Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Could he have flown another route?’ asked Evelyn.

  ‘It’s possible.’ Julian looked up at the sky, as if Locatelli had left some sign behind for them in it.

  ‘Probable even,’ said Rogachev. ‘He had problems regaining control of the shuttle. If he succeeded, he could have drifted off course a fair bit.’

  ‘Where exactly is the mining station again?’ asked Amber.

  ‘In the mining zone.’ Julian pointed his outstretched arm towards the dust barrier. ‘Just a hundred kilometres from here on the axis between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace in the north.’

  ‘By the way, how’s our oxygen looking?’

  ‘Good, considering the circumstances. The problem is that we can’t rely on the maps any more.’

  Amber lowered her map. Until now, she had had the advantage of clear visibility. Every crater, every hill marked on the lunar maps had reliably appeared on the horizon at some point, clarifying their position precisely, but in the sea of dust their sense of orientation would be incredibly reduced.

  ‘So we should try our best not to get lost,’ Evelyn put in with matter-of-fact firmness.

  ‘And Warren?’ asked Momoka insistently. ‘What about Warren?’

  ‘Well …’ Julian hesitated. ‘If only we knew that.’

  ‘What a helpful response, thank you!’ She snorted. ‘Why don’t we look for him?’

  ‘We can’t risk that, Momoka.’

  ‘Why not? We have to go to the foot of the Cape anyway.’

  ‘And from there directly on to the station.’

  ‘We don’t even know if he really fell,’ Evelyn reflected. ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Of course he did!’ exploded Momoka. ‘Don’t kid yourself! Do you really want to drive happily on while he’s stuck in a wreck together with that arsehole Carl?’

  ‘There’s no question of us doing it happily,’ protested Evelyn. ‘But the zone is huge. He could be anywhere.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We’re not looking for him,’ said Julian decisively. ‘I can’t be responsible for that.’

  ‘You really are unbelievable!’

  ‘No, but it would be unbelievable to not get to the mining station because of you,’ said Evelyn, her tone audibly cooler. ‘It’s not that we don’t care about Warren, but we can’t search the entire Mare Imbrium until we run out of oxygen.’

  ‘I have a suggestion.’ Oleg cleared his throat. ‘In a way, Momoka is right. We have to go over to the Cape anyway, so why don’t we just drive along a little and keep our eyes open? Not an organised search, just three, four kilometres and then on towards the mining station.’

  ‘Sounds sensible,’ said Evelyn.

  Julian pondered the suggestion for a moment. So far they hadn’t needed to touch the oxygen reserves.

  ‘Okay, I think we can do that,’ he said reluctantly.

  They veered off, headed for the landmass and steered into the bay a little, the ascending mountain range to their left. A few minutes later, they reached a shallow ditch which stretched out diagonally across the ground, seeming to emerge right out of the fog.

  Julian slowed down the rover.

  ‘That’s not a ditch,’ said Oleg.

  They were staring at a broadly carved-out path. It had been torn into the regolith like a wound, its edges forced up.

  ‘It’s fresh,’ said Amber.

  Momoka stood up from her seat and stared into the distant cloud, then turned to the other side.

  ‘There,’ she whispered.

  Something was lying at an angle on the slope where the strand of the Cape swung up to the mountain range. It was reflecting the sunlight: a small, elongated and alarmingly familiar shape.

  It also marked the end of the path.

  Without saying a word, Julian accelerated. He drove at top speed, and yet Momoka still managed to overtake him. The terrain was only gently inclined, bearable for the rovers, which thanks to the flexible wheel suspension were able to work their way swiftly up the path. By now there was no longer any doubt that they were looking at the wreck of the Ganymede. Its legs gone, it rested in the middle of the rockfall on the slope, wedged tightly between larger chunks of rock. Its rear hatch was wide open. Not far from the ramp lay a body, its head and shoulders in the shadow of the rock. While Julian was still figuring out how he could hold Momoka back, she had already jumped down from the driver’s seat and was rushing up the hill. He heard her wheezing on the speakers in his helmet, saw her fall to her knees. Her upper body was swallowed by the shadow, then a short, ghostly cry resounded.

