Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘I would have had to strap her down to keep her here.’

‘She’s gone then?’

‘Wandering around somewhere. She can’t sleep, or doesn’t want to. I think she went over to Tommy in the control room. And you? Are you coping?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve breathed in so much oxygen these past few hours that I don’t think the smoke inhalation can touch me.’

‘I mean mentally.’

‘I cope.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I try my best to do without mental traumas, I find they’re something of a luxury.’

‘You should see a psychologist, in any case,’ DeLucas advised.

‘Of course.’

‘I’m serious, Dana. Don’t try burying it. There’s no shame in asking for help.’

‘What makes you think I might be ashamed?’

‘You just give the impression that you—’ DeLucas hesitated. ‘That you’re very hard on yourself. Yourself, and others.’

‘Oh.’ Dana raised her eyebrows, interested. ‘Do I?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with putting yourself on the couch,’ DeLucas smiled.

‘Oh, there are some people who reckon I belong on the couch.’ She winked confidingly. ‘See you later. I’m going to run for a bit.’

In a lucid interval, Lynn had sought out the control room’s coffee nook to put down her empty glass. It was a small space, half screened off from the rest of the room by a sheet of sand-blasted glass. Something inside her said that it was important to put things back where they belonged, after she’d spent weeks and months torturing herself with wild terrors, visions of destruction. Gaia was in ruins. She had wrecked it so often in her dreams that she felt a gnawing suspicion that she truly had destroyed it herself, but she wasn’t really sure.

At the very moment that she put the glass down, suddenly all the pieces fell into place, and she remembered.

The rescue mission up on the crown of Gaia’s head. Miranda’s death.

She tried to cry. Turned down the corners of her mouth. Made a tearful face. But her tear ducts wouldn’t do their job, and until she could cry she would wander onward through the maze of her own soul, without hope of redemption. Undecided, she was staring dumbly at the glass when she heard the lift humming.

Somebody was coming up here.

Her face twisted into a mask of rage. She didn’t want anybody up here. She didn’t want Tommy Wachowski anywhere near her. He’d kissed her, the pig! Hadn’t he? How could he do a thing like that? As though she were some cheap tart! A slut in a spacesuit. There for anyone to fuck, a toy, an avatar, a plaything for other people’s fantasies!

You can all go fuck yourselves, she thought.

Fuck you, Julian!

She leaned back a little, so that she could see past the edge of the frosted glass – and into the control room. The lift-shaft passed through the middle of the igloo like an axis. Somebody in a spacesuit came out of the lift, helmet in one hand, gun in the other. It was quite obviously a gun, since he was pointing it at Wachowski, who jumped up and scurried backwards in surprise.

‘Who else is here?’ the new arrival asked in a low voice.

‘Nobody.’

‘Are you sure?’

Wachowski somehow managed not to glance towards the coffee nook.

‘Just me,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Anybody who might turn up anytime soon?’

Wachowski hesitated. He had been left as base commander. He hunched a little. He seemed to be considering whether to attack the other man, who was much bigger than him. Lynn was staring, paralysed, at the shaven back of the big man’s head, unable to move even a finger or turn away her gaze.

Carl Hanna!

‘You never know who may just turn up,’ Wachowski said, playing for time. ‘It wouldn’t be too smart to—’

There was a soft pop. The base commander dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

Hanna turned round.

Nothing. Just the big, softly lit space of the control room. Deserted, save for the dead man at his feet.

Hanna put his helmet down on the console, kept his gun at the ready and walked once around the lift-shaft. None of the other workstations was occupied. Faint light glowed from behind a frosted-glass screen, where he could see part of a shelf, full of packs of coffee, filters and mugs.

He stopped dead, moved closer.

He heard a faint shuffling sound from where he had shot the other man. He spun around in an instant, trained the gun on the motionless body and then dropped the muzzle at the same moment when he realised that the man was dead as dead could be. It had just been his arm, slipping down to the side. He holstered his weapon and leaned over the console, studying its controls. His fingers scurried over the touch-screen, called up a connection with Gaia – or what ought to have been a connection, but there was no answer.

He tried again. The channel was dead.

What was happening over there?

‘Dana, dammit,’ he hissed. ‘Pick up.’

After he had tried one more time, it slowly dawned on him that it couldn’t be Dana’s fault. The computer was telling him that no connection could be made. In other words, there was no connection through to the hotel, even by laser link.

Gaia wasn’t answering.

Lynn huddled against the sink, clenched like a fist, making herself smaller and smaller, pressing her face between her knees. She had overcome her paralysis at the last moment and pulled her head back in a flash – oh, the things you can do, thought little girl lost jubilantly, following the glowing trail of crumbs, amazed at her own miraculous reflexes, while the grown-up woman, the body she lived in, cramped up with tension and her lungs began to ache from holding her breath.

Another chasm yawned in her thoughts. That was Carl Hanna, the guy who would rather have been a pop star. Hanna, maybe a little stand-offish, but pleasant enough for all that, popular with all, the man she’d chatted to one late evening in Gaia, the man whose muscular body she’d imagined – just for a moment – on hers, his strong hands passing skilfully across her, if only she could work up the nerve to drag him off to her suite. That hideous suite, oh hell, where the mirror held a hysteric, a notorious madwoman who gulped down green tablets, that was why she didn’t like to spend time in that suite. Hanna had been cool and collected, and she had reined herself in, and after that there were a few chapters missing in the chronology, things were mixed up. Somebody had said that Hanna was a bad guy, that he wanted to blow up her hotel. Just a few words had turned her world topsy-turvy, and now the same nice guy she’d been flirting with in the Mama Quilla Club had shot poor Tommy Wachowski, and all of a sudden she felt a horror of his muscular body and his skilled hands. Fear bathed her brain in ice-water, so that for a moment she could think clearly again, at least enough to know that she mustn’t move a muscle, mustn’t surrender to the urge to whimper helplessly and whistle the songs of a little girl lost, because if she did, the man who’d been calling himself Carl Hanna would kill her too.

She held her breath and listened, heard him curse, heard every word he spoke, heard his secrets.

Change of plan. Dana was no longer a factor. Whatever had happened to her, he had to go on without her.

Those were the rules.

Hanna swung the dead man over his shoulders like a sack of Christmas toys and went back down to the Great Hall, dragged him out into the airlock and watched his face distend in the vacuum. Then he pulled Wachowski into the cave beyond and didn’t spare him another thought. He ran to the cleft, squirmed in, got down on his hands and knees and slithered along like a snake until the passage opened out again and the familiar pile of rubble appeared in the torchlight. He shovelled the stones aside with both hands, opened up the control panel on the mini-nuke, lifted the cover—