Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Of course I love her!’

  ‘Okay, you’ve done everything for her, you’ve made sure she had the best possible career, but have you ever been interested in her? Are you sure you’ve ever really been interested in anyone?’

  ‘Christ alive, why have I organised all this, in that case?’

  ‘No, no.’ She raised a finger. ‘Listen, little Julian, to what your aunt says! You make films and you cast people in them. With ten billion extras and Lynn in the main part.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Yes, it is. You can’t see that your daughter is manic-depressive, and that she threatens to suffer the same fate as her mother.’

  ‘Exactly,’ cried Tim. ‘Because you—’

  ‘Shut it, Tim! Look, Julian, it’s not that you don’t want to see it, you just don’t see it! Come down to earth. Lynn’s unusually talented, she has brilliant qualities, just like you do, but unlike you she hasn’t got power flowing through her veins, she’s not a natural mover and shaker, and she doesn’t have a buffalo hide. So stop selling her as perfect and beating up on her because she’ll never dare to contradict you. Ease off on the pressure. Say after me: Lynn – is – not – like – me!’

  ‘Erm – Julian?’

  Amber looked up. Nina Hedegaard, visibly troubled, was hovering in the airlock leading to the habitation units. Julian turned his head and forced himself to assume a relaxed expression.

  ‘Come in, come in. We were just swapping funny family stories and discussing our next Christmas party.’

  ‘I don’t mean to bother you.’ She smiled shyly. ‘Hello, Amber. Hi, Tim.’

  Since the Charon had set off on its long trip back to the OSS, Julian had stopped trying to hide his relationship with the pilot. Amber liked Nina and felt sorry for her, particularly for the way she believed Julian when he hinted at their future together.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Julian.

  ‘I’ve got Jennifer Shaw on the line.’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’ He strolled to the airlock, all too willingly, it seemed to Amber.

  ‘And then you come right back,’ she added. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Julian. ‘I was afraid of that.’

  Tim opened his mouth to make a disagreeable remark. Amber flashed a glance at him that made him think better of it.

  * * *

  Lynn was sharpening the blade of her suspicions.

  What had happened on the Moon seemed like a single, painful dream sequence, and in fact she had difficulty remembering the last few hours in Gaia. But when Dana Lawrence floated past in her sleeping bag at the same moment as she opened her eyes, cast her a glance and asked her how she was, a synaptic firework exploded in her brain, and she couldn’t help it. She said:

  ‘Piss off to hell, you two-faced snake.’

  Dana paused, with her head thrown back, her eyelids heavy with arrogance. The voices of the others could be heard from the next sector along. Then she came closer.

  ‘What’s your problem with me, Lynn? I haven’t done anything to you.’

  ‘You’ve questioned my authority.’

  ‘No, I was loyal. Do you think it was fun watching Kokoschka burn, even if he was in cahoots with Hanna? I had to order the evacuation.’

  The stupid thing was that she was right. By now Lynn knew that she had behaved in an extremely paranoid way, even though she wondered in what context it might have been. For example she hadn’t understood why she hadn’t wanted to show Julian certain films. And she couldn’t remember her wild escape across the glass bridges, seconds before the fire had broken out, but she could remember Hanna’s betrayal, the bomb and the operation to rescue the people trapped in Gaia’s head. For a moment she had regained her leadership qualities, before her mind had given in once and for all. That it was now working again seemed at first like a miracle, although she wasn’t particularly pleased, since the generator of her emotions had clearly suffered some damage. Listless and depressed, she couldn’t even remember what it was like to feel joy. On the other hand she knew what she definitely hadn’t dreamed about in all that confusion. It was clearly in front of her eyes, it echoed in her ears, a matter in which Lawrence played an inglorious part.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

  ‘I did my job, Lynn,’ Dana said, insulted. ‘If shortcomings in the planning and construction of Gaia led to disaster, you can’t blame me.’

  ‘There were no shortcomings. When will we actually get there?’

  ‘In about three hours.’.

