Massive Disaster II-11

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  The meeting room was too cold.

  Kira clocked it the second she walked in—the kind of chill that settled under the skin, just sharp enough to be intentional. Some bureaucratic control tactic. Keep people uncomfortable, keep them alert, keep them from settling too deep into their own heads. It wasn't working. If anything, it just pissed her off.

  She rolled her shoulders back as she sat, fingers tapping a restless beat against the smooth surface of the table. Sterile, whitewashed walls. Buzzing fluorescents that made everything feel too bright, too artificial. A room meant to hold serious conversations, the kind that came with consequences.

  Dev, across from her, looked like he was about to fall asleep.

  Arms folded, legs stretched out like he had all the time in the world, posture loose in that easy way only he could pull off. His fingers tapped an absent rhythm against his arm, his gaze drifting toward the ceiling like he was two seconds from throwing a paper airplane.

  Kira didn't bother calling him out. If she was being honest, she wished she could be that relaxed.

  Instead, she checked her omni-tool again, scanning the time.

  Still waiting.

  Dev exhaled through his nose, finally breaking the silence. "So. Either we're getting fired, or this is some really elaborate prank."

  Kira didn't take her eyes off the door. Just flicked a glance at him, unimpressed. "If they were gonna fire us, they wouldn't have bothered calling us in."

  "Could be a special kind of firing," he muttered. "You ever heard of a firing squad?"

  That got a snort out of her, barely audible. "Little dramatic, even for Arkadia."

  Dev shrugged, tipping his chair back slightly. "Eh. Shen-Abraham does love a good show."

  The silence stretched again, heavier this time. Kira checked her omni-tool for the third time, her foot tapping a slow, even rhythm against the floor. A habit, barely conscious, but it made Dev groan.

  "Relax, Kay," he flicked his eyes her way. "You're making me anxious."

  "I'm not anxious," she lied.

  "You're always anxious," the lunkhead snorted. "You just hide it and Zedd's too dense about you to notice it when you flash those baby blues at him."

  That, at least, got her to glance at him, a glare on her face. "We don't even know what this is about."

  "Exactly," Dev said, his grin slow, sharp. "That's what makes it fun."

  She didn't dignify that with a response.

  The door slid open before the silence could stretch again, and the air in the room shifted.

  Colonel Martinez strode in with the kind of controlled, deliberate movement that made people sit up straighter before they even realized they were doing it. Kira and Dev were already on their feet before she spoke—habit drilled too deep to shake.

  Martinez was the kind of woman who didn't need to raise her voice to be heard. Scarred face, iron-straight posture, presence heavier than the damn room. She didn't waste time on pleasantries, didn't so much as glance at the two of them before placing a datapad on the table. The kind of gesture that said everything important had already been decided.

  "You're both being reassigned," she said.

  Kira blinked, thrown off for half a second before she locked it down. Dev went still, but his usual casual energy sharpened.

  Martinez tapped the pad. The holographic display flickered to life, and Kira barely had to glance at the top of the file before her stomach twisted.

  Zedd Victors.

  "Effective immediately," Martinez continued, "you will both be joining Medic Martineu as part of Victory Innovations' security detail."

  Kira's fingers curled into fists at her sides.

  Victory Innovations.

  Zedd.

  She hadn't seen him in weeks. Not since—

  Not since Caleb.

  "Private Martineu has been handling on-site emergency medical," Martinez went on, voice clipped, efficient, like she wasn't dropping a bomb on Kira's life. "But given the… increased interest in Mr. Victors, it's been decided that additional security is necessary."

  Increased interest. That was one hell of a way to put it.

  Zedd was a walking black hole. People didn't just look at him, they got pulled in, whether they wanted to or not. Half the colony saw him as a hero. The other half saw him as a warning. A reminder of what a single person could do when given the right tools, the right push.

  Or the wrong one.

  Being honest, she was half-convinced he was a psychopath and that had nothing to do with any violence she'd seen him commit against the Batarians. And yet, she still wished she had moved before Nina.

