Frank Schätzing - Limit

For over three-quarters of an hour, ferrostatic tension had been building up inside the cabin. Now that the tolerable maximum had been exceeded, it exploded with such destructive force that one of the side casings split off with a deafening noise, smashed the shaft wall into pieces and spread out like shrapnel into the neighbouring shaft, making the staff elevator come to a jolting standstill.

It stopped so abruptly that its passengers were torn off their feet, shot up weight-lessly, banged their heads together and tumbled down wildly. In the next moment, something crashed down onto the roof, making the cabin shake heftily.

‘What was that?’ Sushma sat up and looked around, her eyes wide. ‘What happened?’

‘We’re stuck!’

‘Mukesh?’ Panic rippled through her voice. ‘I want to get out. I want to get out immediately .’

‘Calm down, my love, I’m sure everything is—’

‘I want to get out. I want to get out! ’

He took her arm and spoke to her insistently, quickly and under his breath. One after another, they clambered to their feet, their faces pale and anxious.

‘Did you hear that crash?’ Hsu stared up at the roof of the cabin.

‘But we were already past it,’ Karla said to herself, as if wanting to make the obvious impossible. ‘We were already below the gallery.’

‘Something stopped us.’ Eva glanced at the controls. The lights had gone out. She pressed the button for the intercom system. ‘Hello? Can anyone hear us?’

No answer.

‘What a mess,’ cursed Hsu.

‘I want to get out,’ pleaded Sushma. ‘Please, I want—’

‘Don’t start!’ Hsu barked at her. ‘You were the one that talked us into getting in this thing. It’s because of you that we’re stuck.’

‘You didn’t have to come too!’ Mukesh replied furiously. ‘Leave her be.’

‘Oh, shut it, Mukesh.’

‘Hey!’ Eva interrupted. ‘Don’t argue, we—’

Something made a crunching noise above them. A hollow, grinding noise joined it, followed by deathly silence.

The cabin jolted.

Then it fell.

‘ You did what? ’

Lynn stared at the monitor and Funaki’s baffled face.

‘They wanted to get in at all costs, Miss Orley,’ the Japanese man groaned. He gazed downwards. His head jerked forwards and backwards in quick succession, gestures of submission. ‘What was I supposed to do? I’m not an army general – people have their own free will.’

‘But it didn’t work! And we can’t make contact with them any more.’

‘Did they – get stuck?’

Lynn glanced at the controls. They had seen the cabin stop suddenly under the gallery, but after that the icon had disappeared.

No one said a word. Walo Ögi was pacing through the room, while Heidrun and Tim stared at the controls as if they could conjure up the icon again just by gazing at it.

There was a state of emergency in Lynn’s mind.

The drugs had unleashed their narcotic effect while the acute drama lashed away at her, pushing her beyond her limits. She felt confused, drunk almost, but at the same time acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings, a strange, unsettling clarity. There was no before and after, no more primary and secondary perception. Everything bombarded her at once, while less and less was making its way out. Different levels of reality layered on top of one another, broke apart, forced their way back together again, splintered, and created surreal backing scenery for the performance of incomprehensible plays. The blood rushed in her ears. For the hundredth, thousandth, zillionth time, she asked herself how on earth she could have let herself in for this, building space stations and moon hotels, instead of finally standing up to Julian and making it clear to him that she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t a superhuman, wasn’t even a healthy human for that matter. She should have told him that the task would destroy her, that you may well need a lunatic to create something brilliant and crazy, but certainly not to maintain it or even promote it. Because that, precisely that , was a task for the healthy ones, the mentally clear and stable, those who flirted with lunacy, flirted with it without a care in the world, not having the slightest idea what it really felt like.

How long would she be able to keep going?

Her head was ringing. She closed her eyes, pressing the tips of her fingers against her temples. She had to stay upright. She couldn’t allow the dam holding the flood of blackness to break. She was the only one that knew the hotel like the back of her hand. She had built it.

It was all down to her.

Filled with fear, she opened her eyes.

The symbol was back.

‘Help! Help! Can anyone hear us?’

Eva hammered furiously on the intercom button, shouting and shouting, while Sushma threw herself against the closed internal doors and tried to force them apart with her bare hands. Mukesh pulled her back by her shoulders and held her close to him.

‘I want to get out of here,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’

The elevator had only dropped a metre, but the blood had rushed from all five faces and collected in their feet. As white as chalk, they looked at one another, like a group of ghosts suddenly realising they have already been dead for a long time.

‘Okay.’ Eva abandoned the intercom, raised her hand and tried to sound practical, which she was remarkably successful in doing. ‘The most important thing now is that we stay calm. That means you too, Sushma. Sushma? Okay?’

Sushma nodded, her lower lip trembling, her face wet with tears.

‘Good. We don’t know what’s wrong, and we can’t get through to anyone, so we have to find out.’

‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Hsu. ‘I mean, there’s only a sixth of the—’

‘Twelve metres on the Moon are like two on Earth, you know that,’ retorted Karla. ‘And I guess we’re about a hundred and twenty metres up.’

‘Sshh! Listen.’

A rising and falling roaring sound filled their ears. A tormented howling mixed in with it, like a material under intense strain. Eva looked up to the ceiling. There was a bulkhead in clear view in the middle. She saw the operator control next to the display. She hesitated for a moment, then activated the mechanism. For a number of seconds, nothing happened, giving rise to the fear that this function had been damaged too. How were they supposed to get outside if the bulkhead had failed? But even while she was still pondering the alternatives, it stirred into motion and slowly rose. A flickering orange-red glow made its way in, the roaring intensified. She crouched down, pushing off from her knees, got a grip on the edge of the hatch, pulled herself up with a powerful swinging movement and clambered onto the roof.

‘My God,’ she whispered.

On the right-hand side, a large section of the dividing wall had been torn away, which meant she could see through to the neighbouring shaft. Five, perhaps six metres above her, was the smouldering, half-destroyed cabin of E2. The side casing was completely gone, exposing its inside, the source of the roaring sound, which was now even louder. Red apparitions darted across the floor of the burning elevator, streaks of rust were collecting further up in the shaft. There was debris wherever she looked. A bizarrely distorted, glowing and pulsing piece of metal was directly in front of her feet. She took a step back. At first she thought the brake shoes of the staff elevator had gripped and surrounded the guide rails, but on closer inspection two of them seemed to be blocked by splinters or possibly damaged. The heat was making thick beads of sweat build up over her forehead and upper lip.