Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Good. Warren is driving rover number two, and promises to bring Carl, Mimi and Marc safely to their destination, the rest of us will take the first one. Who’s the chauffeur?’

  When everyone said they wanted to be the chauffeur, the choice fell on Amber. She was told how the various functions worked, took a test drive and got everything right straight away.

  ‘I want one of these when we’re back down there,’ she cried.

  ‘You don’t,’ Julian grinned. ‘It’s six times as heavy down there. It would fall to bits in the garage.’

  The convoy set off. Black let Amber drive ahead to keep Locatelli from breaking speed records, so that they had been driving for ten minutes when the valley dropped away on their left in a wide curve. A narrow path led to a high ridge, from which you could enjoy an incomparable view of the Vallis Schröteri. You could see almost the whole course of it from there, but something else was holding everyone’s attention. It was a crane, mounted on a platform that loomed into the gorge. As they approached they made out a winch at ground level. A steel cable ran through the cantilever and led to a capacious double seat. There was no need to explain how the crane worked. Once you had taken your seat, the cantilever swung over the gorge, and you floated, legs dangling, above the abyss.

  ‘Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!’ Marc Edwards’ extreme-sport soul was boiling over. He jumped from the parked rover, stepped to the edge of the platform and looked down. ‘What’s the drop here? How far could we abseil down?’

  ‘Right to the bottom,’ Peter Black explained, as if he had dug the gorge with his own hands. ‘One thousand metres.’

  ‘Bollocks to the Grand Canyon,’ Locatelli observed with familiar sophistication. ‘It’s a trickle of piss compared to this one.’

  ‘Does that thing work?’ Edwards asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Julian. ‘Once the factory’s up and running, we’ll build a few more.’

  ‘I absolutely have to try it out!’

  ‘We absolutely have to try it out,’ Mimi Parker corrected him.

  ‘Me too.’ Julian thought he could see Rogachev smiling. ‘Perhaps Evelyn would keep me company?’

  ‘Oh, Oleg,’ laughed Evelyn. ‘You want to die with me?’

  ‘No one will die as long as I’m working the winch,’ Black promised. ‘Okay, Mimi and Marc will go down first—’

  ‘I’m going with Carl,’ said Amber. ‘If he has the guts.’

  ‘I do. With you I always do.’

  ‘So then Amber with Carl after that, and then Oleg and Evelyn. Momoka?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Then Momoka will come with us,’ Julian suggested. ‘The rest of us will climb Snake Hill in the meantime. Oleg, Evelyn, you too. It’ll take a while before Peter has lowered those four down and hoisted them back up again.’

  ‘I’ve had a think,’ said Amber. ‘I’d rather go up the mountain with you. What’s up, Carl?’

  ‘Hey! Are you bottling out?’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

  ‘Then see you later. Take care. I’ll take a look and see what lies ahead.’

  * * *

  Hanna watched the others start their climb. The path led gently upwards, curved around and disappeared into a ravine. It reappeared a considerable stretch further up, ran along the flank for about a hundred metres, a steep climb now, and then vanished from view once more. Clearly you had to circle the slope to reach the high plateau. Hanna would have loved to go with them, but he was more fascinated by the gorge, a kilometre deep, with vertical walls on all sides. Perhaps he could climb the high plain later on, with Mimi and Marc. He would have preferred to take the trip on his own, but wherever he went, someone would be talking to him on his headset. At least you could turn individual participants on or off, only the guides were transmitting at all times, and had a right of access to everyone’s auditory canal.

  He watched with interest as Black released the winch, opened the faceplate of the console and activated the controls by pressing on one of five fist-sized buttons. Primitive lunar technology, one might have thought, built for the clumsy extremities of aliens – and wasn’t that exactly what they were on this strange satellite, aliens, extraterrestrials, their fingers forced into hard shells? Black pressed a second button. The cantilever was set in motion and began to swing in. Parker and Edwards jostled each other impatiently on the edge of the platform.

  ‘What are the other buttons for?’ Hanna asked.

  ‘The blue one swings the crane back out again,’ said Black. ‘The one below it turns the winch on.’

