Operation Sea Mink
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
By Anne Tibbets (writing as Addison Gunn)
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Edouard Groult
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-009-4
Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1
N
IGHT FELL IN
the remains of New York City, plunging the Astoria Peninsula into gloom and sending the refugees inside the Schaeffer-Yeager compound scurrying to their shanties like skittish rabbits.
A robust wind from the south scattered fungal spores into the sky, making the air thick, red, and difficult to breathe. For better or worse, the winds had delayed the launch of Operation Elephant Bird by two days.
That was time enough, Miller thought, for Gray to prevent Harris’s dicey plan—but the order to cancel, much to Miller’s disgust, never came.
Preparations for the mission proceeded with or without the weather’s cooperation, or Miller’s approval. The payload was packed and loaded, the choppers were fuelled and prepped, and when the wind calmed on the third day, it was time for lift off.
The spore count was wreaking havoc on the machinery, however, causing unplanned additional maintenance and slowing the process. With the red wind, fungal blooms erupted around the chopper quicker than maintenance crews could remove them.
This was not in any way how Miller wanted to spend his time.
He watched the chopper pilot and the technicians on the helipad as they reached into the air intake valves and fuel lines, pulling out strips of pinkish-red fungal gloop, and realized that he would rather be doing anything else on Earth.
What the hell was he doing here? He was so utterly sick and tired of this compound, of this city, this planet—of the constant feeling of rolling a boulder up a slippery slope, sliding downhill as fast as he climbed.
His thoughts searched for comfort and turned to Samantha, to Billy, and then to his parents—who probably had long run out of supplies on the ranch—and he felt worse, wondering how they were all faring, or if any of them fared at all.
His gut twisted. He should be there, with his folks. He should be packing them into Dad’s truck and getting them to safety—not here, acting as Harris’s stooge.
But where would he take his parents, if he were with them? There was no such thing as a ‘safe place’ anymore. Even inside the compound, the concept of safety was wishful thinking. Safety didn’t exist.
Standing on the helipad, Miller yanked the gas mask off his face and coughed into the thick, hot wind.
How did he end up here—doing Harris’s bidding? Of all the idiotic things to do. If someone had told him—after Harris had announced to the board that he planned to release a super-wasp laced with NAPA-33 to the Infected communes around the compound—that Miller would be implementing said plan, he’d have laughed in their face.
Why would he do
anything
that psychopath wanted?
Robert Harris, the supposed head of security for the last uninfected stronghold in New York City, operated under the delusion that he ran the whole world—and Miller, who knew the full scope of Harris’s delusion included nuking the shit out of the Infected population only two miles from the compound’s flimsy walls—hated that he had to babysit this operation.
It was a joke. Miller was a pawn in a fucked-up power play between Harris and Gray, the CEO of Schaefer-Yeager, and somehow, Miller was supposed to make sure everything happened as it should. One man.
“I’m counting on you,” Gray had said when he’d asked Miller to spearhead the wasp drops, minutes after storming out of the conference room in a rage.
Miller had only agreed to do it because deep down, under the resentment, exhaustion, and suspicion, he agreed the operation needed heavy oversight—and not by one of Harris’s gun-blazing cowboy brigades, but by him.
Still, when he asked, it felt as if Gray had ordered Miller to eat a shit sandwich—and to smile while doing it.
“P
ILOT SAYS FIVE
minutes,” du Trieux said, coming up beside Miller on the helipad and resting her hand on the strap of her Gilboa.
Miller swiped the sweat from his forehand with the back of his hand and let the perspiration drip from his fingertips. It had to be over a hundred degrees, even at this hour. The air was so thick with fungus the stars were obscured. Even the moon looked red. “Payload on board?” he asked.
She nodded. She didn’t appear to be any more thrilled to be there than he was, but at least she was talking to him again. When he’d informed Cobalt of Gray’s instructions, she’d protested, then gone quiet and hadn’t spoken to him since.
“T
HIS DOESN’T MAKE
sense,” she’d said. “We’re missing pieces of the puzzle.”
Miller looked away from the faces of his team, and around the break room, nodding. Sparse, dim, and filthy around the edges, the break room was hardly that anymore. Half the furniture had been commandeered and moved elsewhere. Even their silverware had gone missing. Miller would bet his rifle that one of the other security teams had raided the place, but not wanting to start a rivalry with no point to it, he’d kept that thought to himself. Although he was sure his team had had the same thought. “I know,” he said.
