Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Locatelli panted, waited.

  Green!

  He struck the call button with the flat of his hand.

  * * *

  Hanna wasted no time taking off his helmet after leaving the lock. He hurried between the rows of seats to the cockpit. Had he killed Locatelli? Probably not. The man had jumped off, Hanna had seen his body flying through the vacuum, before the projectile had struck the rover. The wreck might have crashed on top of him, or he might have been hit by some of the flying debris. Without looking behind him, he slipped into the pilot’s seat and ran an eye over the display. He knew what the devices were for, he had had an opportunity to familiarise himself with the workings of all lunar vehicles some months ago. Thanks to Hydra’s perfect preparatory work he even knew enough to drive the spaceship back into orbit, and from there to the OSS, and he wasn’t alone on board as long as Ebola found a way of contacting him after communication had been blocked. Something he probably didn’t need to worry about. Ebola would make sure he got there, and appeared in the right place at the right time.

  His fingers slid over the controls.

  He hesitated.

  What was that? The shaft wouldn’t move. The display was red, which meant that the cabin was currently being drained, or filled with air – or on its way!

  He quickly turned around.

  No, it was there, the space evenly lit behind the narrow windows, and deserted. Hanna narrowed his eyes. He paused. A sudden urge impelled him to get up and check, but he couldn’t afford any further delays, and the light had just switched from red to green.

  Ganymede was ready to go.

  * * *

  ‘There. There!’

  Amber pointed excitedly into the sky. A long way off something was climbing steeply into the sky, something long that glinted in the sun.

  ‘The Ganymede!’

  They had come hurrying down the path, mindless, breathless, in clumsy kangaroo leaps, back to the crane platform, only to discover that both rovers had disappeared. Not a soul far and wide. Black’s cries still echoed in Amber’s ears:

  Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone m— No!

  Carl?

  She had run anxiously out onto the platform and seen what was left of the gondola in which Mimi and Marc should have been sitting. More precisely, there was no gondola. Just the useless back of a chair, twisted steel, the contorted scrap of a safety guard and behind it, wedged in, something white, something numbingly familiar—

  A single leg.

  Only an extreme effort of will had kept her from throwing up in her helmet, while the others had stared down into the gorge and kept a lookout for the missing man. But large parts of the valley were in shadow, so they couldn’t see anything at all.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev had stated at last.

  ‘How can you claim that they’re dead?’ Evelyn said excitedly.

  ‘That is a corpse.’ Rogachev pointed to the amputated leg in the ruined gondola.

  ‘No, that’s – that’s—’

  None of them had managed to speak its name. What an unbearable idea, that the fate of that shredded individual would only be fulfilled when it gave that limb an identity and thus retrospectively supplied the facts.

  ‘We have to look for her,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Later.’ Julian stared at the place where the vehicles had just been standing. ‘We have worse things to worry about right now.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s bad enough?’ snapped Momoka.

  ‘I think it’s terrible. But first we have to find the rovers.’

  ‘Warren?’ Momoka resumed her mantra-like calls to her husband. ‘Warren, where are you?’

  ‘Assuming they managed it—’ Evelyn tried again.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev cut her off in a voice of ice. ‘Five people are missing. At least two of those are alive, otherwise both vehicles couldn’t have disappeared, but the others are down there. Do you want to abseil down there and poke about in the dark?’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t – it isn’t Carl down there?’

  ‘Because Carl’s alive,’ Amber had said wearily, to keep things short. ‘I think he has Peter and the others on his conscience.’

  ‘What makes you so sure about that?’

  ‘Amber’s right,’ Julian had said. ‘Carl’s a traitor, I realised that a few minutes ago. Believe me, we do have a bigger problem than that here! We urgently have to think about how we—’

  At that moment Amber saw the shuttle rising on the horizon. For a moment it seemed to stand still above Cobra Head, then it came towards them and suddenly got bigger.

  It’s flying this way, she thought.

