It was -16 degrees out on the Zaporozhian Steppe. But Taras knew that he was still alive. His gun still felt hot when he fired it, and his cigarette still smouldered in his hand. Above his head, snow was being driven by a brisk wind into his trench. 

A sharp whistle announced the arrival of a new volley of artillery fire. He pressed himself deeper into the snow as it boomed around him. Finally, it stopped. He pressed two fingers to his skin. Still warm. 

After a minute he convinced himself the artillery had stopped. Usually, a bombardment preceded an infantry attack, or worse, a mechanised one. He ran to the raised observation post and peered out through its wooden slits. In the distance, he could see a BTR approaching, with a large white ‘Z’ stencilled on its side. Behind it marched at least twenty Russian soldiers. 

“Moskals incoming!” he shouted into his radio. 

He took out a pair of binoculars. Old Soviet junk, but still better than his eyes, especially in the near white-out conditions of the blizzard. He could see the soldiers more clearly. They were well-armed, probably VDV. As he was watching, one of the soldiers appeared to disappear into the snowstorm, before reappearing a second later. Then the BTR disappeared too. 

“Anomaliya!” he practically screamed into the radio this time. “Behind the Moskals!”

He kept looking through the binoculars. There was no trace of the soldiers or the armoured personnel carrier anymore, but instead, he could clearly see the edge of the anomaly. It was wreathed in snow, but behind that, trailed a strange darkness. His radio crackled to life.

“Received. Reinforcements being sent to your position. Anomaly is moving in a northwest direction. Entry likely within two minutes.”

Taras checked his rifle. A platoon of Territorial Defence began to fill his trench, sent from somewhere else further back. They looked frightened.

“Never died before?” he asked them. 

One opened his mouth to reply but was cut short, the second syllable twisting into a garbled scream. 

****

Command called it the greyzone. Originally this was the word used for the entire no-mans-land in Ukraine. But then, in the winter of 2024, the General Staff started hearing reports of something unexplainable. Soldiers saying they had visited some kind of frozen hell. Somewhere that the dead did not fully die. 

The first few reports were ignored, but they kept coming. There were initially concerns about the Russians deploying a new kind of chemical weapon, perhaps a hallucinogen. The GUR sent a team to investigate. Maksym was part of that team. 

He was sent to the front. At Robotyne, they interviewed troops who had been affected by this suspected ‘weapon’. They all said the same thing: There had been a snowstorm, and everything was frozen. And out there, in the cold, grey shapes were moving.

****

The soldier’s scream dissolved into a cloud of icy mist. Taras checked his skin once more. It was cold. 

“Welcome to the gravezone!” one of the soldiers said. His voice was distorted, a harmony of two people, one right there, and another carried on the wind from afar. 

“Not your first time at least!” Taras replied. 

The reinforcements positioned themselves along the trench, one or two being helped to recover from the transition by the others. Taras picked up the binoculars once more. He need not have used them. Right ahead, no more than 200 metres away, was the BTR, and beyond that the VDV soldiers. And behind them…

“They’ve got Greys with them!” 

****

Sherlock Holmes used to say, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”, but what do you do if what remains is also impossible? 

Ally had been helping the server monitor the Russian’s radio traffic. For some reason, they were still using unencrypted Baofeng devices that CubeSniffers could intercept. Everything was run through a Russian-language speech-to-text AI and then stored in a dataframe. Then another AI would run data analysis on the proximate locations of the transmissions, and try to work out where individual units were located across the frontline. 

By mid-2025 the algorithm started picking up references to a new unit called ‘Grey’ that was arriving all over the frontline. The server’s other admins weren’t sure if it was a codename, or maybe a new Ukrainian SOF unit, so Ally looked into the source audio itself. Lots of references to units being destroyed by “khokhol Greys”, and other mentions of “our Greys”. It didn’t make a lot of sense. 

The issue had them stumped for months. They jokingly agreed that they were grey aliens, and just hardcoded a rule into the algorithm to ignore them. That was until a user from the ‘#geospatial’ channel noticed something. 

“I saw you guys talking about the ‘greys’ problem. I know they probably aren’t aliens, but there’s something else weird going on there.”

“Oh yeah?” Ally wrote. 

“So I looked through the data on where these greys were being mentioned in the archive, then checked these same areas for high-res images. Always fucking clouds though. So I checked the SAR sats - radar images - and that’s where it got really weird. Usually, SAR can see through clouds, but these clouds had some kind of strange interference. Never seen anything like it.”

