Operation Sea Mink

by Addison Gunn

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  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

  NIGHT 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.

  “PILOT 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.

  “THIS 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.

  TWO 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.”

  MILLER 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.

  Movement on the phablet screen caught his eye.

  “West,” Miller said into his earpiece. “Thirty degrees.”

  “I saw it, too,” the pilot said. “Swinging back around.”

  The chopper banked and Miller reached out, unthinkingly grasping the wasp containers to keep them from tipping—before whipping his hand back with disgust.

  He went back to examining the phablet, trying to ascertain where best to drop the boxes.

  Given the size and dexterity of the heat signature he saw dart between two buildings, it was human—or Infected, given how many of them bunched around one another. It joined a faint cloud of body heat clumped into what Miller could only suppose was the lobby of a building of some kind.

  They were three blocks east of 34th and 12th—and from what he could tell from the readings, a pair of titan-birds had taken control of the top of the building, forcing the commune down into the lower levels. The only evidence the commune was there at all was because they seemed to be on the move—their heat fading right before Miller’s eyes.

  Wait. Fading? Why would their signatures disappear like that?

  Down. They were occupying basements, Miller realized. Moving underground as he watched.

  The subway system was probably teaming with communes. That was why they were having such issues finding them on infrared.

  Miller switched his earpiece to the all channel. “Aim for the subway entrances, they’ve gone underground.”

  “No wonder we can’t find the little blighters,” Doyle said. He almost sounded impressed.

  “Drop payload near or into subway stairwells and get back to the compound ASAP,” Miller said. “The wind’s picking back up.”

  “That’s like dropping a ping pong ball into a coffee mug from a hundred meters away,” Morland said, a hint of a whine in his voice, “while standing on a surfboard in the ocean.”

  “Just do the best you can,” Miller snapped. He switched back to the internal channel and urged the chopper pilot to descend.

  “Any more and I could clip the side of a building,” he said. “This is the best I can do, sir.”

  “Alright, here goes nothing,” Miller mused, twisting in his seat. He peered at the darkened ground below, and released the lever that held the wasp containers in place.

  Picking up one box at a time, he pushed the containers out the open side of the chopper, working down the block and hitting any subway staircase he was able to spot. Three. Five. Ten. Finally, when there were only a few left, he slid the wooden pallet with a hard shove, pitching the remainder over the side.

  Miller held tight as the chopper bucked from the loss of weight and watched as the containers dropped out of sight into the darkness below. He listened for the sound of ground contact, but knew he’d never make out the noise over the thump of the helicopter’s rotors.

  “Bugs away!” the pilot cheered, pulling the chopper up and banking toward the left, back toward the compound.

  Miller held tight and glared at the open end of the attack chopper, the second passenger seat and door had been removed to make room for the wasps.

  He listened over the all channel as the other teams made their drops and announced their return toward base.

  It was a victory—technically. Payload was delivered, and they’d go back at it the next evening, although it would be days, maybe even weeks, before they’d know if the super-wasps were doing their job.

  Still, Miller felt the familiar twist in his gut as his eyes trailed up and outside the chopper, resting on the red glow of the moon. He wondered if there was such a thing as safety up there.

  2

  “WHAT THE FUCK is the Tartarus Protocol?” Miller barked.

  Brandon Lewis stood behind his desk and shifted his prosthetic legs, rocking back on his heels.

  “And why do you need me to do it?” Doyle asked from beside Miller.

  Both stood on the opposite side of Lewis’s desk, facing him, their backs to the door and their arms across their chests.

  Miller’s skin felt sticky. He and Doyle had just returned from another bug drop, and stunk to high hell of fungus and chopper fuel. If it had been up to him, they would have been enjoying a hot shower or getting some shut-eye, not reporting to Lewis’s office in the wee hours of the morning.

  Besides, there wasn’t much point to this meeting, as far as Miller was concerned. Given how Lewis’s hands were tied, he was
n’t sure what the man’s role was within Schaeffer-Yeager. If the orders came directly from Harris, what was the point in having Lewis give them?

  Still, this latest development required immediate interference, even if Lewis was only Harris’s parrot. Miller hoped he would side with him in the matter—for all the good it would do.

  Lewis nodded, as if agreeing with the question. “They need a sniper,” he said. “And you’re the best in the compound.”

  Doyle snorted.

  Miller frowned. “Who gave the order?” From Lewis’s expression, he already knew the answer.

  “Who do you think?”

  Miller ran his hands through his hair and scratched his scalp.

  Doyle drummed his fingers against his arms but said nothing.

  “There are only five Cobalts left as it is,” Miller said. “And technically Hsiung is on loan from your old squad. You can’t strip me of one of my best men...”

  Doyle coughed. “One of?”

  “...my best man, and not give me a reason except the name of some covert protocol I don’t have clearance to know about. It’s bullshit. Doyle reports to me. How can he know what he’s doing and I can’t? Besides which, I don’t take orders from Harris, and neither do my men. We take orders from Gray.”

  “He knows,” Lewis said, sitting in his rolling office chair and grasping the desk’s edge. “Gray’s signed off on the transfer.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  Lewis reached across his desk, dug through a pile of papers, and flicked one across to Miller and Doyle.

  Doyle snatched up the paper before it hit the floor and handed it to Miller, who read the order and grimaced.

  The sheet was headed Operation Caspian Tiger: Tartarus Protocol. Sure enough, Gray’s signature was scrawled across the bottom of the hand-written document. He handed it to Doyle, who took it and grunted.