Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Then, as a complete surprise, the first symptoms of paranoia had appeared and, initially uneasy, Dana had seen a certain potential in them, because the change in Lynn’s nature predestined Lynn for the role of scapegoat. She hadn’t let an opportunity pass to discredit Julian’s daughter and feed suspicions of her dishonesty. But back in the Mama Quilla Club, with Donoghue bellowing in her ear, she had suddenly been filled with the worry that Lynn might spoil everything. For the sake of caution she had followed her, but Lynn had only withdrawn to her suite, so she had gone on to the control centre, to find Sophie Thiel, incapable of any kind of dissemblance, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Weak nerves, that one, although she deserved to be admired for her meticulous detective work. Dana’s only mistake had promptly become an albatross – not immediately manipulating the recordings after she’d sent the search parties off on their wild goose chase. With a single glance Sophie had worked out that her boss had started the communications block during the conference call between Earth and Moon, on the pretext of loading the video of the corridor. Clever, Sophie, really clever. Aware that digital messengers were terribly indiscreet, Sophie had relied on pen, paper and Kokoschka, and given the infatuated lunkhead the task of looking for Tim, to tell him who the real enemy was. It was only chance that she had ended up in the control centre at the right time; otherwise she might have been unmasked even sooner.

  Now the recordings had been corrected, although that probably didn’t matter any more. The opportunity to lock both guests and staff away in Gaia’s head on the pretext of a meeting, and turn their air off, so that she could head for Peary Base, had been irrevocably missed. She was trapped.

  Dana breathed deeply into her mask.

  The circulators hummed around her. They did battle with the sooty remains of the flames, sucked up the toxic components and pumped fresh oxygen into the wing. More in a spirit of sportsmanship than anything else, Dana got to work on the bulkhead beyond which escalators led down Gaia’s arm into the lower levels, turned on the automatic settings, tried muscle power, with no success. And how could it have worked? In the hermetically sealed area, the partial destruction of the oxygen had produced a slight but serious reduction in pressure. Until it was resolved, the armour plating wasn’t going to budge an inch. She could safely ignore the bulkhead opposite, behind which lay Gaia’s uncontaminated half. It would take at least two hours until pressure was restored. Time enough to wonder about how that bloody detective had managed to penetrate Hydra’s data banks. Any other setbacks could have been coped with, for example the bomb sustaining damage when it fell into the crater, or Julian’s unexpected appearance in the corridor when Hanna had come back from his night-time excursion. Dana had manipulated the data, and skilfully blurred all the traces. No reason for panic.

  But then everything had spun out of control.

  At the same time, Hydra seemed to have emerged strengthened from its setback with Thorn, and they had agreed to give it a second try, with a team this time. No one was being recruited from NASA now. Thorn had been a happy chance: a generally popular bastard, yet in spite of his ostentatious joviality he was nobody’s mate, and was free of any moral principles whatsoever. Years ago, Hydra had sensed his corruptibility; when he had still been training in simulators on Earth, they had observed him and finally made him an offer that he, by now elevated to the rank of moon base commander, had turned down without a flicker of an eyelash, but also with a request for double the money. When this turned out not to be a problem, everything else had gone like clockwork. In the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, work was coming to an end, Hydra’s buyers had been successful in the black market of international terrorism. A masterpiece of criminal logistics was taking shape, conceived by a phantom that Dana had never met, but whose master of ceremonies she knew very well.

  Kenny Xin, the crazed prince of darkness.

  Even though he was the very model of a psychopath, and she found him in many respects unappealing, Dana could not conceal a certain admiration for him. For the architecture of the conspiracy of which she had been a part for years, crossing continental and cosmic bridges, Hydra couldn’t have wished for a better stress analyst. Immediately after Thorn’s death, Xin, more familiar than anyone else with the pandemonium of freelance spies, ex-Secret Service men and contract killers, had engaged in a conversation with Dana – a former Mossad agent, specialising in the infiltration of luxury hotels, which meant that she was particularly qualified for Gaia – and had also come up with the ideal cover of a Canadian investor to win Julian’s trust.