  ‘So the black one’s there to bring the lift back up again?’

  ‘You’ve got it. Child’s play. Like most things on the Moon, in fact, so that not everything depends on the expert.’

  ‘If he’s dead, for example.’ Edwards stepped back from the edge to make room for the incoming lift.

  ‘Don’t say things like that,’ Parker protested.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Black opened the safety guard of the seats. ‘I’d consider it quite irresponsible of me to die while you’re hanging there. If some unexpected local demons swallow me up unexpectedly, you’ll still have Carl. He’ll winch you back up again. Ready? Off we go!’

  * * *

  ‘Shit!’ said Locatelli.

  They had passed the ink-black shadow of the ravine, climbed the slope and had just reached the spot where the flank curved around, when he noticed. He looked irritably down into the valley. The gorge gaped far below them, four kilometres wide, so that the platform stuck to the edge of the rock like a toy, populated by tiny, springy figures, hopping up and down. Peter was just helping the Californian into the seat, while Hanna studied the winch.

  ‘What’s up?’ Momoka turned round.

  ‘I forgot my camera.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘Really?’ Locatelli took a sharp breath. ‘And who’s the other idiot? Have a think.’

  ‘Hey, no need to fight,’ Amber cut in. ‘We’ll just take my cam—’

  ‘Are you talking about me?’ Momoka snapped.

  ‘Who else? You could have thought about it too.’

  ‘Shut the hell up, Warren. What would I want to do with your stupid camera?’

  ‘Lots, my lotus flower! Who wants to be filmed from dawn till dusk, as if the crap that you produce for the cinema wasn’t enough?’

  ‘I wouldn’t pose in front of your camera if you paid me!’

  ‘That is so funny! You really mean that? You start pissing yourself as soon as you see a camera.’

  ‘Nicely put, arsehole. Go and get it, then.’

  ‘You bet I will,’ snapped Locatelli, and turned on his heel.

  ‘Hey, Warren,’ called Evelyn, quietly rapt. ‘You’re not going all the way back just for—’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Julian. ‘Take Amber’s camera, she’s right. You can film Momoka with it until she pleads for mercy.’

  ‘No! I’m going to get the damned thing!’

  He stamped defiantly back in the direction of the ravine.

  ‘I know he doesn’t have an easy life with me,’ he heard Momoka saying quietly to the others, as if he couldn’t hear every single word, ‘but Warren’s only happy when something’s getting on his nerves.’

  ‘Quite honestly, you both seem to need that,’ Amber remarked.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Momoka sighed. ‘I love it when he hits back. That’s when I love him most.’

  * * *

  Julian, advancing with the pace of a natural leader, had almost reached the plateau when he heard Sophie’s voice in his helmet. Parked some way off, he could just see the rovers via which he was connected to the Ganymede, and via it with Gaia.

  ‘What is it, Sophie?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, call from Earth. I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line for you. Please switch to O-SEC.’

  O-SEC. Bug-proof connection. It meant that he had to sever his contact with the group. No one would be able to hear
what his company’s security advisor had to tell him.

  ‘Fine.’ He obliged. ‘We’re on our own.’

  ‘Julian!’ Jennifer’s voice, urgent. ‘I won’t trouble you with an endless preamble. Lynn will have told you about the warning we received yesterday. We’ve just—’

  ‘Lynn?’ Julian interrupted her, surprised. He turned to the others and gestured to them to stop. ‘No. Lynn didn’t tell me anything about a warning.’

  ‘She didn’t?’ Jennifer said, puzzled.

  ‘When’s that supposed to have been?’

  ‘Last night. Edda Hoff talked to your daughter. Lynn wanted to be kept informed about the matter. Of course I assumed that she—’

  ‘What matter are we talking about, Jennifer? I don’t understand a word.’

  Jennifer fell silent for a moment. The delay between Earth and Moon lasted only a second, but it was enough to create irritating little pauses.

  ‘Two days ago we received a warning from a Chinese businessman,’ she said. ‘He happened to come into possession of a garbled text document, and since then he’s been on the run. The text suggests – or seems to suggest – that one of the company’s plants is threatened with attack.’

