A review in Publishers Weekly criticized the "Sluggish prose and overload of technical detail", but admired the book's conclusion as properly thrilling.

Working alongside the psychiatrist Dr. Roger Corbett and the chief military doctor Michele Bishop, Crane is witness to one of these incidents; a worker named Randall Waite suddenly grabs a hostage after screaming about "voices" in his head, then eventually stabs himself in the neck with a screwdriver.

After interviewing some of the patients there, and finding many of the symptoms including sleeplessness, lack of focus, nausea, and psychological effects such as changes in personality, Crane realizes that there must be some kind of unifying basis to all of them.

The officers determine it was an act of sabotage and Asher reminds all of the heads of departments to be vigilant, while Korolis brings in a team of black ops soldiers, who answer directly to him rather than Spartan, to reinforce security.

[4] Asher also shows Crane several "sentinels" that they have found: cube-shaped objects with a texture that seems to consist of every color known to man, and emit thin beams of light straight up, and gravitate to the center of any room or container they are kept in.

Along with Ping, Crane does not realize what this means, but then figures out that they could possibly salvage the hard drive and look at the decoded messages from Asher's laptop.

He notices how Asher did not want to continue with the digging, and assumes that whatever is on the hard drive is not relevant and would halt America from recovering possibly beneficial technology.

Despite this, Ping manages to resurrect the data using a crude form of magnetic force microscopy, and as they peer onto the screen they realize that the other messages included

Bishop promises to call him back but is discovered by Dr. Corbett an hour later in the Environmental Control section, wiring C-4 into the facility's wall.

The survivors manage to launch the escape pod shortly before Korolis and his men discover a fantastic weapons cache of stable orbiting black holes.

Crane reasons that whoever put the sentinels there were also cautious enough to provide obvious warning signals, as evident by the impossible mathematic equations.

However, McPherson raises two disturbing points: The aliens more than likely consider humans to be negligible due to their primitive technology, hence the violent placing of the devices in the earth as recounted by Albarn 600 years ago; and also that humans at least deactivate weapons before storing them, but because the aliens did not attempt this at all, McPherson thinks that this is not a waste dump at all; it is an active storage facility of weapons for future use.

The team consists of five scientists from the university - Evan Marshall, a paleoecologist; Gerard Sully, a climatologist and the team leader; Wright Faraday, an evolutionary biologist; Ang Chen, a graduate student; and Penny Barbour, a computer scientist - along with the skeleton crew of four soldiers - Corporal Marcelin, Privates First Class Tad Phillips and Donovan Fluke, and the leader, Sergeant Paul Gonzalez.

Specific warnings are that the entire mountain it was found in is a place of evil, the creature exists only for the sole purpose of killing, and that the Tunit do not believe it is dead.

When a production assistant named Josh Peters, Davis, and Fluke are all suddenly and brutally killed, along with Toussaint and Brianna being wounded, Gonzalez decides that the base has to be evacuated immediately.

Everyone boards the trailer and flees, leaving behind only the three remaining soldiers, Marshall, Logan, Ekberg, Sully, Conti, Wolff, Faraday, and Creel.

Usuguk calls it the kurrshuq (the "Fang of the Gods" and the "Devourer of Souls"), a local legend among the Tunit people for generations, and shocks everyone by explaining that the creature, upon thawing out and coming alive, was actually quiet friendly and playful.

However, only after one scientist attempted to study its hunting habits by playing recordings of animal screams, did the creature suddenly turn violent and kill all except Usuguk.

He then reveals one final, chilling detail: The kurrshuq that killed the team in 1958, before it also suddenly died and its body vanished, was no bigger than an Arctic fox; far smaller than this creature.

Marshall then speculates, after comparing all of the victims and the unusually distinct shape of the creature's ears, that the kurrshuq has extremely sensitive, sonar-like hearing, like a bat.

Using this information, Marshall and Sully begin to construct a machine out of sonar technology to emit loud sounds that might be enough to ward off the creature.

Marshall, realizing that it was finally working, starts dragging the machine into a large echo chamber in order to amplify the sounds even greater.

In the epilogue, as the remaining crew members - Marshall, Logan, Ekberg, Faraday, Gonzalez, and Phillips - are being evacuated, the scientists are still baffled by the nature of the creature, as its corpse had suddenly disappeared after it supposedly died.

Logan cryptically mentions how he once lost a pet dachshund while on a family trip, implying that he believes the creature was left behind by extraterrestrial visitors.

A budding relationship between Marshall and Ekberg is hinted at, and Logan bids them farewell, saying that he's gotten a call from his private investigation office about another interesting case.

Shortly after the events of Terminal Freeze, Dr. Jeremy Logan is contacted by an old colleague named Dr. Ethan Rush, who invites him on an expedition into the Sudd in southern Egypt.

Also accompanying the expedition is Rush's wife Jennifer, who has been maintaining a special connection to "the other side" after a near-death experience where she technically died in a car crash, but was revived by her husband.

Shortly after this discovery, Jennifer is fully possessed by the spirit of Niethotep once more, which then sabotages the ventilation system on the base and starts a fire in the engine room.

Valentino orders an evacuation of the Station, with most personnel taking as much treasure with them as possible, and escapes in one of the rafts along with Stone, Romero, and Landau.

A review by Anthony Schultz praised the introductory chapter, but felt the middle of the novel was disappointing, with too much fruitless investigation by Logan before the answers start finally being revealed toward the very end of the book.