"God"

“I don’t know,” the soldier said.  “It’s random.  That one there in the cell was fine for hours.  No sign.  For others it was quick.  Within an hour.”

Of course the people who’d designed this thing had gone that route.  It had to be as nasty as possible.  I wasn’t an Academy student, but I’d spent enough time around the doctors to know the basics.  Diseases that killed their patients too fast killed off the populations before those populations that could spread them.  Diseases that took too long left too big a window to be cured.  But something variable?

Cut to the chase 11.5