Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Julian bore down on it. ‘Momoka, stay behind me,’ he ordered. ‘We have to stick together. If we want to stay on course, we can’t avoid getting close to these machines. They’re sluggish, but sluggishness is relative when you consider their size.’

  The visibility got worse. By the time the velvety regolith was under their wheels again, just before they reached the beetle, its torso was outlined, dark and threatening, against the clouded sky. For its enormous height, it was astonishingly narrow.

  It disappeared behind plumes of whirling dust. As the giant lifted one of its powerful, many-jointed legs and took a step forwards, it seemed to Evelyn as if it was ever so slowly swivelling its stooped skull around to look at them. The rover juddered softly. She put it down to Momoka driving over a bump on the ground, but an inner certainty told her it had happened at the very moment when the beetle rammed its foot into the regolith.

  ‘A mining machine!’ Rogachev turned round to stare at the vanishing silhouette. ‘Fantastic! How could you have kept that from me for so long?’

  ‘We call them beetles,’ said Julian. ‘On account of their shape and the way they move. And yes, they are fantastic. But there are far too few of them.’

  ‘Do they turn the regolith into this – stuff?’ asked Evelyn, thinking of the crumbly wasteland.

  Julian hesitated. ‘As I said, they transform the landscape.’

  ‘I was just wondering, I mean, I wasn’t really sure how the mining takes place. I thought, I mean, I expected to see something along the lines of drilling rigs.’

  As soon as the words had left her mouth, she felt ashamed for discussing mining techniques with Julian so casually, as if forgetting that Momoka had been confronted with Locatelli’s deformed corpse just half an hour before. Since their departure from the Cape, the Japanese woman had not uttered a single word, but she was certainly driving the rover with care. She had retreated within herself, in an eerie, ghostly way. The creature behind the reflective visor pane steering the vehicle could easily have been mistaken for a robot.

  ‘Helium-3 can’t be produced in the same way as oil, gas or coal,’ said Julian. ‘The isotope is atomically bound into the moon dust. Around three nanograms per gram of regolith, evenly distributed.’

  ‘Nanogram, wait a moment,’ pondered Evelyn. ‘That’s a billionth of a gram, right?’

  ‘So little?’ Rogachev was stunned.

  ‘Not that little,’ said Julian. ‘Just think, the stuff was stored up over billions of years by solar wind. Far over half a billion tonnes in total, ten times as much as all the coal, oil and gas reserves on Earth! That’s a hell of a lot! It’s just that, in order to get to it, you have to process the moon surface too.’

  So that’s what you call it, thought Evelyn. Processing. And out of that comes a wasteland of crumb-like debris. Feeling uneasy, she stared off into the glistening distance. Far behind them, a second beetle was creeping through the dust, and suddenly the terrain became ugly and crumbly again.

  ‘And yet it’s an astonishingly low concentration,’ Rogachev persisted. ‘It sounds to me as though vast amounts of lunar soil would need to be processed. How deep do those things burrow down into the ground?’

  ‘Two to three metres. Helium-3 can still be found even five metres down, but they get most of it from above that.’

  ‘And that’s enough?’

  ‘It depends what for.’

  ‘I mean, is it enough to supply the world with helium-3?’

  ‘Well, it was enough to make the fossil energy market collapse on Earth.’

  ‘It collapsed prematurely. How many machines are in use at the moment?’

  ‘Thirty. Believe me, Oleg, helium-3 represents a lasting solution to our energy problems, and the Moon can provide it. But you’re right of course. We need a lot more machines to be able to graze all the terrain.’

  ‘Graze,’ echoed Amber. ‘That sounds more like a cow than a beetle.’

