First Strike: Strikers, #0

By Ann Christy

Epidemiologist Giselle Quick is a happy woman. After being lured away from the CDC to work in the private sector, she now has it all: fulfilling work, a great paycheck, and time to spend with her sons. And seriously, who wouldn't like getting paid to play diabolical games all day? That those games save lives makes it perfect.

Inside the BG Group's laboratories, Giselle and her team game out all the possibilities of biological warfare and natural pandemics. Her Red Cell makes sure they're prepared should the worst happen. It may be for profit, but it's good work.

There's only one small thing to mar this perfect job and life, but it's beginning to make Giselle nervous about BG's intentions...they're getting far too interested in the results of her games.

First Strike is a standalone novella prequel to the Strikers Trilogy. There's no need to read the entire series and it can be enjoyed before or after the main trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ann Christy
• Release date: Mar 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393695448

Ann Christy

Ann Christy is a retired Navy Commander with more than twenty-eight years of operational and scientific experience. A graduate of the University of South Carolina and the Naval Postgraduate School, she has a strong educational and professional background in oceanographic and meteorological physics, biochemical marine science, and coastal ecosystems. She lives by the sea under the benevolent rule of her canine overlord and delusional cat.

Book preview

First Strike

A Strikers Novella

by Ann Christy

Copyright © 2019 by Ann Christy

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, nor may it be stored in a database or private retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events appearing or described in this work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.

www.annchristy.com

Foreword

I get a lot of email from readers, which I enjoy a great deal. Since being an author is a largely solitary pursuit, it’s one of the few ways I have to know if anyone out in the wide world enjoyed my work. Sometimes, those emails can center on a theme. For one series it might be to request a certain character get their own prequel…and please make it a big, fat book. For others it might be to ask that a completed series get more volumes.

For the Strikers trilogy, there have been two themes and it’s been consistent since the beginning. First, when will I finish the trilogy. The second is to ask how the world became like it did in the world of Strikers. How did our country fall apart, and how did Texas become the totalitarian state it did?

To the first question, well, the trilogy is complete, so five years of intense world-building, travel, research, (and even losing my favorite hip-waders in the deep mud alongside the Mississippi River), are done. The last volume, Strikers: Outlands, was released in October of 2019.

As a scientist with a long military career in biochemical oceanography and not one, but two fields of physics, I went hog wild creating a world that could really exist. A reader won’t realize how much science went into the books, but that’s part of the reason it took so long.

Trust me, I’m much quicker at that part now.

As to how it all came to this, well, this novella is your answer. First Strike isn’t full of spoilers. It takes place in our world and our time…or the near future. That said, it does answer some enduring mysteries. If you’ve already read the Strikers books, then you might give an ah-ha or two. If you haven’t, you aren’t spoiling the books at all. You’ll simply enter the world of Strikers, which begins a hundred years after the Fall, with a little more background.

I hope you enjoy it.

One

Jerry! I need those latest numbers for my presentation later, Giselle called out the open door to her office.

Within seconds, Jerry was at her door with a frown on his face. Which numbers? We generate more numbers than the lottery.

Rolling her eyes heavenward, which wasn’t particularly effective considering her office was five floors underground, she said, RC2’s latest run with Ebola SMI Plus. They had some novel interdiction ideas and I wanted to include them in our brief.

That would have confused anyone who didn’t work in their section, but everyone here talked that way. It was the code of the job. RC2 meant Red Cell number two, and that particular Ebola strain was one tagged for slower mortality and slightly increased infection rates—SMI Plus. It sounded bad, and it was, but within these walls, Giselle’s people gamed far worse pathogens.

Jerry’s confusion cleared. Oh, yeah, I’ll grab it and get it folded into the presentation deck. I’ll send you the bullet points too.

How did it go? she asked, genuinely curious. All previous runs had been dismal for the human race.

He made a face. Total doom, as per usual. I don’t know where they get the data on these strains, but they’re bad ones.

Giselle smiled and said, Just be glad they’re all theoretical. Gaming helps us get ready and makes the real diseases seem almost easy.

Jerry turned away to do as she asked, but she heard him mutter, Easy is relative.

Within seconds, the brief deck started updating. Giselle glanced at the bullet points, shook her head, and ran the simulation replay. Even throwing every impediment the Red Cell could imagine in the way, the disease covered the globe with remarkable speed. Increasing infection rates and slowing the progress of the disease, even with decreased mortality, made this variant of Ebola a nightmare.

Before she could get much further, a shadow darkened her doorway. Ed Foley leaned against the door frame and grinned. I cannot believe you have to give this brief at six on a Friday evening. Total barbarians.

Giselle leaned back in her chair and returned the grin. Ed always brought out that side of her. Honestly, I figured the people coming would be way too important to work this late. You know, the islands are waiting for their rich folks to arrive. Can’t start the weekend without them.

Ed stepped into the office and touched the back of the chair. Shall I? Or are you too swamped?

No, do. Give me some relief from all this unremitting theoretical death.

He leaned forward after sitting down, then took a peek at her screen. He winced. Dang, that’s bad. That the SMI Plus?

She nodded and sighed, It is. I don’t know who thinks this stuff up, but honestly, when I got the paperwork from Research, I couldn’t believe how complete it was. They had every detail. It was like they didn’t just think it up. It read like a real pathogen.

Ed narrowed his eyes at that. Do you think it is?

Real? she asked.

He nodded, but said nothing. The way he was looking at Giselle said he was looking for a real answer, not a glib one.

I don’t know. I can’t imagine anyone actually tweaking something as dangerous as Ebola just so they could see how far they could take it. And that’s nothing compared to the smallpox variants. Heck, did you see that flu variant from last month? That was insane. Who even thinks of that?

Ed put on a low voice and went for a dramatic tone when he answered, Very disturbed people who feed on the nightmares of others. He finished with a made-for-TV, entirely diabolical, chuckle.

She laughed, but it died quickly. It was a good question, and an ominous possibility. Even the thought of tinkering with diseases like that gave her the creeps. Do you think they exist? And if so, where? And how did our company find out about it?

"You know, I think they probably do exist, or maybe they did exist. As far as how our bosses find out about them, I don’t know. I mean, industrial espionage is one thing, but this sort of thing isn’t something done outside of very secret organizations. Most of those would be governmental. Yes, I know we work for a giant conglomerate, but BG isn’t the actual government. People can joke that BG doesn’t mean Black Gold and really stands for Background Government,