“About the experiment?”
“Yes. It made sense to quite a few people. Two of Dave’s fuelie comrades, Jeremy and Sam, went to the manager with their concerns.”
“And?”
“And he had them thrown out of his office. Upon which, they made an attempt to take over the administration office and place Mr. Hanratty under arrest.”
“Jesus. What happened?”
“Taylor made short work of them, sad to say. Apparently, while the two of them were tinkering with fuel lines and playing video games, Mr. Taylor was earning his black belt in any number of martial arts.”
Cass blanched. “Are they . . . ?”
“He hurt them bad enough to put them in the trauma center. Dr. Ayres was very upset and told me privately he’s going to bring charges against Taylor as soon as all of this is over. My sweet Dave is beside himself.”
“When did this happen?”
“The day after they tossed you in here. Our dear leader has a near mutiny on his hands and knows it. I believe he’s hoping by bringing everyone together he can present his side of the story and save his hide by shifting the blame to someone else.”
“Someone else? Who?” Biddi had said the words matter-of-factly and without emphasis, but now she tilted her head, giving Cass a pointed look. “Me? What do I have to do with it?”
“I left before people started asking questions, but he said that there was, indeed, an experiment of sorts going on. Then he started holding forth about some kind of psychological mumbo jumbo beyond me. I’m just a bloody fucking janitor, after all.”
“He actually admitted it?”
“I just said so, didn’t I? That wasn’t the real revelation, though. He claimed that he was as much a subject of the experiment as anyone else. Someone else, another crew member posing as a staffer, has been pulling the strings the whole time.”
“Who?”
Biddi rolled her eyes. “You , obviously. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Jesus, Biddi.”
“I’m sorry, bird,” she said, and now Cass could see her friend, for all her banter, was worried. Dark blue smudges hung beneath each eye and her normally rosy cheeks were sallow. She raised a hand to tuck a loose lock of hair behind her ear; the hand trembled. “It’s not a joke, I know, but the whole thing has been terrifying.”
“Who is this mastermind supposed to be?”
“Hanratty calls him—or you, I suppose—the Observer, like some comic book villain.”
“Keene said something about that when they had me in Hanratty’s office. I didn’t know what they were talking about,” Cass said, scowling at the memory. “And people believe his bullshit?”
Biddi shrugged, deflated and out of jokes now. “It makes as much sense as anything else, doesn’t it?”
“And he’s trying to convince everyone that I’m the one? I’m this Observer?”
“I’m afraid so.” She paused. “People are scared, Cass. Hanratty knows he doesn’t have to be right, he just has to sound good. Whatever will keep the crew from turning on him. And you, as a distraction, will do.”
Cass put her face in her hands and spoke through them, her voice muffled. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would I come screaming back to base and accuse him of running the experiment if I’m actually the one behind it all?”
“He’d simply say you were upping the ante on the test, I imagine. Stoking the fire and turning people against him just to see what they’d do. Like the bit about Sheryl still being alive.”
“She is,” Cass said bitterly. “I’m sure of it. But he’d simply say I was taking advantage of a psychologically traumatic event in order to utilize it for the experiment.”
“Now you’re thinking like a true bastard,” Biddi said. “I do believe you know how his mind works.”
“What happens now? Are they going to listen to him? Is the lynch mob coming?”
Biddi clucked her tongue. “Don’t get too maudlin, darling. They’re not all mad dogs. I imagine that even if Hanratty persuades them to his way of thinking, he’ll do no more than tell everyone to leave you right here and let the ‘authorities’—whoever that is—decide once they get communications back up or, God forbid, after the winter runs its course and the first plane comes back.”
“Christ,” she said, trying to imagine the next four months in a literal, instead of figurative, prison. Then a thought occurred to her. “What happens when the ‘accidents’ keep happening? What’s Hanratty going to do then?”
“Good news! You’ll be exonerated.”
