One of the Arctic cyclones that habitually scour the bleak and inhospitable islands of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago at this time of year was in full howl, its winds shrieking across the face of the Karpinsky Ice Cap. For a few years, back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the government had maintained a meteorological station on another of the island's glaciers, the Vavilov; but that was a long time ago, and today, October Revolution Island was devoid of human life, as such a grim and frozen place should be.

Or, at least, it was supposed to be.

Two human figures, heavily muffled and cloaked, struggled across the face of the glacier, moving slowly but with great determination into the teeth of the gale. In the lead, the taller of the two figures pulled his heavy silver-grey cloak tighter about himself and kept grimly on, his eyes invisible behind the green-tinted lenses of his goggles. In his long and varied career, these were not the worst conditions under which the Silver Spectre had taken a stroll, but they were plenty bad enough to suit him.

His companion, bundled up so as to be all but unrecognizable, was a much younger superheroine who went by the crimefighting name of Stardust Ember. Normally she didn't have to remind herself sternly that being the partner of an eminent senior hero like the Silver Spectre was a great and singular honor, but then, normally she didn't try to function anywhere even remotely this cold and windy. Right now, keeping that honor in mind was almost as much of a struggle as moving forward against this awful wind.

It occurred to Ember to ask the Spectre if he was sure he knew where they were going, but one look at the grim set of his face - what little of it could be seen around his goggles and the heavy grey scarf he wore - dissuaded her. Something about this godforsaken place was obviously of huge importance to the man. Ember decided that the only loyal thing she could do right now was grit her teeth and keep slogging onward, trusting him to lead her somewhere warmer... or at least somewhere worth enduring all this cold.

After another hour of silent marching, they came to what appeared to be their destination. At first, Stardust Ember thought it was just a large boulder, fetched up amid many smaller ones in a scree at the foot of a lonely mountain that rose from a cleft in the glacier. Then, as the Silver Spectre examined it more closely and began to cautiously press at it here and there, she realized it was a concealed door. She'd seen things like it before, but never in a setting as remote and isolated as this.

The Silver Spectre continued his investigation of the door for a few moments longer, then satisfied himself as to its workings and gave part of it a decisive press with the heel of one hand. For a moment nothing happened. Then, with the protesting sound of long-neglected hidden workings, the rock ground sideways, revealing a dark passage into the living rock of the mountain.

Neither the Silver Spectre nor Stardust Ember had a light, but that didn't stop either of them from entering the passage. The Spectre's goggles had a night vision function that rendered his surroundings as clear as day. Ember's eyes naturally saw further into the darkness than a normal human's would - one of the many legacies of the alien energy being with which she lived in a perpetual, uneasy symbiosis.

Once they were a few yards into the passage, out of the reach of the screaming wind on the surface, Ember pulled aside her scarf, flopped back the hood of the cloak she wore, and asked,

"What is this place?"

Her voice sounded unnecessarily loud in the oppressive silence of the tunnel, startling her with its reverberating intensity. Spectre glanced back at her, then continued on, but his answer came back to her over his shoulder.

"It's a laboratory."

"A laboratory? Out here in the middle of nowhere?"

"The perfect place," the Spectre replied. After a few seconds it became clear that he wasn't going to elaborate, at least not right now.

As they pressed further into the darkness, the tunnel took a bend, shutting out the ever-dwindling dull grey rectangle of light that marked where they had entered. It also became smoother, more regular, with walls, floor, and ceiling clad in concrete - clearly an artificial installation, not a natural cave. Here and there, Stardust Ember could make out faded inscriptions painted on the walls in what looked like military stencils, but the letters were all completely unrecognizable. They might as well have been painted in Martian as far as she was concerned.

As the artificial nature of the passage became more apparent, apprehension began picking at Ember's heart. She had some personal knowledge of places like this - secret underground laboratories constructed for who knew what purpose - and the memories were not pleasant ones. Unconsciously, she found herself following the Silver Spectre more closely.

