"She needs medical assistance, now!" Gaunt stepped into the lobby of Vanguard's German office seemingly out of nowhere, startling Penny Goodweather and causing her to shriek and drop the files she was working on and spilling them all over the floor of the room.
"Call Gustave! Tell him to get Macgregor ready for a patient!" Gaunt carried Lykopis into the hospital room and waited for Gustave to arrive.
"W-what's wrong with her?" Penny asked from the doorway.
Gaunt turned his head slowly towards the VE secretary. "She's been infected."
**************************************
Icarus Sidewinder flew through the skies, searching the mutated Brood XIII cicadas. He triangulated their last known position on his helmet's built in computer systems and veered towards that direction. His exuberance at being in the air was tempered slightly over anxieties about his performance. The spray would work. It had to. . .
**********************
Doc Paragon oversaw teams of scientists and labor crews as they sought to build a defense against the Brood insects. "The world's largest bug zapper," Some might say.
*****************************
Drake Marshall turned around as Icarus' trail faded in the skies and found himself in total darkness.
"Come." Gaunt's voice sounded around him. Within moments, he found himself standing next to Gaunt. "What's going on? Where's Lykopis?" he asked.
"I left her in sick bay at headquarters. We're going to find Ozzy and Adem and get her a cure."
********************
Ozzy Baxter and Adem Different made their way into Dr. Mueller's home, acting as if they did not suspect that they were being followed.
******************
Mueller himself was hidden away in his private lab in his basement. Frantically he'd searched. In his paniced state, it seemed to take him forever to find what he'd been looking for. He'd smashed and destroyed several years of equipment and research looking for. . .it.
Finally, he saw it. Directly in front of him. How could he be so careless? So stupid? It didn't matter now.
He picked up the small vial labeled "metagene extract. brood XIII dna." and poured the contents into a syringe. Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he wrapped a small length of rope around his arm and waited for a vein to come close to the skin.
Picking up the needle, he injected the serum into his arm and waited. . .
******************
"Adem," Ozzy Baxter said as he picked up a small batch of papers from a table and began reading over them.
"Yes?"
"What the hell is Nu:Genetics?"
The Vanguardians looked at each other for a moment before Different remembered the small drug bottle Gaunt had found in an earlier investigation.
Before he could answer, a voice from behind startled the two. "You're about to find out. . ."
