Astrias

"Sir, the crisis has escalated. The Astrias Disease has been found present in a subject from Red Quadrant. We're under orders from Home Station to close all Quadrant borders."

This was not what Captain Deswick Carson wanted to hear.

"What level are we at now, Galloway?"

"Red Box, sir."

Deswick reclined in his chair, which jostled a little. The display in front of him was a mess of spiking graphs, long medical reports and statistics bearing bad news. Every minute or so, a new box would pop onto the holographic screen, describing a familiar picture. Black tongue. Dead irises. The discolouration of the skin. Apparently the end didn't hurt. Getting there did.

"Shit, that high already?"

"Yes, sir."

Galloway was a respectable officer, tall, strong, and a good ear for information. He stood to Deswick's left, arms behind his back, while Deswick surveyed the situation. He was sweating, obviously not wanting to be there.

"Well, I'd say Home Station's advice is most definitely what is needed. I want Yellow and Red Quadrant locked down tight. No-one in or out of that zone unless given my say-so. Understood?"

"Crystal clear, sir." Galloway stood straight, then left, the door making a faint swish before clamping together again with a sharp staccato note.

Deswick sighed. This was not going well. He gazed out of the massive, cinema-screen sized window, the black reaches of space splashed with white and indigo and blue. No-one else was on the bridge, which would usually be alive with the hubbub of navigators and co-ordinators. The silence was strange, for a ship so large.

The stars had called to him from a young age, and he was no stranger to them. His parents were commendable officers in the European Star Navy before its collapse, and he had spent the most part of his life aboard ships like so many others his age. Before he was fifteen, he had been to no less than fifty star systems, and was naturally expected to follow in his parents' footsteps.

So at nineteen, he had joined the newly formed Space Assembly, and graduated at twenty-one, an early age for a full-blown spacer. He had achieved military success at twenty-five, when a group of pro-human activists launched co-ordinated strikes against four Space Assembly space ports. Deswick held his own, managing to keep three squads alive and push back against one front of attackers.

From there, Deswick got stuck in a rut. He fought, captained a cruiser, fought. He never found a soulmate, never had children. It wasn't until Project Landing talked to him that he felt he had a true purpose, and the sizable pay check didn't hurt either. He was to command a great Arc, a lifeboat of colossal proportions, S.A.V Cityscape. People would get on, he would support them all, and take them to a new planet, one so close to Earth, it was uncanny. Same gravity, nearly the same atmosphere, seas of water. The residence of the Cityscape would then found a new colonisation on this new planet, using the Cityscape as a foundation.

But that wasn't what was happening.

Just thirteen months into their six year journey, a passenger had died in the Yellow Quadrant, falling dead just outside a school. The victim was a woman, Astrias Lida, the mother of three children. People said she was acting feverish and paranoid an hour before she died. Her body showed many symptoms, a black tongue and swollen gums, and dead, grey irises, like the colour had been sucked from them. Discoloured patches of skin were found across her body, ranging from raw pink to clammy grey.

The post mortem found she had been infected by a prion, incorrectly folded sheets of proteins that cause shocking neural diseases. The prions, however, were so strange that no-one had thought them possible. Simple as a whole, yet frustratingly complex separated into parts. Cures were far, far away.

Then more bodies piled up.

Soon, the teachers at the school died, all featuring the same symptoms as Astrias. However, prions can only be transmitted via ingesting infected tissues. No-one knew what was going on. Soon, the area where the school was was quarantined. Now, the entire Yellow Quadrant was practically dead.

Except for children. They were never affected by the prions. There were thousands of orphaned children inside Yellow Quadrant, all trapped inside. Deswick was sick to the stomach of thinking of these things.

He seriously didn't know what to do.

After a few more minuted of trawling through the reports on the disease, Deswick stood from his chair, knees cracking as he straightened them. Making his way up to the cabin, up the stairs with interesting blue lights at the edges, he entered the room. It was spacious, and well ventilated. From the entrance, Deswick opened the door to the bathroom, where he entered, trying to ignore the large mirror projecting his look back at him. He opened the cabinet wide, and pulled out an unlabelled bottle of pills, then twisted the cap off, shook three into his hand, and chucked them down his throat.

The acrid taste punched him, but he ignored it. With a sense of loathing, Deswick lent over the sink, put two fingers to his eyelids and pulled his eye wide open.

The tendrils of grey were weaving his way around the edge of his iris.

Retracting his hand, he brushed his teeth, washed his face, then left the bathroom and entered the cabin, where he disrobed, got into bed, and fell into a deep sleep on the white pillow.