They had penetrated into the complex perhaps a thousand feet, taking four or five turns along the way (apparently the Spectre could read the strange inscriptions on the walls), when she began to notice the ice. At first it was as if there were veins of frost streaking the walls and floor, reaching out toward the exit from some invisible source deeper in the complex. As the two heroes delved, the frost tendrils became rivulets, then fingers, then whole frozen streams, as if a flood had tried to pour out of some central location and congealed as it flowed.

Eventually, they turned a corner and found the hallway almost completely choked with ice - strange, almost perfectly clear ice, so clear Ember would almost have taken it for glass, that had flowed around and burst the edges of an armored bulkhead door before setting into a rock-hard formation of sinuous, sharp-pointed shapes.

The Spectre turned to Ember. "Can you clear that?" he asked.

She sized up the ice-sealed doorway for a moment, then said, "I can try." Squaring off in front of it, she concentrated for a moment, gathering the energies of her alien symbiont, then raised her hands and unleased a blast of dark power. This energy, a weird cocktail of gravity and stranger forces for which men have no names, looked something like smoke and something like lightning, purple-edged blackness at which it was best not to look directly. Whatever it was, it did the job here, shattering the ice like the glass it resembled and sending the dismounted door crashing backward into the room behind it.

The Silver Spectre kept his cloak raised before his face until the ice shrapnel had stopped scattering around the hallway, then dropped it and slipped through the doorway. Stardust Ember followed him. In here, the gloom was so deep that neither the Spectre's goggles nor Ember's dark-adjusted eyes could penetrate very far, so the Spectre produced a white flare from under his cloak, struck it, and tossed it to the floor some distance in front of him. It clattered to the metal decking, rolled a few times, and came to rest against another large shelf of that peculiar glassine ice, its glow casting white light and sharp black shadows that revealed the scope of the room.

The room beyond the frozen door had clearly been the heart of this laboratory. It was a large, vaulted, cavernous chamber that resembled an aircraft hangar in its general size and shape. In the center stood the broken remains of what had been some kind of capsule or containment unit, a coffin-like glass tube about eight feet long, capped at either end with technological-looking apparatus. This was surrounded by a circular ring of consoles, all of them covered with old-fashioned knobs and dials, that gave the place the look of a space launch control center from some 1950s movie.

Stardust Ember shivered, this time not because of the cold. She vividly remembered a room not too unlike this, a ring of consoles not too different from that one...

... but what was that?

She looked more closely at the center of the room, and suddenly all thoughts of her ordeal at the hands of other scientists in another world vanished.

The tube in the center of the room was visible, but indistinct, and now that she looked more closely, Ember saw it wasn't just because of the poor lighting. It was inside, completely inside, a huge column of ice. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter, it reached fully from floor to ceiling, and at top and bottom it spread out as though it had flowed against both horizontal surfaces. On the ceiling, a thick crust of ice spread in a shape reminiscent of a mushroom cloud, reaching nearly to the edges of the room before drooping down in a jagged rim of fat icicles. On the floor the flow was smaller in diameter but taller, encompassing the ring of consoles and about ten feet beyond before cresting in a shape that brought to mind nothing so much as a frozen Hawaii Five-O surfer's wave.

That wasn't the really arresting part, though.

The really arresting part was the people trapped in the ice.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, all apparently men, all wearing lab coats and slacks. They were mostly grouped around the consoles, except for one who was standing front and center in the gap the console ring made right in front of the central tube. All were frozen in positions that spoke of sudden terror, so sudden that its full extent was unfathomed before the ice swept over them and extinguished everything - hands thrown up, bodies recoiling. One had dropped a clipboard, and it hadn't had time to fall more than halfway to the floor.

For a moment Ember entertained the idea that they might be alive, like the people caught in the temporary ice blocks one of Spectre's comrades in the Justice Guild could create... but closer examination put paid to that idea. The bodies caught in the ice were desiccated, mummified. Freeze-dried by what had to be long entombment, if the antique-looking consoles were anything to go by.

All but one.

