Quaranteam - Boo Two (ch. 15.5)

Intermission Three -

Kai

December 20

th

, 2020 - Hamburg, Germany

The snow was lightly drifting down from the sky, and Kai Schumann stepped out from the Emilienstraße station heading north, heading towards Weihnachtsmarkt Osterstraße, a broad smile on his face, three lovely women in tow, his first partner Anny, his second partner Claudia and his newest partner Ilse. All eleven of his partners had wanted to come out with him, but he'd wanted to check everything out for himself mostly first, but of course Anny and Claudia wouldn't let him leave the house without them, and Ilse wanted to tag along see a little bit more of the big city she'd barely had any time to spend in.

If everything went well, they'd come back again in a few days as a full Team. As recently as three or four months ago, Kai hadn't been entirely sure there would even

be

Christmas markets this year, but Germany had made quite a remarkable turnaround over the last six months.

When he'd been approached in August, he'd been on permanent medical discharge. A former army medic, he'd been motorcycling during a weekend pass in 2018, and a drunk driver had whipped out and clipped him, sending him sailing off his bike, throwing him into a metal signpost, breaking his back, both legs and several ribs, leaving loads of metal shrapnel in nearly impossible places to reach in his body. It had taken him the better part of the next year and change to learn how to walk again in even the most rudimentary fashion. Then, in March of 2020, just as he'd felt like he was in a place where maybe he could move around enough so that he could start to get out of his small town of Jork, not far from Hamburg, the lockdowns had begun.

Originally, the story had been that a disease called Covid was catching fire, and that to combat the spread of it, people were being asked to stay at home, to self-isolate, which, for the most part, was fine with Kai. It gave him time to continue rebuilding his house and working on his motorcycles. In fact, he'd found out that he could travel around the Germany countryside on his motorcycles as much as he wanted, as long as he kept distant from other people, and after a few years of only being able to look at his bikes, he knew it was time to start enjoying riding them once more.

By May, the information about the world at large was getting crazier and crazier, and certainly far less reliable. What had started as just one plague had turned into two, and Covid had turned out to be the less deadly sister to dance with at the party. Covid's big sister, DuoHalo, was a bigger, meaner bitch in every sense of the word. At that point, Kai's ability to travel among the German countryside had been limited all over again, but this time it was because he'd started to get information from friends on the inside, as people inside the Bundeswehr had been doing their best to keep him in the loop.

"Don't get sick, Kai," his friend Klaus had said to him. "We'll have need of you soon enough."

That had sounded ridiculously ominous, so Kai had begun doing as much homework as he could with what access he still had. And despite all the coverups that were in play, a

lot

of the information had slipped through. There were simply too many leaks to plug everything up. Nobody had that many fingers.

By July, he was sure that DuoHalo was in every possible sense going to be a new version of the Black Plague, with the casualties going to be in the millions, maybe even the billions. Most information about the severity of it was being suppressed, but it wasn't that difficult to read between the lines, or to add together the intense amount of "people suddenly too sick to communicate" with the information about the disease in order to make the inevitable conclusion that millions of people were

already

dead, and there wasn't much anyone could do about it.

In mid-August, he'd gotten the call to report back into the local base, to return to active duty. Even with the advance warning from his friend Klaus, he was more than a little surprised. Kai had gone into the base, still limping a little bit, the wounds from the accident years ago still pestering him daily. Once he'd gotten there, they'd briefed him in on everything, giving him full access and total clearance to read about everything regarding the plague that had been living in the back of his mind for the last few months.

DuoHalo, the American 'Quaranteam serum,' the imprinting process, the abduction of one of the serum's cocreators by the Russians, a rumored attempt for some Australian Special Forces trying to get the

other

creator of the serum, reports that DuoHalo was man-made and had possibly escaped from a lab in Australia, Indonesia or New Zealand in some sort of transport accident - every detail that they had regarding the whole sordid mess.

"What do you need me for?" he'd asked his superior officer.

As it turned out, they wanted him to be part of the distribution team that was going to get a shot into every German arm before the year's end, and to help with the research needed to spin that team up. Part of the agreement with the Americans had been that they needed to keep things quiet until middle-to-end of November, to keep people from panicking, because the last thing anyone wanted was a global rush on the supply markets, people collapsing into hoarding mode when there was no need for it, when in fact hoarding would only complicate things further.

The Army had relocated him into Hamburg proper, giving him a series of apartments above a café not far from the red-light district, so that their work wouldn't attract unwanted attention. Modifications were going to be made to convert the several smaller apartments into one large home that he could permanently call his own, and he wouldn't need to so much as lift a finger.

As much as he didn't want to leave his home in Jork behind, his country needed him close at hand, and the work to be done was too important for them to risk being caught. The lab had been set up in a warehouse a few blocks away that had been abandoned for nearly a decade. It wasn't a particularly large team, but the best and brightest of Germany's medical minds were there, and Kai was mostly just playing lab assistant to all of them.

