Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Our information centre,’ Norrington explained. ‘From here we stay in contact with Orley facilities everywhere in the world. We work according to the specifications of our subcontractors, which means that there are no continental heads, only security advisers to the individual subsidiaries, who report to London. All company data come together here.’

‘How far under the ground are we?’ asked Yoyo.

‘Not that far. Fifteen metres. We had a lot of problems with groundwater at first, but things are sorted out now. For understandable reasons we had to protect Central Security, avoid any kind of attacks from the air, for example, and if necessary the underground of the Big O serves as a nuclear bunker.’

‘That means that if England falls—’

‘—Orley will still be standing.’

‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Norrington smiled. ‘England isn’t going to fall. Our country is changing, we had to accept the disappearance of the red telephone boxes and the red buses, but the Royal Family is non-negotiable. If it comes to the crunch, we still have room for the King down here.’

He led them into a conference room with holographic screens running all the way around it. Two women stood in hushed conversation. Jericho recognised one of them straight away. The deep black pageboy cut over the pale face belonged to Edda Hoff. The other woman was plump, with appealing if grumpy features, blue-grey eyes and short, white hair.

‘Jennifer Shaw,’ she said.

In charge of Central Security, Jericho completed in his head. Guard dog number one in the global Orley empire. Hands were shaken again.

‘Coffee?’ asked Jennifer. ‘Water? Tea?’

‘Something.’ Tu had spotted a memory crystal reading device, and was making resolutely towards it. ‘Anything.’

‘Red wine,’ said Yoyo.

Jennifer raised an eyebrow. ‘Medium-bodied? Full-bodied? Barrel-aged?’

‘Something along the lines of a narcotic, if possible.’

‘Narcotic and anything,’ nodded Edda Hoff, went outside for a moment and came back in as the others were taking their seats. Tu put the crystal in the reader and nodded to everyone.

‘With your permission we’ll let an old rascal speak first,’ he said. ‘It is to him that you owe your glimpse into the sick brain of your enemies, and in any case I should like to sweep away any remaining doubts about our credibility.’

‘Where is the man now?’ Jennifer leaned back.

‘Dead,’ said Jericho. ‘He was murdered right in front of my eyes. They were trying to stop him passing on his knowledge.’

‘Plainly without success,’ said Jennifer. ‘How did you come into possession of the crystal?’

‘I stole his eye,’ said Yoyo. ‘His left one.’

Jennifer thought for a second.

‘Yes, you should baulk at nothing. Let your dead friend take the floor.’

‘The whole thing, erm, seems to be some sort of satellite breakdown,’ said Tom Merrick, the IT Security supervisor, after Vogelaar had evoked Armageddon under West Africa’s streaming sky. ‘At least that’s what it looks like.’

‘What else could it be?’ asked Jericho.

‘Right, that’s a bit complicated. First of all, satellites aren’t things that you can click on and off as you feel like it. You have to know their codes if you want to control them.’ Merrick’s gaze slipped away. ‘Okay, you can find out that kind of thing through espionage. You can knock out a communications satellite with directed data streams, for a few hours or a day, you can also destroy it with radiation, but what we have here is a total breakdown, you understand? We can’t contact either Gaia or Peary Base.’

‘Peary Base?’ echoed Tu. ‘The American moon base, right?’

‘Exactly. For that one all you’d need to do is black the LPCS, the lunar satellites, because of the libration, but—’

‘Libration?’ Yoyo looked blank.

‘The Moon seems to stand still,’ Norrington cut in before Merrick could reply. ‘But that’s an illusion. It does in fact rotate. Within one Earth rotation, it turns once on its own axis, with the effect that we always see the same side. That’s a thing called bound rotation, typical, by the way, of most of the moons in the solar system. However—’

‘Yes, yes!’ Merrick nodded impatiently. ‘You have to explain to them that the angular velocity with which the Moon circles a larger body, in terms of its own rotation—’

‘I think our guests would like you to keep it simpler, Tom. Basically the Moon, because of its rotation behaviour, wobbles slightly. As a result, we get to see more than half of the Moon’s surface, in fact it’s almost sixty per cent. Conversely, the marginal regions disappear at times.’

‘And they disappear from radio range,’ Merrick broke in. ‘Conventional radio requires visual contact, unless you have an atmosphere that reflects radio waves, but there isn’t one on the Moon. And at the moment the North Pole and Peary Base are in the libration shadow, so they can’t be reached directly from the Earth via radio waves. So the Moon has been equipped with ten satellites of its own, the Lunar Positioning and Communication System, LPCS for short, which circle one another within range of the base. We’re in constant contact with at least five of them, so we should be able to contact Peary, regardless of libration.’

‘And what’s to say that somebody hasn’t taken control of precisely those ten satellites?’

‘Nothing. That is to say, everything! You know how many satellites you would have to knock out to cut off the whole of the Moon from the Earth? Gaia doesn’t actually have a libration problem, it’s in visual range, so it can be reached at any time by TDRS satellites, even without LPCS. Except we no longer have a connection with Gaia either.’

‘So someone must be blocking—’

‘—terrestrial satellites too, yes, that’s one hell of a lot of codes, but yes, I think so. It’s just not a lot of use to them in the long term. They could attack TDRS headquarters in White Sands and paralyse all the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites at a stroke, but then we’d just switch to ground stations or civilian stations like Artemis, which are equipped with S-band transponders and pivotable antennae. How would anyone interfere with all of those?’

‘That’s precisely the problem,’ said Edda Hoff. ‘We’re in touch with every available ground station in the world. There’s no contact up there.’

‘After the breakdown of the conference system we immediately informed NASA and Orley Space in Washington,’ said Jennifer. ‘And of course the Mission Control Center in Houston, our own control centres on the Isla de las Estrellas and in Perth. Nothing but radio silence.’

‘And what could be the reason for that?’ Jericho rubbed the tip of his chin. ‘If not interference with the satellites?’

Merrick studied the lines in his right palm.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Are Peary Base and Gaia cut off from one another as well?’

‘Not necessarily.’ Norrington shook his head. ‘There’s a non-satellite laser connection between them.’

‘So if you got through to the base—’

‘Our message could be passed on to Gaia.’

Jennifer leaned forward. ‘Listen, Owen, I won’t deny that until a moment ago I had some doubts about whether the evidence you have points convincingly to a threat to Gaia. You three could have been a gang of hysterical fantasists.’

‘And what’s your opinion now?’ asked Tu.

‘I’m inclined to believe you. According to your file, the bomb has been dormant up there since April of last year. The opening of Gaia was actually planned for 2024, but the Moon crisis thwarted that one. So it would make sense to detonate the bomb now that it’s finished. As soon as we get a warning through to the hotel, someone sabotages our communication, another clue that it is going to happen, but above all that someone’s got their eye on us, during these very seconds. And that’s extremely worrying. On the one hand because it suggests that we have a mole in our ranks, on the other because it means that someone up there will try to get the bomb into Gaia and set it off, if they haven’t done so already.’