Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Not all that much,’ Hanna observed. ‘I was afraid the rubble would reach all the way up.’

‘No, it’s not much,’ Locatelli confirmed sourly. ‘It’s just that they’re bloody enormous. That one there must weigh several tonnes.’

‘Divided by six. Let’s get to work.’

At half past six, Dana called the search parties back to headquarters. Lynn and Sophie had scoured most of the staff accommodation and part of the suites in the thorax, Michio Funaki and Ashwini Anand had crept like cockroaches through the greenhouses, and had turned every scrap of green and every tomato upside down before devoting themselves to the meditation centre and the multi-religious church. The third team, last of all, was able to report that the pool, the health centre and the casino were, as Kokoschka put it, clean, stressing the word like Philip Marlowe after patting down a suspect.

‘And that’s exactly where the problem lies,’ said Dana. ‘In appearance. Have we had a chance to look inside the walls and floors? In the life-support systems?’

Kokoschka waved his detector tellingly. ‘Didn’t even click.’

‘Yes, of course, but we don’t know enough about mini-nukes.’

‘It was your idea to search the hotel,’ Lynn said furiously. ‘So don’t start telling us it was pointless. And besides, Sophie and I did look in the life-support systems, anywhere there might be room for such a thing.’

‘So?’ Dana stared at her with X-ray eyes. ‘How do you know how much room a mini-nuke takes up?’

‘That’s not fair, Dana,’ said Tim quietly.

‘I’m not being unfair in the slightest,’ she replied, without looking at him. ‘I’m concerned with minimising risks, and the search contributed to that. We’ve looked in the important places, I was in the head, even though I’m still of the view that there might be a bomb at some deeper, more central point.’

‘Or not,’ mused Anand. ‘It’s an atom bomb. The explosive force would be huge, so that it might not matter where you put it.’

‘It might not.’ Dana nodded slowly. ‘At any rate what I’ve heard doesn’t put my mind at rest. At least I was able to have a conversation with Peary Base. As I suspected, they’ve got the same problem, they’ve lost contact with the Earth and our shuttles, and they’re also in the libration shadow. After I told the deputy commander a short version of—’

‘What?’ Lynn exploded. ‘You told him what’s going on here?’

‘Calm down. I was—’

‘You told him about the bomb?’ Lynn jumped to her feet. ‘You’re not going to do that, do you hear me? We can’t afford that!’

‘—told the deputy commander—’

‘Not without my authorisation!’

‘—about the satellite failure,’ Dana said, very slightly louder, but with a voice that sounded as if she were sawing through a bone. ‘And told him we couldn’t get through to our guests. That was what we agreed, correct, Miss Orley? After that I wanted to know if he’d received any unusual news from Earth before the satellites failed. But he didn’t know anything.’

‘So you did tell him—’

‘No, I was just putting out feelers. And he didn’t have anything to say. The base is an American facility. If Jennifer Shaw had decided to tell Houston about the bomb in the meantime, she got there too late. At least too late to tell the base crew before the satellites went down. They don’t know anything about our problems over there, but I did take the opportunity to tell them of my concerns for the fate of the Ganymede. Against a background of a possible accident.’

Lynn’s gaze darted around the room and fixed itself on Tim.

‘We can’t run the risk of this getting out.’

‘If the Ganymede doesn’t reply soon, it will get out,’ said Dana. ‘Then we’ll have to ask the base to send a shuttle to the Aristarchus Plateau to take a look.’

‘No way! We mustn’t worry Julian’s guests.’

Oh, Lynn! Disastrous, disastrous. Tim resisted the impulse to rest his hand on her forearm like a nurse.

‘So what would you do?’ he asked quickly.

‘Perhaps—’ She kneaded her fingers, struggled for clarity. ‘First keep looking.’

‘The guests will be back in half an hour,’ said Funaki. ‘They’ll want their drinks.’

‘Let Axel take care of that. No, you, Michio. You’re the face of the bar. The rest of us will have to take our time. Stay calm. We’ll have to plan the next few steps calmly .’

‘I’m calm,’ said Dana blankly.

‘I’ll take another look at the surveillance videos,’ Sophie suggested. ‘From the night Hanna disappeared and the ones from the day after.’

‘What for?’ asked Kokoschka. Only now did Tim notice that the chef was staring steadily at the freckled German girl from his hungry St Bernard’s eyes, as if testing the quality of her cuts, loins, rump and breasts, and that his eyes darted furtively away every time she looked back. Aha, he thought, the cook’s in love.

‘Right.’ Sophie shrugged. ‘Whoever re-edited the recordings would have had to turn up in the control centre, right? I mean, he must have been captured on some camera or other. So if we can reconstruct—’

‘Good idea!’ Lynn cried exuberantly. ‘Very good! Carl and this – this second person. We’ll have to pump them.’

‘Pump them,’ echoed Dana.

‘Have you got a better suggestion?’ Lynn sneered.

‘But Hanna isn’t here.’

‘So? Julian will be here soon, and he’ll bring him with him. Why should we drive ourselves nuts until then? Let’s ask him, and besides’ – her eyes gleamed – ‘nothing can happen to us here as long as we keep Carl in Gaia! He’s hardly going to atomise himself.’

‘Course not,’ Kokoschka addressed his paunch. ‘Suicide bomber. Never heard of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lynn snapped. ‘Are you trying to provoke me?’

‘What?’ The chef recoiled and ran his hand nervously over his bald head. ‘No, I – sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

‘Does Carl Hanna look like an Islamist or something?’

‘No, sorry. Really.’

‘Then stop talking such rubbish!’

‘We – Our nerves are all a bit on edge.’

‘Didn’t you say the Chinese were behind it?’ Anand asked uncertainly.

‘This guy Jericho said that,’ Sophie replied.

‘How many Chinese Islamists are there?’ Funaki pondered.

‘Interesting question.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ Dana raised her hands. ‘Enough. Christians have taken the shortcut to heaven too. Such rubbish! In my view Lynn’s just produced an argument that gives us a bit of time, as long as we can really lay our hands on this ominous second person. I think we should do as you suggested – Anand and Kokoschka will look behind the walls and floors, Sophie will watch the videos, Funaki will go down to the service section, Lynn and I—’

‘Gaia, please come in!’

Dana paused. They stared at each other. The system put through a wireless message. Seven pairs of eyes were filled with hope that the call might have come via satellite. Sophie leapt to her feet and glanced at the display.

‘Callisto, this is Gaia,’ she replied breathlessly.

‘Hungry crowd on the way!’ crowed Nina. ‘Do you see us? If there’s nothing on the table in five minutes, we’re going over to the Chinese.’

‘Fuck,’ whispered Dana. ‘They’re in range.’

Through the panorama window of the abdomen they saw the gleaming, sunlit shuttle in the sky. The Callisto had approached the hotel from behind and was flying in a final, athletic parabola. Every trip ritually ended with a fly-past above Gaia.