Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Dana leapt to her feet.

  She had to dislodge Kokoschka’s body so that the bulkhead could close. Oxygen fires were uncontrollable, hotter and more destructive than any conventional kind. Even though the gas as such didn’t burn, it fatally encouraged the destruction of all kinds of material, and it was heavier than air. The blaze would spill like lava from Gaia’s throat and engulf the entire suite section. One leap and she was at the manual control panel, crouched down to get as far as she could from the heat, and activated the mechanism that operated the bulkhead. It opened, and Kokoschka was free. He dashed down the steps and leapt onto the gallery, kicking instinctively around. Tentacles of flame shot from the gap, as if to drag back the prey that had just been snatched from them. But the bulkhead closed on them, cutting off the blaze and isolating Gaia’s neck from its shoulders.

  The chef was a human torch. A fog of chemical extinguishing agents forced its way out of the ventilation system, but it wasn’t nearly enough. In a few moments, the plants, the walls, the floor would all be ablaze. Dana pulled a portable CO2 fire extinguisher from the wall, emptied it on the body now lying motionless and then pointed what was left at the ceiling. In the inferno above her, the extinguisher system had probably given up long ago. By now the temperatures up there must be unimaginable. Sooty smoke entered her airways and blinded her eyes. Her chest began to hurt. If she didn’t get fresh air in a minute, she would die of smoke poisoning. Kokoschka and the stairs and parts of the ceiling were still smouldering away, little fires still flared here and there, but instead of trying to quell them, she staggered along the gallery, eyes streaming, unable to breathe, the creak and clatter of the bulkhead in her ears, now sealing off Gaia’s shoulder. Where the gallery ended in the figure’s right arm, there was an emergency storeroom which contained, alongside the inevitable candles, some oxygen masks. She quickly put one of the masks on, greedily sucked in the oxygen and watched as access to the arm was sealed off.

  She hadn’t been fast enough.

  She was trapped.

  * * *

  Tim managed to catch up with his sister in the hall. She’d been trying to escape across the glass bridges, leaping like a satyr but with her knees trembling, so that he was terrified he was about to watch her slip to her doom, but nothing could stop her attempt to escape. It was only at the last jump that she faltered, fell and crept away on all fours. Tim jumped down immediately behind her and grabbed her ankle. Lynn’s elbows bent. She slipped away on her belly, trying to escape him. He held her firmly, turned her on her back and received a smack in the face. Lynn panted, grunted, tried to scratch him. He gripped her wrists and forced her down.

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘Stop! It’s me!’

  She raged and snapped at him. It was like fighting a rabid animal. Now that her hands had been immobilised, she struck out with her legs, threw herself back and forth, then suddenly rolled her eyes and lay slack. Her breathing was fitful. For a moment he was afraid he was going to lose her to unconsciousness, then he saw her eyelids flutter. Her eyes cleared. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  She started sobbing. He let go of her wrists, took her in his arms and started rocking her like a baby.

  ‘Help me, Tim. Please help me.’

  ‘I’m here. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ She pressed herself against him, clawed her fingers into the fabric of his jacket. ‘I’m going mad. I’m losing my mind. I—’

  The rest was drowned by fresh sobbing, and Tim felt as unprepared as a schoolboy, even though it was the terrifying spectre of this situation that had prompted him to come on Julian’s idiotic pleasure trip in the first place. But now his brain threatened to go on strike on grounds of continuous overload and abandon him to naked terror. He threw back his head and looked at the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium, menacingly spreading its wings. Something grew from the balconies, metal plates, enormous bulkheads, and he started to sense that something terrible was going on up there.

  Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

  For the first few minutes they had made quick progress, until it turned out that the bigger boulders supported one another, and developed a curious dynamism of their own as soon as you removed one of them. Several times he and Hanna were nearly crushed by a rolling rock. Whenever Locatelli jumped out of the way at the last second, his mind came up with bold scenarios of cause and effect in which debris – guided in precise trajectories – would crush Hanna as flat as a pancake. The Achilles heel of all these plans was that nothing in the field of debris around Ganymede lent itself to precise calculation, so he resigned himself to cooperation. They carried the rubble down, alert, watching out for each other’s safety, they pushed, pulled, dragged and lifted, and after two hours of backbreaking work they reached their physical limits. Several of the colossal boulders showed some movement, to be sure, but refused to be shifted. Breathless, Locatelli leaned against one of the rocks and was amazed not to hear Hanna panting like a dog as well.

