Chapter 1: The Crimson Throne
The first thing Joaquin Xavier felt was the nauseating vertigo of artificial gravity snapping into place, a sensation like falling up. The second was the bitter, metallic taste on his tongue—sedative, maybe, or just the recycled air of an alien ship. The third was a hand, clamped like a vice around his upper arm, hauling him forward.
His feet, still in stupid grey canvas sneakers, scuffed against a floor of polished black crystal. The world swam into focus, harsh and unwelcome.“Move, human,” a voice grated in his ear. Commander Saline.He remembered her face from the blurred moments of his…extraction. Sharp, ice-chip eyes, hair the color of surgical steel cropped close to a scalp that probably hadn’t softened in three centuries.
“I’m moving, I’m moving,” he slurred, his own voice sounding thick and foreign.“You could’ve just asked for a consult.Conference call. Would’ve been cheaper than a bloody interstellar kidnapping.”
She didn’t dignify that with a reply. Just propelled him through an archway into a cavern that stole the sarcasm right from his lips.The Obsidian and Crimson Council Chamber wasn’t a room; it was a geological event. Walls of jagged, blackened crystal soared upwards, bleeding into a vaulted ceiling where holographic stars flickered and died in a silent, desperate loop. The light they cast was sickly, a jaundiced amber that dyed the blood-red marble floor the color of a healing bruise. The air smelled of ozone and something else, something coppery and old.And there were people. Tall, buff, their skin hues ranging from pale lavender to a deep, bruised crimson. They watched him with a stillness that felt predatory. At the far end, on thrones carved from the same gleaming black stone, sat the council. And above them, literally looking down, was High Councillor Amon.Amon was seven feet and change of gaunt, regal menace. His skin was the shade of old wine, his eyes a piercing violet that missed nothing. He didn’t stand as they approached; he simply uncoiled from his throne, the movements fluid and unnaturally graceful.
A holographic map spun lazily in the space between them—a globe, but not Earth. This one was mottled with pulsating sores of sickly green light, continents withering under the digital blight.“Commander Saline,” Amon’s voice was dry, parchment over stone. “Your…cargo.”
“High Councillor. The human geneticist, Joaquin Xavier, as ordered.”
Amon descended the dais steps, his long robes whispering against the stone. He circled Joaquin, who forced himself to stand straight, to meet that violet gaze. He felt like a specimen under a cold, dispassionate lens.
“This?” Amon finally stopped, his lip curling.“This is the best Earth had to offer? A child in worn clothing?”
Joaquin’s fear boiled over into something hotter, sharper.“The clothes are comfortable. And I’m twenty-two.A PhD, for what it’s worth in this charming little autopsy theatre. You lot are the ones dying. Maybe focus less on the dress code.”
A ripple went through the watching crowd.Saline’s grip tightened until his fingers went numb.
Amon’s smile was thin and humorless.“Spirit. How…primitive.” He gestured to the holographic plague map.“You see our problem, child.A retrovirus.Engineered. It targets specific genetic sequences, the ones that code for our longevity, our cellular regeneration. It is eating my people from the inside.The Cerulean underclass were the first test subjects. Now it jumps the caste barrier.It is in the Crimson quarters. It is here.”
“And you think I can fix it.” It wasn’t a question.
“We have exhausted our science,” Amon said, a flicker of rage finally cracking the glacial veneer. “Our greatest minds are now coughing lesions into silk pillows.You are not our first resort. You are our final, desperate gambit.Your planet’s primitive, scrambled genome is a thing of chaos. We believe in that chaos lies a key.A mirror. A way to reflect the plague back upon itself.”
Joaquin stared at the dying stars above, then at the map.Millions, billions likely, represented by those glowing sores. His stomach churned.This wasn’t a lab grant proposal. This was the weight of a species.
“You kidnapped me to play gene hacky-sack with an apocalyptic virus.”
“Essentially.”
“The ethical ramifications alone…”
“Are a luxury of the living,” Amon cut him off, final as a guillotine blade.“You will work. You will do so under the supervision of our head of xenogenetics, Zephyr.You will live in his quarters. His labs are yours.Commander Saline will be your…liaison. She will ensure you have everything you require.”
Saline’s jaw muscle twitched. “High Councillor.”