  But judging by events, the prince of darkness had lost control of the situation.

  Dana wondered if there was anyone still alive in the hotel. The area that she was trapped in looked deserted, but she didn’t know who had been in Gaia’s head when the oxygen had gone up. If luck had been on her side, they would all have been there. Not that she had any particular predilection for mass murder, but the group’s fate had been sealed the minute Carl Hanna’s cover had been blown. Dana was sure that the man would reach the moon base, but she couldn’t know when and whether she would be able to contact him. By blocking communications, she had tried to allow him a little time; however, if Jennifer Shaw and that detective managed to contact Peary Base via NASA, it would be a real disaster. Hanna had a better chance of carrying out his mission if there was no one waiting at the North Pole to stop him.

  The idea of the communications block had also been a well-aimed and timely arrow from Kenny Xin’s inexhaustible quiver of far-sighted ideas. Sending the staff off in search of the bomb had been a doddle. Like listening in on Tommy Wachowski, the deputy commander of the base, although of course not asking him for help in the search for the Ganymede. To her great relief, they had known nothing at the Pole about a planned attack, a clear indication that neither Jennifer Shaw nor NASA had been able to get a warning to them before communications had broken down. Then she had manipulated the laser connection so that calls from the base were received only on her phone. Now she just had to wait until Hanna called, and leave the hotel for good.

  But first she would have to get rid of the guests. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t send that crowd to the Pole and risk them getting there before Hanna and telling stories about atom bombs. No one from the group must reach the base.

  Who had survived?

  Lynn, she thought. And Tim. Those two at least. They were somewhere in the hotel, possibly in the control centre.

  Time to make contact.

  Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

  The behaviour of bodies in a vacuum has always inspired vivid speculation. Some of these stories correspond to fact. Objects of soft consistency with air pockets, for example, stretch apart like dough as the gas forces its way out. This isn’t caused by the vacuum sucking it out, but by the atmosphere exerting pressure. Some things deform, others explode. Frothy, chocolate-coated marshmallows balloon up to four times their volume. If the original ambient pressure were then to be reinstated, they would transform into shapeless grease, indicating profound structural dilapidation. A knotted condom, however, would regain its original form after a temporary existence as a balloon. Of course, it certainly wouldn’t be advisable to use it for its originally intended purpose. A cow’s lung would collapse into shreds, while holey cheese and aubergines would show no visible change, and nor would chickens’ eggs. Beer foams up like crazy, pommes frites secrete fat and solidify, and ketchup sachets buckle.

  When it comes to human beings, the rumour stubbornly persists that we would explode if exposed to a vacuum. After all, we’re more like marshmallows than condoms in consistency: soft, porous, and interwoven with gases and fluids. And yet, something much more complex happened when Warren Locatelli’s helmet came off. Pressurised water in deep-sea trenches on Earth doesn’t start to boil until it reaches 200 to 300 degrees Celsius, whereas in the rarefied air of Mount Everest it would start to boil at 70 degrees; on the same principle, the liquid components in Locatelli’s sku
ll boiled within a fraction of a second of being exposed to a complete lack of pressure, then immediately cooled again due to the induced loss of energy. Anything that vaporises in a vacuum creates evaporative cooling, so the now liquefied Locatelli froze as soon as he had boiled. His skull didn’t explode, but his physiognomy went through rapid changes and left behind a mask-like grimace, coated with a thin layer of ice. As he was in the shadow of a rock overhang, the ice would stay until the beams of light stretched across and evaporated it. Lastly, Locatelli would suffer terrible sunburn, but luckily he wouldn’t feel a thing. He died so suddenly that the last thing he noticed was the beauty of the starlit sky.

  Hanna sat up straight.

