Chalk Marks

Every morning the names of the dead were found, etched above the door, and we gathered and stared and then silently dispersed. Sometimes, especially early on, a few of us would stay behind crying. In those days we brought offerings of food or flowers, our little sacrifices to unknown gods, a symbol to ward off ill-fortune as much as a gesture of condolence.

The plagues came with the last colony ship. It docked on auto-pilot, all signals from traffic control were answered with an automated message, that the communications had been damaged in an accident of unspecified nature, and that had also wounded a large percentage of the crew.
Station staff scrambled medical personnel to the docking arm without wondering what kind of accident would do all that but leave no external signs of damage. If anyone at the time called for the quarantine regulations to be upheld there is no record of it. I know I didn't.
Even if I had, who would have listened? Engineer-Officer First Class Peter Douglass didn't carry a whole lot of sway then. Back when rank still had meaning.
When the first of the survivors staggered down the flex tube towards us we could hardly believe our eyes, I was the head of the deck crew, standing by to inspect the ship (the SS Britannica) and I was kitted out in fire hazard gear, standard operating procedure for anything more than a routine landing, so I was probably the closest person to the mouth of the tube, the first one to see the carnage inside the ship.
I've seen the aftermath of boarding actions, even fought in two, and I'll never forget them. I've worked damage control on an ancient mining rig, watched as section after section lost pressure, and then went in after the fact to patch it up and clean out anything that the vacuum of space left behind.
This was worse. Five survivors walked out, red-tinged sweat pouring down their dessicated faces, their clothes dirty, hair matted. But they had a fire in their eyes still, the hundred or so would-be settlers locked in makeshift cages behind them...well aside from the fact that they were still upright you couldn't have distinguished them from dead men. It wasn't just that it was a charnel house, it was the pervasive sense of hopelessness.
There was one women, the tallest of the survivors, that still wore something that could be recognized as a uniform, and she walked up to the head of the welcoming committee and through a picture perfect salute that was, reluctantly, returned.
“Lieutenant Sanders, sir, acting captain of the Britannica, this is my acting executive officer Sergeant Tyron, and those three poor saps are Chief Alexi, and ratings Ivan and Romanov. Between the three of them they kept the old bird flying and happy the last week, and I would like to officially commend all of them.”
The only response she received was a dead-eyed stare and the curt question, “Lieutenant, what have you brought to my station?”
Of course it fell to me and my crew to clear the ship, so we suited up and sallied forth, good little engineers. There were some things in there that I don't like to remember. Worse than I've seen since, even with the station falling apart around me, held together with whatever we can beg onto the increasingly rare supply shuttles, but there was one image that I can not seem to shake.
It was on the bridge, there was an annex in one corner, separated from the main control room by a glass door. Inside a corpse sat in a chair, before a stainless steel table, on which were spread an assortment of star charts. Several of these bore markings indicating systems that, to my knowledge, held no useful planets. One wall was all but covered in a tally, chalk marks, each group of four with a fifth slash through it.
The body was wearing the stars of a fleet captain, but that was not what struck me, what struck me was how healthy it looked. It had not succumbed to the same plague that had taken the rest of the crew, it was a bullet to the back of the head that ended the captains life, the round had come from the other side of the door. Next to the hole someone had continued the hash marks, trailing lower and lower, terminating under a computer. A corpse still clutched the bloody stump of chalk.
When we returned to the station we heard that the first of the five had died, Ivan had been his name. That night I took a grease pen from my jump suit and, lying in my rack, made a single mark on the ceiling.
That was four years ago today.