“She will also ensure,” Amon continued, his eyes locking onto Joaquin’s, “that you do not step one millimeter out of line.Your existence here is conditional on your utility. Fail to be useful, and the conditional clauses of your stay will become remarkably simple.”
The threat hung in the metallic air. Joaquin’s mind, trained for complexity, reduced it to a brutal binary: Solve the impossible puzzle, or be disposed of.“Where do I start?” The words tasted like ash.
Amon gestured. A door hissed open in the crystalline wall, revealing a corridor lit with a softer, blue-toned light.“Commander.Take him to Zephyr. Now.”
Saline gave a sharp nod and pulled Joaquin around, away from the oppressive gaze of the council. The walk was silent, their footsteps echoing. He waited until they were around the first bend before he spoke, his voice low.“Liaison?Really? More like warden.”
Saline stopped, shoving him against the cool crystal wall.Her face was inches from his. Up close, she was older than he’d thought, fine lines etched around eyes that had seen too much death. But the strength in her hands was absolute.“Listen, human.You are a tool. I am the hand that wields it.You will refer to me as Commander. You will do as I say. You will not speak to Amon like that again unless you wish to see how we process redundant assets.”
“Is that how you justify this?” he shot back, anger making him brave. “To yourself?Dragging someone from their life to be your little miracle worker? What’s your stake in it, Commander?Promotion? Glory?”
For a fraction of a second, something raw flashed in her blue eyes.Not ambition.Something closer to pain. It was gone instantly, replaced by glacial contempt.
“My stake is the continuation of the Aethryn people,” she said, her voice hollow.“Everything else is noise.Now move.Zephyr is waiting. He, at least, might be civil to you.”
She pushed off the wall and strode ahead. Joaquin followed, his mind already racing ahead of his body, tearing apart the problem. The genetics, the viral structure, the delivery mechanism.It was a grim, horrifying puzzle. But it was a puzzle. And a part of him, the part that had spent lonely years peering into electron microscopes, was already, treacherously, intrigued.He thought of Amon’s face, the cold calculation. He thought of the dying stars on the ceiling. And he knew, with a scientist’s cold certainty, that finding a cure was only part of the danger here. The other part was what these people would do with it—and to him—once he did.
The other part was what these people would do with it—and to him—once he did.
The corridor’s blue-tinged light was softer, clinical.It hummed with a low-grade energy that made his fillings ache. Saline walked a precise two paces ahead, her posture rigid, the black fabric of her uniform stretching across shoulders that looked like they could bench-press a small car. Joaquin’s eyes, trained to notice details, strayed from the path to study her.
It was the little things that didn’t add up. The way her silver-white hair gleamed under the lights, not with the dry brittleness of age, but with a healthy, metallic sheen. The skin at the nape of her neck, visible above her high collar, was smooth and taut, the pale lavender hue consistent, unmarked by time. He’d seen Amon, seen the ancient, regal gauntness in his face. But Saline, who was supposedly over three hundred years old, moved with the lethal, coiled grace of a prime athlete. She looked, for all intents and purposes, maybe thirty.His age.“You stare, human. It’s rude.”
He hadn’t realized he’d slowed.“Sorry. It’s just… the math isn’t mathing.Amon looks… well, old. You don’t.”
She didn’t break stride.“The Crimson caste enjoys extended vitality.The plague disrupts that. It is why your task is urgent.”
“Extended vitality. Right.” He caught up, walking beside her now, his longer legs easily matching her pace.“So, what, you all just stop aging at some point? Cellular senescence just… gives up and calls it a day?”
“A crude simplification.”
“I’m a crude guy. This place,” he gestured at the sweeping, alien architecture, “is it all like this?Glowy crystal and doom maps? Where’s the… I don’t know, the cafeteria?The gym?”
“Your needs for sustenance and movement will be provided for in designated areas. This is the Sovereign Spire.The administrative and scientific heart of our remaining territory. You will not have free run of it.”
“So, a gilded cage. Got it.” They passed a wide, transparent wall overlooking a vast, multi-level laboratory. Hundreds of Aethryn in simpler, grey-blue suits moved between bubbling apparatus and holographic schematics.Many were coughing. Some leaned heavily on stations.The scale of it, the quiet, desperate industry, hit him with a physical force. This wasn’t just a council’s problem.It was everywhere.