  Pushing that aside, Kira forced herself to breathe evenly as she opened her mouth again, but Dev beat her to it. "What exactly are we protecting him from?"

  Martinez didn't hesitate. "Everything."

  That wasn't an answer. It was a deflection.

  Dev's brow twitched. "Respectfully, ma'am—"

  "You'll be briefed in full once you've transitioned to your new assignments," Martinez said, her tone edged just enough to shut the conversation down.

  Kira exchanged a glance with Dev. He exhaled sharply, crossing his arms, his usual cocky energy stripped down to something quieter, more focused. "Understood," he said.

  Martinez nodded. "Your transfer orders have already been processed. He's been informed and has made arrangements for you to live with him. You're expected to report to his home tomorrow morning."

  Kira barely stopped herself from reacting. Tomorrow.

  No time to adjust. No time to think.

  Dev let out a quiet breath beside her, but for once, didn't say anything.

  Kira squared her shoulders, locking her expression into something unreadable.

  They weren't wasting time.

  But then, why would they?

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  February 24, 2179

  The workshop was a mess. Worse than usual.

  Zedd barely noticed.

  He sat hunched over the holotable, half-aware of the clutter around him—open casing panels stacked against the walls, soldering tools scattered haphazardly across the workbench, a half-disassembled drone hanging off the edge of a storage unit like it had given up mid-flight. The place smelled like heated metal and ozone, the sharp bite of circuitry resin still hanging in the air from his last attempt at troubleshooting the stabilizers. Somewhere in the background, a cooling fan whined under the strain of being forced to run longer than it was designed to.

  His third cup of coffee—cold, untouched—sat beside him. Probably hours old. Maybe longer. He didn't know.

  The only thing he was paying attention to was the latest production report flickering in front of him, numbers scrolling too fast, too many at once, but his brain picked out the relevant ones before ADAM even spoke.

  "Sixty-two percent efficiency," the AI reported, smooth, detached. "A three percent increase from yesterday."

  Not enough.

  Zedd pressed his knuckles against his forehead, exhaled slowly through his nose. His thoughts were already shifting, recalibrating—if he adjusted the tolerances on the molecular printers, tightened the error margins on the V-Lift stabilizers, reworked the cooling parameters on the new-gen thrusters, then maybe—

  "Backlog?" he asked.

  ADAM's response was immediate. "Six hundred and seventy-eight active orders. Thirty-two flagged as high priority."

  Zedd's jaw tightened.

  It was too much. The production, the logistics, the calls, the goddamn expectation. He wasn't just an inventor anymore. Wasn't just the guy making cool shit in a basement lab. Victory Innovations was a business. A corporation. A machine that needed managing. And businesses needed people.

  Which was why Nina was here.

  A flicker of movement in his periphery, and suddenly she was leaning against the workbench, scrolling through her omnitool like she wasn't even paying attention, except she was.

  Nina rarely missed anything.

  "You know," she said, flicking through a report, "this is the part where you say thank you."

  Zedd blinked, barely tracking. "…For what?"

  Nina gave him a look, unimpressed. "For quitting my job to babysit your ass."

  Oh. Right. That. Zedd snorted, pushing away from the holotable just enough to crack his spine in a long stretch. "Yeah, because I forced you."

  "No, despite what my mom says, it's because someone had to make sure you didn't work yourself into an early grave." She waved vaguely at the disaster that was his lab. "Case in point."

  Zedd dragged a hand down his face, felt the grease smear across his cheek. He didn't remember when he'd touched the engine core, but it didn't matter. His pulse thrummed in the back of his skull, a steady pressure he wasn't really dealing with. He inhaled through his teeth, exhaled slow.

  "I'm fine."

  Nina didn't even dignify that with a response. Just leveled him with a flat look.

  Then her omnitool pinged.

  She checked the notification, sighed, and muttered, "Perfect timing."

  Zedd frowned. That was never a good sign.

  "What now?"

  Nina gave him a tight-lipped look. "A couple mining outfits over in Ironwood are threatening to pull contracts."

