Operation Deep Freeze
Operation Deep Freeze takes place in Samantha Grey's home timeline of Dimension Delta Zeta 17-46 in the winter of 1967 at a remote research station on the Greenland Ice Cap.
The Silent Depths
November, 1967. Cayo Escondido, 3 a.m. The Caribbean night is a warm bath. Inside the open-air lab, Dr. Vivian Thorne studies a holoterm. Bright dots blink like city lights on its surface. A lattice hovers, equations scrolling in soft gold. She is alone, barefoot, auburn hair pinned with a graphite stylus, when the red phone rings.
"Doctor Thorne? Commander Maxwell Peterson, Zebra Station," the voice crackles, thin with distance. She recognizes the name and the security code -- they have been testing her Deep Radar up on the high ice cap. "Your system just lit up something that shouldn’t exist under a klick of Greenland ice. Need you here tomorrow to verify." Vivian’s hand pauses mid-gesture, freezing a rotating isosurface of density data accompanying the call. "I see what you mean. Yes; yes, I can come. We'll be there," she agrees. The hologram collapses into a bead of light and vanishes.
By dawn the Thorne house is humming.
Caleb -- eleven, already excited, runs wind-chill models on his tablet. "We're going to need our parkas! Yeah!" Zara -- ten, half-dancer, half-engineer -- threads elastic cord through fleece booties she printed for Scout. Their dog, a wiry terrier mix, watches every motion with the solemnity of a bodyguard.
Major Rex Corbin carries heavy bags out to the nearby pad. Vivian Throne, as an important defense scientist, rates a personal flier. Rex has already filed a flight plan with NORAM Flight Traffic Control; supersonic, they'll be wheels-down on the ice cap in a few hours. They climb the ramp. The island falls away below, a green coin on the deep blue sea.
Zebra Station was the last stop on the old "Zoo-Line," a chain of obsolete air defense radars stretching from Alaska down the continent and back up to Greenland. The massive installations, relics of the early atomic race with the British in the '20s, had been given second lives as remote labs for the NAFR's sprawling research arm.
The Thorne's aircraft descends through the sky; wind claws at the fuselage; frost flowers bloom across the canopy. Caleb presses his forehead to the glass. Far below, the ice sheet is not flat but ridged like frozen surf -- seracs leaning at impossible angles, crevasses so blue they seem back-lit. A crack appears -- hair-thin -- then races outward in both directions until it is a kilometer-long lightning bolt. An ice pinnacle the size of a building breaks free and topples into the sea, the splash rising in slow-motion crystals.
Zara whispers, “That just happened.” Scout growls, ears flat.
The jet flares, engines rotating to vertical, wheels down, and kisses the snow with barely a shiver. The base sprawls; buildings, old quonset huts and new modular structures. Several older, heavy, bunkers. Radomes and antennae, some crusted over with rime from years of idleness. The base was built for survellaince back in the 20's. Now, it hosted nuermous science experiments and technology demonstrations. Like the Deep Radar system. The ramp lowers; cold knifes into their lungs, a radical change from the tropics. Commander Peterson strides out in a polar suit, fabric buffeted in the wind. His face is friendly but the skin beneath his eyes is already turnign white.
Zara cannot hold the question. "Sir, the ice -- was that normal?"
Peterson glances at the distant sea where the berg fell. "We're seeing fewer of them each year, but the glaciers still calve often enough," he says, voice muffled by the hood. "But that one was ... enthusiastic." He forces a smile that does not reach his eyes. "Come inside before the wind steals your voices."
Behind him, the station crouches: geodesic domes mottled with frost, antenna arrays like skeletal trees, and, angling down into the ice, a tunnel mouth lit red by hazard strobes. The air tastes of metal and old snow.
The Deep Radar lab is thirty meters under the glacier, carved out by machines and lined with steel. Server racks almost glow, the computation alone to support the Deep Radar keeps the chill at bay. Vivian enters, trailed by Peterson and two technicians.
Suspended at the center of the room is the Deep Radar itself: a torus of braided niobium strands wrapped around a vacuum chamber the size of a coffee urn, all suspended in a mass of wires, tubes, and gold foil. Quantum flux pumps whirr, cooling the core to twenty microkelvins. Vivian sits at the main console, brings up the master diagnostic plot, nods approvingly.