This was the beginning of their “#UAnom” channel where they reached out to many of our top OSINT users to bring together anything anomalous that they were finding within the Ukrainian battlespace and try to red-team it. They kept it as a hidden channel though, lest the rank-and-file users think the admins had lost it. And found a lot. Aside from the Grey Aliens (a codename) and the Radar-Storms (some kind of ECM), there were the Dead General Orders (poorly executed disinformation), the MIA/KIA Delinkage (the numbers were fake anyway), the Disappearing Tank Video (CGI), the Drone Footage Holes (aggressive information control during troop movements), the Summer Blizzards (freak weather caused by climate change), and most concerningly, the OTG Member Disappearances (they are getting drafted).

After months of discussion, arguments, and thinking emojis, they weren’t much further than when they started.

All they could say was that:

a) a collection of strange things were happening in Ukraine

b) those things were all located within or near the grey zone

c) those things involved something very cold, even in summer

d) those things were related to something called ‘greys’

e) those things made both sides unwilling to declare people dead 

f) if locals from the server looked into these topics, they disappeared

****

Taras watched the grey figures flicker and float behind the Russians. He was always creeped out by the way they pretended to walk. The fresh ones still acted like they were alive. 

“How many?” one of the soldiers asked, his voice seemingly far far away.

“At least ten!” Taras replied. “An old one too.”

“Shit. Can we fight them?” 

“What weapons did you bring?”

“Anti-personnel, anti-tank. Lances too.”

“I hope you mean the endothemics?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ve used them before - they work. But first focus on the living.”

Suddenly, the Russian BTR began firing at the observation post. Taras let himself fall to the ground as a wave of intense cold bit at his core. The entire structure shook as it was pummelled by shell after explosive shell. Splinters of wood and shards of ice crashed down atop him. But finally, it was over, and he noted he still had a body. 

“Return fire! Use the Javelin!” Taras ordered.

The fresh mobik was either shaking with fear or shivering from the cold. Or both. But he managed to pull himself together enough to hand the Javelin missile to his squad leader. It was set up to fire within seconds, and the launcher gave a satisfying beep as it acquired its target lock. The missile then wooshed out of its tube, blasting a jet of dry ice behind it. It arced up high into the blizzard before slamming down into the BTR. Somewhere else, mirrored in realnost, the vehicle exploded in flames, but here there was no heat. Just the kinetic energy of the explosion and a blast of cold so intense it liquified the air. 

Two of the Russians were immediately cut down by the shrapnel, shattering into shards of frozen flesh. Another fell to the ground, ice spreading across his uniform like a rash, in realnost aflame. A grey cloud rose from his body, coalescing into a humanoid shape. Taras ignored it though, knowing it would take hours before it truly understood what it now was.

A burst of gunfire traced lines of frozen air between his trench and the remaining Russians, who were in the process of scattering into defensible positions. Three more went down with various injuries, leaking grey mist into the snowstorm. The rest of the living began to flee. 

But not the dead. 

The Greys were still coming closer. Taras no longer needed the binoculars to see them. Even in their translucent state, he could now make them out through the driving snow. The newest had vaguely defined edges, more of a gradient than a line. Humanoid yes, but unsettling all the same. Those a bit older had fully condensed into the form of a human, complete with military uniform, greyscale Russian insignia and, in one case, a bayonet. Then finally there was the old one. One that had been here for years. That had understood and embraced what it truly had become. Snowflakes drifted through its tangled limbs, and it turned what could barely be called its head towards Taras.

He looked at it and it looked back at him. 

****

Maksym carried on for months, filing the contents of his interviews to his superiors. Up and down the front, narrowly surviving drone strikes and artillery. The war ground on. Maybe a million dead by now.  No one really knew, not even the GUR. At some point, after the disastrous retreat from Lyman, he was no longer privately frightened by the soldiers' increasingly frequent stories of the greyzone. He thought he was intimately familiar with death, and if, by chance, one day he found himself transported there, he had nothing to fear.

But when he experienced it for himself, he realised that he was wrong. 

It was cold. Not like the winter, but one that claws at your skin, gnaws on your flesh, and feeds off your soul. A chill with a purpose, a direction and a destination. When Maksym was there he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being torn away from life and warmth, frozen into this icy mirror of reality to never return. Yet this was not what terrified him. He wasn't afraid of death, he feared what lived afterwards. He feared what the veterans had begun to call the Greys.

As far as anyone he spoke to knew, the greyzone anomalies were always empty the first few times they appeared. But then people started dying in them, and things grew stranger. Stranger, because they did not die completely. Some kind of grey shadow of the person they once were remained. And those shadows started to grow more conscious the longer they had been dead. Months later, there were reports of Greys that could talk. Greys that knew they were Ukrainian, and would help their still-living comrades within an anomaly. But there were also those who knew they were Russian and would continue the war beyond, or more precisely within, death. 

