Limit (131 page)

It had been no accident. That was murder!

Warren Locatelli was accused of lots of dubious qualities: uncouthness, recklessness, narcissism and much besides, but cowardice wasn’t among them. His Italian–Algerian temperament broke through, flooded his thoughts. As he started running he saw the murderer pull something from his thigh.

* * *

And Edwards saw it too.

Below them, Black’s flailing figure became smaller and smaller. He knew enough about gravitational physics to be aware that the pilot would not survive the fall, despite the reduction in gravitational pull. The rate of his fall might be slower
than on Earth, twelve metres might be the equivalent of two, but there was no air resistance to counteract it. Black’s body would be accelerated in a linear fashion, determined entirely by mass attraction. With each second his speed would increase by 1.63 metres until he landed at the bottom like a meteorite.

And he and Mimi would—

He was filled with fresh horror. He looked to the edge of the platform and saw the astronaut who had pushed Black into the depths, holding something long and flat in his right hand.

‘Carl?’ he wheezed.

The astronaut didn’t reply. In the same moment Edwards worked out that they too were in extreme danger. He started tugging like mad on his safety guard, bent it to the side and rose from his seat. They had to get out of here. Climb up the rope, back over the cantilever to solid ground, their only chance.

‘What are you doing?’ screamed Mimi.

Edwards was about to reply, but the answer stuck in his throat. The astronaut raised the long object, aimed it at the seat contraption and fired. Instead of gunpowder the little piece of plasticene detonated in the shell. The liquid from the jelly capsule evaporated, swelled to many times its volume and produced sufficient pressure to fire the projectile at him at high speed. It pierced Parker’s helmet, at which point the shower gel and shampoo combined to form what they really were, namely explosives, and the chairlift flew apart along with its occupants, flinging steel, fibre-glass, electronics and body parts in all directions.

Hanna reholstered his weapon and strode towards the parked rovers.

* * *

Locatelli was faster. He jumped, scrabbled, slipped down the path, but he had a longer distance to travel. So he looked on as the fleeing astronaut reached the front of a rover and swung himself onto the driver’s seat. Now once more within view of Julian’s group, he heard a Babel of voices breaking out in his helmet, provoked by something that Amber had said. A moment later the murderer drove away at great speed.

‘Shit,’ wheezed Locatelli. ‘Stop, you bastard!’

‘Warren, what’s going on?’ said Momoka. ‘Answer, please.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Amber said you’d made contact with Black and heard screams. She says—’

Locatelli stumbled. His leaps were too high, too risky. He missed the path, spread his arms out, landed on a steep bank of gravel and turned a somersault.

‘Warren! For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?’

Up and down switched places. He hurtled downwards at great speed, towards
the edge of the gorge. His body, light as a child’s, took off every few metres, soared briefly before landing again, so that he could no longer see or hear; dust, nothing but dust, but his suit didn’t seem to have been damaged. Otherwise I’d be dead, he thought, that doesn’t take long out here, you’re dead before you’ve even noticed.

‘Warren!’

‘A minute,’ he yelled. ‘Ow! Ouch! A minute!’

‘Where are—’

The connection went dead. He slid along the plain on his belly, pushed himself up and landed on his feet, hurried to the second rover. With one spring he was behind the wheel. By now he was being yelled at from all directions, but he’d stopped paying the slightest attention. He didn’t doubt for a moment what the guy was planning, namely to leave them here and clear off on Ganymede.

Was the bastard listening?

It was better to turn off all his connections. The other guy should learn as late as possible that someone was following him. He quickly pressed the central switch, silenced the voices in his head, put his foot on the accelerator and dashed after the fleeing man.

Tim had just appeared in the control centre when Dana gave a warning about some sort of catastrophe. The atmospheric barometer was clearly below freezing, with the hotel manager as cooling element, it seemed to him, while Sophie’s features were helpless and Lynn’s desolate. She looked to Tim like a drowning woman whose fear did battle with the fury of not having learned to swim in time.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

Dana looked at him thoughtfully. Then she delivered her report. Concise, to the point, toneless, without euphemism or down-playing of any kind. Within a minute Tim knew that someone was trying to blow Gaia to atoms, that the Chinese might be behind it, but that in all likelihood it was Carl Hanna, nice, guitar-playing Carl, in whose company Amber was currently out and about.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘How certain is it that there’s a bomb?’