  Of course they were. "It's been a fucking month, man," Zedd pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long exhale. "Because?"

  Nina scrolled through something on her interface. "Because we're operating on a ten-day delay for shipments, and they don't trust the fulfillment schedule you gave them."

  Zedd clicked his tongue. "They'll get their shit."

  "Yeah, well," Nina gave him a look, "they don't like 'eventually' as an answer."

  Zedd bit down his irritation, eyes narrowed. Because she wasn't wrong.

  Because this wasn't a tech problem. It wasn't a thing he could fix by just pulling an all-nighter and recalibrating the system.

  This was business.

  This was expectation management.

  This was a fucking headache.

  Nina folded her arms, watching him with too much patience. "Look, babe, you gotta handle this. We're not just dealing with colony supply chains anymore. You wanna go interplanetary before Quarter 2, okay? People are expecting things. And when people expect things—"

  "They get pissed off when they don't get them," he answered with a click of his tongue.

  "Look at my smart baby," she responded, sarcasm flowing thick.

  Zedd dragged a hand through his hair, resisting the urge to slam his head into the nearest flat surface. "Okay. Fine. I'll talk to them."

  Nina blinked. "Wait, really?"

  "Why are you surprised?" Now it was his turn to blink.

  "Because usually," she raised an eyebrow, "you tell me to 'make them go away' while you bury yourself in work."

  He waved a hand vaguely, holding back a grimace at his own behavior. "Yeah, well. You quit your job, right? Consider this delegation."

  Nina narrowed her eyes. "That's not what that means."

  Zedd shrugged. "Sure it is."

  Her eye twitched.

  ADAM chose that exact moment to interject. "Shall I schedule a meeting with our primary suppliers?"

  Nina shot Zedd a pointed look.

  Zedd sighed. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

  And just like that—another crisis to handle.

  Another thing keeping him from actually finishing the work.

  But this was his life now.

  This was success.

  And it was starting to fucking suck.

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  The holotable flickered. Error logs stacking, stress-test data looping, another failed attempt clogging up his display. Numbers bleeding red.

  Zedd clicked his jaw, dragging a hand down his face, fingers catching against the stubble he kept forgetting to deal with. He blinked hard, trying to clear the dry burn in his eyes. The lab's air felt heavy, thick with the static discharge of overworked emitters, the faint hum of drones shifting inventory somewhere in the background. White noise. Unimportant.

  He tapped through the failure logs, eyes darting across the screen, parsing data before his brain had even caught up. Failure Rate: 64%. Still dogshit.

  "Not catastrophic," he muttered to himself.

  "By your standards," ADAM's voice chimed in, smooth and dry, projected through the overhead speakers. "Still sixty-four percent catastrophic for anyone relying on it."

  Zedd's fingers flexed against the workstation. "Could be worse."

  "By two percent," ADAM deadpanned.

  "It's called progress."

  "It's called optimism," the AI corrected. "Which is statistically uncharacteristic for you."

  Zedd exhaled sharply through his nose, zooming in on the schematic, yanking component pathways into different configurations. The spinal support module was still locking up under stress. He needed active stabilization, something flexible but sturdy, reactive but not rigid—too much resistance and the suit crumpled like old scaffolding; too little and it became a high-tech straitjacket.

  His jaw clicked as he rolled his shoulders, one hand flicking toward the holotable to pull up old mass distribution logs. AYE-U fumbled something behind him, whirring in guilty panic as a crate of circuit components clattered to the floor. Zedd ignored it.

  AYE-U was always fucking up.

  ADAM, on the other hand, did not ignore it. "Boss, your least competent drone just attempted a balancing maneuver. It went poorly."

  "Yeah, I heard." Zedd didn't even glance up, recalibrating the V.E.S.T.'s weight displacement in the simulation. "Tell him to hold something down so he feels useful."

  "He is not sentient."

  Zedd snorted. "Could've fooled me."

  "Would you like me to simulate competence for him?"

  "That'd require you knowing what that looks like."

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  There was a pause. Then, "Hilarious. Really. I'm suppressing laughter."