  ‘Yes.’ Julian’s laughter was a little forced. ‘They really do move across the land like herds. Like a herd of cows.’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Rogachev, but Evelyn thought she could detect a hint of scepticism. The silhouette of a third beetle came into sight in the hazy distance. It seemed to be standing still. Evelyn’s attention was drawn to something agile, something smaller, that was approaching the machine from behind, at first glance a flying machine, until the suspicion took hold that the thing was hurrying over on high, intricate legs, and she couldn’t help thinking of a spider. The apparition paused underneath the monstrous abdomen, ducked down, and seemed to temporarily merge with the beetle. Evelyn stared at it curiously. She wanted to ask Julian, but Momoka’s silence weighed heavily over the group like a stormy sky, so she held her tongue, deeply unsettled. This insectarium was not at all to her liking. Not that she had anything against technology: she conscientiously drove her environmentally friendly electric car, had converted her home to Locatelli’s solar technology and always separated her trash – though she certainly couldn’t claim a devoutly green mindset. Phenomena like robotics, nanotechnology and space travel were just as interesting to her as waterfalls, giant sequoia trees and the endangered tufted-ear marmosets, whose continued existence couldn’t necessarily be regarded as essential to the Earth’s ecological foundations. New technologies fascinated her, but something about this realm of the dead exuded a horror that even Rogachev’s less than squeamish industrial nature seemed to be developing antibodies against.

  Hanna’s tracks veered off in a wide arc. The huge imprints suggested that he had been forced to dodge one of the mining machines. The crater-like tracks were joined by some of lesser diameter, and less deep too. Evelyn looked behind and saw a beetle shimmering in its cocoon of dust like a mirage. She couldn’t make out the spider-like creature any more. She closed her eyes, and the image of the colossal machine left a ghostly afterglow on her retinas.

  * * *

  The beetle was eating.

  It worked its way unceasingly through the undergrowth with its shovel-like jaw, loosening the rocks, sieving out the indigestible fragments and guiding the finegrained matter that remained into its glowing insides. Meanwhile, huge reflectors atop its hunchback followed the course of the sun, bundled photons and sent them off to smaller parabolic reflectors. From there, the light made its way into the cybernetic organism and created a burning hell of 1000 degrees Celsius, not enough to melt the regolith, but enough to divest it of its bound elements. Hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen and minute quantities of helium-3 rose in gas form into the solar oven, and from there made their way into the highly compressed counter-world of its abdomen. At minus 260 degrees Celsius and under enormous pressure, the obtained gases condensed into liquid and were then transmitted to batteries of spherical tanks, separated according to their elementary affiliation: minute amounts of helium-3, every drop a carefully protected treasure, and everything else in huge quantities. Despite the potential value of the hydrogen for fuel production, the nitrogen for the enrichment of air supplies and the carbon for building materials, vast as the beetle was, it still had to release most of these liquefied elements back into the vacuum, where they instantly evaporated, forming a fleeting, cyclically renewed atmosphere around the machine. In this way the beetles altered everything surrounding them: the lunar soil, which they regurgitated in the form of baked crumbs, and the vacuum, which was constantly enriched with the noble gases that the machine constantly expelled.

  As a result of the gas emissions, the dust around the machine became even denser. Strictly speaking, given that there were no air molecules to hold the floating pieces of rock in suspension, they should have been incapable of forming the kilometre-high barrier. But it was the very lack of atmospheric pressure, as well as the scant gravity and electrostatic phenomena, that caused their extremely long and high flight-paths, from which they sank down, as if reluctantly, hours later. So, over time, a permanent haze had descended over the mining zone. The clouds produced by the beetle under
high pressure formed additional dust in such large quantities that the chewing apparatus and insect legs completely disappeared behind it at times. In addition to this, there was an iridescent gleam on the crystalline structure of the suspended matter, almost like aurora, which made it even harder to see.