  It was just as he had said. The act of killing was neither a burden nor a source of pleasure. His victims never came back to haunt him in his sleep. If he had been convinced that Locatelli posed a danger to him, he would have shot him. But at some point in the course of the last two hours, he had become convinced that he didn’t need to. Locatelli’s bravery had won his respect, and even though the guy had been a pompous, arrogant jerk, Hanna had developed something akin to a fondness for him, accompanied by the desire to protect him. The prospect of saving Locatelli’s life had, in some indefinable way, done him good.

  At least he had saved him from suffering.

  He turned away and erased the dead man from his memory. He had to finish the job.

  The buggy lay on its side, having been pushed against the rock face by the Ganymede. Hanna heaved the vehicle back upright and inspected it. He immediately noticed that one of the axles had been so badly damaged that the question was not whether it would break, but when. He could only hope that the buggy would hold out until he reached the mining station.

  Without giving Locatelli or the shuttle another glance, he drove off.

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina

  It was unbelievable, thought Finn O’Keefe, how deathly pale Mukesh suddenly looked. Incomprehensible that someone whose natural pigmentation resembled that of Italian espresso could ever look so pale. His blood-drained face was as empty as the words he used in a vain attempt to raise their morale.

  ‘They’ll come for us, Sushma, don’t worry.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘You know, our friend Funaki—’

  ‘No, Mukesh, there’s no one left, he can’t get hold of anyone!’ Sushma began to sob. ‘No one’s answering at the control centre, and it’s on fire, everything’s in flames down there!’

  How strange. O’Keefe couldn’t stop staring at Mukesh. Particularly his nose. It was as though it had gone numb, a pale radish stuck onto Mr Tomato’s face. The subject of his interest laid his arm protectively around Sushma’s shoulders.

  ‘He’ll get in touch with someone, my love. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Has it got a little warmer already?’ Rebecca Hsu’s brow was wrinkled with alarm. ‘By a few degrees?’

  ‘No,’ said Eva Borelius.

  ‘Well, I think it has.’

  ‘You’ve probably got warmer, Rebecca.’ Karla Kramp went over to the landing and looked down. ‘A side effect of stress hormones, increased blood pressure. It’s completely normal at your age.’

  O’Keefe followed her. Two storeys below, the spiral staircase ended at a steel barrier.

  ‘Perhaps we should try to open the bulkheads,’ he suggested.

  Funaki looked over at them and shook his head.

  ‘As long as the indicators on the control panel are still lit red, we’d better leave it alone. There’s a risk of fatality.’

  ‘But why?’ Miranda fished a strawberry out of her daiquiri and sucked the fruit pulp from its little green star. ‘The automatic system has shut down, so it should be okay for us to take a look, shouldn’t it?’ Her skin was reminiscent of cooked lobster; her face and cleavage glowing. Her chemical-saturated hair had been badly singed above the forehead, and even her eyebrows were damaged. Regardless of all that, she exuded the kind of confidence found only in people who are either especially superior or especially simple.

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ said Funaki.

  ‘Nonsense.’ She licked strawberry juices from the corner of her mouth. ‘Just a quick look. If it’s still burning, we’ll close up again quickly.’

  ‘You wouldn’t even be able to get the bulkheads open.’

  ‘Finn has strong muscles, and Mukesh—’

  ‘It has nothing to do with body strength. Not when the partial pressure of the oxygen has dropped.’

  ‘I see.’ Miranda raised what remained of her eyebrows in interest. ‘Wasn’t he one of the Arthurian knights?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Partial.’

  ‘Percival,’ said Olympiada Rogacheva wearily.

  ‘Oh, that’s right. So what does he have to do with our oxygen?’

  ‘Michio, you old Samurai,’ O’Keefe turned round. ‘Please be so kind as to talk in a way that the billionairess can understand you. I think you meant to say that there’s now a vacuum on the other side, right? Which means we need to think of another way of getting out of here.’

  ‘But how?’ Eva looked at him helplessly. ‘Without the elevator.’

