The weight of Rufus's words pressed down on Alex long after his council had departed. A judgment to be faced. The phrase echoed in the cavernous silence of his study, a chilling counterpoint to Lyra's steady, electronic hum. He paced the mosaic floor, the conflicting advice of his most trusted advisors a dissonant storm in his mind. Maximus's call for war, Perennis's plea for espionage, Sabina's demand for economic defense—each was logical, each was flawed, and none offered a clear path forward. He was an emperor trapped not by his enemies, but by a poverty of options.
He found himself staring at the schematic of the Stell-Aethel still displayed on Lyra's screen, a ghostly reminder of the source of all his power and all his problems. He had pulled Rome back from the brink of famine with seeds from that ship. He had built his entire strategy, his claim to divine favor, on the promise of a miraculous harvest. And now, a ghost from that same impossible past had emerged to challenge him.
It was in that moment, as he wrestled with the grand strategy of empires and the specter of his rival, that the doors to his study burst open without a formal announcement. The breach of protocol was so severe that Alex's hand instinctively went to the gladius he now kept near his desk. But it was only Timo, his young acolyte from the greenhouses, his face a mask of chalky terror, his breath coming in ragged, panicked sobs.
"Caesar! Forgive me… forgive the intrusion, but you must come! It's the volunteers!"
The blood in Alex's veins turned to ice. The volunteers. A week ago, in a move of what he thought was prudent scientific method, he had hand-picked a dozen of his most loyal and robust Praetorian veterans of the German Guard—men who were practically supermen by Roman standards. Their task was to be the first to taste the fruits of his new world. They had been comfortably sequestered in a small, guarded villa on the Palatine slope, their diets carefully managed, consuming small, prepared meals made from the ground Tau Ceti grain. They were his canaries in the coal mine, his proof of concept before the grand public rollout.
"What is it, Timo? What's happened?" Alex demanded, grabbing the boy by the shoulders.
"They are sick, Caesar! Terribly sick!"
Alex didn't wait for more. He swept from the room, his imperial toga billowing behind him, Timo scrambling to keep pace. They half-ran through the torchlit corridors of the palace and down a private garden path that led to the secluded villa. The two guards at the door, their faces pale and worried, snapped to attention as he approached, but Alex barely saw them. He pushed past them and into the villa's main triclinium.
The scene inside was one of controlled chaos. It was not the bloody aftermath of a plague, but something more insidious, more profoundly wrong. The twelve veterans, men Alex had seen sparring with tree trunks for sport, were scattered around the room, curled into fetal positions on couches or leaning against columns, their powerful bodies betrayed by some invisible enemy. They were groaning in agony, their hands clutching their stomachs. Their faces were flushed with fever, and their exposed arms and necks were covered in angry, red welts, like the stings of a thousand invisible hornets. They were not dying, but they were incapacitated, reduced from elite warriors to miserable, suffering invalids.
The attending physician, an elderly Greek named Philipos whom Alex had chosen for his discretion and skill, rushed to his side, wringing his hands.
"Caesar, I don't understand it," he stammered, his usual calm demeanor shattered. "Their vital signs are erratic. They have high fevers, severe gastrointestinal distress… It presents like a severe food allergy, a violent rejection of something they have ingested. But to what? And for it to affect all of them, men of such peerless constitution, and so uniformly? I have never seen the like. It is as if their very bodies are at war with their food."
Alex stared at the suffering men, a wave of cold dread washing over him. He felt like a fool. A catastrophic, arrogant fool. He had trusted Lyra's data implicitly. High-protein, nitrogen-fixing grain analogue… Tier 1 Famine Relief Crop. The data was correct, but it was also incomplete. It was data from an alien database, about an alien crop, for an alien ecosystem. It could not possibly account for the subtle, intricate, and unique chaos of the human gut biome, a system shaped by two million years of terrestrial evolution. He had tested the soil. He had tested the water. He had never thought to test the men.
His grand plan, the key to his absolute power, flashed before his eyes. In two weeks, he was scheduled to host the Ludi Cereales, the festival of Ceres. He had planned to use the occasion to distribute tens of thousands of loaves of his "Miracle Bread" to the populace for free, cementing his status as Rome's savior. If he had gone ahead with that plan… he would have poisoned a tenth of the city. He wouldn't have been hailed as a god; he would have been torn apart in the streets as a monster.
He forced his mind back to the present, his voice taking on a hard, clipped authority that cut through the panic. "Seal this villa. No one enters or leaves without my direct permission. The men inside are to be cared for, but they are under quarantine. Burn all remaining prepared food. Burn the sacks of flour. Burn everything. Not one word of this leaves these walls. This is now a matter of state security. Do you understand, Philipos?"
The terrified physician nodded numbly.
Alex turned and strode out of the villa, leaving the sounds of misery behind him. He walked with a purpose, not back to the palace, but towards the source of his triumph and his failure: the greenhouses. He entered the warm, humid air of the first glass structure, the place of his greatest hope now a monument to his hubris.
He looked at the rows of vibrant, thriving alien plants. The Tau Ceti grain stood tall and proud, its heavy heads ripe for harvest, a picture of agricultural perfection. It was a beautiful, bountiful, and utterly useless crop. He had warehouses on the verge of overflowing with a harvest that was both a miracle and a poison. The irony was a physical weight in his chest.
He stood there for a long time, the setting sun casting long, distorted shadows of the alien flora across the floor. He was surrounded by his salvation, and he was trapped. How could he solve this? Could the grain be processed differently? Boiled? Fermented? Could it be fed to livestock instead? But what if it sickened them, too? Or what if the toxins accumulated in their meat? Every potential solution was a new, terrifying variable.
It was in that moment of despair that he heard footsteps behind him. A Speculatores agent, one of Perennis's men, stood at the entrance to the greenhouse, his expression unreadable.
"Caesar. A report from the city," the agent said, his voice flat. He clearly knew better than to question why the Emperor was standing alone in a garden at dusk.
"What is it?" Alex asked, his tone weary.
"A message from the Prefect of the City, Publius Helvius Pertinax," the agent recited from memory. "He offers his congratulations to the throne. On his own initiative, and using funds from the city's civic budget, he has organized the labor to repair the collapsed section of the Aqua Marcia."
Alex's head snapped up. The Aqua Marcia was one of the city's oldest and largest aqueducts, and the section that fed the working-class districts of the Aventine Hill had been in disrepair for years.
The agent continued, oblivious to the storm gathering in Alex's eyes. "The water is flowing to the public fountains of the Aventine for the first time in a decade. The report states that the people are celebrating in the streets. They are hailing Prefect Pertinax as a hero. They are calling him the 'Servant of the City.'"
Alex stared at the agent, the words striking him like a physical blow. The exquisite cruelty of the timing was not lost on him. While he, the divinely-inspired Emperor, was hiding the fact that his futuristic space-grain was poisoning his best soldiers, his caged political rival was winning the adoration of the masses. Not with secrets or miracles, but by doing his job. By giving the people something simple, something real, something they desperately needed. He was giving them clean water.