  Zedd shook his head, muttering under his breath as he adjusted the spinal interface again, shifting the impact dampeners for the fourth time. The problem wasn't just weight balance—it was recoil. The moment the system absorbed a hit, it froze, locking the user in place instead of dispersing force outward. Stupid. Obvious. A mistake that should've been ironed out five iterations ago.

  Power distribution was already maxed, but maybe… maybe he was going about it wrong. He needed something that could draw heat, redirect force—vent excess energy before the whole system deadlocked.

  That was only one issue, though. It was intended to be a full-service protection suit. Full-service means full... His eyes flicked to the industrial freezer at the far end of the lab, the one that had replaced the mini-freezer. Biometric-locked like the other one.

  He already started integrating med-tech and monitoring into it, but he honestly figured he needed something stronger than medi-gel to prevent… Well, prevent a lot of shit. Could I use that to replace medi-gel? The answer was obvious, and even asking himself was insulting, but it wasn't a matter of if it could, but if it should. Especially when it came to the matter of actual human testing… Just because I know it works doesn't mean shit for shit people get injected into them.

  Even using it on Caleb would bring so many questions down on him. But…

  "Boss," ADAM cut in again. "You have that face."

  Zedd blinked, frowning. "What face?"

  "The one that precedes a bad idea."

  He exhaled through his nose, arms crossing as he tapped his fingers against his bicep, eyes locked on the freezer. "Define 'bad.'"

  "The kind that results in a medical emergency."

  "Not if I control the—"

  "No."

  Zedd huffed, turning back to the holotable. Not helpful. Enough about med-tech, the suit needed an external cooling method, but full cryo-integration was too risky. No way he'd get away with that in standard use cases. Passive cooling wasn't enough. Active cooling needed too much power.

  Which brought him right the fuck back to the problem he'd been running in circles around for two weeks.

  Impact resistance? Still unreliable.

  Biomonitor integration? Still spotty.

  Structural integrity? Still bottlenecked by power constraints.

  "That fuckin' bottleneck." His voice came out rough, half under his breath, barely more than a growl. He dragged a hand through his hair, shoulders tight with exhaustion, brain still spinning through solutions. There had to be a way around it. A workaround. A shortcut.

  Something.

  Behind him, ADAM spoke again, tone slightly too casual. "You know, Boss… if you really want to push past limitations, there is a way."

  Zedd narrowed his eyes at the holotable. "Go on."

  ADAM paused, then deadpanned, "Make it someone else's problem."

  Zedd actually laughed, sharp and breathless, shaking his head. "You wish."

  "I wish you'd get some sleep."

  "Sleep is for people without bottlenecks."

  "That is categorically false—"

  "Shut up, ADAM."

  The AI made a pointed show of muting his own voice before a final, sarcastic note appeared on the holotable display.

  [Acknowledged: "Shutting up, ADAM." Timestamp: 02:14:39. Purpose: Boss being an asshole.]

  The workshop had seen worse.

  Technically.

  The holotable was drowning in half-finished schematics, stress-test reports layered over raw code strings, a tangled mess of projections bleeding together in a way that would've driven a normal engineer insane. Fortunately, Zedd wasn't normal. His brain parsed the chaos like muscle memory, flicking between failure points and possible fixes before the problems even fully registered.

  The V.E.S.T. was fighting him.

  Power distribution? Garbage.

  Material composition? Rigid as hell.

  Biometric sync? Might as well be duct tape and wishful thinking.

  He exhaled sharply, fingers flexing against the worktable.

  Okay. Problem-solving. The array batteries he'd designed for the V-Glide, V-Catch, and V-Grip systems were too weak, too slow, too inefficient for what this suit needed. He already knew that. But the principle, storing and regulating zero-point energy fluctuations, worked. The issue wasn't the function.

  It was the scale.

  Not one power source. A cluster.

  His brain was already firing ahead of him, recalculating faster than he could put words to it. A distributed system. Load-balanced. Self-redundant.

