Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Right. At least no one could say things were getting boring.

  London, Great Britain

  One of the last works of the venerable Sir Norman Foster stood on the Isle of Dogs, a droplet-shaped peninsula in London’s East End. Bent into a U at this point, the Thames flowed around an area of business districts, elegantly restored docks, exclusive apartments and preserved remainders of social housing, whose traditional inhabitants were reduced to the status of extras in this affluent architectural idyll. As early as the 1990s, well-to-do Londoners had discovered the hidden charms of the area for themselves; artists, galleries, medium-sized companies had moved here to bear down on the crumbling working-class estates like so many pest controllers. After over two decades of violent social tensions, the last stretches of estate streets had now been lovingly restored, as if by museum curators, and the families living there had been made protected species, which meant turning them, with financial support, into the kind of happy social case that stressed managers were able to envy without drawing suspicions of cynicism.

  In 2025 there was no one left on the Isle of Dogs who was still really poor. Certainly not in the shadow of the Big O.

  The construction of the new headquarters of Orley Enterprises had begun even in Jericho’s day, the year before the fear of losing Joanna had sent him to Shanghai. In the south-east of the Isle of Dogs, in the former Island Gardens, resting on a low plinth – if you could call a twelve-storey complex low – was an O two hundred and fifty metres in diameter, circled parabolically by an artificial orange moon which contained several conference rooms and was reached via airy bridges. More than five thousand staff swarmed around the light-flooded atriums, gardens and open-plan offices of the big glass torus, busy as termites. A flight pad had been worked into the roof area so skilfully that the curve of the O was preserved from every perspective. Only as you approached it from the air did you notice that the zenith of the building was not arched but flat, a surface with two dozen helicopters and skymobiles arranged on it.

  Tu’s jet had landed in Heathrow at a quarter past four. While it was still on the runway, the company’s security forces had welcomed them and brought them to the firm’s helicopter, which flew them straight to the Isle of Dogs. Further north stretched the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, vainly straining to be a match for the Big O, which towered over everything else in sight. Private boats, tiny and white, moved about on the waters of the renovated docks. Jericho saw two men stepping onto the landing pad. The helicopter turned in the air, settled on the pad and opened its side door. The men’s steps quickened. One, with black, wiry hair and a mono-brow, held his right hand out to Jericho, then reconsidered and held it out to Yoyo.

  ‘Andrew Norrington,’ he said. ‘Deputy head of security. Chen Yuyun, I assume.’

  ‘Just Yoyo.’ She shook his outstretched hand. ‘The honourable Tu Tian, Owen Jericho. Also very honourable.’

  The other man coughed, wiped his palms on his trouser-legs and nodded at everyone.

  ‘Tom Merrick, information services.’

  Jericho studied him. He was young, prematurely bald, and clearly afflicted with inhibitions that kept him from looking anyone in the eye for longer than a second.

  ‘Tom is our specialist in all kinds of communication and information transmission,’ said Norrington. ‘Did you bring the dossier?’

  Instead of replying, Jericho held the tiny cube into the light.

  ‘Very good!’ Norrington nodded. ‘Come.’

  The path led them inside the roof onto a grassy track and across a bridge, beyond which there stretched a bank of glass lifts. The eye was drawn down into the open interior of the Big O, criss-crossed by further bridges. People hurried busily back and forth across them. A good hundred and fifty metres below him, Jericho saw lift-like cabins travelling along the loop of the hollow. Then they stepped into one of the high-speed lifts, plunged towards the ground and through it, and stopped on sub-level 4. Norrington marched ahead of them. Without slowing his pace, he made for a reflective wall that opened silently, and they plunged into the world of high security, dominated by computer desks and monitor walls. Men and women spoke into headsets. Video conferences were under way. Tu straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose, made some contented noises and craned his neck, transfixed by so much technology.

  ‘Our information centre,’ Norrington explained. ‘From here we stay in contact with Orley facilities everywhere in the world. We work according to the specifications of our subcontractors, which means that there are no continental heads, only security advisers to the individual subsidiaries, who report to London. All company data come together here.’

