Massive Disaster 4-8

The New Abraham dual sunset was a beautiful one, the first larger sun in the sky nearly fully over the Horizon as the much smaller one already began to dip. Dying light stained the water a dark gold, copper light filtering back as it reflected off the waves.Caleb watched from the balcony, glass of water icy cool against his palm, condensation gathering where his fingers pressed against it. 

It had been a full week since Phase One of Project Guardian had properly hit full throttle, and from what Caleb knew of the planning, said phase would be done before the year was over.

Even still, it had been a lot.

A full week of procedures.

A proper seven days of surgery.

He’d seen Zedd work himself to exhaustion the whole time, the big boss throwing himself entirely into the job as he did his very best to make sure none of the recruits died on the operating table.

Behind him, a burst of laughter erupted from the main room—Pedro’s distinctive cackle cutting through the general noise. The kid had been quick to adjust, far faster than anyone short of Zedd had expected, his system accepting the changes like he’d been waiting for them his whole life.

Whatever it was, Pedro had taken to moving like he’d been born enhanced, with the only issue being a few broken glass doors and a few doorknobs here and there. Hector didn’t have that problem and neither did the male twin, but Patrick was undoubtedly the one doing the most breaking out of all the recruits.

The balcony door slid open with that whisper-quiet sound that still reminded Caleb of money, of privilege, of power. He had remembered Zedd from his first few months in the colony and he would never have expected this sort of thing to ever come out of the guy who just happened to be really good at engineering.

Dev stepped out, his glass full of something amber that definitely wasn’t water. The former militia officer had his sleeves rolled up, exposing forearms marked with training scars that hadn’t been worth removing. Badges of survival nobody else saw value in erasing.

“Doing the brooding hero thing?” Dev’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “Very on-brand.”

“Just needed some air.” Caleb shifted his weight on the railing, shoulders perfectly loose and limber in a way they almost always were when he wasn’t being hit hard enough to crater concrete, at least. “They’re loud.”

“They’re alive,” Dev replied as he stood next to Caleb, leaning his elbows on the railing with the white-haired super soldier. “Come on, after the last week of getting opened up and put back together? On top of the months of training? Let’s give ‘em a moment, man.”

From inside, Hector’s deep laugh rolled out – the sound somehow more human than the man himself looked now. The cyborg had discovered that he had binocular vision the other day and had experimented with the setting in his optics for hours. Even as he called it “creepy as shit”, it hadn’t stopped the man from grinning as wide as any kid with a new toy.

“Dev… be honest with me for a second.”

“I lie?” A raised eyebrow was aimed his way, the head of the Iron Legion actually looking confused.

Caleb sighed. “You think they’re ready?”

Dev drank, shrugged. “Does it matter? They’re what we’ve got.”

“You’re a real optimist, man.”

“And you’re running around the Traverse with ‘Victory’ in your codename.” Dev tipped back his glass, finishing his beer in one swallow “Come on. Boss wants everyone for dinner, and I’m not explaining to him why our poster boy is being a lil whiner outside.”

“I’m not—” Caleb started, but Dev was already heading back inside, the door sliding shut behind him.

The words hung in the empty air. Caleb took another moment with the sunset, with the quiet. When he finally turned to go inside, he caught his own reflection in the glass – focused, calm, shoulders set with an ease that still felt borrowed. Like someone else’s posture he’d accidentally adopted.

The dining room looked different. The sleek, empty space Zedd usually kept spare (because who the hell was going to sit down for a big dinner in this house) now held a massive table.

Real wood too, not composite. 

The surface was full of actual food, expensive as it was, not nutrient packets or protein bars or synth-meat or anything of the sort. No, the table itself had steam rising from plates that smelled like real meat. Fresh-baked bread that Caleb knew was soft to the touch, along with several bottles of Earth whiskey sitting prominently in the center, catching the light. Expensive fuckin’ spread.

Everyone had settled in, boundaries already blurring between the recruits and Zedd’s inner circle. Patrick stood by the window, massive arms crossed over his chest, his size no less intimidating even as he smiled at something Tommy was explaining with wild hand gestures.

