Frank Schätzing - Limit

His gaze wandered to a point high above her.

Oh God!

Distance! He had to get away!

‘Through the legs,’ called Amber.

‘Are you crazy?’ Julian was driving alongside the mining machine at high speed. ‘Was that not enough for you just then?’

She leaned back and stared up at the giant. Julian was right. It was too dangerous. It was only now, right next to it, that she appreciated how huge the beetle really was. A walking mountain. Each one of its six legs could end her existence with just one blow. The highest concentration of dust was beneath the torso, visibility was nonexistent, and to top it all off, extensive white clouds were breaking out of openings along the torso seam and spreading out rapidly. They made it past the machine and drove around its rear end, from which avalanches of baked regolith were hailing out. They dodged the rain of debris and drove back along the other side.

Back to the monster’s head.

Momoka wanted to relish the moment as long as she could, so she didn’t press immediately, but instead watched as Hanna crawled away, as if there were still the ghost of a chance he could get away from her. Ha! As if there were even the slightest cause to hope that she would change her mind.

‘Scared?’ she hissed.

He should be scared. Just like Warren had been scared. We need him alive, she heard Julian bleating in her mind, that shitty, stupid arsehole who had lured them here, to the bloody Moon, her and Warren. Alive? Fuck you, Julian! She needed him dead! And she would kill him, now, as he pulled himself to his feet. Sayonara , Carl Hanna. A good moment.

She could barely see.

It was darkening rapidly. What was happening? She leaned back and looked up. Unbelievable! Fucking Moon! This Moon was really starting to get on her—

‘Tits,’ she whispered.

A huge black stomper of a foot hung in the air above her.

Then it came down.

The beetle ended Momoka’s life without giving her the opportunity for inner reflection, something that wouldn’t have suited her character anyway. Instead, in honour of her temperament and her belief that people should die as they lived, she exploded one last time: in the course of her physical compression, Hanna’s weapon smashed against the breastplate of her spacesuit and one of the bullets broke in half. A chemical union occurred between shower gel and shampoo. The projectile flew apart, and the nine remaining ones blew up with it, blasting the beetle’s foot clean away.

This time, an error message was sent to the control centre of the moon base. It informed the crew about material damage to the front left walking apparatus of BUG-24, signifying that the machine was in danger of failure and had to shut itself down, which it did that very moment. It stopped all activity directly after the explosion, but that was of no help. The beetle’s amputation was complete. Overloaded by the loss of the front leg, the middle one buckled too, and the colossal machine began to tilt.

Tits. That was the last word they had heard from Momoka.

‘I can’t see her,’ said Amber.

And how could we, in all this dust? thought Evelyn. Her entire body was still shaking. She was reliving the moment in her mind again and again, the moment when she had almost been trampled, a true groundhog day of a thought, splintering off into an eerie alternate reality crowned by the notion that she would wake up the next moment and find she had only dreamed her escape, and the steel foot would—

Steel foot?

Evelyn looked more closely. Something about the beetle was nagging at her. Was she hallucinating? Had they got closer to the machine, or had the machine got closer to them?

Then she saw that one of the beetle’s legs was breaking away.

‘It’s tipping over,’ she stammered.

‘What?’

‘It’s tipping over!’ Evelyn began to shout. ‘It’s tipping over! The machine’s tipping over. It’s tipping over!’

In a second, they were all shouting over one another. The powerful body had unmistakably lost its balance and was indeed beginning to tip over. Fatally, it was tipping in the wrong direction.

In their direction.

Julian changed course, trying to get power out of the rover that it just didn’t possess. On their way from Aristarchus, eighty kilometres per hour had often seemed unreasonably fast to them, when the vehicle, despite being restricted by its weight and lack of traction, had completed the most adventurous leaps and jumps. Now Evelyn felt they were crawling along at a snail’s pace. She looked behind them and saw the machine struggling to balance. For one blessed moment it seemed as if the giant had stabilised again, but it was beyond hope. Although the rear leg held up to the weight at first, it soon started to sway back and forth.

Then it collapsed.

The monster’s torso crashed down into the regolith in a spring tide of dust, and the immense abdomen tipped towards them.

‘What’s that ?’ screamed Amber at the same moment.

It took Evelyn a moment to realise that her agitation wasn’t caused by the machine, but by something else that was rushing towards them from the opposite direction.

‘Swerve! Swerve!’

‘I can’t swerve!’

While the beetle continued to fall at an ever greater speed, they found themselves confronted with a spider that had appeared out of nowhere, whose internal world clearly failed to recognise not only humans, but falling mining machines too. The loading robot hurried purposefully towards the collapsing giant, seemingly intent on cutting off their path. Julian jerked the steering wheel to the left, and the robot changed its course too.

‘Right! Right!’

The ground shook. A shock-wave gripped the rover and submerged the world in cold grey. The vehicle skidded, then began to turn on its own axis, knocking one of the spider’s filigree legs off. The spider began to stagger. Travelling backwards, Evelyn saw the mining machine go down, a collapsing mountain in a hurricane of whirling regolith. The rover took a hit, came to an abrupt halt and tipped over. High above them, the spider went into a frenzy, teetering around aimlessly on its long legs.

‘Get out!’ screamed Rogachev.

They jumped out of their seats, fell, stumbled, and ran for their lives. New clouds shot over and wrapped around them, carrying them off. A huge parabolic reflector spun towards Evelyn, rotating like the blade of an oversized buzz saw. It hacked into the ground not even an arm’s length away from her and disappeared, rolling into the pyroclastic greyness. The beetle had gone down completely, missing her by a hair’s breadth and catching the injured spider instead. With its pincers flailing wildly, it went into an arabesque, lost its grip and collapsed feebly, directly above the rover. Its torso crashed into the steering wheel and seats, then bounced up one more time, rotated and released helium-3 tanks in all directions, aggressive, hopping spherical things which began to hunt down the fleeing people.

Evelyn ran.

And so did Hanna.

At the moment when the beetle’s leg came down on Momoka, he knew what catastrophe was about to unfold. The mining machine’s motion apparatus looked incredibly stable, but ten simultaneously fired detonating caps were designed to rip even the most stable of structures to shreds. Hanna had no intention of waiting to see whether the remaining legs would compensate for the loss. He hadn’t gone far by the time the collision shook the ground and gave him his answer. All around him, a layer of the finest powder flew up. He ran on without stopping. It was only after a while that he forced himself to pause, wheezing, with a painful head and throbbing shoulder. He gave himself a shake and looked back at the scene of the disaster. Grey clouds were forming some distance away. He should have still been able to see the bold silhouette of the machine from here. He took its disappearance as an indication that it really had crashed down. With any luck it had caused havoc amongst his pursuers – a vague prospect, he had to admit.