  This was exactly what happened to Hanna on his solitary trek; the reason why he only became aware of the proximity of one of the mining machines crossing his path once its shovel had practically swallowed him up and passed him through the sieve – only a jump of possibly record-breaking proportions had saved him from being industrially processed. He hastily put some distance between himself and the beetle, aghast that he’d overlooked something so colossal that it could make the ground shake. The machine had towered above him, but it was a well-known fact that small creatures tended to be blinded when they got too close to large ones. He aligned his course to the path of the machine and carried on. From the inexhaustible information provided as part of the conspiracy, he knew that the beetles ploughed the regolith in rectangular paths on the imaginary line between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace, and that you couldn’t miss the station as long as you kept at a ninety-degree angle to the pasture routes – the only orientation device in a world where, due to the lack of a magnetic field, even compasses didn’t work. He had been on the go for well over an hour now since the buggy had served its last, and his long, springing steps had necessitated his breaking into his first oxygen reserves. But he still didn’t feel any sign of fatigue. As long as nothing unexpected happened, the mining station should appear before him in the next fifteen to twenty minutes. If not, he would be in serious difficulties, and there would be plenty of time to worry then.

  * * *

  Totally unexpectedly, they met a spider.

  It emerged from the shadow of a beetle and crossed their path with such speed that Julian had to whip the steering wheel around to stop them from colliding with it. For a moment, Evelyn was reminded of H. G. Wells’ tripods, the machines from Mars in War of the Worlds which attacked entire cities using heat rays, burning them to cinders. But this thing had eight legs instead of three, daddy-long-legs-thin and several metres long, making it look as if its body were hovering in space. There were dozens of spherical tanks lined up right behind its pincers. Another thing that set the spider apart from its Martian colleagues was its complete lack of interest in human presence. Without Julian’s quick-wittedness, Evelyn suspected it would simply have run right over the vehicle.

  ‘What in God’s name was that brute of a thing?’ shrieked Momoka.

  She was communicating again now, although admittedly in a way which was provoking wistful memories of her silence. Any trace of grief seemed to have been transformed into rage. Evelyn suddenly wondered whether Momoka’s joyless personality was less shaped by arrogance than by pent-up aggression, hoarded over many years, and she became less and less happy about her driving the rover. Her heart racing, she stared after the robot as it hurried away. In front of them, Julian slowly began to drive forwards again.

  ‘A spider,’ he said, as if there had been any doubt on the matter. ‘Loading and unloading robots. They receive the full tanks from the beetles, exchange them for empty ones, bring the loot to the station and load them up to be transported on.’

  ‘I don’t exactly feel welcome here,’ observed Rogachev.

  ‘They won’t hurt you,’ murmured Amber. ‘They just want to play.’

  ‘Is the area under surveillance?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘The CCTV only switches on if there’s an error message. As I said, the mining is automated. Distributed intelligence in a real-time network. The robots only react to each other; we don’t exist in their internal image.’

  ‘Pieces of shit!’ snarled Momoka. ‘Your goddamn Moon is starting to really get on my tits.’

  ‘Maybe it would be worth enriching their internal image with some additional data,’ Evelyn suggested. ‘I mean, if a spider has room in its reality cosmos for something as space-consuming as a beetle, surely it can’t be that complicated to squeeze in Homo sapiens too.’

  ‘Humans aren’t supposed be in the mining zone,’ said Julian, a little on edge. ‘The zone is a self-enclosed technosphere.’

  ‘And how big is this technosphere?’

  ‘At the moment, one hundred square kilometres. On the American side. The Chinese occupy a smaller zone.’

  ‘And you’re sure that those are American machines?’

  ‘The Chinese use caterpillar tracks.’

  ‘Well’ said Evelyn, ‘at least we won’t get trampled by the enemy.’

  * * *

  From that point on, they paid even more attention to what was lurking in the shadows, and – because it was impossible to hear anything in a vacuum – also strained their eyes until they hurt. That’s how Amber noticed the buggy, even from a distance.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Momoka as she saw Julian stop.

  ‘Carl might be up ahead.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good.’ She laughed drily. ‘Very good! For me, not for him.’ She tried to overtake Julian but Rogachev put his hand on her forearm.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘What for, for God’s sake?’

  ‘I said, wait.’