“—and then the whole thing just exploded!” the Iron Legionairre burst out, words coming out in a loud, cackling laugh. “Dev’s face was priceless, man. Covered in coolant, eyebrows singed off—”

“We’re just throwing lies around now, huh? Defrauding my good name?,” Dev called from where he was pouring drinks alongside Adele.

Adele sighed. “You mean defaming, babe.”

“Whatever,” Dev answered back, swigging back a drink himself. “Either way, my eyebrows grew back perfectly.”

“Of course, eventually,” Adele added, voice as flat as the table. Tommy burst out with another laugh, the whole table following along just as loud.

Pedro sat cross-legged on the edge of a chair, the teenager keeping his balance perfectly as he talked rapidly with a standing Toni, their heads bent close together over a shared datapad.

“—not just a dispenser, it’s a biologically-integrated rapid-hardening polymer system,” Toni explained, her pink-streaked hair falling across her face. “The torsional strength is off the charts, but I think we could improve the dispersal pattern with—”

“That’s so cool! Like, I didn’t even know that was possible,” Pedro replied, practically vibrating. “What if we adjusted the nozzle configuration? Could get, like, a 30% wider spread.”

Caleb scanned the room without thinking about it. Old habits. Counting exits. Tracking lines of sight. Calculating the fastest route to each person if something went wrong. Checking for blind spots. Predicting where a threat would come from. Things he’d done even before enhancement, habits burned in during the months when his body failed him repeatedly, when seconds of warning meant the difference between collapse and survival.

Hector leaned against the far wall, the seams where metal met flesh no longer hidden under long sleeves. He showed Charles and Marilyn something with his hand, the appendage shifting smoothly from fingers to what looked like a welding torch, then back again.

“Function over form, y’know?” Hector’s voice remained as rough as before the procedure. “Don’t gotta look pretty when you can cut through fuckin’ steel with your pinky.”

Charles nodded, measuring the transformation with a sniper’s careful attention to detail. The former Alliance marksman still didn’t talk much, but his posture had changed – a preternatural stillness that came from having every nerve optimized for target acquisition. “Hand’s still shaking.”

Hector flexed his mechanical fingers. “Yeah, well, calibration’s a bitch. Ghost nerves or whatever fancy bullshit Zee called it. Says it’ll stop eventually.”

“And he’s never wrong, is he?” Marilyn’s skepticism remained, but with a new note of something like respect. As she spoke, tiny blue-white sparks danced between her fingertips, electric current moving unconsciously until she closed her hand, noticing.

Both Eisenhards stayed apart from everyone else, the twins keeping to their corner as usual as they muttered to each other.

Well, Ana muttered.

Mateo listened.

Ana’s red hair caught the light when she reached for her glass. The thing slipped from her fingers, and she reached for it, fingers already aglow with a faint purple aura.

Yet, she wasn’t fast enough.

Mateo’s hand was there as soon as it felll – the other twin’s movements a barely perceptible blur as he caught the glass without looking and without spilling a drop and set the cup back on the table in front of his sister. Ana gave him a look Caleb recognized from training – half gratitude, half annoyance at not being allowed to fail even in the smallest ways.

Caleb wasn’t sure where Kai was, the N7 ninja nowhere to be seen.

Which was good and bad.

Caleb didn’t need to look for Kai. Guy was doing his job, tucked somewhere he could see every door and probably already working out how to drop everyone in the room if things went sideways. Good for staying alive. Bad for the fact that Caleb knew him well enough to know Kai was doing exactly that.

Old habits. They all had them, just wore them different ways.

“Food’s getting cold,” Adele said, claiming her spot at the table. “Some of you need triple calories now. No whining.”

Everyone moved toward the food without much ceremony. Caleb took the chair near the head—Zedd’s usual spot, except the boss was still missing. Probably elbow-deep in some diagnostic he couldn’t let go of. Guy didn’t know how to stop working, enhancement or no enhancement.

