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“Jaeger” by Anhedral (part 1 of 2, read by Crimson Ruari)
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.
Transcript
You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.
Speaker:Today’s story is the first of two parts of “Jaeger”
Speaker:by Anhedral,
Speaker:a musician and writer whose short stories have appeared in ROAR
Speaker:and in Werewolves Versus.
Speaker:Most of his work
Speaker:can be found at http://www.furaffinity.net/user/anhedral/
Speaker:Today’s story will be read for you by Crimson Ruari,
Speaker:the Mountain Smith.
Speaker:Please enjoy “Jaeger”
Speaker:by Anhedral, Part 1
Speaker:of 2 For thousands of years –
Speaker:really, for as long as any histories of wolf or man could relate –
Speaker:werewolves had lived by two sacred rules.
Speaker:Avoid all of the affairs of humans.
Speaker:And never – ever – harm a wolf.
Speaker:The result had been an uneasy, but apparently stable, co-existence:
Speaker:humans, the numerous ones,
Speaker:the clever, warlike ones,
Speaker:the ones with nimble minds and fingers forever bending the world to their whims;
Speaker:and the wolves, bigger,
Speaker:quicker, stronger,
Speaker:nature-tied and fur-clad, casually aloof and supremely uncaring of the lure of gold. In 1917,
Speaker:in the midst of what men would later call the war-to-end-all-wars,
Speaker:that frail edifice finally came tumbling down.
Speaker:And may the Great Sky-Wolf herself forgive me,
Speaker:it was this poor narrator who played a part in bringing the world as we knew it to an end. *******
Speaker:Royal Flying Corps aerodrome,
Speaker:Biggin Hill Surrey,
Speaker:England April 22, 1917
Speaker:My wolf ears pick up voices from behind the heavy door;
Speaker:a moment later the handle turns, and the two military policemen who flank me snap smartly to attention.
Speaker:The door swings open to reveal a weasely, balding man wearing a captain's stripes
Speaker:and the unmistakable air of an Eton toff
Speaker:born to privilege,
Speaker:just another jumped-up something-on-the-staff who's never going to get his boots dirty in a trench.
Speaker:"Ah." This ‘something' clears his throat.
Speaker:He won't quite meet my eye. "Cooper.
Speaker:Please come in."
Speaker:His scent is heavy with disdain and fear.
Speaker:I know I probably shouldn't,
Speaker:but I can't quite stop myself:
Speaker:I give him a quick glare and a flash of fang,
Speaker:just like the cur he thinks I am.
Speaker:He gasps and stumbles back;
Speaker:behind him I glimpse bright bay-windows,
Speaker:dark-panelled walls,
Speaker:and an enormous table standing four-square in the centre of the room.
Speaker:Fresh scents, now: a pungent reek of wood polish,
Speaker:overlain with the stale smoke of oak logs and cigars.
Speaker:The two MPs, unbidden, shadow me through the door.
Speaker:The one on my left has a twitchy finger that's altogether too close to the trigger-guard of his Webley for my liking.
Speaker:Heaven help him if he tries anything...
Speaker:But next, it's my turn to be surprised – because damn me if the other person waiting quietly in the room isn't Trenchard.
Speaker:Not a 'something', not this one.
Speaker:For this is Brigadier-General Sir Hugh Trenchard,
Speaker:gaunt and stern and sporting that trademark close-trimmed moustache that I recognise immediately from the broadsheets.
Speaker:The Commander of the Royal Flying Corps,
Speaker:come to meet personally with a wolf.
Speaker:I don't give a shit about his highfalutin title – the knighthood and those silly military ranks matter to humans, not to wolves –
Speaker:but the wings sewn to the olive-green of his tunic mark him as one of my own.
Speaker:The serial number of his aviator's certificate is 270,
Speaker:if memory serves.
Speaker:The number stamped onto my own is 312.
Speaker:I feel my nostrils flare; he's a pilot, and that's enough for my respect.
Speaker:Although I still won't call him 'sir', I do hide my fangs and perk my ears up tall, giving him a curt nod.
Speaker:The smile I get in return is firm but not unfriendly.
Speaker:To his credit, the man seems unfazed to be this close to six-foot-six of muscled, grey-furred wolf
Speaker:who's wearing not a stitch of human clothing.
Speaker:He doesn't smell scared of me at all.
Speaker:"Cooper. Thank you for coming.
Speaker:coming." We've never met before,
Speaker:but even so I could swear there was an undertone of genuine remorse carried in that single phrase.