"Full-spectrum pulse, three-second chirp," she orders. "Let’s get a second look at your baseline." The torus whines -- a subsonic note felt in bone rather than ear. The servers roar; solving millions of simultenous equations to tease a 3-D raster out of the neutrino reflections. The holographic display lights above the console, showing a scan, two kilometers across. Inside it, the ragged edge seperating the Ice from the rock below shows a shadow. And along that boundary, a lighter oval band, perhaps a hundred meters across, speckled with blurry darker dots.
Peterson’s breath fogs the projection. "That’s the same anomaly. Could be a melt chamber? --", her offers. "... or reflections off a water pool," Vivian finishes. "Look at the third level harmonics, it's still well out of tune. We've got residual error from the retrievel well out of predicted spec. Let's give it another ping," as she turns the emitter gain up to 200%. A second pulse rolls through the ice, deeper, softer.
Far away, the things they see as dots shiver. One shell fractures along a seam of bioluminescent green. In the silence that follows, the glacier itself seems to inhale. Somewhere beneath them, something answers with a scrape of chitin on million-year-old ice.
Discovery and Disbelief
Wind howls around the station, but inside the old tunnel the air is still and mineral-cold. Caleb’s breath ghosts in quick, excited puffs that freeze on his scarf. Zara walks two paces behind, gloves brushing the ribbed ice wall. Scout pads between them, claws ticking on the crisp-sanded floor.
A sign stenciled in fading indigo paint reads: "ICE TUNNEL 7-A | AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY". And now, someone has added a child’s pencil scrawl beneath: "C & Z were here"
"This section’s on the original ’42 survey," Caleb says, flipping his tablet to a map. "De-rated safe for non-critical access. We’re basically tourists."
Zara snorts. "Tourists don’t carry emergency beacons." She pats the orange puck clipped to Scout’s vest. The dog glances up, tongue lolling, then suddenly pauses -- ears swiveling toward the dark ahead.
They passed a mothballed drill rig: twelve meters of cobalt alloy bristling with pipes, hoses, conveyor tubes. Frost feathers every joint. Caleb brushes snow from a brass plaque -- "DeepCore-922, Sea-Bee Btn 477, Republic Navy Construction Corps", and climbs up onto the behemoth machine. He imagines the machine chewing downward like a mechanical kraken. "Wish we could fire it up. The fuel gauge is above empty."
"Mom would implode," Zara laughs, breath sparkling. "And then Rex would implode us." She climbs the treads anyway, arms spread for balance, pirouetting on a frozen cleat. Scout barks once -- sharp, uneasy. The sound ricochets, swallowed by the throat of the tunnel.
They continue; following a smaller side tunnel. Further down, it narrows, ceiling dropping until their reflections skate across rippled ice. Caleb’s tablet dims automatically to conserve power, revealing the soft aquamarine glow from clear fissures overhead. The air tastes metallic, like licking a battery. Scout stops dead. Hackles rise. A low growl vibrates through his ribs into Zara’s ear. "Hey, what’s --" she starts.
Ahead, the part of a tunnel wall has collapsed recently, revealing a widening with pillars of ice that soar like organ pipes, veined with green luminescence. And at their base, glinting off the shine of their headlamps -- big eggs. Dozens. Curved, opalescent, each tall as a garage door. Their shells shimmer with the oily spectrum, but the surface is roughly faceted, almost geometric, as if grown rather than laid. Piles of snow crust the bases; inside, silhouettes stir -- dark, jointed, wrong.
A crack. A single razor line splits the nearest egg. Greenish light leaks out, sickly and alive. Inside, something flexes -- a scythe-shaped limb testing the air. Zara’s heart pounds. She reaches for Caleb’s sleeve, finds his hand already clamped around her wrist. Wordless, they step back.
The crack widens with a sound like breaking porcelain. A shard falls, rings like glass on ice. Through the gap, an utterly alien faceted eye stares. Then the limb punches through, hooked and barbed, scraping frost into powder. Zara whispers, "Let's get out."
Moments later, Scout lets out a terrified yelp -- and bolts. Caleb spins, tablet clattering against the tunnel floor. "Run!" he shouts, voice cracking between registers.