  ‘What’s that you say? Hoff said that to my daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lynn? Lynn, are you there?’

  ‘I’m here, Dad.’

  ‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’

  ‘I – I didn’t want to bother you with it.’ Her voice sounded quavery and upset. ‘Of course I—’

  ‘Lynn, Julian, I’m sorry,’ Jennifer cut in. ‘But there’s no time for all this. The Chinese guy called me again a short time ago, or one of his people did. They’re coming straight to us. This morning they tried to find out more about the background to the document, and it ended in disaster. There were casualties, but they’ve got some new information.’

  ‘What kind of information? Jennifer, who—’

  ‘Wait, Julian. We’re in contact with the Chinese jet. I’ll put you through.’

  A second passed, then a strange man’s voice was heard, amidst an atmospheric hiss:

  ‘Mr Orley? My name is Owen Jericho. I know you have a thousand questions, but I’ve got to ask you to listen to me now. By completing the document we’ve been able to discover that an information satellite was fired into the Earth’s orbit from African soil. The operator was the former government of Equatorial Guinea, General Juan Mayé, who took over in a coup.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Julian. ‘Mayé and his satellite. He made a laughing stock of himself with that thing.’

  ‘What you may not know is that Mayé was a straw man for Chinese lobbyists. It’s possible that he was put in power at the instigation of Beijing, but it was certainly done with their connivance. By now other people are in power in Equatorial Guinea, but during his time in office the Chinese sponsored his space programme. Does the name Zheng mean anything to you?’

  ‘The Zheng Group? Of course!’

  ‘Zheng made lots of their technology available to him at the time, and provided know-how and hardware. But the satellite was just a pretext to fire something else into orbit from Mayé’s state territory. Something that no official site would have allowed through.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A bomb. A Korean atom bomb.’

  Julian froze. He guessed, feared he guessed, what this man Jericho was getting at. He watched uneasily as the others scattered and gesticulated on the path.

  ‘The Koreans?’ he echoed. ‘What on earth do I have to do with—’

  ‘Not the Koreans, Mr Orley, but what Kim Jong Un’s abandoned ghost train left behind. We’re talking about the black market mafia. In other words, China, or somebody who’s hiding behind China, has bought a handy little atom bomb from Korean stock, a so-called mini-nuke. We’re sure that this bomb left the satellite just as it entered its orbit – so a year ago – then travelled on from there to an unknown destination. And in our opinion that destination is not on Earth.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Not on Earth. ‘You mean—’

  ‘We mean it’s meant to destroy one of your space installations, yes. Probably Gaia. The Moon hotel.’

  ‘And what makes you suspect that?’ Julian heard himself saying in a remarkably calm voice.

  ‘The time delay. Of course there are a few variations. But none of them really explains why the thing has been up there for a year without being set off. Unless something got in the way.’ Jericho paused for a miserably long time. ‘Wasn’t Gaia originally supposed to have opened in 2024? And that was postponed because of the Moon crisis?’

  Julian said nothing, as something was set in motion, slowly but inexorably, inside his head. The projectionist slipped by, put in the reel of film and—

  ‘Carl,’ he whispered.

  ‘Sorry?’ asked Jericho.

  ‘In the morning, two days ago,’ cried Julian. ‘My God! I saw it and didn’t understand. Carl Hanna, one of our guests. I ran into him in the corridor, he said he’d been looking for the exit and hadn’t found it, but he was lying! He was outside.’

  ‘Julian.’ Dana Lawrence joined in the conversation. ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong. You’ve seen the recordings. Carl definitely didn’t go outside.’

  ‘He did, Dana. He did! And idiot that I am, I even saw it. Down in the corridor, even though I didn’t understand it. Someone faked the recordings, re-edited the shots. He steps onto the gangway to the Lunar Express—’

  ‘And reappears a few seconds later.’

  ‘No, he was outside! He steps on it wearing a very clean suit, Dana, clean as a whistle! And when he comes out again there are traces of moon dust on his legs. That was what I was looking for the whole time, that subliminal certainty that something was wrong.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Dana said sharply. ‘I’ll get the recordings up on screen.’

