Quaranteam - Boo Two (ch. 28)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

May 4

th

, 2021

"General Bonner, forgive my bluntness, but you're fucking kidding me, right?" Andy asked the General as he stood in her office, with Lexi, Melody and Fiona waiting just outside for clearance reasons. "I understand there's a high level of complexity to this issue, but your go-to move for these sorts of problems cannot be 'hey, let's add another member to Team Rook, that'll make things easier.'"

"I understand your hesitation, Mr. Rook, but we're in something of a pickle right now, and like it or not, when you agreed to do that

60 Minutes

interview, you became the public face of the Quaranteam project," Lt. General Bonner said to him. "Besides, this is only the second time in six months that we've asked you to take on an additional member of your team. You make it sound like we're throwing women at you left and right."

'Sure,' Andy thought to himself, 'but we're already closer to becoming a Tier 6 Team than I'd like, and the last thing I want is to stumble into that blindly.'

"Tell me how everyone else is doing before we even get into that," he said, sipping from a cup of coffee. The military had come by to pick up the bodies and the prisoners last night, and after the adrenaline had faded, the whole group of them had been ready to pass out, so they'd slept in a puddle in the bunker room, staff included. The Air Force hadn't been the first to arrive, though. Nathaniel Watkins, one of New Eden's billionaires who had taken a liking to Team Rook, had personally sent a portion of his security detail over to Andy's house when Andy's power had gone out, and his crew had been the first responders, getting there almost an hour before the Air Force had, something the General had seemed especially annoyed about. "I can't say the Air Force's response time thrilled me any."

"It wasn't our finest hour, Mr. Rook, by all admissions, but between your own defenses and that small private army your friend Mr. Watkins employs, it seems like you came through okay," the General said to him. "Although I expect that was simply because he didn't have his own Team to worry about at that moment, since no one was attacking his house, unlike the dozen or so locations we had to deal with along the western seaboard."

"Everyone's okay, though?" Andy asked. Sometimes getting a straight answer out of the General involved asking the same question a few times. It wasn't as though she was being deliberately withholding from him; she was just a cautious person by nature.

"We're still getting things settled in the Pacific Northwest and over at Valhalla Shores, but it seems like most of the invasion forces were defeated with only minor casualties on our end. We had some advance warning they were coming from your friends in the Empty Wives, because according to their leader, they did everything they could short of send up a signal flare to let us know they were invading. While the CCP were trying to move mostly fast and quiet, the Empty Wives were doing everything they could to get us aware of the snakes in our garden.               In addition to that, these women, all these women, they're infected with DuoHalo. I assume you had a booster encounter last night or this morning, as you were instructed to?"

"I'm not being keen on being lectured when and where I need to fuck," Andy said with a smirk, cutting through the euphemistic language. "But yes, I had a couple of fucks to boost my resistance this morning, figuring we might've been exposed to DuoHalo. We were under the impression China seemed to be in very dire straits, so this seems to confirm that. Have we decided what we're going to do about their situation?"

"Do?" the General asked him, a curious tone to her voice. "What makes you think we're going to '

do

' anything?" She noticed the expression on his face and then chuckled. "I'm fucking with you, Mr. Rook. Of

course

we're going to do something about it, especially since they're willing to acquiesce to a bunch of our demands. Of the old superpowers, it looks like most of them are falling by the wayside. In the last few days, it looks like both Russia and China are pretty well cooked."

"With us, Germany and the UK coming back to the forefront," Andy said. "That's more like a return to older times, isn't it?"

"That's the thing, Mr. Rook," the General said, carrying over a small stack of folders for him to look at. "New intel I want you to take a good look at right now, because it's going to have some pretty major impact on us, I think moving forward."

Andy frowned, looking at the outstretched folders before taking them from her hands and moving to sit down on the couch in her office. This was decidedly not the reason he'd come into her office, but new military intelligence regarding the Quaranteam serum and the DuoHalo virus was, as part of his duties on the civilian oversight committee, something he had to take deadly seriously.

