Location: Arcturus Station
The Systems Alliance Defense Committee, Special Dossier Chamber 5A
48 Hours After the Mindoir Raid
The room was cold. Not by accident, but by design.
The walls were lined with polished black titanium, reinforced against every known espionage method.
No extranet taps, no recording software. Even the ceiling was laced with Faraday shielding.
Here, the most classified conversations in the Systems Alliance took place far from the public, far from the Council, and far from the average soldier who would never know what was truly at stake.
Twelve committee members sat around the oval table, each one bearing stars on their lapels and years of hardened experience behind their eyes.
Admirals, intelligence heads, program directors, and analysts. A few had gray hair. Others had no hair at all. All of them had seen war.
And on the screen above them, they watched it again.
The footage played in slow motion: the young man in red and black, barreling through a Batarian raiding ship at near light-speed, its hull folding inward like paper before erupting in flame.
Another angle showed him on the ground, lifting debris off trapped colonists with one arm and backhanding slavers into unconsciousness with the other. He seemed more machine than man. A force of nature.
A silence lingered after the last frame. It wasn't reverent. It was calculating.
Then Admiral Halden spoke, as he always did first. "Well," he said, setting down his data-slab, "looks like the project's finally paid off."
Across the table, Rear Admiral Leontes folded her arms. "You say that like we didn't spend sixteen years grooming a nuclear warhead."
"That 'warhead' just saved two hundred colonists."
"Today. What about tomorrow?"
Murmurs. A few nodded.
General Mason, head of Systems Security and Strategic Oversight, cleared his throat.
"Let's keep perspective. The mission objective was civilian rescue and Batarian deterrence. Both were achieved. Kalen acted with restraint, efficiency, and precision. No confirmed fatalities by his hand."
"Unconfirmed," Leontes pressed. "He took out four ships in under a minute. That's what, hundreds of lives?"
Mason shrugged. "Batarian lives."
Another voice chimed in from the lower end of the table. It belonged to Director Cho, chief analyst of Extranational Threats. His glasses glinted under the screen light.
"The footage is clear: Kalen engaged in minimal-lethality tactics whenever possible. He even de-escalated a hostage situation with a child using non-lethal heat vision. That's restraint, Admiral."
"But is it permanent?" Leontes asked. "You're all betting your careers that his conscience is stronger than his biology. And his biology… is not human."
That's when the room shifted.
When the voice that most of them had forgotten chose to speak.
"You're right," said Dr. Karin Chakwas, quiet but firm, "he isn't human. But he is mine."
The room turned to her some with confusion, others with the familiar unease they always reserved for the civilian specialists they didn't fully control.
Chakwas was not in uniform. She never had been. She wore a long white coat, immaculate but lived-in, her gray hair pulled back into a no-nonsense twist. Her expression was calm, unreadable but her eyes burned with quiet defiance.
"Dr. Chakwas," Admiral Halden said, steepling his fingers. "Your insight is… valued. But you were brought in as a scientific advisor, not an advocate."
"I'm both," she replied. "And if I don't speak for him, who will?"
She stood, ignoring the tension in the air. The dossier reports hovered on the central holo-display with charts of vitals, neural stress readings, power fluctuations from Kalen's data.
Beside them, short video clips of Kalen interacting with civilians post-engagement. Smiling. Carrying wounded. Comforting a girl who had just lost her father.
"He's not a weapon," she said. "He's a child. A boy who lost his entire people sixteen years ago, alone and afraid, with no language, no parents, no planet. And we raised him. I raised him."
Some eyes rolled. Others softened.
"I've overseen his development every day of his life. I administered his immunizations, tested his limits, held him when he had his first nightmares, and treated his injuries when we pushed him too hard. I taught him how to read. How to think. And when he turned ten, and asked if the stars missed the world he came from, I told him the truth. And he didn't cry. He just said he hoped Earth would be his home."
She looked at Leontes directly.
"You talk about him like he's dangerous. Of course he is. So are you. So am I. But he chose compassion. He chose restraint."
Leontes leaned back. "Until he doesn't."
