The glacier was hissing and melting, boiling like a witch’s cauldron, throwing out super-hot plumes of steam. The world contorted and quaked and that burning glow beneath the ice expanded, X-raying what was below, limning what was rising to the surface: the city. As the ice crackled and split, the structures of Kharkov Station either falling right over, flaring up like matchsticks, or exploding into kindling, the great city rose to the surface, making a beating sound like the constant booming of a battering ram. Its black, jagged towers and spires pierced the slush like fingers and the entire geometrically-profuse, skeletal mass broke through the glacier, rising, rising, seeming to tower hundreds of feet above. The world rumbled and shook with seismic vibrations, water and slush ejected high into the dark sky. The city oscillated with immense power, glowing a phosphorescent emerald, steaming and pulsating and then, as it seemed to fill the world for miles and miles, Kharkov Station split asunder and tossed aside, something even worse happened.

Something unthinkable.

Something horrendous.

Orr screamed at the sight of it.

The city was a gigantic shuddering womb, a gargantuan egg that shattered like an ice sculpture and out of it came a nightmare tide of oozing, placental, viscous slime that was smoldering and palpitating, a bubbling, gurgling fetal mutation that was born into this world, unfurling lashing fleshy umbilicals and snaking, webby feelers. Gigantic, glossy eyes opened with pink-orange pupils hundreds of feet across. It was a living, snotty birth that expanded and divided, foaming and slithering, a vermiform expulsion of noxious, alien flesh and writhing, cremating colors that filled Orr’s brain with agonizing waves. It opened a thousand colossal, mewling, squealing mouths and—

And then there was a tremendous, earth-shattering roar as the tactical nuke waiting in the remains of Kharkov Station was ignited. There was a searing, blinding flash of light and the world went red and brilliant blue and luminous green as if the very auroras were drawn down from the heavens, igniting the ice itself which seemed to burn with a flickering, fissile illumination. The city and the thing born from it blazed and smoldered with a guttering incandescence like blazing magnesium and white phosphorus as a glowing, churning mushroom cloud rose up to the glittering stars above.

Then the shockwave wiped what was left of Kharkov Station right off the ice with screaming, irradiated winds that bore down with the strength of typhoons and tornadoes. Long before that happened, Orr was gone, melting down into the slush. The city was shattered into spoking, melting shards that sank back into the ice, freezing in state as the blaze flickered out, the cold and forever night of Antarctica rushing back in to fill the void.

Then there was only silence.

The howling winds.

And a darkness that went on forever.

GLOSSARY

ADS—Atmospheric Diving Suit

ATP—Active Thermal Probe

AUV—Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

DSSD—Diving System Support Detachment

DSSP—Deep Submergence Systems Project