The image of the frozen corpse stayed on the screen for exactly four seconds before Jo shut it down. Not out of shock—Alex had seen her stare at core samples for hours without blinking—but out of operational necessity. The thermal camera feed was drawing power from a battery backup that was already strained. Every frame of ghostly infrared footage cost them watt-hours they couldn't spare.
"We need to wake Voss," Jo said. Her voice was steady, but her fingers trembled slightly as she powered down the display.
Alex didn't move. He was still staring at the dark screen, tracing the afterimage of that insignia in his mind. The stylized wolf's head. He'd seen it before, years ago, on a news feed in a cramped barracks rec room. The anchor had been narrating footage of a mass grave being exhumed in a village called Kestria, a name that meant nothing to him then and everything to him now. The camera had lingered on a sleeve, torn and bloodied, bearing that same symbol. Viktor Karst's calling card.
"Alex."
He blinked. Jo was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read.
"Voss," she repeated. "And Ida. They need to know."
"Yeah." He forced himself to stand. "Get the image saved to a local drive. Encrypt it. Don't send it over the main network."
Jo raised an eyebrow. "You think someone's going to hack our corpses?"
"I think we're twelve people in a sealed tube with no way out. I think we just found a dead soldier from a war that tore an entire region apart. And I think someone on this station knows more than they're saying."
The words hung in the cold air between them. Jo didn't argue. She pulled a ruggedized external drive from a drawer and began copying the file.
Alex found Voss in the geology lab, hunched over a microscope with a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. The lab was Voss's domain, a cluttered sanctuary of rock samples, thin-section slides, and geological maps pinned to every available surface. The man himself looked unruffled, as if the icequake had been a minor inconvenience rather than a potentially catastrophic event. He didn't look up when Alex entered.
"Mercer. Tell me you've got good news about the generator."
"The generator's fine." Alex closed the door behind him. "We found something."
Something in his tone made Voss lift his head. His eyes were pale blue, almost colorless in the harsh fluorescent light. They studied Alex with an intensity that felt slightly invasive, like a doctor palpating a wound.
"Go on."
"The icequake opened a crevasse near the runway. The external thermal cameras picked up something in the exposed ice." Alex paused. "A body."
Voss's expression didn't change. He set down his pen with deliberate care. "A body."
"Frozen. Probably been there for years. Wearing a military uniform."
"Military?"
"Paramilitary." Alex pulled out his tablet and opened the encrypted file Jo had sent. He turned the screen toward Voss. "Lysian Civil War. Viktor Karst's militia."
The silence that followed was dense and strange. Voss stared at the image, his face unreadable. When he finally spoke, his voice was measured, academic. "The Lysian conflict was over a decade ago. If that body has been in the ice that long, it predates the station by at least five years."
"That's what Jo said."
"Then it's a historical find, not an active threat. We'll document it, preserve it if we can, and hand it over to the appropriate authorities when we're extracted." He turned back to his microscope. "There's nothing to be alarmed about."
Alex felt a flicker of irritation. "Elias, we found a murdered soldier from a war crimes investigation buried in the ice directly beneath our station. That's not just a historical find. That's evidence."
"Evidence of what, exactly?"
"I don't know yet. But the insignia—"
"Is a piece of cloth." Voss looked up again, and this time there was a hardness in his eyes that Alex had never seen before. "I understand you're on edge. We all are. The quake, the isolation, the communications failure. It's a stressful situation. But we can't afford to indulge in paranoia. We have twelve people to keep alive, and that means focusing on practical problems, not playing detective with a decade-old corpse."
Alex opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. Voss wasn't wrong about the practical problems. The station's systems needed maintenance. Supplies needed inventory. The backup communications array needed to be aligned manually if they had any hope of reaching the outside world. A frozen body, however disturbing, wasn't going to kill them. A failed CO2 scrubber would.
"Fine," he said. "But I want Ida to examine the remains. If there's anything that might identify the victim—"
"Of course." Voss's tone softened, the warmth returning as quickly as it had vanished. "We'll do this properly. Document everything. When we get back to civilization, we'll make sure the right people know what we found."
It was reasonable. It was perfectly reasonable. And yet as Alex left the lab, he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just been expertly managed.
The station stirred to uneasy life over the next few hours. Word of the discovery spread through the crew like a slow leak, impossible to contain. By breakfast, everyone knew. By lunch, everyone had an opinion.
Dr. Andreas Polzin, the station's atmospheric chemist and self-appointed expert on everything, held court in the mess hall with the confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own conclusions. He was a wiry, nervous figure with a perpetual squint and a habit of tapping his fingers on surfaces as if transmitting Morse code.
"The Lysian War was a black hole," he announced, gesturing with a fork. "Nobody really won. The Aurelian Federation brokered a peace that fell apart three times before it stuck. Karst was indicted by the International Tribunal in Novigrad, but he vanished. Just disappeared. Rumor was he had his face reconstructed by a black-market surgeon."
"Rumor," Alex said from across the table. "Or fact?"
Polzin shrugged. "Does it matter? The man's probably dead. Buried in an unmarked grave somewhere, if there's any justice."
Jo looked up from her plate. "What about his militia? The people who served under him?"
"Most of them were killed or captured after the siege of Varna Gap. It was a slaughter. The Aurelian peacekeepers boxed them in and cut off their escape routes. Karst abandoned his own men and fled." Polzin's expression darkened. "The survivors were tried in Novigrad. A few got life sentences. Most were released after the amnesty in '14."
