The crawl space between the midlevel and upper deck was twelve feet high, a vast expanse filled with ventilation ducts, pipes, and electrical conduits, sectioned between steel support struts. Standing on a rusted steel beam, I stared at the dark alcove until my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.

And then I saw what Oscar had discovered—the sight making my skin crawl.

Hanging from metal hooks from the ceiling were the skeletal remains of the six male members of the Omega crew, their vacant eye sockets staring back at me, their bones still bearing tatters of dried flesh. The men were identifiable by the size of their frames and the patches of hair still adhering to their scalps. Kevin Read was front and center, Jason Sloan behind him and to the right, Yoni to the left—one of the Israeli’s femurs hanging disjointed from the hip. The other three males filled out the next row so that the men’s remains dangled from the ceiling like bowling pins.

Sensing my distress, Oscar lowered me to the ground, then dropped by my side.

“No … this makes no sense. ABE, analyze the contents of this lab. Determine its purpose!”

PURPOSE UNKNOWN.

ALERT! ONE OF THE CRYOGENIC PODS REMAINS OPERATIONAL.

I pushed past Oscar to inspect the last row of cryogenic pods.

Empty.

Empty.

Sealed!

I tried to raise the lid, only the machine was indeed operational, its unidentifiable occupant vacuum-packed in a frozen pool of tetrodotoxin gel.

Turning my attention to the control panel, I attempted to engage the thawing process, but nothing appeared to be working.

ABE, why isn’t this working?

ALL PRIMARY AND BACKUP CONTROLS WERE INTENTIONALLY LINKED TO GOLEM. TO INITIATE AN EMERGENCY THAW, EXPOSE THE TETRODOTOXIN GEL TO OXYGEN.

“Right, that’s how I woke up!” I searched the lab for something hard to shatter the thick viewport of Plexiglas. Finding nothing, I opened the sliding aluminum door of the walk-in freezer in search of a tool.

“Mother of God…”

They had been hung from the ceiling like lanterns, but when the computer had run out of perches it had begun piling them anywhere it could—on shelves and racks, eventually it had stacked them in piles on the floor.

Cadavers. Hundreds of them. Some had been infants when they died, others centenarians, along with every age in between. Dark-haired, light-haired, bald. Two arms, no arms, and others bearing nightmarish deformities that would be turned away from a circus.

It appeared that every corpse was female.

I slammed the door shut, then stared at the closed walk-in refrigerator a full minute before opening door number two.

“Geez.”

They were in beakers and glasses and specimen jars. At some point, the computer had run out of sealable containers, resorting to bottled water containers—hundreds of them, transported from the galley storeroom.

In each container was an embryo.