Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed.

Soon after Sarah's mission, an urgent mission came down from General Beckman (as she had her NSA Director hat on at that point), word had come through about a new super-virus that had been written, the Omen virus. When Chuck, Jeff and Anna heard what the Omen virus was supposed to be able to do (that it was capable of erasing a hundred zetabytes of data per second) they gasped, which gave the others an idea that this was serious, but it wasn't until Chuck put it into layman's terms (it could wipe out every database in the world in about five seconds) that they realised just what they were facing. Whatever the NSA had on the Omen virus was sent through to them and they started their searches based on that. The only lead on the location of the virus that they could track down was that the designer of the virus was currently living with a cult in a compound out in the back blocks of Massachusetts (which made sense, as he was an MIT alumni), so they got the team ready to head over in a Valkyrie, calling the Barstow complex to get a Wraith Wagon loaded into one and get both ready for the trip by the time that they arrived.

Given the nature of what they were going after, the group was different from their normal missions, Chuck, Anna and Jeff were there to look into the virus, and they had Casey, Carina and Zondra for the action, it was Sarah who was sitting things out this time. When they got to the location of the cult's compound, they sent UAVs with active camouflage out to see what they were up against. They'd already decided that it wasn't safe for Chuck to go in, as he was too recognisable, being splashed across all the society pages as Charles Carmichael, and they were trying to work out who should go in when Chuck burst out laughing, the others came over to see what he was laughing about and Casey's immediate reaction was "Oh hell, no!", as everyone they could see in the compound was naked. The others looked at each other, the obvious one for the job was Carina as she had no compunctions about putting on a show (she'd been made to do far more than that too many times for that to worry her), but the problem was that she'd already put on a show at lots of the functions and clubs that she'd been to, and her face and other bits were quite recognisable from those incidents.

There was no way that Casey was going to go in there naked (even though he was in far better shape than most men half his age, any chance of him agreeing went out the door with Carina's crack about it only being "a little general nudity"), Anna and Jeff had tentatively volunteered to go in (as they weren't as visible and therefore as recognisable as the others), but that plan ran into a snag when they saw that there were paramilitary guards in there who appeared to be quite well trained and capable. The guards made it obvious that this wasn't just a group of eccentric weirdos, the people who were behind it were serious, and Jeff, at least, wasn't up to tackling teams of paramilitary guards. Anna was still prepared to go (well Jeff was, too, but they wouldn't let him), and Zondra said she'd go in with her, so they got ready to head in (well, it took Chuck and Casey longer to unload the W1 from the back of the Valkyrie and get it flight ready than it did for them to get undressed and toss oversized T-shirts on for the quick trip in). At the last second Casey told them that he'd come along and stay with the Wagon in case they needed him, he didn't like the feel of this and didn't want them in there without backup, Zondra thanked him and Anna just came in to give him a hug, she knew as well as Chuck did that the crusty facade that he put on was just that, a facade, and he did care about them.

Casey put the Wagon down in a corner of the compound and the girls tossed the T-shirts back into the cabin before they headed for the nearest group. It was actually good that Anna was there, as she could put up a convincing argument that she knew Colin Davis (the guy they were looking for) from their old hacker days, so people told them where to find to him without any qualms (through they had set off alarm bells with one of the ones running the place who'd overheard them asking for him and she sent the guards after them). The biggest problem was that Colin was more paranoid than Stephen was, and when they tried to convince him to come with them, he'd swallowed the device he had with him to prevent it being used. Zondra put him out with a choke hold while Anna looked up at where the UAVs would be and mouthed a call for Casey to come and get them. Casey lifted off with the Wagon when he saw that, but at that moment, the guards what had been sent to find them arrived. The guards were looking smug and arrogant as they knew they two women didn't have any weapons on them because they certainly weren't carrying anything while they were naked (as they were before they'd picked up the generic robes they were wearing now), and the taller one was gorgeous, they'd been watching her on the monitors before she put that robe on and they were really looking forward to "searching" her, for that matter the little Asian one should be fun, too. Anna and Zondra were moving in preparation to fight the guards off (making sure they could fight back to back and their footing was clear), when there was a flurry of "spluts" and all six guards and the woman who'd sent them after the girls were suddenly laying on the ground, out cold. Both girls looked up at where the UAVs would be and said "Thanks Chuck", this was obviously the result of skills acquired through decades of expertly playing first shooter video games, and the only one they had who fit the bill in that respect was Chuck.

