Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Do that. We’ll just check how long the connection lasts.’

‘Fine. As soon as it goes, I’ll climb again.’

‘It’ll get more stable the closer you get, anyway.’

Locatelli hesitated. Going lower, fine. Perhaps it would be even better to cut back the speed a bit. Not much, just enough to take it below 1000 kilometres an hour. What he was doing wasn’t even slightly comparable to a flight through the Earth’s atmosphere, where you had to battle with air levels and turbulence, but hours upon hours in aeroplanes had got him used to lengthy landings, so he decelerated and began to drop.

The Ganymede plummeted like a stone towards the ground.

What had he done?

The shuttle settled at an angle. Noise flooded the interior, the tortured wails of over-extended technology.

‘Julian,’ he cried. ‘I’ve fucked up!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m crashing!’

‘What have you done? Tell me what you’ve done!’

Locatelli’s hands fluttered over the controls, uncertain about which fields they should press, which switches they should use.

‘I think I’ve got speed and altitude regulation mixed up.’

‘Okay. But don’t lose your head!’

‘I’m not losing my head!’ yelled Locatelli, about to lose his head.

‘Do the following. Just go—’

The line went dead. Shit, shit, shit! Fingers clawed, he crouched over the console. He didn’t know what to do, but to do nothing would mean certain death, so he had to do something , but what ?

He tried to balance out his crooked angle with a counter-thrust.

The shuttle roared like a giant wounded animal, started reeling violently and tilted to the other side. A moment later it lurched so hard that Locatelli was afraid it would break into a thousand pieces. He looked helplessly in all directions, turned his head instinctively—

Carl Hanna was staring at him.

Hanna, whose fault it all was. Under any other circumstances Locatelli would have got up, smacked him one and given him valuable advice about how to treat your holiday acquaintances, but that was out of the question right now. He saw that the Canadian was starting to tug like mad on his fetters, ignored him and bent over the console again. The shuttle was rapidly losing velocity, and tilting still further. Locatelli decided not to worry about the plunge for the time being, and instead to concentrate on stabilising his position, but the only result of his efforts was that he suddenly had no power over the controls.

‘Warren, you—’

Hanna shouted something.

‘—you’ve gone into automatic! You’ve got to—’

Why didn’t that idiot just keep his trap shut?

‘—you’re out of manual! Warren, damn it to hell! Untie me.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘We’re both going to die!’

Locatelli poked stubbornly around in the main menu. The altitude meter was counting down worryingly quickly, 5.0 – 4.8 – 4.6, they were hurtling towards the lunar ground like a meteor. A few moments before, in his excitement, he must have pressed something, he must have activated some function that had effectively disem-powered him and stripped him of access to any kind of navigation. Now it looked as if he could do whatever he liked, and it would have not the slightest influence on the behaviour of the Ganymede.

‘Warren!’

Who was that this time?

Try and remember, do what you did before. What worked so well under Julian’s instructions. Turn off automatic pilot, switch to manual.

But how? How?

‘Release me, Warren!’

Why wasn’t it working this time? Bloody touchscreen! What kind of a crappy cockpit was it? Nothing but virtual fields, unfamiliar electronic landscapes, cryptic symbols instead of solid rocker switches with sensible inscriptions like HELLO, WARREN, TURN ME THE OTHER WAY AND IT’LL ALL BE FINE.

‘We’re going to die, Warren! That won’t do anybody any good. You can’t want that!’

‘Forget it, asshole.’

‘I won’t hurt you, you hear me? Just set me free!’

The ground, skewed at a forty-five-degree angle, was menacingly gaining presence; the range on his right-hand side stretched its peaks over the shuttle’s flight-path. As it grew closer, Sinus Iridum looked as if it were undergoing a weird and inexplicable transformation. In places the basalt plain seemed to be frozen in a process of decomposition, more mist than solid surface, with dark and mysterious phenomena in it. Little more than one kilometre separated the shuttle from the place where it was bound to crash. A vague blur turned into the line of the magnetic rail, and domes, antennae and scaffolding loomed out of it. Locatelli caught a quick glimpse of a collection of insectoid formations on an incline, and then they too were past, and they went on falling to their doom.

‘Warren, you stubborn idiot!’

The worst thing was, Hanna was right.

‘Fine!’

Cursing, he staggered from his seat, practically weightless, given the insane speed of their descent. Everything around him was rattling, vibrating and roaring. The floor was at such an extreme angle it was hardly possible to stand on it, except that he was floating anyway. Grabbing his gun, he made his way hand over hand towards the Canadian, crawled behind him and tugged at his bonds with his free hand.

Nothing. As if they were welded together.

Good work, Warren. Well done!

He would need both his hands. Such a bloody mess! Where should he put the gun? Wedge it under his arm, and quick! Don’t panic, now. Disentangle the knots, loosen them, untie them carefully. The straps slid down. Hanna stretched his arms, leapt up, grabbed the arm of the pilot’s seat and pulled himself into it. His eye fell on the console.

‘Thought so,’ Locatelli heard him say.

With some effort he heaved himself into the co-pilot’s seat. The Canadian ignored him. He worked with great concentration, gave a series of instructions and the Ganymede righted itself. Below them drifted an endless sea of dust, blurred fingers poked from it, reaching for them, stirred up by something vast and insect-like, creeping slowly across the plain. Locatelli held his breath. In the formless grey, huge, glistening beetles seemed to be moving around, then all of a sudden he felt as if his brain were being pushed out through his ears. Hanna violently braked the shuttle. Swathes of smoke whirled in front of the glass. They thundered along blindly, far too fast! A moment ago he had been ready to smash Hanna to a pulp, now he felt a powerful desire to see him at work, as the master of the situation. Sweat ran down Hanna’s face, the muscles of his jaw protruded. From the rear part of the Ganymede came a great bang that sounded like an explosion, even louder roaring, the nose of the shuttle rose—

Contact with the ground.

In a flash the landing-struts broke away. Locatelli was slung from his seat as if a giant had kicked the Ganymede in the belly. He performed a somersault and slid unimpeded to the rear. All the bones in his body seemed to want to switch places with each other. Jets hissing, the shuttle ploughed through the regolith, bounced, crashed down again, hurtled on, bucked, lurched, but the tail stayed firm. Locatelli reached desperately around for something he could hold onto. His hand closed on a stanchion. Muscles tensed, he drew himself up, lost his balance and was flying forwards when the hurtling wreck collided with something, reared up and scraped its way up a hill. Just as the machine came to rest in an avalanche of debris, he landed heavily between the seats, was carried on by his own momentum and bumped his head.

Everything around him turned red.

Then black.

The brief moment of euphoria at the sound of Locatelli’s voice had made way for greater anxiety. Julian was uninterruptedly trying to get through to the Ganymede, but apart from a hiss nothing issued from the speakers.