Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Lawrence was reaching for the control panel. She wanted to seal the airlock, to lock him out. What was her plan? Did she want to get out? What for? What did she want to do out there?

  Clear off?

  The blood was clotting in his nose, his head was swinging like a bell when he dashed back into the airlock at the last minute and managed to grab her arm. Lawrence’s fingers couldn’t reach the closing mechanism. Without letting go of her, and with blows drumming down on him from her free hand, he pushed her back. They started spinning and collided against the outside portal. For a moment, through the porthole, Julian saw the brightly lit opposite side of the enormous ring module, the cables ending in the middle, only minutes to go till the cabin arrived – and then Lawrence rammed her knee into his stomach.

  He felt a wave of nausea, he couldn’t breathe. He let go of her arm and she hurled him against the wall, where he managed to grab onto a strut. Lawrence was floating upright by the outer portal, turned round and faced him. Her right hand wandered to her thigh and took something out of a sheath, a flat thing that looked like a pistol.

  He had lost.

  As in a stupor, Julian leaned his head to one side. It couldn’t, mustn’t end like this! His glance fell on a flap in the wall beside him. It took him a second to remember what it did, or more precisely what lay behind it, and then it came to him.

  OSS handbook, Letter B:

  Bulkhead emergency detonation.

  In emergencies it may be necessary to blast open the outer portal of an airlock, regardless of whether or not a vacuum has been created inside it. This measure may be necessary if the bulkhead or airlock casing is caught or wedged in the rump of the lift cabin or a docking spaceship and launch or departure are impeded, particularly when human lives are at stake. In the event of a detonation, care should be taken that the side of the airlock channel facing the habitation sector is closed and the person undertaking the detonation is wearing a spacesuit and is securely fastened to the wall of the airlock.

  He wasn’t securely fastened. He was just holding on with sheer muscle power, and the bulkhead to the torus was open. He wasn’t even wearing a helmet.

  To hell with it!

  Holding tightly on to the bar, he pulled up the flap. A bright red handle became visible. Dana’s eyes behind the visor widened as she worked out what he was planning. The barrel of her gun came flying up, but not fast enough. He pulled hard on the handle and brought it straight down.

  Held his breath.

  With a deafening crash the charges in the fixing pins went up and blew the bulkhead from its mooring. Tumbling over and over it whirled into open space, and at the same moment the suction began, a wailing, murderous storm, as the air flowed out, pulling Dana out of the airlock with it. Julian clung to the metal pole with both hands. More air streamed out of the torus, a hurricane now. That moment he realised all passageways to the adjacent corridors would close automatically, and he was unprotected, not even wearing a helmet. If he didn’t make it out of the tunnel in the next few seconds and close the internal bulkhead, he would die in the vacuum, so he gritted his teeth, tensed his muscles and tried to crawl his way back inside.

  His fingers started sliding from the rail.

  He panicked. He couldn’t let go, but the hurricane was pulling at him, and most particularly it was pulling his leg. He turned his head and saw Dana Lawrence gripping onto one of his boots. The suction intensified, but she wouldn’t let go, she hung horizontal in the roaring inferno, tried to aim her gun.

  She pointed it at him.

  Tiny muzzle, black.

  Death.

  And suddenly he’d just had enough of the bloody woman. His rage, his fear, everything turned into pure strength.

  ‘This is my space station,’ he yelled. ‘Now get out!’

  And he kicked.

  His boot crashed against her helmet. Lawrence’s fingers slipped away. In a split second she had been swept outside, into the centre of the torus, and even then she kept her gun pointed at him, took aim, and Julian waited for the end.

  Her body passed the cable.

  For a moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Lawrence was flying in two directions at once. More precisely, her shoulder, part of her torso and the right arm holding the gun had separated themselves from the rest.

  Because direct contact with the cable can cost you a body-part in a fraction of a second. You must bear in mind that it’s thinner than a razor-blade, but incredibly hard.

  His own words, down on the Isla de las Estrellas.

