Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘He was in a hell of a hurry,’ Dana remarked.

‘Whatever. We’ll search the area while Kyra flies the guests to a safe distance on the Io.’

‘And where should I fly them to?’ Gore asked.

‘Take them to meet Callisto. Tell her to turn round right away. You should be in radio contact as soon as you’re up there. Then go back to the Chinese base.’

‘That’s madness,’ Dana said. ‘Forget it. How do you expect to find a bomb on a huge installation like this?’

‘We’ll look for it.’

‘Sheer idiocy! All you’re doing is putting your people in danger.’

‘You’ll be flying with the Io anyway.’ Palmer paid her no further attention, and turned to his crew. ‘Does anybody else want to fly with them? You have a free choice – we’re not the army here. I’m going to look for the thing. The bastard must have given himself at least half an hour!’

Dana spread her arms to concede defeat.

‘Leland?’ Minnie DeLucas. ‘If what Lynn was telling me is true, maybe Hanna came up from underground. From the Great Hall.’

‘Good.’ Palmer nodded grimly. ‘Let’s start there.’

Had his suspicion been right, or did MoonLight really just mean ‘MoonLight’? There was uproar and disagreement in the Big O. The Moon was still besieged by the bot army, with no end in sight. No contact with Peary Base or Gaia. Merrick was hurrying, burrowing, scurrying from satellites to ground stations, but getting nowhere.

Meanwhile the MI6 delegation were in a feeding frenzy over the theory that China might be behind the attack. It was a beautiful theory, it fit everything so neatly, temptingly. Gaia, well indeed, why would China have Gaia in their sights, but Peary Base – if that were destroyed, a substantial part of America’s lunar infrastructure would be knocked out. Not an attack on Orley, but on Washington’s supremacy. Knock the enemy off his feet. Weaken the American helium-3 industry. It had to be China! Beijing, or Zheng, or both of them.

The CIA had barely joined the list of potential suspects than it was off again.

‘Whatever the truth of it,’ Shaw said, ‘we’ve reached a whole new level of helplessness.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Yoyo.

Security departments at Orley subsidiaries worldwide were reporting back to the London situation room, but there were no concrete leads on further attacks. Norrington insisted that the corporation had to take every conceivable precaution. He hadn’t come up with any more information on Thorn. A photograph of Kenny Xin had been distributed which his own mother wouldn’t have recognised. A shuttle had set out from the OSS to the Moon, but it would take more than two days to reach Peary Base.

‘Norrington looks nervous to me,’ Jericho said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes, he’s fighting on too many fronts, opening up one campaign after another.’ Yoyo got to her feet. ‘If he carries on like this, he’ll bring the whole operation to a grinding halt.’

Just a few minutes ago, another crisis meeting with MI5 had broken up, since the agencies now reckoned that domestic security was threatened. There wasn’t even a pause to draw breath. One discussion led straight into the next. The air twanged with the buzz of ideas, urgent purpose and determination. But there was an undertone too, a feeling that all this to-do was deluded, based on the belief that being there and acting busy would lead to answers.

‘So why’s he doing that?’ Jericho mused, following Yoyo outside. ‘Is he so worried?’

‘You don’t even believe that yourself. Norrington’s not an idiot.’

‘Of course I don’t believe it. He wants to put a spanner in the works.’ Jericho looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to them. Norrington was making phone calls in his room, and Shaw was doing the same in hers. ‘I just haven’t the first idea who we should trust to talk to about him.’

‘You mean that they could all be in it together?’

‘How would we know?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo looked across at Shaw’s open office door, dubious. ‘She doesn’t exactly look like a mole.’

‘Nobody looks like a mole, apart from moles.’

‘Also true.’ She fell silent for a while. ‘Good. Let’s break in.’

‘Break in? Where?’

‘The central computer. The drives we aren’t authorised for. Norrington’s patch.’

Jericho stared at her. Somebody scurried past them, talking urgently into a phone. Yoyo waited until he was out of earshot, and dropped her voice in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it? If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you know yourself but do not know your enemy, then for every victory you gain you will suffer a defeat.’

‘Is that yours?’

‘Sun Tzu, Art of War . Written two and a half thousand years ago, and every word is as true as the day it was written. You want to know who’s pulling the strings? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, then. Your charming friend Diane will fish for Norrington’s password, and we’ll have a look around his parlour.’

‘You’re pulling my leg! How is she going to do that?’

‘Why are you asking me?’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘I thought you were the cyber-detective.’

‘And you’re the cyber-dissident.’

‘True,’ she said, unruffled. ‘I’m better than you.’

‘How’s that?’ he asked, stung.

‘Aren’t I? Stop moaning, then, and give me some ideas.’

Jericho glanced around. There was still no one paying them any attention. He might just as well have gone off to sleep somewhere, popping up every couple of hours with more ominous news to set them all scurrying.

‘Right then,’ he hissed. ‘We only have one chance, if that.’

‘We’ll do it, whatever it is.’

Twelve minutes later Norrington left his glassed-in cubicle and joined one of the working groups, which was busy making telescopic observations of the Moon. He talked to them about this and that, and then went to fetch a coffee. Then he went to see Shaw in her office, briefly, and went back to work at his own desk.

Access denied , said the computer.

Baffled, he clicked on the file again, with the same result. It was only then that he realised he wasn’t logged on.

But he hadn’t logged out when he left the room.

Or had he?

He glanced around the control room. Everybody was looking busy, except for the Chinese girl, who was standing not far from one of the workstations as though she didn’t know where to go.

Norrington felt a gnawing doubt. Uneasy, he restarted the system to log himself in.

Yoyo watched him out of the corner of her eye. Nobody had noticed her slip into his office and log him out – it had only taken a few seconds. She pretended to be absorbed by one of the wall monitors, and pressed a button on her phone to send a signal up to the roof.

Jericho gave Diane the command to start recording.

Data coursed through the processors in the Big O. Nobody in the whole building had their own computer in the sense of an autonomous unit. All employees had a standardised hardware kit, a portable version of the boxy lavobots that Tu Technologies used. Everybody could access the Big O central computer from any jack or port, simply by logging in with name, eight-character password and a thumbprint. But not everybody had access to all the drives. Even the powerful sysadmins who managed the superbrain and issued passwords couldn’t access the whole machine. The ebb and flow of data in the Big O was like the roar and hum of traffic in a big city, and of course, the roar was loudest during normal working hours.