Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘What?’ Locatelli exploded. ‘Are you off your head?’

‘Can you rule it out?’

‘I’m not the damned government! Of course I can—’

‘But you’re a beneficiary. You think I’m a bastard. But you only looked on while I did something that everybody does, and from which you profit every day without a thought. The paradigm shift in energy supply, aneutronic, clean fusion, that sounds good, really good, and the improved yield of your solar cells has revolutionised the market in solar panels. Congratulations. But when has anyone ever risen to the top without others falling? Sometimes you need a bit of help, and we’re the ones who provide it.’

Locatelli looked into Hanna’s eyes for the twitch that betrays the presence of lunacy, – tics, traumas and inner demons – but there was nothing but cold, dark calm.

‘And what does the CIA want from us?’ he asked.

‘The CIA? Nothing, as far as I know. I’m no longer part of the family. Until seven years ago I was paid by the State, but one day you realise that you can get the same job from the same people for three times the pay. All you have to do is go independent on the free market, and call your boss not Mr President, but Mr CEO. Of course you’ve always known that you were actually working for the Vatican, the Mafia, the banks, the energy cartels, the arms producers, the environmental lobby, the Rockefellers, Warren Buffets, Zheng Pang-Wangs and Julian Orleys of this world, so from now on you’re just working directly for them. It may of course happen that you go on representing the interests of some government or other. You just have to extend the concept of government appropriately: to groups like Orley Enterprises, which have accrued so much power that they are the government. The world is governed by companies and cartels, crossing all national boundaries. The overlaps with elected parliamentary governments are anywhere between random and complete. You never really know exactly who you’re working for, so you stop asking, because it doesn’t make any difference anyway.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Locatelli’s eyes threatened to pop from his head. ‘You don’t even know who you’re doing this for?’

‘I couldn’t tell you unequivocally, at any rate.’

‘But you’ve killed three people!’ Locatelli yelled. ‘You stupid arsehole, with your secret-agent attitude, you don’t do something like that just because it’s a job !’

Hanna opened his mouth, shut it again and ran his hand over his eyes as if to wipe away something ugly that he’d just seen.

‘Okay, it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have told you all that, I should be cleverer! It always ends up exactly the same, with somebody saying arsehole. Not that I’m insulted, it’s just all that wasted time. Annihilated capital.’

He got to his feet, grew to menacing, primeval height, two metres of muscle encased in steel-reinforced synthetic fibre, crowned by the cold intelligence of an analyst who has just lost his patience. Locatelli feverishly wondered how this ridiculous conversation could be held in check.

‘There was no need to kill Mimi and Marc,’ he said hastily. ‘You did that out of pure pleasure at least.’

Hanna shook his head thoughtfully.

‘You don’t understand, Warren. You know people like me from the movies, and you think we’re all psychopaths. But killing isn’t a pleasure or a burden. It’s an act of depersonalisation. You can’t see a person and a goal at the same time. Back in the Schröter Valley, those three were too close, even Mimi and Marc. Marc, for example, would have been able to climb back along the cantilever and follow me in the second rover, not to mention Peter. I couldn’t take any kind of risk.’

‘In that case why didn’t you just kill all of—’

‘Because I thought the rest of you were up on Snake Hill, and therefore too far away to be dangerous to me. Whether you believe me or not, Warren, I’m trying to spare lives.’

‘How comforting,’ Locatelli murmured.

‘But I hadn’t reckoned with you. Why were you suddenly there?’

‘I’d gone back.’

‘Why? You didn’t want to see the lovely view?’

‘Forgot my camera.’ His voice sounded awkward to his own ears, embarrassed and hurt. Hanna smiled sympathetically.

‘The most trivial things can change the course of your life,’ he said. ‘That’s how things are.’

Locatelli pursed his lips, stared at the tips of his boots and fought down an attack of hysterical laughter. There he sat, worrying about whether his confession of forgetfulness would be posthumously weighed against his actions, reducing his heroic status. Would it? At least there would be some kind of obituary! A stirring speech. A toast, a bit of music: Oh Danny Boy —

He looked up.

‘Why am I still alive, Carl? Aren’t you in a hurry? What’s all this game-playing about?’

Hanna looked at him from dark, unfathomable eyes.

‘I’m not playing games, Warren. I’m not treacherous enough for that. You were unconscious for over an hour. While you were out, I analysed our situation. Doesn’t look so great.’

‘Mine certainly doesn’t.’

‘Nor mine. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to get the thing off the ground at the last minute. We should really have been able to avoid the crash-landing with vertical counter-thrust. But the jets failed above the ground, when we were flying through those clouds of dust, perhaps they got blocked. Unfortunately, when we came down it knocked away our ground struts, so the Ganymede is lying on its belly, dug a fair way into the ground. I probably don’t need to tell you what that means.’

Locatelli threw his head back and closed his eyes.

‘We can’t get out,’ he said. ‘The airlock shaft won’t extend.’

‘A bit of a design flaw, if you ask my opinion. Installing the only portal on the underside.’

‘No emergency exit?’

‘Oh, there is: the freight-room in the tail. It can be vacuumed out and flooded with air, so in principle it’s an airlock too. The rear hatch can be lowered and extended into a ramp – but as I said, the Ganymede has ploughed several kilometres through the regolith, before clattering its way into a rock face over the last few metres. There are boulders lying around all over the place, as far as the eye can see. I think some of them are blocking the hatch. It won’t open more than half a metre.’

Locatelli thought about it. It was funny, in fact. Really funny.

‘Why are you surprised?’ he laughed hoarsely. ‘You’re in jail, Carl. Right where you belong.’

‘But so are you.’

‘So? Does it make any kind of difference whether you finish me off here or out there?’

‘Warren—’

‘It doesn’t matter. It couldn’t matter less! Welcome to prison.’

‘If I’d wanted to finish you off, you would never have come round. You understand? I don’t plan to finish you off.’

Locatelli hesitated. His laughter died away.

‘You really mean that?’

‘At the moment you aren’t any sort of threat to me. You’re not going to dupe me again like you did in the airlock. So you have the choice of being obstructive or cooperating.’

‘And what,’ Locatelli said slowly, ‘would my outlook be like if I chose to cooperate?’

‘Your temporary survival.’

‘But temporary isn’t enough.’

‘All I can offer. Or let’s say, if you play along, at least you won’t face any danger from me. I can promise you that much.’

Locatelli fell silent for a second.

‘Fine, then. I’m listening.’

Over the past half-hour Amber had given up all hope of ever reaching the production plant. Seen from a high altitude, the Aristarchus Plateau looked like a softly undulating picture-book landscape for lunar drivers, particularly along the Schröter Valley, where the terrain appeared to be entirely smooth, almost as if planed. But at ground level you got an idea of the day-to-day life of an ant. Everything grew into an obstacle. As effortlessly as the rovers were able to drive over smaller bumps and boulders in their path, thanks to their flexible axles, they proved more susceptible to the tiny craters, potholes and cracks that opened up in front of them, forcing them to navigate from one hindrance to the next at between twenty and thirty kilometres an hour. It was only once they were past a collection of bigger craters on the way towards the Oceanus Procellarum that the ground evened out and their progress became faster.