Massive Disaster 4-3

The lakehouse living room stretched out around them, all sharp edges and engineered calm. Black and white minimalism soaked in dying sunlight, punctuated by curated splashes of cobalt where Zedd had gotten sentimental about color theory after feeling comfortable in the space. Floor-to-ceiling glass along the western wall framed the whole thing like a goddamn painting, orange and gold bleeding out across the lake until it felt like the room might float loose into it if you stared long enough.

Despite the sprawling dimensions, sound-dampening woven into the walls made the whole space sharper, audio-wise at least, voices trapped clean inside little pockets of space. No echo. No mess. Containment by design, perfect for parties.

Zedd paced the upper edge of the room, the small platform that served no structural purpose but gave him just enough height to map the whole crowd without pretending he wasn’t. The aviators caught the sunset, mirrored it back at them in muted fire. The sight of it all made him feel steadier. Maybe it was that or maybe he was just finally happy to be back again on solid planet groun. Spending months on an asteroid or in the depths of space where one mistake could end him for good was not good for the nerves.

It felt good to be home and all that, as bullshit as that statement usually was when people said it. Zedd rubbed the ring on his right hand, his index finger slightly warm as it hummed against his skin. He did his best to ignore it though, the thing almost begging to be used for the slightest thing.

All of the recruits had gathered in the center of the room in the conversation pit, each one forming up without needing to be told, all ten of them in a loose semicircle along the modular seating. Even in complete silence, all of them were broadcasting more about themselves through posture than any file or eval packet had bothered to summarize. Pedro sat half-perched, knees twitching as if he was ready to bolt if someone paid him too much attention.

Patrick sprawled the way big men did, along with the unconscious entitlement of a man used to being the most dangerous thing in a room.

The Eisenhardt twins carved out a pocket of space between them like a sovereign state, Ana’s body tucked so neatly behind Mateo’s it barely counted as separate. both of them quite literally sharing a single cushion.

Yeah, that seems about right, Zedd thought, rolling his eyes behind his glasses.

Hector stat with arms folded, the permanent scowl of a man cataloging how he’d kill everyone here if it came to it, the sunkeen cheeks and dark shadows under his eyes doing little to reduce his air of menace. Marilyn, perfectly positioned with lines of sight to both exits, no tension in her shoulders but too much calculation in her angles. Charles, laid back so hard it almost looked like relaxation, if you ignored the way his fingers hovered near the inside of his thigh where a weapon holster would live. Toni, jittering like her brain was two tabs ahead of the conversation, laser-tracking every piece of tech embedded in the furniture instead of looking at him. Madelyn close to Scot, whose face still carried that wide-eyed guilt like it was stitched into his bones.

Dev posted up by the automated bar, playing the secondary bad cop with arms crossed and a silent scowl that bought Zedd the space to move cleanly. Adele on a high stool, datapad in hand, reading everything and showing nothing. Kai at the door, of course, loose and ready, hands where he could draw fast but subtle. Caleb, helmet tucked under one arm, the poster boy gleam dulled just enough to make him tolerable.

Even ADAM played his part, holographic face flickering half-formed near the VI access port like he thought he was being clever. Zedd knew the AI never actually bothered to use that interface anymore, preferring to appear on a screen but he figured it was simply to keep the impression that he was still just an advanced custom VI. It was insane how quickly the AI had expanded in ability and personality with a few upgrades. Those custom chips, man…

Zedd let them settle, the engineered silence framing every little shift and shuffle.

“Want some caf?” he offered, voice light enough to not sound like a command, as he gestured to the beverage station. “Brazilian. The real stuff. Not the synthetic caf you’ve been getting at the training center or most everywhere else on the colony”

Murmured acknowledgments came from the recruits, some gratefully fast, others slow enough to clock nerves. The service bots hissed to life, glossy white skeletons moving in perfect synch to deliver cups.

Zedd took his own and sipped, bitter and clean against his tongue.