  Clearly the Canadian was in better shape.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘What indeed. We’ve got to get the hatch open.’

  ‘Oh really, Cleverdick? Shame it’s impossible.’

  Hanna leaned down and studied the blockage. Locatelli could hear the gears whirring in his head.

  ‘Why don’t you chuck one of your bombs in?’ he suggested. ‘Let’s blow these bloody things up.’

  ‘No, the energy would disperse outside. Although—’ Hanna hesitated, stepped over and crouched down to a spot where two of the rocks touched. His hand dug into the crack in the ground and brought out some gravel. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m right,’ panted Locatelli. ‘I’m generally right. The bane and blessing of my existence. The deeper your blasted shot goes in, the more it can do.’

  ‘Even so, I’m not sure the explosive will be enough. The stones are enormous.’

  ‘But porous! This stuff’s basalt, volcanic rock. With a bit of luck bits of it will come flying off, and you’ll destabilise the whole pile.’

  ‘Fine,’ Hanna agreed. ‘Let’s try that.’

  They began deepening and widening the channel. After an interval the Canadian disappeared inside the ship, brought out the console struts of the grasshopper, and they went on digging with that makeshift tool; they scraped and scrabbled until Hanna thought the channel was deep enough. At an appropriate distance from the Ganymede, at a slightly elevated position, they piled the smaller stones from the surroundings into a wall, lay down flat behind it, and Hanna took aim.

  ‘Heads down!’

  Like a newborn cosmos, a grey cloud expanded among the rocks. Warren Locatelli crouched lower. Bits of rock were hitting the basalt to right and left of the wall. When he raised his head above the parapet, it looked at first as if nothing had happened. Then he saw the huge boulder at the front shifting incredibly slowly and then spinning on its own axis. The one next to it dislodged as well, pushed its neighbour aside, and immediately collapsed, sending fragments scattering down the slope.

  ‘Yeah!’ cried Locatelli. ‘My idea. My idea!’

  The big boulder was still spinning, and when it was jostled by a third that toppled into the gap, it finally leaned over, rolled heavily a few more metres and produced a chain reaction of tumbling debris that rattled cheerfully down the hill.

  ‘Yeah! Yeah!’

  He jumped to his feet. They leapt from their improvised trench, and shoved the remaining rubble aside. Drunk on dopamine and thrilled by their joint success, Locatelli forgot the circumstances of their enmity, as if the disputes of the past few hours had been based on a script error, in which Hanna, the good mate, had been unjustly demonised, but was now, once again, someone with whom you could run races and blow up moon mountains. They freed the hatch of the Ganymede, and Hanna gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.

  ‘We
ll done, Warren. Very good!’

  That contact, even though he barely felt it through his thick armour, brought Warren to his senses with a start. He couldn’t get so drunk on his body’s stimulants that he would actually let Hanna touch him. He had always liked the Canadian, with his moderate machismo, his monosyllabic manner, and now he thought he could discern something vaguely friendly about him, which made things even worse.

  ‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said roughly. ‘You open the hatch, I drive the buggy out and—’

  ‘No, you can take a break,’ Hanna said equably. ‘I’ll drive it out myself.’

  ‘Why? Do you think I’ll try and get away?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think.’

  And you’re right, you fucker, thought Locatelli. He had flirted with the idea. Now he had conflicted feelings. He watched Hanna as he ran up the slope, climbed the nose of the Ganymede and disappeared from view. Suddenly he was aware that the hitman didn’t need him any more. Feeling uneasy, he took a step back, as the hatch swung open and started to lower. He could see the inside of the freight space. A ramp emerged from the tipping hatch, and there was Hanna, already standing next to the buggy. He sat down in the driver’s seat, checked the controls and started. The ramp came down towards the ground, and Locatelli spotted that its rim wasn’t going to make contact. The furrow that the shuttle had made had piled the debris up too far. It stopped a good metre above the regolith. For a moment the little vehicle looked like an animal about to spring, then it came to a standstill just beyond the edge of the ramp.

