Frank Schätzing - Limit

The high plain drew closer. He could see the blast walls around the spaceport, the hangars, antennae, the neat lines of human presence. He was pressed against the tank in front of him as the maglev slowed, much more sharply than the Lunar Express. For a moment he was afraid that he had misjudged things, that he would be crushed in the murderous deceleration, then the train slid round the last curve as gently as a Sunday excursion and drew to a halt at the station. Hanna jumped onto the platform before a manipulator arm could mistake him for a helium-3 tank, taking care to stay out of sight of the surveillance cameras. All around him the machinery awoke to life, forklifts rolled up, the arms began to unload. He scurried to the further edge of the platform and leapt the fifteen metres to the ground in a single bound. Two kilometres of rough ground stretched away ahead of him, broken only by the road from the spaceport to the igloos. They showed starkly against the hills beyond and the factory buildings around, flanked on either side by the towers of the residential quarters and, in amongst them, a seemingly random assortment of warehouses and huts. Some distance away, a vast structure reared out of the stony surge of a hillside, the shell of the helium-3 power station, under construction.

Hanna loped away at an even, unhurried pace, keeping off the road and in the shelter of the slopes for as long as he could see the base to his right. Soon enough there’d be another sun shining here, only briefly but so blazing bright, and it would change everything. The landscape around. The course of history.

She went up to the top level of Igloo 1 in the lift, then took the connecting walkway between the two domes. Beneath her the road ran off to the factories behind. There were a few small windows here, with views out to the edge of the crater, the industrial plant and the spaceport. The sun cast a panorama of shadow like a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, but Dana had no eyes for the surreal beauty of the landscape under the billions of stars. Intent on her task, she crossed to Igloo 2 and took the lift down to the lounge, where she put on the armoured plates and backpack of her spacesuit. She picked up her helmet and then took the lift on down, past the fitness studios and the sickbay, through a layer of rock into the winding labyrinthine caves and pathways of the underground level. She had memorised every detail of Peary Base from Thorn’s maps and descriptions, so that without ever having been here before, she knew what lay ahead of her, knew which way to turn once the lift doors glided apart.

She stepped out onto a seabed.

At least that was how it looked. The glass walls of fishtanks stretched up, metres high, all around her. Flickering pools of light chased one another like will-o-the-wisps across the floor, reflected from the water when the ruffled surface was stirred up by salmon and trout and perch as they darted about, by the schools of fish flitting back and forth. A little while later the cave divided, most branches leading off into the darkness, only a few passages shimmering with blue-green or white light, and beyond them the greenhouses, the genetic laboratories and production facilities which kept the moon base stocked with fruit and vegetables. She crossed a passageway, walked along a short corridor and emerged into a vast, almost round stone hall. She could have taken a lift down here directly from Igloo 1, but Wachowski had to believe that she was in the fitness studio. Her eyes swept around the place, looking for cameras. There hadn’t been any here back in Thorn’s day, nor could she see any now. Even if there was any such thing down here, Wachowski would have enough on his hands – short-staffed as the moon base was – watching the external cameras. The fishtanks and kitchen gardens were the last thing that he would be looking at.

Several passageways led off from the hall, leading to the laboratories, storehouses and residential blocks. Only one passage had an airlock, that gave onto hundreds of kilometres of unexplored caves, unused, branching endlessly in the vacuum. Most of the lava tubes petered out in the cliff-like rim of Peary Crater, while others burrowed downward, some of them opening out into the canyon fault that ran through the whole site. She put on her helmet, stepped into the airlock and pumped out the air. After a minute, the outer door opened. She switched on her helmet lamp and went into an unhewn rocky passageway which led her onward into the darkness, black as night. The torchbeam skittered nervously over vitrified basalt. After about a hundred metres, she saw a gap open up in the wall to her left, just as Hanna had said. It was narrow, unnervingly so. She squirmed through, pulled her shoulders in, got down on all fours when the roof suddenly dipped down towards her, and crawled through the last part of the cleft on her belly. It had almost become too narrow to bear when the walls suddenly swept apart and she could see a pile of rubble that had obviously been heaped up by the hand of man; she stretched out both hands and moved the rocks aside.

She could see something low, flat and shimmering. Something with a blinking display, and an arming panel.

Hanna had positioned it neatly, she had to admit.

All of a sudden she realised that her cloud had a silver lining here. If all had gone according to plan, the package would have reached the base of the canyon under its own power, and lain there undisturbed until the last day of the trip. Only then, during the official visit to the base just before they all returned to the OSS, would Hanna have left the group, retrieved the contents and taken the bomb up into the caves. Charon would have left the Moon that same evening, and then the payload would have blown twenty-four hours later. But the package’s mechanisms had failed, so Hanna had had to take the contents up to the base ahead of schedule, to hide the mini-nuke here in the bowels of the caves. In hindsight, since his cover had been blown and everything thrown into disarray, it was a blessing that he had been forced to do that.

She opened the catch, lifted the cover to the keypad, and hesitated.

When should she set the detonator for? By now everybody knew that there was an attack planned. They still believed that it was aimed at Gaia, and she had done all she could to encourage that. But perhaps the search parties up on Aristarchus might realise what was going on. What if they came back, knowing that the base itself was in danger, and then started to search here at the Pole?

She mustn’t give them enough time to find the bomb.

A short fuse, then.

Dana shivered. Better if she wasn’t vaporised by the nuclear blast herself. Right now, her fingers were hovering over the control panel of a miracle of destructive technology which could turn Peary Crater into one of the circles of hell, sweeping away every trace of human presence as though it had never been. A good idea then to be as far away as possible, but when would the search parties return, when would the Charon set off? The safe option to make sure that she survived would be to set the detonator at twenty-four hours. But what if the communications jam failed prematurely, and they learned that the mini-nuke really was here at the Pole?

There was no way they could find that out.

But they could. The very fact that they knew that the bomb existed at all proved that they could find out anything. Callisto must have reached the Aristarchus Plateau by now. If they had found any survivors, then she could expect them back soon. If not, then they would keep searching for who knew how long. She couldn’t decide based on what she thought the shuttles might do. She had to arm this bomb, hijack the Charon and then fly to OSS. She’d have a lot of explaining to do once she got there; why she had flown off without the others, why she had flown off at all, how she could have known about the bomb. Especially if there were any survivors, who could bring all her carefully placed lies tumbling down.