Frank Schätzing - Limit

Norrington was outside.

Holding the scissors tightly, she went after him, and the glass doors slid open again. The flight deck stretched away before her eyes, with its helicopters and sky-cars. Norrington hobbled towards something without looking round, waving.

‘Over here!’ he called.

She quickened her pace. She was puzzled to note that there were airbikes up here as well, more exactly, one airbike. She hadn’t noticed it the previous morning, and all of a sudden she knew why.

Because it hadn’t been there.

She stopped. Her eyes skittered around the flight deck, and she saw two guards lying on the floor, their limbs outflung. A figure dismounted. Norrington staggered, recovered and then dragged himself on towards the bike. The figure pointed a gun at him and he stopped, his hand pressed to his thigh.

‘Kenny, what is this?’ he asked, his voice wavering.

‘We’ve classed you as a risk,’ Xin said. ‘You’re stupid enough to get caught, and then you’ll tell them what you mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘No!’ Norrington screamed. ‘No, I promise—’

He was flung upward a little into the air, and his body hung there for a moment like a puppet before he flew backwards, his arms spread, and thudded at Yoyo’s feet.

There was a only a mass of red where his face had been.

She froze. Sank to her knees, and dropped the scissors. Xin walked towards her and pressed the muzzle of the gun against her forehead.

‘How nice,’ he whispered. ‘I had already given up all hope.’

Yoyo stared dead ahead. She thought that if she ignored him perhaps he might just vanish, but he didn’t, and her eyes filled slowly with tears, because it was over. Finally over. This time nobody would ride to her rescue. There was nobody who could turn up and take Xin by surprise.

Very softly, her voice hoarse, so that she could barely understand the word she spoke, she said, ‘Please.’

Xin squatted down in front of her. Yoyo raised her eyes to the handsome, symmetrical mask of his face.

‘You’re pleading with me?’

She nodded. The gun’s mouth pressed harder against her brow, as though boring a hole.

‘For what? For your life?’

‘For everyone’s lives.’

‘How very exorbitant of you.’

‘I know.’ Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, and her lower lip began to tremble. And suddenly, curiously, she felt fear washed away with her tears, the fear that had been her constant companion for so long, leaving only a deep, painful sorrow behind. Sorrow that she would never learn now what had happened to Hongbing, why her life had been the way it was, why their lives hadn’t been different. Xin couldn’t scare her now, nor any of his kind. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to fling her arms around his neck to sob on his shoulders. Why not?

‘Yoyo?’

Someone was calling her name in the distance.

‘Yoyo! Where are you?’

Jericho! Was that Owen?

Xin smiled. ‘Brave little Yoyo. Admirable. It’s a shame, I would have liked the chance for a longer chat with you, but as you see, there’s no rest for the wicked. They’re looking for you, I’m afraid, so now I shall have to leave you.’

He stood up, the gun still pointing straight at her forehead. Yoyo turned her face towards him. The dawn breeze was pleasant as it dried the tears on her cheeks. Caressing. Forgiving.

She heard Jericho shout, ‘Yoyo!’

Xin shook his head.

‘I’m sorry about this, Yoyo.’

The evacuated guests took their seats in the Io and buckled themselves in. Kyra Gore was on her way to the cockpit when a call came through from Callisto. Nina Hedegaard’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Where are you?’ Gore asked as she warmed up her engines.

‘On our way to land soon.’

‘Turn around, right now! Orders from Palmer.’

‘What about our group?’

‘They’re all on board here with me.’ She modified thrust, aimed her jets and lifted the shuttle slowly. ‘Here on Io.’

‘All of them?’

‘The only ones left in the base are Palmer and some of our crew. We had a visit from Carl Hanna. The whole place might blow up any moment now, so turn round and cover some ground away out of here!’

‘What about Carl?’ Julian Orley broke in. ‘Where is he?’

‘Dead.’

She cast her eyes over the control panel, from sheer force of habit. The landing field was dwindling away below the Io, and the whole scattered assembly, factories, pipelines, igloos and corridors, were only toys, a bucket-and-spade set for scientists to muck about in the lunar sand. The roads ran across the regolith like grooves on a toybox lid. In the tiny hangars, little machines assembled other machines, not quite so little. The sunlight gleamed blindingly from the solar panels. Gore curved her flight-path, climbed again and steered Io across the crater wall to the west.

‘Dead?’ Orley snapped.

‘Miss Lawrence killed him. She’s with me, along with your daughter and your guests. They’re all right.’

‘And the bomb? What are Palmer and his crew doing?’

‘They’re looking for it.’

‘We can’t just leave them to—’

‘Yes, we can. Turn around. We’re flying back to the Chinese.’

Had only seconds passed? Or hours? DeLucas couldn’t have said, but when she saw the timecode ticking backwards on the bomb, she knew that the worst experience of her life had not even taken a minute. Kicking and screaming, she had finally managed to break free. After a few metres, the bomb wedged against the rock. She had had enough of being afraid, so this time she simply yelled at the mini-nuke as though it were a snot-nosed kid who only heeded harsh words. Wonder of wonders, it actually listened to her, and the low box came free of the wall. A surge of adrenalin carried her along the corridor and past Tommy Wachowski’s body into the airlock, where she hopped from one leg to the other as though the floor were electrified. As the air pumped slowly in, she saw through the viewport Palmer and Jagellovsk coming into the Great Hall, and she slammed her fists against the pane. Palmer spotted her and stopped dead in his tracks. The door glided open. DeLucas stumbled over the threshold and fell full-length on the floor, and the bomb skittered across to stop at the commander’s feet.

‘Six o’clock,’ she panted. ‘We have thirty-five minutes.’

Palmer grabbed the box with both hands and stared at it.

‘Let’s get it out of here,’ he said.

They went up with the lift, left the igloo and ran outside onto the bulldozed plain, out amongst the hangars. The Io was just disappearing off past the crater wall.

‘What do we do with it now?’

‘Disarm it!’

‘Thanks, wise guy! Do you know how to do that?’

‘Oh, man, I must have seen it a thousand times in the movies. We just have to—’

‘Red wire or green wire? Movies are movies. Are you out of your mind?’

‘Twenty-nine minutes!’

The mini-nuke lay there between them on the asphalt, a squat, malevolent box. The timecode ticked down mercilessly, a countdown to the end of creation, bringing a new Big Bang.

‘Stop!’ Palmer shouted, holding up both hands. ‘Everybody just shut up! Nobody’s disarming a damn thing round here. Get it over to the landing field. We have to get rid of it.’

‘We’ll never manage it,’ DeLucas said. ‘How do you intend to—’

Palmer switched over to the shuttle frequency.

‘Io? Callisto? Leland Palmer here, can you hear me?’

‘Kyra here. What’s up, Leland?’

‘We found the darn thing! It’s going to blow in twenty-eight minutes, excuse me, twenty-seven. I need one of you back here, right now!’