  "ADAM," he muttered, already dragging projection models across the holotable, rearranging components. "Compile a new power model. Increase the array count, stack them into a compact framework, reinforce the field stability-"He paused for a moment, biting his lip.

  "You're proposing a layered array cluster." ADAM's voice carried that same clipped, smooth delivery, deep and efficient, punctuated with just a hint of dry disinterest. "With a modified charge cycle and redundancy failsafe."

  Zedd rolled his shoulders, frowning at the new model as it took shape. "Yeah. Obviously."

  "Increasing energy output by forty percent. At the cost of exponentially rising heat output."

  Zedd grunted. Okay. Yeah. That tracked.

  His fingers twitched, pulling up temperature control schematics, eyes flicking over the numbers. I can work with that. He just needed a compensator. Something that wouldn't overcomplicate the build or throw the weight balance into the shitter.

  ADAM made a sound. Well…. Not a real sound, but the kind of artificial vocalization that conveyed he had already done the math and was waiting for Zedd to catch up. Very human.

  Zedd squinted at the new calculations.

  "Alternator cooling," ADAM supplied flatly.

  Zedd groaned, dragging a hand through his hair. "Fucking fine. Show me."

  The display shifted again, holotable flickering as a revised cooling model slotted itself into the suit schematic.

  Zedd clicked his tongue, frowning at the layout. "...It's viable."

  ADAM didn't miss a beat. "It's the best option."

  Zedd scowled at the red holo-sphere above his table. "Shut up."

  "Noted."

  He ignored the AI's tone, already back in motion, recalibrating the spinal conduit. The whole framework needed reinforcement. The biometric feedback loop needed tighter integration with power regulation. Still too many goddamn moving parts.

  The suit wasn't just armor. It wasn't just a tool.

  It was a failsafe.

  It was never letting another Caleb happen.

  Zedd exhaled slowly through his nose, grounding himself before the spiral could take. He needed this to work. And if that meant locking himself in here for another eight, ten, twenty hours, so be it.

  The work didn't stop.

  But for the first time in hours, it felt like he was getting somewhere.

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  Kira leaned against the farthest workbench, arms folded, shoulders slack, gaze drifting across the disaster Zedd called a lab with the idle, amused air of someone who had absolutely no reason to be here but was planning to stay anyway.

  The place looked exactly like she figured his brain did.

  Overcrowded. Chaotic. Insufferable to anyone who didn't think in six directions at once.

  She'd been watching him work for the past hour.

  Nina had too.

  Not that Kira was gonna bring that up. Not yet.

  Still. She'd noticed the way Nina's expression had tightened when she wandered in, the sharp flick of her eyes, the barely-there tension that came and went so fast it might've been nothing. It wasn't. And Kira hadn't missed the sharp little stab of satisfaction that came with that realization. Not because she was trying anything. Just because… it was interesting.

  Nina had Zedd's attention in a way no one else did. Kira had always known that. Guys paid attention to the physical a lot more, and guys like Zedd didn't care about what wasn't immediately relevant to them.

  But right now? Right now, Zedd wasn't noticing either of them.

  And that was interesting.

  She exhaled, slow and quiet, pushing off the workbench, circling closer as she flicked a glance at the holo-display hovering in front of him. The suit schematics shifted in real-time, Zedd's fingers moving in sharp, precise adjustments with those weird looking gloves on—all focus, all work, not even glancing at her. She let the silence stretch just long enough to make it intentional.

  "You know," she murmured, tilting her head, "for someone who grew up around eezo, you sure don't seem to use any."

  Nothing. No break in rhythm. But there was a shift. A barest fraction of a pause in his shoulders, like his brain had logged it for later dissection.

  "That's 'cause it's shit tech," he answered with a scoff.

  Kira raised one eyebrow. "It's literally the foundation of everything in the universe."

  Another slight shift. Not quite tension, but something else. "Yeah?" He flicked a finger, rotating the schematic, still not looking at her. "And before that, people thought gunpowder was peak innovation. Doesn't mean I'd use it now if I had better options."

