A Plague of Stars — Mark Terry

Con Torres is a physician with Doctors Without Borders — hundreds of years in the future. When his spaceship crash lands on the planet Vatkan, he and the other two survivors are quickly captured and placed into a POW camp and forced into hard labor. The head of the Vatkan military research division plans to use him and his fellow survivor, ship captain Paul Levin, as guinea pigs for his biological warfare experiments to create the prophesied Plague of Stars. Meanwhile, the other survivor, Valeya, becomes a political pawn between the Vatkan leadership and a resistance group trying to overthrow the government. Con and Paul must try to escape the POW camp, rescue Val and get the hell off Vatkan.