Frank Schätzing - Limit

06.44

06.43

– she tore herself away. Dashed into the cockpit.

Looked out.

Sylvester’s crater wall, still a good way off but growing larger every moment. She had to make sure that the bomb would explode on the crater floor, deep inside. Otherwise she would be dead for sure. Her fingers leapt across the instrument panel like a virtuoso at the keyboard as she calculated the angle of approach she would need for a controlled crash, and the shuttle’s nose dipped – no, that was too much, less! – there, that was it. A steady descent.

And now, out of here. Helmet on.

Her hands were trembling. Why were her hands trembling, now of all times?

05.59

The helmet wouldn’t fit.

05.58

She had left it too late.

05.57

05.56

Now!

Cargo hold. Manual controls.

The loading hatch sank down, infuriatingly slowly, to reveal the stars and, far off, the Peary–Hermite range. Nina climbed up onto the grasshopper platform and kicked the thing up into the air, just a little. The hatch yawned wider. A hair’s breadth was all she needed. Without waiting for it to open entirely, she steered the hopper along the cargo hold and through the shuttle’s rear hatch as it tore down towards the ground.

It would be an illusion to think that she was safe now. The shuttle seemed to be standing still relative to her speed, which meant that she was still hurtling towards Sylvester at 1200 kilometres per hour on her tiny craft, just as fast as Callisto itself. Realistically, her chances were just about as bad as could be, though she still had five minutes to achieve the impossible, maybe four. Somewhere between 250 and 300 seconds, at any rate. All her hopes hung on having calculated the proper angle of impact for the shuttle. She swung her nozzles to the horizontal and opened the throttle for as much thrust as the little machine could muster.

The hopper bucked and tried to throw her off.

Then it rushed for all its engines were worth away from Callisto, bravely doing its best against the murderous acceleration, and losing height all the while. The shuttle dwindled away rapidly in front of Nina’s eyes. She swung the nozzles around a little further and went down to the ground, too close to the ground, as she established the next moment, since she was still going much too fast. She was in danger of being smashed to pieces, and she steered the hopper up again, wringing the last drop of thrust out of its jets, and saw Callisto speeding towards Sylvester’s sunlit slopes. The dusty lunar surface was not racing past quite so fast beneath her now, the hopper was battling against its own momentum and winning. It was slowing down, but would there be time to slow it to a safe landing speed?

And if she could? How much time did she still have?

Two minutes?

One?

A small crater rushed towards her, zipped by below and then was lost to sight. An ideal spot to take shelter. Somehow she had to make her way back to the crater, but she was still travelling at considerable speed. Over on the horizon, Callisto hung above the sweeping wall of mountains, a gleaming point, so close to the rim that for a moment she was afraid that she had miscalculated and the shuttle would smash into the crater wall, that the bomb would explode there on the slopes, and that nothing would protect her from the fury of the blast.

Then the shining dot disappeared inside Sylvester, and she gave a victory whoop, since she’d won this point at least in the deadly game. Still whooping, she steered the hopper down, fought against her own headlong hurtle, and gradually, little by little, the contraption seemed to be bleeding off the speed that the shuttle had given it, even if it was still going too fast to land. She could forget about that little crater by now, it was already much too far behind her, but something about the same size sped towards her, maybe a little smaller. The ring wall was two, perhaps three kilometres across but it was astonishingly high, so that all of a sudden she was afraid that the hopper wouldn’t make it over the peaks, would crash. Just before impact, she yanked the machine upwards, scraping over the rim, and then looked down. The crater wall cast a threatening shadow into the cauldron, a curve of blackness like a scythe. She slowed further, flew over the opposite wall, then she could see the plain again and Sylvester, its peaks terrifyingly near, unsoftened by atmospheric haze.

There was something happening there.

Hildegaard narrowed her eyes.

The sky above Sylvester blazed.

She held her breath.

From one moment to the next, the stars were swallowed up by a smear of blazing light as though a second sun were being born inside the crater. Instantly, she turned her eyes away, flew a 180-degree curve and realised that she now had full control of speed and direction. Her second little crater was some distance off by now, but the ground below was no longer hurtling past. She had won the battle against her acceleration and now she had to find shelter. All around, the slopes and cliffs, even the distant polar massif, were glowing in the light of the nuclear explosion, but that died away so suddenly that she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She turned the hopper.

The light had vanished.

For a moment she thought that Sylvester had absorbed the energy of an entire nuclear explosion, but something was different now. At first she couldn’t understand what she was seeing, but then the shock of recognition hit.

The ridge of the crater wall had vanished.

No, not vanished. It was hidden by a screen of dust that shrouded the upper slopes and fountained skywards, swallowing the stars, a plume many kilometres high, growing higher and higher, unreal, bizarre, a nightmare image—

Crawling down the slopes.

Crawling?

‘Oh shit,’ whispered Nina.

All of a sudden, the wall of dust had become a huge wave, spilling over the crater wall in all directions and racing down towards the plain. Nina had no idea just how fast it was travelling, but it was certainly coming ten times faster than her little hopper could fly, twenty times, thirty. For a moment she was paralysed, not able even to tear her eyes away, then she yanked the machine around and thrashed it back towards the nameless little crater. After the breakneck ride out of Callisto, it was as though the hopper was just creeping along. She risked another look. Sylvester had vanished completely. There was only the dust racing towards her, swallowing the sky and devouring all before it.

Faster. Faster!

The crater wall, her only hope of shelter!

Desperately, she yanked the grasshopper upwards, and it hauled itself up the slope as though worn out by the excitement of the past few minutes. Its telescopic legs scrabbled across the rocks and it tottered from side to side, then with one leap it was over the ridge. Nina spread her arms and leapt from the platform. Her body slammed into the steep regolith and then she was rolling down, over a sudden edge. She fell in a long arc and landed quite a way further off, in the shadow of a sheer cliff-face. From the corner of her eyes she could see the grasshopper tumbling end over end. She braced her feet in the scree slope and managed to stop her downward slide. She crawled into the shelter of an overhang and curled up into a ball.

Above her, the sky grew dark.

In the next moment, everything was grey. A hail of pebbles, tiny stones, pattered down into the crater’s bowl. Nina cowered as small as she could, protected against the pressure wave and the rubble by her overhang, but the rocks falling in front of her sent up a spray of regolith in turn. She crossed her arms in front of her helmet for protection and hoped that the suit would hold up to the onslaught. She could see nothing at all, merely a thick grey cloud on a grey ground, and she shut her eyes.