In December of 2020, a shipment of the Quaranteam serum being delivered to Spain had been hijacked by thieves out on the open waters. A boat transporting several refrigerated shipping containers of the serum had somehow 'lost' one in transit, which contained close to 50,000 doses of the Quaranteam serum. How that container disappeared off the ship or where it had gone to had been of great speculation for the military for some time.

New intelligence suggested the container had been split into two, loaded off onto a second boat somewhere in transit, and 25k doses had been shipped to two different countries - Algeria and Gabon. What was even more surprising, both of the countries had apparently been able to reverse engineer a 'working' version of the Quaranteam serum, although the Gabon version had some serious side effects, not the least of which was a sort of pacification effect on the men exposed to it. The men weren't any less intelligent or expressive, but they seemed to exist in a sort of a euphoric daze, incapable of aggression or violence.

For several of the nations of Africa, this hadn't been considered a 'side effect' but a 'benefit,' and explained why the demand from African nations for the serum had declined so rapidly in the early months of the year. Many of the African nations had undergone military coups led by women, and the idea of using the serum to keep their men docile and compliant seemed to have appealed to a lot of the nations that had been ravaged by warlords and terrorists for too long. There were even reports that Egypt, Algeria, Gabon and South Africa were talking about trying to create some sort of African Union, like the European Union, but this one led mostly by strong female leaders, although Algeria had some men on their council who had taken

their

version of the Quaranteam serum, and remained much as they were beforehand. That particular rift had, in fact, been the biggest sticking point on why the African Union

hadn't

formed yet, as the Algerians wanted to move all existing nations onto

their

version of the serum, and many of the nations were just trying to get the first one available they could.

The two versions of the serum didn't play especially well with the other, and a single woman with the Algerian serum introduced a Team built entirely off the Gabon serum would see that Team restored to normal, the docility effect completely stripped from the man within a matter of hours. Because of that, some nations had chosen to

only

accept the Gabon version of the serum, and Egypt was trying to not to mix the two but had additionally stopped taking on any further shipments of the US serum, instead taking only local versions of the serum, focusing on the Gabon version.

Men, in Egypt, were being treated more as property than people, even if the cage was quite gilded.

It was a rather chaotic situation, varying greatly from nation to nation.

All of this had been happening remarkably quietly, off the world stage and behind closed doors, despite how Andy thought he and the rest of the world should've been seeing it on the nightly news. But, as he'd learned in the six months since he'd joined Oversight, much of the world's massive restructuring was happening in the shadows, and people would only see the end results, when it was too late to change or adjust things that might've been controversial.

That was the

first

folder in the stack.

The second folder was a detailed debrief from the Empty Wives, explaining what had happened. The new CCP was

desperate,

and they were falling apart at the seams. However strong they'd felt their grip was on the military, as it turns out, the Empty Wives had been working to change that, and they had turned the CCP into the minority, with the CCP loyalists making up only 10-20% of the remaining military forces. The Empty Wives were closer to 60-70% with the remaining undecided group trying to just find some kind of workable solution.

The two conflicting groups had presented such a problem that neither side had been willing to let the other take on negotiations with a country with the Quaranteam serum, and both sides had tried reaching out on the sly, only to have their delegates murdered by the other group. The CCP had reached out to Gabon, and the Empty Wives had tried reaching out to both the US and the Germans, with no success.

Andy had to make sure he was reading this carefully, because as far as he or anyone else at New Eden had known, no one from China had made contact of

any

kind, not even to

schedule

a meet. He checked it off in his mind as something that needed to be investigated, because if different groups within the US were going rogue on their own, that could be just as much of a problem.

