Frank Schätzing - Limit

She pointed it at him.

Tiny muzzle, black.

Death.

And suddenly he’d just had enough of the bloody woman. His rage, his fear, everything turned into pure strength.

‘This is my space station,’ he yelled. ‘Now get out !’

And he kicked.

His boot crashed against her helmet. Lawrence’s fingers slipped away. In a split second she had been swept outside, into the centre of the torus, and even then she kept her gun pointed at him, took aim, and Julian waited for the end.

Her body passed the cable.

For a moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Lawrence was flying in two directions at once. More precisely, her shoulder, part of her torso and the right arm holding the gun had separated themselves from the rest.

Because direct contact with the cable can cost you a body-part in a fraction of a second. You must bear in mind that it’s thinner than a razor-blade, but incredibly hard.

His own words, down on the Isla de las Estrellas.

The storm raged around him. With an extreme effort of strength he pulled his way further along the rail, without any illusions of his own survival. He wasn’t going to make it. He couldn’t make it. His lungs hurt, his eyes watered, his head thumped like a jackhammer.

Lynn, he thought. My God, Lynn.

A figure appeared in his field of vision, wearing a helmet, secured with a safety-line. Someone else. Hands grabbed him and pulled him back into the shelter of the torus. Gripped him tightly. The interior bulkhead slid shut.

Haskin.

Stars. Like dust.

Lynn is far away, far, far away. The spaceship silently ploughs the timeless, glittering night, an enclave of peace and refuge. When she briefly regains consciousness, she merely wonders why the bomb hasn’t gone off, but perhaps she just hasn’t been travelling for long enough. She vaguely remembers a plan she had to leave the mini-nuke in the habitation module and return to the OSS in the landing unit, to save herself.

Landing unit. Uning landit.

Mini-nuke. Nuki-Duke. Muki-Nuki-Duki, Mini-Something-Something.

Bruce Dern in Silent Running.

Great film. And at the end: Boooooommmmmm!

No, she’ll stay here. And anyway, she’s out of strength. So many things have gone wrong. Sorry, Julian. Didn’t we want to go to the Moon? How is work going at the Stellar Island Hotel? What? Oh, shit, it’s not finished, that’s it, she knew it, she always knew, it’s not finished! It will never be finished. Never, never, never!

Cold.

The little robot watering the flowers with Bruce Dern. He’s sweet. On that platform in space, the last plants are on it before Dern blows himself up, and then there’s a song by that eco-trollop, Joan Baez, Julian says that every time he hears her he has the feeling somebody’s chiselling his head open, and she messes up the whole great finale with her hysterical soprano.

‘Lynn?’

There he is.

‘Please answer! Lynn! Lynn!’

Oh! Is he crying? Why? Her fault? Did she do something wrong?

Don’t cry, Julian. Come on, let’s look at another one of those ropy old movies. Armageddon . No, he doesn’t like that one, everything about it’s wrong, he says, there’s too much wrong, so how about Ed Wood, Plan 9 from Outer Space , or how about It Came from Outer Space ? Come on, that one’s cool! Jack Arnold, the old fairy-tale uncle. Always good for a joke or a horror story. The extraterrestrials with the big brains. That’s what they really look like.

Really? Nonsense. They don’t!

Do so too!

Daddy! Tim doesn’t think they look like that.

‘Lynn!’

Coming. I’m coming, Daddy.

I’m there.

A perfectly normal life—

Hanging pictures, taking a step back, adjusting the angle. Sorting out books, arranging furniture, stepping back, rearranging. Making small changes, stepping back again, approaching things while remaining detached from them, establishing harmony, the universal Confucian formula against the powers of chaos.

If that was what constituted a normal life, Jericho had fitted himself back into normality without the slightest transition. Xin hadn’t burned down his loft, everything was in its place or waiting to be assigned one. The television was on, a kaleidoscope of soundless world events, because he was less concerned with the content of information than with its decorative properties. He had an urgent need not to have to know anything any more. He didn’t want to understand any more connections, only to roll out the little carpet, which was to lie like that – or was it better like that ? Jericho pulled it into a diagonal, took a step back, studied his work and found it lacked balance, because it put a standard lamp in difficulties. Not harmonious, said Confucius, stressing the rights of lamps.

How was Yoyo?

At noon on the day of her rebirth thanks to Xin’s mercy she had woken up, plagued by severe headaches, doubtless partly due to the encounter with Norrington’s skull, also to an unaccustomed excess of Brunello di Montalcino, but finally also to the experience of having been practically shot. The resulting emotional hangover meant that she didn’t talk much on the flight home. At around midday Tu had started the Aerion Supersonic. Four hours later the jet had landed at Pudong Airport, and they had been home again. Of course, in the days that followed there was no escaping the news coverage. Once the Charon had come within range of terrestrial broadcasting, measurements had been confirmed corroborating that there had been a nuclear explosion in the no man’s land of the lunar North Pole, and the outing of the tour group had ended in disaster, with some prominent fatalities. And although the Secret Services tried to spread a cloak of silence over the events, there were rumours of a conspiracy aimed at destroying the American lunar base, with China as a possible source – totally unconsidered assertions that buzzed cheerfully around the net.

Downwinds of suspicion blew anti-Chinese ideas all around the world. In fact there wasn’t the slightest concrete evidence concerning the real masterminds behind it. Orley himself had taken the sting from the suspicions on the way back to OSS, announcing that it was only with the help of the taikonaut Jia Keqiang and the Chinese space authorities that it had been possible to prevent the attack at all. Regardless of this, British, American and Chinese media used the vocabulary of aggression. Not for the first time, China had attacked foreign networks, and it was common knowledge that Beijing administered Kim Jong Un’s military legacy. Voices warning that the space-travelling nations should finally pull together mingled with fears about the armament of space. Zheng Pang-Wang found himself in a public relations crisis when details emerged about the role of the Zheng Group in the construction of the launching pad in Equatorial Guinea. Rushing ahead, the Zhong Chan Er Bu made clear that nothing was known about anyone called Kenny Xin or an organisation called Yü Shen, which supposedly drew its recruits from psychiatric institutions and mental hospitals and trained them up as killers. But if this man Xin did exist, he was operating unambiguously against the interests of the Party. And why were Mr Orley and the Americans really surprised, when they withheld important technologies from the world and snubbed the international community with continued violations of the treaty concerning the Moon and space? This all sounded so familiar in terms of the lunar crisis that serious considerations about what the Chinese actually stood to gain from the destruction of Peary Base (nothing at all, according to seasoned analysts) faded into the background.