“And someone else might be dead. That’s not good enough,” Cass said. Then, when her friend hesitated, “Spit it out, Biddi.”
“Before Commander Jack’s dog-and-pony show, a few people were talking.”
“About?”
Biddi paused, then sighed. “I think it’s madness, but a few of the younger crew were talking about trying to make the trek overland to Orlova for help.”
Cass’s mouth fell open. “That’s thirty miles away. In the dark. At a hundred below zero.”
“You forgot the one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds.”
Cass calculated the journey in terms of the obstacles, not the distance. With the darkness, the low temperatures, and the wind, the journey would take several days even by snowmobile or snowcat . . . but would you really want to drive it when, if you wandered even slightly off the SPoT, you could plunge headfirst into a two-hundred-foot crevasse? Walking, with the ability to plumb for ice bridges and faults, would be safer, but then you were talking a top speed of just a few miles a day. It would take a week to make it to the Russian base. No one on earth had the stamina and strength to survive the journey. She shook her head.
Biddi had been watching her and nodded grimly. “It’s suicide.”
“But they were willing to give it a try before Hanratty’s speech?”
“They were willing to talk about it.” Biddi gave a dishwater-thin smile. “Then they did the same figuring you just did and decided to hear what their station manager had to say for himself instead.”
“So, my situation is to hang tight and let some kangaroo court decide my fate,” Cass said bitterly. “While one of them is manipulating everyone. In fact, whoever the Observer is must’ve predicted this, right? When all the social norms start to break down and accusations start to fly, a full-scale revolt is the only logical outcome.”
“If you say so. My bet is on Keene.”
Cass waved her hand dismissively. “He’s not smart enough.”
“Maybe playing dumb is part of his master plan. Maybe it’s an act.”
Cass snorted. “Nobody’s that good.”
Biddi smiled again, then her face fell into sober lines and she stood. “I’ve got to get going, Cass. If anyone catches me here, they’ll lock me up, too. Then where will we be?”
Cass grabbed her friend’s hands and squeezed them. “Thanks for sneaking in, Biddi. Be my voice, okay?”
“Of course.” Her friend looked at her closely. “Are you holding up all right?”
Cass thought about it. Her initial reaction upon waking up had been fear and shock that Hanratty and Keene had actually stooped to imprisoning her. But those emotions had been burnt away by a cold, seething anger . . . and a desire to get even. She wasn’t sure where the newfound confidence was coming from, but if it was fueled by anger, she was prepared to use it.
“I’m good. Ready to punch Hanratty in the mouth if I get a chance. But good.”
Biddi nodded, satisfied. “That’s exactly how I predicted you’d handle this. Take care, birdie. I’ll be back when I can.”
Cass watched her slip out the door, closing it quietly behind her and turning the key in the lock, the sound every prisoner in history had dreaded.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“You’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”
Carla’s smile was a just-courteous baring of her teeth. “Unless you double majored in astrophysics and advanced
biology, no.”
Anne’s face closed down like a light had been turned off. “Sorry. I’ll just sit in the corner, then.”
Carla turned back to her desk, her smile turning into a grimace. Her friend had a martyrish streak to her that hadn’t been obvious before things at Shackleton had started going to hell in a handbasket. As the chaos around them had gone from the manageable to the unimaginable, Carla had fled to her work in the lab for solace, counting on the structure and stability of science to help her make sense of the madness that had taken ahold of the station.
Withdrawal wasn’t a logical reaction, she knew. Sticking her head in the sand made little sense; rationally, the deaths of some colleagues and the imprisonment of others meant that the survival of the base was at stake. And, if the station—as well as her life—was in jeopardy, then it followed that her work was, by most measures, irrelevant.
