Nomad

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  FOR THEIR GENEROUS TIME

  in helping to develop the science behind Nomad, I’d like to extend a special thank you to:

  Dr. Kevin Rauch

  University of Maryland Astrophysics

  Dr. Ramin Skibba

  Space Sciences Center UC San Diego

  Dr. Seth Shostak

  Director of SETI

  Dr. James Gillies

  Research Fellow at CERN

  SPECIAL FEATURE

  You can enjoy this purely as an exciting story, but Nomad also comes with its own detailed physics-based simulation—the events described in the novel are based on real-world science. At the end of the book, there is a video of the author running and explaining the simulation, describing what happens. You can even run it yourself, if you’re so inclined, and feel like destroying the solar system in your own ways.

  Survivor testimony #GR12;

  Event +49hrs;

  Name: Dario Holder;

  Reported location: central Florida peninsula;

  What do I see? (coughing)

  I’m staring out the window of a wrecked home on Sugarloaf Mountain, the highest point in Florida…but Sugarloaf Island would be a better name, and Florida is gone. Just gone, like we’ve been transported into some other (static)…waves sweeping over…(crying in background) I see black water, endless dark skies, no day or night…gray snow is falling, a dirty blanket of it a foot deep between (static)…or at least it looks like snow. Only three of us left alive here, myself and two children, we have nothing to eat, no fresh water…freezing…send help…for love of God, please…

  Transmission ended in high ionization static.

  Freq. 7350 kHz/LSB. Subject not reacquired.

  OCTOBER 16th

  1

  ROME, ITALY

  “BIG ENOUGH TO what?”

  “Destroy the entire solar system,” repeated Dr. Müller, a sixty-something, pot-bellied man with thick spectacles below a tangle of gray hair. “And the Earth with it.”

  Ben Rollins stared at him in dumbfounded silence and rubbed his bleary eyes. “That’s what I thought you said.” He wiped his hands down his face to pinch the bridge of his nose between his forefingers, squeezing his eyes shut. Opening them, he brought his hands away from his face together, as if in prayer, and exhaled slowly.

  “Are you serious? Is this a joke?”

  “No joke. We need you, Ben.” Dr. Müller pointed at a chair.

  Ben stared around the wood-paneled conference room he’d been unceremoniously dragged into at three in the morning. Familiar faces, many looking even more haggard than he felt, nodded at him. Ben did a quick inventory: five people he recognized as fellow astronomers, all of them exoplanet hunters like himself. He didn’t know the other dozen dark-suited shadows hanging near the edges of the room.

  Taking a deep breath, Ben focused on Dr. Müller—his clothes rumpled, two-day-old stubble on his chin—behind the podium at the front of the room. What the hell was he doing here? And what did he say? We need you? Ben hadn’t seen, or even heard, from Müller in twenty years. He slumped into the seat, his mind still off-kilter.

  “In 2015 we discovered that 70,000 years ago, Scholz’s star passed through our solar system,” Dr. Müller said, continuing his presentation. “We now know that other stars transit our solar neighborhood every few tens of million years, some close enough to disrupt the orbits of the planets.”

  He paused to take a drink from a glass of water on the podium, his hand visibly shaking. “New data from NASA has uncovered that our solar system has been falling toward a massive object we previously mistook for dark matter in the nearby arm of the Milky Way. However, the anomaly is much closer than that.”

  “What kind of mass?” someone asked.

  “Perhaps tens of times larger than our Sun.”

  “Have you been able to image it?”

  Dr. Müller shook his head. “Thus far we are only detecting it through gravitational effects.”

  “And how far? What path is it on?” Ben asked.

  “That’s why I’ve asked you here.” Dr. Müller began pacing again. “I need to get access to your data; need you to assemble your teams.”

  “But you must be certain enough to drag us out in the middle of the night,” Ben persisted. “What’s your best guess?”

  Dr. Müller stopped to grip the podium and stared down at the plush red carpeting. “Our best guess…” He paused to emphasize the word, looking up to lock eyes with Ben. “…is that Nomad—”

  “Nomad?”

  “That’s what we’re calling it—whatever it is. It’s heading directly toward us at extremely high speed.” He enunciated each word clearly to make sure nothing was misunderstood. “We estimate it is now less than twenty billion kilometers away. At most, we have a year, perhaps only months until the anomaly reaches us.”

  Ben stared into Dr. Müller’s eyes, and a tingling of dread shivered from his scalp to his fingertips. He'd expected some answer, perhaps on the order of centuries and light years.

  But not in kilometers.

  And not in months.

  2

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  “A THOUSAND YEARS of family weapons,” Jessica Rollins whispered in awe. “That’s not something you see every day.”

  In a red velvet-lined display case in front of her, an array of ancient weapons glittered; daggers mounted side by side, and below them, a collection of swords. The smell of old wood and damp stone lingered beneath the pine-fresh scent of polished cabinets.

  “Yes,” replied Nico, the tour guide, “this castello has been the seat of the Ruspoli family for eleven centuries of unbroken succession.”