Speaker:And then, to the two MPs:
Speaker:"Thank you, gentlemen. You can go now."
Speaker:"But, sir!" Captain Something is all a-fluster. "Cooper here, he's a trained killer!"
Speaker:Trenchard is mildness itself.
Speaker:"Yes. Yes, he is. But he only became that way by human hands, no choice of his.
Speaker:his." He nods sharply to the two MPs, who this time do not hesitate.
Speaker:As the door clicks shut
Speaker:he turns back to his subordinate, who's stood there rooted to the spot
Speaker:and looking appropriately aghast.
Speaker:"The army's guard-dogs are not needed here right now, Captain;
Speaker:I'm sure that we can all be civil.
Speaker:Please be so good as to brief our guest." "S
Speaker:-sir!" The idiot actually clicks his heels and does his best to recover.
Speaker:He reaches for a fancy wooden swagger-stick that's propped against the table.
Speaker:"Here's the thing, Cooper.
Speaker:Got a bit of a show brewing up in northern France."
Speaker:I sigh, and feel my tail hang slack until its bushy tip
Speaker:brushes the parquet floor. 'Bit
Speaker:of a show' is British Army-ese for 'massacre', I'm guessing.
Speaker:They must be desperate if they're calling in the likes of me.
Speaker:And so I amble over to the map that's splayed out there, its edges curling and corners dog-eared.
Speaker:The baseline cartography is a spiderweb of Flanders villages,
Speaker:fields and roads;
Speaker:some of those settlements have,
Speaker:I know, been obliterated by countless high explosive shells fired by one side or the other.
Speaker:Overlain, the coloured hieroglyphs of military symbols:
Speaker:the zig-zags of trench on trench,
Speaker:men by the tens of thousands reduced to so many pretty little codes and squiggles,
Speaker:the choreography of carnage.
Speaker:Captain Something turns up his nose and sniffs, disdaining. "The Kaiser's gone and found himself a brand new hotshot.
Speaker: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.
Speaker:Manfred von Richthofen."
Speaker:I can't help but grin as Trenchard takes over the briefing.
Speaker:"A bloody good flyer, and a brilliant tactician to boot.
Speaker:Been reorganising the Jastas, picking up right where Immelmann and Boelcke left off;
Speaker:he's cherrypicked the best of the German pilots for Jagdstaffel 11,
Speaker:turned it into a sort of highly mobile killing unit,
Speaker:shifting between different airfields all around the front.
Speaker:They've got those new Albatros D.III vee-strutters, painted up in every colour of the rainbow.
Speaker:rainbow." Trenchard huffs, grimly. "Von Richthofen's Flying Circus is what they're calling his outfit –
Speaker:and his planes are tearing our squadrons to shreds.
Speaker:shreds." ******* RFC Arras, northern France
Speaker:April 25, 1917 4:38 am
Speaker:Douai, sixteen miles east of Arras:
Speaker:that's where the Circus is flying out of right now.
Speaker:According to the latest intel, anyway.
Speaker:If the top brass haven't got that right – well, there's not a lot that I can do.
Speaker:They've
Speaker:trained me, trained me well to do their killing,
Speaker:knowing I have not the slightest choice in the matter.
Speaker:At least they've given me the best damn crate in the RFC with which to it.
Speaker:It's a brand new model, this SE5,
Speaker:not even out to the squadrons yet.
Speaker:Biplane, painted black as pitch from radiator to rudder.
Speaker:A tweaked Hispano-Suiza V8 for a powerplant,
Speaker:pushing out two hundred horse;
Speaker:a beast. Big ol' two-bladed prop right up front.
Speaker:To left and right, the upper wings reach out above me like some monstrous raptor mantling its prey.
Speaker:My fur prickles. Even just sitting here quietly on the lush pasture of the Pas-de-Calais my plane feels dangerous,
Speaker:a death-bringer made incarnate in doped fabric and taut steel wire.
Speaker:The very air seems to quicken around her.
Speaker:In the faint eastern glow an hour before the dawn she seems high-strung,
Speaker:impatient to get on with the single task for which she was designed:
Speaker:the prosecution of wholesale
Speaker:airborne murder. She will never shirk from her task – not in the right hands.
Speaker:Or in the right paws, in this case.
Speaker:Some airmen will tell you the SE5 is an ugly plane, all boxiness and awkward angles,
Speaker:but if they know what's good for them they'll make sure I'm out of earshot before they say those things.
