As the weeks of quarantine wore on and everyone retreated into escape, that was the thought that I escaped to. It was almost like a little movie I would watch in my head: here's the scene where I steal a vial from the lab, here's the scene where I drop a time-release capsule in their cockpits, here's the montage of them all dying, roll credits while I literally dance on their graves.
The problem is, that wound up being a pretty boring and self-indulgent movie. I found myself nitpicking my own petty revenge fantasy the way I would analyze protein folding at work:
Stealing from the lab is too incriminating and they're supposed to keep countermeasures for everything they store on site. It would be better if I made my own thing. Plus, now I get to imagine a little montage of me building the perfect pathogen for the job!
Getting access to the cockpits of military walkers probably wasn't going to happen. Besides, a localized delivery with specific targets was so incriminating. Better to make something airborne and virulent that can wipe out the entire area indiscriminately. None of us are free from sin here, after all. Now the montage is bigger and better than ever!
Even in this fantasy, a happy ending is a bit much. Maybe a dramatic last stand in the face of impossible odds. Gunshot, fade to black.
But it always remained a fantasy. It was compartmentalized nice and neat in the cineplex of my imagination. Alongside all the music videos that play when I listen to songs I like, and the arguments I win against myself in the shower.
Then about three months in, when it was clear that we weren't going to be leaving anytime soon, the mercenary psychos started getting really into this conspiracy theory. All the evidence shows that Mark Starr Syndrome is naturally occurring, but of course because we're in an age of war a lot of peoples' immediate first thought was "The humans did this."
I don't want to say the name (because it's hate speech) but this particular theory was that the terminal stage of Mark Starr Syndrome, the obsessive shaving or plucking of the fur, was a sort of "signature" from the humans who designed it. That it wasn't enough to kill us, that as a final act of humiliation they would make us resemble them.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
They invited me into their group chat at the very start of quarantine and I never replied so either they forgot I could see everything or they just didn't care. Either way, at first it was kind of funny to watch these violent idiots go stir crazy in between discussions of race science and weapon statistics. Once they latched onto this conspiracy theory, things started getting really bleak. They were doing stuff like posting dead bodies of Mark Starr Syndrome victims just to work themselves up and talking about how "someone" should "do something about it".
Ryzeen is a border settlement on our, sorry, the Nakunan side so thankfully there weren't any humans on the planet for them to take this growing hatred out on.
Then on month five of the quarantine a human stealth ship crash landed about an hour out from the colony.
It was two hours after lights off and I had gone to sleep. Then all of a sudden there's this frantic pounding at my door, waking me up. Lance is standing there in full flight suit, with body armor on underneath. He's holding out a pistol by the barrel, offering it to me.
"Hey nerd, feel like popping your cherry tonight?" he asked with a grin, his nose twitching excitedly as his wide amber eyes peered up at me.
Lance and all of his friends liked to mess with me sometimes, but now he was being serious.
"Never in a million years." I replied, sleepy enough to look like I was playing it cool.
The thing I hated about Lance was that I could never piss him off. Usually when I don't like someone and they're annoying me I just make them feel uncomfortable until they leave me alone. Lance always took everything I did in stride. I see why he was a leader, even if I disagree with his leadership choices.
"Yeah, I figured. Just thought I'd offer so you don't get to complain that you missed out. Get your beauty sleep, Big B, You can always watch the videos tomorrow." Lance said all cool-like as he flipped the gun around in his paw and tucked it into a holster on his leg.
And then he was gone around the corner in a flash, his little cottontail vanishing a split second after the rest of him.
I didn't know what was up, but I knew it couldn't be good. I also knew that there was nothing I could do about it. I was just a big fat panda who belonged in a lab. So I chose to turn away from wondering about what was going on, if only to be able to get back to sleep.
The next morning I wake up and all the mercenaries and their walkers are still gone. But they're not the only ones absent from the base. Apparently the rest of Tartarus Squadron had gone around making similar offers to the other non-frontline personnel, and more than a few of them accepted it. We couldn't get any work done so we called it a day and waited.