“Soooooo,” he started up again, dragging the word out just enough to break the tension without dropping it, “seems like training’s been moving at a real pace, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, Dev’s been feeding me your progress reports like a good commander should.”

He continued his pace along the platform, slow but never casual, only to pause and pivot, zeroing on Pedro with a sharp turn to his left.

“Pedro,” Zedd called out, voice flipping from casual to clinical without any real warning. “Combat scores up twenty-three percent last month. You’re really climbing up there, in just three months too.”

Pedro straightened like he’d been shocked, pulling his feet under himself automatically. “Uh. Thanks, sir. I…,” he glanced around at the other recruits for a moment, “I mean… uh, we, we had good teachers.” His eyes flicked over to Dev, the former militia officer keeping his gaze forward.

Zedd let the smile curl his mouth.

“The Eisenhardts are giving the sparring bots migraines,” he said, pivoting without transition to the twins, cutting the tension off Pedro before it could spiral. “Good. Means the algorithms need breaking.”

Ana shifted first, subtle defensive lean. Mateo answered for both, voice clean, steady, the kind of answer you practiced because you knew no one cared about individuality when you were stronger together.

“We’ve always worked as a unit.”

Zedd’s gaze snagged for a second longer than necessary, the slight uptick in temperature behind his sunglasses almost involuntary as he tracked Marilyn in the crowd, the braids tight against her scalp, posture straight without the brittle edge some people wore when they thought discipline meant fear; she carried herself like someone who didn’t need permission to exist and maybe that was why he actually liked her, because in a room full of potential weapons she already felt forged, sharp without screaming about it.

“Marilyn,” he said, the word barely lifted above the room’s ambient hum, clipped and clean enough to hit without feeling like an order, “your tactical reports made it into our new colony defense protocols. They mention that to you yet?”

She nodded once, a controlled gesture that didn’t waste energy. “Commander Shankar told me,” she said, like she expected no congratulations for doing her damn job better than half the salaried strategists Alliance brass liked to brag about. Smart. Efficient. Exactly what he needed more of.

Zedd flicked his wrist without really thinking about it, pulling up ADAM with a subvocal ping that had the VI spinning alive near the conversation pit, Victory Innovations logo first before it bled into a fully tactical galactic overlay, the Milky Way sprawling out in aggressive blues and reds above their heads, human settlements so small they looked like afterthoughts on the scale of civilizations that had been carving up the galaxy since before Earth had figured out how to split an atom.

“ADAM, full active territorial spread. Updated this cycle,” Zedd muttered as he moved, pacing through the edge of the projected stars without slowing, the hologram shimmering against his frame like it wanted to move around him and thought better of it.

He passed through a spiral arm and didn’t look back.

“You’re not here for a pat on the back,” Zedd said, voice dry enough to spark, stepping back into the pit’s edge so the light framed him without meaning to, “and you’re sure as hell not here because I need another file to skim at three in the morning.”

The map zoomed tighter at his silent prompt, red markers pulsing into view along the outer colonies, the pain points, the failure points that the Alliance wrote off in clean language and neat casualty reports after the damage already happened.

“You’re here because humanity’s survival curve looks worse than a drunk’s EKG and nobody outside our species is going to throw us a goddamn life preserver.”

His hand lashed through the closest cluster, red flecks scattering across the projection like blood drops flung across a clean floor.

“The Batarians hit here three weeks back. Fifty-three minutes before the Alliance even spun up a response team. Fifteen minutes to tear through everything that mattered.”

He didn’t slow as the map flipped to another colony, another red blink, another place someone had sent a message and nobody had answered until the screaming was just background noise on the comms.

“Council sent observers. Not soldiers. Not aid. Observers. Took them eight days to show up and document the bodies.”

The map collapsed at his casual slice through it, leaving the recruits standing in the shadow of nothing, no illusions left between them and the math.

