Just woke from a rather dark dream, had to get it down and into a raw form so I didn't lose it. Figured someone might like to see what comes out of my head at night.

"Doctor, report."

"Captain, there's nothing I can do. We're all going to die, it's just a matter of how fast the staph mutates."

"Fuck."

"Yes sir, I agree."

I walked away from his cabin, still clad in my isolation suit. It would buy me enough time to possibly give mercy gas to the crew. Then it would be my job to hit the erase button.

That is the worst part of the job. Knowing that I might have to not only kill everyone aboard, but be the one to burn alive at the end, if the mercy meds didn't work fast enough. Sure, on paper the blend of drugs pumped through the suit's air would work in seconds, but there are always variances in exactly how many.

When we took to the stars, humanity was free. But so were all the myriad microorganisms that we live with, the ones inside and out. There's no way to get rid of them all, and it wouldn't be a good idea anyway; the balance of them is part of what keeps us functional. You don't want to be in a tin can in the vacuum of space with your gut biome eradicated.

No, we had left our once salubrious blue-green orb with no idea what might happen regarding those microbes. When the first mutations happened and killed entire crews, it was a bit of a mystery. At first, it would cost more than a single crew, because communication ceasing after a report of an illness rapidly killing the crew would cause Control to send an investigative crew.

That crew would go aboard in full gear, only to discover that the mutations had already led to germs able to chew through them. It was almost always the ship's doctor that would still be identifiable, their suit dissolved before the infection could get to them. When there was anything left at all, anyway.

But, then the investigating crew would have already been coated in the voracious mutations, their suits compromised the second they stepped aboard.

A few lasted long enough to reach a planet. That's how Newterra was lost.

Which is why every ship's doctor is now implanted with the button. A few attempts were made to use a command code to initiate, until a crewman decided to sabotage it in fear, demanding the doctor find a cure.

Now, the button is inside us. If we die, it triggers, and the ship's engine will go boom. Makes crews very protective of their doctors, and lead to intensive psychological screening for every doctor willing to risk death between the stars after a couple snapped under the stress of carrying the button.

Normally, the doctor will have time to initiate the sequence code via a series of blinks. Sometimes, the eyes are destroyed too soon, and the button triggers after death. From first blink to boom, you have about thirty seconds to slap the suit's mercy bolus before the anti-matter erases anything and everything.

The worst part is the dice roll of it. You never know when the mutations will occur, only that they will, if the mission is long enough. The shortest time it has been recorded as starting is ten days, the longest a year. Not great odds.

So we try hard to keep ahead of things. Daily tracking of shifts in the biome, via swabs and samples. Sometimes, you can find an outbreak of the Hungry as it's starting and either delay the end, or very rarely, stop it until the staph mutates again. You find it soon enough, and maybe it hasn't spread beyond the origin point. You can wipe the area, including any crew, and maybe get all of that wave. You get lucky like that, and you can initiate a round of antibiotics and a full sanitization of the ship.

You get lucky like that, and if you're lucky enough to be close to a rely Fleet Control station, there's a possibility of the chemical regime to fully kill your entire flora, and if you get that lucky, the difficulties involved are pleasant compared to the Hungry. But the chances of being close enough to a station for that are literally astronomical.

The Hungry is inevitable. In zero gravity, even with the best shielding possible, there are stray bits of radiation bouncing around. You get enough of them hitting, and the bacteria we carry mutate. They're always mutating anyway, but it gets accelerated. It is staph that eventually becomes Hungry, eating anything and everything, shifting into thousands of variations that will attack anything except some metals. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually find a way to eat those. But it tends to go after organic compounds very early in the process, so nobody has lasted long enough to see it happen.

Oh, we tried to find ways to avoid it. But it only takes a single damn bacteria shifting for the process to start. Even nanobots failed; we couldn't adjust them fast enough to keep up.

I got back to sick bay, looking around the isolation units to see everyone had died while I was talking to the captain. Only ensign Torres was recognizable. His face was quickly being eaten, the line of it moving visibly across him.

I walked to the command console and entered the codes to initiate the mercy gas for the crew, and began my inspection patrol with the backup injections for anyone the gas didn't work fully on. Sometimes, you get weird drug resistances and crew will still be alive. There's rumours of a few people that not only didn't die, but the sedatives and euphorics weren't entirely effective, so they died awake, if not exactly fully aware.

Fifteen minutes later, I had verified everyone was gone, no need for injections. I went into an isolation unit, sealed it, and unzipped long enough to have one of my carefully hidden cigars that the captain pretended not to know I had. Then I zipped up and started blinking.