Massive Disaster III-23

Zedd barely glanced at the photo in the corner of his omnitool. He’d already seen it when Nina had sent it to him as the call started. Caleb, shirtless, and purple-eyed, the guy mid-sprint, the muscle density and striation organized and layered upon each other enough that most untrained eyes would clock it as “not normal”, even those who had never met Caleb.

Nina’s face took up the rest of the frame, haloed in that pretentious lamp she kept on max back in Whitefall. The kind she called a “study essential” and he called a migraine trigger. Her hair was cropped now and sleeker, short and neat, in the way he held his tongue when she asked if he liked it. He just couldn’t stand the short look at all, all the clean edges where soft ones used to be.

“What. Did. You. Do.”

It wasn’t a question.

Zedd flexed his fingers once against the edge of the desk as he considered his options here, thought about pretending not to understand. Decided against it when he realized Nina knew well enough that it would only come off as more insulting.

“Targeted cell rewrites,” he began, answering without answering. “Mostly some bioengineered mito repair, a little bit of integrated respiratory refac—”

“Zedd.”

Her voice had that flat weight now. Not raised. Just heavier. He shut up, not even groaning as he gave her back a flat smile that said a lot to the both of them.

“Just…” she let out a sigh, tired and frustrated from the way she was rubbing her face. “Why him? Why Caleb?”

Because he was breaking. Because he trusted me. Because I needed to know it worked and I had no other option for a procedure that amplifies all traits a person has. All those thoughts and more flit through his brain, Zedd unsure which one to actually go with.

Finally, he exhaled through his nose. “Because he was dying. Not all at once, just… slow. Every day.”

Nina didn’t blink. Her jaw worked once instead. “So your fix was giving him that?”

Zedd shrugged. “Call it… iterative improvement.”

Her mouth twitched. She didn’t want to smile, but even then, the expression she made had no humor in it, before she wiped it off her face. “You made him a weapon.”

Zedd looked her in the eye. “I made him functional.”

“Zedd.”

The name landed like a slap.

“When does a human have glowing purple eyes?”

“What?” Zedd frowned now, unable to help it. “An entire species of alien can create tiny black holes with a thought but a man with glowing eyes is beyond the pale?”

“Zedd.”

He sighed again. “Fine. He can breathe. Full draw. No collapse. No fallback. He’s not counting the steps to the nearest medbay anymore.”

Nina stared back at him. “And the muscle mass? The fuckin’ costume?”

“Side effects, you know how that goes,” he answered back, smile still flat. “And the other stuff is… contextual applications.” Public relations, he didn’t say. He still had plans for that and they weren’t ready to be shared, even with his girlfriend.

“Bullshit.” Her hands came up, like she was holding back from shaking the camera. “You don’t get to turn our friend into a goddamn science project and call it medicine.”

“He volunteered.”

Nina’s eyes narrowed his way, almost invisible from the glare of her lamp. “And he knew what he was volunteering for? Really?”

He didn’t answer.

The honest answer was a resounding yes, for more reasons than one. He had told Caleb as much as he could about the project and what he was going to do to his body, in as much detail as he could cram into a few minutes, so there was that. But the real answer couldn’t be yes, because Caleb was desperate and he was dying and even if Zedd had told him nothing at fucking all, the guy would have trusted him anyway, especially considering the fact that he was the one to give him the VEST and bankrolled his recovery.

Nina leaned back to rest againt the wall of her dorm, her eyes not leaving his. “Right.”

“He’s better now,” Zedd said, quieter than before, but still just as confident in the truth of his words. “A stronger specimen. The perfect human. No more pain.”

“You didn’t fix him,” Nina spat. “You just told me you rewrote him.”

“i said I rewrote his cells, babe. Not talking a full Ship of Theseus, here. Give me a fucking break here. He’s not mad about it. Why are you?” Zedd’s laugh cracked out sharp.

She simply glared.

All Zedd could do was sigh. “Neen, c’mon. It’s still him. Just—updated.”

She didn’t answer right away. Just watched him. The silence started to hum.

“And what happens when the Citadel sees this?” Nina asked, the question clearly rhetorical as she barrelled on. “You think they’re gonna slap you on the back for fucking your way over every galactic law on genetic mods? You think the Alliance won’t notice when Caleb shows up on the feed?”