“Are they… Cerulean?” he asked, his voice quieter.
Saline followed his gaze, her expression unreadable.“Yes.They are more susceptible.The virus was designed that way.It began there. A weapon to control the underclass.It mutated. Broke its constraints.”
“You guys make a weapon to kill your own people?Classy.”
Her head snapped toward him, eyes flashing. “It was not my design. I am a soldier, not a politician.”
“But you enforce their will.” He let the accusation hang.“This Zephyr.Is he Crimson too? Or is he down there, coughing into a petri dish?”
“Zephyr is Crimson. Head of Xenogenetics.His labs are separate.Isolated.” She said it like a shield. “He requested you specifically.Studied your Earth publications on recombinant viral therapy. He believed your… chaotic approach… might yield solutions ours cannot.”
“Great. So no pressure.” They arrived at a seamless door of dark metal.Saline pressed her palm against it. A scan light flared, and it hissed open.The space beyond was a paradox. One wall was a single, enormous pane overlooking the teeming lab below. The others were lined with data-screens, biological containment units holding bizarre, pulsating samples, and shelves of crystal data-slates. But in the room’s center was a living area: a low, elongated couch of some felt-like material, a table, a recessed niche with what looked like a food synthesizer. It was part lab, part monastic cell.A figure rose from behind a cluttered console. Zephyr was taller than Saline, lean where she was muscular, with skin of a deeper crimson and wise, tired eyes the color of twilight.He offered a thin, preoccupied smile.“Ah.The human.Joaquin Xavier. I am Zephyr.” His voice was a rasp, dry as dust. He gestured to the room.“This is my work space.It is now also your living quarters. I hope you find it… adequate.”
Joaquin stepped in, his sneakers silent on the cool floor. “It’s got a view.” He walked to the enormous window, looked down at the suffering below, then back at Zephyr, then at Saline, who remained planted in the doorway. “So, we’re roommates now? You, me, and the Grim Reaper out in the hall?”
Zephyr coughed, a dry, rattling sound he tried to suppress into his fist.“Commander Saline’s duties are myriad.She will not be babysitting. She will be ensuring you have access to what you need. And ensuring you do not stray.”
“Right. The liaison.” Joaquin walked over to a containment unit, peered at a swirling, amber fluid inside.“So, let’s cut to the chase.You have the viral isolate? Full genomic sequence?Protein folding models?”
Zephyr’s eyebrows rose, impressed despite himself. “Direct.Good. The data is here.” He pulled up a hologram, a complex, twisting double-helix glowing in the air.It was beautiful and horrific. “This is the Aethryn Plague, Phase Three.It has a ninety-eight percent mortality rate in Ceruleans. Sixty-seven and climbing in Crimson.It is airborne, waterborne, bloodborne. We have contained it to this planet through a total quarantine.We are all already exposed. We are simply waiting to see who dies.”
Joaquin stared at the spiral of death. His mind started whirring, grabbing at threads, seeing the elegant, malicious logic in the base pairs. “It’s a masterpiece of bastardry. Who built it?”
A silence filled the room, thicker than the sedative fog in his brain.Zephyr and Saline exchanged a look.
“That,” Saline said from the doorway, her voice final, “is not your concern. Your concern is un-building it.”
Joaquin looked from her rigid form to Zephyr’s weary face, down to the lab where people were dying, and back to the beautiful, deadly helix spinning in the air between them.The puzzle was here, immense and terrifying. But the answers, the real ones, were clearly locked away behind other doors.
“Okay,” he said, pulling out the chair at Zephyr’s console and sitting down.He cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get to work. First, I need to see how this thing interacts with your baseline, non-Cerulean, super-annoyingly-vital Crimson DNA.Show me everything you’ve got. And somebody get me something that approximates coffee. This is going to be a long night.”
He didn’t look back at Saline. But he felt her eyes on him, a pressure on the back of his neck, as permanent and watchful as the dying stars.
But he felt her eyes on him, a pressure on the back of his neck, as permanent and watchful as the dying stars.
