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instant. But only an instant.
    Their eyes were raw, bloodshot. Probably from the dust more than the parasite infecting them.
    Wheezing through her mask, du Trieux, ever dependable, loped out of the dust and blaze of the Bravo’s headlights, rifle up. More than anything else, the two side-by-side barrels of the Gilboa Viper II looked nasty . A lot nastier than just some little shotgun.
    The one with the baseball bat let it swing down to his feet, the group starting to shuffle backward. “You’re supposed to be dead!” one of them howled. Another, all but spitting up tears, said, “You’re supposed to be extinct. Like animals. We’re the only ones meant to survive.”
    Before they disappeared into the dust entirely, breaking into a run like a pack of defeated wolves, Miller’s steel slipped entirely. His hands shook, the shotgun’s barrel wobbling, and the sweat plastering his skin turned cold despite the heat.
    “Miller?”
    “Dial Northwind,” he said into his earpiece, touching the ‘phone’ button. He marched towards the accident at the intersection, tapping back onto the Cobalt team circuit. “Trix, guard those bodies.” He jerked his head in the direction of the family. A few were still twitching, but Miller doubted anything could be done.
    “ How the fuck are the Infected breathing this shit? ” du Trieux asked, her voice lost to the dust and wind, audible only in his earpiece. “ A mouthful of it nearly made me throw up. ”
    “I have no idea.” The phone continued to ring in Miller’s earpiece, then went to hold music. He got to the mangled wrecks, and had to stop to fiddle for a moment with the shotgun’s flashlight. He eventually got it switched on and swung it to illuminate the interior of one of the wrecks, to see four rat-things sitting in the driver’s lap gnawing their way into his guts. They looked up in shock, like dumb toads, blinded by the light and sitting stock still as blood dribbled off their leathery faces.
    They weren’t having any trouble breathing either. Apparently the Archaeobiome wildlife, and the Archaean Parasite, both got along with the lethal fungal blooms just fine.
    Miller shifted his point of aim fractionally, and blasted all four of them into the passenger seat with a single shot. A second shot ended their squealing. He did the same in the other wrecked cars, clearing them of the bastard little scavengers, and finished just as Northwind picked up his phone call.
     
     
    U NTIL RECENTLY, C YCLOPS- N ORTHWIND had nothing to do with civilian operations, and nothing to do with Miller. But, piece by piece, Schaeffer-Yeager was absorbing useful parts of its subsidiaries. Originally, Cyclops was part of StratDevCo’s support and logistic services. Now Northwind, its communications satellite management department, had been sealed into the filtered, steel-shuttered concrete blockhouse of their private mission control centre somewhere in Arizona with an expanded set of responsibilities.
    Tracing the spider’s web of what the corporation owned and who it employed was a full time job in itself. Miller could, if he needed, ask Northwind to handle that for him, but not today. Miller knew who he needed, just not how to get in touch with them.
    Forty minutes later, faster than some pizza deliveries he’d had, a pair of fire truck-sized emergency response vehicles shouldered through the traffic jam, pausing every so often to push abandoned vehicles off the road and onto the sidewalks. Boltman Oil and Chemical’s in-house fast emergency intervention and response team—the Blue Bolts. They were trained to deal with industrial accidents, oil well fires, chemical spills. This was biological, but Miller’s gamble that they were equipped to deal with that, too, paid off.
    A team of four in firefighters’ exoskeletal harnesses finished clearing the road, and a new convoy set off, trapped civilian vehicles following them through the streets to the Astoria Peninsula. Their refugee