Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘But to what purpose? What’s so special about the valley, apart from the fact that it’s beautiful?’

Tim crossed his fingers and shook his head. ‘I’m more concerned with wondering why the bomb hasn’t gone off yet.’

‘Well, up to three and a half hours ago it hadn’t gone off yet,’ O’Keefe corrected him. ‘By now it could have blown sky high.’

‘And we wouldn’t have a clue here!’ growled Wachowski. ‘What a mess! What the hell is wrong with the satellites?’

I could tell you all a thing or two, thought Dana. ‘Either way,’ she said, ‘we won’t solve the problem here and now, and to be honest I’m not interested right at this moment. I want to know what has happened on Aristarchus.’

‘The shuttles should be fuelled up soon,’ promised Wachowski.

‘Hmm, Carl.’ Heidrun wrinkled her forehead. ‘I wonder what he’ll do?’

‘That depends. Is he alive, are the others alive? Was he able to flee? My bet is that he still has something he needs to do in the hotel.’

‘And what would that be?’ asked Tim.

‘Priming the bomb.’ She looked at him. ‘What else?’

‘He needs to prime it?’

‘Possibly.’ Wachowski nodded. ‘How else would you ignite the thing?’

‘Remote control.’

‘In order to ignite it via remote control you’d need a very large antenna, which you would have seen when you were searching the Gaia. Otherwise, he’ll need to do the ignition himself.’

‘Which explains why we’re still alive,’ said Ögi. ‘Carl didn’t have a chance to set up a timed fuse. His plans were turned upside down.’

‘Do we care about that?’ O’Keefe looked around at them all. ‘I wouldn’t waste a minute looking for him. Let’s concentrate on the Ganymede.’

‘I totally agree with you,’ said Dana. ‘But it could come down to the same thing. If we find the Ganymede, we may stumble upon Hanna.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ growled O’Keefe. ‘More than fine.’

Nina came into the lounge.

‘We’re ready!’

‘Good.’ Dana and Palmer had agreed to send two search teams off right away. Nina was to fly the Callisto to the Plato crater, follow the Montes Jura along the mining zones and then head for Aristarchus. The Io, a shuttle belonging to the Peary Base, would set off fifteen minutes later, keep a southerly course by Plato, and then, 500 kilometres on, swing over the plain of the Mare Imbrium towards Callisto. Dana got up. ‘Let’s put the teams together.’

‘You can fly with me.’

‘Thank you, but I think my presence is more needed here. Someone has to look after the others. How many people can you spare, Leland?’

Palmer rubbed his chin. ‘Kyra Gore is our head pilot. She can fly the Io with Annie Jagellovsk, our astronomer—’

‘My apologies,’ Dana cut him off mid-sentence. ‘I didn’t express myself correctly. How many people have to stay in the base in order to ensure everything can function?’

‘One. Well, let’s say two.’

‘I want you to be clear about how dangerous this man is. It’s possible that the search teams will be forced to attack Hanna. They may have to free the group from under his control. Each shuttle should be occupied by four, or preferably five people.’

‘But there’re only eight of us.’

‘I’ll come too,’ said O’Keefe.

‘Me too,’ said Tim.

‘Heidrun and I—’ Ögi started to say.

‘I’m sorry, Walo, but you’re not the ideal person.’ Dana made the effort to smile. ‘You’re certainly courageous enough, but we need younger, fitter people. So, Tim and Finn will fly with Nina, plus two more people from the base. The Io will fly with five men from the base—’

‘Just a minute.’ Palmer was trying to rein in the galloping horse. ‘That would be an extraordinary mission.’

‘Well, we have an extraordinary problem,’ replied Dana ungraciously. ‘In case you haven’t noticed.’

‘Six out of eight people. I’d need to consult—’

‘Consult who?’

‘Well—’

‘You won’t reach anyone.’

‘Okay, but – it’s not that simple, Dana. That’s three-quarters of my team. And the shuttles will have no contact to base for most of the time.’

‘View me as a reinforcement here,’ said Dana. ‘My responsibility is the safety of Julian Orley and his guests. And, to be honest, Leland, I would be less than understanding if the rescue mission were to fail due to lack of—’

‘Fine.’ Palmer exchanged a look with Wachowski. ‘I think it’s doable. Tommy, you stay here and – hmm, Minnie DeLucas.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Dana.

‘Our specialist for life-support systems.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if Jan stayed?’ wondered Wachowski.

‘And who’s that ?’

‘Jan Crippen. Our technical director.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Palmer. ‘Minnie can take on his duties, and besides, we won’t be gone for all that long.’

‘I don’t care how long you’re gone,’ said Dana. ‘As long as you find Julian Orley.’

More importantly, as long as you’re all out of the picture for the next few hours, she thought. Carl and I can handle Wachowski and this woman DeLucas.

If Hanna was still coming, that was.

At around 02.40 that morning, the shuttle bus finally took the search teams over to the landing field.

O’Keefe sat on the bench of the open vehicle and let his gaze wander. On their second evening on the Moon, in an effort not to expose himself to too much conversation, he had retreated to the Gaia’s multimedia centre before the meal was over, and had watched a film about the Peary Base. So he knew that it covered over ten square kilometres and that the landing field alone took up three times the space of a football field. The silo-like towers on the western wall were spaceships left behind by the teams who had first ventured to the North Pole. Originally converted into living quarters, they now served as emergency accommodation, themselves dwarfed by a telescope currently under construction, while the domes in the centre, Igloos 1 and 2, formed the heart of the base. Both had been brought to the Pole as collapsible structures, and had then been blown up to house size and coated with a layer of regolith several metres thick, in order to protect the inhabitants from solar storms and meteorites. Airlocks had been cut into the walls, the ground levelled off all around them, and vehicles and equipment had been stored in hangars, those halved tubes which Momoka had referred to in her usual defeatist manner as junk, and which were actually burnt-out fuel tanks from the Space Shuttle era.

Over the years, the station had grown, expanding to include streets, annexe buildings and a vast open-cast mine. In the distance, against a backdrop of automated factories in which the regolith was processed into building components, the framework of huge, open assembly facilities towered up. Manipulators ran on rails along the bodies of mining machines in the making: welding, riveting and adjusting parts, while humanoid robots carried out precise mechanical work. Cable cars and railway trucks were carrying material from the factories to the building yards. Wherever you looked, machines were hard at work. Lifelessness in its most vivid form.

O’Keefe looked towards the east as the bus made its way towards the landing field, two kilometres away from the main site. Fields of solar collectors, their panels directed at the wandering, never-setting sun, covered low, undulating hills. The craters were interspersed with canals of lava. Thanks to them, the Peary Base had a widely ramified system of natural catacombs, the majority of which hadn’t yet been explored. Just one feature betrayed what the ground was concealing: a crack, or rather a chasm. It gaped at its full width in the high plateau, spread out to the west and opened into a steeply descending valley, the bottom of which wasn’t touched by a single ray of sunlight. Bridges crossed over what seemed like the remains of a severe earthquake, although it was actually a caved-in lava canal, through which liquid stone had flowed billions of years ago. As O’Keefe knew from the documentary, some of the cave branches led into the chasm, which made him wonder whether the underground of the base was accessible from there.