Nomad (15 page)

Dr. Müller nodded. “Let me check again.” He stood. “Sorry, the network security team was overwhelmed today.”

Ben clenched his jaw and watched Dr. Müller wind his way out of the room.

“He does have a point.” Roger nudged Ben, pointed at the star fields on the screen. “Something that big, even at this distance, with Gaia’s instruments we should be seeing microlensing. That’s what you asked me to look for around Gliese 445, right?”

Ben nodded. Microlensing meant a tiny shift of intensity in the light coming from a star. A small black hole—small relative to the millions-of-solar-mass ones at the centers of galaxies—wouldn’t be big enough create a fish-eye kind of lensing. It would only shift some of the light away from the observer, making a star it passed in front of appear to twinkle. Teams around the world were processing Gaia’s images, looking for this signature, but it was maddening work. Every star had some small variability.

The door to the control room opened. Dr. Müller’s face appeared. He motioned for Ben to come to the door. “I have your equipment.”

Ben looked at Roger and shook his head. “Finally.” They stood and walked to the door, exited into the hallway.

“Here you go. There are instructions for logging into our imaging network” Dr. Müller gave them a folded sheet of paper along with their laptops and cell phones. He pointed down the hall. “I’ve reserved room 304 for your use.” He looked at Ben and pursed his lips. “Your emails and calls will be monitored. It’s the best I can do.”

“Great.” Ben grabbed his stuff and stalked off without looking back. He opened the door to room 304. Not more than twelve-foot square—two cubicles with workstations, and a gray couch next to the entrance with a flat screen TV on the wall beside it.

Ben turned on the TV and tuned it to CNN, while Roger opened his laptop to log into ESOC.

“You getting the feed?” Ben asked.

Roger held up one finger, waiting for the connection, then nodded. The newest images from Gaia loaded up, and bright pinpoints of starlight spread across his screen. They were linked into the satellite data feed from Gaia, as well as a dozen other ground-based and orbiting observatories connected to Darmstadt.

“Perfect.” Ben sat at the workstation to Roger’s right and opened his own laptop.

Roger looked over his shoulder at the news feed on CNN. “The riots stopped in LA. Maybe you helped. Maybe Müller knows what he’s doing.” He pointed at a headline scrolling across the TV’s display.

Ben glanced at it, then returned to logging into the ESOC wireless network. “Doubt it. People are in shock, acting emotionally. Random outbursts. To be expected.”

“Expected? You think this was expected?” Roger cocked his head and stared at Ben.

“Not Nomad, that’s not what I mean.” Ben typed in the password taped to his laptop. “I mean, through the magic of modern media, we’ve just told seven billion people that they have months left to live. Like we’ve told everyone on the planet they have terminal cancer. Classic seven stages of grief, starting with shock and emotional acting out.”

Roger grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. An “expert” was in the middle of explaining how the whole thing was a hoax. “What about denial?”

“That’s in the first phase as well.” Ben waited for the network to accept a connection. He opened his phone and turned it on. “Still nothing?” He flicked his chin at the Gaia image on Roger’s laptop.

“Nothing.” Roger shook his head. “Don’t you think they should have found something by now?”

Ben leaned back in his chair and stretched. “I don’t know. I mean the thing is, just like we humans somehow imagine we’re separate from our environment, we also imagine that the solar system is separate from the interstellar environment, but it’s not.”

He pointed at the star field on Roger’s laptop. “Sedna, our tenth planetoid beyond Pluto, was captured when our solar system collided with another star system a billion years ago. Thirty-five million years ago, the Earth’s orbit changed, triggering a massive ice age and asteroid impacts that formed the Chesapeake Bay. I’d bet it was caused by another star passing through our solar system, just like Scholz’s star grazing us only seventy thousand years ago. ”

“Four million years ago, a star three times the size of the sun passed a half parsec from it.” Roger had obviously done some homework. “And a million years from now, a K7 dwarf will skim us at less than a tenth parsec.”

“Exactly,” Ben said. “We’re intimately connected to other stars around us in interstellar space. How many extinction-level events have there been in Earth’s history?”

