Frank Schätzing - Limit

It coincided with Hanna’s escape.

Coincidence? Never in a million years! There was something bigger going on here.

Behind him, Hanna groaned quietly. Locatelli turned his head. After a long search he had finally found a few straps for lashing down cargo, and tied him to the front row of seats. You couldn’t exactly have claimed that he was trussed up like a parcel, but Hanna wouldn’t be able to free himself quickly enough to stop Locatelli shooting him in the leg with his own gun. He studied the murderer’s pale face for a moment, but the Canadian kept his eyes closed.

He turned back to the control panel. After a while he thought he had worked out various things, such as how to regulate the altitude of Ganymede, to make it climb or descend by—

That was it. Of course!

Locatelli was suddenly very excited. The Moon had no atmosphere, so in fact flight altitude couldn’t have anything to do with it, although of course it meant you were eating into your fuel supplies. It didn’t alter the general conditions, a vacuum was a vacuum. But the higher he climbed, the less noticeable the curvature became, until it was entirely irrelevant. As far as he remembered, only the Rupes Toscanelli Plateau stretched north-east of the Schröter Valley, with Snake Hill. If they weren’t cowering under the spurs of rock right now, but had fought their way through to the space station, he had to get through to them!

His fingers darted over the controls. The shuttle had a frightening number of jets, he established, some pointing stiffly downwards, others backwards, others still were on a pivot. He decided to ignore the pivotable ones, and switch thrust entirely to the vertical. He entered a value at random—

Suddenly the air was squeezed from his lungs.

Damn it! Too much, much too much! What sort of stupid bloody idiot was he! Why hadn’t he started with less? The idea of a calm flight was out of the window. The Ganymede shot upwards like mad, rattled, vibrated and bucked as if trying to shake him out of its innards. He quickly reduced the thrust, worked out that not all the jets were firing evenly, hence the vibrations, corrected, regulated, balanced, and the shuttle calmed down, continued climbing, now at a more moderate speed.

Good, Warren. Very good!

‘Locatelli to Orley,’ he shouted. ‘Momoka. Julian. Come in, please.’

All kinds of white noise emerged from the speakers, but nothing that even slightly resembled human articulation. The Ganymede was approaching the thirteen-kilometre mark. After its initial bickering, it allowed itself to be ridden like the most placid of ponies, climbing constantly higher, while Locatelli shouted Julian and Momoka’s names in turn.

Fourteen kilometres.

The landscape stretched below him. Again there was rattling and trembling, as the irritable automatic controls registered deviations from the longitudinal bearings and roughly compensated for them.

‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka! Oleg, Evelyn. Can anybody hear me? Come in! Locatelli to—’

14.6 – 14.7 – 14.8

He gradually started to feel queasy, even though the rational part of his brain quickly reassured him that he could theoretically fly into outer space. All just a matter of fuel.

‘Momoka! Julian!’

15.4 – 15.5 – 15.6

Nothing.

‘Warren Locatelli to Orley. Come in please.’

Hiss. Crackle.

‘Locatelli to Orley. Julian! Momoka!’

‘Warren!’

‘Warren! Warren! I’ve got Warren on the line!’

Momoka started to do a kind of St Vitus’ dance around the charred rover, whose bed they had started to load with batteries. They paused, all listening. His voice rang out with promising volume in their helmets, clear and distinct, as if he were standing right next to them.

‘Warren, darling, sweetie!’ cried Momoka. ‘Where are you? Sweetheart, oh my sweetheart! Are you okay?’

‘All fine. You?’

‘A few of us are missing, we don’t know exactly what happened. Peter, Mimi, Marc—’

‘Dead,’ said Locatelli.

Not that any confirmation was required. But the word fell like a blade and guillotined the unregenerate little optimist who had, until that moment, been tirelessly coming out with all kinds of murmured ifs and could-bes. There was a moment of hurt silence.

‘Where are you now?’ asked Julian, audibly chastened.

‘In the shuttle. Carl, the bastard, slung Peter into the gorge and then blew up Mimi and Marc, and then he hijacked the shuttle, but I managed to get on board.’

‘And where’s Carl?’

‘He’s unconscious. I knocked him out and tied him to the seats.’

‘You’re a hero,’ cried Momoka, delighted. ‘You know that? You’re a goddamn hero!’

‘Of course, what else? I’m a hero in a spaceship that’s going incredibly fast, with no idea of how to fly the stupid thing. That is, I’m getting the hang of it now. Turning round, getting down and landing, not so sure about.’

‘Can you get through to the hotel?’ asked Julian.

‘Don’t think so. Too far away, too many mountains. I’m over fifteen kilometres up, to be quite honest I’m starting to feel something like vertigo. And I don’t know how much gas I’ve got left.’

‘Fine, no problem. I’ll help. Just stay up there for the time being, because of the radio connection.’

‘The LPCS has failed, right?’

‘Sabotage, if you ask me. Did Carl actually say anything to you?’

‘I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything.’

‘Oh, my hero!’

‘Do you know your position?’

‘Fifty degrees west, forty-six degrees north. On the right there’s a crater plateau, with mountains attached to it.’

‘Can you give me some kind of name?’

‘Wait a second: Montes Jura.’

‘Very good. Listen, Warren, you’ve got to—’

Locatelli listened carefully to Julian’s instructions. As he did so, he found himself suspecting that his host didn’t know what needed to be done down to the last detail either, but definitely had more of a notion about how to fly a Hornet shuttle than he did himself. For example, he knew how to take a bend. Locatelli would have adjusted the jets individually, and plunged to his death as a result. Whereas in fact it was relatively simple, if you bore in mind simple things like turning off the automatic course programming and switched to manual.

‘Keep to the right, fly east, towards the Montes Jura, and then make a big hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and head south again.’

‘I’m with you.’

‘Not even nearly. Don’t make any tight turns, okay? Make sure they’re wide. You’re going at 1200 kilometres an hour!’

Locatelli did as he was told. Perhaps he was an excessively obedient pupil, because the bend turned into an extended sightseeing tour of the landscape. When he had turned the Ganymede, he found himself to the west of forty degrees longitude, with the jagged agglomeration of the Jurassic mountains below him, arranged in a circle around a vast bay. The bay was called Sinus Iridum and adjoined the Mare Ibrium, and somehow the name struck him as familiar. Then he remembered. Sinus Iridum was the apple of discord that sparked the Moon crisis in 2024. From the windows of the cockpit he had a breathtaking view. Hardly anywhere else was the illusion of land and sea so perfect, all that was missing was a blue glow on the velvet basalt base of the Mare Ibrium. It looked particularly velvety here, most of all where it abutted the south-western foothills of the mountains.

‘Where are you?’ asked Julian.

‘Southern half of Sinus Iridum. There’s a spit of land ahead of me. Cape Hera-clides. Shall I go lower? Then I won’t have such a long journey down later on.’