“Project GUARDIAN isn’t about making another branch of the military,” Zedd said, pacing the semicircle they made without ever needing to be told how to arrange themselves, “it’s about deterrence. Real deterrence. You don’t stop predators by asking them nicely. You make them scared enough to pick easier prey.”

The display shifted again at his twitch of a hand, new images floating up in quick succession—humanoid silhouettes tearing armored vehicles apart, kinetic shielding flaring under heavy fire, lightning snapping from ungloved hands—and none of it sanitized for audience sensibilities.

“You won’t be Alliance,” Zedd said, each word striking clean, “you won’t be Citadel-approved. You’ll be cells. Independent strike teams operating in regions where ‘oversight’ is a polite fiction.”

His gaze dragged across them again, cataloging the micro-reactions, the little pulls of tension, the way Toni’s hand twitched toward the hologram without meaning to, how Patrick’s foot tapped once against the tile and stopped like he hadn’t meant to show the nerves. Zedd didn’t smile. He didn’t even need to.

“Anyone who threatens human colonies, human autonomy, or human future,” Zedd continued, voice cooling further, “is a target. Doesn’t matter whose flag they fly.”

He let the weight of that hang long enough for Pedro’s hand to twitch upward, a jerk more instinct than decision, and Zedd tilted his head just a little to acknowledge it.

“Yeah, O’Hara?”

The eighteen year old scratched at his hairline, Zedd almost able to see the gears working in his head as he tried to build up the courage to finish what his instincts had already started.

“I mean… so, not to sound dumb or anything, but… like, I get the enhancements and stuff… but what exactly are we talking about? Like, surgery, gene splicing… or…?”

The words on his lips faded out slowly, Pedro clearly embarrassed, but Zedd didn’t deny the question was a good one, even if it was one he didn’t want to answer in full quite yet.

“Not a dumb question,” Zedd said, voice drifting a little more casual, almost like they were back in a shitty cafeteria in a backwater colony instead of standing on the lip of revolution. “It’s a proprietary protocol. Custom sequencing. We’re not giving you alien biotics or bolting tech into your bones. We’re unlocking what was already wired in—human-only enhancements.”

He shut his mouth, going quiet for a few moments as he thought of exactly what he was going to do to them, the speaker in front of him in particular. “And you, Pedro,” Zedd added, the smallest tilt of a grin forming now, real enough to flash teeth, “you’re gonna be spectacular.”

Pedro leaned forward, elbows practically digging into his knees now, that nervous, overeager energy ratcheting up a notch like he was trying to physically force the question out before he lost the nerve to finish it. “And what happens if something goes wrong?” he asked, the words rushing each other, stumbling a little on the exit. “I mean, no offense, but we’ve all seen the holovids where this kind of thing goes… uh, sideways.”

The laugh he tacked on at the end didn’t do much to cover the real fear underneath, not from anyone who knew how to hear those cracks instead of the words. Zedd filed it away automatically without changing expression, the same way he filed away the slight tightening around Madelyn’s mouth, the way Scot shifted like he thought maybe it was a good time to duck.

“Fair concern,” Zedd said, no judgment, no comfort either. Just fact. He spun a lazy circle through the pit, coming back to face them before he dropped his weight onto the edge of a seat, posture loose enough to read as casual if you didn’t know how coiled he stayed even at rest. “We’ve been working on this for years.” Two and change, technically, but the only people in this room who needed to know that already did. He flicked a glance at Caleb, who caught the silent cue without missing a beat.

“Major Victory was our first test case,” Zedd said, nodding toward him like they were talking about some science fair project instead of the re-engineering of human baseline limits. “Any regrets, Caleb?”

Caleb smiled that easy public smile he’d polished so hard it practically reflected light. “Only that I didn’t do it sooner.”