“That’s why I stay out here,” Zedd muttered. “No eyes on me in the Terminus. No leash either on what I can make. Besides, unless you’re doing some deep full-force investigation, there’s no proof anything I’m doing is genetic at all. You’re just looking at the premier tech of Victory Innovations that nobody else can crack.”

“I’m sure no one’s gonna crack the fact you’re building a fucking army, sure,” she shot back.

His thoughts flickered over to what he was already planning on. “A team.”

“A team of what? Enhanced humans? Bio-modded shield-bearers?”

He tightened his fist. “Guardians.”

She echoed it, flat. “Guardians. Against what, exactly?”

Zedd stared at the screen. “Every-fucking-thing, Neen. Take your pick, open your mind a little bit, the galaxy is a fucking minefield for humans. Batarians, Asari black-ops, Salarian spies, another Turian war, fucking meteor strikes. Doesn’t matter. A crashed ship on a human colony with some vorcha on it and we have a horde of violent little viruses in six months. I’ve said this forever, but nobody seems to listen to me, because everybody seems to think that getting a long with an uncaring galaxy is the road to utopia.” He grunted, biting back the rant before it could continue. “We are soft. We are weak. We are tech-stunted. Humanity is a fucking joke.”

Nina bit back her own rant, the look on her face making it clear she had a lot to say. What she did say was a lot more pointed. “And it’s your job to fix that now?”

“Someone has to.”

Her frown deepened into a scowl. “Why you?”

Because I can. Because no one else will. “Because I’m the only one building the tools to build the tools to do what I need to do.”

Her voice dropped. “And what if they decide you’re the threat?”

“Then I’m already outside their range.”

That stuck. She didn’t fill the silence right away. Just looked at him, like she was still trying to find the edges of the person she thought he was.

Nina sighed. “I can’t do this.”

“…Do what?”

Her mouth opened. Closed.

And the screen went black.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The room was already humming when Zedd stepped in. Not metaphor—literal. The holopanel by the wall was throwing off a frequency it shouldn’t’ve been, just high enough to irritate. He made a note to have ADAM recheck the power routing later. Or maybe not. Let the irritation stay. It kept him sharp.

Dev was mid-rant, pacing like a roided-up podcast host. “—and then, boom, gone. That was the MAGNI with the reinforced torso plating, right? Beacon tore the guy in half. I named that one. Johnny. Guy had a good glide profile, little twitch in his left arm but I liked it, gave him personality, y’know?”

“You mean Beacon broke Johnny in half,” Adele cut in, not looking up from her tab. She didn’t look up often. Didn’t need to. Her tone did the heavy lifting. “Which you’d know if you stopped assigning identities to corporate defense systems like a first-year psych student.”

Dev snorted. “Hey, if the bossman can give people names like ‘Beacon’ and ‘Victory,’ I can name the walking turrets. ‘Sides, we need more of those fuckers in here anyway if those two are gonna run through them in training like this all the time.”

Zedd dropped into his chair at the head of the table like he hadn’t heard any of it, not really caring in the slightest. Not the irrelevant parts, anyway. “Don’t worry about Johnny, Dev. I’m… I’m working on some new models. In-house. Cheaper. A whole new type of combat mech. We’ll change the fucking market.”

Dev and Adele shared a look, clearly hearing something in his tone. Wisely, they chose not to comment on it.

His gaze flicked over as they spotted movement off to the side, Zedd’s brain already filling in what he was looking at before his eyes properly processed it. Kai. As always, silent footsteps, no breath shift. Just suddenly there, his bodyguard was, only noticeable when he was in a room and in an open space, the guy was pretty much invisible unless he chose to be right behind Zedd.

He decided not to acknowledge him. If Kai wanted to be seen, he’d say something.

The door hissed open. Caleb and Scot walked in, one after the other. Caleb looked like someone had resized him wrong—t-shirt hanging too tight across his chest, sleeves almost giving up. That much was normal, the guy loved his too-tight shirts now. It was almost a uniform. More than that, he moved like he still thought he’d break something if he wasn’t careful.