  Lynn started unbuckling herself. She was thirsty. And for something specific, grapefruit juice. So she wasn’t just thirsty, she’d got an appetite. An emotional reaction, almost.

  ‘They should have put in more emergency exits,’ Dana Lawrence said, trickling acid into the wounds. ‘The throat was a bottleneck.’

  ‘Didn’t I sack you?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Then shut up.’

  Lynn pushed Lawrence aside and slipped over to the hatch leading to the next area. As always, everyone would be very nice and caring, Embarrassing, embarrassing, it should have been her task to ask Julian’s guests what they would like. But she was ill. Gradually, in manageable portions, Tim had told her the full extent of the disaster, so by now she knew who had died and under what circumstances. And again she had struggled to feel anything, grief, or at the very least rage, and had come up with nothing but dull despair.

  * * *

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘What?’ Julian took off his headphones.

  ‘I said, what did she want?’

  Tim tried not to sound unfriendly. Julian turned his head. The command panel of the Charon was in the back part of the sleeping area. Through the open bulkhead they could see into the adjacent lounge, where Heidrun, Sushma and Olympiada were in conversation with Finn O’Keefe, while Walo Ögi was despairing over one of Karla Kramp’s castling manoeuvres.

  ‘Something really strange,’ Julian said quietly. ‘She was asking how many bombs we found at the moon base.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Apparently there were two mini-nukes aboard that rocket from Equatorial Guinea. There’s another one of those things up there.’

  He said it in such a calm and matter-of-fact way that it took Tim a moment to understand the full import of the news.

  ‘Shit,’ he whispered. ‘Does Palmer know about this?’

  ‘They informed him straight away. Panic must have broken out at the base. They want to inspect the caves again.’

  ‘You mean, in case a bomb is found—’

  ‘Hanna may have hidden a second one.’

  ‘Pah.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ Julian rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder. ‘Whatever, we don’t want to tell the world about it.’

  ‘I don’t know, Julian.’ Tim frowned. ‘Do you seriously think he put the second bomb in the caves as well?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘When there was already one in there? I’d find a different place for a second one.’

  ‘That’s true too.’ Julian rubbed his beard. ‘And what if the second mini-nuke isn’t meant for the base?’

  ‘Who else would it be meant for?’

  ‘I’ve just got this idea. A bit crude, perhaps. But just imagine that someone’s trying to stir the Chinese and Americans up against each other. Not hard, given that they mixed it up last year. So what if the second bomb—’

  ‘Was meant for the Chinese?’ Tim slowly exhaled. ‘You should write novels. But okay. There’s a third possibility.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The mining zone.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Julian gnawed on his lower lip. ‘And there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘But how about I tell Amber?’

  ‘Okay, but no one else. I’ll have a talk to Jennifer and tell her what we think.’

  Orley Space Station (OSS), Geostationary Orbit

  They approached
the space station at an angle, so that the massive 280-metre mushroom-shaped structure hung at a diagonal. By now they were all wearing their spacesuits again. Even though the Earth was still 36,000 kilometres away, seeing the OSS getting bigger on the screens was a bit like coming home: its five tori, the wide circle of its wharf, the extravagant modules of the Kirk and the Picard, the ring-shaped space harbour with its mobile airlocks, manipulators, freight shuttles and phalanxes of stumpy-winged evacuation pods. At 23.45 a hollow chime rang through the spaceship, along with a faint vibration as Hedegaard docked on the ring.

  ‘Please keep your suits on,’ said Nina. ‘The full kit. Your luggage—’

  She fell silent. She had clearly realised that no one had any luggage. It had all been left in Gaia.

  ‘From the Charon we go straight to the Picard, where a snack bar has already been set up. We haven’t got much time – the lift will be there at about a quarter past twelve, and will leave the OSS straight away. We thought it – ahem, in your interest to get back to Earth as quickly as possible. You can store your helmets and backpacks in Torus-2.’