They sprint. Boots hammer. Breath sears lungs. Behind them: a chorus of splintering shells, a rising chitter that scrapes the inner ear like tinfoil. The tunnels twisting turns flash past, strobed by headlamp beams.
Zara’s mind races: left at the blue vein, right at the orange cone. She sketches the route in memory, recounting their steps. Scout skids around a corner, claws carving curls of frost; the kids follow, Caleb rebounding off a frosted coolant pipe.
A mantis-shape scuttles up from behind them. It's smaller, scout-sized, wings still soft. It rears, mandibles clacking. Caleb snatches a flare pen from his belt, thumbs the cap. Red fire blossoms; the creature recoils, hissing. He throws it back down the tunnel, and the creature pursues it. They rush up out of the side tunnel, their lungs burning, and burst back into the wider tunnel where the old drill rig looms.
Scout leaps the treads in a single bound. Zara vaults after, Caleb half-falling, half-sliding down the far side. The chittering fades, swallowed by distance and ice. They do not slow until the orange glow of the station’s bulkhead lamps appears ahead like sunrise.
The mess hall in Zebra Station main habitat Module smells of coffee and ozone heaters. Caleb slams the hatch so hard the mugs jump. Faces turn -- technicians, cooks, off-duty guards. Zara’s cheeks are blotched crimson, her braid half-undone. Scout trembles against her shins.
"We saw eggs!" Caleb blurts, voice raw. "Big as cars. They’re hatching! Things with claws, eyes like honeycomb--"
A petty officer turns. "Easy there, kids, what now?"
Commander Peterson straightens from filling his cup, fatigue etched around his mouth. "Slow down, son. What did you see?”
Zara steps forward, small but steady. "We have video. Caleb, your tablet!" Caleb pats down his parka, frustrated hands not finding it. "Where is it? Gosh! I must have dropped it."
Peterson squints, skepticism warring with something colder. "Kids, we can't be playing games just now." "Light does refract down the crevasses after the borer seals them." a tech offers. Peterson exhales through his nose, shaking his head. "All right. No more tunnel explorations for you. They're now off limits; stay above ground." He turns away, dismissing them.
Rex finds them by the heat exchangers, still panting, frost in their lashes. He kneels so his eyes are level with theirs. "I heard you got in trouble with Commander Peterson, telling wild stories. Now tell *me* what you saw," he says, quiet as snowfall.
Between shaky breaths they do. Caleb’s words tumble; Zara interjects with precision. Rex listens without interrupting, hand resting on Scout’s head until the dog stops shaking. When they finish, he stands, his decision made. "Gear up," he tells Lieutenant Li, who has appeared at the junction. "Three-man recon, live rounds, full bodycams. We’re following the kids’ breadcrumb trail."
Li raises an eyebrow. "Peterson says--" "He’s tired and worn," Rex answers, voice like flint. "I’m not. Maybe it wasn't giant bugs, but they saw something."
He checks the magazine on his sidearm with a soft snik, then looks back at Caleb and Zaram arm pointing tot he command bunker. "Go inside, find your mother, get warm. Keep the channel open." His smile is thin, but real. "You did good. Now let the grown-ups believe you."
Bootfalls fade down the icy track.
Revelations and Escalations
The holocube in the Deep Radar Lab flickers once, then sharpens into a nightmare. Vivian spreads her fingers, peeling the ice layer away like an onion skin. At the bottom of the scan -- an unbelievable shape. A fifty-foot thorax, armored in plates that refract the radar like dark mirrors. Folded forelimbs end in scythes tall as a man. "What in the ...," she whispers. "Depth one-point-one klicks. The drill team will breach the ceiling in minutes." Peterson’s coffee cup slips, shatters. The shards hiss across the deck. "Too much ice to raise the them on radio comms." Vivian replies, "Then we'll have to take a crawler." They exchange glances, and race up to and out of the command bunker.
Peterson drives the tracked crawler down the freshly cut tunnel at breakneck speed, headlights carving their steep path downward in the dark. Vivian stands at the stick, parka hood rippling in the slipstream. Rex’s voice crackles in her earbud, already losing signal. "I just confirmed the kids’ story. Bugs are real. Hold that drill." She yells into the mic over the crawler's engine roar, "Already en-route," she snaps.
