"Sir, he's here." The bodyguard who had spoken had just received the news from his earpiece. He looked to the current President of the United States for instructions. They were in the Oval Office, of course.

The President sighed. "Well, bring him in!" His successor was about to be inaugurated and now was the time said successor was to be briefed on everything going on with the country. Usually, the president didn't do such briefings himself, but the last few items only he knew about, so he had to.

A moment later, the future President of the United States walked into the room confidently. He was a southerner, who had been elected on a campaign of nuclear prevention and protection, whatever that really meant. It was such an important issue he had been the first third-party President to ever be elected. His name was Lewis Teller. He was deceptively intelligent, which was really the only thing about him that gave the current president hope.

The current President sighed. "This is the last of your briefings." He motioned for everyone else to leave the room. Even his security, which was highly unusual and a bit risky. "And it involves a few things that are so top-secret only the president and the people working on them know about it."

Teller sat down opposite the President. These briefings were usually quite dull, but this sounded more interesting. "I'm listening."

The President's mouth hardened into a flat line. "Listen well. I'm only going to say this once. You know of the current nuclear situation, correct?"

"Yes. North Korea's got the bomb, Russia's protecting them, Cuba is trying to arm themselves, half a dozen smaller countries managed to make one themselves without us knowing until it was too late, and so on. Another Cuban missile crisis, but the nukes are definitely already there this time around." He wasn't exaggerating. "I do have a plan to fix all that, just so you know." It was what Teller had run his entire campaign on.

"Maybe you do, but it might not be fixable. And if one country says 'screw it' and fires, the rest of the world follows suit in self-defense and retribution. Most of the world becomes a nuclear wasteland. So, with that in mind, the president before me diverted quite a bit of funding to a project. Ten projects, actually. Each one has unlimited resources, and some of the brightest minds in America or anywhere else on Earth. Each project is entirely independent of the others. The only thing they have in common is their goal. Preserve the future of intelligent life on Earth in event of nuclear war and its aftermath. They have no supervision save for annual reports delivered directly to the President. And they have unlimited funding."

Teller thought that it was a good backup in case he failed. His plan was anything but guaranteed to work. However... "What exactly are they doing?"

The President smiled. "Teams one, two, and three are constructing massive fallout shelters, designed to be self-sufficient in different ways. Teams four, five, six, and seven are working on various methods of preserving knowledge and animal species. Basically super-advanced seed banks and libraries. Team eight is working on a better way to build self-sufficient colonies on Mars, with the goal of the colonists eventually returning. Team nine is supposed to be working on a way to make humans genetically immune to radiation... but they say they've hit a wall, and are working on 'alternative solutions', whatever that means. Team ten is working on underwater habitation." Then he frowned. "The shelters probably won't be done in time, but the archives are coming along nicely. Team eight will probably never be done in time, and who knows what's going on with team nine. They have the most difficult task of all of them, but they seem confident, whatever their 'alternative solutions' are. Team ten is actually already done, and testing in the ocean near the Arctic as we speak. All under the highest security of course."

Teller felt inspired by all of these efforts. Humanity really was preparing, and not just sticking its proverbial head in the sand. "So, what obscure portion of our uncontrolled spending do I need to protect?"

The President laughed. "Social Security."

Teller's jaw dropped. "Really? You're funding all of this from people's pensions?" Then he thought about it. "Actually, given if I don't pull off a minor miracle nuclear war will probably erupt before the end of my term... well played."

The President returned to the serious matter at hand. "Just leave them alone, and hopefully eight or nine will bear fruit in time. They're used to working independently, so you can really just forget about them and concentrate on preventing a war altogether."

Teller nodded. It was nice to have a backup plan, but he wanted to save the world, not prepare to live in the aftermath. He would keep the programs funded, and keep anyone from investigating them. It might be slightly illegal to do that, but it was for the greater good. He idly wondered, as they wrapped up the meeting, what team nine's 'alternative solutions' were.

"Well, we're screwed. That's the bottom line, right? We're screwed." Skyler Hermanez was not at all optimistic as her co-researcher finished up presenting her results to the group. Normally, she might have considered herself overreacting, but there seemed no way around the problem at hand. The entirety of research team nine was backed into a conceptual corner.

"It's not that bad..." Iris Trovich tried to sound optimistic, but she privately agreed with her second-in-command. However, as the de-facto leader of the group, she had to keep morale high.

"Not that bad? We already know it's not possible to modify human DNA to make us immune to radiation. We don't have anything other than our skin to work with as a shield. So, we decided to go a completely different path. But now you tell us we can't just design a new body structure from scratch, because to make one we need a living subject. That's impossible, because we can't get a living subject without making one first, and we can't make one without a living subject. It's a freaking paradox!"

A third team member chimed in. Abdul Scalonsky was a brilliant geneticist, but a fairly shy man in his mid-thirties. "That limits us to body types that already exist. But we need something sapient. And we're the only sapient creatures on the planet. The only ones this smart. Even dolphins aren't close enough." He slumped. "So we really are screwed."

