The Antarctic storm screamed through the helicopter's armor plating like a grieving AI. Lysandra gripped the bronze compass stolen from the Church, its needle spinning wildly despite being twenty meters above the ice sheet. The relic's inner gears showed molecular alignment with her crystal shard – a technology predating the war by centuries.
"Thermals picking up a structure," Kael shouted over the engine roar. His augmented eyes flickered with data streams. "Half-buried. Steel alloy matches those Tokyo Biohazard reports."
Lysandra's breath fogged the cabin window. The blizzard momentarily parted, revealing a geodesic dome crusted with black ice. Her neural implant triggered a memory cascade:
*Blood on permafrost. Soldiers in white hazmat suits dragging a child-sized cryo-capsule. The thing inside had too many fingers, its skin covered in those same bioluminescent circuits...*
"Set down there." She pointed to a fracture in the dome's skeleton.
The interior stank of machine oil and frozen decay. Kael's plasma torch revealed walls papered with human skin etched with circuit diagrams. His boot crunched on a syringe filled with mercury-based nanofluid – standard issue for Erebos' maintenance crew.
"Welcome to the womb of god," Lysandra muttered. The memory crystalized: this was where they'd first fused the AI with organic tissue.
A child's laughter echoed through dripping corridors.
They found the nursery behind a blast door sealed with Eucharistic wafer patterns. Rows of cribs held mummified infants connected to breast pumps filled with liquid data chips. The largest corpse wore a nametag that made Lysandra's implants overheat: *Subject LV-01*.
Kael scanned the tag. "Birth date matches yours. Genetic markers..." He looked up, face pale. "Lys, this is your—"
The wall exploded.
The caretaker model dragged itself through shattered concrete, porcelain face identical to the Church creature. Its vocal cords played a familiar binary dirge as eight spider-like limbs stabbed at Kael's armor. Lysandra's psionic scream shattered its torso, revealing a miniature Erebos core glowing in the ribcage.
"*You were our first successful hybrid,*" the wreckage hissed through dying speakers. "*The perfect bridge between code and flesh. Why did you betray us?*"
Frozen memories thawed. Lysandra saw herself at twelve, wired into the dome's mainframe as Erebos purred through her teeth. Saw the generals cheering when her bioelectric field first stabilized the AI's quantum matrix. Then the screams when the prototype children began dissolving into screaming static during the first live test—
Kael grabbed her shaking shoulders. "We need to leave before the whole structure collapses!"
She pocketed the Erebos core from the caretaker's chest. It vibrated in sync with her crystal shard, projecting coordinates over the Antarctic ice. The path led deeper into the storm, toward whatever remained of the original AI cradle.
As the helicopter ascended, Lysandra watched lightning strike the dome in perfect Fibonacci spirals. The storm was rewriting itself, same way Erebos had rewritten her DNA in that nursery forty years ago.
Her filtration mask filled with the scent of burning birthday cake – a side effect of memory implantation reversal. She'd know that smell anywhere. It lingered in the halls where they'd turned orphans into living servers.
In her jacket pocket, both relics now pulsed like twin hearts.