The tungsten bit punches through the roof of the deep cavern, spilling light from headlamps and worklights inside, and the workers finally see what they have found. For one heartbeat it was silent -- then the world erupts. The Brood Mother unfurls like a living guillotine, forelimbs scissoring the first driller in half. Blood flashes crimson against green light, hissing into vapor. Workers scream over the comm net -- voices distorted, wet, too short. Not a hundred meters behind the main drill, Peterson slews the crawler sideways and Vivian pops the hatch. "Get in!" Two frantic survivors dive in, faces streaked with fright and gore. Behind them, smaller mantises spill from cracked eggs -- amber eyes, wings still crumpled like wet parchment. They scuttle up the tunnel, claws ticking, mouths chittering; if they could speak, it would be just one word: feed. The crawler roars up the tunnel; behind them, a crowd of small insects, small being only relative. They were man size and larger, clamboring up the tunnel after them. Huge forelimb-swipes breaking off chuncks of ice as the Brood Mother cuts a path for herself.
Commander Peterson's gloved hands are vise-locked on the crawlers' controls, single mindedly navigating the crawler up the long tunnel. Once the exit is in view, Vivian uses the wide-band "Emergency! Hostiles ... enemy pursuing us," Unsure of the military terms to use, she does her best: "... Condition red! Get your weapons and shoot to kill!" The crawler explodes from the tunnel mouth into blizzard light. Guards open fire -- tracer rounds stitch red seams through the dark. Two mantises fall out of the tunnel entrance, fold mid-stride, leaking yellow ichor into the snow. Peterson and Vivian vault out of the crawler, as more personnel start shooting at the insects, and others bring up plows to pile snow to block the entrance. Sprinting for the command bunker. Peterson makes it to the console, headset askew, punching codes.
"Zooline Command, this is Zebra, priority one! Hostile xenofauna breach. Condition ZULU, I repeat, ZULU." Zulu, the code word no facility commander ever wanted to utter: his station was under heavy attack by the enemy in great force, and would be lost without immediate relief. He turned to Vivian, "There's NO WAY they can get help here in less than two hours. Yak is three hundred klicks from here!"
Vivian checks her children, passing a glance of relief to Major Corbin that they're safe in the bunker. "Thank you," she mouthed silently, and nodded for him to join the fight in the snow.
Outside, the Brood Mother’s scythe punches through the snow berm -- three meters of chitin and obsidian edge -- slicing a fuel line. Jet-fire fountains into night. Rex runs for the crawler, its engine still running hot.
Caleb and Zara grab headsets, their voices clear and youthful: "Major Rex! DeepCore Machine fifty meters inside 7-A! It's a lot bigger!" Zara adds: "Just to your left! Block the tunnel with that!" Rex races and finds the machine, vaults into the cab, presses and holds the red starter button. It chugs and then roars. Hydraulics groan alive. He guns the throttle; treads bite ice, throwing rooster-tails of snow.
The rig rumbles forward and out of 7-A like a dinosaur, turns and goes flat-out over the open ice, then slamming its hundred-ton bulk against the snow berm. Steel meets carapace with a sound like titanic scissors. The Brood Mother’s forelimb sparks against the chassis, carving molten gouges in the metal. Rex bails, rolling clear as the limb slices the driver’s seat he was in half a second earlier. The brood mother strikes at the machine, but it holds, for now. Behind the barricade, smaller bugs scuttle, already digging at the ice under its treads.
Every minute was bought with blood and ammunition. Power fails to emergency red. Chief Sharma rigs daisy-chained thermal mines from tunneling explosives, voice calm, fingers flying. Commander Peterson frantically yelling orders into his comm, and sending the distress call over and over. Vivian watching scans, researching station diagrams, passing them to her two children. Caleb and Zara crouch over the comm console, headsets blinking, feeding coordinates to Rex like kids piloting a lethal video game.
A remote-piloted snow-cat packed with C-4 trundles down the main bore but is swatted aside by the Brood Mother. The blast collapses a side wall -- bottlenecking the swarm but also burying six men alive.
