Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Listening to Vogelaar,’ Norrington said, ‘you’d see the Chinese everywhere.’

‘Not impossible.’ She paused. ‘But Julian already suspected someone before the connection was severed. A guest. In fact the guest, the last to join the group. The perpetrator might be known to us.’

‘Carl Hanna,’ said Norrington.

‘Carl Hanna.’ Jennifer nodded. ‘So please be so kind as to get hold of his papers for me. Screen the guy, I want to know what he had for breakfast! Edda, put me through to NASA and issue orders to the OSS. Our people or theirs need to send a shuttle to Gaia.’

Hoff hesitated. ‘If the OSS has capacity at the moment.’

‘I don’t care whether they have capacity. I just care that they do it. And straight away .’

The rover Julian had mentioned was parked in the dugout, but the second was stranded on the runway, scorched as if it had got in the way of a shuttle jet. All that remained of the third one, however, was a pile of junk. Debris lay scattered all around the place, so Momoka immediately set off in search of Locatelli’s remains. She scoured the area in grim silence. After that it was agreed that Locatelli wasn’t here, and nor was any part of him.

They all knew what that meant. Locatelli must have managed to get on board the shuttle.

They listlessly trawled through the hangars. Clearly the Schröter spaceport was still in the finishing stages. Everything suggested that airlocks and pressurised habitats were planned, so that people would be able to survive here for a while, but nowhere was there a sign of a life-support system. A cold room, for the preparation of foodstuffs, lay abandoned. The section of the hangar in which the moonmobile was parked was identified by inscriptions stating that grasshoppers should have been stored there, but there was no sign of one far or wide.

‘Well,’ Evelyn observed caustically, after glances into steel containers that should have contained spacesuits revealed nothing but a yawning void, ‘theoretically, at least, we’re in safety. The whole thing should just have happened four weeks later.’

‘Is the stupid moonmobile really all we’ve got?’ groaned Momoka.

‘No, we’ve got more than that,’ said Julian’s voice. He was walking through the next room with Amber and Rogachev. ‘You should come over here.’

‘Nothing that flies,’ he went on, ‘but a few things that drive. That burnt rover out there hasn’t got any prettier, but it does work. So along with the one in the hangar we’ve got two. And look what Amber has found: charged replacement batteries for both vehicles, and in the boot of the undamaged rover enough extra oxygen for two people.’

‘There are five of us,’ said Momoka. ‘Can we connect the tanks to our suits in alternation?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine. The supplies wouldn’t get you to Gaia, and the rovers would be worthless in the Alps. But whatever happens, our supplies will be enough to take us to the mining station.’

‘And does anyone know the way?’

Amber waved a stack of slides around. ‘These guys do.’

‘What, maps ?’

‘They were in the rover.’

‘Oh, great!’ Momoka snorted. ‘Like Vasco da Gama! What sort of crap technology is that, when you can’t even program in your journey?’

‘The technology of a civilisation that increasingly confuses its achievements with magic,’ Rogachev coolly. ‘Or might it have escaped you that the satellite communication has gone down? No guidance system without LPCS.’

‘It hasn’t escaped me,’ said Momoka sulkily. ‘And incidentally, I’ve got a constructive remark as well.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘We can’t really make ourselves comfortable in this mining station, can we? I think we’ve got to make contact with the hotel, and that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment because of the satellite strike. So how are we going to get to the hotel under our own power?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Are there any flying machines in the mining station?’

‘Maybe some grasshoppers.’

‘Yeah, those’ll get you around the Moon just fine, but at a snail’s pace. Except, if I remember correctly, the helium tanks are taken to the Pole by magnetic rail. Right? That means there’s a station there, and a train goes from there to Peary Base. And from Peary Base—’

Julian said nothing.

Of course, he thought. That might work. How obvious! Hard to believe, but just for a change Momoka really had come up with something constructive.

Locatelli stared at the control displays.

He had worked out by now that Hanna was taking his bearings from the holographic map, a kind of substitute LPCS. The outside cameras synched a real-time image of the visible area of the landscape with a 3D model in the computer into which you’d programmed your destination and route. That meant you could hold a steady course, practically on autopilot, because the system continually corrected itself, although that called for a high altitude. Locatelli guessed that Hanna had programmed in a destination that the controls were unable to tell him anything about. He would have bet that the Canadian was flying back to the hotel, but they were too far west for that. To get to Gaia he would have had to take a northeasterly course, and instead it looked as if he was stubbornly heading due north at fifty degrees longitude.

Was Hanna trying to get to the Pole?

Questions accumulated. Why did Hanna not use LPCS? How did you land a thing like that? How did you slow down? They were hurtling along at twelve hundred kilometres an hour, ten kilometres up, extremely worrying. How long would their fuel hold out if the jets had to constantly generate thrust in order to keep Ganymede at this altitude and accelerate at the same time?

He picked up his helmet and tried to make contact with Momoka via his suit connection. When he received no answer, he tried to get through to Julian and switched to conference reception. Nothing but atmospheric hiss. Perhaps the suit systems didn’t work at such distances. After all, they had been flying northwards for half an hour. Glancing at the map, he scanned the distances and reached the conclusion that there must by now be over five hundred kilometres between the shuttle and the Aristarchus Plateau. On the right, a considerable way off, a crater stood out in the middle of a plateau: Mairan, the map told him. Another, Louville, appeared over the edge of the horizon to the north. It was time to get to know the cockpit. It must at least be possible to contact the hotel from the Ganymede.

His eye fell on a diagram above the windscreen, which he hadn’t noticed until then. A simple set of instructions, but enough to get him to the main menu, and suddenly everything was much easier than he’d thought. Admittedly he still didn’t know how to fly the thing, but at least he knew how to work the radio. His disappointment was all the greater, then, when he still heard nothing but silence. At first he thought the radio mustn’t be working, but then at last he worked out that the satellites were out of operation.

So that was why Hanna had switched to map navigation.

At the same moment he understood why he couldn’t get through to anybody on conventional channels. Traditional radio meant that the partners had to be within visible range of each other, so that there was nothing between the transmitter and the receiver to absorb the radio waves, and in the case of the Moon the strong curvature quickly absorbed all contact. That was why his connection with Momoka and the others had been severed earlier on as well, because they had been on the other side of Snake Hill when the chase was taking place. Which was how he now knew the exact time of the satellite failure.