Casey touched down and popped the door of the cabin, calling to ask if they needed him to pick the guy up, but they waved him off and grabbed an arm each to drag the guy to the Wagon, tossing him in and climbing in after him. Casey closed the cabin door as he lifted off. He'd been talking to Chuck and was taking them to another point further away to rendezvous with the Valkyrie, Chuck was calling the UAVs back in now and would follow as soon as they'd been retrieved. As usual, Chuck came in with his signature landing manoeuvre, the Valkyrie's weren't as stealthy as the Wraiths (as Stephen and co had basically tacked VTOL capabilities onto a near hypersonic airframe when they redesigned it for the group's purposes, whereas the Wraiths' original design was a VTOL platform), so the only way to make a really stealthy landing with the Valkyrie was something that only Chuck, with the ultimate Intersect in his head, could pull off. The Chuckdown (as the rest of them like to call it) consisted of coming in at just above any ground cover (trees etc) and shutting down the jets before pulling up into a stall to stop forward momentum, letting it fall and cutting in the VTOL fans just in time to level it out and cushion the impact as the Valkyrie touched down so that it did so gently and evenly.

As usual, he'd calculated everything perfectly, so when they'd landed and he lowered the ramp, the Wagon was right at the end of the ramp. Casey was in the process of reconfiguring the Wagon from flight mode to transport mode, so Chuck and Jeff ran down to grab Colin and carry him into the Valkyrie, but when they were about to dump him in a seat, Anna stopped them and asked them to hold him for a sec as she grabbed a pair of sweatpants, to put them on him while they were holding him up. Chuck looked at her when she did this and she grimaced, saying "Trust me, we had to see that on the way over and you DON'T want to get that view", he grinned at that and bent down to kiss her on the cheek, saying "Thanks" after they'd dumped Colin in the seat. Meanwhile Casey had finished putting the Wagon into transport mode and had grabbed a tablet to drive it backwards up onto the ramp and engage the locks to hold it in place, vaulting up onto the ramp behind the Wagon before he initiated the command to close the ramp and told Chuck to get them out of there. They were all used to Chuck's handling of the Valkyries and half of them didn't even bother sitting down, just holding on as he lifted off and canted it nose down to use the thrust of the lift fans to get the Valkyrie's momentum up before bringing in the jets, like the Chuckdown, this was the stealthiest and most efficient way to take off with a Valkyrie and it was also something that really required the Intersect to successfully run through all the calculations needed to make it work on the fly, so they called this one the Chuckoff. Most of them enjoyed watching Chuck as he did his landings and takeoffs, as he was like a virtuoso, one hand on the joystick and the other dancing over the panel used to control the individual lift fans and engines, occasionally darting off to operate the landing gear and anything else needed, they knew that he didn't really like the Chuckdown and Chuckoff terms, but the girls (including Sarah) kept using them to wind him up, and so did Bry, Casey and Jeff sometimes. Zondra and Anna got dressed while they flew, if anyone else had been with them they would have used the Valkyrie's toilet to get changed, but they were comfortable with the fact that Jeff and Casey, like Chuck, were gentlemen and would respect their privacy enough for them to be able to do so in the main cabin (Colin wasn't a factor as they'd tranqed him in the Wagon and he'd be out for an hour at least).

They went back to one of Stephen's more out of the way lab facilities, putting the Valkyrie down behind the building before Casey and Chuck picked Colin up to carry him inside. Chuck had a chance to talk to Sarah (and the twins) while they waited for Colin to wake up, and they all had something to eat. There was also time for Jeff to duck out and pick up the ingredients that Chuck requested (using the drug and poisons database in the Intersect) to make up a concoction to be used to expel the virus device from Colin's stomach, as well as another concoction to cure his affliction once his stomach had given up what it was harbouring. When Colin came to, Chuck went to talk to him.

