The final recruits were being escorted into the room. Class would soon start again. He had done a quick count of desks. They were down another recruit. Down to thirty one now. He tried to visualize who was missing but found he couldn’t. It’s hard to visualize which of them is missing when they all look so alike with their shaven heads and drab grey uniforms.

Sergeant instructor Radklif entered the room. He was the only one who seemed unaffected by the monotony of the past months. He casually threw his books on his lectern and was as excited as always when he started to speak.

‘At the start of your classes, I told you about my three rules. I’ve made you all memorize them by heart and have repeatedly told you how important they are. Yet up till today I haven’t taught you anything that you can’t learn by enrolling in one of Saltpetersburg’s many universities or one of the resident technical colleges even.

You there, what are the three rules?’

A recruit on the left of Voss shot up straight and began reciting them. ‘ First rule: You will use ranks when addressing your superiors. Second rule: The past is irrelevant, you will not speak of it. Third rule: Never speak of anything you see or hear during your service in the fifth with anyone who doesn’t have proper clearance, sergeant.’

‘Good. Now keep sitting up straight. I’ll have none of that slouching business going on in here today. You must be wondering by now what the purpose of that third rule in particular is. What is so secret that you can’t share it with anyone? Today I’ll answer those questions.’

The sergeant took a dramatic pause before continuing. Voss was getting tired of those pauses and of the sergeant’s antics in general. It had started to feel like he was forced to watch a never ending theater play.

‘You see, spacefaring isn’t what it used to be. There have been a series of events in the past years that have drastically worsened things.

Around ten years ago, a Behmot class ship called “Vigos 7” appeared at the edge of our system. It broadcasted an emergency signal. One of our patrol ships happened to be nearby and within instant communication reach. It received a harrowing rapport of what had unfolded on the Vigos. There had been thousands of souls on board when the Vigos had departed. Yet, only a handful remained alive by the time it had entered our system. The survivors had locked themselves into the bridge of the ship. Everyone outside of those safety doors had been wiped out by some mysterious virus. To give you a sense of just how dire things had gotten on that bridge. None of them had eaten in three weeks. Water was so scarce that they had resorted to drinking their own urine to survive. Even then, over half of those that had made it to the bridge had died by the time the ship appeared in the Fosfat system.

They had traveled from a planet called Nepo, situated in the Rekal sector. Their entire planet had been wiped out by the virus in a matter of weeks. They and a handful of others had managed to escape inside interstellar vessels. Unbeknownst to them, one passenger aboard the Vigos had already been infected when she boarded the ship. When that person showed the first symptoms, they locked down the entire ship. It was too late. The virus had already spread to almost the entire vessel. Only the bridge, which had been sealed off from before launch, was unaffected.’

The sergeant allowed for a ghostly silence to fill the poorly lit room. This was the first time any of them ever heard about the threat of interstellar viruses. Let alone one that could cause an empire wide stellardemic, capable of wiping out all of humanity.

‘To give you all an indication of how bad this virus is. Around two hours after departure, patient zero started to show the first symptoms. An immediate full lockdown was called. However, despite patient zero only having been in the rear stern of the ship, never having set foot in other parts of the ship; and despite there having been a soft lockdown from before departure, every compartment of the ship got infected within those two hours. Once even a single person within a compartment became infected, that entire compartment was doomed.

There’s much we don’t know about this virus. The survivors knew nothing about where it had come from, how it spread or what it did exactly. It had all happened too fast. It took less than three weeks between the first person showing symptoms and the entire planet of Nepo being eradicated. They had no time to study the virus. No chance to take measurements to contain it. By the time they were aware of what was going on, the vast majority of people on their planet were already infected. The few who had lived in more isolated areas tried to make an escape, but very few made it out alive. The virus managed to make it onto almost every refugee ship, and wiped out everyone aboard them.

What we did manage to discern about the virus is that once infected, it takes mere hours to become contagious. It takes approximately two weeks before the first symptoms appear. These symptoms can include innocuous things such as coughing or excess sweating. After the first symptoms appear, it takes a maximum of twenty four hours before the patient dies. Usually from extremely high blood pressures that lead either to a heart attack or brain hemorrhage. During the twenty four hours between the first symptoms and death, the patient will become increasingly frantic and delirious.