The “coffee” was a bitter, sludgy paste that tasted of burnt roots and regret. It worked. His brain, already buzzing with hyper-vigilant adrenaline, locked onto the data.Hours blurred. The holographic helix rotated, split into component proteins, unfolded into nightmare origami. Zephyr spoke in a low, continuous rasp, pulling up model after failed model. The man was a brilliant encyclopedia of despair.
“We tried a mirror-RNA approach here,” Zephyr said, highlighting a complex sequence. “It bonded, but then acted as a primer for accelerated replication. It made things worse.”
“Of course it did,” Joaquin muttered, chewing on the stylus he’d been given. “Look at this folding. It’s a goddamn booby trap. It’s designed to punish linear thinking. Our science, your science… it’s too clean. This thing thrives on clean.”
He leaned back, his chair groaning. His eyes were gritty. Below, in the main lab, the gentle blue lighting had dimmed to a night-cycle glow.Fewer figures moved. The coughing seemed louder in the quiet. He watched a Cerulean in grey-blue lean over a sink, shoulders heaving.
“They don’t stop, do they?” Joaquin said, not looking at Zephyr.
“The work is all we have. Stopping is dying.”
“And you’re up here. In the nice, isolated lab. With the fancy air filters.” He finally turned. Zephyr’s crimson skin looked ashen under the screens’ glow. The man was exhausted, but it was a different flavor of exhaustion than the people below. It was the strain of command, of responsibility. But not of immediate, physical fear. “You’re Crimson. They’re Cerulean. The virus treats you differently. Do you?”
Zephyr’s weary eyes held his for a long moment. He minimized the viral models with a slow gesture. The room felt suddenly hollow.
“You are observant,” Zephyr said, his voice even drier than before.
“It’s my job. So, what’s the deal? Castes. Crimson, Cerulean. You live longer, they… what, serve you?”
“It is the order of things. For millennia.” Zephyr said it without conviction, a recitation.
“Bullshit. Nothing’s just ‘the order of things’. There’s always a reason. Usually a shitty one.” Joaquin spun his chair fully, facing the older scientist. “What happens to a Cerulean who steps out of line? Or a Crimson who disagrees with Amon?”
Zephyr’s gaze flicked to the sealed door, then back. A deep, weary resignation settled into his frame. “You ask dangerous questions.”
“I’m a dangerous guy in a dangerous situation. Humor me. How does it feel? To be one of them down there?”
Zephyr was silent for so long Joaquin thought he wouldn’t answer. He looked past Joaquin, out the window to the lab below, his expression crumbling from academic detachment into something profoundly sad. He let out a sigh that seemed to come from the very roots of his being.
“How does it feel to be Cerulean?” Zephyr repeated the question softly. He shook his head, a slow, painful movement. “It is awful. We are seen as dogs to the Crimson.Useful, perhaps. Loyal, even. But lesser.Disposable. Our lives are measured in utility, not years. Our pain is a statistic. Our extinction was a political calculation that went wrong. And now… now even the masters are afraid of the kennel.”
The raw honesty in the words hit Joaquin like a physical blow. It wasn’t anger. It was grief, vast and institutional. He saw it then—the slight hunch in Zephyr’s shoulders wasn’t just from age or fatigue. It was the weight of complicity, of a brilliant mind trapped in a brutal system, forced to watch his own people, his true people, be sacrificed first.
Before Joaquin could form a response, the door hissed open. Commander Saline stood there, not as a silhouette, but fully present in the room’s light. She held a nutrient tray. Her eyes, however, weren’t on the food. They were fixed on Zephyr, sharp and warning. She had heard.
The moment shattered. Zephyr’s face sealed over, smooth and impassive once more. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod to Saline—apology or acknowledgment, Joaquin couldn’t tell.
Saline placed the tray on the table with a definitive click. “Progress?” she asked, her voice flat.
Joaquin looked from her closed-off expression to Zephyr’s shuttered one, then down to the viral helix still hovering, forgotten, in the corner of the screen. The puzzle had just gotten a thousand times more complicated. The cure wasn’t just in the genes. It was buried under centuries of oppression, and the people who needed it most were the ones everyone in power saw as dogs.
He turned back to his console, the bitterness in his mouth no longer from the alien coffee. “Progress,” he echoed, pulling the horrific, beautiful helix back to the center of the screen. “Yeah. We’re just getting started.”