Colin was prepared to tell him about the virus that he'd written for the Collective, and that the device he had with him was just the virus key (or more to the point, the core of the virus), which needed to be combined with another device for it to be activated and delivered. When Chuck jokingly asked him if he'd swallowed that, too, Colin shook his head, saying that it was locked up back at the Collective where he was working when he wrote it, before he got agitated and tried to convince Chuck just how dangerous this virus was, saying that he should have destroyed it to make sure that it could never be used, but it was his crowning achievement, his magnum opus, and his pride just wouldn't let him destroy it, so he'd taken the key that was needed for it to be used, and he ran. He'd been on the run for a while when one of his old buddies from MIT told him about the cult out in the boondocks where you could disappear and no-one could find you, so he'd gone there. Chuck looked at him for a bit before pointing out (as gently as he could) that whoever had told him that he couldn't be found there was obviously wrong, as they'd tracked him down to the cult without too much trouble, though he conceded that apparently no-one else had managed to do that yet. At that point, Carina had brought coffee in for the two of them, and stayed to talk to them and distract Colin while he drank his (when Carina made the effort she could distract just about any man on the planet, and most of the women, so with her assistance he drank most of the "coffee" before he'd even noted the fact that there was a marked after taste to what he was drinking, because what he'd been given was in fact the concoction that Chuck had made up, mixed with a liberal dose of coffee essence to mask the flavour). When Colin had emptied his stomach into the waste paper bin that she pushed in front of him, Carina pulled some surgical gloves on and fished the key out of the mess in the bottom of the bin, taking it out for Stephen to clean it up and ensure that it hadn't been damaged by the gastric acids while it was in Colin's stomach.

Back in the room where Chuck and Colin were, Chuck handed Colin another cup, telling him to drink it as it would counteract the effects of the first concoction that he'd drunk. Colin wasn't in the mood to trust him after the first thing they gave him to drink, but thought that anything would be better than the way he felt at that moment, so he did, and felt almost immediate relief. Chuck apologised for what they'd done to him, but explained that they did, in fact, know how dangerous his Omen virus was, and that was why they'd been tasked with tracking it down and making sure that it was locked away where it could never be used. He also explained that to ensure that no-one could discover another copy of the virus key code somewhere on the Collective's systems and use that to activate the virus, they'd need to recover the other part of the delivery mechanism, and they'd need his help to do that. At that point, Colin's desire to help out dried up, as he was obviously terrified of the people at and behind the Collective, Chuck was getting frustrated with the responses he was getting and took a break, using the time to check into one of the things that Colin had told him. Unfortunately, what Colin had told him was correct, there was no way to hack into the Collective's systems from the outside as they'd employed solid controls which generally prevented a direct link being made between their internal systems and the outside world. The only hole in their defences was a small number of dual homed systems that served as gateways that bridged the internal and external networks, but they were configured in such a way that it would take too long to get control of them and use them to exploit the internal systems without triggering the watchdog systems that they had in place. This meant that someone had to go in there and get enough control of their security systems to let their people into the secure area where the other part of the Omen delivery mechanism was located, and they only had one person who was up to that task.

For the first time, Chuck was glad that Sarah was on the other side of the country, because she was going to kill him when she found out what he was planning to do. The ONLY one who had a chance to do what had to be done inside the time window that they'd have was the Piranha, because even if he was prepared to ask Anna to do this (which he wasn't), she couldn't do what they needed inside the limited time window that would be available. Chuck had also looked up everything know about the Collective and had confirmed what Colin had told him about their recruitment, or rather entry tests, that the only way to get into the Collective was to beat the best they had in a hack-off contest, and anyone who tried and failed got a bullet in the head, so if you weren't good enough to become part of the Collective, you were dead. That obviously meant that whoever they went up against had to be pretty damned good just to stay alive. Also, as well as the quite effective electronic and cyber security controls they employed, they had a significant force of mercenaries serving as their physical security, so no part of this was going to be a walk in the park. While Chuck was looking at this, trying to formulate a plan that had a good enough chance at success (the fall back option of dropping a few bunker busters on the building was actually looking good for the first time, but given what the Omen virus was looking like, Chuck thought that they really needed to see what else they had in there), Casey came up to quietly remind him of what he'd told him on their last op, if he got himself killed in there Sarah would bring him back to kill him again. Chuck nodded, but after looking around to make sure that no-one else could overhear him, asked Casey to line up two or three trusted NSA strike teams to back them up on this, as he had a nebulous plan in his head that would require them once he did his part.

