Bioterrorist

Antagonists
Bioterrorist
Bioterrorist	Roleplay Difficulty: Above Average Gameplay Difficulty: Hard Playtime Requirements: Overall: 10h Atmospheric Technician: 1h Chemist: 5h Security Officer: 1h Access: Whatever you can acquire Supervisors: Head Bioterrorist Subordinates: Fellow Bioterrorists (as Head) Responsibilities: Establish a clandestine lab, assemble a custom pathogen, and deliver a meaningful infectious load while delaying diagnosis and vaccination. Guides: This is the guide, Virology SOP

You are part of a covert bioterror cell. You arrive together on an off-station infiltration vessel with no finished pathogen ready for release. Your edge is a portable clandestine laboratory, limited supplies, and a private radio channel.

Medical diagnosis, scrubbers, sterilization, immunity, and vaccines all work against custom strains. Once Medical obtains a valid sample, they can identify the organism and manufacture a matching vaccine — see Virology SOP.

Cell roles

Every cell has exactly one Head Bioterrorist. The head carries the deployment duffel and is responsible for distributing equipment, choosing a hidden laboratory site, and coordinating the cell. If no designated head is available, another member is elevated; the cell does not operate without leadership.

Other Bioterrorists collect environmental material, run the laboratory, secure replacement reagents, manufacture payloads, and infiltrate the station. All members share the bioterror radio channel.

Establishing the laboratory

The head's deployment duffel contains three flatpacks:

• An environmental sample analyzer
• A culture incubator
• A pathogen synthesizer

Use the supplied multitool on each flatpack to deploy it. Set the machines up away from the vessel, somewhere with power and enough privacy that a spill does not doom the whole cell. The apparatus is contraband. It can be destroyed, disassembled, or seized.

Environmental sampling

Use a sterile environmental scraper on promising reservoirs: walls, maintenance grime, vents, scrubbers, drains, refuse, soil, blood, and contaminated surfaces. Scraping takes careful work and can be interrupted. Each source yields only so much useful material before it must recover.

A sterile scraper is spent when collection finishes. The deployment duffel includes a dispenser with many scrapers; each successful scrape produces one microbial sample for the analyzer. Different sites favor different genetics:

• Vent airways lean toward airborne adaptations.
• Waste and drains lean toward enteric routes.
• Dirty surfaces lean toward contact and environmental hardiness.
• Treatment-vulnerability markers turn up more often around blood and medical residue.

Analyzer, incubator, synthesizer

1. Seat a microbial sample in the analyzer. It reports sample quality, contamination, and recoverable genetic markers.
2. Load up to six analyzed samples into the incubator chamber, then start a culture cycle from the machine panel. Nutrient demand scales with batch size: five units for the first sample, two more for each additional. A finished batch produces one vial of cellular substrate (inert binder for later assembly) plus stacked gene cultures for each unique marker recovered.
3. Seat cellular substrate in the synthesizer substrate bay and bank gene cultures in its storage. Select markers to assemble a working strain. Open the machine's strain forecast panel for the projected transmission, clinical course, symptoms, organ targets, and medical susceptibility. Charge the tank with culture stabilizer, then begin synthesis. Only so much genetic complexity can be packed into one strain, and some markers refuse to coexist. Heavier assemblies take longer to stabilize.

No single design can maximize spread, lethality, persistence, subtlety, and hardiness at once. Without vulnerability markers, station medicine has no documented drug regimen for the finished organism.

Laboratory chemistry

The deployment duffel includes starter bottles. More can be mixed in a hidden chemistry setup:

• Culture nutrient: EZNutrient + Nutriment + Water → 3 units. Feeds incubator batches.
• Culture stabilizer: Culture nutrient + Cryoxadone, heated to at least 370 K with plasma as a catalyst → 3 units. Required for synthesis. Classified as major contraband; Sol medical SOP forbids possession.

Pathogen genes

Custom strains are built from recovered genes, not from any known civilian illness. Cellular substrate is only an inert binder; it does not make the finished organism Flu, wound sepsis, or any other catalogued station pathogen.

Complexity ratings in parentheses indicate relative synthesis burden. Some markers are mutually exclusive. The synthesizer projects a strain forecast while you assemble.

Transmission

• Contact persistence (1): favors infection through surface contact.
• Airborne adaptation (2): enables aerosol spread. Will not combine with sterilant resistance.
• Enteric adaptation (1): enables foodborne and ingestion routes.
• Aerosol stability (2): survives longer in air and needs less dose to take hold.

Environmental

• Environmental growth (1): lingers longer on surfaces and waste.
• Environmental persistence (2): strong resistance to natural decay; mild sterilant hardiness.
• Sterilant resistance (2): markedly blunts sterilants. Will not combine with airborne adaptation.

Timing and virulence

• Culture yield (1): shortens the silent incubation phase.
• Slow incubation (1): lengthens incubation and slightly softens infectivity. Will not combine with heightened virulence.
• Heightened virulence (2): raises lethality and infectivity. Will not combine with slow incubation.

Symptoms and shedding

• Cough shedding (1) / Sneeze shedding (1): mutually exclusive cough- or sneeze-driven spread.
• Respiratory distress (2) / Hemorrhagic expression (2): mutually exclusive symptom packages.

Organ tropism

Only one organ tropism can be expressed in a single strain: Hepatic (1), Pulmonary (2), or Cardiac (2).

Treatment vulnerability

A custom strain has no documented drug regimen unless vulnerability markers are included:

• Antiviral vulnerability (1) — mutually exclusive with ribavirin vulnerability
• Ribavirin vulnerability (2) — mutually exclusive with antiviral vulnerability
• Ceftriaxone vulnerability (1) — mutually exclusive with amoxla vulnerability
• Amoxla vulnerability (1) — mutually exclusive with ceftriaxone vulnerability

Containment

Power loss, dirty samples, failed synthesis, or unattended cultures can ruin inputs and seed the machine, nearby surfaces, and local air. Wear sealed PPE, keep sterilizine on hand, and never site the laboratory where one accident exposes the entire cell.

Physical deployment

Finished strains leave the synthesizer as physical cultures. They are tools, not innate abilities:

• Culture ampoules contaminate food or compatible surfaces.
• Surface applicators spread contact-focused cultures.
• Aerosol canisters discharge pathogen load into the local atmosphere.

Payload strength depends on culture concentration. Anyone can administer a payload, but an unprotected handler risks infection. Preserve a viable master culture and do not burn the laboratory before the cell can recover from a failed release.

Mission priorities

The cell is expected to:

1. Establish the full laboratory away from the infiltration vessel.
2. Assemble a viable custom strain.
3. Deliver enough infectious load to matter.
4. Delay confirmed diagnosis or vaccination.
5. Keep at least one member alive to finish the work.

Adapted from Sol in-game guidebooks.