Massive Disaster 4-1
The skycar thrummed low, steady beneath Zedd’s palm as they cut through the air over Providence. He didn’t pilot so much as lean—minimal input, fingers ghosting over the controls like the thing knew where he wanted to go.
It had changed. That was obvious. Grid tighter. Lines sharper. Density pushed up like someone cranked the resolution. Not chaotic growth either—intentional. Reinforced rails, layered zoning, high-tension cabling clean and nested.
Zedd adjusted his shades, the blue-tint HUD flickering without prompt. Didn’t need the overlay. Just liked the distance it gave. Made things easier to compartmentalize.
Seven months.
Felt longer. Like the city evolved faster without him in it. Which, yeah—probably true.
“Whole colony’s tripled,” Dev said beside him, arms crossed like a man used to giving orders now. “City’s just the face of it.”
Zedd nodded, the movement not quite one of agreement. More acknowledgment, and even still barely that. “Thought it’d take longer.”
Dev had bulked out, his shoulders squared up, jaw tighter. The MELD upgrades helped, sure, but it wasn’t just that. Leadership left marks and being in charge of the Iron Legion had definitely done everything short of scarring him.
Zedd had also bulked out as well, much more than he had compared to the more-proportioned meals and exercise of his first year in Providence.
In the back seat, Adele leaned forward, elbow on knee. “People go where the power is. And Victory’s… Victory.”
“Mm,” Zedd murmured, the sound as noncomittal as they came. “I’m so good at branding it’s disgusting.”
Dev made his own noise. “You just slap your name or initial on everything.“
A bright white grin turned his way. “Exactly.”
He dipped the car toward the lakeside, autopilot catching the descent like it was on rails. Home stretch. Not that he was thinking about it like that.
Kai sat silent up front, face neutral, gaze pinging through the window like he was still casing the approach. His now-longer hair was pulled back tight in a neat ponytail, the same dead-eyed stillness unchanging even behind his custom new sunglasses.
Dev shifted, head tilted slightly. That look meant a question was coming—one he’d already decided Zedd wouldn’t like.
“So… Nina said anything?”
Zedd didn’t blink as silence filled the skycar, the air stilling in response to the question. His hand tensed on the throttle. Not a flinch, really, just enough to register as he sped up ever-so-slightly.
“No.”
Adele glanced sideways at her boyfriend, reading the silence before the word even dropped fully. Dev did the same, but with less finesse, fighting off a grimace from asking the question in the first place. The car’s interior dipped in temperature—figurative, mostly.
“She’s still offworld?” Adele’s voice gentled, not quite casual.
“Doing her thing,” Zedd said, his voice more clipped and flat than he intended it to be. Unfortunately, it was too late to take that back now, wasn’t it? Instead, he chose not to elaborate.
Not that he needed to in the first place. Everyone in the car already knew what he meant by that.
Dev cleared his throat. “Kira’s still with the Alliance?”
Zedd nodded once.
Dev nodded back like that made the silence less loaded. It didn’t.
“So,” Dev tried again, pivoting hard, “you gonna brief us on what you were building out there? Whole blacksite deal with Kai watching your back for months—”
Kai didn’t blink.
Zedd finally looked over at Dev. “Later. After we pick up Tommy and Caleb.”
The house came into view through the canopy break. Lake-edge, built low and wide—clean lines, reflective glass, obsidian composite against green and water. It still hadn’t changed much, still looked the same as back when Nina still walked through schematics with a mug in her hand and too many critiques about his window ratios.
He shoved the memory down. No time for ghosts.
The car touched down soft in front of the house, kinesis buffers catching the weight like it didn’t exist.
They disembarked without chatter. Adele stretched. Dev cracked his neck. Kai scanned. Zedd walked. He didn’t pause at the door. It opened for him.
“Welcome home, boss,” ADAM chimed, too cheerful for Zedd’s ears. “It’s been approximately seven months, thirteen days since your last—”
“Thanks, ADAM.” He answered, his voice low and with enough edge for his AI to take the hint. “Status report on Tommy?”
“Tommy Hale is currently in the garage, examining your personal projects. Would you like me to activate security protocols?”
Zedd snorted once. Not amused. Just… done.
“No. Just tell him we’re here.”
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
The person they were looking for wasn’t hard to find.
Tommy was already wrist-deep in an engine block by the time they hit the part of Zedd’s basement workshop that led to his expanded garage, the man in question cussing under his breath like the car owed him credits. Something about proprietary coupling valves and “whoever designed this mess being due for a karmic rectal re-alignment.” Zedd didn’t have to hear all of it to get the gist.