  The armoured body was gaining form and outline, but also, worryingly, altitude. Whoever was flying the Ganymede plainly didn’t plan to land and pick them up. The machine moved silently overhead, accelerated, turned in a northerly direction, shrank to a dot and disappeared.

  ‘Julian, call Gaia,’ urged Evelyn. ‘They’ve got to pick us up from here.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen.’ Julian sighed. ‘The connection’s been broken.’

  ‘Broken?’ cried Momoka, horrified. ‘How come it’s broken?’

  ‘No idea. I did say we had a bigger problem.’

  Berlin, Germany

  Xin’s transformation back from a lion-maned Mando-Progger to a perfectly normal contract killer was as good as complete when his contact called.

  On the way back from the Grand Hyatt he had constantly asked himself what the two policemen had been doing there. No doubt about it, they had been after Tu – Jericho and the girl as well – but to what end? Jericho wasn’t mentioned by name in Berlin, so the investigators had their sights set on Tu. Why him, of all people?

  On the other hand he didn’t care. Admittedly he had had to disappear without having achieved anything, but his intuition told him he had arrived too late anyway. The group had cleared off. So what? What were they going to do? Vogelaar and his wife were dead, the crystal was in his possession. While he put his wigs and fake beards away, he took the call.

  ‘Kenny, damn it, how could that happen?’

  No Hydra, no other greeting. Just anxious whispering. Xin hesitated. His contact was beside himself.

  ‘How could what happen?’ he asked warily.

  ‘It’s all going down the tubes! This guy Tu and this Jericho guy and the girl, all the contraband is on its way to us, and they know! They know everything! About the parcel, about the attack! They’ve even had a chance to talk to Julian Orley. Our cover’s being blown!’

  Xin froze. The Mando-Progger’s Tartar beard lay in his hand like a small, dead animal.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he whispered.

  ‘Impossible? Well, then perhaps you could come here! Right now the company’s being hit by a devastating earthquake.’

  ‘But I’ve got the dossier.’

  ‘So have they!’

  A volley of oaths rained down on Xin, taking in, amongst other hardships, the unmasking of Hanna and the activation of the communication block. The latter had been planned as an emergency measure in case details of the attack were to seep through prematurely to the Moon. Something no one at Hydra had seriously reckoned with, but that was exactly what had happened.

  ‘When was the net jammed?’ asked Xin.

  ‘During the linkup.’ The other man breathed sharply into the receiver. ‘Over the next twenty-four hours the Moon will be cut off from everything, but we can’t keep the block going for ever. I just hope Hanna gets the situation under control. Not to mention Ebola.’

  Ebola. Hanna’s right hand was a specialist when it came to infecting supposedly independent systems and weakening them from within. That Ebola had managed to interrupt the fatal linkup could be seen as a brilliant manoeuvre, a skilful turnaround in the adverse wind of circumstances, but unfortunately on a leaking boat.

  Vogelaar had outwitted him.

  No! Xin forced himself to calm down. They weren’t leakin
g yet. He had chosen Hanna and Ebola because they knew how to improvise and would keep the upper hand, regardless of how inauspicious the circumstances might be. He planned not to waste a second brooding on the possibility that the undertaking might go wrong.

  ‘And how are you going to force this Tu and his rat-pack to see sense?’ the other man raged. ‘You’ve lost Mickey Reardon, two of your people died in Shanghai, you can’t count on Gudmundsson and his team at the moment, they’re otherwise engaged, so how do you think—’

  ‘Not at all,’ Xin cut in.

  Puzzled, his contact fell silent.

  ‘There’s no longer any point in eliminating Tu’s group,’ Xin explained to him. ‘The facts of the situation have become common knowledge, the dissemination of the dossier can no longer be stopped. Everything else is decided on the Moon.’

  ‘Damn it, Kenny. We’ve been busted!’

  ‘No. My task right now is to protect Hydra from being unmasked. Does he know about it yet?’