Peterson cracks. He slams the plexiglass cover over the self-destruct panel, fumbling the arming key, mic still open. "We have a five kiloton self-destruct," He looks at Vivian, almost seeking her permission. "No, bad idea!". she replies. He continues, "We can't let those things escape, I'll nuke the site -- it's the only way to be sure!" Vivian turns, eyes fully open, mouth agape in shock. Her open hand connects to his cheek -- a crack like thunder. "Those things might survive that! You will not kill everyone in a fool's panic. Help is coming! We can hold out!" Peterson, enraged, balls a fist. Rex and Lieutenant Li step inside the bunker. Seeing the situation, Lieutenant Li raises his rifle. Rex's voice, low, determined. Final. "Commander Peterson, you are relieved. Lietenant Li, take the commander outside, see that he finds a rifle, and points it at the bugs."
The Eleventh Hour
Mantises loose in the equipment yard gnaw through a final junction box. Lights flicker to darkness. The heaters stop blowing. Frost creeps over windows. Emergency lights come on. The Brood Mother rams the drill rig barricade and its metal screams, hydraulics bleed, and is shoved aside.
Then, over their tactical comms, they hear it: "Zebra Station, Strike Force Alpha inbound, ETA six minutes. Confirm data-link zero-niner-seven-gamma."
Rex wipes blood-ice from his eyebrow and keys the mic. "Roger, Alpha, Zero-Niner-Seven-Gamma. Major Corbin here, temporarily in command. Advise, hostile man-sized insects at large in the station yard. Massive single hostile creature escaping ice tunnel four-bravo. Outside personnel dead or in retreat. Hardened carapaces, tough like steel armor -- bring some heat. We’ll keep the porch light on." A familiar voice then cuts in: "Major Rex Corbin? Agent 713 here, Samantha Grey, we've met. Hold on a bit longer, the cavalry is coming."
Corbin passes flurry of comamnds out to the station personnel, directing them to safe positions behind buildings and equipment. The Brood Mother's children focus on moving the DeepCore machine out of her path. Dozens of them tug on it, push against it, dig snow away. Corrdinated, possibly even intelligent.
A klaxon howls; one long, warbling note that vibrates in the fillings of every tooth. Outside the command bunker, the night has turned chromatic: red tracer fire, orange gouts of burning fuel, pale search-lights slicing the blizzard. The DeepCore boring machine is already half-gone, ripped apart by the Brood Mother’s forelimbs.
Behind her, a tide of smaller mantises spills into the yard. Facted eyes glinting, wings glistening. They roll out in a wedge, climbing over broken crates and overturned vehicles.
Rex’s defenders work a fighting withdrawal, firing in disciplined bursts -- some penetrate, but most caseless 5 mm rounds spark off chitin, leaving scars but hardly slowing the charge.
Caleb’s voice, high but steady, crackles over the tactical net: "Sector four, shift left! Ten meters, low wall of fuel drums!" Rifle fire arcs to the drums; a blossom of blue flame whoofs skyward and engulfs three drones. They writhe, shrieking, and collapse into burning husks.
Zara monitors the backup generator shack -- the only thing keeping the emergency lights on. Her headset glowing, eyes focused, translating the display into compass bearings. "Major, a big one’s flanking north under the radome!"
The Battle of the Deep Freeze
A pair of sonic booms roll across the glacier.
Two NAFR hypersonic transports knife out of the stratosphere, belly-plates glowing dull cherry. They sweep across the sky, overflying the station, brake in a violent S-turn, dropping down low on the far side of the base, vectored thrust pluming snow twenty meters high.
Ramps drop. Agent Samantha Grey steps out first -- armor reinforced tactical uniform in Republic Scarlet, Silver and Black, eyes alight. From the second transport, Yellowstone Caldera lumbers into view, molten rock already crackling across his shoulders like living armor.
A firm voice comes across the tactical comms: "This is Major Carnes, Strike Force Alpha. Cavalry's here, Major Corbin -- pull your people back. We’re taking point."
Rex exhales -- half relief, half battle-calm. "Copy. All Zebra personnel, pull back to Charlie positions."
Samantha ignites. A ribbon of white-hot plasma whips across the yard, carving a thirty-meter arc through the first wave. Mantises disintegrate, chitin popping like popcorn. She blinks, vanishes in a swirl of embers, and reappears atop the DeepCore rig. A ball of fire forms in her hand, is thrown, and detonates against the Brood Mother’s flank. The monster lets out a bizzare roar that rattles snow from rooftops.