  ‘How far under the ground are we?’ asked Yoyo.

  ‘Not that far. Fifteen metres. We had a lot of problems with groundwater at first, but things are sorted out now. For understandable reasons we had to protect Central Security, avoid any kind of attacks from the air, for example, and if necessary the underground of the Big O serves as a nuclear bunker.’

  ‘That means that if England falls—’

  ‘—Orley will still be standing.’

  ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Norrington smiled. ‘England isn’t going to fall. Our country is changing, we had to accept the disappearance of the red telephone boxes and the red buses, but the Royal Family is non-negotiable. If it comes to the crunch, we still have room for the King down here.’

  He led them into a conference room with holographic screens running all the way around it. Two women stood in hushed conversation. Jericho recognised one of them straight away. The deep black pageboy cut over the pale face belonged to Edda Hoff. The other woman was plump, with appealing if grumpy features, blue-grey eyes and short, white hair.

  ‘Jennifer Shaw,’ she said.

  In charge of Central Security, Jericho completed in his head. Guard dog number one in the global Orley empire. Hands were shaken again.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Jennifer. ‘Water? Tea?’

  ‘Something.’ Tu had spotted a memory crystal reading device, and was making resolutely towards it. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Red wine,’ said Yoyo.

  Jennifer raised an eyebrow. ‘Medium-bodied? Full-bodied? Barrel-aged?’

  ‘Something along the lines of a narcotic, if possible.’

  ‘Narcotic and anything,’ nodded Edda Hoff, went outside for a moment and came back in as the others were taking their seats. Tu put the crystal in the reader and nodded to everyone.

  ‘With your permission we’ll let an old rascal speak first,’ he said. ‘It is to him that you owe your glimpse into the sick brain of your enemies, and in any case I should like to sweep away any remaining doubts about our credibility.’

  ‘Where is the man now?’ Jennifer leaned back.

  ‘Dead,’ said Jericho. ‘He was murdered right in front of my eyes. They were trying to stop him passing on his knowledge.’

  ‘Plainly without success,’ said Jennifer. ‘How did you come into possession of the crystal?’

  ‘I stole his eye,’ said Yoyo. ‘His left one.’

  Jennifer thought for a second.

  ‘Yes, you should baulk at nothing. Let your dead friend take the floor.’

  * * *

  ‘The whole thing, erm, seems to be some sort of satellite breakdown,’ said Tom Merrick, the IT Security supervisor, after Vogelaar had evoked Armageddon under West Africa’s streaming sky. ‘At least that’s what it looks like.’

  ‘What else could it be?’ asked Jericho.

  ‘Right, that’s a bit complicated. First of all, satellites aren’t things that you can click on and off as you feel like it. You have to know their codes if you want to control them.’ Merrick’s gaze slipped away. ‘Okay, you can find out that kind of thing through espionage. You can knock out a communications satellite with directed data streams, for a few hours or a day, you can also destroy it with radiation, but what we have here is a total breakdown, you unders
tand? We can’t contact either Gaia or Peary Base.’

  ‘Peary Base?’ echoed Tu. ‘The American moon base, right?’

  ‘Exactly. For that one all you’d need to do is black the LPCS, the lunar satellites, because of the libration, but—’

  ‘Libration?’ Yoyo looked blank.

  ‘The Moon seems to stand still,’ Norrington cut in before Merrick could reply. ‘But that’s an illusion. It does in fact rotate. Within one Earth rotation, it turns once on its own axis, with the effect that we always see the same side. That’s a thing called bound rotation, typical, by the way, of most of the moons in the solar system. However—’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Merrick nodded impatiently. ‘You have to explain to them that the angular velocity with which the Moon circles a larger body, in terms of its own rotation—’

  ‘I think our guests would like you to keep it simpler, Tom. Basically the Moon, because of its rotation behaviour, wobbles slightly. As a result, we get to see more than half of the Moon’s surface, in fact it’s almost sixty per cent. Conversely, the marginal regions disappear at times.’