Have any of you ever played one of those zombie world games that are so popular?’

There were a couple of ‘yes, sergeant’s and nods throughout the room. Voss had never played them, but he knew how popular they were amongst citizens and residents alike.

‘Well it’s a lot like that. The infected become hyper-aggressive. They’ll try to break out of any containment you put them in, even at great self-expense. They’ll attack anyone on sight. They’ll bite, scratch, punch and kick like a madman, but they never seem to be out to kill. Rather they behave like some aggressive drunk trying to fight everyone at once, not caring if he wins or loses any of the fights he picks.

There’s security footage from the Vigos that shows this process. I have been given permission to show you lot a heavily restricted selection of some of the footage obtained by the special crews that boarded the Vigos. I must warn you though, the footage is quite disturbing.’

A clip started playing. After a short warning about the footage being top secret and anyone viewing it without proper clearances was liable to receive the death penalty, it started playing. The footage showed a bunch of passengers hanging out and about aboard at what seemed like a standard passenger bay. Everyone sat or stood either by themselves or huddled together with family members. The passengers kept looking over at each other. Their fear and paranoia was visible. One man could be seen coughing. Then all hell broke loose. People ran away. Some were climbing over each other, or even punching each other. People tried to get through doors with others trying to close those doors to keep others out. People did anything they could to get away from the man. Voss had never seen such hysteric fear before, and he doubted any of the other recruits had.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The footage fast forwarded by about thirty minutes. Where the man had at first seemed content with laying down and barely moving, he now became more restless. It wasn’t long before he got up and walked around erratically. No part of his body stood still anymore. Everything was either shaking or twitching. He looked like a Kerosine junkie with severe withdrawal symptoms. The man started to walk around as if he was looking for something. He soon realized that the shut door in front of him had people behind it. He walked towards it and started pounding his arms, body and even his head, into the door.

The footage switched to another camera inside the room. It showed dozens of people huddling inside it. Several of them were already coughing by this point. They all looked scared witless. The footage fast forwarded again by a few minutes. It now showed the man outside the door lying on the floor, unconscious inside a pool of his own blood. He had smashed the steel door with everything he had in him and appeared dead.

Inside the room, people now started to get erratic too. Several of them started to pick fights. Some of them were armed with knives or sticks. At first, those wielding arms formed a group and coördinated a defense against the first passengers that had gotten into a frenzied state; soon the entire room had turned into a rampage. Everyone was clawing at each other. Punching and biting anyone they could get to. Even small children and the elderly joined in without abandon. Weapons were either dropped or thrown around as if they had been rocks. One man repeatedly injured himself by flaying around his knife without any consideration of his own safety. Within minutes all but one man was laying on the floor, either dead or dying.

The footage was now sped up. The solitary survivor got more and more restless. Running around from wall to wall and looking for a way to get out of the room. Any form of intelligence had departed from his skull. He couldn’t even operate a simple door handle anymore. Through sheer luck and use of blunt force, he eventually managed to open the door and sprinted out into the hallways, bleeding profusely. He ran through them frantically. Going back and forth to look for more survivors. He didn’t find any and after about thirty seconds of sped up footage, the man suddenly grabbed his chest with both arms and collapsed onto the floor. The footage ended.

Voss looked around him. The entire room looked aghast. None of them had ever seen such things, not even those who came from the worst slums.

‘Sergeant, if I may speak freely, this doesn’t look like anything natural. Is this some man made weapon?’

‘An astute observation recruit Jabs. The answer to that question is: we don’t know. Everything points at it being a manmade horror, but nobody’s ever been able to track down the original source of the virus. The only things we know are that the virus can travel through the air and that it can survive for prolonged periods without a host. An interplanetary exploration party was sent to Nepo over two years after the Vigos incident and none of them came back alive. A single patient seems to be capable of infecting thousands of others. Once infected, there is no hope for a cure. Your behavior alters in such a way that you infect as many others as you can. In short, it’s the perfect killing machine capable of exterminating both man and animal.