  His unusually authoritative tone made Momoka stop. Rogachev pulled himself up. There were no spiders nor beetles as far as the eye could see. The baked regolith was the only indication that the mining machines had already processed this part of the Sinus Iridum. Amidst the bleak landscape, Hanna’s buggy looked like the remains of a long-lost battle.

  ‘I can’t see him anywhere,’ said Amber after a while.

  ‘No.’ Rogachev turned his upper body round and back. ‘It really doesn’t look like he’s there.’

  ‘How could you tell in all this fucking dust?’ growled Momoka. ‘He could be anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t know, Momoka. All I know is that – so far – we haven’t been shot at.’

  There was expectant silence for a while.

  ‘Okay,’ Julian decided. ‘Let’s go over there.’

  Within a few minutes it became clear that Hanna wasn’t lying in wait for them somewhere. His buggy had succumbed to an axle fracture. Bootprints led off in a straight line away from it.

  ‘He set off on foot,’ commented Amber.

  ‘Will he be able to make it?’ asked Evelyn.

  ‘Sure, as long as he has enough air.’ Julian bent over the cargo area. ‘He hasn’t left anything behind in any case, and I know for sure that he took oxygen reserves from the Ganymede with him.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be there soon?’ Evelyn stared into the distance. ‘I mean, we’ve been on the go for over an hour now.’

  ‘According to the rover it’s another fifteen kilometres to the station.’

  ‘A piece of cake then, really.’

  ‘For us, but not so much for him.’ Julian straightened up. ‘He’ll need one to two hours from here. That means he’s still out there somewhere. There’s no way he’s already reached the station.’

  ‘So we’ll run into him.’

  ‘And soon, I think.’

  ‘And what will we do with him when we do?’

  ‘The question’s more what he’ll do with us,’ snorted Amber.

  ‘Well, I know what I’m going to do with him,’ hissed Momoka. ‘I’m going to—’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Julian interrupted her. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Momoka. We’re grieving with you, but—’

  ‘Oh, spare me that shit!’

  ‘But we have to find out what Carl is planning. I want to know what this is all about. We need him alive!’

  ‘That won’t be easy,’ said Rogachev. ‘He’s armed.’

  ‘Do you have any ideas?’

  ‘Well.’ Rogachev was silent for a moment. ‘We’ve got the advantage in some ways. We have the rovers. And we’re approaching him from behind. If he doesn’t happen to turn round right at t
he decisive moment, then we could drive right up without him even realising.’

  ‘And do you want to risk him shooting at us as soon as he does realise?’ Amber turned round. ‘Driving right up close is all well and good. But what then?’

  ‘We could surround him,’ Julian mused. ‘Approach from both sides.’

  ‘Then he’d definitely see us,’ said Rogachev.

  ‘How about a friendly ramming?’ Evelyn suggested.

  ‘Hmm, not bad.’ Julian thought for a moment. ‘Let’s say we drive next to one another, nice and slow. Then one of us can run him down from behind, and then, before he has time to react, the ones in the other rover can jump down and grab his weapons, and so on.’

  ‘And so on. So who’s doing the ramming?’

  ‘Julian,’ said Rogachev. ‘And we’ll form the attack commando.’

  ‘And who’s driving?’

  ‘Well …’ Rogachev turned to Momoka, who was standing there motionless as if waiting for someone to activate her vital functions. ‘Momoka is very emotionally charged right now.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ said Momoka tonelessly.

  ‘But I do,’ said Rogachev coolly. ‘I don’t know whether we can let you drive. You’ll mess things up.’

  ‘And?’ Momoka broke out of her frozen state and climbed back into the driver’s seat. ‘What’s the alternative, Oleg? If you let me jump on him you’ll be risking much more. For example, the fact that I’ll smash in his visor with the nearest available rock.’

  ‘We need him alive,’ Julian repeated insistently. ‘Under no circumstances will we—’

  ‘I got it!’ she snapped.