Spectre picked up the flare and, holding it aloft like a torch, picked his way over the outlying tentacles of ice until he stood near the edge of the frozen wave, looking up at the central column. As Ember made her way to his side, she realized there was another figure here, frozen in the ice at the very center of the column, surrounded by the shards of the containment tube. The ice gave the illusion that it had literally frozen time, capturing a snapshot of a split-second: a man, his head thrown back, an expression of anguish on his face, his upper arms at his sides and clenched fists outstretched, the tube he had been sealed in exploding around him as something burst forth from within his tortured body.

With a sudden shock, Ember realized that the man in the center, whoever he was, wasn't withered and cadaverous like the scientists who surrounded him. His clothing was much more colorful than theirs - in the dim light, through the bluish tint of the ice, she couldn't be sure, but she thought it was mostly green, with a red star emblazoned boldly against what appeared to be a white shield design on his chest. His face was half-masked, but his cheeks and eyes were not sunken, his square jawline was firm and intact. He even had stubble. He really did look like a snapshot, one of a living man. She wouldn't have been entirely surprised to see him breathe, though of course he didn't. He did nothing at all.

"Who... who is he?" she asked.

The Silver Spectre regarded the entombed shape for a few moments, then dropped the burning flare at his feet, stepped back a couple of paces, and turned to face his young partner.

"His name is Alexei Kovalov," he said. "He was called the Siberian Shield. He was one of the Soviet Union's super-soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. That's what the Russians called World War II." Turning back to face the ice, the elder hero went on, "He was the best of them. We were allies back then, America and the Russians. We didn't like each other much, politically, but we had to team up to stop Hitler." He sighed. "Alex wasn't political. All he cared about was protecting his homeland. His people. I liked his attitude. We were friends."

The Silver Spectre seemed to consider whether to go on for a few moments, then said, "Near the end of the war, the Shield disappeared. A few of us who worked with him - me, Sarge Victory, a couple of the guys from Company 13 - we looked for him, but... well, to say that things were chaotic then would be putting it mildly. And things went sour with the Russians almost the minute the war was over. Once the Iron Curtain came down, we never had the chance to look for him, never had any idea what had happened to him."

"Until that old man came to visit you last month," Stardust Ember said, blinking as several previously unconnected facts snapped together in her mind.

The Spectre nodded. "He told me he'd been part of Project Redstar, the secret military project that gave Alex and a couple of his comrades their super-powers. That it was shut down after the war by the GRU - military intelligence - and everybody who worked on it was sent to the gulag by order of Stalin." He looked around. "And that this base was here, and I might find something of interest to me inside."

Ember snorted. "Russians apparently have a gift for understatement," she remarked, but the Spectre was in no mood to respond to quipsmanship. He just stood, arms folded, regarding the column of ice, for several long, silent minutes.

Finally, unable to stand the silence any longer, Ember asked, "So... now what do we do?"

The Silver Spectre reached into his cloak and produced a compact blowtorch from a hidden compartment.

"Now we get him out of there," he said.

It was a long, arduous process. Rather than attempt to thaw the frozen hero on the spot, the Silver Spectre and his young partner carefully cut him from the column, still enclosed in a block of ice. Maneuvering this unwieldy, several-hundred-pound object out of the hidden base and back to the spot where the Silver Spectre had stashed the Spectrejet took them the better part of four hours, though at least the wind had abated somewhat. Then they flew back to Paragon City, Ember nervously keeping watch over the block in the cargo hold the whole time.

"Well," said the radsuited figure of Professor Neutrino thoughtfully, "his body has thawed without any of the usual catastrophic cell failure one would expect to see, and he's in normal hibernation. I would guess that there's nothing to prevent him from returning to normal function if I give him the usual treatment."

The Silver Spectre nodded. Neutrino didn't wear the radsuit to protect himself from radiation; rather, he wore it to protect those around him from the radiation his own body constantly poured out. The Spectre knew from experience that one of the uses to which the Professor could put that energy, if he wanted, was to repair harm to those around him, even to the point of dragging them back from the edge of death. It was a hell of a handy trick, one for which the Spectre had had reason to be grateful many times.