Like all the other people working on Project: Frauenweg, he'd gotten paired up as soon as he'd arrived, Anny being a statuesque blonde twenty-two-year-old from Flensburg they'd brought down as they thought she would be the best possible match for him and would be understanding about the new way of the world without too much pushback. They'd gotten on exceptionally well right from the start, although Anny had been a bit taken aback by the size of Hamburg, having spent her entire life in smaller towns, Flensburg clocking in at less than 90k before DuoHalo had ravaged it, and Hamburg approaching 2 million.

Much as they usually were, their American friends were playing things close to their vest, but also as they usually were, they were expecting the rest of the world to be behind the curve. Germany had no desire to let American expectations set the tempo for the rest of the world. They had decided that as much as possible, they preferred to have their fate in their own hands.

The initial batch of doses the Americans had sent over to Germany in early August had been meant to stabilize the government and the military. The size of that shipment had been reasonable - about thirty thousand doses. But instead of immediately handing out all thirty-thousand doses, the German government and military had set aside five hundred doses for research and development.

The Americans had promised to share the formula and all the associated technologies with it by mid-October, but nobody in the Bundesregierung wanted to wait that long, so they'd decided they'd just crack it on their own, using what the Americans had provided as a roadmap of where to focus their research. Even the American's supposed "Oracle" system, a combination computer program and questionnaire designed to use algorithms to pair up compatible individuals they'd just used for initial calibration, studying how it worked as best they could before coming up with their own version, Heiratsvermittlerin, quite literally, "Matchmaker," which would let them do their own pairings without relying on the Americans, and, more importantly, without giving the Americans a complete database of every man and woman still alive in Germany.

Of course, The Americans had offered assurances that all the data would not be used for anything other than pairings and matching, but just because the wolf gives you his word that he's vegetarian is no cause to put him amongst your chickens.

In early September, the German team had been able to replicate the Quaranteam formula exactly but hadn't been able to modify it to remove any of the strange side effects that seemed to come part and parcel with it. In fact, the longer they worked on it, the more they were starting to feel like the serum couldn't be altered at all, not even in the most minor of ways. Some of the side effects they'd wanted to avoid removing, but the fact that the serum couldn't be given to men directly had been something that was still plaguing German scientists as well. Still, sometimes what worked had to be good enough. And in many cases, the side effects had proven extremely beneficial, as Kai himself could attest to.

Kai's fifth partner, Tanja, had been the first person to use the German version of the serum, on September 5

th

, 2020, and she'd integrated into his family perfectly. And, even more importantly, she'd triggered Kai's regeneration. They'd both gone to sleep after he'd begun her imprinting, and when he'd awoke, in the bed beneath him had been sloughed off layers of skin, all wrapped around bits and shards of metal fragments, left over shrapnel that his body had been holding onto since the motorcycle accident years ago, all in places too dangerous to consider removing, but the serum had simply instructed his body to slowly work the fragments out and repair the damaged nerves, muscles and tissue. When he'd awoken the day after Tanja's arrival, he felt twenty years younger, with no pains or aches in his body, no stiffness, no limp, even the heavy scarring that had covered much of his back and bottom had been entirely healed up. Tanja had still said "imprinting" in English, however, so it was clear their derivative was just adhering to whatever protocols the original had.

Still, they had a formula they could mass produce, and on September 7

th

, 2020, Germany became either the second or the third country to begin large scale production of a version of the Quaranteam serum. (Reports were still unclear as to whether the Russians were mass producing the serum or not - it had

sounded

like they were producing loads of it, but their death toll continued to rise catastrophically in the face of that information, which didn't make

any

sense.) A week later, reports would start coming in that the Brits had begun spinning up their

own

version of the serum as well, having gotten a leg up from the Americans, who'd gone out of their way to be extremely helpful in getting the Brits set up. It wasn't enough for their Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to take it seriously, of course, because the man died on Oct. 1

st

, somehow having convinced himself that the serum was worse than the disease, if reports were to be believed.

In the first week of October, the German Army had begun its process of travelling from north to south across their great nation, vaccinating every woman they could find. There were some people being transported from one region to another, but the idea was to try and cause as little disruption as possible, and whenever possible, people were left where they were. There was definitely some condensation, however, as major cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Munich were given influxes in population from small villages in the countryside to counteract the amount of people they'd lost.

Compared to many other countries, however, Germany had

excelled

in keeping its citizenry alive. Germany's population had been around 83 million at the beginning of 2020, and by the end of it, they were expecting the survivors to be a little over 30 million - they'd lost the 6 million or so people in the DuoHalo killzone (11-17), and the older population (65+) had been hit especially hard, losing about 15 of the 18 million people in that range, but they'd kept the male survival rate in the Green Zone (18-39) at a surprisingly high 30%, something the government had attributed to the lower-than-norm birth rates in Germany over the last decades, and the intense scrutiny they'd placed on caution since the pandemics had begun.

By the end of October, they'd started a second wave of teams starting in the south, with the plan to meet up in the middle a few weeks before Christmas. But a few weeks earlier was when things started to get a little weird.

On October 15

th

, 2020, a man named Manfred Ullman had seemed to reject his first pairing. Because of the nature of toxicity in mismatched pairings, the woman in question had been given a new partner and Manfred had been brought in for further study.