  Crossbows filled the next display case—ballista said the inscription—with strings and winching mechanisms intact, some of them intricately carved, some worn and workman-like. Several dated to the twelfth century, and below the weapons, inside the case, sat piles of crossbow bolts. Unused ammunition. A collection of pikes, the long spears infantry used to carry into battle, rested against the display cases.

  “Today we will be visiting the armory museum and family crypts below,” Nico continued. “But this is still a home.” He pointed to the window. “The red brick buildings on the other side of the courtyard are the residences of the Ruspolis when they come out of Florence in the summer.”

  “Over a thousand years,” Jessica said in a low voice to her mother, Celeste, standing beside her. She took a sip of white wine from the almost-empty glass in her hand.

  “Puts other royals to shame,” Celeste whispered back. “Even the Hapsburgs managed only what, six hundred years?”

  Jessica paused to admire her mother’s olive skin bronzed from years doing geological fieldwork, her blond hair proudly streaked with gray—still a beauty even in her mid-fifties. No wonder their tour guide Nico kept staring at her.

  Catching her own reflection in a window, Jessica had to admit that she’d gotten her good looks from her mom. Almost a mirror image of photographs she’d seen from when her mom and dad got married. Jess hoped she’d look so good in middle age, but a part of her doubted she’d even live that long. Just making it to twenty-six was an accomplishment.

  “A fortification has stood on this mountaintop, at the western edge of the Chianti region, for time beyond history.” Nico smiled at an elderly couple, the only other people in their small tour group. “The original foundations are built atop ruins that date back thousands of years.
The wine cellars are built in three-thousand-year-old Etruscan caves that burrow deep into the mountain below us.”

  In front of Jessica, one particular dagger caught her attention—bejeweled with rubies and sapphires, its glitter hypnotic. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered under her breath.

  Nico, the tour guide, heard her and smiled. “Ah, the Medici dagger. A gift to the Baroness Ruspoli by the Medici family in 1434 following the Ciompi revolts in Florence, for their support in defeating the Albizzi family.” He paused, allowing the group to have a closer look. “In the next room,” Nico continued in a loud voice, walking around the corner, “we move up through the centuries…”

  Jessica stopped to look out the window. Rolling mountains stretched into the blue distance. Dense green forests covered the landscape, of course with groves of olive trees and iconic cypress standing at attention, but also oak, juniper, and thickets of fir trees amid the bursting lines of grape vines. Nothing like the dusty roads and baked orange hills most people imagined of Tuscany. More like the mountains of the Catskills in upstate New York where she grew up, where her family had their own cottage, or did have, far back in time. Jessica pushed a memory from her mind, of a face disappearing into a black hole ringed in white.

  Celeste stood behind Jessica. “So when can I meet Ricardo?” she asked. “Is he coming out to meet us? Is this the big secret?”

  Her mother had flown in from JFK and landed the previous morning at Fiumicino, Rome’s main airport. Jessica had said she had a special surprise.

  Jessica took a deep breath. “No, you’re not going to meet Ricardo. That’s over.” She couldn’t tell her mother the real reason she dragged her out here. Not yet.

  “Over?”

  “Over. I broke up with him.”

  “You’re a wandering nomad, you know that, Jess?” Her mother’s lips pressed tightly together. “When are you going to settle down?”

  “Settle?” Jess clucked. “Mom, please…I’m happy. I like my life.”

  Celeste winced, crinkling her nose. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

  Jess exhaled, silently counting to five. Maybe this was a mistake. “It’s okay,” she muttered, turning from the window. She followed the tour guide into the next room, finding row upon row of muskets, revolvers, and a whole range of everything in between.

  Celeste came up behind Jess and caught the look in her eye. “Your favorite,” her mother whispered, “guns.”

  Jess contained herself this time, trying to ignore the passive aggressive tone. “I’m done with all that,” she whispered back, but they both knew it wasn’t true.

  “The Ruspoli family were experts in weapons, building many of these themselves,” Nico explained, seeing all four of his tour group had made it into the room. “From the Dark Ages, through the Renaissance and up to the late 19th century, the Ruspolis operated their own gun smithy. Renowned the world over for their precision weapons, they were major suppliers of the Genoese crossbowmen that signaled the end of armed aristocratic knights in the Middle Ages.”

  Celeste pursed her lips and changed topics. “So what did you want to talk to me about at brunch?”

  Jess sighed. It had taken three glasses of prosecco at brunch for her to bring up her problem, but she was interrupted by the announcement of the start of the crypt tour. Jess gulped down the remainder of her fourth glass of wine and put it down on a shelf near the entrance. She was drunk, just as she'd hoped she would be. Pulling her mother away from the other people in the tour group, she said under her breath, “I’m in trouble.”

  Celeste knitted her eyebrows together. “What kind of trouble?”

  “The kind that involves me going to jail.”

  3

  ROME, ITALY

  BEN SETTLED INTO his chair, putting his espresso down on the café table. Behind him a buzzing growl erupted, and he turned to see a scooter loaded with two riders, one of them clutching a brown bag of groceries, roaring toward him. He flinched backward, the mirror of the scooter flying just inches from his face.