“See?” Zedd smiled as he turned back to Pedro. “The procedure’s tailored to your genetic profile,” he said, not bothering to sugarcoat the next part. “We don’t greenlight anything unless your genome and neurology clear every benchmark. You pass, we proceed. You don’t, you stay baseline.” His gaze pinned Pedro again, sharp and unflinching. “Risk is minimal. Not zero. But minimal enough that anyone who pops even a one percent spike on failure rates gets rejected.”

Marilyn’s voice cut through next, steady as bedrock, her words slicing through with all the calm and focus of a woman who had asked harder questions under worse conditions. “You’re describing autonomous hunter-killer units operating off the Alliance’s leash,” she said, an edge to her words as she brought up the Alliance. “I understand the need. I don’t understand the plan for when we get caught with our hands in someone else’s war zone. What’s our legal standing even?”

Zedd didn’t blink. “Legal? That’s an interesting way to approach that but I can see why you’d go there. We both know that’s kind of a bullshit question, though.”

Marilyn frowned at his response, almost rearing back even as Hector, Patrick and Charles all made a sound like a snort in near-unison. “Let me explain,” Zedd cut in before the woman could cut in, “both the Alliance and the Citadel tolerate merc activity despite the heavy criminality they engage in simply for the fact that anything outside of Citadel and Alliance Space is too much trouble to deal with. Besides, you know and I know that a little localized crime on the fringes is cheaper and more manageable than the fallout from massive civil unrest or open war at the core. So, you’re no more illegal than the Blue Suns… just fresher.”

He snapped his fingers and the hologram shifted again, peeling back into corporate schematics that looked clean and boring unless you knew how to read the buried dead-drops of shell companies and obfuscation trees. “Victory Innovations has record of Project GUARDIAN. You’ll be private security contractors on paper. Protecting corporate interests. Nothing more.” He let the smile slip through, sharp and bright and anything but reassuring. “Unofficially? They’d need squadrons of Spectres just to get a bead on your location, never mind bringing you in.”

Before she could fire off the obvious follow-up again, he kept going, letting the words pile up. “We have extraction protocols. Redundancy built into the system. Political leverage with the Alliance, friendly ties in the right sectors. If you get grabbed, we have contingencies, of course. But try not to get grabbed.”

“And those targets you mentioned?” Marilyn pushed anyway, still determined to find out more. “You understand that ‘anyone’ threatening human interests is rather vague, of couse. Who defines that threat?”

Of course he did. That’s why he said it.

“Right now, I do,” Zedd said, no flinch to the words as he launched them at her bluntly. “Later, as teams prove capable, authority spreads. Operational autonomy scales with success. You’ll get parameters. You’ll get guidelines. But the final decisions… those’ll be yours more often than not.”

He glanced across the room, letting that weight settle properly before it turned into false comfort. “We’re not the Alliance. You won’t need five admirals and a Parliament subcommittee to rubber-stamp saving your own people.”

He paused, meeting Marilyn’s eyes again. “We see a threat, we neutralize it.”

Toni Cho broke the silence next, and it wasn’t nerves pushing her, it was curiosity burning hotter than common sense, her hands looking like they were half-ready to sketch invisible blueprints in the air.

“So… these enhancements,” she said, quick and bright, “are they purely biological? Strictly gene-modding only? Or is there cybernetic integration layered in? Nanotechnology? Rumors say that Victory has some incredible nanotech but that’s just extranet talk, you know…”

The smile on Zedd’s face was entirely real and it took him a few good seconds of silence for him to realize it was there, catching himself with a chuckle. “Good instinct, Cho. No really,” he opened, the girl nodding with a tight smile on her face as he let out another little laugh. “I can tell you that hybridization is part of the process. We push the biological to where it’s strongest, where it can be pushed to. We reinforce with next-gen interface tech where human limits bottleneck potential.”

He waved his hand again at the hologram behind him, and a new schematic unfurled, just stylized enough it wouldn’t give anything away but it got the point across as it showed biological nodes merging with enhanced neural latticework, glinting with low-level psionic potential.

Human-made.

Human-kept.

