Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Sophie.’ Kokoschka’s finger twitched; an eyeless, sniffing creature, it swung around and rested on Dana. ‘ She’s the one. Not Lynn. It’s her!’

‘You’ve been spending too much time at the oven.’ Dana stepped back. ‘Your brain’s overcooked, you great idiot.’

‘No.’ Kokoschka’s massive form started moving, a Frankenstein’s monster taking its first steps. ‘She paralysed the communications. She wants to blow us all up! She’s the one! Dana Lawrence! ’

‘You’re mad!’

‘Oh, really?’ Donoghue’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I think we can find that one out pretty quickly.’ He picked up the oxygen cartridge and approached her from the other side. ‘I remember this great joke where—’

Dana reached into her hip pocket, drew a gun and pointed it at Donoghue’s head.

‘Here comes the punchline,’ she said, and squeezed the trigger.

Donoghue stopped dead. Brain matter spilled from the hole in his forehead, a trickle of blood ran between his eyebrows and along the bridge of his nose. The candle slipped from his hands. Aileen’s mouth gaped, and an unearthly wail issued from it. Dana was just swinging the gun around, when the doors of E2 opened and Ashwini Anand stepped out, impelled into the lion’s den by her fear of being late. The bullet struck the Indian woman before she had a chance to grasp the situation. She slumped to the ground, blocking the lift door, but her unexpected arrival had lost Dana valuable seconds, which Kokoschka exploited to go on the attack. She took aim at him and at the same moment she was attacked by Aileen, who leapt at her, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back. Aileen was still uninterruptedly wailing, a ghostly funeral lament. Dana reached behind her, trying to shake Aileen off and Kokoschka grabbed her wrist and she managed to knee him in the testicles, before firing off two shots. The chef bent double, but he managed to knock the gun from Dana’s fingers. She struck him in the throat with the edge of her hand, and shook the Fury from her back with a roll of her shoulders. Almost gracefully, Aileen sailed against her husband, who was still standing, and dragged him down with her. Kokoschka was crawling along the floor on all fours. Dana kicked him in the chest, just as she heard a metallic hiss that didn’t bode well.

The bulkheads were closing.

She stared at the holes in the wall, where the two stray bullets had struck.

The tanks! They must have hit one of the hidden tanks. Compressed oxygen was bursting out, raising the partial pressure and causing the sensors to close off access to the levels above and below. It wasn’t impossible that the external cooling pipe had been hit, releasing toxic, inflammable ammonia.

She was in a bomb.

She had to get out of here!

The invisible gas settled on the wildly flailing Aileen, on Chuck’s corpse, streamed into the open lift, whose doors were blocked by Anand’s dead body. Kokoschka’s eyes widened. Gurgling, he got to his feet and stretched out both arms towards Dana. She paid him no attention and ran off. The doors were closing at worrying speed. With one bound she reached the entrance to the suites, jumped and just managed to get past the bulkhead from Gaia’s neck, somersaulted down the stairs and landed on her back.

Kokoschka came after her. Properly trained, he knew the potentially disastrous effect of an uncontrolled release of oxygen. Desperate to get out in time, he followed Dana to the bulkhead, but didn’t get all the way through. He was trapped.

‘No, no, no, no, no…’ he whimpered.

Now he could hear the faint hiss of the escaping oxygen. Terrified, he tried to brace himself against the approaching metal plate. His breath was forced out of him, his organs crushed. He heard one of his lower ribs breaking, saw Aileen kneeling over Chuck’s corpse and burying her face in the crook of his neck. A metallic taste spread through his mouth, and his eyes bulged. He tried to shout, but all he managed was a dying croak.

‘Chuck,’ Aileen whimpered.

There was a not especially loud puffing sound as the oxygen went up. Two glowing spears of fire suddenly thrust from the wall where the bullets had hit, striking Aileen, Chuck’s corpse and Ashwini Anand’s bent body, the walls and the floor. The flames quickly swept along the lift doors, forced their way into the open cabin of the staff lift, like living creatures, fire spirits in orgiastic exuberance. A moment later half of the mezzanine was alight. Kokoschka had never seen a fire raging like that. People said that fires spread more slowly in reduced gravity, but this—

He spewed a stream of blood. The bulkhead pressed relentlessly against his tortured body, and as if the fire had only just noticed him, it reared up to new heights and seemed to pause uncertainly for a moment.

Then it leapt at him hungrily.

Miranda Winter had, with Sushma Nair, set off for the lower floors, once it could no longer be ignored that there were noisy arguments going on down there. On the stairs from Selene to Chang’e, they heard two muffled bangs in quick succession, which anyone who had ever been to the movies would have recognised as pistol shots from a silenced weapon, followed by Aileen’s bloodcurdling howl, then some bell-like chimes, as if a hammer were being struck against metal. Sushma’s expression turned to one of naked fear; Winter, however, was made of sterner stuff, so she beckoned Sushma to wait and approached the passageway through the neck.

What the—?

‘The bulkhead is closing,’ she cried. ‘Hey, they’re locking us in!’

Baffled, she stepped closer to get a glimpse through the crack of what lay below.

A figure of flame came flying at her. The demon hissed and roared at her, reached for her with sparks flying from its finger, singed her eyelids, brows and hair. She stumbled, fell and pushed herself up as she tried to get away from the raging flames.

‘Oh, shit!’ she cried. ‘Get out, Sushma, get out!’

The demon tumbled and licked its way around, multiplied, giving birth to new, twitching creatures that darted around gleefully setting ablaze anything that stood in their way. With uncanny speed they covered the glass façade, found little of interest there and concentrated their campaign on the floor, the pillars and the furniture. Miranda leapt to her feet, hurried up the stairs, driving the distraught Sushma ahead of her with a series of loud shrieks. The bulkheads to Selene were closing right above them. A wall of heat was surging at them from behind. Sushma stumbled. Miranda slapped her on the backside, and Sushma pushed her way past the bulkhead to the next floor up.

Close! Christ, that was close!

Like a gymnast, she grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and pulled herself up on it. For a moment she was afraid her ankle would get stuck in the lock, but then, by a hair, she got into Selene, and the bulkhead closed with a dull thud and saved them from the wave of fire.

‘The others,’ she panted. ‘God alive! The others!’

Dana was lying on her back, Kokoschka’s legs pedalling wildly above her, hammering the steps of the spiral staircase. The roar of the fire reached her from the neck, followed by the flames themselves, greedily creeping up Kokoschka’s jacket and trousers. They looked as if they were feeling, searching for something. They flowed in waves over the ceiling, the structure and its coverings in its quest for food.

Dana leapt to her feet.

She had to dislodge Kokoschka’s body so that the bulkhead could close. Oxygen fires were uncontrollable, hotter and more destructive than any conventional kind. Even though the gas as such didn’t burn, it fatally encouraged the destruction of all kinds of material, and it was heavier than air. The blaze would spill like lava from Gaia’s throat and engulf the entire suite section. One leap and she was at the manual control panel, crouched down to get as far as she could from the heat, and activated the mechanism that operated the bulkhead. It opened, and Kokoschka was free. He dashed down the steps and leapt onto the gallery, kicking instinctively around. Tentacles of flame shot from the gap, as if to drag back the prey that had just been snatched from them. But the bulkhead closed on them, cutting off the blaze and isolating Gaia’s neck from its shoulders.