Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘What for?’

‘You’re flying one of the hoppers. The more of us there are, the quicker—’ Suddenly she stopped and stared at Dana with her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Hey, you’ve piloted the Callisto before, right?’

Dana came slowly closer, bent over and readied her own bodily murder weapons.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly.

‘Good, then we’ll do it like that. No hoppers.’

Incoherent conversation came out of the loudspeakers, hastily uttered sentences. Silently, Dana walked around the console.

‘Hey, Dana!’ Lynn wrinkled her forehead. ‘Are you listening to me?’

She moved faster. Lynn craned her head back, looked her up and down from beneath her half-closed eyelids and took a step back. Her expression came back to life. A hardly perceptible flicker betrayed her suspicion.

‘You’ll fly the Callisto, do you hear me?’

Sure, thought Dana, but without you.

‘No, that won’t be necessary!’

As if she’d been hit by lightning, Dana stopped and turned round. Nina had come into the control centre, accompanied by Karla. She was dressed in her spacesuit, carrying her helmet under her arm, and looked thoroughly contrite.

‘I’m sorry, Lynn, Miss Lawrence, I’m very sorry indeed: I wasn’t at my post. I fell asleep in the rest area. Karla walked past me three times, but then she managed to find me after all and told me everything. I’ll fly the shuttle.’

Dana forced a smile. She would have been confident enough of taking on Lynn and Karla, but Nina Hedegaard was incredibly fit and had quick reflexes. At that moment, Mukesh Nair stormed in, bathed in sweat, and the bubble of Dana’s quick getaway burst.

‘Karla,’ he called, exhausted. ‘There you are. And Nina! Miss Lawrence, thank heavens.’

‘Our plan has changed,’ said Lynn. ‘Nina’s flying up with the shuttle.’ She walked over to the console and spoke into the microphone: ‘Sushma, Eva, back to the control centre. Right away!’

Dana folded her arms behind her back. Nina was by far the better pilot; any objections on her part would have been futile.

‘You have a lot to make up for,’ she said strictly. ‘I’m sure you realise that.’

‘I’m sorry, really I am!’ Nina lowered her gaze. ‘I’ll get them out of there.’

‘I’ll come too. You’ll need help.’

Without waiting for an answer, Dana walked across the control centre, went into the room containing Sophie’s corpse and jumped back. Feigning rage and horror, she spun round towards Lynn.

‘Damn it! Why didn’t you tell me about that ?’

‘Because it’s not important,’ answered Lynn calmly.

‘Not important? Again something that’s not important? Are you completely insa—’

In a flash, Lynn stormed over, grabbed Dana by the neck and threw her against the doorframe, making her head jerk back and crash against it painfully.

‘Just you dare,’ she hissed.

‘You are insane.’

‘If you suggest one more time that I’m insane, you’ll get a very tangible impression of what insanity really is. Mukesh, put your suit on, the box with the XL label! Karla, box S!’

Dana stared at her with unconcealed rage. Her entire body was trembling. She could have killed Julian’s daughter with a few unspectacular hand movements, right this very second. Without breaking eye contact, she put one finger after another around Lynn’s wrist and wrenched it from her throat.

‘Now, now, Lynn,’ she whispered. ‘Not in front of the guests! How would that look?’

After Gaia’s last nod, the airlock was jutting out from the viewing platform at such an angle that it was now pointing at the far-away Earth like a cannon. They held on to the railing, and each other, as the cabin bulkheads glided to the side.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Miranda sarcastically. The view over the terrace couldn’t have been more worrying.

The world had tipped by forty-five degrees; millions of tonnes of rock seemed to be eager to topple towards them from the ravine opposite. Where the terrace ended, Tim and Ögi were huddled against the railing to prevent whichever one of them might lose their grip from falling into the depths. Miranda reached out for the frame of the open airlock, grasped hold of it and pulled herself outside. The boots of her bio-suit were equipped with powerful treads to prevent them from slipping. Her fingers found a grip in an indentation. With her legs spread and the unrolled wad of material – several tablecloths from Selene knotted together – slung around her hips, she worked her way up the slope. The makeshift rope had been O’Keefe’s brilliant idea; the other end of it was fastened to Olympiada’s chest guard.

‘Okay. Pass her towards me.’

Heidrun steered the Russian woman out of the airlock, waited until she had a firm grasp on the railing, then let her go. Olympiada immediately crumpled over and slipped down the slope, but instead of falling she hung on the end of Miranda’s umbilical cord. Miranda climbed further up along the shaft of the cabin until she was able to crawl under it. With her feet wedged against the wall of the shaft, she heaved Olympiada up, unknotted the cloth and let it back down. Heidrun then hurried swiftly upwards, followed by O’Keefe, who had rammed the ice pick into the airlock door to prevent it from shutting and sending the shaft back down.

‘Everything okay there?’ called Ögi.

‘More than okay!’ said Heidrun.

‘Good. We’re coming up to you.’

It was relatively easy to pull themselves up over the railing, but once they got there it was still a fair distance to the airlock. Miranda threw the rope to them. After two attempts, Tim finally got hold of it, knotted it around the bars of the railing, and they made their way across hand over hand. It was incredibly tight behind the cabin with six of them, but at least they had a stable wall at their backs to prevent them from sliding down. They clung on alongside one another, hardly daring to move through fear that too much movement could tip Gaia’s head clean off.

‘Lynn, everyone’s outside now,’ said Tim.

The glass wall shook. Heidrun reached for Ögi’s hand.

‘Lynn?’

No answer.

‘Strange,’ sighed Miranda. ‘I never thought I’d end up regretting it.’

‘Regretting what?’ asked Olympiada hoarsely.

‘The swimming accident.’

‘Before Miami?’ She cleared her throat. ‘The one you went to court for?’

‘Yes, exactly. My poor Louis.’

‘What exactly do you regret?’ asked O’Keefe, tired. ‘The fact that he died, or that you helped?’

‘I was found innocent,’ said Miranda, in an almost cheerful tone. ‘They couldn’t prove anything.’

A new quake ran through Gaia’s skull and refused to let up. Olympiada groaned and fastened her grip to O’Keefe’s thigh.

‘Lynn!’ screamed Tim. ‘What’s going on there?’

‘Tim?’ It was Lynn. Finally! ‘Hold on, I’m on my way. We’re coming to get you.’

Lynn had insisted on their all leaving the Gaia together. In the maelstrom of her disintegrating sanity, the realisation still won through that Dana was playing dirty somehow, and that it wouldn’t have been a good idea to let her fly alone with Nina. Resolving both evacuation and rescue at the same time seemed to be the most efficient plan, and had a sense of well-ordered finality. She graciously acknowledged Dana’s laboriously concealed rage and ferocious hate and felt herself become strangely calm. Yet at the same time she was overwhelmed by the desire to roar with laughter. It was just that, if she started, she probably wouldn’t ever be able to stop.

They went into the sweltering body of the Callisto. Nina opened the rear hatch and ignited the jets. They rose vertically up into the star-sprinkled circus dome, below which they had once had the best seats in the house for viewing magic tricks and clownery, and where they now had to pull off the murderous acrobatics of saving lives.