Thirty-two years ago, Liguainian Sector, XA-01 System, Battleship Kansas
The Kansas was well out of her league. The blue and yellow stripes painted attentively onto her hull could not hide the steaks of dilapidation and misplaced welding rivets. Spluttering at twenty-six years of age, the clunky Kansas was an old ship.
There was a good reason she was the last of the Battleship-class vessels left in service. Despite numerous overhauls, including the complete deconstruction and replacement of the engines and various other parts, the ship was ailing. After surviving what had been the bloodiest years of human history, she was a ship that had been pummeled and rebuilt one too many times. Malfunctions plagued the Kansas like heartworms, consuming what was left of her utility.
The old Kansas could barely be trusted with the simplest of tasks. Even patrols were risky, so they were left with supply runs that Command had no one else to assign to. For a battleship, it was an insult, but the Kansas’ crew was more aware of the ship’s wasting condition than anyone else.
It left Samantha Scarlett envying her fiancé’s assignment to the Flagship Singularity. It would have been an honor to serve on board the international flagship, but she intended to drop her commission as a fleet officer after this last mission.
A simple supply run, they should be there and back in just a few days. At first, many of the sailors had been uneasy about entering the fabled Liguanian Sector, but days passed without incident. It began to seem that even the Kansas could complete this task.
Advancing through the system, the ailing battleship did not push through space with ease. Her boxy shape lacked the streamlined elegance of modern space flight. As she passed in front of a swirling red gas giant, the Kansas more closely resembled a folded paper origami creation than a veteran warship. Her seeming frailty only added irony to the unfortunate fact that they never should have been anywhere near the Liguanian Sector.
It was not a particularly welcoming corner of space. Dark planets and spewing neutron stars dominated the overall region. The XA-01 System was worse than the rest of it. The entire system was subject to ferocious solar storms, often with little warning as the aging red star at the core of the system went into unstable fits.
The only settlement in the entire sector was the small UCSC research station the Kansas had been assigned to resupply. The secluded facility orbited the stormy red gas giant of the XA-01 System with little more than a skeleton crew of scientists.
Allegedly, the star was the subject of study at the research station. Experts expected the star to collapse within the next five years, but most sailors did not buy that at all. Rumors of the station’s true, less-innocent purposes lingered, and they were quite unsettling.
The secretive outpost was built into one of the largest rock chunks of the stormy gas giant’s distorted ice rings, but it was far too small for even the undersized Kansas to dock.
It was Lieutenant Scarlett’s job to alert the allied forces to their approach. She should have known something was wrong when silence answered her hail. The Kansas’ crew should have heeded the warnings. But, despite the outpost’s persistent silence, they prepared an away team to fly over in one of the Kansas’ support ships.
Most likely, a solar storm had damaged the base’s communications array, rendering them unable to respond. It was possible the outpost did not have the equipment to fix the damage. Yet, a visual inspection of the array, made by the Kansas’ telescopes, revealed that there was no apparent damage.
It was yet another red flag that the ill-fated crew had ignored.
The boarding party’s transport met no challenge as they trekked from the safety of the Kansas launch bay to the lifeless station. It was all too easy. It was like something had wanted them to be there, like something had wanted them to die.
Samantha Scarlett was not on the away team. She stayed at her station on the Kansas’ bridge, where it was supposed to be safe, tracking communications. An open line ran from the away team to the speakers on the bridge. It was audio-only, but she did not need to see the station to know that they should never have set foot on the outpost. The horrified gasps that came over the communications link only solidified her regret.
There was blood. On the floor. On the walls. On the ceiling. And, on the first corpse they found.
Red smeared hand prints decorated the bulkheads and decks. Blood splatters were found everywhere else. They found the first scientist slumped up against the wall in an area where the lighting was poor. At first, he only appeared to be resting, but as they drew closer, it was nothing so serene.
Blood had solidified where it leaked from open wounds. The back of his hands had been clawed so badly they bled candidly onto his formerly white lab coat. The stains were still red, the corpse still fresh.
