Frank Schätzing - Limit

His fingers slid over the controls.

He hesitated.

What was that? The shaft wouldn’t move. The display was red, which meant that the cabin was currently being drained, or filled with air – or on its way!

He quickly turned around.

No, it was there, the space evenly lit behind the narrow windows, and deserted. Hanna narrowed his eyes. He paused. A sudden urge impelled him to get up and check, but he couldn’t afford any further delays, and the light had just switched from red to green.

Ganymede was ready to go.

‘There. There!’

Amber pointed excitedly into the sky. A long way off something was climbing steeply into the sky, something long that glinted in the sun.

‘The Ganymede!’

They had come hurrying down the path, mindless, breathless, in clumsy kangaroo leaps, back to the crane platform, only to discover that both rovers had disappeared. Not a soul far and wide. Black’s cries still echoed in Amber’s ears:

Carl, what’s going on? Have you gone m— No!

Carl?

She had run anxiously out onto the platform and seen what was left of the gondola in which Mimi and Marc should have been sitting. More precisely, there was no gondola. Just the useless back of a chair, twisted steel, the contorted scrap of a safety guard and behind it, wedged in, something white, something numbingly familiar—

A single leg.

Only an extreme effort of will had kept her from throwing up in her helmet, while the others had stared down into the gorge and kept a lookout for the missing man. But large parts of the valley were in shadow, so they couldn’t see anything at all.

‘They’re dead,’ Rogachev had stated at last.

‘How can you claim that they’re dead?’ Evelyn said excitedly.

‘That is a corpse.’ Rogachev pointed to the amputated leg in the ruined gondola.

‘No, that’s – that’s—’

None of them had managed to speak its name. What an unbearable idea, that the fate of that shredded individual would only be fulfilled when it gave that limb an identity and thus retrospectively supplied the facts.

‘We have to look for her,’ said Evelyn.

‘Later.’ Julian stared at the place where the vehicles had just been standing. ‘We have worse things to worry about right now.’

‘Don’t you think that’s bad enough?’ snapped Momoka.

‘I think it’s terrible. But first we have to find the rovers.’

‘Warren?’ Momoka resumed her mantra-like calls to her husband. ‘Warren, where are you?’

‘Assuming they managed it—’ Evelyn tried again.

‘ They’re dead ,’ Rogachev cut her off in a voice of ice. ‘Five people are missing. At least two of those are alive, otherwise both vehicles couldn’t have disappeared, but the others are down there. Do you want to abseil down there and poke about in the dark?’

‘How do you know it isn’t – it isn’t Carl down there?’

‘Because Carl’s alive,’ Amber had said wearily, to keep things short. ‘I think he has Peter and the others on his conscience.’

‘What makes you so sure about that?’

‘Amber’s right,’ Julian had said. ‘Carl’s a traitor, I realised that a few minutes ago. Believe me, we do have a bigger problem than that here! We urgently have to think about how we—’

At that moment Amber saw the shuttle rising on the horizon. For a moment it seemed to stand still above Cobra Head, then it came towards them and suddenly got bigger.

It’s flying this way, she thought.

The armoured body was gaining form and outline, but also, worryingly, altitude. Whoever was flying the Ganymede plainly didn’t plan to land and pick them up. The machine moved silently overhead, accelerated, turned in a northerly direction, shrank to a dot and disappeared.

‘Julian, call Gaia,’ urged Evelyn. ‘They’ve got to pick us up from here.’

‘It’s not going to happen.’ Julian sighed. ‘The connection’s been broken.’

‘Broken?’ cried Momoka, horrified. ‘How come it’s broken?’

‘No idea. I did say we had a bigger problem.’

Xin’s transformation back from a lion-maned Mando-Progger to a perfectly normal contract killer was as good as complete when his contact called.

On the way back from the Grand Hyatt he had constantly asked himself what the two policemen had been doing there. No doubt about it, they had been after Tu – Jericho and the girl as well – but to what end? Jericho wasn’t mentioned by name in Berlin, so the investigators had their sights set on Tu. Why him, of all people?

On the other hand he didn’t care. Admittedly he had had to disappear without having achieved anything, but his intuition told him he had arrived too late anyway. The group had cleared off. So what? What were they going to do? Vogelaar and his wife were dead, the crystal was in his possession. While he put his wigs and fake beards away, he took the call.

‘Kenny, damn it, how could that happen?’

No Hydra , no other greeting. Just anxious whispering. Xin hesitated. His contact was beside himself.

‘How could what happen?’ he asked warily.

‘It’s all going down the tubes! This guy Tu and this Jericho guy and the girl, all the contraband is on its way to us, and they know ! They know everything! About the parcel, about the attack ! They’ve even had a chance to talk to Julian Orley. Our cover’s being blown! ’

Xin froze. The Mando-Progger’s Tartar beard lay in his hand like a small, dead animal.

‘That’s impossible,’ he whispered.

‘Impossible? Well, then perhaps you could come here ! Right now the company’s being hit by a devastating earthquake.’

‘But I’ve got the dossier.’

‘So have they!’

A volley of oaths rained down on Xin, taking in, amongst other hardships, the unmasking of Hanna and the activation of the communication block. The latter had been planned as an emergency measure in case details of the attack were to seep through prematurely to the Moon. Something no one at Hydra had seriously reckoned with, but that was exactly what had happened.

‘When was the net jammed?’ asked Xin.

‘During the linkup.’ The other man breathed sharply into the receiver. ‘Over the next twenty-four hours the Moon will be cut off from everything, but we can’t keep the block going for ever. I just hope Hanna gets the situation under control. Not to mention Ebola.’

Ebola. Hanna’s right hand was a specialist when it came to infecting supposedly independent systems and weakening them from within. That Ebola had managed to interrupt the fatal linkup could be seen as a brilliant manoeuvre, a skilful turnaround in the adverse wind of circumstances, but unfortunately on a leaking boat.

Vogelaar had outwitted him.

No! Xin forced himself to calm down. They weren’t leaking yet. He had chosen Hanna and Ebola because they knew how to improvise and would keep the upper hand, regardless of how inauspicious the circumstances might be. He planned not to waste a second brooding on the possibility that the undertaking might go wrong.

‘And how are you going to force this Tu and his rat-pack to see sense?’ the other man raged. ‘You’ve lost Mickey Reardon, two of your people died in Shanghai, you can’t count on Gudmundsson and his team at the moment, they’re otherwise engaged, so how do you think—’

‘Not at all,’ Xin cut in.

Puzzled, his contact fell silent.

‘There’s no longer any point in eliminating Tu’s group,’ Xin explained to him. ‘The facts of the situation have become common knowledge, the dissemination of the dossier can no longer be stopped. Everything else is decided on the Moon.’