“Damn it.” Friedrich Mkhize, Prime Minister of the Unified Confederacy of Southern Africa, muttered as he looked over a map of his country. “It’s all falling apart…”

Stretching from Cape Agulhas all the way up to the Horn of Africa the UCSA boasted a respectable amount of land. An incredible amount of resources also lay within their borders. Oil, wood, diamonds, gold, aluminum, gas, uranium. You name it, the UCSA could probably provide it.

If you could access it at least.

“Sir!” A guard said as she entered the office and saluted, shaking Freidrich out of his contemplation.

“What is it!” he snapped, motioning for the woman to continue.

“The representative of the second province has come to pay a visit!”

Freidrich thought for a moment before sighing in defeat. “Very well, let him in.”

The guard saluted once again, turned, and walked out the room as Freidrich turned around to gaze out the large window behind him. He heard heavy footsteps enter the room not a moment later.

“Freidrich! How are you?” A deep booming voice asked kindly, causing Freidrich to crack a smile that quickly fled his face.

“I am well, Uncle Mandle. How are you?” he asked as he turned back around, only to be enveloped in a bear hug.

Mandle laughed loudly as Freidrich struggled to escape the large man’s grip. “I am doing fine! More importantly…” he trailed off as he slacked his grip and allowed Freidrich to escape. Meeting his eyes, Mandle softly inquired, “how are you holding up?”

Freidrich felt close to tears as he broke his Mandle’s gaze. “...she might not make it,” he said quietly.

“It’s the…” Mandle trailed off, not wanting to say it.

“Yes,” Freidrich confirmed, “It’s the Pretorian Virus.”

As Mendle fell into a cursing tangent, Freidrich lost himself in his thoughts as he stared out his window at the quarantined city.

It was called the Pretorian Virus.

The name was kind of a misnomer seeing as how it wasn’t actually a virus and that it wasn’t first spotted in Pretoria, the UCSA’s capital, but it stuck.

It wasn’t actually the symptoms itself that made the disease scary. A high fever, some light coughing, all relatively tame compared to something like the black death. What was scary about it, was its proliferation, subtlety, and its immunity to bacteriophages.

The disease was extremely contagious. Any skin-to-skin contact with a diseased individual had an eighty percent chance of the disease being contracted. Combine this with the fact that victims only start to show symptoms after two weeks of becoming contagious and its a miracle that the disease hasn’t become a global pandemic.

Freidrich, his wife, and his daughter only avoided getting infected because they were in Europe for a UN summit when it broke out five years ago.

When people started flooding hospitals across the country because of their illnesses, doctors quickly discovered a disturbing fact about the disease. It was immune to antibiotics and, more concerningly, bacteriophages.

Immunity to antibiotics wasn’t a new thing, Superbugs were discovered back in the 1950s after all. To counter these growing health hazards humanity turned to an old technology, bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages, in simple terms, are viruses. Specifically, they are very specialized viruses, attacking only specific bacteria of a certain strain and nothing else. So, by introducing these ‘Phages’ into the human body, they will reproduce and kill all the harmful bacteria while leaving the patient alone. The first recorded use of bacteriophages was back in 1919, but the technology was abandoned for a long while when antibiotics were discovered.

Phage treatment relies on the fact that every strand of bacteria has a natural viral predator. The only somewhat tricky part was finding that natural predator. However, the Pretorian Virus doesn’t appear to have a natural predator and, so far, attempts to create an artificial phage have been met with failure.

Thus, the Pretorian Virus is, for all intents and purposes, incurable.

The only hope that people have is that the body’s natural immune system will be able to fight it off. All the doctors can do is provide fluid and nutrients to the body so it can fight better. However, this doesn’t help the fact that many won’t be able to get water and nutrients. There are only so many people that hospitals can serve at once, after all.

There was only one thing that brought a brief respite from the disease, winter.

The Pretorian Virus was extremely vulnerable to colder temperatures. So much so that it would die if exposed to an environment below twenty degrees celsius or about seventy degrees fahrenheit.

This information was helpful in containing the spread, but not useful for helping those already infected.

For five years the Pretorian Virus has ravaged the UCSA, receding in the winter only for it to return in the spring. While the virus has a low death rate among the younger and healthier population, the older and weaker ones have suffered terribly.

Weaker like Freidrich’s daughter and, now deceased, wife.

Sighing sadly, Freidrich turned back around to talk with the still raving Mandle. “Mandle! Mandle! Calm, please…” he shouted, gaining the man’s attention.

“I’m… sorry Freidrich,” he apologized.

“It’s fine, Uncle. We’re all stressed. We have been for the past five years. It’s nothing new…” Freidrich assured with a sad smile.

“How is Danai’s condition?” Mandle asked, hopefully.

