Plague Ships

Abandon All Hope...

Day 1
Caydie opened her eyes to strange, sterile walls. She heard the ship's engines all around her, a thick pane of mirrored glass separating her from the rest of the vessel. She lifted herself up as she stared at the mirror. She felt eyes watching from behind it.
She gathered up the pieces of her scattered memory. She knew little of how she got there, and even less about where she was. An image lingered, the last thing on her mind before waking: She remembered the missiles, her ship being torn apart on its first voyage.
The door opened, and a beast walked in. It stood at 8 feet with a slender, scaly body. She failed to learn more. Even if she remained conscious, biology wasn't her field. Regardless, she needed to find answers to more pressing questions. This moment served as a prime example. Why was this creature wearing an airtight suit?
Day 17
How many days has it been? Space made it hard to tell. Caydie tried to keep track. Every time it felt like an hour passed her by, she made a mark on the far wall. Over time, the minutes started to feel like hours, the hours felt like days. She stoped the tally at forty-five.
They tried to feed her, but what came through the strange mechanism on the glass was more than unfit to eat. It was meat, but not properly cooked. She tried to eat, but her body refused. She stopped when she felt she got enough down to stay alive. The smell alone was reason enough.

Day 34
She was wasting away, barely able to resist when they came for her. They entered the room holding some strange device. After that, everything went black. She woke up with another scar, this time on her leg. Her body was covered with them, now.

Imagine that moment. You know everyone's going to die. You're alone, not a single soul for millions of miles. Sending a call for distress is useless. Even if someone heard you, even if they could reach you in time, you're only making it worse. A plague ship is a ship where everyone, or almost everyone, on board has died due to a foreign contagion.
Plague ships are a horrifying reality for those who travel the void. The premise is already a horror story in the making. You pick up a distress call, or a rogue signal in the black. You investigate and find a ship, lifelessly floating along as Newton intended.
The monsters here are far too small to see. Exposure to contagions outside the evolutionary timeline of your species might not affect you at all, but if it does, you will almost certainly die of it. A terraforming event could stir a microbiome hidden in caves on a distant world. It dooms the colonists, and much more if it manages to reach another inhabited planet.

Protocol

Plague ships are ticking time bombs, floating in the void. There is nothing that can really be done. Most insist on accepting your fate. Some follow the rules. They record messages for loved ones, hoping a kind soul will pick it up and take it where it needs to go.
They broadcast these messages and their classification as a plague ship, some taking the time to go on a spacewalk and paint "do not enter" on the hull. When they are done, they resign themselves to death with a clear conscience. This rarely happens though. People panic. They spend their final moments clinging to whatever hope they can. This makes answering distress signals complicated. There are lists of protocols to be used when doing so.
You enter in airtight suits, if you enter at all. This comes with rigorous decontamination procedures. Military vessels refuse to answer most distress calls due to their fear of plague ships. Civilians, however, are easily swayed. There are groups who dedicate their lives to handling plague ships, such as Caduceus. Every member is forbidden to even step foot on most planets, spending their lives in a self-imposed quarantine.

Day 43
caydie woke up with another scar. What were they looking for? Better yet, were they leaving anything behind? Humanity's first contact with an alien race began with war and experimentation. Caydie cried herself to sleep, like any other night. This time however, she heard a tap on the glass. She looked to the mirror and could see straight through. One of the creatures stood on the other side with its hand on the glass. She could see it without obstruction, the suit having been removed and replaced with what could easily be a military uniform. It slid something through the mechanism.
She stood and picked it up. It was dense, reminding her of the protein bars she ate on long voyages in the void. She opened it. It even smelled right. She devoured it, an act that would've been impolite back home. It seemed to fill the creature with pride.
She could hear it breathing, a wheezing she noticed every time the others come into the room. She assumed it was a biological function, something to do with their lungs. She pointed to the creature, then to the nutrient bar. Did they make it? It nodded. The act leaves her confused. Why would it know to nod? She later found out the creature had been studying humans for some time, and knew exactly how to respond. Now, it seemed, he was ready to learn more.

Day 57
She stopped crying at night, eagerly awaiting her forbidden visitor. He referred to himself as Rael, which could be a name, or possibly a word meaning doctor. They spoke in gestures, along with what little of their language they can comprehend. Despite his kindness, the others kept coming. She woke with a new scar on her head, and when the others went to sleep, Rael emerged. He pointed to Caydie, then to his head. She narrowed her eyes. Did they put something in her head? Rael coughed before speaking, hacking, wheezing, and desperate for air. "I'm sorry," he says. "We're dying. You're going to need that translator..."

Consequences

I know. It seems a little extreme, but the consequences are reason enough. These foreign contagions can spread through a ship like fire. It can spread across a planet just as fast. A plague ship crashing on a planet is cause for concern, but many ships come with automated landing protocols.
These ships gently glide to the ground, land, and sit just waiting for someone to step inside. If those who do are allowed to leave, it could wipe out the population just because the planet happened to be in the way.
The consequences alone are reason to avoid these ships, but for some, it isn't that simple. Those ships could have technology, tactical information, resources, and who knows what inside. Take the right precautions, and this wealth could be yours.

Crime and Opportunity

Criminals exist in the void, and they are never opposed to stepping into a plague ship. They strip everything of value and leave, after thoroughly decontaminating it, of course. It's highly profitable, and it even earns some goodwill among local populations.
These scavengers are known for delivering transmissions to the family of those who died. The Sea of Names, a well-known pirate vessel, is notorious for this. This practice is exactly how it got its name.
Some groups are known to stash illicit goods and smuggle them on marked plague ships. People know about it, but the possible contamination is well beyond their pay grade. The only exception is when too many plague ships appear in a short period of time, making the illegal operations obvious.

Caduceus

This organization, referred to as Caduceus by humans, is a multi-species initiative dedicated to clearing plague ships. The name doesn't truly refer to the organization, but instead refers to a human vessel within in. The SVN Caduceus is a medical cruiser created in Caydie's Cradle on Safeharbor. The vessel is predominantly crewed by humans. It's the first ever human vessel with more than one species on its crew.
The organization imposes strict rules of isolation. Every member is a member for life, and will never see the surface of a planet again. They do this because of the changes made to their physiology. Each member has a slew of vaccines pumped into their system. Their immune system is second to none. This allows them to work together without fear, but also makes them likely to be carriers of the contagions they encounter.

Day 74
Rael gasped her name, desperately fiddling with a panel on the outside of her cell. The commotion woke Caydie, and she rubbed her eyes, looked over, and saw the bodies on the floor, some taking their last breath. They choked and wheezed until it killed them. They brought something on board, something in Caydie's biology that humans haven't worried about in eons. It killed them all. Caydie remained huddled in the corner of her little cell. The door was open, but she couldn't bring herself to walk through it.
The bodies float from the floor to the ceiling and back down as hours pass. Rael's body hovered in the threshold, his arm out with a strange device in his hand. He died trying to give it to her. She isn't sure how long she waited.
She turned to a noise, a beeping coming from the nose of the vessel. She looked and saw the words on the screen: proximity warning. The translator did its job well. She rushed to the front of the ship, gathered as much information as possible, and found a strange slot in the console next to the pilot's chair. She rushes back to Rael, grabbed the device he tried to give her, and slid it into the slot.
The ship sprang to life, the engine's firing. She felt the weight as the ship propelled itself forward. Debris that would have ended her life passed by without a hitch. She studied every inch of the vessel, and finally found what she needed to get home. She stumbled on the star charts.