While Chuck was formulating a plan, he was also putting together a site where he could quickly access all the tools he'd need to pull this off, given what he'd seen (and been told by Colin) about the nature of the entry tests, he'd be sitting on one of the dual homed gateway machines, so he should be able to access this staging site to grab his tools and deploy them against the internal systems (or other systems). To pull this off, he had to run four operations, the first three pretty much concurrently and the fourth to finish them off. The first operation was to get into all the internal systems and databases and pump any data or code stored on them out to the staging site he set up, so it could be analysed and followed up once they took the Collective down. The second operation was to gain control of the security and lighting/power systems, so that when the time came he could a) give the others access to the vault where the Omen delivery device was stored, and b) crash the security and power circuits to give them an escape route and let the NSA strike teams in to get control of the facility, capture anyone present and collect anything else that was in there. The third operation was to actually win the competition for the Collective's entry test (to avoid the bullet to the head), while the fourth operation had to wait for the first operation to be completed and terminated, because it was to insert worms and other malware into the internal network to wipe out all of the Collective's systems and databases, and he'd have to pull off the three non-test operations without anyone there realising what he was doing. While he was doing all of this, they had to have a team get into the facility and slip past or take down the Collective's guards without being discovered, and extract the Omen delivery device from the vault where it was stored (Colin had given Chuck all the detail he could about where the device was stored, how to identify it when they found it and what they would be up against, and to be honest, Chuck could understand why the man was too afraid to go back in there, you'd have to be an idiot to want to go into that vipers' nest, not that he was going to admit THAT to Casey).

When he had what he thought was a workable plan, Chuck called the others together and laid it out (just leaving the bullet in the head angle out of the description, only Casey knew about that as he'd been listening in), he explained what he'd be doing (he'd be going in as a prospective Collective member, pretending to be trying to win a position with them), and also explained what the other team would have to do. Given what would be required of them, it was quickly determined that the other group would be made up of Carina (for her breaking and entering and combat skills), Anna, again (to handle any technical security or computer system issues they came up against and for her combat skills), and Casey (as the blunt instrument to make sure that the other two got out safely), and that they'd land on the roof in a Wraith Wagon or Van (depending on whether one of the strike teams was going in from the roof after them, or not) and come in that way, using the Nova tactical armour and helmets with active camouflage to make it easier (and safer) to slip through the building, and Zondra would be piloting the Wraith Wagon or Van in full combat gear, ready to come in to support them if needed. They'd also have at least two NSA strike teams waiting outside to breach the doors downstairs and capture everyone in the building when he crashed the security and power systems.

The others looked at Chuck, sensing that there was something that he wasn't telling them, but couldn't fault the plan as it was presented, so Chuck called the Collective, using Colin's name and saying that he'd known him back when he originally joined them but hadn't heard from him since then, and got called in for a try out. Once he had a time and place (which confirmed the location they already knew), Chuck got started on getting himself a new face so he wouldn't be recognised, and put on the covert protective gear that he normally wore under his stereotypical all black cracker outfit (trying not to think about the fact that, with the possible exception of the thin liquid armour beanie, the protective gear he'd be wearing gave him absolutely no protection against the bullet in the head that he'd been told to expect), while the others got themselves kitted out with the full tactical armour suits and helmets, along with whatever weapons and equipment they though they needed.

They flew down to New York in a Wraith Van and picked up one of the strike teams when they dropped Chuck off. Carina surprised Chuck by pulling him into a rib cracking Ellie hug and fiercely whispering in his ear that he better get through this fine, because her niece and nephew were NOT going to grow up without a father! Chuck kissed her on the cheek and told her that he had everything planned out, then he left (not finding out until later in the mission that Carina, Zondra and Anna had cornered Casey and forced him to spill what Chuck hadn't told the rest of them about the consequences of failing the Collective's entry test as soon as he'd left, but Casey had looked at Anna and reminded her what the Piranha could do before asking HER whether she thought the Piranha could beat whatever cracker he was put up against. It was only Anna's reluctant nod in response to Casey's question that stopped Carina and Zondra from grabbing Chuck before he got to the Collective's building and calling off the whole operation).

