

and noses down into a spin.

My windshield and my goggles abruptly splash with red.

My muzzle mats with blood that's not my own.

"FUCK!", I scream, slamming down a furry fist upon the cockpit's cowling.

Why did the idiot have to take off at all? "...

"...fuck..." Tak-tak-tak.

Thirty yards, by my guess. I have no time for recrimination or remorse.

Throttle. Stick. Wipe goggles.

Fly. This was the the first of two parts of “Jaeger”

by Anhedral,

read for you by Crimson Ruari,

the Mountain Smith.

Tune in next time to find out how the dogfight ends –

and its unexpected consequences.

As always, you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog, or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for listening to The Voice of Dog.