With these words begins Gideon Crew's latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on Earth. 5 years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, lead a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite-the largest ever discovered-from a remote island off the coast of South America. The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic waters and broke apart, sinking-along with its unique cargo-to the ocean floor. 108 crew members perished, and Eli was left paralyzed. But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space. Now, that lifeform has implanted itself in the sea bed 2 miles below the surface-and it's growing. If it is not destroyed, the plant will be doomed; there is only one hope, for Eli and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon's expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the "meteorite" has a mind of its own-and it has no intention of going quietly.