Frank Schätzing - Limit

Someone had died. So many had died.

Her memory was empty.

Yoyo, presumed missing, had arrived at the stroke of 22.00 just as Diane was carrying out the electronic exhumation of a person presumed dead. Presumed, because no one had been able to get even a fleeting glance of the corpse. Because it was still undiscovered, as all objects moving in unknown or unpredictable orbits tend to be.

‘Victor Thorn, known as Vic,’ Jericho said, without deigning to ask Yoyo why five minutes had turned into three hours and what Tu was up to in his state of rage.

‘I’m sorry, I…’ Yoyo fidgeted hesitantly. She had a frog in her throat and it had to come out. ‘I know I was planning to be back much sooner—’

‘Commander of the first moon base occupation. A NASA man. In 2021, he ran the show for six months.’

‘—Tian isn’t really like that. I mean, you know him.’

‘It seems that Thorn did a good job. So good, that in 2024 they entrusted him with another six-month mission.’

‘To be honest, we haven’t spoken that much,’ said Yoyo, a little shrilly. The frog was croaking on her tongue. ‘He was just terribly angry. We ended up watching a film, pretending everything was normal, you know. It was probably the worst conceivable moment, but you shouldn’t believe—’

‘Yoyo.’ Jericho sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s your business. It has nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course it has something to do with you!’

The frog was on the move.

‘No, it doesn’t.’ To his amazement, he meant it. The old, unconquered hurt which had lingered on him so long, like a bad odour on clothes, gave way to the insight that neither Tu nor Yoyo was responsible for his bad mood. However well they were getting on, it really had nothing to do with him. ‘It’s your lives, your story. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

Yoyo stared at the monitor unhappily. Their surroundings left a little to be desired in terms of intimacy. The space in the information centre had been screened in a makeshift way; people were working all around them, like microorganisms in the abdominal cavity of the Big O, digesting and processing information, then expelling it.

‘And if I want to tell you something?’

‘Then now is definitely not a good time.’

‘Fine.’ She sighed. ‘So what’s this about Thorn?’

‘Well, assuming that the explosion of the mini-nuke was planned for 2024 without fail – then someone must have been up there at the time: to hide, position and ignite the bomb. Either that or someone else was supposed to travel on after it and do that.’

‘Sounds logical.’

‘But no explosion was registered, and the people from MI6 think that storing a mini-nuke in a vacuum for too long could pose the risk of a premature decay. So why wasn’t it ignited?’

Yoyo looked at him, a small, steep line of thoughtfulness between her eyes.

‘Because the person in question wasn’t able to carry out the ignition as planned. Because something happened.’

‘Correct. So I sent Diane on the hunt. There’s information on the internet about all the space missions in the last year, and I stumbled across Thorn. A fatal accident during an external mission on the OSS, on 2 August 2024. It was completely unexpected and happened before he could take up his position on the Peary Base, but the most significant thing is that it was almost three months to the day after Mayé’s satellite was launched.’

Yoyo gnawed at her lower lip.

‘And the Chinese? Have you checked?’

‘You can’t “check” the Chinese,’ said Jericho. ‘The best you can find is their own statements, and according to them there was no loss of personnel in 2024.’

‘Apart from the Moon crisis. The commander of the Chinese base was imprisoned by the Americans.’

‘Oh, come on! First they shoot an atomic bomb up to the Moon as part of some unbelievably elaborate and sophisticated camouflage manoeuvre, then a few taikonauts stumble into American mining territory like a couple of idiots and get themselves caught?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo wrinkled her forehead. ‘So someone took the elevator. But to do that they would either have had to plant someone in an authorised team—’

‘Or bribe someone who was already in it.’

‘And Thorn was in the team.’

‘On his mission to the Moon, all official and above board.’ Jericho nodded. ‘In the role of a commander, with almost unlimited access. And above all, he knew his way around up there like the back of his hand. He’d been there before.’

‘Have you told Shaw and Norrington about this?’ Yoyo’s eyes were gleaming. Suddenly she was a Guardian again, infected by curiosity.

‘No.’ Jericho stood up. ‘But I think we should remedy that right away.’

Shaw and Norrington were wandering around somewhere in the Big O with delegates from MI5, but Edda Hoff gobbled up the fillet steak of their investigations hungrily. She knew about Thorn’s case of course, but so far no one had come up with the idea that the respected two-time commander of the Peary Base might have been the chosen one for blowing Gaia to smithereens. She promised to put together some information about Thorn and fill her superiors in on Jericho’s theory. Then Tu Tian reappeared, looking perfectly composed, as if nothing had happened. He told a joke and listened to the latest news before retreating into the guest area.

‘Business,’ he said, with an apologetic gesture. ‘The day’s just getting started in China. Armies of hard-working competitors are sharpening their knives; I can’t act as if I don’t have a company to run. So if you don’t need me to save the world—’

‘No, not right this moment, Tian.’

‘Excellent. Fenshou !’

Shaw and Norrington came back in, but Hoff was tied up in a video conversation with NASA. Jericho was just about to speak to Shaw about Vic Thorn when Tom Merrick announced that, in all probability, he had found the reason for the communication blockade but was unable to lift it.

‘Knowing why it doesn’t work is still progress,’ said Shaw as they gathered in the large conference room.

‘As I already mentioned’ – Merrick’s gaze flitted from one face to the next – ‘to be able to cut the Moon off from all communication, you’d need to interfere with so many satellites and ground control stations that it would be practically impossible. So my guess is that it’s something else: IOF.’

‘IO what?’ said Shaw.

Merrick looked at her as if he found it incomprehensible that people didn’t talk exclusively in abbreviations.

‘Information Overflow.’

‘Paralysis of the terminal device by botnet mass mails,’ said Yoyo. ‘Data congestion.’

One of the MI6 people present looked confused.

‘Imagine there’s someone sitting in a room, and you want to silence them,’ she explained. ‘And you don’t want them to be able to hear either. Assuming that you succeed in getting your hands on all the keys, you’ll try to bolt all the doors in order to cut them off from the world. The doors are the satellites and ground control stations, but you can’t stop more and more doors being built in, not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get all the keys anyway. The alternative is incredibly simple. You just go into the room, put a gag in their mouth and cotton wool in their ears.’

‘So, as far as I understand it, that man is Gaia’s computer.’

‘Two men,’ said Merrick. ‘Gaia’s computer and the Peary Base system.’

‘Don’t they have any mirror systems?’ asked Jericho.

‘Okay, four men then.’ Merrick waved his hand impatiently. ‘Or even more, as it’s possible the shuttles’ satellite receivers were gagged too. In any case, the procedure is much more efficient because you only interfere with the terminal device, that is the IP addresses of the people you want to target. Everything is fine with the satellites –, you can have a million of them flying around and it won’t change anything, quite the contrary. Nowadays, satellites and ground control stations function increasingly as knots in an IP network, like an internet in space! The botnet can jump from one knot to another in order to fight its way through.’