  ‘I told him five minutes ago. He’d be glad of a personal call from you, otherwise I’ve got to sign off now, such a bloody mess! What happens if they track me down? What am I supposed to do then?’

  ‘Nobody’s going to get busted.’

  ‘But they’re bringing the dossier with them! I don’t know what’s in it. Perhaps it would be better—’

  ‘Just chill.’ The tearful whining at the other end was starting to make Xin feel ill.‘I’ll come to London as quickly as possible. I’ll be near you, and if things get tight I’ll get you out.’

  ‘My God, Kenny! How on earth could this happen?’

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ Xin snapped. ‘The only risk is that you lose your nerve. Go back to the others and act as if nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘I hope Hanna knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘That’s why I chose him.’

  Xin finished the conversation, swapped his phone from one hand to the other and inspected the room. As might have been expected, he noticed thousands of things that weren’t right, things that were asymmetrical, things that were out of proportion, strange excrescences in the design, an irritating bouquet of flowers. The florist hadn’t been skilled enough to make the number of petals a multiple of the number of the flowers, thus giving the sorry effort some kind of mathematical meaning. For want of a self-contained idea, the supposedly aesthetic function failing to correspond to a structural one, the arrangement had something menacingly haphazard about it – a nightmare for Xin. The mere idea of being unable to produce a rationale for one’s actions was totally horrifying! He reluctantly dialled another number, held his mobile in his left hand, while the fingers of his right gripped the flowers and tried to correct the arrangement.

  ‘Hydra,’ he said.

  ‘How big is the dossier?’ asked the voice.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.’ Kenny pinched at a lily. ‘I’m sorry about what happened. Of course I’ll assume full responsibility, but we could do nothing more than threaten Vogelaar with torture and death. He must have passed on a copy of the dossier to Jericho.’

  ‘You’re not guilty,’ said the voice. ‘What’s crucial is that the block still stands. What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Change of tack. Take the heat off Jericho, Tu and Yoyo. Their deaths are no longer a priority, and we can’t influence what’s happening on the Moon. I remain convinced that the operation will be a complete success. The important thing now is to preserve Hydra’s anonymity.’

  ‘Do we agree on the weak points?’

  ‘From my point of view there’s only the one we’ve already discussed.’

  ‘That’s exactly how I see it.’

  Xin considered the flower arrangement. Not really any better, still without any semiotic content. ‘I’ll take the next plane to London.’

  ‘Are you well enough equipped there?’

  ‘Airbike and everything. If necessary I can summon reinforcements.’

  ‘Gudmundsson is busy, you know that.’

  ‘My net stretches wide. I could set legions marching, but that won’t be necessary. I keep myself constantly at the ready, so that should do it.’

  ‘Tell me about the basic information in the dossier. Now that we’ve shelved email communication, unfortunately you can’t send it to me any more.’

  ‘But it was still right to take the pages off the net.’

  ‘Keep me posted.’

  Xin paused.

  Then he threw his phone on the bed and turned his mounting rage on orchids, lilies and crocuses. He had to leave Berlin as soon as possible, but he couldn’t even leave this room as long as the arrangement was subject to an unsatisfactory structure. The world was not random. Not haphazard. Everything had to yield a meaning. Where the meaning ended, madness began.

  The head of a lily broke off.

  Bobbing with fury, Kenny Xin tore the whole arrangement out of its bowl and shoved it in the bin.

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina, The Moon

  Lynn had decided to search the subterranean areas of Gaia along with Sophie. Tim sensed the reason for that. She dreaded arguments with him, because she knew very well that she would no longer be able to keep up her pretence. She was still able to lie to herself. Her attitude alternated between moments of complete clarity, subjectivity and erupting fury. That abysmal, night-black fear dwelt once more in her every glance, the fear that might easily have killed her years before, and Tim thought he noticed something else in it, something vaguely insidious that frightened him to the core. As he poked through the casino with Axel Kokoschka, the chef, his concern swung from her to Amber, who was travelling with a suspected terrorist. Julian had received the information on a protected frequency, but how had he reacted? Peter Black was with him. Had they caught Carl?