Yellowstone powers up. The ground buckles beneath his boots. Lava veins pulse up through the ice, forming lava moats that hiss and swallow drones whole. He raises a jagged rampart of obsidian, cutting the swarm in half. With a grunt he hurls a ten-ton shard of basalt, its impact echoes like a bell; the Brood Mother staggers, one scythe cracked and dripping ichor.
Behind them, soldiers in armored combat exoskeletons move up with squad weapons, and others take up sniping positions. Staccato bursts erupted from their rifles. Unlike the station guards' desperate plinking, these heavy-caliber rounds didn't just spark -- they punched through chitin, dropping mantises dead in their tracks.
The queen erupts from the tunnel mouth in a spray of ice shards, knocking over the DeepCore boring machine, but Samantha isn't on it anymore -- she's hovering in the air, sheathed in flames, arms extended, pulling kinetic power from the mass of insects, and passing it to the Alpha soldiers, and to Yellowstone.
The queen is hardly slowed. Fifty feet of night-black armor and razored limb, she cleaves the ice wall with a single swipe. Her wings unfurl; veined, translucent, stained-glass horrors. They beat once, catching lift from the cold gale. Caleb's voice comes across the tactical comm: "Strike Alpha, the big monster it trying to fly, I see its back-plate folded open for its wings, that spot looks soft!"
Major Carnes' voice comes over the comm, somewhat surprised, "Command acknowledges ... uh, Junior Tactical. Fire for effect."
Samantha teleports mid-air, reappears behind the wings, palms pressed together. A sphere of sun-core fire blooms -- but the Brood Mother twists, the blast only grazing her, but the wings close. Samantha flits out, gathers her will, and pulls a dozen smaller mantises into a clump in time for soldier's rockets to hit them as a mass.
Yellowstone, now completely covered in stone and magma, ten feet tall, walks straight up ahead and starts pummeling the front of the creature, each massive fist stroke shaking the creature and leaving a burned scorch. The mother directs a huge forelimb, edged like a six-foot steak knife at him, but it sparks off his rock-armor to no effect.
Zara's voice, ice-calm, cuts the comm: "Left flank -- thoracic seam, mid segments!" Yellowstone raises twin pillars of rock that slam the queen sideways.
Samantha blinks again, inside the arc of the scything arms, gestures and pulls green mist out of the huge monster. It slows down, every limb moving in stop-motion, struggling to speed up, but it cannot.
"Caldera! Now!," She calls out.
Yellowstone summons a massive shard of black obsidian and throws it -- impaling the thorax and pinning the Brood Mother to the glacier. Samantha detonates her flame. A red star blossoms, blinding even through goggles.
When vision returns, the queen is still, armor cracked open like a burnt walnut. The remaining drones falter, antennae twitching in confusion.
Strike Force Alpha squads move in, precise bursts finishing the swarm.
Snow settles. Steam rises from cooling lava seams.
Samantha lands lightly, bat wings folding, tacticals smoldering, and offers Rex a gloved hand. "Sorry we’re late, Major. Traffic was murder." He chuckles, shaking her hand.
Vivian and the kids burst out of the command bunker.
Rex laughs and pulls the kids into a brief, fierce embrace. "Im going to have to teach you comms discipline, aren't I?" Zara and Caleb stare at the queen’s smoking corpse with something between awe and survivor’s guilt. Overhead, the aurora flickers its bright curtains across a starry sky. The battle is over.
Enduring Secrets
Snow has stopped falling. The long November night broke to a hint of dawn, that would fade to dusk before the sun could cross the horizon. The yard is a battlefield museum: sooted ice, glass-smooth lava rivers cooling to midnight stone, and the Brood Mother’s cracked carcass steaming like a fallen meteor.
Alpha squads move in staggered lines, tagging carcasses, scanning for residual heat. Occasional gunfire as they finish off drones still twitching. Crawlers transporting the mess of bodies to a burn site. Other, more solemn, troops identifying and gathering the human dead.
Chief Sharma leads an Alpha squad down tunnel 7-A, to where unhatched eggs that still pulse with green light lay. His voice is soft. "Never thought I’d see an egg the size of a refrigerator."