‘Nothing’s certain. Speculations, but as long as they haven’t been refuted we should give them the status of facts.’ Her eyes emitted a freezing beam towards Lynn. ‘Miss Orley, any ideas, in your capacity as boss?’

* * *

Lynn gasped for air.

‘There isn’t the slightest reason to blow up Gaia! It must be a mistake.’

‘Thanks, that’s a great help to us. Give me a directive, or allow me to make some suggestions of my own. We could order an evacuation, for example.’

Lynn clenched her fists. She looked as if she wanted to tear out Dana’s voice box.

‘
If
there really was a bomb in the hotel, why didn’t it go off ages ago? I mean, who or what was it being aimed at? The construction site? Anyone in particular?’

‘We’re all in danger,’ said Tim. ‘Who’s going to bring an atom bomb to the Moon with a view to sparing human lives?’

‘Exactly.’ Lynn looked at them in turn. ‘And so far we’ve all gathered together every night, so why hasn’t anything happened? Perhaps because there is no bomb? Because someone’s just trying to scare us?’

‘Hmm,’ said Sophie hesitantly. ‘As this guy Jericho’s already said, Hanna’s task might have been to get the bomb here. If it reached the Moon a year ago—’

‘Did Gaia even exist a year ago?’ asked Tim.

‘In its raw state.’ Lynn nodded.

‘That means it could have been here since then.’

‘An atom bomb?’ Dana’s face expressed scepticism. ‘Sorry, but even I don’t believe
that
. I don’t know much about mini-nukes, I have no idea about atomic weapons, but I think I know they give off radiation. Wouldn’t this bomb do that too? How long could you ignore something like that?’

‘Perhaps Hanna only brought it up here the day before yesterday,’ Sophie concluded. ‘On his night-time—’

‘That’s pure speculation!’ Lynn flung her hand in the air with exasperation. ‘Just because he had some dust on his trousers. And even if he did, why didn’t he set it off ages ago?’

‘Perhaps he was waiting for the right moment,’ Tim suggested.

‘And when would that be?’

‘No idea.’ Sophie shook her head. Her curls flew around as if having a party, in spite of the drama of the situation. ‘Certainly not now. Apart from Miss Orley and Tim there are only comparatively unimportant people here.’

‘Fine!’ said Lynn triumphantly. ‘Then that means that we don’t have to evacuate after all.’

‘I’m not keen on an evacuation, if that’s what you mean,’ Dana replied calmly. ‘But I’ll do it if it strikes me as advisable. For the time being I agree with Sophie. Things will probably only get critical when the shuttles come back, which should be happening at about seven o’clock. At the moment it’s’ – she looked at the electronic display – ‘16.20. More than two and a half hours to look for the thing.’

‘Excuse me?’ Lynn rolled her eyes. ‘We’re supposed to comb the hotel?’

‘Yes. In teams.’

‘We’d be looking for a needle in a haystack!’

‘And finding it if there is one. Sophie, get the rest of them together. We’ll concentrate on places where a thing like that could be hidden.’

‘How big is a mini-nuke?’ Sophie asked helplessly.

‘The size of a briefcase?’ Dana shrugged. ‘Does anyone know?’

Shaking of heads. On the screen Sophie opened several windows with schema-grams and tables full of numbers.

‘At any rate, we’re not registering any unusual radiation levels,’ she said. ‘No increased radioactivity, no additional sources of heat.’

‘Because there’s no bomb here,’ sulked Lynn.

‘And the sensors cover every area?’ asked Tim.

‘Every accessible area, yes.’

‘We should address another issue before we set off on our search,’ said Dana. ‘In my view we’re not just dealing with a bomb.’

‘What else, then?’

‘With a traitor.’

‘Oh Christ!’ Lynn shook her head. ‘I thought Carl was the bad guy.’

‘Carl is
a
bad guy. But who re-edited the video? Who helped him leave Gaia on the Lunar Express?’ she added with a sidelong glance at Lynn. ‘Your father seems to have a very keen faculty of observation.’

‘You think one of us is working for Carl?’ asked Tim.

‘You don’t?’

‘I don’t know enough about it.’

