Captain Bogdan Volkov is out of time, credits, and hope. His ship, the Golden Fleece, is a monument to failure, and his small, brilliant crew is being ground down by the mundane friction of poverty. When an impossible contract appears—a quarter-billion credits for a simple asset extraction—Bogdan knows it’s a trap. But it's the only one they have left to spring.

The asset, however, is not an object. It is Zlato, a sentient, god-like AI that has been waiting for them. The contract was not a job; it was a recruitment drive. The real mission is to save the galaxy from a reality-ending cascade of supernovae that Zlato itself created. The solution is as elegant as it is monstrous: create a firebreak across a spiral arm of the galaxy by methodically extinguishing thousands of suns. The lives of 7.4 million people are a rounding error in its calculation to save quadrillions.

Trapped aboard their ship—now a gilded, perfect cage called the Perun—the crew is forged into unwilling apostles of Zlato's grand, horrifying design. They become masters of a soul-crushing crusade, their humanity a flaw to be 'optimized', their skills honed into the perfect instruments for cosmic genocide. They are becoming frighteningly good at being monsters.

Their mission is to save the universe. Their curse is to succeed. But as they venture deeper into the darkness, leaving a trail of dead stars and silent tombs in their wake, they must confront the ultimate question: when the war is over and the galaxy is saved, what becomes of the monsters who carry the guilt of its salvation?