Chapter 62: The Bitter Harvest
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.