  Locatelli hesitated. He didn’t really know what to hope for, or what to fear. For a moment he had been worried that Hanna might simply drive on and leave him here, in the shadow of a broken-down spaceship that could no longer even be flooded with breathable air. Now, when he saw the Canadian climbing out, the source of his unease shifted to the possibility that the Canadian would proceed to make short work of him before driving off. Nervously, he took a step towards the ramp.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Hanna. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘Coming?’ echoed Locatelli.

  ‘You can still be useful to me.’

  Useful. Aha.

  ‘And for how long,’ Locatelli asked, ‘will I be useful?’

  ‘Until we’ve reached the American extraction station.’ Hanna pointed outside at the dusty plain. ‘When you were unconscious, I did a rough calculation of our position. What I see from here tells me that we’re stranded precisely at the tip of Cape Heraclides. That means that the station is to the north-east, in the middle of the basalt lake, where the Sinus Iridum and the Mare Imbrium meet. About a hundred kilometres from here.’

  ‘And why do you want to go there?’

  ‘The station’s automated,’ said Hanna. ‘But inspectors are always going there. A terminal was set up for them. Pressurised. A proper little base, where you could live for several months. We’ll have to rely on our own sense of direction to get there, since all the satellites are out.’

  ‘Turn them back on, then.’

  ‘What makes you think I can do that?’

  ‘What makes you think I’ve got shit for brains?’ barked Locatelli. ‘They all failed when you set off on your crazy little journey. Are you trying to tell me that was coincidence?’

  Hanna said nothing for a few moments.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But it’s not in my power to correct that. We had to interrupt communication after I’d been busted, and now stop bugging me, okay? Help me to navigate and I’ll leave you at the extraction station. If you want to live—’

  Hanna went on talking, but Locatelli wasn’t listening. He stared past the ramp. Something to the side of the Ganymede had attracted his attention.

  ‘—rid of me,’ Hanna was saying. ‘You’ve just got to—’

  Why was dust swirling up where the body of the shuttle was in the regolith? Little clouds puffing up along its flank, like an approaching steam train. What was happening? The outlines of the spaceship blurred, its steel fuselage quivered. The edge of the ramp barely rose above the debris, but more dust was pouring out. The ground was trembling too.

  ‘—then we’ll—’

  ‘The shuttle’s slipping!’ yelled Locatelli.

  Hanna jerked around. The Ganymede reared up, no longer stabilised by the boulders that they had blown away. A moment later it started moving again and slipped backwards, spraying up sand and gravel. Locatelli saw Hanna dash up and jump onto the ramp that was now hurtling towards them, which swept the buggy up and away; he tried to leap to safety, stumbled and fell. He was back on his feet in a moment, pushed himself away, dived to the side—

  Another half-metre and he would have done it.

  The moment the rim cut into his belly, he saw with crystal clarity the image of Carl Hanna who, a universe further off, had done the right thing and sought refuge in altitude. Then a searing pain erased all other thoughts. He instinctively gripped the steel, a torero impaled on the bull’s horns, shaken to the core by the downhill race of the Ganymede, which dropped one last time, pitched and slung him away in a high arc. He landed on his back several metres away, became aware that the shuttle had stopped sliding just as suddenly as it had started, wedged on a ledge of rock, saw the buggy somersaulting and Hanna leaping along the loading bed and jumping into the rubble.

  He pressed both hands to his belly, as hard as he could.

  Hanna came running across and bent over him. Locatelli tried to say something, but all that came out was groaning and retching. He didn’t need to look down at himself – which he couldn’t have done anyway – to know that his suit had a tiny tear in it. If he was still alive, it was only because bio-suits didn’t immediately burst like balloons, losing all their air at once.