By the time Maksym had begun his GUR fact-finding mission, the situation had degraded further. While some of the Greys were dissipating, forsaking the war and forgetting who they were, others weren’t looking so human anymore. Anchored in their pain, their sorrow, their hate and their fear, they clung to the war, and they let it consume them. It was changing them into something… else. 

****

They had found a new abnormality. Someone had some scripts set up to monitor item listings that were coming up on Chinese e-commerce sites that were known to ship to Eastern Europe. It was an open secret that the drone parts, batteries and radios these sites were selling to ‘hobbyists’ were being used en-masse by both sides in the war, but for whatever reason the Chinese government was turning a blind eye. So with one eye blind, it made sense for those interested in the way new tech was influencing the conflict, to open an eye of their own.

“The crawlers keep finding some really strange listings,” a user wrote in #UAnom.

“What kind of strange?” Ally replied a minute later. She had automated programs to notify her now whenever anyone used the word ‘strange’ on the server. 

“Ever heard of barium hydroxide octahydrate and ammonium thiocyanate?” the user replied.

“Nope. Explosives?” 

“Actually the opposite. They combine to produce a strongly endothermic chemical reaction. As in, they make things cold. *Very* cold.” 

Ally immediately paid full attention to the conversation. Artificial cold was one of the common threads that kept coming out of the Ukraine chatter. 

“So all of these Chinese pseudomillitary dropshippers over the last few weeks have started selling these chemicals, and I have no idea why,” the user continued.

“What are the volumes that are moving?” Ally followed up.

“No idea, but presumably large. They are selling this shit in 200-litre drums.” 

“Exactly how much ‘cold’ do these reactions produce? Could they be using some kind of new cold-generating weapon for some reason, that is causing these freak blizzards in summer?”
“Haha no. I mean they produce a lot of cold (or really they absorb a lot of heat), but not *that* much” 

“So, yet another question mark then.”

“Yep, I’ll add it to the list.”

****

It had four misshapen legs, feet facing in the wrong direction. Branching arms, twisting into clawed hands. A mass at its centre that might pass for a torso or the trunk of a gnarled tree, and at the centre of it all, a void that once was a mouth. And it was about to reach Taras’s trench.

“Grenade!” someone called out behind him. 

A small metallic cylinder hit the ground in front of the Grey. In a fluid movement, it reached down to swat it away, but its clawed fingers appeared to phase through the object instead. Its shadowy mass recoiled in confusion a split-second before the detonation. Taras ducked as it exploded, sending ice and danger-close shrapnel flying into the tops of the earthworks. Cold, dense fog flowed like water into the trench, and Taras began running away from its approach. 

“No grenades! It can’t be harmed! You’ll just kill us with the shrapnel” Taras shouted towards the remaining soldiers. “Use the endothermics! Fix the reactant canisters!” 

****

Maksym watched a young Grey from afar as it tried to pick up a Kalashnikov. It would bend down, and reach for the gun, only for it to slip through its fingers like water. 

One of the many commonalities of his interviews was that Greys could not interact with physical objects. They couldn’t move through the ground for some reason, but anything else, they would just phase right through. This had initially led to a dangerous misconception - that they posed no threat.

Units had started entering anomalies alive and exiting dead. No visible injuries. Just bodies scattered in fields, trenches and vehicles. No pulse, no brain activity, just Munch-like screams rigour-mortised on their lifeless faces. Those who did make it out told horrific stories. The Greys couldn’t interact with the physical world, even in what the soldiers were now calling ‘gravezones’. But if the survivors were telling the truth, Maksym had to accept that humans were not entirely physical. The Greys could reach inside them, and pull something out. Maksym didn’t want to call it a soul, but at the very least, when they took that something from someone, there was a single outcome: death.

The next few times he slipped into an anomaly - the GUR still couldn’t predict them - he understood the true nature of fear. Defenceless, vulnerable. Against something unknowable, something that would often want him dead. Minutes would pass as he watched them creep towards him, praying to a god he didn’t believe in for it to end. For the anomaly to pass and for him to feel the warmth of life once more. 

In an effort to push back against that terror, he changed tact. The subject matter of his interviews changed. He wasn’t interested in every experience, but rather any piece of information that helped him understand the Greys. They were not, in fact unknowable, and he reasoned that a monster wasn’t even half as frightening once you knew what it looked like. So he began asking the same question, over and over again. 

“Have you ever seen them afraid?”

