Silex grabbed Aimee’s sleeve, his voice lowering and developing a pleading inflection. “Look Aimee, please, if we prove the existence of petroleum or natural gas deposits in the near area with my new imager we won’t need to be making basic wage with the fucking military anymore. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I’ve been approached by Texegen—they want to buy out my patent. I can make you an advisor, or a minority partner; you’ll never have to work again. I need your support here, please, Aimee.” He was now holding her forearm with both his hands and was squeezing her skin underneath the cave suit as if to milk approval from her.

Alex was standing ten feet away with his back turned but his sensitive hearing allowed him to catch every nuance of the conversation. He felt like wringing the scientist’s neck; the U.S. government funded all of Silex’s research and should have first rights to any inventions and downstream discoveries. Alex shook his head and wondered what the man was like before greed and self-interest became his prime motives. He’d let the Hammer deal with him on their return. He turned and watched Aimee gently tug her arm free and respond to him.

“No, thank you, Dr. Silex. I don’t think that sounds legal and besides, staying here any longer may just be putting us all in danger.”

“Bullshit. You don’t have to agree with everything that side of beef says, you know. I really don’t understand you; for an intelligent woman you’re acting more like a lovesick teenager. You’re making wrong decisions, Dr. Weir; maybe you just aren’t as smart as Tom and I thought you were.” Silex spun away before Aimee could respond.

Aimee stood stunned in the darkness. Disgust and anger flared briefly, and then just as quickly morphed into pity. But it wasn’t the kind of pity that made her want to help Silex or offer assistance; more the sort of pity one feels when seeing a scorpion trapped in a spider’s web. Sad, but dangerous and repellent, and best to just avoid it altogether. At least she now knew why he had volunteered to come to the Antarctic and why he was pushing Alex and his team so hard to take them all further into the caves. Texegen was a trillion-dollar oil and gas conglomerate and had approached her at GBR several times, mostly just for job offers, but sometimes with much more clandestine propositions to buy raw data and research material. They had a lot of money to spend and she bet they had already spent some on Silex.