Chuck got into the Collective and jumped into the entry test, flipping back and forth between multiple windows the entire time to cover up what he was doing in the background. The tools he had on tap on the site he'd set up made quick work of getting into the Collective's systems and databases so he could siphon everything back out via the encrypted pipe he'd created to the site, and the same applied to getting control of the security and power systems. When Carina and Anna were at the door of the vault (they'd sent Casey to cover Chuck, being prepared to follow his plan didn't mean that they were ready to take chances with his safety), they sent Chuck the agreed signal and he unlocked it for them. Thirty seconds later they were back outside with the delivery device in their possession and sent him the agreed follow up signal. Chuck quickly checked to confirm that the operation to extract the Collective's data was completed and sent the commands to lock down the server room and then crash the security and lighting systems, injecting the worms etc (disconnecting the encrypted pipe to his external site with the commands that he'd appended to the packets that he sent in), just before crashing the rest of the power systems and bolting.

The computer and database systems were on uninterrupted power supplies, so they stayed up long enough for the worms etc to wipe out all the systems, but crashing the building's power systems took out any monitoring or communications interfaces outside of the server room, so except for the few systems support people who were actually in the server room, no-one knew what was going on until it was too late, because they couldn't contact anyone else in the building, or anywhere else (the Collective had a faraday cage encasing their entire server environment, with the only connectivity in or out being the shielded cables running out to the coders' area, so mobile phones couldn't work from inside the server room, and as he'd locked the server room down before he crashed the security systems, they couldn't get out of there to call anyone either. They'd be released when the UPS in the server room ran out, because the locks could be released manually then).

As soon as he crashed the power systems, Chuck bolted, using wide spectrum imaging glasses disguised as sunglasses (another great creation of Stephen and Laszlo) to see where he was going in the dark, and he left none too soon as he heard gunshots behind him as he left the room that the coders' area was in. When someone grabbed his shoulder he spun to engage his attacker, but stopped when he saw it was Casey (the imaging glasses negated the active camouflage enough to see the shapes of anything using their active camouflage), so he turned and resumed running towards the roof were the Wraith Van was. As he ran he asked Casey why he wasn't with the girls, quickly turning his head to glare at him when he admitted to telling the girls about the bullet in the head angle that he'd kept from them, because he knew what he'd be facing from Sarah when she found out that he'd knowingly gone into a situation like that. When they heard the strike team heading down from the roof, Casey deactivated the active camouflage to cover up the fact that they had that capability (as Zondra and Anna did) and they waved the team through. On the roof they piled into the Wraith Van, but the girls were too stuck in yelling at him about taking chances like he did to do anything about moving, so Chuck just pushed past them into the cockpit and took off himself.

Back at Stephen's lab, Chuck made sure that they had a few viable images of the Omen virus on standalone systems before they delivered the key and the delivery device to be locked away in the CIA/NSA secure archives, because there was something about all this that was setting off alarm bells in the back of his head. He also spent time getting as much detail about the development parameters for the virus as he could out of Colin before he went into witness protection (they'd made a case for witsec for Colin, based on the fact that he'd run with the key to the virus to prevent it being unleashed, and that it would be inadvisable to have him interned anywhere that the others from the Collective or those who'd commissioned the virus could find him. On top of that they'd shuffled him through multiple identify changes before he was released to witsec, and then muddied the trail as much as they could in the witsec records once they'd turned him over, so they were fairly sure that he was safe from the ones he'd been hiding from). On the basis of what Chuck had learned from Colin, he, Anna and Jeff jumped onto making amendments to all their gateway and system controls to provide as much protection as possible from incursions from anything like the Omen virus as soon as they got back to the Fish Palace (which was only partly a ploy on Chuck's part to hide from Sarah, he WAS genuinely concerned that they hadn't heard the last of this yet, and Sarah hadn't gotten her hands on him yet, so the alarm bells he was still hearing weren't just the ringing in his ears from his loving wife's reaction to the news of what he'd done).