Funny enough, there was almost no reason to gatekeep psionics past the nature of secrecy and the simple fact it was proprietary technology. Most species just had major physiological barriers that meant an attempt to grant them psionics would either fail completely or outright kill them at worse, like the Drell for the latter.

The only two species that didn’t have those barriers in physiology were the Salarians and Batarians, ironically enough, and in those cases, it was definitely more of a mental issue, from what he understood regarding psionics.

“Some of you,” Zedd said, tracking her with a slight tilt of his head, “will lean heavier into that integration. Your skillsets dictate the builds.”

Toni’s whole body leaned forward, vibrated on the edge of her seat. “Will we have access to our data sets post-modification? Adjustment rights?”

The question sat in Zedd’s mind for a few moments, despite the fact he’d given thought to this for months now already. “Limited access until stability’s confirmed. After that?” He shrugged. “If you don’t crack under the load, you’re free to tweak your own operating parameters.”

She beamed at him like he’d handed her the keys to a starship.

“I expect you’ll be updating your own firmware within the first year,” Zedd added, amused despite himself. “Looking forward to seeing how far you push it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” The next voice didn’t carry the same eager shine. It came flat, measured, pure operational weight, as expected of a former Alliance sharpshooter. “Command hierarchy. ROE. Extraction contingencies. You pay me enough already not to care about anything else, but that… that I need to know..”

Zedd let his aviators slide down his eyes — on purpose, of course, the things adapted to his face so well an explosion would have to near kill him to send them flying — and met Bartlett’s eyes, the bald man not looking away in the slightest. “Good questions, good questions all around,” he nodded with the words. “I’m loving the curiosity, because it saves me from explaining this later.”

He laughed again but only Pedro and Toni seemed to smile along with him, and as his laughter trailed off, he clicked his teeth. “But to answer yours, Mr. Bartlett, field command is strictly in the hands of your team’s respective leader. You all might not be on the same team. Judging from your skills, you won’t be. For now, you will be training and working together. That’s all you need to know. ROE is simple—protect human assets, minimize fallout when possible, erase traces when needed. No unnecessary witnesses. No broadcast unless ordered. For certain ops, however…”

The smile on his face was thin but he was laughing on the inside. “You will be instructed to record… eh, let’s call ’em highlight reels.“

It was Marilyn that spoke again this time, the woman’s blue eyes sharpening at Zedd’s last words. “Pro-human propaganda?”

“Of course,” Zedd said, not even bothering to iron the edge out of it, just letting the words drop like a steel plate between them. The woman who asked it flinched, microscopic but real, and Zedd smiled at her, all teeth and no warmth, because sometimes it was good to remind even the smart ones that the game had already started and they were late.

He didn’t wait for her to recover. He pivoted clean back to Bartlett like he hadn’t even been interrupted, letting the conversation snap back into his hands where it belonged.

“Extraction’s self-managed first. Emergency protocols if you fuck it up enough to need ’em,” Zedd said, sitting back with the kind of posture that looked lazy if you were stupid and coiled if you weren’t. “You’ll get the real playbook in Phase Two.”

Charles didn’t nod. Didn’t breathe wrong. Zedd logged it. Assassin patience. Good.

“Collateral thresholds?” Bartlett asked, tone so flat it barely counted as a question.

“Situational,” Zedd said, flipping his fingers lazily through the holographic map like he was dealing cards nobody wanted. “Pirate hubs? High. Civvie clusters? Minimal.” He let his voice drop, sharpen slightly, enough to slice clean. “Slaver camps? Total.”

The silence that hit the room wasn’t the clean kind either. It was sticky. It clung. The hologram shifted with a pulse of Zedd’s omni, red blooms crawling like rot across the Batarian-controlled zones.

Hector leaned in then, and the temperature of the room shifted in that subtle, instinctive way you only noticed if you were used to rooms like this, rooms that might end bloody. His voice didn’t rise above conversational, but it carried anyway.