  ‘Evelyn,’ said Julian on a separate frequency. ‘I think you would be the best one to …’

  ‘Okay,’ said Evelyn unhappily. ‘I’ll look after her.’

  Sinus Iridum

  Considering all the setbacks he had faced so far, Hanna had been amazed to make it to the mining station without problem. He was all too familiar with the nature of escalation. The damaged axle of the buggy was bound to break apart prematurely, and that’s exactly what it did, the dramaturgy of failure obliging fifteen kilometres too soon. It wasn’t a pothole or geological fault that finished it off, however. It broke in two with banal finality on even ground, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt halt, forcing it into a spin, and that was that.

  Hanna sprang down into the debris. The basic rule of survival was to think positive. The fact that the old banger had even made it that far, for example. And the fact that he had an extraordinary sense of orientation, which had enabled him to find his way without fail so far. Regardless of the miserable visibility, he had held his course, of that he was certain. As long as he just kept going in a straight line, he should reach the mining station within about an hour. But he would have to really watch out from now on. The dust concealed dangers that weren’t so easy to get away from on foot as in the buggy. He would have to keep his distance. Admittedly the beetles were quite slow, but the filigree, nimble spiders had a tendency to make unpleasant surprise appearances.

  Hanna let his gaze wander. Some distance away, he saw a ghostly silhouette hurrying along towards him. He walked over to the buggy’s cargo bed, grabbed a survival pack in each hand and marched off.

  Cape Heraclides, Montes Jura

  While Evelyn attended to her emotional support duties, Julian, Amber and Oleg feverishly searched the inside of the wreck and the nearby area, but there was nothing to suggest that Hanna was still around.

  ‘How did he get away?’ Amber wondered.

  ‘The Ganymede had a buggy on board,’ said Julian, as he trudged around the nose of the shuttle. ‘And it’s disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, and I know where,’ Oleg’s voice rang out from the opposite end of the ship. ‘Maybe you should come over here.’

  Seconds later, they were all standing in the path. So far they had only noticed the devastation the shuttle had inflicted on the regolith when making its emergency landing, the brutality with which it had dug into the surface, but something different now captured their attention: a story about someone who had set off into the far-away dust, a story told by—

  ‘Tyre tracks,’ said Julian.

  ‘Your buggy,’ confirmed Oleg. ‘Hanna has driven down along the path and out onto the plain. I don’t know how well he knows the area, but what else could he be interested in other than the place we also want to get to?’

  ‘So the bastard just fucked off!’ Momoka came over with Evelyn, down from the hill where Warren Locatelli lay.

  ‘Momoka,’ began Julian, ‘I’m so terribly—’

  ‘There’s no need. No outpourings of sympathy, please. The only thing I’m interested in is killing him.’

  ‘We’ll give Warren a proper burial.’

  ‘There’s no time for that.’ Her voice had lost all modulation. Autopilot driven by rage. ‘I looked at Warren’s face, Julian. And do you know what? He spoke to me. Not some jabbering from the other side, not that old shit. He would speak to you too, if you took the effort to go over there to him
. You just have to look him in the face. He doesn’t look the same as he did before, but you can hear him say loudly and clearly that humans have no business being up here. None at all! Not us, and not you either,’ she added in a hostile tone.

  ‘Momoka, I—’

  ‘He said we should never have accepted your invitation!’

  But you did, thought Julian, though he didn’t say a word.

  ‘Carl has driven to the mining zone,’ said Amber.

  ‘Very well.’ Momoka marched over to the rovers. ‘We have to go there anyway, right?’

  ‘No, wait,’ said Julian.

  ‘For what?’ She stopped. ‘You seemed to be in a hurry just now.’