"That's exactly why he needs autonomy," Chakwas replied, sharper now. "Because if you treat him like a bomb, eventually he'll believe he is one."
A murmur ran through the room again.
Halden folded his hands. "This isn't a therapy session, Doctor. This is about control. What happens if the Council learns of him before we're ready? What happens when the turians demand a threat assessment? Or worse, access?"
"We'll deny it," Cho offered. "We're already issuing controlled leaks. A high-performance suit. Classified biotic enhancements. A new Spectre candidate in development. Disinformation will muddy the waters."
Leontes scoffed. "And when he sinks a moon with his pinky finger, what then?"
Chakwas didn't blink.
"Then I'll be the first to say: thank god we had someone like him on our side."
Silence again.
A different voice spoke, Admiral Singh, an older man, quiet but firm.
"And what does he want?" Singh asked. "Does the boy know what he is? What we've done with him?"
"He knows enough," Chakwas said gently. "And it's time he learned more. He's growing stronger by the week. If we don't teach him who to be, someone else will."
Mason spoke next. "Which brings us to the core dilemma. Do we keep him hidden? Or do we make him public? Mindoir changed everything. The footage's already circulating in some corners of the darknet. It's only a matter of time before rumors break containment."
"The Council will demand answers," Cho said. "So will the media. Hell, half of C-Sec's extranet traffic is already tracking the 'Red Comet' theory. 'Human biotic savior' trending on a dozen forums."
"Good," Chakwas said. "Let them believe that. Let the galaxy believe that someone out there is watching. That someone cares."
"That someone is dangerous," Leontes muttered.
"Maybe," Chakwas replied softly, with weariness and conviction weighing equally in her tone. "But so is hope. And Kalen is both."
The room fell silent.
* * *
Far from the polished metal of high command, beneath the wounded skies of Mindoir, hope was crouched beside a broken girl in the dirt.
The fires had long since died down. Blackened husks of what were once homes still smoked like dying coals. The cries had quieted, replaced by a haunted stillness. Alliance triage teams moved through the rubble in organized columns, helping, lifting, grieving.
Kalen knelt next to Jane with a gentleness that belied the strength he'd demonstrated just hours ago. Her side was bandaged, and her shoulder, badly bruised, was being stabilized by his careful hands.
His touch was impossibly light, as if he feared that applying even an ounce too much pressure might cause the already-traumatized girl to break further.
A shimmering blue glow pulsed softly from the tips of his fingers as he activated the bio-stitching tool on her abdomen. He steadied her breathing with calm words, glancing at her between motions, noting every wince, every flicker of pain.
"You're holding up well," he said quietly, applying the last patch with precision. "Your vitals are stable now. You'll recover."
Jane's gaze remained fixed downward, the corners of her mouth drawn tight, eyes blank. Her fingers clenched the bloodstained edge of the blanket she'd been given, knuckles white. She didn't speak.
Kalen sat back slightly, giving her space. He wasn't used to these moments. Medical skills came easier than comforting words. But he tried. He always tried.
"My mom… she's a doctor," he offered, awkward at first. "Taught me enough to help in a pinch. Thought I'd be patching up Marines, not kids like us."
That got her to look up, if only briefly. Her eyes were red, rimmed with the salt of silent tears. Kalen gave a soft smile, one of empathy, not pity. He felt the heat radiating from her, not just from the wounds, but from within.
"I don't feel lucky to be patched up," she finally rasped. "I feel… I feel like I want to kill them. Every last one of those monsters."
Kalen paused. His expression didn't change, but his eyes flickered with recognition. That anger. That helpless rage. He'd felt it too.
"They took everything," Jane continued, the dam breaking. "My mom, my dad, my brother. He was only ten and they didn't care. They laughed. You saw what they did, didn't you?"
He nodded once, solemn.
"I saw," he said. "I felt it."
"I wanted to tear them apart," she snarled, the tears finally falling. "I wanted to scream, to break them, to make them pay. But I just lay there. Buried. Weak. Pathetic."
"No," Kalen said, voice firmer now. "You survived. That's not weakness."
She looked at him, confused, lost, desperate.
"You don't get it."
