Frank Schätzing - Limit

He looked inside.

Into the shaft?

Maybe not! Funaki was staring up at him with his eyes wide, trying to climb back up again, but something was stopping him, pulling at him with all its might. He screamed something and stretched out his arm. O’Keefe leaned over to grasp his outstretched hand, when he suddenly had the eerie sensation that he was looking into the gullet of a living thing. His hair, his clothes, everything began to flap wildly. A powerful suction seized him, and in a flash he realised what was happening.

The air was being sucked out of Gaia’s head. There must be a leak somewhere in the shaft.

The vacuum was threatening to swallow them up.

He braced himself against the frame, trying to reach Funaki’s hand. The Japanese man tried with all his might to reach the next rung of the ladder. Out of the corner of his eye, O’Keefe saw the bulkhead starting to move, making its way up, the goddamn automatic mechanism, but it was just doing its job; the shaft had to close so they wouldn’t all be sucked into it, but Funaki, he couldn’t leave Funaki! Hands clung to his clothing; Miranda and Olympiada were screaming, preventing him from being sucked in. The bulkhead came closer. He stretched out his arm as far as he could, felt his fingertips touch the other man’s for a second – then Funaki was torn from the rungs and disappeared into the abyss with a shrill scream.

The women pulled Finn away. The bulkhead slammed shut in front of his eyes. Breathless, they helped one another up, struggling to balance on the uneven floor of the restaurant. Eerie creaks and groans forced their way up to them from Gaia’s depths, harbingers of even worse disaster.

Dana heard the same noises directly above her. A powerful blow had ripped her off her feet, followed by an immense roar, which had died away as abruptly as it came. But the gallery still seemed to be echoing from the explosion-like crash which had come before the roar. The entire building had swung like a tuning fork, then finally settled, and all at once there was deathly silence. Apart from the wails and squeaks in the roof, which sounded like cats roaming through the night in search of mates.

She ran to the bulkhead and hit her hands against the mechanism. It stayed shut.

‘Lynn,’ she screamed.

‘No answer.

‘Lynn! What’s going on? Lynn!’

No one in the control centre responded.

‘Come on, talk to me! Something huge has broken up there. I don’t want to die in here.’

She looked around. By now, visibility in the gallery was pretty much clear again; the ventilators had done a good job. The pressure would soon be restored, but if what had happened up there was what she feared, then this area was in danger of being buried under the weight of the head sooner or later too.

She had to get out of here! She had to take control again.

‘Lynn!’

‘Dana.’ Lynn sounded like a robot. ‘There have been a number of incidents. Wait your turn.’

Dana sank down with her back to the wall, exhausted. That damn bitch! She couldn’t blame her of course, she had every reason to be angry, but pure hatred for Julian’s daughter was burning up within Dana. In a way that was completely contrary to her nature, she began to take it personally. Lynn had brought this disaster on her. Just you wait, she thought.

At about eleven o’clock, Momoka suddenly stopped.

‘If he fell anywhere, then it would have been here,’ she said.

Julian, who was driving ahead of her, stopped too. They parked behind one another on the sunlit expanse of the Mare Imbrium. To their left, Cape Heraclides and the southern foothills of the Montes Jura towered out from the basalt sea, the steep outposts of the Sinus Iridum, the Rainbow Bay. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that, instead of sitting in rovers, they were in expedition boats, looking at the land across the calm sea; the only thing missing was perhaps a little colour and a picturesque lighthouse on the rocky cliffs. As if to complete the illusion, satellite images were displaying the widely dispersed, flat waves in which the frozen flood of the mare fell into the Rainbow Bay. They were, however, old images, as the weather conditions over Sinus Iridum had changed since the beginning of helium-3 mining. A broad bank of fog had now swallowed the waves and seemed to be drawing in landwards. From where they had stopped, they could just make out the clouds in the distance, a shapeless grey weighing down on the stony sea.

‘Could he have flown another route?’ asked Evelyn.

‘It’s possible.’ Julian looked up at the sky, as if Locatelli had left some sign behind for them in it.

‘Probable even,’ said Rogachev. ‘He had problems regaining control of the shuttle. If he succeeded, he could have drifted off course a fair bit.’

‘Where exactly is the mining station again?’ asked Amber.

‘In the mining zone.’ Julian pointed his outstretched arm towards the dust barrier. ‘Just a hundred kilometres from here on the axis between Cape Heraclides and Cape Laplace in the north.’

‘By the way, how’s our oxygen looking?’

‘Good, considering the circumstances. The problem is that we can’t rely on the maps any more.’

Amber lowered her map. Until now, she had had the advantage of clear visibility. Every crater, every hill marked on the lunar maps had reliably appeared on the horizon at some point, clarifying their position precisely, but in the sea of dust their sense of orientation would be incredibly reduced.

‘So we should try our best not to get lost,’ Evelyn put in with matter-of-fact firmness.

‘And Warren?’ asked Momoka insistently. ‘What about Warren?’

‘Well…’ Julian hesitated. ‘If only we knew that.’

‘What a helpful response, thank you!’ She snorted. ‘Why don’t we look for him?’

‘We can’t risk that, Momoka.’

‘Why not? We have to go to the foot of the Cape anyway.’

‘And from there directly on to the station.’

‘We don’t even know if he really fell,’ Evelyn reflected. ‘Maybe—’

‘Of course he did!’ exploded Momoka. ‘Don’t kid yourself! Do you really want to drive happily on while he’s stuck in a wreck together with that arsehole Carl?’

‘There’s no question of us doing it happily,’ protested Evelyn. ‘But the zone is huge. He could be anywhere.’

‘But—’

‘We’re not looking for him,’ said Julian decisively. ‘I can’t be responsible for that.’

‘You really are unbelievable!’

‘No, but it would be unbelievable to not get to the mining station because of you,’ said Evelyn, her tone audibly cooler. ‘It’s not that we don’t care about Warren, but we can’t search the entire Mare Imbrium until we run out of oxygen.’

‘I have a suggestion.’ Oleg cleared his throat. ‘In a way, Momoka is right. We have to go over to the Cape anyway, so why don’t we just drive along a little and keep our eyes open? Not an organised search, just three, four kilometres and then on towards the mining station.’

‘Sounds sensible,’ said Evelyn.

Julian pondered the suggestion for a moment. So far they hadn’t needed to touch the oxygen reserves.

‘Okay, I think we can do that,’ he said reluctantly.

They veered off, headed for the landmass and steered into the bay a little, the ascending mountain range to their left. A few minutes later, they reached a shallow ditch which stretched out diagonally across the ground, seeming to emerge right out of the fog.

Julian slowed down the rover.

‘That’s not a ditch,’ said Oleg.

They were staring at a broadly carved-out path. It had been torn into the regolith like a wound, its edges forced up.