“We killing Batarians?”

Zedd didn’t answer right away but after a few seconds, he smiled. “You bet.”

Two words, simple and sweet, because anything more would’ve been lying.

The tension didn’t break, exactly. It frayed. Some of them straightened up like the weight finally made sense. Some of them went quieter, retreating inside the part of themselves they’d have to lean on later. Some just breathed out like they hadn’t realized they were holding it.

Dev and Adele exchanged a glance across the room. One of those this-is-what-we-trained-for looks.

“Enhancements start tomorrow. Medical Bay, Level Three. 0600,” Zedd said, pushing off the console and pacing a slow orbit around them like a lazy predator. “Tonight’s your last exit window. If you walk, you walk clean. But if you show up tomorrow…”

He let the pause stretch just long enough to itch under their skin.

“You’re not walking this back.” He caught eyes as he moved. “I want you to understand that you will not be strictly human anymore. A regular human to you will be like an Asari without biotics. An entirely different being.” One by one.

“The security of every human colony outside the Alliance leash?” His mouth twisted. “It’s gonna sit partly on you.”

He waited, body language still loose, but he was counting the milliseconds between breathing patterns. Who blinked. Who hesitated.

No one spoke.

“Good,” he said, sharp enough to slice through the static weight hanging around the pit. “0600 sharp.”

The recruits drifted out after that, some faster than others, clustering in nervous knots or peeling off solo like they needed to be alone with the size of what just dropped on them. Pedro bouncing around Scot like a puppy that didn’t know it’d been hit by a truck yet. Patrick stalking toward the lift like he already had plans. The twins quiet, heads bent together. Toni already tapping calculations into her omni like she might somehow prep her mind for what was coming. Hector moving slow, heavy, like a man who’d been waiting for this.

The room hollowed out as they left. Emptied of noise but full of it anyway.

Dev poured himself something brown and mean from the bar without asking. Adele perched on a chair, datapad lit up, probably writing the obituary for any version of these kids that wasn’t weaponized. Kai didn’t move. Didn’t need to.

“You think they’re ready?” Dev asked, knocking the drink back like he needed a different answer than the one he knew he’d get.

“No,” Zedd said, plain as a fist to the face. “But they will be.”

Adele didn’t look up from her screen. “Council’s gonna notice. Sooner than later.”

“Yeah.” Zedd didn’t blink even as he rubbed the ring on his finger. He knew the STG had been tracking him throughout the year, even when he was in the Terminus and it was only a matter of time, but there was a lot they simply didn’t know.. “But by the time they pull their heads out of their own asses?”

He shrugged, letting the motion roll through him like it didn’t matter. “It’ll be too late.”

He let his gaze slide back to the windows then, the lake ink-black and perfect outside, stars punched into it like bullet holes. His reflection floated there too, blurred and cold, the aviators hanging off one hand for once, bare eyes gleaming back.

“And when they figure it out?” he said, voice light, almost careless.

He smiled, real and sharp and without an ounce of mercy in it. “We’re out in the Terminus, A. They can suck my dick.”

Dev laughed, quick and mean. Adele just shook her head and went back to her planning. Kai simply stood quiet.

The room settled into breathing silence again as Zedd stayed by the window, watching the night eat the horizon. He let the aviators drop into place again, the world tinting blue, manageable.

“We’re doing this,” he said under his breath, maybe to ADAM, maybe to the ghosts stacked up in his own brain.

The first move wasn’t tomorrow. It had already happened. Months ago. Years, if you wanted to count it right. Tomorrow was just the first time they’d bleed over the edges loud enough for the galaxy to notice.

Project GUARDIAN wasn’t a theory anymore.

And if the rest of the galaxy couldn’t handle what was about to come tearing through the gates?

Not his problem.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –​

5k Words (100 FP)


FAIL: Bolthole Protocol (400 FP) [Honor Harrington] {Knowledge – Reverse Engineering}

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