"I do," he said. "Maybe more than you think. I could've ended them all. I could've leveled this whole colony to stop them. But I didn't. Because we don't get to become them. Not even when they take everything."
Her jaw trembled. His words weren't an order, or a lecture. They were an anchor. Something solid. Something to hold on to.
"You're angry," he continued. "You're hurting. I get that. You're allowed to feel it. Just don't let it consume you."
Silence fell between them again, heavy but less suffocating. The wind shifted across the ruins, catching the edge of Kalen's red cape and sending it fluttering behind him like a dying flame reigniting.
Jane's lips parted, the words catching in her throat before she forced them out.
"I want to join you."
He blinked.
"I want to join the Alliance," she said louder, more certain this time. "I want to fight. To do something that matters. Not just for revenge but because no one should feel this powerless ever again."
Kalen studied her. This girl who had lost everything. This girl who still had fire left. Something within him stirred, not the kind of power he used to fly or fight but the kind that made him feel human.
"I think you'd be good at it," he said. "Really good."
"You think so?" she asked, vulnerable.
"I do," he smiled gently, then stood up, brushing the dust from his gauntlets. "We'll probably take different paths, at least for a while. But, I'll look forward to seeing what you become, Jane."
Her eyes followed him as he turned, cape catching the fading light.
"Promise me something?" she called out.
He looked back, one eyebrow raised.
"Don't stop being who you are."
He tilted his head, lips parting to answer and then nodded.
"I won't."
And then he was gone, striding off into the fractured horizon where the last of the wounded waited, where orders needed to be given, where rubble needed lifting, and where a child barely more than a boy had already started becoming something more.
* * *
Outside the chamber, a space station drifted silently in orbit above the arc of Earth, wrapped in a pale haze. The Atlantic shimmered below, a storm twisting itself together like a wound tightening shut. Lightning flickered in the clouds, far beneath the veil of reinforced glass.
Inside the sublevel of the station, buried beneath layers of clearance codes and protocol, Kalen sat still in his quarters having returned from Mindoir.
The room was sterile, functional, meant more for isolation than comfort. Only the window broke the monotony. He watched the stars.
His eyes weren't glowing. They hadn't in hours.
He hadn't slept.
He held something in his hand: a child's drawing. A mess of lines and color on a crumpled corner of synth-paper, the ink smudged but still bright. A stick figure with spiky black hair and a red cape. "THANK YOU SUPERMAN" written across the top in shaky, oversized letters.
The cape was wrong. The 'S' was drawn backwards. But the feeling was right. That child had survived. That child had seen him. That child had named him.
Superman.
He traced the drawing with his thumb, feeling the grooves of the pressure pen strokes as if they meant more than anything the Alliance had ever etched into their reports.
The hiss of the doors cut through the quiet. He didn't look up. He didn't have to.
"I thought I might find you here," came the soft steady voice.
Dr. Chakwas.
Kalen didn't turn, but he spoke low. "They're still talking about me, aren't they."
She stepped into the room. "They always are."
He gave a breath like a scoff. "Good or bad?"
"Both," she said. "Depends on whether they're looking at the data or the future."
"Figures." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I think I scare them."
"You do," she said gently, walking up beside him. "And you will. But not because of what you've done but because of what you could do."
The truth of it didn't hurt. It just settled like a stone in his chest.
"I didn't ask for this," he muttered. "I didn't ask to be the experiment. The answer. The weapon."
"You're not a weapon," Chakwas said, her voice tightening. "You're my son."
That made him turn. The tension in his jaw eased just slightly, and for the first time since returning from Mindoir, his eyes softened.
"I don't want to hide anymore."
Chakwas looked at him, calm and assured, the same way she did when she first held him all those years ago, cradled in radiation-warped rags from the remains of a world no telescope had time to name.
"Then don't," she said.
They stood in the silence for a moment longer, the whir of the station's core systems humming beneath them like a heartbeat.
But even as Chakwas turned to leave, her hand lingering for a second on his shoulder, Kalen didn't look back to the stars.
He looked at the drawing. Folded it carefully. Slipped it into the pouch on his uniform.
And rose to his feet. Now, the true work begins.