Speaker:Ugly she may be, but she's my sort of ugly, and I love her to distraction.
Speaker:Probably just as well.
Speaker:If I'm going to die inside a cockpit, it ought to be the cockpit of a bird I love.
Speaker: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.
Speaker:"All fuelled up. Ammunition’s topped off, every round's been checked;
Speaker:you shouldn't have any jams.
Speaker:The Lewis gun up top has incendiaries. The Vickers, standard ammo, tracer every fifth."
Speaker:Daniel Wainwright,
Speaker:Yorkshire born and Rolls-Royce trained,
Speaker:still only in his thirties yet already lined and greying.
Speaker:His right eye has recently acquired a persistent tic,
Speaker:some mornings his hands won't stop shaking,
Speaker:and I know he only sleeps at night by drinking till he's catatonic.
Speaker:Just one more casualty of war,
Speaker:dying a little more with every shot-up pilot he eases from a cockpit,
Speaker:with every seared and blackened relic – a
Speaker:cigarette case, perhaps a loving parent's letter –
Speaker:he retrieves from a charred corpse.
Speaker:But despite all the horrors that he's seen, he's still the best mechanic-fitter in the RFC.
Speaker:I'm a lucky wolf to have him.
Speaker:"Convergence on the guns?"
Speaker:"Thirty yards, just like you asked for.
Speaker:Adjusted it myself by the hanger's lights, just a half an hour ago."
Speaker:He had. Standing a good two feet from the Vickers I can feel the heat still radiating
Speaker:off the barrel's cooling fins.
Speaker:"Cooper, I still say thirty yards is awful close –"
Speaker:"No, no." I shake my head at him, athough here in the darkness his human eyes probably don't pick up the gesture.
Speaker:"Gotta get close. Thirty is spot on."
Speaker:"Yeah, well..." He hesitates for a moment, shoulders dropping, that classic English reticence.
Speaker:"She's all ready, she's as good today as I can get her –"
Speaker:On impulse I reach out to clasp his arm.
Speaker:He knows full well my grip could crush him, but he doesn't flinch.
Speaker:Instead he takes my furry forearm in his own hand,
Speaker:and his hold is every bit as firm as mine.
Speaker:"You take care up there, you damn furball.
Speaker:furball." There's a minute tremble to his voice;
Speaker:a stranger wouldn't pick it up, but it's there.
Speaker:"And please try to bring the crate back in one piece."
Speaker:"I will." Dammit, why can't there be more humans like Wainwright?
Speaker:But we both know the unspoken truth:
Speaker:there's a very real chance we'll never meet again.
Speaker:"You're a good man, Daniel, always looking out for me.
Speaker:Best human friend a wolf could have.
Speaker:have." I flick my ears; now that he's closer I can catch his brown eyes with the amber of my own.
Speaker:"In a different lifetime,
Speaker:you'd have made for a good wolf."
Speaker:A half-serious, half-joking comment just between the two of us,
Speaker:just something to lighten the mood of the moment.
Speaker:When he grins back at me, eyes flashing, I know I've said the right thing.
Speaker:"In a different lifetime," he blurts out quietly,
Speaker:"perhaps I'd ask you to bite me."
Speaker:I blink back at him, not quite believing his words,
Speaker:but the moment's already passed and gone.
Speaker:Time's a-wastin'.
Speaker:I clamber into a cockpit that's been heavily modified to suit a werewolf's larger frame,
Speaker:pressurize the fuel tank,
Speaker:zero the altimeter.
Speaker:I pull on my goggles.
Speaker:Over by the hanger, a blackbird starts to sing.
Speaker:"Clear?" "Clear." "Contact!" *******
Speaker:Who could have predicted that werewolves would make for such good pilots?
Speaker:But we do. And I think I'm in a good position to understand exactly why –
Speaker:because you see, I wasn't born a wolf.
Speaker:Twenty-two I was, as naïve and fresh-faced as they come and determined to squander all of my lawyer's training –
Speaker:training which had eaten through most of my parents' savings –
Speaker:to immerse myself in my newfound fond obsession. Flight. 1912 was the year, and Farnham was the place,
Speaker:the airfield a pocket-handkerchief of flat grass
Speaker:amid a sea of Surrey heather-heath.
Speaker:Pusher-biplanes were what they gave us to learn on in those early days,
Speaker:ridiculous excuses for aircraft;
Speaker:the ungainly things were little more than flimsy filigrees of wire and fabric,
Speaker:unseemly creatures for the sky.