When they'd updated their security controls to give some protection from something like the Omen virus, it was time for Chuck to face the music, but what Sarah did got to him far more than violence would have, she just cried, letting out her fear and hurt about how it would have effected her and their children if his gamble hadn't paid off, if one of those head cases from the Russian Mob who ran the Collective had just shot him in the head as he'd been told could happen. Chuck took it all, as she was right, he HAD taken a risk that could have turned out very bad, but then he pointed out that she'd agreed that the ramifications of the Omen virus getting out were catastrophic, and also pointed out that he, as the Piranha, was the only one who could have been almost guaranteed to pull off the job of getting through the Collective's entry test, and now they had copies of the Collective's other work (much of it almost as nasty as the Omen virus), as well as their records of the customers who paid the Collective for these things. When Sarah still didn't look convinced, he pointed out that he'd only been in her world as a field agent for less than six years, but he'd been handling a lot of the government's cyber security and cyber terrorism issues for over eighteen years, THIS was his world, THIS was his responsibility to handle, so he wasn't going to send Anna or Jeff in when they weren't as well equipped to succeed, or survive, as he was.

He gently grabbed her chin to make her look at him and assured her that he'd done everything that he could to stack the deck in their favour, and he'd had the commands queued up so that if things looked like they were going bad, he could have crashed all the power systems in five to ten seconds, dropped to the floor and gotten out of there before anyone had any idea where he was. He looked her in the eye and promised her that he'd done everything possible to make sure that he'd be coming back to her and their children, because they meant more to him than anything else in this world, but he had a responsibility to do his best to prevent something like that getting out, because the potential loss of life from the systems that it brought down was unacceptable, let alone the catastrophic effects of collapsing economies (which could quite well happen if all the computer systems crashed and couldn't be recovered). Sarah eventually nodded, saying that she understood why he had to do it, but when she'd heard what he'd done, all the possible repercussions of one gunshot burst over her, and she couldn't handle the thought of them having to go on without him. Emma had taken the twins to her apartment, so Chuck just spent the night holding her and reminding her that there was nothing more important to him, and nowhere that he'd rather be than there with her and their children.

The tears and fears and anguish came crashing down on them all over again a few weeks later when the Omen virus WAS unleashed. When it was investigated after the fact, it was found that the remnants of Graham's organisation were behind the "tip" that had come through about the virus, because they and the Collective hadn't been able to track Colin Davis down to get the virus key (they'd been the ones who'd commissioned the Collective to create the Omen virus), but someone had had the bright idea of using the system to get the Intersect team, via General Beckman, to do it for them. Once the key and the delivery mechanism were in the Secure Archives, they'd just used the people they had in the system to retrieve them from there, so what the team had done by tracking down the elements of the virus and ensuring that it was safely locked away from the bad guys was, in fact, deliver it right to them. Of course, those details didn't come out at first, but when the virus was released, the archives were immediately checked and when the devices turned up missing, a witch hunt was started to discover who took them. It didn't take long to narrow that down to Clive Johnston, the CIA's North Eastern Region Deputy Director who'd just gone AWOL and Stanley Fitzoy, the pathetic little worm in the Archive's Administration who'd retrieved the devices for Johnston without any authorisation or approval from any of the parties who were quite clearly listed as having the ONLY authority to release these devices, purely because Johnston had patted him on the head and pandered to his ego by telling him how important he was and how he deserved far more respect than he was getting. Now Fitzroy was sitting in a cell facing serious treason charges (while still asking what he'd done wrong), but he was absolutely no use in finding what had happened to the devices, because he was nothing but a mindless tool, like a stupid little mutt who was just sitting there wagging his tail because he'd gotten his belly rubbed for fetching when his master told him to.

The effect of the Omen virus wasn't actually as bad as they'd expected it to be, though. Yes, billions of systems around the world were being owned to create botnets big enough to overpower the target systems, but those systems were still functioning to a large degree, so they weren't being taken out by the virus as Colin had thought that they would be. When Jeff went through the Omen code on the stand alone machines that they'd copied it onto (while Chuck was King of the Hackers in their circles, Jeff was their master of reverse engineering code, so they took him off everything else and had him focussed ONLY on finding out what the Omen virus was supposed to do), he found that the target systems were all government systems, and the purpose of the Omen virus seemed to be to datamine the government systems and databases for the purpose of creating a master database of all government intel. There were a few glitches that helped prevent the Omen virus working the way that they'd expected it to, the first being the controls that Chuck, Anna and Jeff had put in place to mitigate incursions from Omen or anything like it into any systems that they had a hand in controlling (primarily anything to do with military intelligence and other military systems), and the fact that the nature of those controls had been shared with other parts of the US government and commercial sectors in an attempt to protect the integrity of American systems, and had also been shared with America's allies. The controls hadn't been implemented by everyone, but they were implemented widely enough to seriously curtail the effects of the virus. The primary problem for Omen's plans though was that the majority of the databases were configured for essentially read only access for anything other than a small number of specific IDs (mainly Database Administrator IDs), so the commands to erase the data after it was extracted were generally rejected.