But Shackleton had changed her. She had attempted to take charge during the power outage, trusting in and valuing her own innate authority and intelligence. The results had been terrifying, even aside from her own injury. Even now, remembering the chaos and the primal fear that had overtaken the crew took her breath away. Forced to sit in her darkened berth for days, nursing her concussion, she’d come to the conclusion that they’d all been at the mercy of the environment since stepping foot onto the continent. Whether it was through the actions of other people as Cass would have them believe or freezing to death on the godforsaken plain outside the station, she’d come to realize that drive, ambition, and intelligence didn’t mean shit in Antarctica. Your plans, hopes, and dreams were about as meaningful and permanent as footprints in the snow on the other side of this wall.
The thought jogged her memory, and she remembered some old-timer during training telling them that Antarctica wanted to kill them. He’d been wrong. It didn’t just want to kill them; it would kill them.
In the face of that, she was comfortable with, perhaps even proud of, her own newfound myopia. If extending oneself outwardly didn’t work, she might as well turn inward, and for Carla, that meant her work since her time in the lab was simply an extension of her identity. To lose her life would be only slightly more jarring than losing her work—ergo, she’d prefer to die rather than sacrifice her experiments. Had she been a laborer on the Titanic , she would’ve been polishing handrails and setting tables while others jumped for the lifeboats. Let someone else man the oars or shout hoarsely from an upper deck.
Anne, on the other hand, seemed unable to cope with either the change of circumstances at the station or the particular tragedy of Jun’s suicide. She had refused to go back to work at the COBRA building or even the in-station astrophysics lab down the hall, putting a huge amount of stress on the remaining two astrophysicists to do the work of four and drawing Hanratty’s ire. Many of the other staff members, without the luxury of being able to stop working, weren’t happy with her, either.
Carla, unable to comprehend the mind of someone who preferred not to work over any other option, would’ve resented Anne, too, had her friend not come and begged her to let her stay in the biology lab. Initially reluctant, Carla had given in after one of the scientists had told her something that only a few knew: Anne’s father had hanged himself when she was a little girl. On the first shift after Jun’s death, Anne had trekked out to the COBRA building to sign on for her twelve hours, only to return screaming, claiming she’d seen her father’s body hanging from the top of the antenna.
But now Carla was barely hanging on to her own sanity because Anne—in emotional turmoil, but still possessed of a scientist’s mindset—had insisted on helping Carla with biology experiments she was unqualified to perform. The stress of the situation on base plus Anne’s insistent presence had brought Carla’s concussion-induced headaches back full-time, making her snap at the slightest provocation. Now the two of them were both on edge, no work was getting done, and Carla was close to kicking her friend out into the hall.
Instead, she gritted her teeth for three seconds, relaxed her jaw, and turned around with as genuine a smile as she could muster. “This sequence really is a one-person job. If I could clone myself, I still wouldn’t be able to help. But what I could use is a good jolt of coffee. If you wouldn’t mind playing intern for a minute, could you run down to the galley and grab me a cup?”
“You’re serious? You want me to fetch coffee?”
“Don’t think of it as fetching,” Carla said brightly. “Think of it as providing field support. If I’m going to get the most out of this latest round of tests, I’ve got to stay awake and alert for the next twelve hours. Only coffee and good conversation is going to make that happen.”
Anne looked wounded, but nodded and said, “Black, right?”
“Just like my test results,” Carla quipped. She got a slight lift of the lips in return, then Anne headed outside and down the hall to the galley.
Carla stifled a sigh. Anne was going to have to either lighten up or get back to work, or there’d be more than a couple casualties before the winter was over. She winced. She could be an insensitive bitch at times. She didn’t know where it came from. Jun had been a nice man, after all, and Sheryl had always been polite and cheerful. Carla frowned. Assuming Sheryl was actually dead, of course; Cass’s accusations had gotten everyone talking, but Carla preferred to deal with the facts that she could see in front of her. Until she saw the proof that Sheryl’s death had been faked, the woman remained dead to her.
