Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said roughly. ‘You open the hatch, I drive the buggy out and—’

‘No, you can take a break,’ Hanna said equably. ‘I’ll drive it out myself.’

‘Why? Do you think I’ll try and get away?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think.’

And you’re right, you fucker, thought Locatelli. He had flirted with the idea. Now he had conflicted feelings. He watched Hanna as he ran up the slope, climbed the nose of the Ganymede and disappeared from view. Suddenly he was aware that the hitman didn’t need him any more. Feeling uneasy, he took a step back, as the hatch swung open and started to lower. He could see the inside of the freight space. A ramp emerged from the tipping hatch, and there was Hanna, already standing next to the buggy. He sat down in the driver’s seat, checked the controls and started. The ramp came down towards the ground, and Locatelli spotted that its rim wasn’t going to make contact. The furrow that the shuttle had made had piled the debris up too far. It stopped a good metre above the regolith. For a moment the little vehicle looked like an animal about to spring, then it came to a standstill just beyond the edge of the ramp.

Locatelli hesitated. He didn’t really know what to hope for, or what to fear. For a moment he had been worried that Hanna might simply drive on and leave him here, in the shadow of a broken-down spaceship that could no longer even be flooded with breathable air. Now, when he saw the Canadian climbing out, the source of his unease shifted to the possibility that the Canadian would proceed to make short work of him before driving off. Nervously, he took a step towards the ramp.

‘What’s up?’ asked Hanna. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘Coming?’ echoed Locatelli.

‘You can still be useful to me.’

Useful. Aha.

‘And for how long,’ Locatelli asked, ‘will I be useful?’

‘Until we’ve reached the American extraction station.’ Hanna pointed outside at the dusty plain. ‘When you were unconscious, I did a rough calculation of our position. What I see from here tells me that we’re stranded precisely at the tip of Cape Heraclides. That means that the station is to the north-east, in the middle of the basalt lake, where the Sinus Iridum and the Mare Imbrium meet. About a hundred kilometres from here.’

‘And why do you want to go there?’

‘The station’s automated,’ said Hanna. ‘But inspectors are always going there. A terminal was set up for them. Pressurised. A proper little base, where you could live for several months. We’ll have to rely on our own sense of direction to get there, since all the satellites are out.’

‘Turn them back on, then.’

‘What makes you think I can do that?’

‘What makes you think I’ve got shit for brains?’ barked Locatelli. ‘They all failed when you set off on your crazy little journey. Are you trying to tell me that was coincidence?’

Hanna said nothing for a few moments.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But it’s not in my power to correct that. We had to interrupt communication after I’d been busted, and now stop bugging me, okay? Help me to navigate and I’ll leave you at the extraction station. If you want to live—’

Hanna went on talking, but Locatelli wasn’t listening. He stared past the ramp. Something to the side of the Ganymede had attracted his attention.

‘—rid of me,’ Hanna was saying. ‘You’ve just got to—’

Why was dust swirling up where the body of the shuttle was in the regolith? Little clouds puffing up along its flank, like an approaching steam train. What was happening? The outlines of the spaceship blurred, its steel fuselage quivered. The edge of the ramp barely rose above the debris, but more dust was pouring out. The ground was trembling too.

‘—then we’ll—’

‘The shuttle’s slipping!’ yelled Locatelli.

Hanna jerked around. The Ganymede reared up, no longer stabilised by the boulders that they had blown away. A moment later it started moving again and slipped backwards, spraying up sand and gravel. Locatelli saw Hanna dash up and jump onto the ramp that was now hurtling towards them, which swept the buggy up and away; he tried to leap to safety, stumbled and fell. He was back on his feet in a moment, pushed himself away, dived to the side—

Another half-metre and he would have done it.

The moment the rim cut into his belly, he saw with crystal clarity the image of Carl Hanna who, a universe further off, had done the right thing and sought refuge in altitude. Then a searing pain erased all other thoughts. He instinctively gripped the steel, a torero impaled on the bull’s horns, shaken to the core by the downhill race of the Ganymede, which dropped one last time, pitched and slung him away in a high arc. He landed on his back several metres away, became aware that the shuttle had stopped sliding just as suddenly as it had started, wedged on a ledge of rock, saw the buggy somersaulting and Hanna leaping along the loading bed and jumping into the rubble.

He pressed both hands to his belly, as hard as he could.

Hanna came running across and bent over him. Locatelli tried to say something, but all that came out was groaning and retching. He didn’t need to look down at himself – which he couldn’t have done anyway – to know that his suit had a tiny tear in it. If he was still alive, it was only because bio-suits didn’t immediately burst like balloons, losing all their air at once.

Perhaps if he kept his hands pressed against the wound—

‘You’re bleeding,’ said Hanna.

‘Sh-shit,’ he managed to gasp. ‘Can you—?’

‘Idiot!’ How strange. The Canadian seemed to be angry. ‘What were you doing? I spared you, for God’s sake! I could have brought you to safety!’

‘I’m – I’m s—’

What? Sorry? Was he apologising to Hanna for allowing himself to be rammed in the body by the Ganymede? Whose fault was that, then, damn it? But right now he felt terribly cold, and he understood that apart from Hanna he had no one now.

‘Please – don’t – let – me—’

‘You’re going to die,’ Hanna said soberly.

‘N-no.’

‘There’s nothing to be done, Warren. The vacuum will suck you empty as soon as you take your hands away.’

Locatelli’s lips moved. Connect me to something, he wanted to say, repair the suit, but all that came out was gurgles and coughing.

‘Every second that we drag things out, you will suffer.’

Suffer? He shook his head weakly. Stupid idea, he thought as he did so. No one can see you anyway. Each saw himself reflected in the helmet of the other. Searing hooks tore at his guts. He groaned.

‘Warren?’ Hanna’s hands approached his helmet. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Shhhh—’

‘Look at the stars. Look at the starry sky.’

‘Carl—’ he whispered. The pain was almost unbearable.

‘I’m with you. Look at the stars.’

The stars. They circled above Locatelli, sending out messages that he didn’t understand. Not yet. Oh, Christ, he thought, as Hanna busied himself with his helmet, who ever died with such an image before his eyes? How fantastic, in fact.

‘Sh – it,’ he gasped once more, still his favourite word.

His helmet was taken off.

However many heads Hydra had, at that moment they all had cause for the greatest concern.

And there had been problems on the horizon. The disaster of 2024 cast its long shadow, since Vic Thorn, the bacillus that they had been cultivating at such expense, had vanished into the expanses of interstellar space. More than a year of dread, month by month, during which the package frayed her nerves, as no one was able to say whether it would be able to survive that long in the lonely bleakness of the crater. Admittedly mini-nukes were almost impossible to find, as Dana Lawrence knew very well, although of course she hadn’t told the assiduous afternoon search party. The little nuclear weapons got their energy from uranium-235. They didn’t give off gamma rays like their beloved cousins, but instead produced alpha waves; even a sheet of paper was enough to dupe detectors. Nonetheless, in a stored state they gave off thermal energy that had to be dispersed somewhere or other, a process performed on Earth by the atmosphere. On the Moon, on the other hand, there were no busily circulating molecules to pick up the little packets of heat and carry them off. To counteract the overheating of an atom bomb in an airless space, you needed big radiators, which the little bomb did not possess, because it was designed to be hidden for three months after the landing of Thorn, who would have been just around the corner from it on the moon base. If everything had gone to plan, Thorn would have positioned the bomb, set the timer, headed for Earth on the pretext of sudden illness, and the rest would have been available to read in the chronicles of noteworthy disasters.