  They had climbed down to Selene in order to inspect the staff elevator, the only one of the three lifts that went through into the restaurant area, but Funaki had energetically intervened:

  ‘Not until the system or control centre signal that it’s safe! We don’t know what’s happening in the elevator shaft. If you don’t want to be hit by a wall of flames, then don’t even think about opening those doors.’

  But the control centre still hadn’t been in touch.

  ‘If we need to we can climb down through the ventilation shaft,’ he had added. ‘It’s not the most comfortable of methods, but it’s safe.’

  A while had passed since then. Karla looked back down into the worm casing of the spiral staircase.

  ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to let myself get roasted up here,’ she decided.

  ‘Roasted?’ Hsu’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Why? Do you mean that—’

  ‘Karla,’ whispered Eva. ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘What?’ Karla whispered back in German. ‘There’s nothing but stars above us. We can’t get to the viewing platform without spacesuits, and everything’s burning down below. Fire has a tendency to rise, you know. If Funaki doesn’t make contact with the control centre soon, we’ll all meet our maker up here, mark my words. I want to get out of here.’

  ‘We all want to get out of here, but—’

  ‘Michio!’ A distorted voice came out of the intercom in the bar. ‘Michio, can you hear me? It’s Tim. Tim Orley!’

  * * *

  Maybe he’d got his priorities wrong. He should have ignored Lynn’s misery and made contact with the others without delay, but in the face of her suffering that had seemed an unbearable prospect. The level of her sobbing seemed to indicate that the medication she had taken was helping a little. He had fetched the elevator at once, calling it down from the very top in order to go to her suite on the thirteenth floor with her. At first, only his subconscious registered the fact that it was unusually warm in the cabin. It was only once they reached the glass bridge that he had remembered the worrying noises from the neck of Gaia, the phantom of smoke in the dome of the atrium and how the architecture seemed, bizarrely, to be in motion. Then he had looked up at the ceiling.

  A massive armour shield was stretched out above him.

  Perplexed, he wondered where the steel panels and bulkheads had come from all of a sudden. They must have been stored between the floors, hidden from view.

  What on earth had happened up there?

  By the time they got to the bathroom, Lynn was shaking so much that he had to lay the green tablets and white capsules she asked for on her tongue, one after another, and hold the glass for her as she drank, panting, like a little child. The resulting coughing fit gave reason to fear that she might bring up the cocktail of medicine again in a pro
jectile arc, but then it had begun to take effect. A quarter of an hour later, she had got a grip of herself; at least enough to allow them to leave the suite. They immediately ran into Heidrun and Walo Ögi.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the Swiss man in a concerned voice as he looked around. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Up there,’ whispered Lynn. Based on the colour of her skin, she could have passed for Heidrun’s sister.

  ‘We’ve been up there,’ said Ögi. ‘We wanted to go to the meeting, but everything’s locked up and barricaded.’

  ‘Barricaded?’

  ‘I think you’d better come with us,’ said Heidrun.

  It was only as they went further up that Tim realised just how extensive the armour plating really was. A solid steel wall without even the slightest hint of a gap had descended diagonally over the gallery. The doors of E2, one of the two guest elevators, had disappeared behind it, as had the left-hand side entrance to the neck. The one accessible spiral staircase ended in a closed bulkhead. It was only now that he realised his vision was imperceptibly impaired, as if some wafer-thin film had been pulled over his retina. Here and there, black bits of fluff were spinning through the air. He reached out to catch some and they crumbled into grease between his fingers.

  ‘Soot,’ he said.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ Ögi was snuffling all around, his moustache twitching. ‘Like something’s burnt.’

  Horror crept over him. If the bulkheads were closed, then that could only mean it was still burning! Filled with dread, they rode down and could already hear Funaki’s urgent calls by the time they reached the lobby. Lynn shuffled over to the controls, activated the speech function, waved her brother over wearily and sank down into one of the rolling chairs.