  The storm raged around him. With an extreme effort of strength he pulled his way further along the rail, without any illusions of his own survival. He wasn’t going to make it. He couldn’t make it. His lungs hurt, his eyes watered, his head thumped like a jackhammer.

  Lynn, he thought. My God, Lynn.

  A figure appeared in his field of vision, wearing a helmet, secured with a safety-line. Someone else. Hands grabbed him and pulled him back into the shelter of the torus. Gripped him tightly. The interior bulkhead slid shut.

  Haskin.

  * * *

  Stars. Like dust.

  Lynn is far away, far, far away. The spaceship silently ploughs the timeless, glittering night, an enclave of peace and refuge. When she briefly regains consciousness, she merely wonders why the bomb hasn’t gone off, but perhaps she just hasn’t been travelling for long enough. She vaguely remembers a plan she had to leave the mini-nuke in the habitation module and return to the OSS in the landing unit, to save herself.

  Landing unit. Uning landit.

  Mini-nuke. Nuki-Duke. Muki-Nuki-Duki, Mini-Something-Something.

  Bruce Dern in Silent Running.

  Great film. And at the end: Boooooommmmmm!

  No, she’ll stay here. And anyway, she’s out of strength. So many things have gone wrong. Sorry, Julian. Didn’t we want to go to the Moon? How is work going at the Stellar Island Hotel? What? Oh, shit, it’s not finished, that’s it, she knew it, she always knew, it’s not finished! It will never be finished. Never, never, never!

  Cold.

  The little robot watering the flowers with Bruce Dern. He’s sweet. On that platform in space, the last plants are on it before Dern blows himself up, and then there’s a song by that eco-trollop, Joan Baez, Julian says that every time he hears her he has the feeling somebody’s chiselling his head open, and she messes up the whole great finale with her hysterical soprano.

  ‘Lynn?’

  There he is.

  ‘Please answer! Lynn! Lynn!’

  Oh! Is he crying? Why? Her fault? Did she do something wrong?

  Don’t cry, Julian. Come on, let’s look at another one of those ropy old movies. Armageddon. No, he doesn’t like that one, everything about it’s wrong, he says, there’s too much wrong, so how about Ed Wood, Plan 9 from Outer Space, or how about It Came from Outer Space? Come on, that one’s cool! Jack Arnold, the old fairy-tale uncle. Always good for a joke or a horror story. The extraterrestrials with the big brains. That’s what they really look like.

  Really? Nonsense. They don’t!

  Do so too!

  Daddy! Tim doesn’t think they look like that.

  ‘Lynn!’

  Coming. I’m coming, Daddy.

  I’m there.

  3–8 June 2025

  LIMIT

  Xintiandi, Shanghai, China

  A perfectly normal life—

  Hanging pictures, taking a step back, adjusting the angle. Sorting out books, arranging furniture, stepping back, rearranging. Making small changes, stepping back again, approaching things while remaining detached from them, establishing harmony, the universal Confucian formula against the powers of chaos.

  If that was what constituted a normal life, Jericho had fitted himself back into normality without the slightest transition. Xin hadn’t burned down his loft, everything was in its place or waiting to be assigned one. The television was on, a kaleidoscope of soundless world events, because he was
less concerned with the content of information than with its decorative properties. He had an urgent need not to have to know anything any more. He didn’t want to understand any more connections, only to roll out the little carpet, which was to lie like that – or was it better like that? Jericho pulled it into a diagonal, took a step back, studied his work and found it lacked balance, because it put a standard lamp in difficulties. Not harmonious, said Confucius, stressing the rights of lamps.

  How was Yoyo?

  At noon on the day of her rebirth thanks to Xin’s mercy she had woken up, plagued by severe headaches, doubtless partly due to the encounter with Norrington’s skull, also to an unaccustomed excess of Brunello di Montalcino, but finally also to the experience of having been practically shot. The resulting emotional hangover meant that she didn’t talk much on the flight home. At around midday Tu had started the Aerion Supersonic. Four hours later the jet had landed at Pudong Airport, and they had been home again. Of course, in the days that followed there was no escaping the news coverage. Once the Charon had come within range of terrestrial broadcasting, measurements had been confirmed corroborating that there had been a nuclear explosion in the no man’s land of the lunar North Pole, and the outing of the tour group had ended in disaster, with some prominent fatalities. And although the Secret Services tried to spread a cloak of silence over the events, there were rumours of a conspiracy aimed at destroying the American lunar base, with China as a possible source – totally unconsidered assertions that buzzed cheerfully around the net.

