Black
While Samuel and Charlotte were racking their brains over the Krull and that Rangdan fleet that had come from God knows where, I had my own war—far less flashy, but just as important: people kept dying of stupid things.
Infections.
Cancer.
A badly treated scratch on a frontier world with no decent hospital.
You could have hundred-meter Titans and fleets capable of crossing the galaxy, and still lose a soldier to a fever that, back on Earth in my day, you’d cure with a couple of pills.
That didn’t sit right with me.
If I was going to build something that would serve humanity in the long run, it couldn’t just be a couple of combat tricks.
It had to be something structural.
Something written into the body itself.
And so the idea of Chromosome 24 was born.
The logic, explained without all the technical jargon my tech-adepts loved so much, was this: the human body already comes with twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and it gets by reasonably well with them.
What would happen if we added one more pair, designed from scratch, without the evolutionary baggage of millions of years of biological improvisation?
An artificial, custom-made chromosome whose only job was to keep at bay anything that wanted to kill its carrier from the inside.
The result, after years of testing, failures, and more than one scare I’d rather not remember in detail, worked better than I had dared to hope.
C24—that’s what I named it, because “advanced immunological defense artificial chromosome” didn’t sound good to anyone—made its carrier practically immune to every known disease.
Viruses, bacteria, parasites—none of it posed a real threat anymore.
But it didn’t stop there.
The same mechanism that let the body annihilate any infection in a matter of minutes also accelerated cell division to a rate of roughly fifty times normal.
That meant almost instant tissue regeneration: a broken bone knitted in hours, a deep wound closed before your eyes.
And since the entire body was now running under new rules, the effects spilled over into everything else: muscular strength far beyond human, physical endurance bordering on the absurd, and a brain that, fed by such an efficient metabolism, ended up processing information with a clarity not even I had expected.
“Look at this,” I told my team the first time we saw the full results in a healthy subject, unable to hide my grin.
“A handful of gods out there have spent ten thousand years playing at making champions out of Primarch blood, rituals and sacrifices.
You’re welcome.”
The first volunteers were discharged soldiers, veterans with old wounds nobody knew how to treat anymore.
Watching them regain their mobility, their strength, even years of life they’d thought were lost, was one of the most satisfying things I’d witnessed since arriving in this universe.
We began to expand the program.
Colonists.
Workers from radioactive mines.
Ordinary people who just wanted to stop being afraid of a simple cold.
Everything was going well.
Too well, in hindsight, and I should have suspected that something like this couldn’t come free.
The problem showed up in a small group of subjects that, through administrative carelessness more than any ill intent on my part, included a handful of inmates with histories of extreme violence, a couple of them with prior diagnoses of psychotic behavior.
No one thought it mattered: C24 acted on the body, not the mind.
Or so we believed.
The first symptoms were subtle.
Mood swings sharper than normal.
Insomnia.
One of the subjects started talking to himself, in a low voice, about things that—according to him—he “could finally see clearly.” We chalked it up to the natural neurological adjustment that came with the boost in intelligence.
A rookie mistake I’ll never entirely forgive myself for.
Three days later, that same subject attacked two guards in the observation area.
The doctors who managed to restrain him described something that matched no known clinical record: grayish, necrotic skin, completely white eyes, a strength that bent reinforced steel bars as if they were copper wire, and an aggression that didn’t respond to pain, or reason, or anything remotely resembling a survival instinct.
When the images reached my desk, I felt something inside me freeze—something that hadn’t felt cold in a very long time.
“Seal off that medical wing right now,” I ordered, without bothering to soften my tone.
“Nobody goes in, nobody comes out, and if anything gray with an urge to bite knocks on that door from the inside, you shoot first and apologize to me later.
I’m on my way.”
It was four, and the pattern repeated itself with small variations: subjects with a history of violence or prior psychological instability didn’t just develop off-the-charts strength and endurance—their behavior degenerated into something that could no longer be called human.
Some simply attacked anything that moved, eyes empty, their bodies decomposing even as they stayed on their feet, like corpses that refused to find out they were dead.
Others mutated in far more specific, far more terrible ways, their bodies twisting in directions no human skeleton should ever allow.
One of them, the most dangerous of the four, no longer fit through the door of his own containment cell by the time I arrived.
The reports from the soldiers who tried to stop him, before I ordered a full withdrawal, spoke of horns, of bone armor growing straight out of his skin, of a roar that sounded like nothing a living being should ever produce.
Someone, with more fear than sense of humor, gave him a name that stuck: the Hell Knight.
I stood in front of the monitors, watching that thing tear through a reinforced-plate containment wall as if it were cardboard, and for the first time since arriving in this universe I felt something very close to panic.
“Black,” said one of my few trusted technicians over the comm, his voice shaking, “the facility’s psychic sensors went haywire ten minutes ago.
Whatever that thing is, it’s not alone.
There’s something else with it.
Something that didn’t come from our side of reality.”
I closed my eyes for a second.
Of course.
Of course it couldn’t be as simple as an experiment gone wrong.
I had opened a crack—not in the body, but in something much deeper—and something on the other side had already noticed.
Great.
Just what I needed: the Warp neighborhood finding out there was a vacancy.
“Get the maximum-level containment team ready,” I ordered, this time not even bothering to fake calm.
“And somebody tell whoever needs telling that we’re no longer talking about an experiment with side effects.
We’re talking about me accidentally leaving the back door open for the Blood God.
No wonder nobody invites me to the important meetings.”
Behind me, on the screen, the Hell Knight raised its head and, for an instant that would stay burned into my memory for a long time, seemed to look straight at the camera.
At me.
Thank you for your understanding!