"Amnesty?" Ida's voice was sharp. She had entered the mess hall silently and was standing near the doorway, her coffee mug forgotten in her hand. "There was no amnesty for war crimes. The Tribunal made that clear."
"The Tribunal's jurisdiction was limited," Polzin said. "Low-level fighters, conscripts, people who could prove they were coerced. They got clemency. It was part of the reconciliation process."
"Reconciliation." Ida said the word like it tasted of something sour. "I worked in a refugee camp outside Novigrad in '13. I treated children with shrapnel wounds and phosphorus burns. There is no reconciliation for that."
The mess hall fell silent. Ida rarely spoke about her past, and the rawness in her voice was jarring. She set down her mug with a deliberate click and turned to Alex.
"I want to see the body. If there are identifying marks, I can cross-reference them with the Tribunal's public database. It's not complete, but it's something."
Alex nodded. "I'll take you out there."
"Not alone," Voss interjected. He had appeared in the doorway behind Ida, his timing impeccable. "The crevasse is unstable. The ice could shift again. We go in pairs or not at all." He looked at Alex. "You and Jo. Ida and I will follow once you've secured the site."
It was a sensible safety protocol. It was also, Alex noted, a way to ensure that no one examined the body without Voss present.
They assembled their gear in the equipment bay: insulated suits with active heating elements, full-face masks with integrated night vision, and crampons for the treacherous surface. The temperature outside had dropped to minus sixty-one, cold enough to freeze exposed skin in seconds. Alex triple-checked everyone's seals before allowing the airlock to cycle.
The polar night swallowed them instantly. The darkness was absolute, a velvet void that seemed to press against Alex's visor like a physical thing. His headlamp cut a narrow cone through the blackness, illuminating a world of wind-sculpted ice and drifting snow. The station lights dwindled behind them, a diminishing cluster of amber beacons.
The crevasse was a wound in the ice, its edges sharp and crystalline. Jo led the way, her gait confident despite the treacherous footing. She had spent more time on the ice shelf than anyone, and it showed in the economical precision of her movements.
"There," she said, pointing.
The body was visible from the edge, half-embedded in the crevasse wall about three meters below the surface. The ice around it was cloudy, fractured by the quake, but the corpse itself was remarkably preserved. Alex could make out the dark fabric of the uniform, the dull gleam of metal buttons, the pale waxy skin of the face.
"It's a male," Ida said, kneeling at the edge. "Mid-thirties, based on the bone structure. The uniform suggests an officer rank—see the braiding on the sleeve? That's not standard issue for conscripts."
Alex lowered himself into the crevasse on a rope harness, his crampons biting into the ice. Up close, the body was both more and less human than he'd expected. The cold had mummified it, drawing moisture from the tissues until the skin had the texture of old leather. The expression was peaceful, almost serene. But there were wounds—two small entry holes in the chest, perfectly circular, surrounded by dark discoloration that had to be frozen blood.
"Gunshot," Alex said. "Close range. Execution-style."
He forced himself to look at the face. It was a face like any other: a straight nose, a strong jaw, a faint scar above the left eyebrow. There was nothing monstrous about it. And yet that was almost more disturbing—the ordinariness of a dead man in a uniform that represented atrocity.
"Check the pockets," Ida called down. "If he has identification, it'll be in a waterproof pouch. Standard practice for winter operations."
Alex's gloved fingers were clumsy, but he found the pouch inside the man's jacket. It was a small, flat container made of waxed canvas, sealed with a snap that had frozen solid. He pried it open.
Inside was a metal disc. An identity tag, military issue. The engraving was faint but legible.
"Mikhail Orlov," Alex read aloud. "Lieutenant, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion."
Above the name was the same insignia from the uniform sleeve. The stylized wolf's head.
"Orlov," Ida repeated. There was a tremor in her voice that Alex had never heard before. "I know that name. He was one of Karst's inner circle. The Tribunal indicted him for crimes against humanity—targeting civilian infrastructure, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances. He vanished the same time Karst did."
"So he wasn't a victim," Jo said quietly. "He was a perpetrator."
"Someone executed him," Alex said. "Someone caught up with him and put two bullets in his chest and buried him in the ice. Which means—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
If Mikhail Orlov was buried here, someone had put him here. And if that someone had been covering their tracks for over a decade, they would do almost anything to keep their secret buried.
The wind howled across the ice shelf, and Alex felt the cold press against him like a warning.
Voss's voice crackled over the radio. "Mercer, report. What did you find?"
Alex looked at the identity tag in his hand. He thought about the expression on Lena's face during the quake. He thought about Voss's measured calm, his careful management of the situation, his insistence on being present for every step of the investigation.
"Nothing definitive," he said into the radio. "Just a name. We'll need to run it through the database back at the station."
There was a pause. Then Voss's voice returned, smooth and untroubled. "Understood. Secure the site and return. We'll debrief in the control room."
Alex slipped the identity disc into his pocket. He would run the database search himself. He would do it quietly, without Voss looking over his shoulder. Because there was one thing Alex knew with absolute certainty, one fact that had crystallized in his mind like ice forming on a cold window.
There were twelve people on Ishtar Station. One of them had shot Mikhail Orlov in the chest and buried him beneath the glacier. And whoever that person was, they were about to learn that the past doesn't stay frozen forever.
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