Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘All right,’ Gore said. ‘We’re turning round.’

‘We’re nearer,’ Nina said.

‘What? But you have to—’

‘There!’ called Jagellovsk.

DeLucas held her breath. Callisto broke free against the backdrop of the stars, curved about and dropped down towards the base.

‘I’m coming in to land,’ said Nina.

‘Over to Igloo 1!’ Palmer shouted. He leapt and danced like a dervish, waving his arms. ‘Igloo 1, you hear me? We’re outside! Get the bomb on board and then dump it as far away as you can, in some goddam crater!’

‘I see them,’ Nina said.

Julian bent down. ‘Once we’ve got the thing on board—’

‘Once I’ve got the thing on board.’ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘You’re getting out.’

‘What? Out of the question!’

‘You are.’

‘We’re flying together—’

‘You’re all getting out,’ she said, with an air of quiet command. ‘You too, Julian.’

And then there it was.

For one deeply satisfying moment she saw fear in Julian’s eyes. For just an instant, but an instant that would be with her for ever, she saw at last what she knew she had earned, knew that she deserved from him, that she’d never asked for, in all the time by his side. He wasn’t afraid for his guests, or his precious daughter, or for his hotel. He was afraid only for her, afraid that she might be hurt. Fearful of the hole she would leave in his life if she died, the hole in his heart.

She slowed, and let the shuttle sink down.

Down below, the astronauts were scurrying about and waving to her. She choked back on the thrust. The bulldozed patch down here was relatively small, full of vehicles and machinery. Carefully, she guided Callisto over to a spot near the igloo that offered just enough room for her to land, then settled with a bump, extended the airlock and turned around to her passengers.

‘Everybody out!’ she shouted, clapping her hands. ‘Then bring the damn bomb in here. Quick!’

She looked at Julian. He hesitated. The storm-clouds cleared on his face and she saw a beam of honest-to-goodness affection break through like the sun, and all of a sudden he was hugging her to himself, and gave her a scratchy kiss.

‘Take care of yourself,’ he whispered.

‘You won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled. ‘Watch out for the engines when you get out. Don’t let them wander about under the thrusters.’

He nodded, slid from his chair and hurried to catch up with the others. Nina turned back to the controls. The lift control showed her that the group was going down to the ground. She watched through the cockpit window as an astronaut hurried across carrying something about the size of a suitcase in both hands. The figure disappeared under Callisto’s belly, and then she heard Palmer’s voice.

‘It’s in!’

‘Got you.’

‘Get going then! Twenty minutes to go! Get the thing away from us!’

‘You can say that again,’ she murmured, revving. She brought the shuttle up a few metres even as the airlock was retracting, and turned. A shudder ran through Callisto.

‘What happened?’ she called.

‘You struck the lock against one of the hangars here,’ Julian said. ‘Just brushed the roof.’

Nina cursed, and lifted higher. She glanced around for any error message.

‘Is it still retracting?’

‘Yes! Seems fine.’

The controls showed that the lock was fully inside Callisto. Nina climbed to three hundred metres, then accelerated faster than she would ever have dared with passengers on board. The thrust pushed her back into her seat as Callisto shot off at more than twelve hundred kilometres per hour. The base dropped away out of sight. Cliffs, chasms and plateaux flew past below like a time-lapse landscape. She would have to make for lower ground as soon as she could, but the stark mountains below seemed to climb and climb for ever where the edges of Peary Crater fused into Hermite to the west. Range reared up after range, ridges and plateaux marched on endlessly, but then at last she saw a ragged abyss yawn wide.

The bowl of Hermite Crater.

Still too close.

Even if the mountain ranges protected the base from the blast itself, there was no telling where the debris would rain down. Nina called up a polar map on her holographic display and looked for a suitable spot. The question was how far she could make the time left to her stretch out. If she waited too long to chuck the mini-nuke overboard, she was in danger of being caught in the nuclear furnace herself, but she didn’t want to dump it out of the airlock too soon. The shadows of a sunlit plain rushed past below her, sown with impact craters from smaller meteorites. Flying as low as she was, she had lost radio contact with everyone. According to the dashboard clock she had been flying for eight minutes, and she still wasn’t past the whole of Hermite. She could see the crater’s western wall looming in the distance, a vast, curving cliff, growing fast, growing closer.

Twelve minutes left.

She looked back at her map. Further to the south-west was a smaller crater, in deep shadow, which suggested that it must be fairly deep. She asked the computer for more information, and a text field unrolled on top of the hologram.

Sylvester Crater, she read. 58 kilometres in diameter.

Depth: unknown.

She liked the look of it. It looked almost tailor-made to swallow the energy of a nuclear bomb, and all of a sudden she had to smile. Sylvester, how appropriate. A crater named for the father of industrial explosives, and it would see the biggest damn explosion the Moon had known for thousands of years. Grinning, she changed course a few degrees south-west, and Callisto tore over Hermit’s western rim.

Eleven minutes.

The crater wall fell away beneath her, rugged, pocked by lesser impacts, and gave way to a broad, flat valley. The other side of the valley had to be Sylvester’s outer wall. Nina leapt from the pilot’s seat and ran to the airlock, suddenly scared that Palmer might have misread the timecode, but when she peered through the pane she saw the mini-nuke sitting on the cabin floor, its counter just ticking down from the ten-minute mark.

The sight of the bomb made her suddenly queasy.

09.57

09.56

09.55

Time to throw in her hand; she’d pushed her luck as far as she could. There was enough distance now between the bomb and the base. She ran back to the cockpit and gave the command to extend the airlock.

The computer gave her an error report.

Incredulous, she stared at the console. Suddenly the lift symbol was blinking, fiery red. She tried again to extend the shaft, but without success.

Impossible. Just impossible!

She demanded a report.

Airlock not fully drawn up , it said. Please draw up lock before attempting to extend.

Her legs trembled wildly. Hastily she ordered the shaft to draw up, even though it was already drawn up – at least, it had seemed that way, but perhaps there was a centimetre or so still to go. But the display didn’t stop blinking.

Airlock cannot be drawn up.

Cannot be drawn up?

Nine minutes.

Less than nine.

‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted at the control system. ‘Draw up, extend! How the hell am I supposed to—’

She stopped. You had to be completely crazy yourself to try arguing with a computer. The airlock wouldn’t open, and that was that. Which meant that she couldn’t just spit the bomb out that way, and she couldn’t fetch it from the lock to throw it out of the rear hatch.

The rear hatch!

Her heart pounding, she raced to the stern, opened the bulkhead to the cargo hold, charged inside and looked around. There were a few grasshoppers here, hanging in their brackets and ready to roam. It had hardly been eighteen hours since they had been using them to tour the legendary Apollo landing site. She loosened the clips on one of them, stood it up on its telescopic legs and checked the fuel tank. Enough. All right then, back to the bridge, but as she drew level with the airlock she couldn’t resist glancing inside. She hesitated, then looked in at the infernal device, saw the timecode running down—