Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  He picked up his helmet and tried to make contact with Momoka via his suit connection. When he received no answer, he tried to get through to Julian and switched to conference reception. Nothing but atmospheric hiss. Perhaps the suit systems didn’t work at such distances. After all, they had been flying northwards for half an hour. Glancing at the map, he scanned the distances and reached the conclusion that there must by now be over five hundred kilometres between the shuttle and the Aristarchus Plateau. On the right, a considerable way off, a crater stood out in the middle of a plateau: Mairan, the map told him. Another, Louville, appeared over the edge of the horizon to the north. It was time to get to know the cockpit. It must at least be possible to contact the hotel from the Ganymede.

  His eye fell on a diagram above the windscreen, which he hadn’t noticed until then. A simple set of instructions, but enough to get him to the main menu, and suddenly everything was much easier than he’d thought. Admittedly he still didn’t know how to fly the thing, but at least he knew how to work the radio. His disappointment was all the greater, then, when he still heard nothing but silence. At first he thought the radio mustn’t be working, but then at last he worked out that the satellites were out of operation.

  So that was why Hanna had switched to map navigation.

  At the same moment he understood why he couldn’t get through to anybody on conventional channels. Traditional radio meant that the partners had to be within visible range of each other, so that there was nothing between the transmitter and the receiver to absorb the radio waves, and in the case of the Moon the strong curvature quickly absorbed all contact. That was why his connection with Momoka and the others had been severed earlier on as well, because they had been on the other side of Snake Hill when the chase was taking place. Which was how he now knew the exact time of the satellite failure.

  It coincided with Hanna’s escape.

  Coincidence? Never in a million years! There was something bigger going on here.

  Behind him, Hanna groaned quietly. Locatelli turned his head. After a long search he had finally found a few straps for lashing down cargo, and tied him to the front row of seats. You couldn’t exactly have claimed that he was trussed up like a parcel, but Hanna wouldn’t be able to free himself quickly enough to stop Locatelli shooting him in the leg with his own gun. He studied the murderer’s pale face for a moment, but the Canadian kept his eyes closed.

  He turned back to the control panel. After a while he thought he had worked out various things, such as how to regulate the altitude of Ganymede, to make it climb or descend by—

  That was it. Of course!

  Locatelli was suddenly very excited. The Moon had no atmosphere, so in fact flight altitude couldn’t have anything to do with it, although of course it meant you were eating into your fuel supplies. It didn’t alter the general conditions, a vacuum was a vacuum. But the higher he climbed, the less noticeable the curvature became, until it was entirely irrelevant. As far as he remembered, only the Rupes Toscanelli Plateau stretched north-east of the Schröter Valley, with Snake Hill. If they weren’t cowering under the spurs of rock right now, but had fought their way through to the space station, he had to get through to them!

  His fingers darted over the controls. The shuttle had a frightening number of jets, he established, some pointing stiffly downwards, others backwards, others still were on a pivot. He decided to ignore the pivotable ones, and switch thrust entirely to the vertical. He entered a value at random—

  Suddenly the air was squeezed from his lungs.

  Damn it! Too much, much too much! What sort of stupid bloody idiot was he! Why hadn’t he started with less? The idea of a calm flight was out of the window. The Ganymede shot upwards like mad, rattled, vibrated and bucked as if trying to shake him out of its innards. He quickly reduced the thrust, worked out that not all the jets were firing evenly, hence the vibrations, corrected, regulated, balanced, and the shuttle calmed down, continued climbing, now at a more moderate speed.

  Good, Warren. Very good!

  ‘Locatelli to Orley,’ he shouted. ‘Momoka. Julian. Come in, please.’

  All kinds of white noise emerged from the speakers, but nothing that even slightly resembled human articulation. The Ganymede was approaching the thirteen-kilometre mark. After its initial bickering, it allowed itself to be ridden like the most placid of ponies, climbing constantly higher, while Locatelli shouted Julian and Momoka’s names in turn.

  Fourteen kilometres.