  ‘And they disappear from radio range,’ Merrick broke in. ‘Conventional radio requires visual contact, unless you have an atmosphere that reflects radio waves, but there isn’t one on the Moon. And at the moment the North Pole and Peary Base are in the libration shadow, so they can’t be reached directly from the Earth via radio waves. So the Moon has been equipped with ten satellites of its own, the Lunar Positioning and Communication System, LPCS for short, which circle one another within range of the base. We’re in constant contact with at least five of them, so we should be able to contact Peary, regardless of libration.’

  ‘And what’s to say that somebody hasn’t taken control of precisely those ten satellites?’

  ‘Nothing. That is to say, everything! You know how many satellites you would have to knock out to cut off the whole of the Moon from the Earth? Gaia doesn’t actually have a libration problem, it’s in visual range, so it can be reached at any time by TDRS satellites, even without LPCS. Except we no longer have a connection with Gaia either.’

  ‘So someone must be blocking—’

  ‘—terrestrial satellites too, yes, that’s one hell of a lot of codes, but yes, I think so. It’s just not a lot of use to them in the long term. They could attack TDRS headquarters in White Sands and paralyse all the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites at a stroke, but then we’d just switch to ground stations or civilian stations like Artemis, which are equipped with S-band transponders and pivotable antennae. How would anyone interfere with all of those?’

  ‘That’s precisely the problem,’ said Edda Hoff. ‘We’re in touch with every available ground station in the world. There’s no contact up there.’

  ‘After the breakdown of the conference system we immediately informed NASA and Orley Space in Washington,’ said Jennifer. ‘And of course the Mission Control Center in Houston, our own control centres on the Isla de las Estrellas and in Perth. Nothing but radio silence.’

  ‘And what could be the reason for that?’ Jericho rubbed the tip of his chin. ‘If not interference with the satellites?’

  Merrick studied the lines in his right palm.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Are Peary Base and Gaia cut off from one another as well?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Norrington shook his head. ‘There’s a non-satellite laser connection between them.’

  ‘So if you got through to the base—’

  ‘Our message could be passed on to Gaia.’

  Jennifer leaned forward. ‘Listen, Owen, I won’t deny that until a moment ago I had some doubts about whether the evidence you have points convincingly to a threat to Gaia. You three could have been a gang of hysterical fantasists.’

  ‘And what’s your opinion now?’ asked Tu.

  ‘I’m inclined to believe you. According to your file, the bomb has been dormant up there since April of last year. The opening of Gaia was actually planned for 2024, but the Moon crisis thwarted that one. So it would make sense to detonate the bomb now that it’s finished. As soon as we get a warning through to the hotel, someone sabotages our communication, another clue that it is going to happen, but above all that someone’s got their eye on us, during these very seconds. And that’s extremely worrying. On the one hand because it suggests that we have a mole in our ranks, on the other because it means that someone up there will try to get the bomb into Gaia and set it off, if they haven’t done so already.’

  ‘Listening to Vogelaar,’ Norrington said, ‘you’d see the Chinese everywhere.’

  ‘Not impossible.’ She paused. ‘But Julian already suspected someone before the connection was severed. A guest. In fact the guest, the last to join the group. The perpetrator might be known to us.’

  ‘Carl Hanna,’ said Norrington.

  ‘Carl Hanna.’ Jennifer nodded. ‘So please be so kind as to get hold of his papers for me. Screen the guy, I want to know what he had for breakfast! Edda, put me through to NASA and issue orders to the OSS. Our people or theirs need to send a shuttle to Gaia.’

  Hoff hesitated. ‘If the OSS has capacity at the moment.’

  ‘I don’t care whether they have capacity. I just care that they do it. And straight away.’

  Aristarchus Plateau, The Moon

  The rover Julian had mentioned was parked in the dugout, but the second was stranded on the runway, scorched as if it had got in the way of a shuttle jet. All that remained of the third one, however, was a pile of junk. Debris lay scattered all around the place, so Momoka immediately set off in search of Locatelli’s remains. She scoured the area in grim silence. After that it was agreed that Locatelli wasn’t here, and nor was any part of him.