Speaker:We loved 'em anyway.
Speaker:Our instructor, dear, patient Gassinger,
Speaker:was scarcely any older than we were;
Speaker:still, no parents ever doted on their children more than this kindly Austrian did his fledglings.
Speaker: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,
Speaker:dreaming of the time when we too would swoop and sing just like the swallows high above.
Speaker:The best of us – and the only wolf among us
Speaker:– was a tan-furred female of some nineteen tender years.
Speaker:Sylvia was sweet and svelte, and a dancer in the sky.
Speaker:Her soul resided somewhere in the clouds,
Speaker:and her laughter could bring me rapidly to joyful tears.
Speaker:She was the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen.
Speaker:It was a full twelvemonth before I finally persuaded her to bite me.
Speaker:She held me gently as my body changed,
Speaker:whispered sweet nothings as my world shuddered into a bright new focus.
Speaker:Her fey scent mingled in my muzzle with the distant tang of high-octane petroleum spirit and dope.
Speaker:"Now," she murmured to me, nuzzling my ear.
Speaker:"Now you'll see what flying's really like."
Speaker:Caspian, our cub, was born in March of 1914.
Speaker:By July of that same year, much of the human world had turned to war.
Speaker:The wolves of all nations were resolute:
Speaker:they would have no truck with an insanity that was never of their making.
Speaker:Instead, they agreed to a kind of voluntary internment. Werewolves by the thousands entered purpose-built camps,
Speaker:reluctant but stoick,
Speaker:ready to suffer the indignities of locks and keys and high barbed-wire fences.
Speaker:In their eyes it was by far the lesser of two evils.
Speaker:Surely, they reasoned,
Speaker:humanity would return to its senses within a year.
Speaker:And so there we were,
Speaker:Sylvia and young Caspian and I all together with two thousand other werewolves in the Croydon
Speaker:Lycanthrope Facility,
Speaker:doing our level best to get on with our lives.
Speaker:My days of flight settled slowly into memory, the stuff of happy dreams;
Speaker:firmly grounded as I was,
Speaker:I kept the wolf from the door by doing paralegal work through correspondence,
Speaker:carefully navigating the fraught legalities with which humans like to complicate their lives.
Speaker:None of my clients needed to know I was a wolf.
Speaker:None of them even thought to ask.
Speaker:And that might well have been the story of my war – except that one day,
Speaker:late on in 1915,
Speaker:a little posse of hired thugs from MI5 came to see me.
Speaker:It had become a dangerous world for werewolves, they were careful to point out.
Speaker:Humanity was bleeding out, while wolves sat back and watched;
Speaker:there was no shortage of men who'd like nothing more than to exact some bitter vengeance.
Speaker:And it was an especially dangerous time for a young female wolf, one with such a helpless, vulnerable charge.
Speaker:Who could say what might come to pass?
Speaker:Of course, some sort of protection might be put in place – if,
Speaker:in return, a certain pilot-wolf would only render some occasional...
Speaker:services. I'd always been a proud wolf, had never once regretted my decision to take the fangs and fur.
Speaker:Even so, I still counted plenty of humans amongst my friends.
Speaker:I'd always resisted the siren call of misanthropy –
Speaker:Right up until that day. *******
Speaker:Human pilots tend not to fly at night;
Speaker:their eyesight really isn't up to it.
Speaker:Werewolves, on the other hand...
Speaker:The luminous hands of the cockpit clock read 4:55.
Speaker:I glance down, and sure enough,
Speaker:from a hundred feet my wolf eyes pick out the tents,
Speaker:the petrol bowsers, the vee-strutters, ten, fifteen and more: the Flying Circus, caught unawares and at repose.
Speaker:I'm about to give them a very bad start to their day.
Speaker:I sigh, and nudge my plane into a shallow dive.
Speaker:The engine roars as I open up the throttle;
Speaker:streaks of bright flame spear from each exhaust.
Speaker:The airspeed hits one-ten,
Speaker:and as my thumbs shift to the triggers the wind starts screaming through the rigging-wires.
Speaker:My bird, she always did love to sing. *******
Speaker:A dozen biplanes blaze in fiery ruin.
Speaker:Something very flammable inside one of the tents suddenly blows up, and there's a wash of heat across my face.
Speaker:Upon the instant,
Speaker:the entirety of the devasted airfield is bathed with an infernal light.
Speaker:Light enough for their anti-aircraft gunners to get a glimpse of me, if they're looking in the right direction.