Scot looked the opposite—slight, deliberate, whole-body control. Even his steps were pre-buffered.

“Ran late,” Caleb offered with a grin, that awkward look the serum had yet to change. “Training kinda spiraled.”

“No problem,” Zedd answered back, gesturing for the two of them to sit around the table “You’re still on time. I’m just early.”

Adele gave him a long, pointed look. Zedd didn’t acknowledge it. He was up already, fingers swiping through the air as the holo array spun to life over the table. Projections flared up in blue, responsive and ready as Zedd had long implemented the original holo-table’s tech across his entire house — maps, schematics, render queues, production lines.

“Let me get to the point of this before we all get bored and fall asleep,” Zedd spoke up again, adjusting his aviators properly over his face. “We’re moving faster.”

Dev leaned in. “Faster how?”

Zedd flicked a few nodes. “Full-scale rollouts. VEST production’s quintupling, on my order. Three new manufacturing sites—low footprint, low oversight. I’m going full automation and I can’t be bothered to supervise anything else.”

“Dude.” Dev whistled. “You’re going heavy on infrastructure. That’s… ambitious, bro.”

“It’s not a flex, Dee, it’s necessary.”

Adele raised her head now. “Necessary for what?”

Zedd pulled distribution overlays on the holo-table, showing locations sprawling across half the known Terminus. “We’re close to critical mass. We stall, if we don’t hit velocity, people start looking. And if they look, they interfere. Need to push past that tipping point on our own timescale, even if that’s one we pushup.”

Caleb’s voice cut in, quieter. “This about the Alliance officer who showed up last week?”

“Captain.” Zedd didn’t pretend not to know. “And partly. He wasn’t alone. He was early.”

“So was he a warning shot?” Adele asked, fingers steepled now. “Or a countdown?”

Zedd didn’t answer directly. He pulled up the next set—vehicles, personal kinesis shields, QEC units small enough for any random civ to carry. Then the molecular structures. One clean. One messy.

“This is Pax.” He rotated the first one slow. “Addiction treatment. No crash, no rebound. Rewrites cravings without triggering breakdown.”

“And that?” Adele asked, eyes narrowed. Zedd knew she recognized the second one, at least partially. He’d be offended if she didn’t, considering he’d given her a whole rack of the real shit last year in case of emergencies.

“Panacea,” Zedd said. “Something like a healing agent. In this form, it’s a variant of medigel but twice as effective. Also human-specific.”

Adele’s look didn’t fade. “Uh…huh.” She knew the specifics of the real Panacea and two times faster than medigel was such a downgrade it had actually taken effort to make it that shitty.

“Yooo.” Dev leaned in so far the projection distorted. “You know how much the outer colonies’ll pay for that?”

“Not doing this for credits.” Zedd didn’t look at him. “Doing it for insulation. Independence. Council tech can’t keep up. Alliance regs slow everything down. This is ours.”

“You’re talking about changing the entire economic structure of colonial space,” Scot observed, his voice measured but eyes rapidly cataloging the projections. “Making it almost reliant on you.” The analytical mind behind those dark purple eyes missing very little.

“Yeah,” Zedd said. And grinned. “We’re rewriting the rules.”

Adele didn’t flinch. “They’re not going to let you.”

Zedd let the silence answer for him. The kind of silence that builds pressure.

She finished it for him. “This kind of market disruption threatens every established power structure.”

“Let them try.” Zedd didn’t look up, didn’t flinch, just flicked his fingers and let the projection ripple outward. Colonial map lit up like a neural flare, blue dots spiderwebbing across half the known frontier. Not a spread. A sprawl.

“We’re past clean shutdown. No surgical strike, no blackout protocol, no pretty little recall order. Too many dependencies in too many places. Pull us out, they start bleeding.”

Caleb leaned forward, hand braced on the table like he was physically holding the moment in place. “So we push. Fast. Before they can coordinate a response.”

Zedd nodded, just once. “Push ’til we break the math.”

Dev clapped his hands, grinning like a kid who just got handed a warhead. “So we flood the zone, run the tempo, drop product until they can’t keep up. Play the long game, fast.”

