Event Horizon
prometheus110
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- Location
- La Ballena City Raft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Event Horizon
Following response plans that were first drawn up during the second Extrasolar war and mindful of the need to ensure containment lest the situation get out of hand, the Helghan Republic's response to the release of a chemical/biological agent in its capital was rapid and total. In a matter of hours, the initial exposure site was secured by specialists and its contents sterilized, government officials were placed in relative isolation to prevent disruptions to the civil service, medical staff from both civilian and military hospitals were called up regardless of their shift status, and routes out of the city were temporarily closed. Meanwhile, both the local and federal authorities urged the people of Pyrrus to stay calm and isolate themselves at home, a service was set up so that anyone caught within the estimated exposure radius could self-report, and systems designed to fight a long-term pandemic ground into motion.
Barely twenty minutes after the abortive attack ended, the last of the 150+ people exposed to the unknown agent arrived at the isolation wards prepared earlier. Even as they were shown to their beds by HAZMAT-suit wearing personnel and their clothes exchanged for sterile scrubs, those exposed began to report fevers and headaches with some of the elderly victims reporting more advanced symptoms. Given the length of time between exposure and symptoms first presenting themselves, the subsequent report from military labs that the substance used in the attack was some kind of virus-based biological weapon came as little surprise; the knowledge providing little comfort to those exposed as they rapidly began to develop additional symptoms. Over the course of the next two hours, periodic testing revealed extremely high viral loads within the bloodstreams of those infected and symptoms swiftly progressed to include nausea, vomiting, confusion, and muscle spasms.
An unfortunate and unavoidable fact of medicine is that the survival of the index case (or cases) for any novel virus is largely determined by the base lethality of the disease in question rather than the level of medical care received. While such care can make a difference in edge cases, being unable to predict what symptoms will emerge and unable to treat the underlying cause of a viral disease due to its nature means that medical staff are forever on the back foot when it comes to combating viruses. It is with this knowledge in mind that Helghan medical personnel watched as their charges grew ever sicker; anxiety, irritability, hyperactivity, hypersalivation, and insomnia soon joining their other symptoms.
It was around the three-hour mark that things took a turn for the worse.
Though a minority of infected progressed to display a kind of listless depression, the majority (>90%) swiftly became extremely combative and paranoid towards medical personnel and each other --more than a dozen fights breaking out between patients, and numerous bite wounds sustained by medical personnel who were themselves then forced to quarantine. In all cases where patients attacked others, Republic military personnel were required to use less-than-lethal weapons to restore order. In the worst incident, a dozen of the infected, caught in a paranoia-induced mental break, managed to force their way out of the isolation ward they were being held in with several of them assaulting whomever they came across. While order was swiftly restored and the infected prevented from escaping into the city, a number of people had to be placed in isolation as a result.
With the need to identify the virus used so pressing and the resources of an entire planet put to the task, it was only a matter of time until a breakthrough was made and made it was. Operating out of a civil lab in Karpathia, a doctor Petra Mendleson, a virologist from the Magistracy of Canopus, identified the virus as a novel variant of the Rabies lyssavirus with genetic markers from a number of unrelated viruses included in its makeup. Clearly modified, and quite cunningly so, the virus has a number of features designed to cloak it from the human immune system and supercharge its replication rate, though the extremely rapid onset of symptoms in the initial infected appeared more to be a result of exposure to extremely high viral loads rather than the viruses increased reproductive speed.
With the illness now properly diagnosed, treatment moved from impossible to merely extremely difficult and the predicted survival rate of the infected made a similar shift. While humanity has been living with the rabies virus for several hundred years, it is still an extremely lethal disease to contract and treatment of it after the development of symptoms is equally aggressive. Armed with the knowledge of what they were fighting and the permission of the victims' families, medical personnel placed the majority of those infected into medically-induced comas and hooked them up to an experimental cocktail of retroviral drugs. Despite the best efforts of their doctors and nurses, the first death amongst the infected occurred two days after the attack with a Mr Barend Hulst suffering a heart attack due to exhaustion. The next fourteen days saw every patient not put into a medically induced coma, and 80% of those who were, die from a mix of suffocation, seizures, exhaustion, and widespread paralysis.
Complicating matters, it was at this point it first became apparent that a number of people had either slipped the initial net set up to prevent people from leaving the site of exposure or else had the misfortune to be nearby and get infected by airborne particles. However, thanks to the communication campaign being run by the Republic combined with the lockdown of the city and the cooperation of media outlets, the majority self-reported when they first expressed symptoms, the virus was prevented from spreading to another city, and only a handful progressed to the stage of attacking others before being taken in for treatment. All told, by the time the final survivor recovered and came out of their coma a full ninety days after the attack, a hundred and forty-five Helghan citizens had been killed by the hostile agents and many many more traumatized by the worst terror attack in Helghan's recent history.
Given the known goals of the hostile agents and their choice of disease, it's believed that the intention of the attackers was to spread the virus throughout Pyrrus and Konstantine prior to and after the derailment of the hijacked trains in order to provide cover for their raids on Petrusite research labs. While almost 80% lethal with extreme treatments and 100% without, the relatively low transmission rate of the modified rabies virus combined with its slow progression during normal circumstances means that it would never work as a weapon to kill the Republic. However, the chaos caused by multiple simultaneous terror attacks combined with the panic and disruption caused by hyper-aggressive infected rioting throughout both cities would naturally disrupt the ability of government forces to respond to attacks on research centres and give the hostile agents ample time to raid the sites. If this was indeed the plan, then the Republic's efforts to counteract the hostile spies likely saved hundreds if not thousands from suffering in the ensuing chaos and prevented the theft of vital research.
As for how the virus made it onto Helghan and the attacks organized, the investigation into the matter has only just begun. That said, the initial evidence points to the hostile agents making use of Helghan's criminal underworld to gain access to the bioreactors needed to cultivate the weapon in secret. What kind of deal was struck with said criminal elements is still unknown at this time, however, the presence of both E. Coli and Benzoylmethylecgonine in several of the bioreactors indicates that said criminals may have been manipulated as it's deemed extremely unlikely that they would willingly participate in something that would render them enemies of the state.
Speaking of enemies of the state, over the past 90 days rumours regarding the origins of the attack have bounced from one side of the Republic to the other. Fed in large part by leaks from within the government and civil service, the public's view of the Celestial Mandate has plummeted with opinion polls suggesting that as many as 73% believing that the Mandate was behind the attack. Furthermore, 67% believe that there will be another terror attack soon, 55% believe that the Celestial Mandate is the Republic's greatest threat, and 42% believe that the government isn't doing enough to protect them. The public's desire for the rabies vaccine is also at an all-time high, something that Helghan's medical system is ill-equipped to cope with given the disease's historical rarity on Helghan. Unfortunately for those hoping that the existing vaccine will be enough to protect them and their families, the modifications made to the virus means that a novel vaccine will need to be developed thanks to the virus's unusual structure and infection mechanisms.
In contrast to the public's fear and anger, the international response to the attacks has been generally quite positive. The Republic's nearest Inner Sphere neighbour, the Capellan Confederation, has publicly denounced the attacks through state media organs, though has carefully skated around commenting on the perpetrator's origins. The Federated Suns and Free Worlds League, meanwhile, have quietly reached out to the Republic government and offered condolences, while ComStar and the member-states of the Outer Rim Defence Initiative have offered to assist in developing a vaccine for the virus. The Celestial Mandate, meanwhile, has steadfastly refused to comment on the matter; Republic agents located in those systems bordering the Aurigan Coalition reporting that the buildup of military forces there has continued unabated...