  Perhaps if he kept his hands pressed against the wound—

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ said Hanna.

  ‘Sh-shit,’ he managed to gasp. ‘Can you—?’

  ‘Idiot!’ How strange. The Canadian seemed to be angry. ‘What were you doing? I spared you, for God’s sake! I could have brought you to safety!’

  ‘I’m – I’m s—’

  What? Sorry? Was he apologising to Hanna for allowing himself to be rammed in the body by the Ganymede? Whose fault was that, then, damn it? But right now he felt terribly cold, and he understood that apart from Hanna he had no one now.

  ‘Please – don’t – let – me—’

  ‘You’re going to die,’ Hanna said soberly.

  ‘N-no.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be done, Warren. The vacuum will suck you empty as soon as you take your hands away.’

  Locatelli’s lips moved. Connect me to something, he wanted to say, repair the suit, but all that came out was gurgles and coughing.

  ‘Every second that we drag things out, you will suffer.’

  Suffer? He shook his head weakly. Stupid idea, he thought as he did so. No one can see you anyway. Each saw himself reflected in the helmet of the other. Searing hooks tore at his guts. He groaned.

  ‘Warren?’ Hanna’s hands approached his helmet. ‘Do you hear me?’

  ‘Shhhh—’

  ‘Look at the stars. Look at the starry sky.’

  ‘Carl—’ he whispered. The pain was almost unbearable.

  ‘I’m with you. Look at the stars.’

  The stars. They circled above Locatelli, sending out messages that he didn’t understand. Not yet. Oh, Christ, he thought, as Hanna busied himself with his helmet, who ever died with such an image before his eyes? How fantastic, in fact.

  ‘Sh – it,’ he gasped once more, still his favourite word.

  His helmet was taken off.

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina

  However many heads Hydra had, at that moment they all had cause for the greatest concern.

  And there had been problems on the horizon. The disaster of 2024 cast its long shadow, since Vic Thorn, the bacillus that they had been cultivating at such expense, had vanished into the ex
panses of interstellar space. More than a year of dread, month by month, during which the package frayed her nerves, as no one was able to say whether it would be able to survive that long in the lonely bleakness of the crater. Admittedly mini-nukes were almost impossible to find, as Dana Lawrence knew very well, although of course she hadn’t told the assiduous afternoon search party. The little nuclear weapons got their energy from uranium-235. They didn’t give off gamma rays like their beloved cousins, but instead produced alpha waves; even a sheet of paper was enough to dupe detectors. Nonetheless, in a stored state they gave off thermal energy that had to be dispersed somewhere or other, a process performed on Earth by the atmosphere. On the Moon, on the other hand, there were no busily circulating molecules to pick up the little packets of heat and carry them off. To counteract the overheating of an atom bomb in an airless space, you needed big radiators, which the little bomb did not possess, because it was designed to be hidden for three months after the landing of Thorn, who would have been just around the corner from it on the moon base. If everything had gone to plan, Thorn would have positioned the bomb, set the timer, headed for Earth on the pretext of sudden illness, and the rest would have been available to read in the chronicles of noteworthy disasters.

  Dana looked with revulsion at Kokoschka’s charred and smoking body. At last she had managed to put out the remaining fires. She couldn’t imagine what kind of inferno was currently raging in Gaia’s sealed-off neck, but there too the flames must already have consumed much of the oxygen that had been there at the outset. The life-saving mask filled her lungs with oxygen, and a visual barrier protected her eyes against the stinging smoke, but the real problem was that she wasn’t going to get out of here very quickly.

  And all because of Julian’s crazy daughter!

  What the hell was up with Lynn? Never, not during her interviews for the job, and not afterwards, either, had she ever given the impression of being mad. Controlling, certainly. Almost pathological in her striving for perfection, but she also seemed to be more or less perfect. Even until a few days previously, Dana wouldn’t have been able to say anything else about Lynn Orley, except that she was the legitimate architect of three extraordinary hotels, and completely capable of running a global company.