Iris wasn't going to take this sitting down. "Alright, everyone. No matter how bad this looks, we need to keep thinking." She addressed the group of scientists as a whole. "So we need something extremely intelligent, and it needs to have some sort of natural defense we can modify to defend against ambient radiation."

There were somewhere above twenty people in the room, and not a single one had an idea. They had been working on this project for years, only to now come to the discovery that creating a new, radiation-proof body to transfer human consciousness into wouldn't work. Not the transfer part, they already had that figured out. The creating a stable new body part.

Iris saw that they were getting nowhere, and switched tactics. "I'm pulling everyone from their individual tasks to work on this. We'll meet again when someone has something, anything. No matter how likely it is to work if you have an idea I want to hear it."

The meeting broke up, the scientists heading back to their workspaces to start brainstorming. Iris wasn't worried about anyone slacking off. They were all dedicated to this project. Besides, they were in a self-sufficient bunker in the middle of Alaska. Not much else to do. She met up with Skyler outside of the meeting room. "Not the end of the world."

Skyler laughed at that. "Except that's the whole reason we're here." She saw Iris's concerned expression. "Don't worry, I'm not giving up. In fact, I had an idea where to start searching."

Iris was intrigued. "Where?"

Skyler shrugged. "It's a stupid idea, but we could check if the other research teams have anything we could use. Four through Seven are on saving pretty much everything, right? In vaults. We can go through their stock and see if anything pops out." She smiled sarcastically. "Although I'm still pretty sure we're the only intelligent species on the planet. Maybe they have a few aliens stored away somewhere."

A few hours later, both women were bored. They had been looking through the databases of the vaults through their top-level security clearance. Being on one of these teams gave immediate access to the highest level of government clearance. Which meant being able to see what the other teams were doing, not that anyone usually cared.

Iris was leaning back in her chair. She was a young woman in her mid-twenties. A bit young for this job, but she was a brilliant biologist and technician. She had been the second-in-command for the previous director before he died of a stroke. So she was the one most suited to take over. Not that she had really wanted to. She didn't enjoy being in charge, even if she was the best person for the job.

Skyler was also bored, but she decided to do something about it. She navigated through the files of the other groups. She stopped at one in particular from group ten. "Hey, aren't these guys setting up in the Arctic right now?"

Iris looked over at her friend's screen. "Yeah, why?"

"I think this is the live feed. Wanna watch for a few minutes?"

Iris had nothing better to do. "Sure." She wheeled her chair around to get a better view of Skyler's screen. She watched as Skyler accessed the video and communication feeds.

Suddenly they could hear the chatter of the crew of team ten's construction division. They could also see the feed from the underwater construction machines team ten had specifically designed for this mission. They watched as team ten worked. The idea was that underwater living areas would be cheaper and quicker to build in bulk than fallout shelters. The team was setting up in the Arctic to avoid notice. But that meant dealing with the random ice. The team had apparently planned with that in mind because they were at the moment drilling into a massive iceberg.

All was well for a few minutes. Skyler had switched the view to that of the drilling machine. There was something hypnotic about watching it cut into a massive block of ice that had probably been there for centuries. Then the comms from the team actually there exploded.

"Wait, what the hell is that?!"

"What are you screaming about?"

"Everyone calm down! It's probably just a frozen shark or something. Greg, cut towards it." The tone of that voice suggested that the speaker was trying to hold in excitement.

Skyler and Iris had seen what the men on the cutting machine had seen.

Iris stared at the screen, unwilling to move. She addressed Skyler. "That is definitely not a shark." She saw Skyler nod out of the corner of her eye. They had both spent the last few hours looking at pretty much every living creature in existence. That was no shark.

As the cutting machine grew closer, a very strange and, at least to the eyes of a biologist, wonderful creature was slowly revealed through the refractions of the ice, still entirely encased in ice.

Iris had seen a Mammoth before, frozen like this. But this was something she hadn't known existed at all. This was a black reptile, about the size of a medium-sized car. And it seemed to have wings. They were wrapped around the body of the creature as if it was curling in on itself. Because of that, she couldn't see how many legs it had. The head also seemed to be tucked inside the wings, and the creature seemed as if it had been frozen trying to protect itself, huddled into a ball. A massive, black, reptilian cocoon.

Iris's heart immediately felt pity. It seemed to have been frozen in a moment of terror. Then her mind connected something. Just last year, a frozen mammoth had been discovered. Scientists had devised a plan to revive it, but the government had shut them down. She could see that the team here was going to extract this thing, still in the ice. If they brought it back, the same thing might happen. More than likely, it would be broken out and dissected to study, like the mammoth was. The government always liked the safer option.

But Iris, after only knowing about this thing for a few seconds, didn't want that to happen. She turned quickly to Skyler. "You know how this will play out."

Skyler nodded, her face darkening. "Just like that Mammoth." It had been a massive news story, and neither of them had been happy with that particular event. "And with something we didn't even know exists."