  * * *

  Clever Julian, thought Hanna.

  He stood there motionlessly while the cantilever swung over the gorge, Mimi and Marc hung laughing over the abyss, and Black set the winch in motion, and he heard something that he shouldn’t have heard. But he was switched in. This time, once again, Ebola ensured that he was able to function, even though his room for manoeuvre was dramatically shrinking. He would never have expected to get busted, his identity was watertight. Not even when Vic Thorn had died had the operation been as precarious as it was right now. All of a sudden the planned course of action was out of the window; he had to act, carry out his mission prematurely, use the seconds, minutes at most, that Ebola had wangled for him to create the maximum possible confusion and take to his heels.

  ‘Have the hotel searched right now,’ Owen Jericho was saying. ‘This guy Carl, perhaps he’s been outside to hide the bomb in Gaia. Ask him—’

  ‘I will ask him,’ hissed Julian. ‘Oh, I’ll ask him!’

  Yeah, right, thought Hanna.

  The lift sank slowly into the gorge. Black stood by the winch, waving at the Californians. Wanted to know what it felt like being a kilometre above the ground.

  ‘Amazing!’ raved Parker. ‘Better than parachute jumping. Better than anything.’

  Hanna got moving, stretched his arms out.

  ‘Can you speed the pace up a bit?’ asked Edwards. ‘Speed it up. Let us fly!’

  ‘Sure, I—’

  With both hands Hanna grabbed Black by the backpack, pulled him away from the console, lifted him in the air and carried him to the edge.

  ‘Hey!’ The pilot reached behind him. ‘Carl, is that you?’

  Hanna said nothing, walked quickly on. His captive turned, kicked his legs, tried to get a hold of his assailant.

  ‘Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone mad? – No!’

  He hurled Black over the edge of the platform. For a moment the pilot seemed to find purchase in the void, then he fell, comparatively slowly at first, getting faster and faster. His shrill scream mingled with Mimi Parker’s.


  Nothing, not even a sixth of terrestrial gravity, could save a person falling into an abyss from a height of one thousand metres.

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina

  ‘Julian?’ called Sophie. ‘Miss Shaw?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ snapped Dana.

  ‘Radio silence. Both gone.’ She tried in turn to re-establish connection with headquarters in London and with Julian, but all communication had been interrupted immediately after the start of the video showing the miraculous sullying of Hanna’s trouser legs in the sterile surroundings of a gangway. The Canadian, small and cheerful, went for a walk on the corridor conveyor belt, unnoticed by anyone.

  ‘Julian? Please come in!’

  ‘Try to reach the Earth in the conventional manner,’ said Dana. ‘Oh, don’t worry, let me do it.’

  ‘She pushed Sophie aside, pulled up a menu, switched from LPCS on direct aerial connection to the terrestrial Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, targeted ground stations, which was just possible within view of Earth, but Gaia seemed to have been deprived of her sensory organs. Lynn stared, her hand in front of her mouth, at the monitor wall, while Sophie shifted nervously from one leg to the other.

  ‘I was carrying on the conversation quite normally when—’

  ‘Don’t apologise before I start blaming you,’ Dana yelled at her. ‘Keep on trying. Perform an analysis. I want to know where the problem lies. Lynn?’

  Lynn turned her head as if in a trance.

  ‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’

  ‘What?’

  Rigid with fury, Dana left the control centre. Lynn followed her into the hall like a robot.

  ‘I think—’

  ‘Sorry!’ Dana flashed her inquisitorial grey-green eyes. ‘You’re my boss, Lynn, and that means I have to be respectful. But now I have to ask you very clearly what yesterday’s warning was about.’

  Lynn looked as if she had been recalled to life after a long period of unconsciousness. She raised a hand and studied its palm as if it contained something very attractive.

  ‘It was all pretty vague.’

  ‘What was vague?’

  ‘Edda Hoff called and said a few people were planning some sort of attack on an Orley plant. It sounded – well, vague. Not like anything to worry about.’