Frank Schätzing - Limit

The wall raced past her.

She had no idea how long she had been lying there. When she finally dared take her arms from her faceplate, the impacts had stopped and a hazy, shifting cloud of dust hung everywhere.

She clambered to her feet and stretched her limbs. She could hardly believe that she was still alive. That nothing had broken. Apparently, she was totally unharmed.

She had survived an atom bomb.

On the other hand, she was now stuck in a nameless crater miles from Peary with no means of getting away. Her own little crater, that had saved her life. She had an intact spacesuit, her radio and enough oxygen for the next few hours until Io found her. At least, she hoped that they’d be looking for her and hadn’t simply assumed that her death was inevitable.

First of all, she decided, she had to get out of this crater. Better for the radio reception once Io turned up.

Resigned, she set out on the long climb.

I’m sorry about this, Yoyo—

Whatever else Xin said after that reached her as mere wordsound, a voiceprint only, since at that moment her overloaded nerves gave way. The nervus vagus, that had survived so many lesser crises before now, simply stopped all regulatory function and left the organs under its command to their own devices, plunging them into chaos. Without higher functions to command them, arteries let the blood rush unhindered to her legs, her heart found nothing to pump, her brain waited in vain for the oxygen to arrive and Xin’s next words were nothing more than a half-heard electrochemical impulse. ‘You lose.’ Maybe he said them, maybe he didn’t. At that moment, all systems shut down. Her eyes turned up, and she slumped. Shot down by a bullet that never hit her.

That was how Jericho found her. As part of a collection of bodies scattered over the flight deck: two dead guards, the dead traitor, and Yoyo lying there as though dead, without a pulse, unbreathing, drenched in cold sweat. She hadn’t picked up when Shaw called from her extension, nor when he tried his own phone. One look into Norrington’s office told them that he wasn’t there. This was enough to send him up to the sixty-eighth floor, worried, where he found Diane lying pitifully, her cables wrenched out, and clear signs of a fight. No sign at all of Yoyo but a trail of blood on the floor, on the gallery, the bridge, the steps up to the deck.

The rest was intuition.

He had burst out onto the roof just in time to see the airbike vanishing into the sky, and for a dreadful moment he thought that Yoyo was dead. He sank to his knees beside her, broken by his failure, seeing clearly the grief that would seize Tu and Hongbing when he brought them the news. But then he heard a barely perceptible heartbeat, his ear pressed to her ribcage. Another followed. A slow, faltering rhythm that picked up speed and grew stronger, and then the blood flowed back to her brain and consciousness returned. When he propped her legs up she came to, groggy, confused, just about able to see and speak. Who am I? Headache, tired, sleep.

Xin had let her live.

Why?

Meanwhile Shaw was growing apoplectic. Norrington’s guilt still had to be proved, even if she no longer doubted it. She was prey to a whole swarm of suspicions about what the deputy head of security could have done to damage Orley, and she ordered his data combed, his body searched. They found a datastick disguised as a house key, containing only a single program which uploaded as the image of a nine-headed snake, a shimmering, pulsing sign of his treachery.

That was the point when Jericho decided to give up.

They could fix their own problems. He couldn’t do any more, didn’t want to. It was as though he and Xin had some tacit agreement now that the killer had spared Yoyo’s life and vanished, leaving a curt but unambiguous message: Mind your own business. Maybe Xin had simply recognised that by now Yoyo’s death was unnecessary, since so many other people knew her secret. It would have been pointless to kill her now, and somehow or other pointless actions simply didn’t fit into Xin’s… philosophy, if that was what it was.

Never mind.

He was a detective, and he had kept his promise. He had brought Yoyo back to his two clients, to Tu and Chen. Everything else was for Shaw and the British Secret Services to bother about, none of his business, and he was also horribly tired. At the same time, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink, no matter how hard he was yawning now.

Tu on the other hand hardly appeared to sleep at all, and the shock seemed to have jolted him into a state of unceasing wakefulness, driven by the guilt of not having been there at Yoyo’s side. She had been asleep in her bed for two hours now – all the guest suites in the Big O had several rooms, and spectacular views – while he sat with Jericho in the living room, drinking tea and gobbling down the nuts and nibbles like a maniac.

‘I have to eat,’ he said half apologetically, belching loudly. ‘Food and sex are man’s essential desires.’

‘Says who?’ muttered Jericho.

‘Confucius, since you ask, and he meant by it that we should be sure to eat well so that we can protect our women. Which means I have some catching up to do.’ A handful of Brazil nuts and jelly babies together. ‘And if I ever get my hands on that swine—’

‘You won’t.’

Tu slapped the table. ‘We’ve got this far, xiongdi . Do you really think that I’ll knuckle under and let the bastard get clean away? Think of what he did to Yoyo’s friends, to Hongbing. The tortures he put him through!’

‘Not so loud.’ Jericho glanced at the half-closed bedroom door. ‘No question that you’re right to be angry, but perhaps you should just be grateful that you’re not dead.’

‘All right, I’m grateful. What next?’

‘Nothing next.’ Jericho spread his hands and rolled his eyes. ‘Live. Life goes on.’

‘It’s not like you to take this attitude,’ Tu chided him. ‘The woodworm doesn’t just sit about making comments on the carpentry.’

‘Thanks for the comparison.’

‘So why did we get involved in the first place?’ Tu asked between gritted teeth. ‘So that the bastards could get away with it?’

‘You listen to me.’ Jericho put down his teacup and leaned forward. ‘Maybe you’re right, and maybe next week I’ll see it all differently, but where has all this got us? Following leads in ever-widening circles, all these killers, mercenary armies, Secret Services, coups in West Africa, government ploys and corporation plots, yesterday Equatorial Guinea, today the Moon, the day after tomorrow who knows, maybe Venus? Where has it got us? Corrupt oil cartels, Korean atom bombs, hotels on the Moon, rogue astronauts, oil managers getting shot at, Greenwatch wiped out, theories about China and the CIA, nine-headed monsters? Where? To a baking hot day and a man scared for his daughter. The furniture still in its packing and he’s worried that she’s disappeared, but first of all he has to help me get two chairs out of the bubble-wrap so that we have something to sit on. To be blunt, I couldn’t give a shit about Xin and his Hydra. With the best will in the world, I have no idea what we have to do with Orley Enterprises. There’s a girl in the next room, still breathing, we didn’t have to lay her out in a shroud, and to me that’s worth all the global conspiracies you could pile up together, since it looks as though we’re well out of this game, however the whole thing plays out. We’ve got those sods on the run, Tian, so much so that they can’t see any point in killing us. The story will fizzle out of its own accord. It begins and ends on the Shanghai Pudong golf course when you asked me to bring your friend his daughter back, alive and in one piece. That’s what I did. Thank you, next please.’