She sighed, getting back to the problem at hand: Anne. She’d racked her brain trying to come up with things for her friend to do around the lab, but the work wasn’t just specialized for someone with a PhD in biology; most of the tests and experiments had been specifically devised by Carla for herself to perform. Space for busy work—mentally, physically, and professionally—just didn’t exist. In truth, Anne’s running out to get coffee was probably the most useful thing she could’ve done. Carla let her eyes meander around the lab, trying to dream up fake tests and bogus tasks she could give Anne when she got back, a kind of work placebo, but nothing came to mind.
Stop wasting time , she chided herself. The only thing that could make the situation worse would be if Carla squandered the time she’d been given after successfully getting Anne out of the lab. She’d just toss her another bone when the time came. Carla cleared her mind and bent over the slides she’d been working on.
Anne stalked down the hall toward the galley, seething. Rationally, she could understand Carla’s need to get rid of her—if the situation had been reversed and Carla had insisted on pestering her in the middle of an analysis of COBRA data, she would’ve hit her with a laptop—but she had trouble, had always had trouble, when her friends had appeared to abandon or dismiss her. It fostered in her a profound sadness that twisted and transformed into a deep-seated anger she had difficulty defusing.
Worse, with an analytical mind like hers, she knew exactly where the anger came from. But no amount of left-brain analysis had ever overcome her right-brain emotion. Simply put, if she could, she would go back in time and kill her father.
She’d come to the conclusion long ago that the burden of guilt she would bear from killing a parent couldn’t compare to the cross she’d been forced to bear when, as a seven-year-old in a daisy-patterned dress, she’d discovered her father hanging from the second-floor banister of their Providence brownstone. Anything would be preferable to that.
Two of her friends had come over to play, and when she’d turned to them, hysterical, for help and advice, they’d laughed at her and accused her of making up stories. Since then, any time thoughts of her father and an image of his slack body resting still and motionless in the stairwell invaded her head—when she’d looked up at the dish antenna and was sure she’d seen him hanging from the steel catwalk, but shod in Jun’s threadbare sneakers—they were accompanied by the light, scornful laughter of little girls.
Anne pressed her hands to her face, willing the image and the sound away, desperate
ly trying to put the look of pity and impatience on Carla’s face into perspective, trying to rationalize to herself why her friend’s charity and tolerance might be wearing thin enough to send her on a bullshit mission in search of coffee.
“Get ahold of yourself, Klimt,” she said out loud, startling herself, but the sound died in the dead walls of the station. No one was around to hear her, which, not long ago, would have struck her as strange. Even on a winter-over, she should have run into a familiar face or two on the way to the galley, but since Cass’s announcement at the midwinter party, people had chosen to hunker down in their berth or bury themselves in their work. Like some people she knew.
If she had any doubts that life at Shackleton wasn’t proceeding normally, entering the galley put them to rest. The dining room was as empty as the halls and that was definitely not right. People on base ate and drank constantly for comfort and camaraderie. Not long ago, half the station would’ve congregated in the galley simply to be close to one another. Now, the room stood empty, and she could imagine herself as the only one alive on base. Alone, wandering the halls, looking for someone, anyone to talk to . . .
Stop that . Yes, there’d been two deaths, and a blistering chaos of violence and accusations, but forty-odd crew members still lived at the station. She wasn’t the only human being left on earth, for Christ’s sake. She moved deeper into the galley, hoping to see someone she’d missed.
“Pete?” she called, figuring the cook, at least, had to be around. When there weren’t meals to be made or served, there were dishes to be washed and appliances to be maintained, right? But there was no answer. Despite the fact that she’d just left Carla in the biology lab five minutes before, the sensation that she was utterly alone returned in full force. It was like a ten-pound weight had suddenly appeared in her gut, dragging her to the floor.
Timidly, she walked across the galley to the coffee urns that were a mainstay at the base. Ignoring the decaf, she grabbed two porcelain diner cups from the rack and tilted the REGULAR urn forward, but she knew it was empty as soon as she touched it.
The Winter Over Page 23
