More starting hosts sped up the initial stages, but by incrementally smaller amounts. If they started by injecting around five hundred people, for example, they could accelerate through the first four months. But after that, even if you doubled the starting number to one thousand, you only gained one more week. The next week would need two thousand people. That was two thousand opportunities for discovery. So after five hundred, the marginal return of manually infecting people would be far outweighed by the speed of the infection’s natural spread.

So once the drug was ready, they were going to need nine months. No matter what they did, it would take at least nine months to spread to the entire population. And so the danger, as both the colonel and now the captain had seen, was that the vast majority of people would not be immune till the very last stages of the spread. If their plan was discovered just a month before they were ready, more than three quarters of the planet would still be defenseless. That was five billion lives in the balance.

That was equivalent to the population of America, times fifteen. It was four times the entire continent of Europe. These were the odds the team was faced with. Only a week before they were ready and half the planet would die. Six weeks early and it was effectively still genocide.

Even this disturbingly slow uptake did not factor in that the spread would be far from regular. A person could only ‘catch’” the cure if they were near an immunized person who was producing it. It would not leap easily from country to country, and certainly not from continent to continent. So they needed to seed the process evenly across the globe.

If this disturbingly fragile part of the project succeeded before they were discovered, they could then, to some degree, come out of the shadows and be more proactive in their attempts to destroy the satellites, the threat of being wiped out abated.

But if they didn’t …

They both stood stoically, considering all this. Eventually the captain shook his head, the colonel was waiting for him to get it all out. And so the captain decided to finish his thought, now he had started, “There is something else, despite it all, despite the power of the satellites, and that damn superflu they want to drop on us.

“Even if I forget how incredibly easy they seem to find killing all of us, we seem to be ignoring the fact that there are eight of their Agents amongst us even now. And they can pick up fucking planes, Colonel, planes, and that didn’t seem very strenuous for him either.”