  ‘I’ve found some additional oxygen reserves in the storage space of the shuttle. Really, Momoka, we have time to give him a decent—’

  ‘That’s very sensitive of you, but Warren is already buried. Carl slit open his stomach and took off his helmet. I don’t see any reason to stone him too.’

  There was icy silence for a second.

  ‘So?’ she asked. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘I’ll drive,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘I’m happy to as well—’ Oleg offered.

  ‘None of you will drive,’ decided Momoka. ‘If any of us has reason to drive, then it’s me. To follow him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Amber cautiously.

  ‘I’ve never been so sure,’ said Momoka, and her voice made her visor steam up.

  ‘Fine.’ Julian looked out over the plain. ‘Seeing as we don’t have any satellite connection, I’ll link the four of us on one frequency. From now on, no one will be able to hear us, not even Carl, should we get close to him. It might help.’

  Gaia, Vallis Alpina

  ‘There must be a way!’

  Tim had lost all sense of time. Seconds seemed to drag out endlessly, but at the same time an hour dwindled into a disheartening nothing, brief enough to feel useless. Although the deaths had had the relative advantage of distracting them from the bomb, it took on a new, tyrannical presence now that they had alerted the prisoners to the threatening cataclysm. Strangely, Lynn seemed to gain more strength the more confused the situation became. It wasn’t that she was really doing any better, but catastrophes, real catastrophes, seemed to have an exorcising effect on the demons in her head – even her perception of Tim was gradually becoming closer to his true nature. They were nothing other than the monsters of hypothesis, creatures from the family of what-ifs, the genus of could-bes, all equipped with the torture devices of paths left untaken.

  He felt deeply sorry for his sister.

  The fear that her work could turn out to be vulnerable and faulty must have cost her every last rational thought. Tim was now convinced that his uneasiness, fed by Dana Lawrence’s suspicions, had proved to be a tragic misunderstanding. Lynn wasn’t the one trying to cause damage to her own creation and its occupants. Her mind might be struggling against disintegration, but for the moment there was probably nothing better than for her to be forced to react by her nightmares being realised. After all, she was even explaining the latest developments to Dana, her newly elected arch enemy, and taking a huge, humbling leap by asking the fired director for her advice.

  ‘We’ve looked at the images from the external camera,’ she said. ‘The flames have clearly led to a partial breakdown in the steel skeleton within Gaia’s neck. So the fire should have been extinguished, but now the structure is damaged. There are a number of gaping leaks up there.’

  Dana was silent. She seemed to be thinking.

  ‘Come on, Dana,’ pressed Lynn. ‘I need your assessment of the situation.’

  ‘Well, what’s yours?’

  ‘That there’s only one way out for Miranda, Olympiada and Finn, and it’s not downwards.’

  ‘Over the viewing terrace, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Out through the airlock in the Mama Quilla Club.’

  ‘We’d have to overcome two problems with that,’ said Dana. ‘First, you can’t climb up over the outside of the head.’

  ‘Yes, you can. We planned for a roll-out ladder in case of emergency.’

  ‘But it wasn’t installed.’

  ‘Why not? According to the safety regulations—’

  ‘For optical reasons. On your instructions, by the way,’ added Dana, with audible satisfaction. ‘We could carry out the installation of course, but it would be dreadfully complicated under the prevailing conditions and it would also take a considerable amount of time.’

  ‘The second problem is harder to solve,’ interjected O’Keefe, who was switched on to their frequency. So the fibre-optic connection still seemed to be intact at least. ‘We don’t have any spacesuits up here. So the terrace won’t be much help to us.’

  ‘Couldn’t we bring some up?’ asked Ögi. He was relentlessly pacing the room, taking equally long, precisely measured steps, or so it seemed to Tim. He was the only one who had stayed behind in the control centre. The others were seated in the lobby, trying to get a grip on things with Heidrun’s help. ‘E1 still seems to be functioning.’

  ‘But E1 only goes to the neck,’ said Tim.

  ‘Forget it.’ Lynn shook her head. ‘The shaft is completely sealed off to protect us from the vacuum. After the structural changes up there the doors wouldn’t open up again anyway. There’s only one option.’