Iris smiled. "But right now, we are the only ones who know about it. Us, and team ten. And they won't say anything until they have it safely in their grasp." She motioned to the screen, where team ten was carefully cutting around the creature. It would be hours before they extracted the chunk of ice containing it. The implication was obvious. Team nine had doctors, biologists, and geneticists. And all the equipment that went with those professions, all state-of-the-art. As well as some more exotic equipment for their specific purpose. "It probably won't help with our problem, but shouldn't we at least try?"

Skyler met her eyes. She smiled. "Of course!"

Iris triggered the intercom system. "Ladies and gentlemen, something just happened. Get to my office NOW!" She turned the intercom off. "If they agree, then we'll try to get team ten to send it to us. If they do, we can try." She laughed. "We might as well."

Once the entirety of team nine had piled into the helpfully quite large office, Iris addressed them. "This isn't about our mission. Team ten just discovered something, frozen in a block of ice. Something that no one has ever seen before." She pulled up the clearest image of the frozen black reptile they had. There was a gasp from the rest of the team, and then silence. The mood in the room immediately darkened.

Someone spoke up. "Too bad it'll just be dissected." His voice was bitter.

Iris grinned. That was what she was hoping would be the reaction. "Actually, we wanted to know if you guys would be willing to try and revive it here. Right now, no one knows about it, and we have top security clearance. If team ten agrees, we can get it here in secret. And we have the facilities to try and revive it." She thought of something. "And the facilities to safely contain it too." The bunker had several quite large holding cells, in case genetic experiments went wrong. Not to mention twenty geniuses in various fields. They were as qualified as anyone to handle this, it just wasn't exactly what they were supposed to be doing. But what they were supposed to be doing had hit a dead end anyway.

There was a cheer. The decision was entirely unanimous. Some of them cared more than others, but they all wanted to do something good that they actually had a chance of completing.

Iris gestured for quiet. "I'm going to patch us into their communications. Let me do the talking."

She did so. "Hello, I need to speak to the leader of team ten. This is team nine."

The reply was almost instant. "What the heck is team nine doing here?" That was a man with a deep Scottish accent.

Iris blushed. "We happened to be watching your progress. We're kind of at a dead end, so it was a nice change of pace to see success." She figured some flattery wouldn't hurt. "And we saw what you discovered. Do you remember the Mammoth?"

There was almost an inaudible growl. "Aye, that I do. A dark day for science and human decency that was." His tone grew suspicious. "Why do you ask?"

Now was the test. "That thing should be brought back. But the politicians won't let that happen. If they knew. My team is capable of doing it ourselves. We request that you send it to us, and not tell anybody else."

The voice was almost hopeful. "You think you really can?"

"Yes." Iris gestured to the crowd in her office to prepare them. "Don't we?" That was directed at the crowd. They responded with a massive affirmative shout that was clearly audible through the microphone. They understood their part in doing the convincing.

"Yeesh, ya didn't have to deafen me. I get yer point." There was a minute of silence, as team ten discussed it. Then there was a reply. "We'll send it over to you, still frozen. And as far as everyone else is concerned, we never found anything. Good luck. Oh, and send pictures if you do manage to bring it back. We wanna see exactly what it is we found. Just a black lump right now."

Everyone in the overcrowded office sighed in relief. Iris and the leader of team ten worked out the details. The ice chunk would have to be delivered by special cooler vans, given its size. They estimated it would get to the bunker of team nine in about two weeks. That gave them two weeks to prepare.

Skyler was grinning wildly. "We're completely breaking the law, you know that right?" Her tone of voice suggested she didn't care.

Iris shrugged. "So? I'd happily go to jail to save a life. Especially one no one even knew existed." That brought up another question. "What is it anyway? Reptilian, judging by the scales, but it definitely has wings. That's pretty much all we can tell before defrosting it."

Skyler laughed happily. "Maybe a dinosaur, or some ancient alien? But I'm thinking something else. Something else entirely." Her voice grew low. "What mythical creature is present in pretty much every culture's lore?"

Iris knew the answer to that. "Descriptions vary wildly, but... dragons. But we've never found any proof they ever existed."

Skyler walked away. As she went, she threw one parting shot over her shoulder. "I think we just did!"

They had three weeks. Three weeks to prepare to hopefully save a life, and answer that question. It was going to be a short three weeks, that was for sure.

Author's Note: A few pieces of information.

First, this story, as with all of my stories (barring Namesake), is complete. So no matter what, it will be updated on schedule and not abandoned. It consists of twenty-three chapters, including the epilogue. Updates will occur once a week on Thursdays.

In regards to the story itself, I tried to balance the sci-fi aspects. So in the future, if something seems overly simplified for you technologically-inclined readers, feel free to point it out. But know that it was likely a conscious decision on my part to 'dumb it down' so as to not distract from the story itself. So I'll likely respond with the full logical and complicated original explanation that I skipped in favor of 'they thought of that and figured out a solution, no need to mention it'.

Finally, there might be some badly done attempts at writing romance contained within. By badly done, I mean I think I stink at writing that particular facet of life. Humor me by remembering that the movies opted to skip over that particular part almost entirely. So I can't do any worse. And that's not really the main focus of the story anyway, though it is a part of it.