The results had shocked

everyone

in the lab. Not only was Manfred immune to DuoHalo, but his body had also taken the brief amount of Quaranteam serum that he'd gotten from the failed first pairing and had gone into overdrive generating its own variation, completely unlike any other subject they had heard of.

Within two days, they'd learned a lot. Manfred was bisexual but strongly preferred men, his sperm could be used to 'reset' any previously paired woman

exactly

once, and a woman who'd been reset could be paired onto

anybody

, either a man or a woman. Women paired onto women obviously had less protection than several women paired onto the same man - about 60-70% resistance versus the 98% all people in a Team of 12 or higher would gain - but it would allow those women who were ardent lesbians to get some level of base protection.

It offered a huge amount of relief to the German teams, who had been more than a little nervous about permanent pairings. Of course, the Americans had told them about the "necrotized reset," which involved combining necrotized sperm of the dead old male with another dose of the serum then injecting it into the woman, resetting her to take another host. That, at least, could be done multiple times without risk of serious repercussions, but one of the reasons German engineering had been so successful over the years was its tendency to incorporate automatic failover systems, interlocking redundancies to avoid single points of failure anywhere in the greater mechanism. They were calling the resetting sperm "Manfred Mix," and it was being distributed to most of the teams in case of accidents or overly enthusiastic pairings, as well as those in military jobs, as a "break glass in emergency" thing they could carry with them.

As such, Germany was now entering negotiations with loads of other countries, to provide some of

their

version of the QT serum in exchange for resources, land or even key members of their populace. The Americans had been trading their serum away for scientists, soldiers and spies, so why not Germany?

Unsurprisingly, loads of other countries in the European Union were happy to look to Germany's solution if it could be delivered faster than the Americans could deliver theirs. As such, much of the European bloc was engaged very heavily with Germany in order to get their serum, although most were also still negotiating with the Yanks or the Brits, trying to keep all their options open. Still, it felt like Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria, Monaco, Italy, Greece and maybe even France were starting to consider the Germans a better option than the Americans, although Germany was being incredibly careful not to overplay its hand. Also, a handful of the other more eastern European countries such as Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary were more than a little nervous about Germany becoming such a centralized power structure again. When the Americans had asked, Germany's official response was that "they're coming to us, we're not going to them."

All of this was infinitely complicated by the complete lack of coordination coming out of Russia. In fact, communication lines between Germany and Russia had broken down so much that no one was really sure who was in

charge

over in Russia, much less how they were reacting to DuoHalo.

Which had led to Operation: Zuckerbecher.

In early October, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (or, more commonly, the BND, which was Germany's only overseas intelligence service) had reports that one of the co-creators of the Quaranteam serum, a Doctor Adam McCallister, who had been abducted by the Russians several months ago, had turned up in western Russia, and that there was a chance that, because of the actual shitshow that was Russian security for the time being, they might be able to extract him and bring him back to Germany.

A team of operatives, led by Lovisa Wagner, stalked him like wild prey. His wife escaped first, and it had been tempting for the BND team to grab her, to do so would've exposed their position, so they chose instead to wait, and they didn't have to wait all that long. Less than a month later, Adam McCallister's position inside of the Russian government had gotten so tenuous that he no longer felt safe, so he and a few of his partners had broken out of the lab and fled, only for the BND team to strike almost immediately after. (Reports were that Dr. Eve McCallister, Adam's wife, had made her way after her escape back to America.)

By the time the Americans were announcing DuoHalo's existence to the world in late November, 80% of the surviving population of Germany already had the German version of the serum running through their veins, with the remaining 20% to be completed before year's end, and Dr. Adam McCallister was on his way back to Germany. The feeling was the Americans would be too caught up in wanting to

punish

Dr. McCallister and that they wouldn't be able to use his sizable knowledge to help make additional changes to the serum, to try and scale back some of its more difficult to manage traits. Early reports from Lovisa while in transit were that those potential changes might still just be a pipe dream, and that McCallister was only going to help them refine the serum better, claiming that removing the effects from the serum was beyond even his knowledge.

When the man arrived in the Hamburg lab in the beginning of December, Kai immediately took a disliking to the pompous git. McCallister's knowledge was obviously deep when it came to the serum, its development, its applications and usages and how the formula might be able to be tweaked, but he almost seemed astonished that they had discovered and developed "Manfred Mix" on their own, and that many of the things that McCallister supposedly brought to the table had just been things that the German team had already picked up on their own with basic research and study off those samples of the original QT formula they'd gotten from the Americans months ago. Anything related to the regenerative properties of the formula, it seemed, had mostly come from the other leader on the project, Dr. Phil Marcos, whom the Americans kept under strict lock and key.

McCallister had not been worth as much as advertised.

Of course, he wasn't completely useless.

His brain held some useful knowledge about how the "Manfred Mix" worked, as they had a similar situation appear in Russia with a gay man named Sergei, but his wife Evie had made off with most of that research and all the samples, so he was mostly just another set of well-educated eyes when it came to studying that particular offshoot.