Pain was the first anchor. It was a white-hot spike driven through his leg, pinning him to the wreckage of the comms room and to the horrifying, sharp-edged reality of the last few hours. Captain Ivan Petrov opened his eyes. The blizzard still raged outside, a howling symphony of white noise, but inside the ruined K-7 station, the silence was absolute. It was the silence of a tomb.
He pushed himself up, gritting his teeth as a fresh wave of agony washed over him. His leg was a mangled ruin, trapped beneath a heavy bank of servers. But it was the cold that was truly strange. He was a man who had lived his life in the Arctic; he knew the feel of sub-zero temperatures. This was different. The cold wasn't just around him; it was in him. It was a deep, internal chill that seemed to emanate from his very bones, pushing back against the external frost.
With a roar of effort, he gripped the edge of the server bank. The moment his bare fingers touched the metal, a thick layer of feathery frost bloomed from his skin, racing across the surface in intricate, crystalline patterns.
He stared at it, not in wonder, but in grim understanding. The power that had saved him was as alien as the monster that had attacked.
He freed his leg. The wound was horrific, but the bleeding was sluggish, the edges of the torn flesh strangely pale and numb, as if the cold within him was fighting the injury. He made a crude splint from a length of conduit and a ripped electrical cable, his movements methodical, detached. Grief was a luxury he couldn't afford yet. First, there was work to be done.
He limped through the station, a ghost in his own life. The mess hall, where he'd shared vodka and laughter with Dmitri just yesterday, was a crater of twisted metal. He found Dmitri's body near the shattered wall, and gently took the dog tags from around his neck. In the generator room, he found Anya, her bright, scientific mind silenced forever. He retrieved her tags as well.
He gathered them one by one, the small metal plates cold against his palm. Each one was a fresh stab of guilt. He was the Captain. They were his responsibility. He had failed them.
He stood in the station's main airlock, the wind screaming through the buckled outer door. He had a rifle, a flare gun, and a handful of energy bars. It was a fool's errand. He was one wounded man against a creature of myth and nightmare. He should stay put, try to repair the emergency beacon, and wait for a rescue that might never come.
He looked down at the dog tags in his hand. Dmitri. Anya. Mikhail. Lena. His crew. His family.
The grief he had held at bay finally broke through, but it was not hot with tears. It was a cold, hard, perfect rage. The air around him dropped another ten degrees. The moisture in his breath didn't just mist; it fell to the floor in a shower of tiny ice crystals.
He was no longer Ivan Petrov, scientist and researcher. The mammoth had killed that man. What was left was something else. A vessel of grief and vengeance, filled with an impossible, arctic power. He pulled on his parka, the dog tags clinking softly as he tucked them inside his jacket, placing them over his heart. Then, he stepped out into the storm, not to survive, but to hunt.