Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Have the hotel searched right now,’ Owen Jericho was saying. ‘This guy Carl, perhaps he’s been outside to hide the bomb in Gaia. Ask him—’

‘I will ask him,’ hissed Julian. ‘Oh, I’ll ask him!’

Yeah, right, thought Hanna.

The lift sank slowly into the gorge. Black stood by the winch, waving at the Californians. Wanted to know what it felt like being a kilometre above the ground.

‘Amazing!’ raved Parker. ‘Better than parachute jumping. Better than anything.’

Hanna got moving, stretched his arms out.

‘Can you speed the pace up a bit?’ asked Edwards. ‘Speed it up. Let us fly!’

‘Sure, I—’

With both hands Hanna grabbed Black by the backpack, pulled him away from the console, lifted him in the air and carried him to the edge.

‘Hey!’ The pilot reached behind him. ‘Carl, is that you?’

Hanna said nothing, walked quickly on. His captive turned, kicked his legs, tried to get a hold of his assailant.

‘Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone mad? – No!’

He hurled Black over the edge of the platform. For a moment the pilot seemed to find purchase in the void, then he fell, comparatively slowly at first, getting faster and faster. His shrill scream mingled with Mimi Parker’s.

Nothing, not even a sixth of terrestrial gravity, could save a person falling into an abyss from a height of one thousand metres.

‘Julian?’ called Sophie. ‘Miss Shaw?’

‘What’s going on?’ snapped Dana.

‘Radio silence. Both gone.’ She tried in turn to re-establish connection with headquarters in London and with Julian, but all communication had been interrupted immediately after the start of the video showing the miraculous sullying of Hanna’s trouser legs in the sterile surroundings of a gangway. The Canadian, small and cheerful, went for a walk on the corridor conveyor belt, unnoticed by anyone.

‘Julian? Please come in!’

‘Try to reach the Earth in the conventional manner,’ said Dana. ‘Oh, don’t worry, let me do it.’

‘She pushed Sophie aside, pulled up a menu, switched from LPCS on direct aerial connection to the terrestrial Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, targeted ground stations, which was just possible within view of Earth, but Gaia seemed to have been deprived of her sensory organs. Lynn stared, her hand in front of her mouth, at the monitor wall, while Sophie shifted nervously from one leg to the other.

‘I was carrying on the conversation quite normally when—’

‘Don’t apologise before I start blaming you,’ Dana yelled at her. ‘Keep on trying. Perform an analysis. I want to know where the problem lies. Lynn?’

Lynn turned her head as if in a trance.

‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’

‘What?’

Rigid with fury, Dana left the control centre. Lynn followed her into the hall like a robot.

‘I think—’

‘Sorry!’ Dana flashed her inquisitorial grey-green eyes. ‘You’re my boss, Lynn, and that means I have to be respectful. But now I have to ask you very clearly what yesterday’s warning was about.’

Lynn looked as if she had been recalled to life after a long period of unconsciousness. She raised a hand and studied its palm as if it contained something very attractive.

‘It was all pretty vague.’

‘What was vague?’

‘Edda Hoff called and said a few people were planning some sort of attack on an Orley plant. It sounded – well, vague. Not like anything to worry about.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it straight away?’

‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’

‘I’m the manager and the security officer of this hotel, and you didn’t think it was necessary?’

Lynn stopped studying the palm of her hand and stared furiously back.

‘As you have already observed, Dana, I am your boss and, no, I didn’t think it was necessary to inform you. According to Hoff it was an extremely vague suspicion that somewhere in the world at some point an attack on one of our plants was planned, which was why she wanted to talk to me or Julian and not to you , and Julian had enough on his plate, so I asked to be kept informed. Does that answer your question?’

Dana took a step nearer. As if the prospect of disaster were not hovering about the hotel, Lynn found herself immersed in fascinated thoughts about the mysteries of the Dana physiognomy. How could such a sensually full mouth look so hard? Was the pallor of the face, framed by coppery red, due to the light, to a genetic predisposition or merely to Dana’s bitterness? How was it possible to seethe with rage and yet reveal such mask-like indifference?

‘Maybe you missed a few things back there,’ the manager said quietly. ‘But there was talk of this hotel being blown up by an atom bomb. One of your guests seems to be involved in it. We’ve lost contact with your father and with Earth. You should at any rate have talked to me about it.’

‘You know what?’ said Lynn. ‘You should get on with your work.’

She left Dana standing and went back to the control centre. The video of Hanna was still flickering on the monitor wall. The manager followed her slowly.

‘I’d love to,’ she said icily. ‘Are you overworked, Lynn? Are you up to this? A moment ago you looked as if you’d been paralysed.’

Sophie looked up and away again, not liking what she saw.

‘I’m afraid we’ve had a satellite failure,’ she said. ‘I can’t reach Earth or Ganymede or Callisto. Shall I try the Peary Base?’

‘Later. First we’ll have to talk through the next few steps. If what we’ve just heard is true, we’re threatened with catastrophe.’

‘What kind of catastrophe?’ asked Tim.

Locatelli caught his breath.

He saw Black disappearing just as he stepped from the shadow of the ravine and back into the sunlight. He stared at the scene as if nailed to the spot. It wasn’t easy to tell who had pushed whom into the gorge, and he had switched the gang down there to mute, but there was no doubt that it had been deliberate.

It had been no accident. That was murder!

Warren Locatelli was accused of lots of dubious qualities: uncouthness, recklessness, narcissism and much besides, but cowardice wasn’t among them. His Italian–Algerian temperament broke through, flooded his thoughts. As he started running he saw the murderer pull something from his thigh.

And Edwards saw it too.

Below them, Black’s flailing figure became smaller and smaller. He knew enough about gravitational physics to be aware that the pilot would not survive the fall, despite the reduction in gravitational pull. The rate of his fall might be slower than on Earth, twelve metres might be the equivalent of two, but there was no air resistance to counteract it. Black’s body would be accelerated in a linear fashion, determined entirely by mass attraction. With each second his speed would increase by 1.63 metres until he landed at the bottom like a meteorite.

And he and Mimi would—

He was filled with fresh horror. He looked to the edge of the platform and saw the astronaut who had pushed Black into the depths, holding something long and flat in his right hand.

‘Carl?’ he wheezed.

The astronaut didn’t reply. In the same moment Edwards worked out that they too were in extreme danger. He started tugging like mad on his safety guard, bent it to the side and rose from his seat. They had to get out of here. Climb up the rope, back over the cantilever to solid ground, their only chance.

‘What are you doing?’ screamed Mimi.