  The landscape stretched below him. Again there was rattling and trembling, as the irritable automatic controls registered deviations from the longitudinal bearings and roughly compensated for them.

  ‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka! Oleg, Evelyn. Can anybody hear me? Come in! Locatelli to—’

  14.6 – 14.7 – 14.8

  He gradually started to feel queasy, even though the rational part of his brain quickly reassured him that he could theoretically fly into outer space. All just a matter of fuel.

  ‘Momoka! Julian!’

  15.4 – 15.5 – 15.6

  Nothing.

  ‘Warren Locatelli to Orley. Come in please.’

  Hiss. Crackle.

  ‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka!’

  ‘Warren!’

  Aristarchus Plateau

  ‘Warren! Warren! I’ve got Warren on the line!’

  Momoka started to do a kind of St Vitus’ dance around the charred rover, whose bed they had started to load with batteries. They paused, all listening. His voice rang out with promising volume in their helmets, clear and distinct, as if he were standing right next to them.

  ‘Warren, darling, sweetie!’ cried Momoka. ‘Where are you? Sweetheart, oh my sweetheart! Are you okay?’

  ‘All fine. You?’

  ‘A few of us are missing, we don’t know exactly what happened. Peter, Mimi, Marc—’

  ‘Dead,’ said Locatelli.

  Not that any confirmation was required. But the word fell like a blade and guillotined the unregenerate little optimist who had, until that moment, been tirelessly coming out with all kinds of murmured ifs and could-bes. There was a moment of hurt silence.

  ‘Where are you now?’ asked Julian, audibly chastened.

  ‘In the shuttle. Carl, the bastard, slung Peter into the gorge and then blew up Mimi and Marc, and then he hijacked the shuttle, but I managed to get on board.’

  ‘And where’s Carl?’

  ‘He’s unconscious. I knocked him out and tied him to the seats.’

  ‘You’re a hero,’ cried Momoka, delighted. ‘You know that? You’re a goddamn hero!’

  ‘Of course, what else? I’m a hero in a spaceship that’s going incredibly fast, with no idea of how to fly the stupid thing. That is, I’m getting the hang of it now. Turning round, getting down and landing, not so sure about.’

  ‘Can you get through to the hotel?’ asked Julian.

  ‘Don’t think so. Too far away, too many mountains. I’m over fifteen kilometres up, to be quite honest I’m starting to feel something like vertigo. And I don’t know how much gas I’ve got left.’

  ‘Fine, no problem. I’ll help. Just stay up there for the time being, because of the radio connection.’

  ‘The LPCS has failed, right?’

  ‘Sabotage, if you ask me. Did Carl actually say anything to you?’

  ‘I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything.’

  ‘Oh, my hero!’

  ‘Do you know your position?’

  ‘Fifty degrees west, forty-six degrees north. On the right there’s a crater plateau, with mountains attached to it.’

  ‘Can you give me some kind of name?’

  ‘Wait a second: Montes Jura.’

  ‘Very good. Listen, Warren, you’ve got to—’

  Ganymede

  Locatelli listened carefully to Julian’s instructions. As he did so, he found himself suspecting that his host didn’t know what needed to be done down to the last detail either,
but definitely had more of a notion about how to fly a Hornet shuttle than he did himself. For example, he knew how to take a bend. Locatelli would have adjusted the jets individually, and plunged to his death as a result. Whereas in fact it was relatively simple, if you bore in mind simple things like turning off the automatic course programming and switched to manual.

  ‘Keep to the right, fly east, towards the Montes Jura, and then make a big hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and head south again.’

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘Not even nearly. Don’t make any tight turns, okay? Make sure they’re wide. You’re going at 1200 kilometres an hour!’