“...not good, Uncle, not good. The doctors tell me that there’s nothing we can do except hope.” He paused and broke out into a deprecating laugh. “But where has that gotten us before? Eh?” he questioned with grim joviality.

Mandle bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile. “Hah, yes. Not very far in the end.” Dropping his gaze from his ward, Mandle sighed. “I guess all we can do now is pray…”

They both sat in silence…

“Now, now. Haven’t you heard? God only helps those that help themselves.”

Both men froze for a second before Mandle pulled a pistol from his coat while Freidrich simultaneously dived away from the window. Rolling forward Freidrich pulled his own pistol from his coat as well and turned to point it at the intruder who slowly raised their hands in surrender.

It was a woman, her outfit made that clear. A short purple leather jacket over some kind of black skintight suit. She wore dark purple combat boots and her black hair was pulled up into a sort ponytail. The top half of her face was covered with a purple crescent half mask that had no eyes but from what Freidrich could make out from the bottom half of her face, she looked Hispanic. She wore a sort of collar around her neck with a small bulb on the front.

“Come now, boys. Is that any way to treat a guest?” she said and pouted, her lips not matching up with her words.

“Who are you? How did you get in here? And why are you here?” Mandle asked, his voice cold and calculating.

The intruder laughed. “I love it when a boy gets straight to business. Alright.” Freidrich got the impression that she rolled her eyes before she reached into her small jacket, causing both of them to tighten their grips on their weapons.

They both relaxed slightly when, instead of a weapon, she pulled out a folder. “Relax boys,” she said nonchalantly as she swaggered up to Freidrichs work table and slapped the file on the table. “I’m here because I have a business proposition for you. One that may solve your Pretorian Virus problems.” She opened the folder, pulled out a piece of paper, and slid it down the table towards where Freidrich was standing.

Hesitating slightly, Freidrich made eye contact with Mandle. The silent conversation that they had like that was one only close lovers or those who had fought together for many years could have.

…Obviously they were the latter.

Don’t be gross.

Nodding slightly, Freidrich stepped up to the table and peaked at the paper before him, not taking his gun off the intruder in the slightest.

It was a photograph of a man in a black hoody. His face was slightly turned away from the camera and he was in motion so it was blurry, but Freidrich could somewhat make out his features.

“...what am I looking at?” he questioned as he stepped back again.

“This,” She said as she reached across the table and picked up the photo, “is someone they’re calling Miracle Man, and about five days ago, he cured an entire hospital of their ailments,” She paused and leaned forward slightly. “All. At. Once.”

Both men stared at her for a moment, shared a look, and lowered their weapons. Holstering his weapon completely, Freidrich once again stepped up to the table and started flipping through the folder that the intruder slid to him.

A minute passed where only the shuffling of pages could be heard. Mandle glared at the intruder who just stood there without a care in the world.

“So,” Freidrich began, breaking the silence, “what exactly are you offering?”

The intruder smiled widely. “Me and my associate will go and acquire Miracle Man for your use. In exchange, we simply ask for your patronage as well as some time to study Miracle Man for ourselves.”

“How much?” Freidrich asked, still not looking up from the folder.

“Twenty billion.”

Freidrich stopped flipping.

A silence descended on the office and Mandle tightened his grip on his pistol. The intruder shifted side to side but kept a pleasant smile on her face.

“Done.”

Freidrich slapped the file on the table and slid back to the intruder, stepping around the table he walked up to her and held out his hand with a pleasant smile on his face.

The intruder picked up the folder and took his hand with a wide smile. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Quite… But,” he added, his grip tightening and his smile turning feral. “You will return to me Miracle Man in one piece and functional or else, I will remind you who my father was,” he whispered with deadly intent.

The woman nodded, her smile a bit more plastic than before. “Of course, sir. You can call me Transporter.”

Releasing her hand, Freidrich relaxed, but his eyes still shown with malice. “Nice to meet you. Now… get out of my office.”

Transporter nodded and seemed to pop out of existence right before his eyes. Stepping over to his knocked over chair, Friedrich righted it and sat.

“...I haven’t seen you that angry since our last battle with the Imperialists.” Mandle commented calmly, finally holstering his pistol. “What’s our next move? We’re not going to just let them take him, are we?”

“Of course not,” Freidrich said as he rolled up to his work table. “Why would we do that when we could just capture him ourselves?”

Mandle laughed. “I’ve always liked the way you think Freidrich. So? Who are we sending? The SAID, the Kufihliwe, oh, oh, we should send the-”

“Send the Isipoki.” Freidrich interrupted.

“...do you think that’s a good idea?”

“My daughter's life is at stake Mandle. I will not leave anything to chance.” He met his eyes, and Mandle saw the seriousness in them.

“Send the Isipoki.”