The Thaw
The permafrost had been retreating for decades, but it was Dr. Anya Kuznetsova who noticed the signal. Not a radio signal — the frequency was too low for conventional equipment — but a thermal signature, a pattern of heat beneath the frozen ground that pulsed with a regularity too precise to be geological. Her research station, a cluster of prefabricated modules on the Yamal Peninsula, had been monitoring permafrost degradation for three years, cataloguing the methane releases and carbon deposits that the thaw exposed like wounds in the earth. The thermal anomaly appeared in her data on a Monday in October, when the first hard frost should have been deepening the freeze instead of revealing something warm beneath it.
She brought the data to her colleague, Dr. Pavel Orlov, who was a geophysicist and a pessimist and who looked at the thermal signature with the expression of a man who has been expecting bad news and is almost relieved when it arrives. The heat source was deep — two hundred metres below the surface, well within the permafrost layer that had been frozen continuously for forty thousand years. Nothing should have been generating heat at that depth. The permafrost was a tomb, a frozen record of everything that had been buried when the ice advanced — pollen, bones, bacteria, the preserved remains of ecosystems that had not existed since the Pleistocene. It was not