As a last-ditch effort, the CCP had decided to send a strike force to the US. They'd gathered forty-two women, divided into teams of three, to form twelve strike teams and two teams dedicated to their exfiltration from the US. The Empty Wives had found out about the teams, and followed them when they flew into Mexico, and took a ship to sail up along the west coast, dropping the majority of the teams off in the Bay Area before sailing up another day or so to Oregon and Washington. The Empty Wives contingent had been much smaller than the CCP had sent, only four members to spare, and so they had followed them into New Eden, trying to draw as much attention to themselves along the way as possible. But because they hadn't anywhere near the forces to take on the CCP, they'd just decided to follow the most vicious of the Communist teams and when it looked like things were going to get completely out of hand, they'd decided they had to intervene.

That was when they had attacked and worked to prevent Andy's abduction. They had stripped down to next to nothing to prove their intentions not to harm him or his family, and they were willing to do whatever it took to broker a bargain with the United States to get the serum shipped to China.

The discussions between the Empty Wives and the President had gone on almost immediately from when they'd been taken into custody until Andy's arrival early this afternoon. That was what the last folder was all about.

Operation: Faint Dawn.

It would be the largest deployment of the Quaranteam virus done in the shortest period of time, using up nearly all of the remaining stored doses to inoculate as many people from China as they could as quickly as they could. It would also involve quite a large number of military forces, both US and Chinese, sweeping through the country from east to west, in an effort to save as many people as they could.

Deploying the Quaranteam serum into a woman with the sleeping plague would wake her up for about twenty minutes before she would fall unconscious again. Once paired with someone, however, the DuoHalo would be flushed out, and all other norms of pairings seemed to be holding.

All the things China would be giving up in exchange for this humanitarian rescue operation were listed on the page, and it was quite a sizable series of asks. Taiwan's independence had to be guaranteed and respected. North and South Korea would be reunited, under the South Korean leadership, with no official ties to China. China would need to hold democratic elections, and demolish the existing Communist government structure. And Operation Funnel Cake would apply as well, although only in more populated urban areas that had been doing their best to quarantine and survive.

As it turned out, the only thing China needed as much as the Quaranteam serum itself was men.

The United States was starting to run low on its pool of 'less desirables' and made that clear to China, and the Empty Wives had basically replied that they were out of options at this point, that they would take just about whatever they could get their hands on, shy of violent psychopaths and murderers. They were starting to consider even taking those, and just keeping them shackled and chained up, something the United States had no official stance on.

The last page of the second document made Andy sigh, shaking his head with a little laugh. It was a note from the President herself.

"Mr. Rook - I know your country asks a lot of you, but I am hoping we can trouble you just a little further. As part of Operation: Faint Dawn, the Empty Wives faction of China would get one person to work there, in New Eden, contributing and aiding to the Quaranteam research. I understand you met her a few hours ago - her name is Dr. Ming-Yue Chen. She needs a Team to join, and I would like to ask you to consider adding her as part of yours.

I am aware your Team is already quite large, but you are, frankly, one of the only people I can think to ask this of, and I feel like she has already proven her intentions by saving your life. I don't want to make a habit of asking things of you, but since you've gone far already, I hoped this one last step wouldn't be too troubling. It is a noble calling we ask of you, one born of honor and duty. Your country won't ask you to take on any additional Team members beyond this, but we have done our homework on her, and her file should be accompanying my note.

We ran her through Oracle against your last on-file test results, and you came up as a surprisingly high match, much higher than anyone else on the base. She actually matches up higher than many of your current Teammates. You can see the results for yourself. Talk about it with a couple of your wives if you need to. If you refuse, we'll have to redirect her to a Senator whose compatibility isn't even half of yours, just for security reasons, something I'm loathe to do. But right now, it almost feels like making it to Nov. 2022 is going to take every last drop I have in me.

It's a strange world we live in, Mr. Rook.

But it's the only one we've got.

President Nancy Pelosi

"Goddamn it," Andy grumbled beneath his breath. Then he looked at the file beneath the President's note. Dr. Ming-Yue Chen was 35, and a doctor specializing in nanobiology. She had spent much of her life in Shanghai but had spent close to a decade in London getting her education in medicine, which explained the complicated nature of her accent. She came from a small family that had been at odds with leadership in the Chinese Communist Party but had done her best to try and fight DuoHalo and Covid.