Tommy glanced up mid-swear and grinned wide. “Look what the varren dragged back home,” he said, wiping grease off on a rag — Zedd narrowed his eyes at the oil dripping off it — that looked more oil than fabric now. “Good ol’ Zee.”
Zedd caught the microstutter in his gait, and instinctively filed it. The weight loss wasn’t dramatic—twenty pounds maybe—but Tommy was one of those guys who looked wrong if you could see too much cheekbone. Zedd didn’t bother to bring it up. Instead, he just clasped his hand, and let Tommy yank him into a fast, shoulder-heavy hug. Despite the weight loss, the guy’s grip hadn’t softened in the slightest.
“Heard you threw your lot in with Dev.” Zedd said it flat but let the edge lift, just a bit, as they stepped back. Tommy smelled like steel and citrus cleaner. One of Zedd’s formulations when he had ventured into making his own body wash out of curiosity. Forgot I put that on the market. Hell, he hadn’t even realized anyone else was using it.
Tommy shrugged in that exxagerated way of his. “You vanished and stopped using me for illegal stress-testing. Felt kinda naked, not getting electrocuted and slapped around twice a week. Dev’s at least got standards.”
“Generous word for his workout routines,” Zedd muttered, not looking at Dev yet.
Tommy patted his stomach—still solid, just softer around the edges. “At the very least, I’m moving around. Try to hit at least ten, maybe twenty good steps a day now.”
“Wow,” Adele said, voice dry as sun-bleached ferrocrete. “Only took you what? Four whole years to get off your fat ass?”
“Five,” Tommy countered, mock offended. “And I’ll have you know, before I was Zedd’s voluntary crash dummy, I had a well-respected job at the water treatment plant.”
“Respected? That the word you’re looking for, Tommy?” Dev tilted his head, already smirking.
“Critically vital to the colony’s survival, thank you very much,” Tommy said, straightening up with a little too much dignity for someone who’d once been knocked unconscious by a misfiring exo-leg.
Dev snorted. “You clogged a quarter of a whole pipeline sector once.”
“Allegedly.” Tommy looked to Zedd, palms up. “Anyway, testing your hardware pays better. Plus, the health insurance comes with hazard bonuses.”
Zedd gave a slow blink. “We don’t offer health insurance.” That much was true, any healthcare for a VI worker on the colony was done in-house
“Exactly,” Tommy said, like that explained everything.
A pause stretched just long enough to get awkward, and Tommy filled it the only way he knew how. “So, what’s the big secret, boss? You ghosted us for seven months—figure you’ve gotta have something insane cooking.”
Zedd didn’t answer. Didn’t have to.
The low whumph of atmospheric drag outside did it for him.
He looked toward the door, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
“‘Bout time,” he said, already moving.
Nobody needed prompting. The group followed, unspoken sync slotting into place.
Zedd stepped out just as the silhouette dropped—clean lines, silver and cobalt, jump jets flaring with kinesis dampers to bleed off speed. The landing barely whispered against the gravel.
Three-point pose. Cliché, Zedd thought with a quiet snort. Still cool, though, he didn’t see anything wrong with admitting that..
Caleb rose from the crouch with practiced ease, armor gleaming like it had something to prove. Slimmer than VEST standard, custom-trimmed—Zedd’s own work, top to bottom. Modded Mach 7 chassis, insulated flex joints, dual-vented backplating for heat dispersion. Even in civilian light, it looked built to outlast a war.
The helmet dissolved back, showing off Caleb to the world. His friend’s face was sharper than before—angles more defined, jaw firmer. His hair was still platinum from the psionic-inducement side effects, but the weirdness had worn off. People adapted.
Even to glowing eyes.
Still had the flicker, though. Barely there, sure, and more noticeable when he used his psionics actively. You just had to know where to look.
Zedd crossed his arms. “Subtle entrance.”
Caleb grinned and spread his own arms like he’d just won a medal. “C’mon. The branding team would riot if I didn’t.”
Dev chuckled, arms crossed again. “How’s the hero circuit treating you?”
“Bizarre,” Caleb said, the word leaving his mouth too quickly to be anything but honest. “But efficient. People listen more when you’re wearing half a million credits of chrome and lightshows. Public opinion’s the highest it’s ever been.”
“Should’ve added fireworks,” Zedd muttered.
Caleb turned, serious now as he looked him up and down. “Huh.”
