“People are losing their shit, is what’s happening.” Her voice started high and climbed the scale. “Jack, you need to make an appearance or we’re going to have some major issues.”
“Get Taylor on the horn and tell him to get back ASAP, then head for the galley and help Ayres stabilize things. I’ll join you in two minutes.” The door closed with a soft bump. Hanratty looked at Keene again, his eyes slightly wild. “I need some ideas, Gerald.”
“We need to calm people down and start looking for the Observer. No more tiptoeing. No more pretending we don’t know what’s going on. No more playing within his sphere of influence. I’m not sure we’re dealing with a rational or even sane person. At the rate the situation is escalating, the next test may not only be lethal, it will be widespread.”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Cass demanded.
“What about her?” Hanratty gestured as if she were a piece of furniture.
“She’s volatile and a liability. The Observer obviously used her to spark full-scale unrest among the crew. She’s smart and generally well liked. If you let her run amok among the personnel, she’ll have them burn this place to the ground. We’ll never flush out the Observer then, because we’ll be too busy keeping our heads above water.”
“So . . . ?”
“I think we need to reduce our liabilities.”
Cass turned in her chair in time to see Keene reach into a breast pocket and pull out a flat, black case the size of a cell phone. From it, he withdrew a prefilled syringe, removed the cap, and flicked the barrel to force an air bubble out. Eyes wide, she opened her mouth to scream when Hanratty suddenly pinned her in the chair with his shoulder and knee. Ignoring her yell of protest, he grabbed her right forearm in both of his hands and forced her palm upward, exposing the soft, white underside of her forearm and the blue veins beneath. Cass began screaming as she understood what they were trying to do. She clawed at Hanratty’s neck with her free arm.
“Hurry,” Hanratty said through gritted teeth. “She’s strong.”
Keene stroked his thumb along the vein that stood out from the skin of Cass’s arm, then tried unsuccessfully to push the needle in. “Hold her.”
“I’m trying, goddammit.”
On the fourth attempt, Keene hit the vein and pushed the plunger to its limit. “Don’t let up. This could take a minute.”
Cass screamed insults at them as long as she could but, driven by her slamming pulse, the drug slipped like quicksilver up her arm. Even as she started in on a new round of curses, she felt herself falling away, tumbling through layers of gossamer and spider lace until her head slumped forward on her chest and she was out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Taylor swore loudly and jerked his head up.
Out of long habit, he’d rested his face against his fist as he read over the report he was crafting. But doing so put pressure right below his broken nose, sending streaks of pain followed by dull, but insistent, throbs up into his cheeks, forehead, and eyes.
Gingerly, he explored a spot behind his jaw where he could put his fist so that he could continue with the report. It was doubly irksome because the document had been Hanratty’s idea, not his, a bit of bureaucratic bullshit that the station manager thought might save their asses at trial—if the consequences of what had been done at Shackleton ever made it that far.
It was incredibly frustrating to sit at a desk, writing a report that would never see the light of day, when what they should be doing was getting out into the crowd, cracking skulls and getting in people’s faces. But when he’d proposed the idea to Hanratty, he’d been shot down.
The station manager had the same reaction as so many others Taylor had tried to advise over the years; they mistook his hands-on approach as simplistic bullying. But Taylor wasn’t a Neanderthal and he wasn’t stupid. Sheer physical intimidation wasn’t going to silence the kind of people who came to Antarctica. Pressing a crowd already teetering on the edge into doing things, agreeing to things, that they might normally find difficult to defend . . . well, that was another story.