Sitting in his cabin, Orr realized with a biting, raw misery that they had made a terrible mistake coming here, going through with all this. Not himself or the team below or the mechanics, as it were, of the op, but the NSF and ONI, all the big boys up top, the puppet-masters and power-players. They had seriously underestimated what was going on in Antarctica and particularly at Kharkov Station and the lake below. They were toying with something that was best left alone. Certain boxes were meant to be kept shut and certain scabs should not have been picked at.

Don’t fool yourself, he told himself. They knew. They knew exactly what kind of mess this was. You and the rest of the Vordog team were lambs they led carefully to slaughter. Don’t pretend otherwise, because you know it’s true.

“Too late,” he said to himself in the darkness. “It’s all too late now.”

And maybe, somehow, he had known this the very moment he arrived at Kharkov with the DSSD engineering team and got a feel for the station, stepped into the drill tower and looked down into the hole they were boring into the ice. Surely he should have known it when he got a good look at the faces of the maintenance crew and the drill team…pale and pinched, rarely smiling, eyes like non-reflective glass. Haunted. Every one of them haunted. And if he hadn’t known it then, he should have known it when his own headaches started and those godawful dreams began plaguing him.

Yes, he should have known.

Sitting there, his head throbbing like a bad tooth filled with infection, he tried to think, tried to put it in perspective in a larger sense as had always been his way. But there was nothing. Just that curious blankness and lethargy he’d brought with him out of the dreams. He’d been awake maybe ten minutes and the dreams were fading, but their hold on him was strong, organically-rooted. He could remember tossing and turning, haunted and terrified, waking cold and shaking and sweaty, a scream locked in his throat.

And he could remember…remember…

The city…those things hovering above the city…and he was one of them…

He felt like he was going mad. But deeper down, he knew it was something else entirely. Something was reaching out for him, wanting to convert him and remake him in its own hideous image.

Swallowing the dryness in his throat, he turned on the light, trying to control his breathing, trying to remember that he was an officer of the United States Navy and he had to continue mission regardless of how he felt.