A smirk crossed Zedd’s face. “Something wrong?
Caleb pursed his lips as he met Zedd’s gaze. “No… just… no, you staying this time, Zee?”
Zedd looked his friend over, well aware that by height and body mass, he outsized Caleb by at least a little. There was nothing for them to talk about there that wasn’t obvious. “That’s the intent. Really, I only came back here to take you guys out to dinner.”
Adele’s brow lifted. “You vanish for over half a year and reappear with dinner plans?”
“I got hungry.” Zedd didn’t miss a beat. “Besides, I’d rather drop the big reveal with something edible in front of me. Makes the future go down easier.”
Tommy raised both hands. “As long as it’s not those protein bricks again. I still have texture nightmares.”
“Grow a stomach,” Zedd said, already turning.
He didn’t wait for them to follow.
“Come on.”
Instead of the skycar they’d arrived in, Zedd led them to a vehicle covered by a sheet in the back of the garage. Zedd pulled the cover off like he was stripping armor from a corpse—fluid, unceremonious. The sheet hissed free, pooled at his feet in one clean drop.
Underneath, the black skycar looked exactly like it had since the day he shelved it. Aggressive stance, cobalt trim catching the fluorescents like it was still breathing, it was a beauty. He hadn’t built the thing for stealth, though it could pull that off well enough. He’d built it to make people shut the hell up.
“Meet the Z-Coupe,” he said, hand dragging across the hood. The metal was warm. Good insulation retention. He wasn’t looking at anyone as he spoke, too focused on the thing he spent a month of time on. “Souped-up V-Coupe chassis. Old project. Never got past prototype. I guess—” he stopped and bit back whatever that sentence wanted to become. “I guess I just didn’t get around to it.”
Tommy let out a long, appreciative whistle. “That’s not a skycar. That’s a midlife crisis with wings.”
Zedd smirked as he kept his eyes on the car itself. “Yeah. Thought about calling it the ‘Overcompensator’ but then I’d have to deal with all the stress of Dev being mad at me for hurting his feelings. Not worth it, ya know?”
Dev slowly walked around the car, his head bobbing every second or so as he drank it in, so enthralled by the design he wasn’t even bothering to strike back. “I used to look up old vintage Earth cars. They don’t make ’em like this anymore… like, literally. They don’t. You went uber retro on this one.”
Zedd slid into the driver’s seat, the upholstery adjusting around him like it remembered his weight. “You know me,” he said, flashing Dev a grin, “old man soul.”
“You got that right,” Dev muttered, already climbing into shotgun. Kai climbed in next, then Adele, Caleb, and finally Tommy in the back.
Without another word, Zedd started the skycar and they were off.
Flight felt like thought.
The coupe moved clean—no drag, no hesitation, just frictionless response and unspoken input. Zedd barely twitched a finger to guide it, the neural sync catching faster than it should’ve. He hadn’t even finished calibrating that module.
Apparently, it didn’t matter. It worked anyway.
The skyline peeled back like a memory rebuilt in chrome and ambition. New Abraham had stretched vertical—Governor Shen’s expo plans had metastasized into a financial backbone as Victory Innovations grew and Zedd’s wallet grew with it. I know a galactic economy is huge, but I could never imagine having this much money in a million lifetimes. To make it even crazier, from what the governor had mentioned to him, guys like he and Zedd were still considered small-fry. Small fry is insane.
Either way, the small fry money Zedd had went to good use as the city looked like someone gave an arcology steroids. Transit veins pulsed with steady light, the air traffic above grid-tight, VEST units posted like punctuation across the perimeter. Victory Innovations signage popped on every other corner, subtle but everywhere.
Subtle like a billboard-sized knife.
A half-hour flight later, they touched down in front of an establishment that looked like Zedd’s house in miniature, only with blue where there was white, and black tinted windows in place of clear glass.
The backlit cobalt-colored sign at the top of the building spelled out it’s name-BLU. The car hissed low as it parked, hydraulics easing into silence. Zedd stepped out, eyes skimming the entrance without slowing. Modern façade, clean angles, and enough glow to feel expensive without trying too hard.
“Still letting people think it’s asari-owned?” Caleb asked, adjusting his jacket as he fell into step. He didn’t slow down for a moment, even as he waved at all the people on the street pointing his way.
Zedd shrugged, nodding his head at the few who seemed to recognize him. Despite the hologram of him holding up a globe in front of his company’s HQ, he didn’t really have the same pull with the people Caleb did. Which made a lot of sense considering he was gone for half the last two years. “Eh, you know. Helps justify the menu markup.”