The only reason I’m even capable of telling any of this to you, is that those people on the bridge of the Vigos had the premonition to lock the bridge’s compartment doors before the other passengers boarded. If they hadn’t, we’d all be dead. It’s a miracle they even managed to get that ship into interstellar jump. There were no navigators on board that ship. If the Vigos hadn’t already had its course preset for Fosfat, they either wouldn’t have been able to make the jump, or they’d have jumped themselves into the direction of a random planet or sun. Ironically enough, the Vigos was set on course for Fosfat because it was set to deliver a large shipment of medicine. In their ignorance of spacefaring, they hadn’t even reversed their engines yet. If it hadn’t been for our patrol vessels coaching them into firing their engines in retro thrust and then getting multiple docking tow ships to pull the Vigos out of its set course, that ship would have gotten itself caught into an inescapable gravitational trajectory towards Fosfat. The Behmot class ship would have smashed right into the surface of our planet, causing a total annihilation event due to the combination of the impact and the virus escaping onto our planet.’

‘Sergeant, wouldn’t we have been able to divert its course with our tow ships anyhow?’

‘That wouldn’t have been an option, recruit Bean. A Behmot class ship hurling towards our planet at 0.81 light speed is not something you can attach a towing ship to mid flight.’

‘How about if we had shot it to bits, sergeant?’

‘Highly doubtful that would have worked. Our bastions are made to shoot down asteroids from extremely long range, not cargo ships from short range. Besides, by the time we’d have realized the Vigos wasn’t slowing down, we’d have had perhaps two minutes to respond.

Anyhow. This virus, which we have since named “the Scourge”, was the start of what has been ten years of misery. There’s still a lot we don’t know. We don’t know who made the scourge or which planet got infected first or why. We don’t know how many planets were intentionally infected and how many were collateral damage due to becoming the victim of infected refugees. We don’t even know if the virus was set loose intentionally, or if the creators of the Scourge were amongst those who got wiped out.

What we do know is that all of the Rekal sector got exterminated. Several other sectors were affected to varying degrees. Fosfat and Arham, a factory planet in the Gamma sector, were the only ones lucky enough to receive a warning in time before getting infected.

After the incident with the Vigos, we dispatched ships to as many planets as we could. We tried to warn any planet that would listen to us and halted all ships that were headed towards Fosfat. We managed to save dozens of planets who in their turns saved dozens more. However, sadly there were also planets which we couldn’t reach in time. We found those either exterminated or on the brink of total collapse.

Ever since the scourge broke out, interplanetary travel has been made illegal except for some rare exceptions. Extraterrestrial quarantine has been made mandatory. Cargo procedures have been altered. Cargo crews are now always uni-planetary. They are no longer allowed to visit any planet other than their own. Cargo bays are sealed before their journey and nobody is allowed entry until they have been thoroughly examined for traces of the virus.

Now I know this is a lot to process, and you’ll learn what you need to know about spacefaring when you get to the spaceport, so I’ll leave it here for the day. Just know that the galaxy has turned into a paranoid place where planetary governments distrust all outsiders. The empire is only held together thanks to Earth’s leadership.’

The sergeant took a pause so he could take a sip of his water. Voss realized the sergeant hadn’t been doing any of his usual hand gestures in a while now. The sergeant must have known for years and was still taken aback by the scourge and Fosfat’s close call.

‘There’s a big debate amongst fifth branch top brass about whether recruits like you should even know of these things. My personal position is that you do. I want you to know about the scourge, so you’ll understand why protocols are so strict. In my experience, people won’t follow rules unless they understand the reasoning behind them.’ The sergeant’s face relaxed and revealed a small grin. ‘Especially not fine, distinguished people such as yourselves.’

His last remark broke the tension in the room. A few chuckles could be heard. Voss was thankful for the relief.

‘So please follow the protocols they’ll teach you. You’ve seen what the Scourge does and it isn’t pretty. Now class dismissed. You are to report to the shuttle which will bring you to the spaceport, immediately. There will be an officer at the door handing you all your first stripe. Good luck and bless you all.’

The door opened and several fifth branch officers poured into the room. They were all armed with rifles. It seemed like they really didn’t want to take any chances on knowledge about the scourge spreading. They were getting shipped off as soon as they found out about it. Voss didn’t expect any of these men would ever return to Fosfat. They may have been promised a chance to get out after a certain amount of years, but he doubted Fifth would keep their word if that meant they risked word getting out on something as horrific as this.

‘Get up and get moving’ one of the officers yelled. ‘This is it’ Voss thought. ‘We’re heading into space.’