His face wore a blank look of bliss between chapped, bleeding lips and torn skin around gory eye sockets. The irises looked at the visitors with a cloudy, unseeing gaze of marbled white. The clumps of missing facial tissue were snagged under the scientist’s own nails, covered in a sickening amount of blood. The crimson dripped off his hands, down onto the floor.
The bloating phase of the decomposition cycle had yet to start, and the natural breakdown never would occur in the base’s sterile environment. That corpse would sit there forever unless removed.
The Kansas’ team tore their flashlights from the revoltingly fresh carcass to the message that had been scrawled onto the metal bulkhead above the slump of mortal remains. Chillingly written in the cardinal shades of human blood, the words ‘SCARLET FLU’ dripped downward, clearly done in the scientist’s own hand. The smears angled down to where he’d sat to die.
They never ventured further into the station. Commander Reddy ordered the away team immediately back to the Kansas, counting it lucky that they had followed procedure and worn their vacuum suits. The suits internally circulated air, so the team had not yet been exposed to whatever had killed the scientist.
“Follow Decontamination Procedure Set Alpha,” Reddy ordered, looking harrowed by even the reports he had heard of the station. “There is no illness that can survive the void.” All virus and infection microbes were killed by either space’s freezing temperatures, the lack of air, or by the background radiation. By decontaminating themselves and their equipment with harsh exposure, there was no chance that whatever sickness had killed the scientist would be transferred back to the ship.
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Lieutenant Scarlett breathed out a sigh of relief when the shuttlecraft landed safely in the Kansas’ singular landing bay. “Mag-lock secure, Commander.” Their team was back, alive and well.
“Aye. Bring her about,” Reddy ordered his helmsman. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The Kansas was not equipped to deal with biological hazards. “This is the scout fleet’s can of worms.”
The helmsman nodded, and made some reply that Samantha could not hear. She was trembling, even as she tried to calm herself, her breathing only came faster and shallower. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying not to panic, trying to comfort herself. But what if? What if the decontamination procedure hadn’t worked?
“Lieutenant,” she looked up to find Commander Reddy standing in front of her station, “How are you feeling?”
She nodded, “O-okay, sir.” She just had to keep telling herself that she would be safe.
Reddy smiled calmly, lowering his voice, “I know what you much be thinking about your… situation right now, Sam. I mean that as a friend, not a commanding officer.” He understood that she had more reason to worry about getting sick than anyone else at the moment, but that secret would stay between them for now. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll have you back with the Captain in no time.” Alpha Procedure always worked. It was a coverall for contaminants humanity had never encountered before.
“It’s Major now, actually.” Sam told him, grateful for the distraction. “He’s been promoted to the flagship’s second officer.”
Reddy whistled, the sound ringing shrilly across the bridge. “Damn, that kid’s going to make General before they even retire the Kansas at the rate he’s climbing the ranks.” Sam’s fiancé was one of the most promising officers in the fleet. “You must be proud.”
She nodded. That was why she was out here, doing this last mission, making this supply run. “He wanted me to take emergency medical discharge when I told him.” But she had refused to jeopardize his career, and trusting this last mission to go off without a hitch.
“Good man,” Reddy affirmed. “I knew I liked him.” He had been ready to sacrifice his career for the people he cared about. There were too many people who would not have done the same. “Let me know when we get in range to contact Command. We need to warn them about the outpost so they can send a containment crew.” The outpost would have to be observed, tested and sterilized.
“It’ll be at least a day, sir.” The communications relay buoys did not come out this far. The Liguanian Sector was isolated, with apparent good measure.
“Understood,” he replied with an easy smile.
Reddy thought it was over, that they were safe. He should have known better, because the symptoms they had just seen matched with an illness known as the Red Flu, the most contagious virus ever documented. There was just one problem with that observation: humans were not susceptible to the Red Flu, no matter how resilient and highly contagious it was.
So, the Kansas turned away from that outpost, accelerating back into the void. Her crew would never know the small letters that had been written underneath the scientist’s hand with his dying breaths. ‘It’s already too late.’ They would never see the cerise color of the blood, but they would soon know the truth of the message.
It started with a small, innocent cough. That was all it took for the infection to spread faster than fuel-fed fires. They would later hypothesize that the biological virus had somehow survived on the exterior of the vacuum suits, to be carried unknowingly back on board. But it didn’t really matter now.