  Downwinds of suspicion blew anti-Chinese ideas all around the world. In fact there wasn’t the slightest concrete evidence concerning the real masterminds behind it. Orley himself had taken the sting from the suspicions on the way back to OSS, announcing that it was only with the help of the taikonaut Jia Keqiang and the Chinese space authorities that it had been possible to prevent the attack at all. Regardless of this, British, American and Chinese media used the vocabulary of aggression. Not for the first time, China had attacked foreign networks, and it was common knowledge that Beijing administered Kim Jong Un’s military legacy. Voices warning that the space-travelling nations should finally pull together mingled with fears about the armament of space. Zheng Pang-Wang found himself in a public relations crisis when details emerged about the role of the Zheng Group in the construction of the launching pad in Equatorial Guinea. Rushing ahead, the Zhong Chan Er Bu made clear that nothing was known about anyone called Kenny Xin or an organisation called Yü Shen, which supposedly drew its recruits from psychiatric institutions and mental hospitals and trained them up as killers. But if this man Xin did exist, he was operating unambiguously against the interests of the Party. And why were Mr Orley and the Americans really surprised, when they withheld important technologies from the world and snubbed the international community with continued violations of the treaty concerning the Moon and space? This all sounded so familiar in terms of the lunar crisis that serious considerations about what the Chinese actually stood to gain from the destruction of Peary Base (nothing at all, according to seasoned analysts) faded into the background.

  Standard lamp and carpet. Harmony refused to establish itself between the two.

  Although her shared flat had gained an extra room after Grand Cherokee Wang’s demise, Yoyo had moved in with Tu. Temporarily, she stressed. Perhaps she wanted to stand by Hongbing, who was also staying in the villa until his own apartment had been refurbished, but Jericho suspected she was hoping for something like a confession after the openness of the last few days. She was preparing to resume her studies. Daxiong was working on his bike, disregarding medical advice, as if he didn’t have a freshly stitched wound in his back and an even bigger one in his heart, Tu devoted himself to the steam-train rhythm of his businesses, and pleasantly boring cases of web espionage awaited Jericho. After Operation Mountains of Eternal Light had come to such a bloody end, they had agreed that Hydra no longer posed a threat. They still faced questioning by the Chinese police, but did not feel obliged to reveal the circumstances under which Yoyo had come across the message fragment, particularly since the Secret Services had every reason to be grateful to them: in the end, what was more likely to exonerate Beijing from the accusations that were flying around than that the attack had been scuppered by the feisty actions of two Chinese and an Englishman living in China? The first three days of June had passed uneventfully, and Patrice Ho, Jericho’s high-ranking policeman friend from Shanghai, had called to announce his promotion and his move to Beijing.

  ‘Of course I know that your investigations gave a great boost to my career,’ he said. ‘So if you have any idea of how I can pay you back—’

  ‘Let’s just see it as a credit,’ said Jericho.

  ‘Hmm.’ Ho paused. ‘Perhaps I can come up with a way of increasing that credit.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘As you know, our investigations in Lanzhou were highly successful. We were able to take out a nest of paedophiles, and came across evidence that suggests—’

  ‘Hang on a second! You want me to go on poking around in the paedophile scene?’

  ‘Your experience might be very useful to us. Beijing places a lot of hope in me. After the double success in Shenzhen and Lanzhou, it might provoke irritation if our series of triumphs suddenly came to an end—’

  ‘I understand,’ sighed Jericho. ‘At the risk of squandering my credit, I’ve decided not to take on any more jobs of that kind. A few days ago I moved into a larger flat, and it’s already too small for all the ghosts I have lodging with me.’