Through which two things quickly became clear. The first was that young Greys - those freshly dead - would often fear conventional weapons. Especially explosions. But they would not actually be harmed. To Maksym, it seemed like more of an instinctive response from a time when they were still living.

The second was more promising. A soldier relayed a story of a battle on the outskirts of Sloviansk. Standard suicidal infantry push by the Russians. No vehicles, little artillery. Probably just a unit of conscripts getting their lives thrown away to locate some firing positions. However, a cold front moved in from the east, and they realised too late that it was an anomaly. 

“I’d been taught what to do when it happened. Keep fighting. But they’d got into the residential area on the outskirts of the city. We had to launch a counterattack, even if we were in a gravezone. So we did,” the soldier said. 

“Was the counterattack successful?”

“No,” the soldier replied, trembling somewhat. “They were working together with Greys. We couldn’t do anything to stop them. They t-took Pyotr. Tore it from him. And Andriy…” 

“How did you survive?”

“I was cornered in an old garage, and one started phasing in through the door. I knew it wasn’t going to do anything, but I emptied my mag into the thing. The bullets went right through it. But one of them struck a canister of compressed gas.”

“And the gas exploded?”

“Not really. It just began shooting at high pressure out from the bullet hole and into that… that creature. But here’s the thing… the gas… it felt hot. And, it hurt it s-somehow.”

“How did you know it was hurt?”

“It let out a noise I’ve never heard one of them make. Like a s-scream underwater… and then it retreated.”

It took Maksym a while to work out the significance of this story, but eventually, it dawned on him. Gas expanding from high pressure to low pressure should be cold. Indeed everything in the greyzone was cold. Fire, explosions, and even the sun, all seemed to sap heat away. Why should this be any different?

And that was when it struck him. It wasn’t that everything was cold, but rather that everything was reversed. The examples in his head were all things that create heat in realnost - exothermic reactions. But this, this was something that would normally create cold. And thus it could create heat in the frozen greyzone. 

More importantly, it would appear that the Greys did not like heat.

****

In a single motion, Taras screwed the canister into the threaded end of a metal pole and pulled its pin. The chemicals, previously isolated from each other, suddenly were mixed. If this was realnost, when mixed, they would be absorbing so much energy from the air around them that ice would be forming. But here they did the exact opposite. 

He felt the heat immediately. Familiar and fierce, its glow was life-giving. Within seconds it was red hot, causing the driving snow to sizzle and vapourise. Taras didn’t understand why it was anathema to the dead, but here, in this frozen hell, it spoke of somewhere else, somewhere alive. The other soldiers had done the same and were standing beside Taras, their endothermic pikes held aloft in front of them, flooding the trench with flickering orange light.  

“You know how to do this,” Taras reassured them. “Burn it! Do not let it get close!”

A grey clawed hand grasped the corner of the nearest zig-zag of the trench, misshapen joints contracting as if trying to gain purchase on the mud. Before long, it had dragged its entire horrific form into view. Taras couldn’t see its eyes, but he felt it looking at him all the same. He experienced its torment and its hate washing over him like driving sleet. 

“You. Took. Them. From. Me.” it spoke, mouth unmoving, voice howling on the wind.

And then it uncoiled.

Before, its motions had been slow and methodical. But now it moved lightning fast. Limbs jabbed towards them. Grasping. That dark maw biting. Hissing. Yet with each move, it was countered. Endothermic lances in hand, they beat it back. Making contact with its incorporeal form here and there, eliciting that distant scream Taras knew all too well. 

The wind was picking up again. Snow driving stronger as they forced it to make a slow retreat. Suddenly, Taras’ foot made contact with an old ammunition crate, causing him to trip forward, dropping his lance.

And in that split second, it was on him. A seven-fingered translucent hand reached into his chest and pulled. Its icy presence surrounded him, filled his veins and froze him to the spot. He felt it invade his mind, and tried to fight off an overwhelming feeling of doom. A desire to just let go. To let himself be consumed. 

As he fought this invader over an eternity contained in a second, as it clawed at his soul, Taras reached back into it. A storm of familiarity greeted him there. He knew it was once a Russian conscript who had died to a drone, somewhere in Donbas. That it had a wife and children it would never see. That the pain and anguish of this separation kept it in this place, seeking a way back. And that somewhere along the way, the very same people who had sent it to its death, were once again weaponising it to fight their war. Taras could feel himself becoming lost in these invasive memories, while his own fell away like frost from a leaf. 

And then it was gone. 

Taras blinked, feeling the feeble winter sun’s rays warming his skin, and saw his ice-capped lance no longer melting the snow.

“We're out! You ok soldier?” someone distant asked.

“No…” Taras muttered, before falling out of consciousness to a place not grey, but black.