  No one said anything. Gloomily they left the spaceship by the airlock, said farewell to their cramped flying hotel and, in a sense, belatedly to the Moon, which couldn’t in the end do anything about what had happened. They floated one after the other down the corridor to Torus-2, the distributor ring that accommodated the lobby and hotel reception. From there, connecting tunnels branched out, leading down to the suites and up through the levels to the part of the station used by the research teams with its labs, observatories and workshops. The two extendable airlocks on the inside of the torus which led to lift cabins were locked. Three astronauts were working on the consoles, checking the lift systems, overseeing the unloading of a freighter and repair work on a manipulator.

  O’Keefe thought of the disc of the wharf, where spaceships were being built for bolder missions, of machines dashing through the silence of the universe and solar panels sparkling in the cold, white sun. Heidrun had pushed him out of the airlock up there, she had made fun of him, and Warren Locatelli had puked in his helmet.

  How long ago was that? A decade? A century?

  He wouldn’t be coming back, he knew that, as he set his helmet down on its shelf. Making brash science-fiction films, saving the universe, any time! Whatever the script called for. But no going back.

  ‘No,’ he said to himself.

  ‘No?’

  Heidrun set her helmet down next to his. He turned his head and looked into her violet eyes. He studied her elfin face, saw her hair forming a flowing white fan in zero gravity. Felt his heart like a lump in his chest.

  ‘Would you come back?’ he asked. ‘Here? To the Moon?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘Yes. I think I would.’

  ‘So you found something up here.’

  ‘A few things, Finn.’ She smiled. ‘Quite a lot, in fact. And you?’

  Nothing, he wanted to say. I’ve just lost something. Before I had it.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  He would never see her again either. He would stay out of everyone’s way. The world was full of lonely places, it was a lonely place. You didn’t have to go to the Moon to find one of those. Heidrun opened her lips and raised a hand as if to touch him.

  ‘In our next life,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But there’s only this one here,’ he answered roughly.

  She nodded, lowered her head and slipped past him. A strand of her hair passed across his face and tickled his nose.

  ‘Mein Schatz,’ he heard Walo say. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘Coming, sweetie!’

  The lump was starting to hurt. Finn O’Keefe stared at his helmet, turned round and drifted after the others, his mind a blank.

  * * *

  Midnight had just gone. It had been such an effort to quell the excitement of the last few days that no one felt much like reviving it with caffeine, so everyone pounced on fruit juice and tea in the Picard. Julian would have liked to have some soup, but because eating soup in micro-gravity was pretty much a no-no, there was lasagne. He sawed a piece of it off and disappeared into the tunnel that led down to the suites, to phone the Earth from there.

  Dana Lawrence joined him.

  ‘Not hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am. I just left my report in the Charon.’

  He stopped outside his cabin, balancing his lasagne. Did this woman make any sense at all? In Gaia, she had proved her mettle, she had challenged the traitor Kokoschka and finished off Carl Hanna. Lynn couldn’t have made a better choice, and yet, thinking about it, it was the fact that any other choice was rationally unthinkable that unsettled him. Perhaps it was because of the image he had of women, of people in general, that he couldn’t make head or tail of her. He couldn’t imagine her bursting into tears or bursting out laughing. Her Madonna face with its heart-shaped mouth and piercing eyes made him think of a replicant, of Brooke Adams’ post-pod character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in the scene in which she opens her mouth and emits the hollow, unearthly scream of an alien. Clearly very intelligent and passably attractive, Dana Lawrence was miles away from any kind of passion.

  ‘I must thank you,’ he said. ‘I know Lynn wasn’t always – always quite up to it during the crisis.’

  ‘She fought remarkably well.’

  ‘But I also know that Lynn’s initial enthusiasm for you turned into rejection. Don’t blame her. Lynn’s judgement was clouded during this trip. You were farsighted and brave.’

  ‘I did my job.’ She mimicked a smile, making her features softer but no more sensual. ‘Will you excuse me?’

  ‘Of course.’ She floated past him and disappeared down the next side corridor.

  Julian immediately forgot about her. He hungrily sniffed his lasagne, looked into the scanner and slipped into his cabin.