The first crewmen dropped like flies: suddenly, and within hours of contracting the sickness. It only became more prolonged as the infection spread, the virus lending its hosts more time to infect others.
There was no stopping it.
It was all over the ship, carried by the recycled air, before they managed to seal the ship off into quarantined portions. The crew donned vacuum suits, in the hope that perhaps one of them had managed to remain uninfected, but it did no good. Within sixteen hours of leaving the outpost, half the crew was dead, and the rest had reported feeling the symptoms.
Reddy knew what he had to do. He gave the order while he looked at Samantha, disheartened by the fact that she had not listened to her fiancé. “Turn us around. Aim us away from Ariea and the civilized worlds.” It was for the good of billions. The sickness had left no survivors so far. They could not risk infecting any of the populated worlds. They had to keep it contained to this sector.
“I’m sorry, Sam.” He wanted to give her a ship, as if she could outrun whatever circle of hell this was, but she had the plague, and she knew it. He could see that in her eyes. Even if she left, she’d be dead before she saw the Major again, and she’d risk infecting and killing him as well as thousands of others.
Four hours later, the last of the medical staff died. It became all they could do to distribute pain medication. The infection was lasting longer and longer, as if sensing it had to wait for fresh hosts to continue its spread. It became more and more painful for those who still lived.
In another two hours, only a third of the crew remained alive, and the lucky half of them had fallen comatose while the last of their life burned away in their fevers. Lieutenant Scarlett and Commander Reddy were all that was left of the command staff. They were left to consult the remaining crew on a plan of action.
Reddy’s warm timbre had gone hoarse. “How many of you want to end this now?” Hands went up, and he counted them under his breath. Beside him, Lieutenant Scarlett remained perfectly still, arguing for nor against this plan. He put a comforting hand on the shoulder of her suit, declaring, “That’s majority.”
The worlds spat upon the very thought of what they were going to do. Even in these dire circumstances, it was dishonorable to attempt to end one’s own life. The worlds would spit upon their memory, but the remaining crew of the Kansas didn’t care. They were going to die. There was certainty in that now, but anything was better than dying in the infected hell of the virus.
The symptomatic rash was so itchy it made many claw apart their own skin. It was maximum discomfort, pain in every waking moment, and that was why the gut-wrenching decision had been made. They would destroy their own ship.
No one would be able to stumble upon it like they had the research base. They would leave a message about what had happened and what they had done in the ship’s power core and eject it, knowing that it would be recovered under quarantine procedures until the Kansas’s official fate was known. They could only hope that it would be recovered before any other ship was sent to the base.
Leaving the power core drifting outside any gravity wells, Reddy cut the coolant lines to the engines and ordered full speed ahead towards the nearest star. They shut down life support and denied the automatic engine shutdown protocols. The engines would overheat and detonate the fuel stores, destroying the ship. It was a fool proof plan.
The heat knocked most of the remaining crew into bliss, where they died peacefully, but Sam sat, shivering. How could she still be so cold?
Reddy was moving sluggishly, but he pulled the emergency blanket from the kit on the bridge and wrapped it around her shoulders. He pulled her close, as if he could share his body heat through their thick, rubbery vacuum suits. It was no use, but she was comforted by the fact she would die beside a friend. “Thank you.” Reddy had courage she didn’t, willing to work through the pain to spare someone else.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I don’t have anyone waiting for me back home,” his voice was shallow now, almost a whisper, “I cannot imagine what this is like for you.” She was leaving someone behind who would grieve for an incalculable loss. “Does it help to know that you’re saving him?” By containing the infection to this ship, she was sparing the worlds, and her fiancé with them.
“Yes,” she said, nodding off, promising herself that this was worth it, that this was enough and that there was nothing else she could do.
But that was all a lie.
Coupled with his prior history, she knew very well that this loss would break him. William Gives would never be the same again.
Engine One blew as they planned. It overheated, building up pressure until it exploded and destroyed the portside stern. Engine Two malfunctioned and spluttered out before it could finish the job, leaving the Kansas drifting in the cold, endless void.