  ‘You won’t have to go to the front line,’ Ho hurried to reassure him.

  ‘You know one always ends up on the front line.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry if I’ve put you under extra pressure.’

  ‘You haven’t. Can I think about it?’

  ‘Of course! When are we going to go for a beer?’

  ‘What about this week?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  Nothing was wonderful. The carpet and the standard lamp understood one another marvellously well. The point was that neither of them was in harmony with him. There was no harmony anywhere, and certainly no normality. As if by way of confirmation, Julian Orley’s face appeared larger than life-size on the holowall, against the open sky and surrounded by people. He was saying something as he pushed his way through the crowd, followed by the actor Finn O’Keefe and a thrillingly weird-looking woman with snow-white hair. Clearly the tour group had come back to Earth. Jericho turned up the sound and heard the commentator say:

  ‘—the explosion of the second mini-nuke at nine o’clock Central European time at a distance of 45,000 kilometres from the OSS, which it was clearly designed to destroy. Meanwhile fears are being raised that the series of nuclear attacks might resume. Julian Orley, who plans to leave Quito in the next few minutes, has so far refused—’

  Jericho gave a start and turned the sound up again, but he seemed to have missed the most important bit. A news-ticker along the bottom of the screen carried the message of an attempted nuclear attack on the OSS, and said that the number of victims was as yet unknown. Jericho zapped through the channels. Clearly there had been a second atom bomb hidden on the shuttle that had carried the survivors from the Peary Base to the space station, but this had been discovered in time and detonated at a considerable distance from the OSS. Orley himself said that he didn’t plan to comment in any way. Jericho thought he had aged several years.

  Yoyo called. ‘Did you hear that? The stuff about the second bomb?’

  He switched from CNN to a Chinese news channel, but it was running a story about university reform. Another one was trying to talk down new Uyghur revolts in Xinjiang.

  ‘Very strange,’ he said. ‘Vogelaar didn’t mention a second bomb in his dossier.’

  ‘That means he only knew about one.’

  ‘Probably.’ The BBC was showing a special report on the events. ‘Luckily it’s nothing to do with us any more.’


  ‘Yeah, you’re right. God, I’m glad we’re out of that! And that they’re leaving us in peace – On the other hand, it’s awesome, isn’t it? It’s really awesome!’

  Jericho stared at the red strip of the news-ticker.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ he said. ‘Everything else okay with you?’

  ‘Yep, fine.’ She hesitated. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but there’s so much happening at the moment, I’m – I’m just trying to get back in step. It’s not that easy. I’ve got funerals of friends to go to, Daxiong is acting the hero, and my father – okay, we had a long talk, I think you know what about—’

  These topics were always awkward. ‘And?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘It’s all right, Owen, we can talk openly about it. You can’t tell me anything I haven’t found out already. What can I say? I’m glad he told me.’

  She sounded oddly terse. She had suffered from Hongbing’s silence all her life, and now all she could find to say was that she was glad that he was suddenly communicating openly with her.

  ‘Hey!’ she said suddenly. ‘You do understand that we prevented those attacks? Without us there would be no moon base, and no OSS.’

  A German channel. The same wobbly pictures of Orley and his group flickered across the holowall. A journalist with a microphone in his hand and the Pacific in the background claimed to have heard that a bomb had gone off on a spaceship, a moon shuttle, and that contrary to the initial reports there had been fatalities, at least one.

  ‘Just think about it – that would have set American space travel back by decades,’ Yoyo observed. ‘Wouldn’t it? What do you think? No space lift, no helium-3. Orley could have mothballed his fusion reactors.’

  ‘It almost looks as if we’re heroes,’ he said sourly.

  ‘Yeah. So we can cautiously start being proud of ourselves, can we? What are your plans for this evening?’

  ‘Shifting furniture. Sleeping.’ Jericho glanced at his watch. Half past ten. ‘Hopefully. I’ve been exhausted for three days and can’t get to sleep. Only towards the morning, for two or three hours.’