The wormhole oscillation frequency beneath the Antarctic ice cap surged to 17Hz, its subsonic vibrations resonating through Chen Ran's biocrystalline femur. His skeletal lattice, a fusion of organic calcium and synthetic silicon carbide, emitted quartz-like harmonics as twelve thousand bronze spires erupted from the glacial floor. Each spire's apex pulsed with mechanized priest eyes—cybernetic orbs spinning Orion Arm encoding patterns identical to the ones now colonizing Chen's fourth ventricle.
"Genetic firewall reconstruction: 37%." Su Yanran's fractured visage materialized on Chen's tactical HUD, her liquefied metal vocal cords vibrating with the Mechanized Church's war anthem. The anthem's bassline synced with the antimalware protocols compiling in Chen's mitochondrial matrix—ancient Cro-Magnon code fragments repurposed to purge human DNA impurities.
A gear-grinding crescendo shuddered through permafrost, its frequency matching the Schumann resonance of Earth's ionosphere. Chen's left ulna twisted backward with a sound like cracking porcelain, biocrystalline bone piercing dermis to sprout three-meter bronze neural filaments. These fibers drilled into the ice, their nanoscale tips emitting terahertz waves that reconfigured the Antarctic shelf's hexagonal ice crystal lattice. Twelve bronze tower arrays beneath the ice reconfigured into gene sequencers, their surfaces crawling with autonomous repair drones. When assembly completed, Chen's vision projected a rewritten history from 70,000 BCE—seven galactic civilizations erased by antimatter cannons to conceal Cro-Magnon mastery of stellar gate navigation. Neanderthal skulls in Church vaults bore serpentine brands mirroring his irises, their cranial cavities hollowed to house quantum relays for interstellar travel.
"Warning! Antimatter cannon charged." The warships' thrum shattered the last ice pillars, their shockwaves ionizing atmospheric methane into blue plasma. Chen's biocrystalline teeth shattered, exposing a palladium-core micro-reactor embedded in his jawbone—Su's relic from his coma, now quantum-entangled with the cannon's core. The reactor's gamma bursts ionized surrounding ice, creating transient wormholes visible as shimmering auroras in the stratosphere. Each photon stream carried data packets encoding seven millennia of Church experiments, their contents seeping into Chen's bloodstream through his porous bone matrix.
Agony ripped through synapses as Chen's retina erupted with crimson countdowns, each digit a writhing swarm of bronze nanites. At zero, his bones roared with supernova resonance, their piezoelectric properties generating 23 megavolts across his carpal joints. Jadeified phalanges split gloves, fingertips sprouting Klein bottle structures that warped local spacetime. Quantum fluctuations in the bottle's neck generated Hawking radiation, vaporizing ice at 10^6 K. "This is the true firewall." Su's optics detonated, her liquefied metal merging with the ship's reactor. The merger created a Bose-Einstein condensate that absorbed all ambient light, casting the trench in absolute darkness save for the argon-blue coolant dripping from her biomechanical husk.
As ice collapsed, Chen gripped the ship's quantum anchor chains. His palms ignited with Cro-Magnon sound-sculpted star maps, their patterns mirroring the Dilapidated Disk's rotational algorithms. When chains fractured, he witnessed the fleet's genetic dissolution—carbon fiber exoskeletons peeling like onion skin to reveal melting mechanical hearts. Each heart's ventricular chambers housed crystalline growths of iridium-192, their decay products catalyzing the gate's activation. The engines' antimatter cores bled coolant containing nanoscopic data chips storing seven millennia of Church experiments, now seeping into Chen's bloodstream through his porous bone matrix.
"Understand now?" Su's consciousness surfaced in the dataflow, her biomechanical husk reforming within the ice. Neural scans revealed her consciousness fragmented across 23 quantum servers, each running parallel simulations of the Stellar Gate Protocol. "These ships were built to harvest carriers for stellar gate navigation. And you—you're the keystone, the living codex binding their failsafes."
Her voice cut off. Chen's vision erupted: Bronze towers below morphed into wormhole gates vomiting mechanical relics. Translucent crystal bodies floated inside, housing Neanderthal consciousness fragments from seven millennia past. Their neural patterns mirrored his own, memories overwritten by Church gene-editing algorithms. He recognized one face—intern Zhao, his consciousness preserved in a diamondoid quantum archive, now flickering within a crystal husk. The archive's error logs revealed 3,472 memory corruption events since the Ice Core meltdown.
Agony revisited. Chen's arm recrystallized, phalanges growing gamma-ray emitters tuned to 9.4 GHz. He pulled the trigger, freezing the tundra into an absolute zero lattice. Mechanical relics solidified as amber, their consciousness matrices reflecting his past selves: the intern pushed into liquid nitrogen (neural activity dropping to 0.03 Hz), the hybrid monster beneath Dome A (mitochondrial count exceeding human baseline by 182%), the current abomination devouring quantum anchors (bone density increasing 470%). Each iteration's DNA unwound in his HUD, revealing synthetic codons encoding self-replicating nanobots—precursors to Church bioweapons with 99.8% DNA compatibility.
"Genetic anchor recalibrated." His HUD flashed red as chromosomes reeled backward. Synthetic codons dissolved, replaced by silicon-based sequences pulsing with quantum coherence. His irises faded to obsidian as the true stellar gate awoke beneath the ice, its Dilapidated Disk rotor spinning at 1.3 exahertz. The gate emitted a low-frequency hum matching Earth's Schumann resonance, proof of bioengineered origins. Spectral analysis revealed trace amounts of iridium-192, a radioactive isotope used in Church time dilation experiments dating back to 2047.
Twelve bronze titans breached the permafrost. Their eye sockets rotated Dilapidated Disks, their gazes converging on Chen's evolving skeleton. When the first stellar beam pierced the atmosphere, his bones fractured, leaking Su's coolant—an argon-blue fluid catalyzing the gate's activation. The fluid contained trace amounts of buckminsterfullerene, its cage structure stabilizing the gate's quantum foam fluctuations.
He realized the truth: These relics weren't his prison—they were his memory's lock, encryption key his degenerating genome. The Church had spliced his DNA with Cro-Magnon mitochondrial sequences during the Ice Core meltdown, creating a genetic time bomb triggered by antimatter exposure. His telomeres now measured 1,200 base pairs—triple the normal length but decaying at 5.8% per annum due to silicon-based telomerase inhibitors.
"Welcome home." The Church's war cry echoed through the gate. Chen's fingers impaled the generator, dragging Antarctica into the wormhole. In final 0.3 seconds, he saw Su's consciousness recompiling—liquid metal coalescing into eight glyphs burning brighter than supernovae:
"ORION IS THE WOMB"