Frank Schätzing - Limit

Daxiong followed the tracks. They led at least two kilometres across the open field and disappeared into a tunnel, more of a covered passageway, really, that opened right into the converter hall. Shots were ringing out from there now. He put his foot right down, caught his front wheel in one of the tracks, slipped. The motorbike threw him off. He skidded along on the seat of his trousers, dumbfounded by his own stupidity, jumped to his feet, cursed. He had got off lightly, but the accident had cost him time.

His eyes scoured the sky.

No trace of an airbike. He righted his toppled motorbike and tried to start it. After several attempts and encouraging words, the most frequent of which was Merde! , the machine finally sprang to life, and Daxiong plunged into the darkness of the passageway. What he saw was less than encouraging. A shunting-engine rested, broad and sedate, on one of the two parallel tracks; another was coupled to two torpedo cars. He wouldn’t be able to get by on either side, only the space between the trains was wide enough – but there was something blocking it.

He should have gone through the rolling mill!

Forced to stop, he got off his bike and walked over to the obstruction, which turned out to be a twisted metal frame. Bracing his three-hundredweight bulk against it, he tried to shift it from its position. Further ahead he could see the dim opening beyond which the hall lay. It couldn’t have been more than twenty metres away.

He had to get there.

At that moment there was a third explosion, a salvo this time, much louder than the others. The passageway lit up, something burning flew into it and crashed to the ground. Further explosions followed. As if possessed, Daxiong rattled at the metal frame until at last, with a great creak, it started to give. The thing wasn’t heavy, just hopelessly stuck. He tensed his muscles. All hell must have broken loose through there, flames were blazing. Daxiong panted, pulled and tugged, pushed and shoved, and all of a sudden the metal frame yielded and twisted a little to the side.

Still. Just enough of a gap for him to squeeze through.

Xin held a hand in front of his mouth and nose as he rode his airbike through the billows. Acrid smoke brought tears to his eyes. What in hell’s name had the blond guy been up to? Hopefully it had been worth it at least. Beyond the deep blackness he saw flames flickering. His right hand reached for the butt of the sub-machine-gun in its holster and let go of it again.

First he had to find a way out.

The smoke cleared, giving him a view of the hall. The whole place was in flames. Not a soul in sight, just a toppled airbike hanging from the balustrade of a gallery, dented and blackened. The windscreen was missing. Xin steered towards it, as a great roll of thunder set the hall trembling. Immediately behind him a column of fire shot into the air, the wave of pressure sending heavy vibrations through his bike. He climbed, then glimpsed a movement at the far end of the hall.

Something came roaring out of the wall. The motorbike rider. The bald giant.

Xin drew the gun from the holster.

A greasy black cloud billowed over and enveloped him, hot and suffocating. He held his breath, brought the bike further up, but the cloud wouldn’t let go of him. Of course it wouldn’t! Smoke drifted upwards. What sort of an idiot was he? Blinded and disorientated, he brought the bike back down again. He couldn’t even see the lights on the instrument panel now. He steered haphazardly to the right and collided with something, then dragged the handlebars around.

Further down. He had to get down there.

Small fires crackled around him, immersing his airbike in a flickering red glow. He thought he could hear voices coming from somewhere, headed straight ahead to avoid any further collisions, and managed to get out of the cloud. Between flickering flames and plumes of smoke he saw the motorbike.

Yoyo was sitting on its pillion.

Xin bellowed with fury. The motorbike disappeared into the wide, low passageway from which it had emerged. With hissing jets he shot after the two of them and followed them into the tunnel. The motorbike dashed between two trains. He tried to estimate the amount of room he had: airbikes were a bit broader than motorbikes, but if he was careful he would fit through.

When he was just about to shoot the girl in the back, he saw something blocking the way.

Iron bars. Bent, wedged.

Beside himself with fury, he was forced to look as Yoyo and the giant ducked their heads and managed by a hair to get under the twisted metal. He himself would have been skewered. Not a chance. His bike was too wide, too high. He pivoted the jets and braked, but his momentum carried him on towards the metal poles. For a moment Xin was filled with a paralysing sense of complete helplessness; he pulled the bike round sideways-on, scraping along against the trains, and metal crunched against metal as he managed to reduce his speed.

He held his breath.

The airbike stopped, just centimetres away from the metal frame.

Seething with rage, he stared through it. Daylight entered at the end of the passageway. The motorbike engine seemed to give him an insolent growl as it disappeared from view. Close to losing his self-control, Xin wrenched the airbike round, flew back into the hall, plunged into the smoke, sped through the rolling mill and the warehouse and back outside. Above the slagheap, he turned in a great circle, grateful for the fresh air, opened the cover of the second weapon chamber and reached inside. When his hand came back out, it was holding something long and heavy. Then, at great speed, he bore down on the blast furnace.

Jericho spat and coughed. The smoke billowed into every corner. He wouldn’t survive another fight in this inferno. If he didn’t get out of here right away, it would all be too late. Another few minutes, and he might as well just settle down and fill his lungs with tar until they were the colour of liquorice.

He hoped devoutly that Yoyo had made it. Everything had happened at impossible speed. Their escape over the platform, Zhao’s bike. Then, all of a sudden, Daxiong. The hitman must have seen him, but something had kept him from reacting straight away, fire, perhaps, welling smoke. They had had time to get to Daxiong, who stopped his bike all of a sudden and paused with the engine running. There had been a flicker of puzzlement in the giant’s narrow eyes, as he wondered how he would get them both on his narrow pillion.

‘Go, Yoyo,’ Jericho had said.

‘I can’t—’

‘Go, damn it! No speeches, just fuck off! I’ll be fine.’

She had looked at him, soot-blackened, unkempt and plainly shocked, with a mixture of fury and defiance in her eyes. And all of a sudden he had seen that strange sadness in her, which he knew from Chen’s photographs. Then Yoyo had jumped on Daxiong’s pillion. At that moment Zhao had spotted them both.

Jericho clung to the hope that they’d got away from the hitman. Visibility was getting worse and worse. With his sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose, he edged his way up to the gallery and inspected the airbike. In poor shape, but the damage seemed to be mainly cosmetic in nature. Hoping the handlebars weren’t damaged, he bent down and hoisted the machine upright.

His eye fell on something small.

It lay on the ground next to the airbike, something flat, silvery, gleaming. He picked it up, surprised, looked at it, turned it around in his hand—

Yoyo’s computer!

She must have lost it here. When she fell off the bike.

He’d found Yoyo’s computer!

He quickly slipped the device into his jacket, swung onto his saddle and started the bike. The familiar hiss.