‘You know exactly as much as the rest of us do. How is Hanna going to cope up here all by himself? Acting and blurring his traces at the same time? Why did the satellites fail when his name was mentioned? How much can we put down to chance?’

‘But who would it be?’ Sophie’s girlish face was filled with horror. ‘Nobody on the staff. And certainly not one of the guests.’

‘Hanna came here as a guest. A guest personally chosen by Julian Orley. How could he win so much trust?’ Dana studied Lynn. Her gaze wandered on to Sophie, and settled on Tim. ‘So, the other one, who is he? Or is it a she? Someone in this room?’

‘Utter nonsense,’ snapped Lynn.

‘Could be. But that’s one reason for us to search in teams.’ Dana smiled thinly. ‘So that we can keep an eye on each other.’

Hanna only registered that he was being chased after quite a long time. The last thing he had heard amidst the chaos in his helmet was that there was no longer any connection between Gaia and headquarters in London, or the Chinese jet. Hydra had discussed a few possible ways of paralysing communication from the Moon or the Earth if the situation required. Clearly Ebola had been active. Now they were only connected by the radio in their suits, or by the aerials of the rovers and the shuttle, although that required visible contact. The last voice he had heard was Locatelli’s, which had clearly been closer to him than the others.

Was
he
charging after him?

Hanna swerved around a small crater. The rover’s top speed was eighty kilometres an hour, but that was almost impossible to reach. The vehicle was light, particularly when under-occupied, and kept lifting off the ground, leaving clouds of dust behind. Somewhere in the washed-out grey the other vehicle had suddenly appeared, and it was quickly approaching. Either the driver had underestimated the particular qualities of gravity up here, or he was working from professional experience.

Locatelli was a racing driver.

It
had
to be him!

Hanna briefly considered stopping and blowing him up, but the swirl of dust wouldn’t exactly help his aim, and he would also lose time. Better to increase his distance. Once he had reached the shuttle it didn’t matter what became of Locatelli and the others. It wasn’t likely they’d manage to leave the Aristarchus Plateau, but even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to stop him. He had more than enough time left to carry out the operation and settle in the OSS. From there he could—

The right front wheel sped up. The rover performed a leap, landed crookedly, skidded along and wrapped Hanna in grey clouds. For a moment he lost his bearings. Uncertain in which direction to turn, he set off again, found himself facing the gaping depths of the Schröter Valley, and at the very last second quickly whipped the wheel around, saved himself as best he could. Clearly the only weapon that could be used against Locatelli was speed.

* * *

Dust. The monster that swallowed everything up.

Locatelli cursed. The bastard in front of him was whirling up so much of it that he had to hold back to keep from getting too close to him and dashing blindly to his death. Then, all of a sudden, it looked as if the murderer himself were driving into the abyss. He was just short of the edge when he regained control over his vehicle and whipped it on, whirling up clouds of tiny particles that glittered in their billions in the sunlight, as if the regolith were filled with glass. Darkness fell around Locatelli, then the clouds lifted. A moment later he saw the rover right in front of him with astonishing clarity. The subfloor had changed, asphalted terrain now, only a few hundred metres still to go to the Ganymede. Dark and massive, it rested on its beetle legs—

What had the guy actually fired at him? A tiny island of pensiveness appeared in the whipped-up ocean of his fury, a place of quiet contemplation. What in hell’s name was he doing here? What could he do to someone who was carrying deadly weapons and had no discernible qualms about using them? A moment later new waves of fury thundered through him, blowing away all his reservations. The murderer didn’t even seem to find him worth a bullet. He hurtled like mad towards the shuttle, brought the rover to a standstill under the tail, jumped from his seat and hurried to the lock shaft that protruded from the Ganymede’s abdomen like a monstrous birth canal. Only at the last second, with one leg in the cabin, did he pause and turn his reflective visor towards Locatelli.

‘You miserable creep!’ cried Locatelli, trying to wrest from the electric motor a performance that it had never managed before. ‘Wait, just wait!’

The astronaut put his hand to his thigh and drew the long, flat thing.

He finally realised what an unfavourable position his recklessness had placed him in. He saw himself through the eyes of his enemy, the cross-hairs practically painted on his helmet, one big invitation to pull the trigger—