A single spark

Posted on Wed Aug 12th, 2026 @ 10:13am by Lieutenant Acacia Thomas

815 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: The Hand That Rocks The Babe
Location: Hospital Main.

The rota that sent people to and from the stricken planet was absolute.

48 hours was the maximum that any sickbay personnel would spend on the planet without a full decontamination and rest period.

Some of her doctors were pushing the envelope on that rota. However, It wasn't as if in a crisis such as this that she was really going to do anything extreme. There were a few however, that she'd noted to her dismay were likely going to get themselves killed before this was over due to overwork. Sereno, Aya, and Carlyle.

Offer them a transfer out of this city, once this is over. If it ever ends.

There were statistics emerging, not good ones but it was starting to show a pattern. She recognized it peripherally, and she had not yet sat down with the data to figure out exactly what was playing out before her. The exponential bell curve at which the organ failures became irreversible. The start of the proliferation that should be manageable but wasn't. The numbers of the very youngest that were surviving was increasing. The death toll was no longer 100%.

98% still offered some small amount of hope for these people on the planet that were suffering and dying from something designed to kill them. Engineered to do the most destruction in a short amount of time. The question was, why?

Why wipe them out to a man? What did this planet have that was worth such a cost. Again, Acacia knew that the reason why was a powerful indicator of how to fight such a thing.

Supportive care didn't work, because it over-wealmed the immune system before it could fully mount an attack. That made sense in the grand scheme of things, because this virus wasn't intending to survive. That wasn't very virus like, because if a virus kills it's host, it can't survive to infect the next host. It dies, the same way it's hosts do, when the virus itself runs out of food.

The fact that they had a set of infants, babies in arms that lived didn't make any sense. That point, was completely counterintuitive, for those that didn't have a fully functional immune system shouldn't be able to fight off this virus. They should be the highest level of casualties and yet they were not. That fact lingered in her head. Festered like a sore she couldn't reach.

Why.

She spoke it aloud into the empty decontamination bay, that she stood in in the new undergarments she'd put on once she'd been fully decontaminated. Her body lit by the inhospitable, florescent lights of the secure bay.

"Why does this bug not kill all the babies?"

The answer came to her in a flash of lightning so extreme that it staggered her.

Because it's mutating. Because as good as these genetic engineers are, they can't stop biology from being biology.

Acacia swore, in exactly the same tone that she'd heard Jack use on the battlefield and she ran for the suits. Programming an emergency override of her own time, she meticulously set herself into the environmental suit. Pants. Boots and seal. Jacket, zip and seal. Gloves and a second pair. Seal and secure. Oxygen supply- green. Helmet on. Secure. There was the little suction against her skin when the equipment secured itself to her.

"Ventilation start."

Cool air blew into her face, and teased the violet curls. Force field securement was on.

"This is taking too long" she muttered more to herself than anyone, for she was ensuring that she didn't succumb to the virus that she was fighting.

Green lights and a faint glimmer of the force field around her helmet.

READY.

Anything was better than this non-stop terror of the unknown. Knowing that all you could do was watch people die was demoralizing in the kind of way that in the past had Doctors and other medical personnel ending their own lives in sheer despair. The suicide rate for Medical staff was still higher than she'd like it to be, but it wasn't like the rates that occurred when the last pandemic had hit Earth. When any of them had, the despair had been the same. Crushing, with all the focus of every last person on the Medical staff. They'd been called hero's. None of them saw themselves as heroes for doing their jobs, and failing at their calling. Each death was personal. Each death was a failure of her mind, their minds to get ahead of this disaster. They had the finest xeno's on it already and it had so far been for naught.

Until that one patient survived.

Any hope was worth chasing.

Any tiny grasp of light in the darkness was worth pursuing until it was gone or until it blazed into a light that could burn the very virus from the ship.

SECURE.

Acacia ran.

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