The maître d’ recognized him on sight. No greetings. No names. Just a nod and a pivot to the private dining wing on the second floor. The back room was light-controlled, sleek, with quiet—walls tuned to mute without echo. Not sound-proofing because that was a big mistake to make, but a quiet hum in the background.
Zedd didn’t glance at the decor. Instead, he checked the sightlines, the distance to the exit, the height of the window overlooking the city. Habit.
They sat around the sleek black table, drinks already placed in front of them. The staff knew their orders already, from their favorite meals to their favorite drinks and had them almost ready to go all the time.
As he took the first sip of his blueberry lemonade, Zedd leaned in slightly, voice low. “How are our guests?”
Adele folded her hands, gave a small nod before she spoke. “Pedro’s acclimating, as are the others, but his profile was given the most scrutiny due to his lack of combat-related stress and coping mechanisms for non-civilian life. Profiles are stable across the last three cycles.”
“Twin siblings are whining,” Dev added, voice deadpan as he wiped his mouth clean of the blue-colored beer that they brewed here. “They hate the cots. Say it’s ‘like sleeping on recycled metal.’ It is. That’s the point.”
Tommy blinked. “Twins?”
Zedd leaned back, let the cadence fall natural. “The twins are part of the first recruit batch for Project GUARDIAN. Redhead and a blonde. Attempted to join up with a group of anti-slavery freedom fighters to kill Batarian ambassador Jath’Amon. She’s louder. He reads everything.”
Caleb squinted. “Another blonde? That… a side effect of what you did to me?”
Zedd raised an eyebrow, and tossed back half his drink before answering. “In your case, yeah. In his? Genetics”
Plates arrived in front of them in practiced silence, conversation vanishing as the staff entered. Appetizers came first but Zedd didn’t touch his yet, allowing the others to take the first bites.
Only after the servers cleared did he speak again.
“So… I’m going to adress the elephant in the room. You guys have been wondering what I’ve been up to, right.”
Dev raised an eyebrow. “Well, fuckin’ duh. You been gone almost a whole year this last time. What you been up to?”
Zedd nodded, a slight smile on his face. “Remember when I mentioned my pipe dream? That insane idea you thought would never get off the ground?”
Dev and Tommy snorted at the same time, Tommy nearly spraying the table with his beer, though it was Dev who spoke first. “Which fucking one, bhai?”
“Project Shatterpoint.”
The name cracked the table’s atmosphere like a pressure drop. Even Kai shifted slightly, and the man hadn’t moved from where he stood for the last ten minutes.
“That’s it, then?” Adele’s voice was even, but her fingers had stilled against her glass. “You figured it out.”
Zedd nodded and he felt the weight of it hit his own tongue as he spoke it aloud to someone other than Kai. “Non-eezo FTL. Quantum vacuum manifold reconfiguration. No element zero. No mass effect core.”
Dev’s fork clattered, sharp against ceramic. “You’re joking.”
Zedd tilted his head. “You fucking wish I was.”
Dev’s eyes didn’t leave him. “Yeah, I do actually.”
“Zedd,” Adele said quietly, “that’s impossible. Nothing can go faster than light without mass effect. That’s like… one of the laws of physics.”
“I know.” His grin sharpened beneath his aviators. “And yet.”
“Vacuum reconfiguration would require—” Caleb started, then stopped. Shook his head like the numbers were wrong and the math was personal. “That’s not a prototype. That’s asking to tear a hole in spacetime or something.”
“Which is why I built it out there,” Zedd replied, gesturing vaguely back toward the void they all knew he’d vanished into. “Away from oversight. And… noise.”
Adele frowned. “Has it been tested?”
Zedd didn’t doubt that the smile on his face could’ve rivaled the Joker’s, Jack Nicholson’s definitely. “You know me, Adele. I don’t believe in anything but the best. Repeatedly, in fact. And Kai can tell you that I’ve done it at length.”
Dev swore under his breath, possibly in a mix of Hindi and English.
Tommy leaned back, hands raised like he was distancing himself from any craziness. “And you just… what? Plan to drop this at dinner?”
“Better than during dessert,” Zedd said, pushing up from the table as he rose to his feet.
“It’s layered tech,” Zedd continued, index finger sketching loose schematics in the air like muscle memory, like it wasn’t tethered to a dozen iterations of buried failures. “Modified kinesis compression coil, same foundation we use for the VESTS, except instead of absorbing force—it stretches. It stretches local spacetime. Pinches it, pulls it. No inertial drag. Granted, it need tj”
No one blinked. Good. Bad. It was kind of hard to tell.
