An alien ship crashed into Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier 150,000 years ago and froze within the ice...until glacial melting thawed out its deadly inhabitants in the present day.

Kai and Jules Bevins, both professors of astrobiology at Caltech, are roused from their home and whisked away to the site where a special division of the army has taken charge. But not before something escaped through a breach in the hull.

Meanwhile, a pair of Alaska state troopers locate a missing Amazon driver fifteen miles away on the Juneau Icefield and trace his movements to a nearby village with a population of less than fifty. Arriving in town, they are greeted by the bodies of villagers who were killed in an impossible, horrific way.

Thousands of miles away, under a remote archaeological find in Pakistan, the Nine?a team of superbeings placed on Earth a million years ago by intergalactic colonizers that seeded our planet to create human life?are lifted from their long slumber. The kind of threat they've been waiting for has finally come.

The Nine find unexpected allies culled from the ancient history of their home world in the form of a teenage boy and godlike entity. All this leads to a confrontation on a volcanic island that will determine the fate of civilization, even as the Nine uncover the shattering truth behind their own tragic paths and learn of a much greater battle to come.

Will they be enough to stem the apocalyptic menace threatening all of mankind?