  A close call. A near miss. But he was none the worse for it, except for a jolt of adrenaline to go with his caffeine.

  Shifting his seat closer to the wall, Ben watched the scooter disappear down the cobbled street in a haze of blue exhaust. In the stifling air, a fetid aroma wafted from garbage piled near the corner. The collectors were on strike. Unseasonably hot weather for Italy in early October. Looking up, he admired the French-shuttered windows lining each story of the tiny alley up to three stories above him, cables and wires stretched like jungle vines from one side to the other with a thin blue strip of sky beyond that. A flock of birds fluttered across the rooftops.

  If there were ever a day for alcohol at breakfast, today was that day, but Ben kept to coffee. The meeting the night before had been short, with Dr. Müller giving precious little information except that he needed Ben to help assemble a trusted group.

  Ben hadn’t seen Müller in years before last night, not since Müller was his thesis advisor at Harvard. Ben heard the old man had gone into the private sector; either that or retired. Apparently not.

  Dr. Müller wanted Ben’s data; that’s why he needed him. Ben both loved and hated being in charge of the exoplanet group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Sometimes there was excitement, like when he co-discovered one of the first planets orbiting another star in 1992. But ten more planetary discoveries took ten more years of drudgery after that.

  In the last decade, though, the floodgates had opened with the development of new telescopes and sensing systems. Now the list of exoplanets—planets that orbited stars other than our Sun—stretched into the many thousands, with dozens of them similar in size and orbit to Earth. What they were looking for now wasn’t a planet, but a lot of the data they’d collected could be used for what Dr. Müller needed.

  Ben still had a headache.

  The night before had been a celebration of sorts. This year was a big event for the International Astronomical Union, one hundred years since its inception. Five thousand astronomers and physicists from all over the world assembled here in Rome, back at the place it all started—in Italy four hundred years ago when Galileo turned his telescope skyward and championed the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

  “So this is where you’re hiding,” said someone behind Ben.

  Turning, he discovered the smiling face of Roger—the graduate student attending the IAU meeting with him—looking down at him with a quirky grin. Dr. Müller had made it clear that only a small group of senior people was to be included at this point, so Ben couldn’t say anything to Roger yet. He did his best to smile.

  “What, the Grand Hotel isn’t grand enough for you to enjoy your coffee there?” Roger said, laughing. “You look terrible. Too much vino last night?”

  “Maybe.” Ben shrugged limply. “You know what it’s like when us old boys get together.”

  “Sure.” Roger sat opposite Ben, his hands wide apart on the table. A white-aproned waiter wheeled out of the café entrance and Roger mouthed, “Espresso,” while pointing at Ben’s empty cup and saucer.

  Ben held up a finger, requesting his third. The waiter nodded and turned back.

  “Are you going to the seminars this morning?” Roger asked, pointing at the IAU meeting schedule open on the table between them.

  Ben stared at the thin strip of blue sky between the rooftops overhead. Was destruction really coming? With dozens of countries with active space programs, hundreds of spacecraft and telescopes peering into space, how could it be possible to miss something like this? Did this thing suddenly appear from nowhere? It seemed impossible, but Dr. Müller promised more answers at the meeting later this morning.

  Even after thirty years as a professional astrophysicist, Ben was amazed at the detail of the universe that humans had managed to construct, all by staring up into the sky and by peering through tiny devices. A collection of fantastical objects—dwar
fs, red giants, black holes, dark nebulae—sounded more like fantasy than reality. But it seemed the fantasy was about to deliver a cold dose of reality.

  “Earth to Ben. Are you going to the seminars this morning or not?”

  Ben caught himself staring up, lost in thought. Rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, he turned and met Roger’s quizzical smile with an awkward grin.

  “Sorry, coming back to Rome brings up a lot of memories. I honeymooned here.” He folded his arms. “And to answer your question, no, an emergency meeting was called last night.”

  “An emergency meeting? At the Union?” Roger snorted. “What, they want to turn Pluto back into a planet?”

  The waiter appeared as if by magic and hovered over the table. He delivered their two espressos before vanishing again.

  Ben picked up his cup and took a sip, resisting a strong urge to spill the beans. “Something big must be up.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben did his best to look mystified. “They invited all the senior exo-hunters, that’s all I know.”

  “And they didn’t invite me?” A frown flitted across Roger’s face, but his smile returned and widened. He picked up his espresso. “Must be above my pay grade.”

  “Must be,” Ben agreed grimly. This was above everyone’s pay grade. He finished off this third espresso, savoring the richness, and tapped his cell phone screen. Swearing under his breath, Ben stood and patted Roger on the shoulder. “And I’m late. Can you pay?” His brain was still recovering from an excess of wine and lack of sleep, all of that wrapped in a tight fist of anxiety.

  Roger nodded and picked up the program schedule. “Sure, it’s your expense budget.”

  “Thanks.” Ben squeezed Roger’s shoulder and strode off down the alleyway, turning the corner to the Grand Hotel.