  What was happening right now on the Aristarchus Plateau?

  Amber, he thought, come in! Please!

  * * *

  Gaia’s underground floors, by Dana’s estimation, deserved particular attention, because it was from there that a bomb would release its greatest destructive force. Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had been assigned to the staff accommodation areas, Lynn and Sophie to the underground greenhouses, aquaria and storage units. Gaia’s mirror world stretched down deep – but then staff plans for 2026 allowed for one employee per guest.

  ‘In the meantime I will try to reach the Peary Base,’ Dana had said before they went off in different directions.

  ‘How, without a satellite?’ Tim had asked.

  ‘Via the dedicated line. There’s a direct laser connection between Gaia and the base. We send the data back and forth via a system of mirrors.’

  ‘What do you mean, mirrors? Ordinary, common-or-garden mirrors?’

  ‘The first one is on the far side of the gorge. A thin, very high mast. You can see it from your suite.’

  ‘And how many are there?’

  ‘Not all that many. A dozen to the Pole. Arranged in such a way that the light-beam passes around crater rims and mountains. To reach shuttles, spaceships or even the Earth, of course you need satellites, but for intralunar communication between two fixed points there’s nothing better. No atmosphere to scatter the light, no rain – so I’ll set out our situation to them in the hope that they aren’t having any problems with their satellites there, but my optimism is muted.’

  And then, after Lynn had disappeared with Sophie into the lift, Dana had taken him aside.

  ‘Tim, this is awkward for me. You know I don’t tend to beat around the bush, but in this case—’

  He sighed, troubled by dark forebodings. ‘Is it about Lynn?’

  ‘Yes. What’s up with her?’

  Tim looked at the floor, at the walls, wherever you looked to keep from returning the other person’s gaze.

  ‘Look, Lynn and I never had personal contact,’ Dana went on. ‘But she supported my appointment at the time, and trained me up, in the camp, on the Moon, confidently and competently, entirely admirable. Now she strikes me as
irresponsible, erratic, belligerent. She’s changed completely.’

  ‘I—’ Tim hemmed and hawed for a moment. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  Her quizzical eyes fastened on his. Suddenly it occurred to Tim that Dana Lawrence wasn’t blinking. He hadn’t seen her blink for ages. He remembered a film, Alien, a quite old but still excellent flick that Julian loved, in which one of the crew members was unexpectedly revealed as an android.

  ‘I don’t know how I should answer that,’ he said.

  ‘No, you do, you know very well.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Lynn is your sister, Tim. I want to know if we can trust her. Has she got herself under control?’

  The clouds began to clear in Tim’s head. He looked at the manager, illuminated by the realisation of what she actually meant.

  ‘Are you suggesting Lynn is Carl’s accomplice?’ he asked, almost lost for words.

  ‘I just want to hear what you think.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘All of this is crazy. Come on, we’re running out of time. It would be a great weight off my mind if I was wrong, but three days ago Lynn tried with all her might to persuade her father that he was imagining things. She wanted to withhold the surveillance camera videos from him, she left me in the dark about Edda Hoff’s warning, although she really should have talked to me. All in all she’s behaving as if we had dreamed up the events of the past thirty minutes, even though she herself has been involved from the very start.’

  That’s not true, Tim wanted to say, and in fact Dana was wrong about one thing. Lynn hadn’t been there from the start. Sophie had taken the call while his sister had been sitting in the Selene with the manager and the cooks, talking about the possibility of a picnic at the bottom of the Vallis Alpina. Jennifer Shaw had wanted to talk to Lynn or her father, so Sophie had immediately sent a message to the Selene and the security advisors had immediately put it through to Julian on the Aristarchus Plateau. By the time Lynn and Dana had reached headquarters, the conversation was already well under way.