What experiments require such isolation that even fellow researchers cannot know? Why do the killer whales beach themselves screaming on moonless nights? What cargo do those submarines really carry through the frozen depths? Who keeps the lights burning in the basement when the station should be empty? What ancient thing stirs beneath the ice when the long winter darkness falls?
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I had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth
― Ernest Shackleton
Dr. Sarah Chen had volunteered for winter rotation despite protocol. Eight months alone at Outpost Meridian, officially conducting geological surveys while the others fled to civilization. The Army brass had been surprisingly accommodating about her request to stay.
The basement levels weren’t on any official blueprints.
She’d discovered them during her third week, following power cables that shouldn’t exist. Past the generator room, beyond the supply caches, steel steps descended into permafrost-carved chambers. Banks of monitoring equipment hummed in the control room, screens displaying sonar readings from the deep channel where submarines supposedly traveled.
But submarines didn’t move like that.
The armory held no conventional weapons—instead, rows of specialized harpoons, nets woven from unfamiliar materials, and tanks filled with luminescent compounds that hurt to observe directly. Research logs, stamped CLASSIFIED, detailed decades of observations: migration patterns, behavioral changes, anatomical anomalies in local cetacean populations.
The killer whales weren’t just passing through. They were fleeing.
Night fell earlier each day. The sonar operators who’d mysteriously remained behind worked in shifts, tracking something vast moving beneath the ice shelf. Their conversations stopped when Sarah approached, but she caught fragments—“breeding cycle,” “emergence phase,” “containment protocols.”
On the longest night, the screens went dark. Outside, she could hear the whales calling—not their familiar songs, but something desperate, pleading. The ice groaned, and through her frosted window, Sarah glimpsed immense tentacles breaching the surface, black against the aurora-lit sky.
The basement generators kicked in, flooding the depths with that terrible luminescence.
Whatever they’d been watching was finally watching back.