  They all knew what that meant. Locatelli must have managed to get on board the shuttle.

  They listlessly trawled through the hangars. Clearly the Schröter spaceport was still in the finishing stages. Everything suggested that airlocks and pressurised habitats were planned, so that people would be able to survive here for a while, but nowhere was there a sign of a life-support system. A cold room, for the preparation of foodstuffs, lay abandoned. The section of the hangar in which the moonmobile was parked was identified by inscriptions stating that grasshoppers should have been stored there, but there was no sign of one far or wide.

  ‘Well,’ Evelyn observed caustically, after glances into steel containers that should have contained spacesuits revealed nothing but a yawning void, ‘theoretically, at least, we’re in safety. The whole thing should just have happened four weeks later.’

  ‘Is the stupid moonmobile really all we’ve got?’ groaned Momoka.

  ‘No, we’ve got more than that,’ said Julian’s voice. He was walking through the next room with Amber and Rogachev. ‘You should come over here.’

  * * *

  ‘Nothing that flies,’ he went on, ‘but a few things that drive. That burnt rover out there hasn’t got any prettier, but it does work. So along with the one in the hangar we’ve got two. And look what Amber has found: charged replacement batteries for both vehicles, and in the boot of the undamaged rover enough extra oxygen for two people.’

  ‘There are five of us,’ said Momoka. ‘Can we connect the tanks to our suits in alternation?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s fine. The supplies wouldn’t get you to Gaia, and the rovers would be worthless in the Alps. But whatever happens, our supplies will be enough to take us to the mining station.’

  ‘And does anyone know the way?’

  Amber waved a stack of slides around. ‘These guys do.’

  ‘What,maps?’

  ‘They were in the rover.’

  ‘Oh, great!’ Momoka snorted. ‘Like Vasco da Gama! What sort of crap technology is that, when you can’t even program in your journey?’

  ‘The technology of a civilisation that increasingly confuses its achievements with magic,’ Rogachev coolly. ‘Or might it have escaped you that the satellite communication h
as gone down? No guidance system without LPCS.’

  ‘It hasn’t escaped me,’ said Momoka sulkily. ‘And incidentally, I’ve got a constructive remark as well.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘We can’t really make ourselves comfortable in this mining station, can we? I think we’ve got to make contact with the hotel, and that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment because of the satellite strike. So how are we going to get to the hotel under our own power?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Are there any flying machines in the mining station?’

  ‘Maybe some grasshoppers.’

  ‘Yeah, those’ll get you around the Moon just fine, but at a snail’s pace. Except, if I remember correctly, the helium tanks are taken to the Pole by magnetic rail. Right? That means there’s a station there, and a train goes from there to Peary Base. And from Peary Base—’

  Julian said nothing.

  Of course, he thought. That might work. How obvious! Hard to believe, but just for a change Momoka really had come up with something constructive.

  Ganymede

  Locatelli stared at the control displays.

  He had worked out by now that Hanna was taking his bearings from the holographic map, a kind of substitute LPCS. The outside cameras synched a real-time image of the visible area of the landscape with a 3D model in the computer into which you’d programmed your destination and route. That meant you could hold a steady course, practically on autopilot, because the system continually corrected itself, although that called for a high altitude. Locatelli guessed that Hanna had programmed in a destination that the controls were unable to tell him anything about. He would have bet that the Canadian was flying back to the hotel, but they were too far west for that. To get to Gaia he would have had to take a northeasterly course, and instead it looked as if he was stubbornly heading due north at fifty degrees longitude.

  Was Hanna trying to get to the Pole?

  Questions accumulated. Why did Hanna not use LPCS? How did you land a thing like that? How did you slow down? They were hurtling along at twelve hundred kilometres an hour, ten kilometres up, extremely worrying. How long would their fuel hold out if the jets had to constantly generate thrust in order to keep Ganymede at this altitude and accelerate at the same time?