Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘It’s fresh,’ said Amber.

Momoka stood up from her seat and stared into the distant cloud, then turned to the other side.

‘There,’ she whispered.

Something was lying at an angle on the slope where the strand of the Cape swung up to the mountain range. It was reflecting the sunlight: a small, elongated and alarmingly familiar shape.

It also marked the end of the path.

Without saying a word, Julian accelerated. He drove at top speed, and yet Momoka still managed to overtake him. The terrain was only gently inclined, bearable for the rovers, which thanks to the flexible wheel suspension were able to work their way swiftly up the path. By now there was no longer any doubt that they were looking at the wreck of the Ganymede. Its legs gone, it rested in the middle of the rockfall on the slope, wedged tightly between larger chunks of rock. Its rear hatch was wide open. Not far from the ramp lay a body, its head and shoulders in the shadow of the rock. While Julian was still figuring out how he could hold Momoka back, she had already jumped down from the driver’s seat and was rushing up the hill. He heard her wheezing on the speakers in his helmet, saw her fall to her knees. Her upper body was swallowed by the shadow, then a short, ghostly cry resounded.

‘Evelyn,’ said Julian on a separate frequency. ‘I think you would be the best one to…’

‘Okay,’ said Evelyn unhappily. ‘I’ll look after her.’

Considering all the setbacks he had faced so far, Hanna had been amazed to make it to the mining station without problem. He was all too familiar with the nature of escalation. The damaged axle of the buggy was bound to break apart prematurely, and that’s exactly what it did, the dramaturgy of failure obliging fifteen kilometres too soon. It wasn’t a pothole or geological fault that finished it off, however. It broke in two with banal finality on even ground, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt halt, forcing it into a spin, and that was that.

Hanna sprang down into the debris. The basic rule of survival was to think positive. The fact that the old banger had even made it that far, for example. And the fact that he had an extraordinary sense of orientation, which had enabled him to find his way without fail so far. Regardless of the miserable visibility, he had held his course, of that he was certain. As long as he just kept going in a straight line, he should reach the mining station within about an hour. But he would have to really watch out from now on. The dust concealed dangers that weren’t so easy to get away from on foot as in the buggy. He would have to keep his distance. Admittedly the beetles were quite slow, but the filigree, nimble spiders had a tendency to make unpleasant surprise appearances.

Hanna let his gaze wander. Some distance away, he saw a ghostly silhouette hurrying along towards him. He walked over to the buggy’s cargo bed, grabbed a survival pack in each hand and marched off.

While Evelyn attended to her emotional support duties, Julian, Amber and Oleg feverishly searched the inside of the wreck and the nearby area, but there was nothing to suggest that Hanna was still around.

‘How did he get away?’ Amber wondered.

‘The Ganymede had a buggy on board,’ said Julian, as he trudged around the nose of the shuttle. ‘And it’s disappeared.’

‘Yes, and I know where,’ Oleg’s voice rang out from the opposite end of the ship. ‘Maybe you should come over here.’

Seconds later, they were all standing in the path. So far they had only noticed the devastation the shuttle had inflicted on the regolith when making its emergency landing, the brutality with which it had dug into the surface, but something different now captured their attention: a story about someone who had set off into the far-away dust, a story told by—

‘Tyre tracks,’ said Julian.

‘Your buggy,’ confirmed Oleg. ‘Hanna has driven down along the path and out onto the plain. I don’t know how well he knows the area, but what else could he be interested in other than the place we also want to get to?’

‘So the bastard just fucked off!’ Momoka came over with Evelyn, down from the hill where Warren Locatelli lay.

‘Momoka,’ began Julian, ‘I’m so terribly—’

‘There’s no need. No outpourings of sympathy, please. The only thing I’m interested in is killing him.’

‘We’ll give Warren a proper burial.’

‘There’s no time for that.’ Her voice had lost all modulation. Autopilot driven by rage. ‘I looked at Warren’s face, Julian. And do you know what? He spoke to me. Not some jabbering from the other side, not that old shit. He would speak to you too, if you took the effort to go over there to him. You just have to look him in the face. He doesn’t look the same as he did before, but you can hear him say loudly and clearly that humans have no business being up here. None at all! Not us, and not you either,’ she added in a hostile tone.

‘Momoka, I—’

‘He said we should never have accepted your invitation!’

But you did, thought Julian, though he didn’t say a word.

‘Carl has driven to the mining zone,’ said Amber.

‘Very well.’ Momoka marched over to the rovers. ‘We have to go there anyway, right?’

‘No, wait,’ said Julian.

‘For what?’ She stopped. ‘You seemed to be in a hurry just now.’

‘I’ve found some additional oxygen reserves in the storage space of the shuttle. Really, Momoka, we have time to give him a decent—’

‘That’s very sensitive of you, but Warren is already buried. Carl slit open his stomach and took off his helmet. I don’t see any reason to stone him too.’

There was icy silence for a second.

‘So?’ she asked. ‘Shall we go?’

‘I’ll drive,’ said Evelyn.

‘I’m happy to as well—’ Oleg offered.

‘None of you will drive,’ decided Momoka. ‘If any of us has reason to drive, then it’s me. To follow him.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Amber cautiously.

‘I’ve never been so sure,’ said Momoka, and her voice made her visor steam up.

‘Fine.’ Julian looked out over the plain. ‘Seeing as we don’t have any satellite connection, I’ll link the four of us on one frequency. From now on, no one will be able to hear us, not even Carl, should we get close to him. It might help.’

‘There must be a way!’

Tim had lost all sense of time. Seconds seemed to drag out endlessly, but at the same time an hour dwindled into a disheartening nothing, brief enough to feel useless. Although the deaths had had the relative advantage of distracting them from the bomb, it took on a new, tyrannical presence now that they had alerted the prisoners to the threatening cataclysm. Strangely, Lynn seemed to gain more strength the more confused the situation became. It wasn’t that she was really doing any better, but catastrophes, real catastrophes, seemed to have an exorcising effect on the demons in her head – even her perception of Tim was gradually becoming closer to his true nature. They were nothing other than the monsters of hypothesis, creatures from the family of what-ifs, the genus of could-bes, all equipped with the torture devices of paths left untaken.

He felt deeply sorry for his sister.

The fear that her work could turn out to be vulnerable and faulty must have cost her every last rational thought. Tim was now convinced that his uneasiness, fed by Dana Lawrence’s suspicions, had proved to be a tragic misunderstanding. Lynn wasn’t the one trying to cause damage to her own creation and its occupants. Her mind might be struggling against disintegration, but for the moment there was probably nothing better than for her to be forced to react by her nightmares being realised. After all, she was even explaining the latest developments to Dana, her newly elected arch enemy, and taking a huge, humbling leap by asking the fired director for her advice.