“We waiting for him?” Tommy asked, staring at the spread like it might disappear.

Dev shook his head. “Said to start if he’s late. Something about ANGEL tweaks.”

“Man works himself stupid,” Adele muttered, already loading her plate. “Even if he definitely juiced himself up too.”

Caleb cleared his throat quietly, unsure what to say to that. That was the little unspoken secret with the boss. He had definitely juiced himself up of course, even if he didn’t bring it up. You didn’t jump at least five inches and gain a ton of mass out of nowhere after the age of eighteen, especially off in the depths of terminal space with little real food to eat and no time spent on workouts. I just wish I knew what mix he gave himself. 

Just out of curiosity, at least.

The conversation kept going while they ate. Shop talk turning into stories turning into the kind of comfortable bullshit that happened when people who’d trained and lived together finally had time to sit still. Strangely enough, Caleb found himself actually relaxing for once.

Pedro was halfway through explaining how he’d accidentally brought down a ceiling during wall-crawling practice—”thing just came down with me, like gravity got confused”—when Zedd finally showed up in the doorway.

The boss looked like hell. Dark circles were visible underneath the man’s eyes, hair sticking up, clothes wrinkled like he’d slept in them. If he’d slept at all. He still managed to smile at everyone, though, with the real thing wide across his face, not the corporate version.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice rough around the edges even if it still managed to sound unfairly smooth. “ANGEL was being difficult.”

“Fixed now?” Adele was already pushing food toward the empty chair.

Zedd dropped into the seat harder than usual. None of his normal control. “Close enough.” He looked at the table like he couldn’t figure out where all the food came from. “This is…”

“Tommy and Dev cashed out for the good supplies,” Adele explained.

“Figured real food was worth it,” Dev said, raising his glass. “To not dying horribly.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Zedd agreed, lifting his own glass, even if his hand wasn’t quite steady. “To not dying horribly.”

Dinner went on around Zedd after that. The guy ate like it was fuel, answered when people talked to him, but Caleb could see him fading. It reminded him of his own first week, when just staying conscious was its own workout.

When they started clearing plates, Zedd straightened up sudden-like, remembering something important. Grabbed his glass and stood, making everyone go quiet.

“Got something to say while you’re all here,” he started, looking around the table. 

“A week ago, I tore you apart. All of you. And then put you back together, rebuilt some parts of you, even,” his gaze trailed over to Scot and Madelyn, before landing on Hector. “All different ways, all different results,” Zedd paused and Caleb had to blink, actually surprised at the fact that the boss was actually thinking about his words for once. “What you’ve done since… adapting, recovering, getting stronger… it’s not just good. It’s impossible. You’re the first of your kind. A new generation of humanity.”

He raised the glass higher. “To Project GUARDIAN. To all of you. For surviving and for what’s coming next.”

Everyone lifted their glasses. Zedd drained his in one go, sat back down, and the energy went out of him like someone cut a wire.

“—and that’s when I realized the auxiliary power routing could be completely bypassed,” Toni was explaining excitedly to anyone listening as the meal continued. “Which means the armor response time drops to—”

“Three-point-two milliseconds,” Zedd finished for her, nodding even as he tried to fight off a yawn. Made his whole jaw crack. “Good catch.”

Dinner broke up the way these things did—everyone drifting toward the living room without anyone really deciding it was time. The conversation pit could fit all of them, which was probably the point. Zedd dropped onto one of the couches with his datapad, still checking whatever he was monitoring even while pretending to listen to the chatter.

Caleb ended up in a corner with Dev and Marilyn, the three of them doing what people who’d been shot at always did when they got together—breaking down the tactical side of everything. Pedro’s new setup, specifically. How it worked, how it didn’t, how to keep it from getting him killed.

“Range isn’t the problem,” Caleb said, leaning in. The motion used to hurt. Didn’t anymore. Still caught him off-guard sometimes. “It’s the filtering. You get too much input, can’t process any of it.”

Marilyn’s eyebrow went up. “Experience talking?”

