Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Fracture
The meteor had punched through the ice shelf like a fist through glass, and Iriane Sovel could see the wound from sixty kilometers out. Her instruments had been screaming about atmospheric disturbances for the past hour, but nothing prepared her for the sight of steam rising from Antarctica like breath from a dying giant.
"McMurdo Base, this is Search and Rescue Seven-Four, I have visual on the impact site. Requesting updated coordinates for any registered facilities in the affected zone." She kept her voice steady, professional, even as her stomach clenched at the scope of the devastation below.
Static crackled through her headset, then a voice emerged, broken and uncertain. "Seven-Four, McMurdo. We're showing... we're showing nothing registered in that sector. But we're picking up an automated distress beacon. Frequency doesn't match any known protocol."
"Understood. I'm going to investigate."
"Iriane." The voice belonged to Commander Tobias Henriksen, her supervisor and the closest thing she had to a friend in this frozen posting. "Be careful. Something's not right about this one."
She didn't respond, because there was nothing to say. Something was always not right about Antarctic emergencies. The continent existed in a state of perpetual wrongness, a place where humans had never been meant to survive, and every rescue mission was a negotiation with physics and fortune.
Iriane banked her helicopter toward the rising steam, watching the ice shelf give way to exposed rock and something else—something that gleamed with an artificial sheen beneath the fractured surface. Metal. Structures. A facility that shouldn't exist.
The distress beacon pulsed stronger as she approached, its signal now accompanied by others. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one a heartbeat crying out from beneath the shattered ice.
She found a landing site on a relatively stable outcropping, the helicopter's skids crunching against frost-covered rock. The facility—if that's what it was—lay partially exposed where the meteor's impact had torn away decades of accumulated ice. She could see corridors, chambers, the geometric precision of architecture that spoke of planning and purpose.
And through the cracked walls, she could see movement.
Iriane grabbed her emergency kit and stepped out into the Antarctic wind, her breath crystallizing instantly in the minus-forty air. The facility's entrance had been sealed once, a massive door of some composite material she didn't recognize, but the impact had buckled it inward, creating a gap just wide enough for a person to squeeze through.
She activated her helmet camera and spoke for the record. "Entering unknown structure at coordinates negative seventy-eight point four-two-three by negative one-sixty-two point eight-nine-one. Time is fourteen-thirty-seven Zulu. Structure appears to predate any known Antarctic construction."
The interior was warmer than it should have been, and lit by emergency lighting that cast everything in a pale blue glow. Iriane moved through corridors that curved in ways that felt wrong to her pilot's sense of spatial awareness, following the sound of the distress beacons and something else—voices, she realized. Human voices.
She found them in the third chamber she entered, and her mind simply refused to process what she was seeing.
Rows. Hundreds of rows, stretching back into the blue-lit darkness. Transparent pods, each one containing a human figure, each figure connected to a web of tubes and monitors. And the faces—the faces were all the same. Not similar. Identical. The same woman, repeated over and over, in various stages of consciousness as the pods' systems failed and their occupants began to wake.
Iriane's hand found the wall for support. "What the hell is this?"
One of the pods nearest to her had cracked, its occupant spilling out onto the floor in a tangle of tubes and monitoring cables. The woman—one of the women—looked up at Iriane with eyes that held no confusion, only a terrible, patient awareness.
"You're early," she said. "The restock wasn't scheduled for another forty years."
"Restock?" Iriane's voice came out as a whisper. "What are you talking about? Who are you people?"
The woman smiled, and it was the smile of someone delivering news they'd rehearsed many times. "We're the same as you. The same as everyone. We're the backup copies. And you, pilot—you're about to learn what your species really is."