  Kira narrowed her eyes. That… wasn't entirely bullshit.

  But it was interesting.

  Especially since his better options weren't exactly available to anyone else.

  Her gaze flicked, casual but tracking—

  To ADAM's interface, response times too quick. To AY-U and AY-E, hovering in the background, moving with just a little too much autonomy. To the fact that nothing in this lab used Element Zero.

  Not one damn thing.

  That wasn't normal.

  Even the best ex-Alliance engineers she'd met back on Ryland Station still needed some Mass Effect integration.

  But Zedd? He wasn't just ignoring it. He was avoiding it.

  She tucked that realization away, neat and quiet. Later.

  Instead, she glanced back at him, watching the way his fingers kept twitching, adjusting, moving like his body refused to stop even for a second. Like if he kept working, kept moving forward, he wouldn't have to sit still long enough for anything to catch up.

  Yeah. That tracked.

  "Anyway," she said, rocking back on her heels, watching as he finalized another minor alteration to the suit schematic. "You do realize Nina's about three seconds from throwing something at my head, right?"

  Zedd didn't react. Not really. Just exhaled sharp, fingers still moving, eyes still locked on the display.

  "She'll live."

  Kira grinned. "Oh, I know. Just think it's funny."

  From across the room, she felt Nina's glare, burning hot against her back.

  Yeah. This was fun.

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  TWO WEEKS AGO

  Colonel Martinez hadn't sat down yet.

  That was never a good sign.

  Kira and Dev had. Or, well, they'd started to, both halfway into their seats when her tone shifted, something in the way she spoke hitting just sharp enough to make them hesitate.

  "You are not just there to protect him." A statement, not an order.

  Dev's expression barely flickered, but Kira caught the slight tilt of his chin, the way his hands settled on the table like he was already running the numbers on whatever the hell this was turning into. She tilted her head slightly, watching Martinez's body language instead. Tension. Not mission tension. The other kind. The kind that came when someone knew they were about to say some shit no one wanted to hear.

  Kira let herself settle back into her seat, arms folding. "Yeah?"

  Martinez's eyes flicked to her. Narrowed just a fraction.

  Dev stayed quiet, but Kira could already tell he was waiting her out. Watching, assessing. He wasn't going to speak first. Fine. She would.

  "You're not gonna tell me we're spying on him," she said, slow, deliberate. "Because that would be dumb."

  Martinez exhaled. "I would not use that word."

  "But that's what this is," Dev's voice was mild, but his focus had sharpened. "That's the real job."

  Martinez inclined her head. "To assess him. To report on him."

  Not protect. Not assist. Report.

  Something cold and sharp slotted into place inside Kira's chest, but she didn't let it show. Not in her face. Not in her voice. Martinez must have caught the shift in her posture anyway, because her next words were just a little too even.

  "This does not have to interfere with your personal relationship with him," the colonel added.

  Kira let out a sharp, breathy laugh. "Oh, I'm sure."

  Martinez didn't react.

  "We need to ensure he remains cooperative. That his work and mindset remain beneficial to the colony." Martinez's voice stayed level, but Kira caught the almost imperceptible hesitation before the next part. "Someone like him… could easily end up working with… unsavory individuals. Or fall to ideologies that might bring… a level of heat down on the colony. Terra Firma, The Sons of Liberty, Children of Earth… we simply don't know where his allegiances could lie."

  Dev didn't move.

  Kira felt the weight of the moment settle over them.

  They weren't saying no.

  Not yet.

  Not because they wanted to say yes. But because if they didn't, someone else would.

  Someone worse.

  Martinez's gaze swept between them. "This assignment is long-term. We need people he trusts."

  We need you. Kira exhaled sharply. "Right."

  Then, slowly, carefully, Dev nodded at the colonel. Just once.

  Kira didn't.

  But she didn't say no.

  Which was as good as saying yes.

  Martinez nodded. "Good."

  She turned, heading for the door.

  "This briefing never happened."

  The door hissed shut behind her.

  And Kira and Dev sat in complete silence.