Speaker:It's time to go. I pull around for one last pass – –
Speaker:and suddenly there's that all too familiar 'tak-tak-tak', the quick staccato chatter of twin Spandau machine
Speaker:-guns synchronized to fire through a propeller’s arc.
Speaker:Some brave sod's managed to get up in the air.
Speaker:His guns are loud; he's close.
Speaker:In a blink, a spatter of neat round holes appears across my starboard lower wing.
Speaker:I yelp out a curse, jam the stick hard over,
Speaker:and boot the left-hand rudder bar.
Speaker:My plane responds,
Speaker:and as we slew wildly to port I crane my head around, glimpsing not one but two vee-strutters maybe fifty yards behind.
Speaker:I'm not entirely surprised to find that the lead Albatros sports a bright crimson paint
Speaker:-job; that's Richthofen all right,
Speaker:the Red Baron, and of course if anyone was going to get off the ground it would be him.
Speaker:His companion's plane is painted in a bold harlequin
Speaker:of diamonds green and blue, and he's flying a little higher and further back in a classic combat spread.
Speaker:I'm way too low for serious manoeuvring;
Speaker:I need distance, and I need height.
Speaker:My bird may not be quite as agile as the German craft, but she's got a considerable edge in speed.
Speaker:I level out and slam the throttle open wide.
Speaker:The two hundred horses of the Hispano-Suiza bray wild and loud,
Speaker:and for the time being
Speaker:the guns of my adversaries fall silent.
Speaker:Another glance behind.
Speaker:Three hundred yards;
Speaker:that's enough. I pull back on the stick,
Speaker:and the engine, coming under load, takes on a harsher, deeper edge.
Speaker:The altimeter dial spins up.
Speaker:Can they make me out, well enough to follow?
Speaker:There's certainly a chance; the sky is brightening all the time.
Speaker: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.
Speaker:The other planes are well below.
Speaker:It strikes me that they've never fought an SE5 before –
Speaker:and never any pilot with a werewolf's reflexes and spatial awareness.
Speaker:I can use these facts against them.
Speaker:I fix the last positions of German planes in my mind,
Speaker:make my best guess as to what they're likely to do next,
Speaker:and aim for the thickest clouds that I can see.
Speaker:Fifteen seconds more of blind climb in the shroudlike pallid grey,
Speaker:and then I throw my craft over on her wingtips and hurtle back the way I've come.
Speaker:I punch out of the bottom of the cloud –
Speaker:And there they are, still climbing as hard as they can and coming straight towards me, about two hundred yards away.
Speaker:I have the airspeed and I have the height advantage, so they make a defensive split,
Speaker:which is pretty much their only choice.
Speaker: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.
Speaker:I watch him carefully, but I can't wait long –
Speaker:because somewhere, out of my sight,
Speaker:his friend is circling back around to intercept me.
Speaker: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
Speaker:two-second burst from both my weapons.
Speaker:The guns awaken in a din of death;
Speaker:cordite smoke burns in my muzzle, the spent casings spew and tumble before me and above.
Speaker:And I watch, I watch,
Speaker:as with an appalling inevitability the tracers converge,
Speaker:and the fuselage of my foe drifts right into their path.
Speaker:My first rounds hit home between the cockpit and the tail;
Speaker:I see the plywood splinter, shred and fly.
Speaker:But then my bullets scamper forward,
Speaker:and find a surer mark.
Speaker:The flyer's body jolts up and backwards as he's hit,
Speaker:and in his final spasm he jerks rearward on the stick.
Speaker:His pretty blue-green plane pulls sharply up – and then stalls,
Speaker:and noses down into a spin.
Speaker:My windshield and my goggles abruptly splash with red.
Speaker:My muzzle mats with blood that's not my own.
Speaker:"FUCK!", I scream, slamming down a furry fist upon the cockpit's cowling.
Speaker:Why did the idiot have to take off at all? "...
Speaker:"...fuck..." Tak-tak-tak.
Speaker:Thirty yards, by my guess. I have no time for recrimination or remorse.
Speaker:Throttle. Stick. Wipe goggles.
Speaker:Fly. This was the the first of two parts of “Jaeger”
Speaker:by Anhedral,
Speaker:read for you by Crimson Ruari,
Speaker:the Mountain Smith.
Speaker:Tune in next time to find out how the dogfight ends –
Speaker:and its unexpected consequences.
Speaker:As always, you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog, or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker:Thank you for listening to The Voice of Dog.