“First week after…” Caleb stopped, trying to figure out how to explain what it had been like when every heartbeat in the room sounded like a vague thud and he could pick up conversations happening three rooms away. “Loud. Everything was really fucking loud.”

“Still say we could extend the perimeter detection,” Dev said, getting that stubborn tone that meant he’d already worked out the whole modification in his head. “Focal amplifier, maybe—”

That’s when Tommy said something about “boss would know” and didn’t get an answer back.

Caleb looked over at Zedd’s spot on the couch.

The custom-designed Victory Innovations ZTab had slipped from Zedd’s hands, half buried in the seams of the cushion beside him. The man himself had his head tilted back against the couch, eyes closed, and breathing silent but steady as he allowed himself a proper rest in the longest time.

Dev noticed the direction of Caleb’s gaze and let out a small sound that might have been amusement. “Finally,” the big man grumbled. “Was waiting on that.”

“We gonna wake him?” Pedro asked, the teenager’s head tilting as his body hung almost horizontaly on the edge of the couch. Even now, he was making the most of his new abilities in the most subtle way.

“Absolutely not,” Adele replied firmly, her boyfriend nodding firmly with crossed arms from behind her. “You all know he’s been active for a week straight. Micro-naps aren’t going to cut it. He needed this.”

Caleb studied Zedd’s sleeping face—the usual intensity gone, replaced by something unfamiliar. No furrowed brow. No tension in his jaw. Just… rest. It felt almost intrusive to see him this way, vulnerable in a way the CEO never allowed himself to be.

Reminded Caleb of the first night after his own procedure, when the pain finally stopped and he’d slept for sixteen hours straight. His body simply taking what it needed once it felt safe enough to shut down.

“Hey… tone it down,” Caleb said quietly to the group. “Keep going, sure, just keep it low. Big boss earned the break.”

The conversation picked up, quieter but still lively enough, as Pedro jumped back into his story about getting stuck to a wall during training and Zedd walking by with Kai Leng by his side, both of them holding cups of caf and not bothering to unstick him

Hector’s laugh came out rough and genuine. “At least you still gotta eat real food. Found out yesterday I don’t need to brush my teeth anymore. Mouth just… cleans itself.” He tapped one of the metal plates along his jaw. “Weird as hell.”

Tommy moved between them with a bottle, topping off glasses without being asked. “Dev, I was literally there,” Adele shot over at her boyfriend demanding that Caleb had once misfired a rocket launcher his way, but she was almost smiling even as she pulled on a NicStic. “The screaming definitely came first.”

The Eisenhardts kept to their corner like always, but Ana was doing something with her glass that caught Caleb’s attention. She was sliding it across the table without actually touching it, the motion smooth and controlled with purple light misting from her fingertips while she talked to Mateo about something in the twin shorthand they rarely felt the need to share with the rest of the class. Her brother watched the glass move, nodding along to whatever she was saying, but his eyes never left the telekinetic display.

Caleb sat back in his chair, taking in the whole scene. Zedd still slumped on the couch, datapad dark beside him, completely out. Around him, nine people who’d been torn apart and rebuilt were discovering what they’d become.

Madelyn and Scot had claimed one of the smaller couches, her head tucked against his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her like he was still making sure she was real. They weren’t talking much, just being in the same space, even as locks of her red hair seemed to glow oddly bright at times.

Outside the windows, the lake had gone black, reflecting stars that looked like pinpricks in dark fabric. Inside, the lights were warm, and voices steady as Caleb drew air into his lungs, held it, let it go slow. No stabbing pain. No careful rationing of oxygen. Just breathing. Still felt like a small miracle every time.

On the couch, Zedd looked so much younger, more like an incredibly built teenager instead of the hard-ass CEO rushing through his twenties until his life was where he wanted it to be. Even in his dreams right now, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was thinking about his tech spreading all across the entire galaxy.

Caleb didn’t doubt that before the sun came up, Zedd would be back to his usual intensity, but right now, surrounded by the people he’d rebuilt, he was just resting.