“I advise,” Kai murmured from his corner, voice barely audible but slicing straight through, “that you take effort to bury redundancies. And redundancies behind those redundancies. The kind they won’t find until it’s already too late.”

Wow, that’s the most he’s said in the last two weeks. Zedd tapped twice on the table. The map collapsed, replaced with specs, schematics, raw design data flowing fast enough to give a migraine. Combat suits. Hardlight shielding. Adaptive optics. All of it still ugly and half-finished and untested—but real.

“Next phase,” Zedd said. “Formalization.”

The footage loaded next. Facility defense drill, second-to-last run. Caleb cutting through impact zones like gravity didn’t apply to him. Shield ricocheting kinetic bursts like a second spine. Scot following up with those tight, controlled psionic bursts—measured, precise, just enough. Metrics scrolled along the side. Zedd didn’t need to look.

“You’re not security anymore.” His voice dropped half a register, eyes locked on Caleb. “You’re first-gen. You’re the leader of a team, The Victors.”

Caleb glanced sideways, like he could feel the capital letter in the air. “I thought we were Guardians.”

Zedd took a moment to hold back his scoff. Instead, he shook his head and focused his attention on Caleb. “No, no, no, that’s the project. Not the people. Victors is you and your team. I considered Vindicators but that felt too long and also… it’s my money. I get to name shit.”

Scot raised an eyebrow, something flat and unreadable in his voice. “Am I included in this?”

Zedd didn’t miss a beat. “Not in The Victors, that’s what. You’re V-Force.”

Scot blinked once. “Charming.”

Dev snorted. “Real subtle branding, Zee.”

Zedd didn’t look at him. “Subtle doesn’t get people’s attention, Dee. This will.”

“And you think that’ll go over well with the public, with the colonies you’re working with?” Adele cut in, calm but sharp. “A paramilitary outfit with no leash?”

Zedd held back a frown. He already had one woman giving him shit over his plans, he really didn’t need another right now. “We can’t be worse than the Blue Suns. Those fuckers kidnap and enslave people, let’s be real. Either way, there’s someone holding the leash.”

Adele raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

Zedd looked her straight on. “Me.”

Silence. Not rhetorical. Not strategic. Just weight.

“So you’re building an enhanced private army,” Adele said finally, voice measured.

“I’m building…” he took in a breath, unable to deny that much, “insurance.”

Scot again, soft this time. “And Madelyn? If her parents greenlight it?”

“Then she joins. If she wants,” he shrugged. “Design’s already adapted. It’s… different than yours. Complementary profile.”

Dev cleared his throat, voice light but eyes not. “So. Applications open, or…”

The question landed, clearly serious, despite the joke in Dev’s voice, Adele shooting her boyfriend a terse look.

Zedd kept his voice level, unsure how to properly tell Dev that his bloodwork and scanning had basically shown both poor compatibility with both higher doses of MELD and psionics both. “Not yet, man. Still tuning protocols. Every integration’s unique. Rushing makes ghosts.”

Not a lie. Not the whole thing either.

The meeting ground forward after that, into logistics. Production curves. Site loadouts. Distribution chains seeded into the cracks of colonial infrastructure. By the end, everyone had more weight on their plate than they came in with.

Eventually they filtered out, one by one. Caleb last, giving Zedd a nod on his way out—tight, understanding. No words. Didn’t need them.

Zedd stayed.

He stood alone in the light of the projection, adjusting nodes like they were chess pieces. Rebalancing the flow. Forward-pressure system. Everything tightening to a point.

ADAM’s voice crackled soft in the room. “Displaying full Guardian Protocols, Gamma to Omega.”

The interface expanded. Not schematics this time. Architecture. Ecosystems. Colonies wired into his tech at the root, built to be independent of the Council, of Earth, of everything. Supply loops. Power redundancies. QEC-linked fallback protocols. All of it. Already halfway seeded.

And past that—

Specialist unit breakdowns. Combat models. Psionic overlays. Prototype response drills. Soft-power influence structures. Civil response manipulation.

Zedd tweaked one line in the schedule. January 2183. Critical mass.

The glass in front of him mirrored it back. His own face, overlaid by blue light and red lines.

“Three years,” he said.

PROJECT GUARDIAN