The next biggest issue with the plans for the Omen virus was that Colin didn't have a background in business critical enterprise systems, and that was where Omen was coded to store the massive amounts of data it was supposed to be collating from the government systems, the plan had been to take over major cloud server environments as staging areas for the data, and then forward it to the destination from there, but while the cloud server environments theoretically had the capacity to handle the petabytes of data that they were expecting, they didn't factor in how the telco level load balancing and edge filter mechanisms that a large scale server farm used would handle the type of data streams that they'd be generating, which was just to drop the traffic with no response to indicate what was happening to it. Another boon was the fact that Colin or someone else had repeated the mistake of the Code Red Virus, in that it was coded to forward data to specific IP address ranges, so if those address ranges were changed, the data had nowhere to go.

The end result was that the Omen virus didn't crash most of the world's systems like they expected it to. Yes, the impacts were significant, even catastrophic to a degree, the billions of systems that were taken over to be used for the massive botnets or staging servers had to be rebuilt, the majority by hand as their owners weren't set up to re-image them readily. On top of that, the massive distributed denial of service attacks took major government and commercial systems off-line for hours, or even days, and that was enough to kill off businesses, even some sizable enterprises, as the inability to operate on-line nowadays is a business killer to over 99.99% of businesses. Then there was the issue of the classified information, the government demanded that they get all the disks from every system or device that the data extracted from classified government systems (basically every government system) had passed through, and the outcry and arguments from the commercial sector were thunderous, as the financial impact of this (due to hardware replacement costs and loss of business while systems were rebuilt from scratch with the new hardware) would certainly be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and probably far more than that.

Luckily for the team, the arguments about classified data and financial damages and reimbursement weren't their problem, their problem was tracing the data trail through to the final systems and capturing the people involved, and that wasn't actually that hard. The target address ranges for the next stage was coded into each stage of the data path, so they just had to step through the data path until there wasn't a next step. There were several branchings of those data paths along the way, so in the end they had around fifty target systems and they went back to one of the things they did best, quietly hack into the systems and copy off the contents, covering up all traces of the incursion once they were done, then decrypt what they had collected and pull it all apart. They got names, addresses, financial records, and when they pulled the files on the people associated with those things, Chuck was flashing so continuously that he lived with constant headaches (even with the much improved later Intersect) and he was putting out reams of intel on the people associated with those systems. The Intersect team was involved with the capture of the more important names that came out of their investigation, but the vast majority of the hundreds of names were farmed out to other NSA agents. They lost quite a few of the targets (more than a few in quite suspicious circumstances), but upwards of 80% of them (and all the primaries and politicians) were taken into custody. At that point the Intersect team's responsibilities in regard to the Omen fallout were cut back significantly.

Their workloads post Omen were actually much more manageable than they'd been previously, the Piranha workload was cut back significantly when customers didn't have the funding to continue with the contracts that they'd engaged them for, with their existing customers, they generally agreed to put their contracts on hold until the current crisis had blown over. (They didn't really need paying gigs to keep going, they were mainly just for the cover.) For the most part, the CIA and NSA were licking their wounds after Omen, so few missions came down the pipeline for them, though the team did keep generating missions themselves when actionable intel turned up, whether from Chuck's flashes or other analysis of situations or information. Their DIA and JOC workloads were effected the least by the Omen incidents, as military issues never seemed to go away.

The team did get a surprise when they were called back to D.C. for another award ceremony after the Omen incidents, because Chuck was to be awarded with the National Intelligence Cross and a second award of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal by the DNI for what he did in the Collective (and afterwards). The award just meant another bit of frippery that he had to add to the collection to Chuck, but it upset Sarah as she was reminded of her fears about his actions in there, which then led to her pointing out to him that everyone but him seemed to believe that he'd been at risk in there, and that of course meant that much more for Chuck to make up for.