  Locatelli did as he was told. Perhaps he was an excessively obedient pupil, because the bend turned into an extended sightseeing tour of the landscape. When he had turned the Ganymede, he found himself to the west of forty degrees longitude, with the jagged agglomeration of the Jurassic mountains below him, arranged in a circle around a vast bay. The bay was called Sinus Iridum and adjoined the Mare Ibrium, and somehow the name struck him as familiar. Then he remembered. Sinus Iridum was the apple of discord that sparked the Moon crisis in 2024. From the windows of the cockpit he had a breathtaking view. Hardly anywhere else was the illusion of land and sea so perfect, all that was missing was a blue glow on the velvet basalt base of the Mare Ibrium. It looked particularly velvety here, most of all where it abutted the south-western foothills of the mountains.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Julian.

  ‘Southern half of Sinus Iridum. There’s a spit of land ahead of me. Cape Hera-clides. Shall I go lower? Then I won’t have such a long journey down later on.’

  ‘Do that. We’ll just check how long the connection lasts.’

  ‘Fine. As soon as it goes, I’ll climb again.’

  ‘It’ll get more stable the closer you get, anyway.’

  Locatelli hesitated. Going lower, fine. Perhaps it would be even better to cut back the speed a bit. Not much, just enough to take it below 1000 kilometres an hour. What he was doing wasn’t even slightly comparable to a flight through the Earth’s atmosphere, where you had to battle with air levels and turbulence, but hours upon hours in aeroplanes had got him used to lengthy landings, so he decelerated and began to drop.

  The Ganymede plummeted like a stone towards the ground.

  What had he done?

  The shuttle settled at an angle. Noise flooded the interior, the tortured wails of over-extended technology.

  ‘Julian,’ he cried. ‘I’ve fucked up!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m crashing!’

  ‘What have you done? Tell me what you’ve done!’

  Locatelli’s hands fluttered over the controls, uncertain about which fields they should press, which switches they should use.

  ‘I think I’ve got speed and altitude regulation mixed up.’

  ‘Okay. But don’t lose your head!’

  ‘I’m not losing my head!’ yelled Locatelli, about to lose his head.

  ‘Do the following. Just go—’

  The line went dead. Shit, shit, shit! Fingers clawed, he crouched over the console. He didn’t know what to do, but to do nothing would mean certain death, so he had to do something, but what?

  He tried to balance out his crooked angle with a counter-thrust.

  The shuttle roared like a giant wounded animal, started reeling violently and tilted to the other side. A moment later it lurched so hard that Locatelli was afraid it would break into a thousand pieces. He looked helplessly in all directions, turned his head instinctively—

  Carl Hanna was staring at him.

  Hanna, whose fault it all was. Under any other circumstances Locatelli would have got up, smacked him one and given him valuable advice about how to treat your holiday acquaintances, but that was out of the question right now. He saw that the Canadian was starting to tug like mad on his fetters, ignored him and bent over the console again. The shuttle was rapidly losing velocity, and tilting still further. Locatelli decided not to worry about the plunge for the time being, and instead to concentrate on stabilising his position, but the only result of his efforts was that he suddenly had no power over the controls.

  ‘Warren, you—’

  Hanna shouted something.

  ‘—you’ve gone into automatic! You’ve got to—’

  Why didn’t that idiot just keep his trap shut?

  ‘—you’re out of manual! Warren, damn it to hell! Untie me.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘We’re both going to die!’

  Locatelli poked stubbornly around in the main menu. The altitude meter was counting down worryingly quickly, 5.0 – 4.8 – 4.6, they were hurtling towards the lunar ground like a meteor. A few moments before, in his excitement, he must have pressed something, he must have activated some function that had effectively disem-powered him and stripped him of access to any kind of navigation. Now it looked as if he could do whatever he liked, and it would have not the slightest influence on the behaviour of the Ganymede.

  ‘Warren!’

  Who was that this time?

  Try and remember, do what you did before. What worked so well under Julian’s instructions. Turn off automatic pilot, switch to manual.

  But how? How?

  ‘Release me, Warren!’

  Why wasn’t it working this time? Bloody touchscreen! What kind of a crappy cockpit was it? Nothing but virtual fields, unfamiliar electronic landscapes, cryptic symbols instead of solid rocker switches with sensible inscriptions like HELLO, WARREN, TURN ME THE OTHER WAY AND IT’LL ALL BE FINE.