“All we went through with the Charismatics, and now they want us to spread
more
bugs?” Morland piped in, visibly confused.
Du Trieux mumbled something in French.
Doyle, sitting in a lopsided folding chair, sipped his coffee-flavored water with a slurp. His feet were propped against a broken cabinet door he’d ripped from the wall and set on top of some old paint cans—their new table. “Does the right hand know what the left is doing?” he asked. He made an obscene gesture and Hsiung coughed.
“Doubt it,” Miller said. He glanced at du Trieux and she frowned, deeply. “There’ll be five choppers in the air,” he explained to them. “One man each, aside from the pilot. We scout communes, drop payload, and come back in less than half an hour, which is about how long the fuel lines last before they clog with fungus. Any longer than that, payload or not, you bug out. We do this until the wasp samples run out. Rumor has it, that’ll take a few days. Any questions?”
“Why are we dropping wasps on communes again?” Morland asked.
“It’s a special breed. It’s supposed to stop the other wasps from laying eggs in the Infected’s brains, and interrupts their ‘genetic replicating.’ Don’t ask me how.”
“I don’t get it,” Morland said, “are we
helping
the Infected now?”
“No,” Miller answered, a little too quickly. “Well, sort of. Yes. But, no. It’s more to stop the parasite from spreading.”
“Why stop the wasps at all?” Hsiung asked. “If they lay eggs in the Infected’s brain, and then the Infected go nuts and find ways to die, like with the swimming club”—she gestured at Doyle, who grunted in reply—“then why are we stopping them? The Infected are dying. They’re literally killing themselves. I say let them. Less for us to do.”
“Now there’s an idea,” Doyle said.
Du Trieux shook her head.
“Look, I don’t make the orders,” Miller said. “I just relay them. Gray wants us to do this so he knows it’s done right, and quite frankly, I agree with him—at least on that point.”
“Doesn’t makes sense to me,” Morland said.
“No argument here,” Miller agreed. “Now, get loaded up and be ready. We lift off once these winds die down.”
Doyle stood and slurped one last gulp of pseudo-coffee. “No rest for the wicked.”
Miller didn’t bother to comment.
T
WO DAYS LATER,
out on the helipad, du Trieux stood with her back against the breeze, her gas mask slung around her neck as she eyed the crews scooping fungus. “You sure this is a good idea?”
Miller frowned. “Taking the choppers out or dropping the wasps on communes? Take your pick.”
“Both.”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Apparently, they’ve had success with this method in Boston. Those two doctors we picked up have the data to prove it. If this slows things down as they project, perhaps we can finally get ahead of the parasite. Maybe it’ll keep things from getting out of hand.”
Du Trieux raised an eyebrow.
“...more out of hand,” he corrected himself. He had meant Harris’s plans for nuking the Infected at Lawrence Point, but he didn’t clarify.
“Well,” du Trieux said, “when you’re ready, board. Looks like the crew’s done cleaning out your bird.”
“You be careful up there,” Miller said.
There was an odd hitch in du Trieux’s face as she nodded and turned away. “You too.”
M
ILLER ADJUSTED THE
night vision goggles on the top of his head and watched the phablet’s infrared display.
Searching for communes at night was risky, given the unreliability of the helicopters’ equipment—not to mention the wildlife.
Since titan-birds were believed to be diurnal, and rarely seen after sunset, Miller hoped the airways were clear, for now. What happened to the days when you didn’t have to worry about being swallowed whole by a colossal lizard with wings?
“Twelve minutes on the fuel lines,” the pilot said.
“Copy that.”
Miller scanned the phablet display. It was surprisingly sparse down in the depths of the streets. Either the Infected were doing a better job of hiding their communes, or there were fewer of them. The majority of movement came from wildlife. On the display, large red blobs of heat slunk up and down alleys—which had to be terror-jaws—while larger, titan-bird-sized blobs crowded rooftops and upper levels of skyscrapers. Out on the avenues and streets, enormous heat signatures—thug behemoths—crowded in clusters but stayed still, most likely keeping in herds to protect their young at night.
In all that confusion, it was difficult to find batches of human heat signatures at all. In fact, so far, he hadn’t found any.
If he didn’t find one soon, this whole trip would be for naught. Miller didn’t want to waste the compound’s dwindling supply of chopper fuel, and frankly, didn’t fancy sitting next to the wasp containers on the way back, either. Their buzzing and movement inside the cardboard containers was unnerving. Hell of a prize inside
this
cereal box, Miller thought.