In many ways, she was everything a traditional Chinese woman was expected not to be. She was outspoken, bold, brash and loved to challenge authority. And yet, because of her brilliance, she had gone out of her way to excel in her field and lead research into nanotechnology. But the very first photo in the stack of pictures they had gathered of her was from her college days, and she was wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, black leather pants and stiletto leather boots. It was quite a daring look.

She liked her men thoughtful but decisive, contemplative but not so much that they were caught up in analysis paralysis.

Interestingly enough, she was a big fan of fantasy and science-fiction, but she had never heard of Blake Conrad (Andy's pen name) before seeing the

60 Minutes

story last fall, nor had she read any of the Druid Gunslinger books. Apparently the Mandarin translations were lackluster, and she had been hoping to get either the English originals or Cantonese translations.

The Oracle assessment had pegged her and Andy as being 94% compatible, the sort of number that was hard to ignore. She even listed her favorite movie as Terry Gilliam's

Time Bandits

. How was he expected to argue against that?

"Looks solid on paper, right?" the General asked him, a slight smile on her often-inscrutable face. "I told you - the decision wasn't coming from me. It was coming from up on high."

"When the hell did my life become a Gilbert & Sullivan musical?"

"Farcical?"

"No, that's incidental," he replied. "I just meant the constant reminders about honor and duty."

"Some of us are called to higher things."

"Having a harem of what sounds like it's about to become 23 women isn't what most people would describe as 'higher things,'" he scoffed.

"And yet—"

"And yet here I am."

"Called to higher things."

"Oh stop," Andy sighed. "You knew I was going to say yes even before you even sent for me, didn't you?"

"You're a good and noble soul, Mr. Rook," the General said. "Yes, I expected you were going to do the right thing, no doubt in my mind."

"That only makes me want to say no even more."

"But you won't, will you, Mr. Rook?"

"...no."

"No?"

"No, I won't say no," he grumbled. "But the President's right in her note. You can't ask me to take on anyone else. I'm already far closer to being a Tier 6 team than I'd like."

"Don't worry, Mr. Rook, I intend to honor the President's deal with you - no more pairings without them being requested by you or the woman in question personally. Between the unusual circumstances regarding your pairings with Miss Brown, sorry, Missus Rook, and Miss Park, I'd say you already have more than your fair share of unusual aspects, don't you?"

"Much more than I'd like."

"How's she doing by the way? Hell of a thing, discovering the impressions window like that," the General told him. "I'm sure she's got mornings where she doesn't want to start the day with thanking you, but it not being up to her must drive her crazy."

"She's got a workaround for it that helps her manage."

"Can I ask what that is?"

"She sends me a text message first thing every morning thanking me for allowing her into the family," he said. "It just pops up as another message in our chat thread, so it satiates her need to thank me in the morning."

"And the, ah, dirty talk?"

"Well," Andy said with a wry smile. "I don't mind that and neither does she, so we let her go as long as she keeps the volume in check, or we're downstairs in a room that's decently soundproofed."

"And the Missus? Piper? How's she taking to her... individualistic quirks?"

"She says you never fully get used to being able to

smell

another person, to be able to track them via scent, but it's gotten to the point where she can at least

manage

it and it's not driving her crazy or anything," he told the General. "But she's gotten more precise with it over last few months. "She can sort of determine what sort of mood I'm in by my smell, whether I'm calm or stressed. It's almost like she's got a sort of low-level empathy with me based on my scent. She says she feels like it gives her secret insight into how I'm doing. I know your people have been testing her blood and mine, seeing if you can find some way to replicate that ability. Any luck with that?"

"Nothing actionable," the General sighed. "Which is a shame, because it would be a very nice tool to put into the toolkit of all security forces. How do you feel about the intel about the impending African Union?"