Inside the command bunker, the holotable flickers with final telemetry. Vivian stands alone, parka unzipped, hair frizzed with frost and fatigue. The power was back up, and the heaters were going again. It was almost tolerable. She scrolls the Deep Radar’s last sweep: the cavern now hollow, the anomaly collapsed into a ragged scar. Her reflection in the screen looks older than those mere hours ago. She whispers, "We opened a door we didn’t know existed."
Behind her, Rex steps in quietly, lays a thermos of coffee on the console. "Not long ago, we didn't know the Republic had door-kickers ready to close nasty doors like that. I was talking with Carnes, they've been informally calling themselves 'Super Force'. Sounds about right."
She took the steaming cup up and took a long sip from it. The black coffee warmed and fortified her. It felt like days since she'd slept. "I used to think I understood the world. Since seeing Agent Grey three years ago, and now she and Caldera do their work again, I don't know what's impossible any more. On the frontiers of science, it's new and bewidlering sometimes, but it always made sense. I can't understand either of them. Magic? And it makes me wonder what else is out there."
Rex slowly drank from his own mug. "True. But if we have them, you can bet the Imps do too. We can't stop, not with them, or with your science."
She agrees, "I think sometimes, we explore places, sciences, even -- that in a gentler world, would have better been left alone."
Neither speaks; the steam between them says enough.
The survivors assemble on the packed-snow parade ground -- twenty-three souls, parkas blood-speckled, eyes too wide.
Major Carnes shakes Rex's hand. "Good work Major, you and the troops here held the line, no easy feat with those nightmares." He turns to Lieutenant Li, "You're provisionally in command here until the regular relief force arrives. The first elements will be wheels-down in twenty hours. We have to lift back out in six, but until then, you have every pair of hands we have to help you get the site cleared."
Li replies, "Thank you, Sir. And Major Corbin?," Li's voice is steady, "Would follow you into hell's own ice, sir."
In the habitat hut, Caleb and Zara sit on benches, sharing a single cocoa tin. Their headsets lie beside them, now deactivated, Chief Sharma told them the headsets would be reported as "Lost in the firefight." Caleb has his datapad back, and traced fracture lines on a photo of a mantis wing, memorizing angles. Zara cradles the red magma-gem memento Yellowstone pressed into her palm -- still warm, pulsing faintly. "They'll make you erase it," she says, surprised by the steadiness in her own voice. He chuckles, "That's why I'm memorizing everything I can!" Scout noses her boot; she scratches his ear, and for the first time since the eggs cracked, the dog’s tail wags.
Across the habitat module, a folding table becomes an impromptu debrief.
Captain Andrews, leader of Yellowstone's team, slides a thick packet across: "Official Secrets Act, revised 1963. Sign or disappear." Peterson, about to become just another civilian, signs with shaking fingers.
Yellowstone fashions a second gem for Vivian: a tiny star caught in volcanic glass. "To remind you," he rumbles, "some doors should stay shut." She accepts it, "I'll keep that in mind, but when needs must, the Devil drives."
Samantha leans close to Rex, voice low. "Major Carnes is getting promoted and reassigned soon. My team will need a new commander. I get a say in that. Think about it." Rex glances at the kids, at Vivian, then back. "I already have a family to guard." She smiles, quiet, understanding, and the moment passes.
Dawn edges along the horizon, promising, but sadly, unable in November to deliver a true sunrise. The Thorne jet sits on the ramp, engines idling to warm up, the Ultrazine tanks topped off curtesy of Alpha. Rex shoulders the last crate; Vivian pauses on the ladder, looking back at the glacier. "Every discovery has a shadow." she says. Zara straps in, magma-gem against her heart, and whispers to Scout,
"We’ll keep their secrets. But we’ll remember."
The jet lifts off, contrail carving a white scar across dark sky; at altitude, the sun peeks over the horizon, finally.
Far below, a stealthed British SIGINT drone skims the ridgeline, infrareds swiveling to catch the fading heat bloom.
Encrypted burst transmission: "Zebra station sector. Main station. Possible weapon test. Advise further recon."
The aurora ripples, green fire over white silence, until the glacier swallows even that faint electronic whisper.