Dev had stopped chewing entirely, fork still hovering mid-air. Adele’s shoulders hadn’t moved in over twenty seconds, and Tommy looked like he’d just been slapped with an open textbook. Twice. Caleb kept his face neutral, which meant he probably already knew. Or suspected. Kai, per usual, didn’t react, the man already aware of most his. ia have been carved from tungsten.
Zedd leaned back slightly, elbows on the arms of his chair. “It’s not just non-eezo. No mass effect fields. No cores. No dependency chains. It’s self-contained.”
Adele blinked once. “You built an FTL drive that breaks the entire foundation of current physics,” she said slowly, like every word was something she needed to run diagnostics on before release.
Zedd tilted his head. “I built one drive. Let’s not get messianic yet.”
Dev groaned, dragged his hands down his face like he was trying to scrub out whatever numbers were rewriting themselves behind his eyes. “Holy shit,” he said finally. “Zedd, who the fuck else knows?”
“Technically?” Zedd gave a slow shrug. “Just you.”
“People’d kill for this,” Tommy said. Too fast. His voice cracked halfway through it, and he didn’t recover clean.
“They’ve tried,” Kai murmured. First sound he’d made since dessert arrived. The whole table stilled.
Tommy opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Can we—like—see it?”
Adele exhaled through her nose. “Seriously?”
“What? I’m curious.” He raised both palms. “We’re already eating in a Bond villain restaurant, might as well get the tour.”
Dev rolled his eyes. “Yeah, screw it, let’s see the thing. We already signed the death waiver by being friends with the guy.”
Adele pulled her vape and took a slow drag, the blue glow catching in her lashes. “I don’t know why I try to maintain protocol around you people.”
“Because it’s cute,” Zedd said, standing.
Dinner dissolved after that—conversations fractured, plates half-touched. The energy in the room buzzed like overloaded capacitors, everyone trying not to look like they were hurrying. They were.
Zedd didn’t comment. He just drove.
The Z-Coupe rose smooth and silent into the air, acceleration barely perceptible. They banked over Victory’s spinal tower and peeled off toward the treeline—no lights, no transponders, flightpath locked to private clearance.
“It’s off-grid,” Zedd explained, eyes flicking between nav markers and the treeline. “No uplink to ADAM. No tether to Victory. Everything’s sandboxed. Analog backups, zeroed caches.”
“So… paranoia standard,” Dev muttered from shotgun.
“Would you prefer it was sitting in the middle of downtown, labeled ‘Shoot Me’ in eight languages?”
“Touché.”
“How isolated is it?” Adele asked.
“Deep woods. Compound built into the rock. The first prototype’s housed underground—just big enough for a small crew and the core stack.”
“How big is the current one?” Caleb asked.
“Working on that. First flight-capable chassis only seats two. Barely. Second one’s—”
Flash.
Light slammed across their vision—violet-white, brutal and unnatural, strobing through the canopy like someone had ripped reality sideways. It didn’t make noise. Not at first. Just fried every shadow into blinding clarity.
Zedd didn’t see it. He felt it—right before the left stabilizer shuddered and the Coupe jerked hard right, whole frame screaming like something just clipped its spine.
“Shit!” Zedd’s hands locked on the controls, but the Coupe was already spiraling—tailspin torque fighting every calibration. Kinesis buffers screamed red across the HUD. The horizon spun sideways.
Kai snapped forward, one hand locking on the dash. “Origin vector?”
“Working on it!” Zedd barked, thumb hammering the override to cut inertial dampening before the system miscorrected and folded the whole car in half.
The Coupe bucked again, frame lurching into a shallow dive. Zedd gritted his teeth, breath catching between adrenaline spikes.
“ADAM—status—”
Nothing.
Flatline across every comm band.
“We’re blind!” Zedd shouted. “Everything’s dark!”
Dev swore in Marathi. Adele braced against the seat with both hands, eyes flicking between the view and the dash like she was trying to calculate escape vectors.
Tommy yelled something incoherent from the backseat.
Another lurch. Too close. Tree line coming up fast—too fast—and Zedd’s stomach dropped, the crash math already screaming behind his eyes.
He yanked hard left. Partial stabilization caught for a second. Just long enough to see the treetops rear up ahead of them.
“Brace!” Zedd yelled, milliseconds before impact.