  ‘Through the airlock,’ said Dana.

  ‘Yes.’ Lynn dug her teeth into her lower lip. ‘From the outside. We have to get the suits inside through the airlock of the viewing platform.’

  ‘But for that you’ll have to bring them up first,’ said Finn. ‘And it won’t stop creaking up here so it has to be quick! I don’t know how much longer the head will hold.’

  ‘Callisto,’ said Dana. ‘Bring them up on the Callisto.’

  ‘Where is Nina anyway?’ asked Tim.

  Lynn looked at him in surprise. In the heat of the moment she had completely forgotten the Danish pilot.

  ‘Wasn’t she with you in the bar?’ asked Lynn.

  ‘Who – Nina?’ O’Keefe shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘And has someone down here—’ Lynn paused. ‘Oh, shit! In order to bring up the Callisto, we need someone who can carry out precision manoeuvres in a large craft.’ The last trace of colour drained from her face. ‘We have to find Nina!’

  ‘We can’t wait that long,’ urged Finn.

  ‘Then—’ She tried to catch her breath in an effort to fight off a panic attack. ‘We could – we have ten grasshoppers in the garage! Almost all of you have already flown a craft like that.’

  ‘Sure, close to the ground,’ said Dana. ‘But do you think you could manage this? Climb up more than a hundred and fifty metres with a grasshopper and carry out a precision landing on the terrace?’

  ‘The precision landing isn’t a problem,’ said Tim. ‘But the height—’

  ‘Technically speaking the height is the least of our worries; theoretically they can be used to fly in open space.’ Lynn brushed her hands over her eyes. ‘But Dana’s right. I don’t trust myself. Not in my condition. I’d lose my nerve.’

  It was the first time she had publicly dropped her guard. Tim had never known her to do that. He took it as a good sign.

  ‘Okay, fine,’ he said. ‘How many of the things do we need? Each hopper can take one additional person, so three all together, right? Three pilots. I’ll do it. Walo?’

  ‘I’ve never been up that high with one, but if Lynn thinks it will work—’

  Tim ran into the lobby and clapped his hands.

  ‘Someone!’ he called. ‘We need one person for the third hopper.’

  ‘Me’ said Heidrun, without knowing what it was even about.

  ‘Are you sure? You have to land the thing on Gaia’s head. Do you think you can do it?’

  ‘Generally speaking, I think I’m capable of doing anything …’

  ‘No fear of heights?’

  ‘… but whether I manage it or not is a differe
nt matter.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Tim shook his head. ‘You have to manage it. You have to know now whether you can or not, otherwise—’

  She stood up and brushed her white hair behind her ears.

  ‘No, no “otherwise”. I’ll manage it.’

  There were spares of all the spacesuits concealed behind a wall in the lobby, which meant they didn’t have to go up over the bridges to the lockers. They helped each other into the suits, put the gear for Olympiada Rogacheva, Miranda and Finn together and packed it into boxes.

  ‘Are there problems in the corridor?’ asked Tim.

  ‘No, the sensors are registering steady values.’ Lynn went ahead of them, led them to a passageway the other side of the elevators and opened a large bulkhead. Behind it was a spacious stairway with steep steps.

  ‘You’ll get down below this way. I’ll open the garage from the control centre.’

  Tim reflected that she should perhaps have built a route like this upstairs too, but bit back the observation.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Lynn.

  Tim hesitated. Then he put both arms around his sister and pulled her close. ‘I know what you’re going through,’ he said softly, ‘and I’m unbelievably proud of you. I have no idea how you’re coping with all this.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ she whispered.

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he said.

  ‘What’s left?’ She pulled away from his embrace and grasped his hands. ‘Tim, you have to believe me, I have nothing to do with Carl, no matter what Dana says. It’s myself I’m destroying, not anything else.’

  ‘This isn’t your fault, Lynn. There’s nothing you can do!’