  ‘We’re going to die, Warren! That won’t do anybody any good. You can’t want that!’

  ‘Forget it, asshole.’

  ‘I won’t hurt you, you hear me? Just set me free!’

  The ground, skewed at a forty-five-degree angle, was menacingly gaining presence; the range on his right-hand side stretched its peaks over the shuttle’s flight-path. As it grew closer, Sinus Iridum looked as if it were undergoing a weird and inexplicable transformation. In places the basalt plain seemed to be frozen in a process of decomposition, more mist than solid surface, with dark and mysterious phenomena in it. Little more than one kilometre separated the shuttle from the place where it was bound to crash. A vague blur turned into the line of the magnetic rail, and domes, antennae and scaffolding loomed out of it. Locatelli caught a quick glimpse of a collection of insectoid formations on an incline, and then they too were past, and they went on falling to their doom.

  ‘Warren, you stubborn idiot!’

  The worst thing was, Hanna was right.

  ‘Fine!’

  Cursing, he staggered from his seat, practically weightless, given the insane speed of their descent. Everything around him was rattling, vibrating and roaring. The floor was at such an extreme angle it was hardly possible to stand on it, except that he was floating anyway. Grabbing his gun, he made his way hand over hand towards the Canadian, crawled behind him and tugged at his bonds with his free hand.

  Nothing. As if they were welded together.

  Good work, Warren. Well done!

  He would need both his hands. Such a bloody mess! Where should he put the gun? Wedge it under his arm, and quick! Don’t panic, now. Disentangle the knots, loosen them, untie them carefully. The straps slid down. Hanna stretched his arms, leapt up, grabbed the arm of the pilot’s seat and pulled himself into it. His eye fell on the console.

  ‘Thought so,’ Locatelli heard him say.

  With some effort he heaved himself into the co-pilot’s seat. The Canadian ignored him. He worked with great concentration, gave a series of instructions and the Ganymede righted itself. Below them drifted an endless sea of dust, blurred fingers poked from it, reaching for them, stirred up by something vast and insect-like, creeping slowly across the plain. Locatelli held his breath. In the formless grey, huge, glistening beetles seemed to be moving around, then all of a sudden he felt as if his brain were being pushed out through his ears. Hanna vi
olently braked the shuttle. Swathes of smoke whirled in front of the glass. They thundered along blindly, far too fast! A moment ago he had been ready to smash Hanna to a pulp, now he felt a powerful desire to see him at work, as the master of the situation. Sweat ran down Hanna’s face, the muscles of his jaw protruded. From the rear part of the Ganymede came a great bang that sounded like an explosion, even louder roaring, the nose of the shuttle rose—

  Contact with the ground.

  In a flash the landing-struts broke away. Locatelli was slung from his seat as if a giant had kicked the Ganymede in the belly. He performed a somersault and slid unimpeded to the rear. All the bones in his body seemed to want to switch places with each other. Jets hissing, the shuttle ploughed through the regolith, bounced, crashed down again, hurtled on, bucked, lurched, but the tail stayed firm. Locatelli reached desperately around for something he could hold onto. His hand closed on a stanchion. Muscles tensed, he drew himself up, lost his balance and was flying forwards when the hurtling wreck collided with something, reared up and scraped its way up a hill. Just as the machine came to rest in an avalanche of debris, he landed heavily between the seats, was carried on by his own momentum and bumped his head.

  Everything around him turned red.

  Then black.

  Aristarchus Plateau

  The brief moment of euphoria at the sound of Locatelli’s voice had made way for greater anxiety. Julian was uninterruptedly trying to get through to the Ganymede, but apart from a hiss nothing issued from the speakers.

  ‘Crashed,’ Momoka whispered, over and over again.

  ‘That needn’t mean anything,’ Evelyn said, trying to console her. ‘Nothing at all.

  He must have got the thing under control, Momoka. He’s done it before.’

  ‘But he’s not in contact.’