The Deep Reserve

Captain Ilse Varga wakes choking on stasis gel to a frozen, empty vault and a broken simulation she has relived thousands of times. Sealed deep underground alongside thousands of sleeping soldiers, she is part of the Deep Reserve, a long-forgotten army waiting for a surface call that was never supposed to come. When a signal finally pulses through the ancient hardline, it brings not salvation, but a child who commands life itself—capable of stealing or granting decades of time with a single word. To unravel the truth behind their endless confinement, Ilse risks defying her zealous commanding officer and scales a abandoned shaft to the world above. What she discovers is shattering: the surface world is alive, peaceful, and has spent centuries believing the Deep Reserve died out in a war that ended three hundred years ago. Their memory survives only as a nursery rhyme and a children's festival game. Worse, their stolen dreams were never meant for military readiness, but redirected as living computing power to sustain a failing orbital elite that now views the uncorrupted soldiers merely as genetic stock. With an orbital board poised to extinguish the vault forever and her own colonel arming the awake troops to take the innocent city hostage, Ilse must navigate betrayal on every front. In a subterranean chamber housing the ancient controls of human life, she faces a final, impossible choice between using godlike power over time and breaking the cycle of control once and for all.