"What about his powers?" Stardust Ember asked. "Something froze that secret Russian lab solid, and every indication was that it was him."

Neutrino nodded. "Yes, the genomic alterations that gave him his powers were somewhat unstable, and from what I was able to piece together, it looks like someone in that lab - possibly in an attempt to stabilize the situation - accidentally unbalanced the whole system instead. Our understanding of how these things work is much more advanced nowadays. Or at least mine is," he added with a slightly apologetic shrug for the boast. "I believe I've been able to correct the problem." Dryly, he added, "He won't be filling the Guildhall with ice involuntarily. However," he went on, his tone becoming a bit more cautious, "I can't speak for his mental state. All indications are that he was trapped in that ice for more than 60 years. Even in a state of coma, that kind of experience can do strange things to the mind."

"If Stalingrad couldn't unhinge Alex, being frozen for a few years isn't going to do it," the Spectre said positively. "Wake him."

"If you're sure," Professor Neutrino replied. "Very well, stand back, please." Neutrino stepped to the edge of the medical table on which the thawed but inert form of the Siberian Shield lay, considered the unconscious hero for a moment, then raised his hands. Greenish-yellow energy surrounded them both as, with an unearthly noise, Neutrino's inner radiations poured through carefully controlled vents in his containment suit.

The nimbus of energy surrounded the Siberian Shield and lifted him from the table into an upright position. He stirred, then stretched, his pose for a moment reminding Stardust Ember uncannily of the position she and the Spectre had found him in.

Then, as the energy corona faded away, he settled to the floor, raised his head, and opened his eyes. They were blue, Ember noticed - the palest blue she'd ever seen, almost a dead match for the glass-like blue ice they'd found him entombed in.

"Chto... " he muttered, shaking his head. Then, recognizing the Silver Spectre, he switched to English with no trace of an accent. "Adam! You... you're alive. I thought I saw you... " He shook his head again, putting a gloved hand to his forehead for a moment. "... But I couldn't be sure it wasn't just more of my endless frozen dream."

The Silver Spectre took off his slouch hat, pushed his goggles up on his forehead, and pulled down his trademark scarf, revealing the face of his civilian self. Adam Banks wore a smile, but it was tinged with sadness.

"Alex," he said. "It's damn good to see you. How do you feel?"

"Tired... hungry. Alive." The Siberian Shield peeled back his own mask, letting it flop empty behind his neck. "Where am I?"

"Justice Guild Headquarters. Paragon City."

"The war - ?"

Banks nodded. "The war's over. Our side won. The Nazis were utterly beaten." With a very slight, very dark smile, he added, "The official story is that Hitler shot himself with the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army knocking on his front door." He gave Kovalov a serious look. "Do you remember anything about what happened to you?"

"I remember everything," Kovalov said flatly. "Shistavenko tried to kill me."

Banks blinked. "Doctor Shistavenko? The project head of Redstar? Why?"

"Because I was politically unreliable," Kovalov said with a bitter smile. "Shistavenko was an NKVD plant, and he knew of my hatred for Stalin. He must have been afraid of what I might do with my power after the Hitlerites were routed. When I went back to the Ice Palace for one of my periodic stabilizing treatments, he tampered with the formula. He thought it'd poison me." His bitter smile became wider and bitterer. "Instead, my powers went berserk. At least I got to see the look on Shistavenko's face as the ice overwhelmed him and his cronies." Kovalov went to a chair in the corner of the medbay and sat down, sighing.

"Thank you for rescuing me, my friend. I assume this means I can't go back to the Soviet Union now - except to do exactly what Shistavenko was afraid I'd do." He looked up at Banks. "Do you think I can convince your new president to let America's heroes help me free my country from the tyrant Stalin? I think Roosevelt would have, but I have no feeling for this new man, Truman."

Neutrino and Ember both glanced at Banks, who cleared his throat.

"Uh... yeah. About that, Alex. I'm afraid I have some... er... complicated news."

"The Secret of Severnaya Zemlya"
A City of Heroes Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Stardust Ember created by John Trussell
City of Heroes property of NCsoft