  * * *

  Dana reached Torus-1, with its bars, libraries and common rooms – then continued on and slipped into the long tunnel which led towards the upper level and connected the OSS Grand with Torus-2. Only two astronauts were still on duty at the terminal.

  ‘I have to go to Charon for a minute,’ she said to them. ‘For some documents.’

  One of the men nodded. ‘Fine.’

  She turned away, disappeared into the corridor that linked Torus-2 with the outer ring of the space harbour and drifted towards the airlock behind which the spaceship lay at anchor. Everything was still going to plan. Hydra still hadn’t lost, quite the contrary. It was only Lynn’s suspicion that unsettled her, as she couldn’t work out how it had come about. But even that wasn’t particularly important. Dana opened the bulkhead leading to the Charon and looked behind her, but no one had followed her down the corridor. In the Picard they were indulging in lasagne and homesickness. She sped into the landing unit and on into the habitation module, crossed the bistro, the lounge and started working away at the wall covering.

  Hanna had told her exactly where to do it.

  And there she was.

  * * *

  The lightning flash of memory. Amazing how it appeared in the middle of heavy cloud cover. She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done in the igloo, but she could see Carl Hanna very clearly, before she had sunk to the floor by the coffee machine, frozen with terror. She saw him murdering Tommy Wachowski, heard his quiet, traitorous cursing:

  Dana, for fuck’s sake. Come on!

  Dana.

  Her suspicions had already been aroused a few hours ago, when Dana Lawrence had hypocritically asked her how she was, but now it was certain. Hanna had tried to make contact with the bitch, in a way that revealed that the contact had been prearranged. Why? Drawing the necessary conclusions would have taken a considerable amount of energy, too much to put Julian in the picture as well, particularly since she didn’t talk much to her father any more. It had dawned on her that she felt a lot better as soon as she banished him from the centre of her thoughts. At the same t
ime she missed him, as a puppet misses the hand that moves it, and she was already aware, at least on an intellectual level, that she actually idolised him. Maybe she no longer felt what she felt, but at least she still knew what she felt.

  Something had gone wrong in her life, and Dana Lawrence had played an inglorious part in that.

  Lynn peered down the corridor.

  Determined not to let her enemy out of her sight, she had followed Dana Lawrence when she had left the Picard with Julian. The cunning of madness, she thought, almost with amusement, but the madness had fled. A few seconds passed, then she slipped after Lawrence. At the end of the corridor she saw that the Charon’s bulkhead was open, and knew that Lawrence was in the spaceship.

  I’ll get you, she thought. I will prove you’re a snake, and the seething hatred that I know you feel for me will be your downfall. You shouldn’t have allowed yourself to be dragged into all this, unapproachable, unassailable, controlled Dana, but you aren’t unassailable after all. You didn’t try to shatter the others’ confidence in me for nothing. You will pay.

  She floated silently over the rim of the bulkhead, crossed the landing module, the bistro, the lounge. She glimpsed Dana in the sleeping area bent over something angular, the size of a briefcase, that she had taken from the opened wall. Saw her fingers darting over a keyboard and entering some data:

  * * *

  Nine hours: 09.00

  The plan was so simple, so efficient at its core. Launching a rocket to the Moon and detonating it above Peary Base might have worked, but its trajectory would be immediately traceable, and the risk of missing the base was great as well. To fire another missile at the OSS, whether from Earth or a satellite, was practically impossible. The rocket would have been intercepted, and here too the reconstruction of its flight-path would have led straight to its originator.

  But Hydra had come up with the perfect solution. Two mini-nukes, disguised in a communication satellite, from which they could travel unnoticed to the Moon and land some distance from the base, to stay there until someone came to take them out of the capsule and put them in the right places. One in the base, the second in the spaceship that would bring the bomb and the killers back to the OSS. Immediately before leaving the base, set bomb 1, then hide bomb 2 in the OSS, program that too and travel quite officially back to Earth in the lift before the timers set off both explosions, destroying both Peary Base and the OSS. The perfect double whammy.