Roger scrunched his face and smiled. It was one of his favorite topics. “Five big ones that wiped out more than half the life on Earth, plus dozens of smaller ones. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, the Permian extinction took out over ninety percent of life worldwide. It was tens of millions of years before the planet was inhabited by more than protozoa.”

“Caused by what?”

An almost rhetorical question, but Roger played along. “Asteroids, comets, and volcanoes...”

“But the real answer is, we don’t know. What about a star exploding, a supernova, within a few dozen light years?”

“That would do it,” Roger agreed. “Irradiate the Earth and kill nearly everything.”

“With no warning.”

“Nope. Can’t outrun the speed of light.”

Ben pointed at a new image on Roger’s screen. “In our galaxy there are billions of stars, bright points we can see, but there are hundreds of millions of neutron stars, collapsed remnants of stars, that float around between them and are almost invisible. That’s what we know, but it’s what we don’t know that I’m worried about.”

“And that is?”

“Dark matter. Ninety percent of the material that makes up our universe, that makes up our
own
galaxy, is made of something we can’t see. All those stars”—Ben stabbed a finger at the screen—“there’s ten times more stuff floating between them that we can’t see, but we know it’s there by its gravitational signature, by the way the galaxies hold together. Exactly the same way we know Nomad is there, that
something
is coming. We detect the effects of its gravity, but we can’t see anything.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That we
don’t
know. Who knows what wiped out life on Earth before? Maybe we’re about to have a cosmic encounter with something we don’t understand.” Ben hung his head. “I’ve always had the feeling we think we’re wizards.”

“You mean astronomers?” Roger’s face twitched into an expression halfway between a grimace and a grin. “Like we gaze into our crystal balls? It’s called
scrying
, I think.”

“Right. We stare at patterns of light, and imagine that we can divine the history of the universe, even predict the future. It’s pride, pure hubris. Five big extinction-level events, but maybe this one won’t just destroy life. Maybe it’ll actually destroy the planet.”

Roger turned his laptop off. “Do you think it’ll hit us?”

“Doesn’t need to. We can’t see it, but whatever it is, it has a massive gravitational field. The Earth is like a giant water balloon, the solid crust beneath our feet just the thin, stretched plastic surface. If this thing comes close enough, past the Roche limit, the Earth will burst from the tidal forces.”

“No matter what, it’ll fling the Earth into interstellar space,” Roger added quietly. “The atmosphere would freeze solid in a few weeks.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” The connection symbol on Ben’s laptop winked on. He logged into his email. “We don’t know what it is; we have only a general sense of its path. Maybe it’ll miss the solar system. Maybe it will disappear.”

“Maybe.” But Roger didn’t sound convinced.

Ben scanned his inbox, flooded with media requests and colleagues requesting calls. But…there, an email from Jess, and not just one but a dozen. He opened the first one. “Oh, no…”

Roger blinked. “What?”

Ben read one email and then another. “Jess and Celeste didn’t get on that flight. They came to find me.
Damn
it.”

“Where are they?”

“I have an address. Go get Dr. Müller. I need him to arrange a pick-up in Rome. Arrange a military transport.”

“Okay.” Roger snapped out of his daydream, stood, but stopped and turned. “One thing, Ben. You said this was predictable, the shock and emotion. That this was the first step of grief.”

“And?” Ben chewed on his thumbnail. Why didn’t Jess take that flight? On the TV, an image of the candlelight vigil in the rain at St. Peters’s Square at the Vatican. Over a million people.

“What’s the next step?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Ben looked Roger in the eye. “The next stage is anger.”

16

R
OME,
I
TALY

“ANGELA POLIDORO,” JESS yelled into the intercom. “
Amici di
Angela.”

“
No, appartamento trecento
,” crackled the reply. “No Angela.”

“Please, buzz us in,” Jess pleaded. “We’re stuck outside.”

They hung up.

Jess cursed in frustration. It was dark out. Rain hammered onto the cobblestones in a downpour. A river flowed down the middle of the alley, plastic bottles and papers from the garbage piles clogging a drain in the middle. They buzzed all the apartments. Nobody would let them in. Jess tried to explain, but they spoke no English, and her Italian wasn’t good enough to charm her way past their suspicions.

“Sit down for a second,” Celeste urged. She found wooden packing crates around the corner and arranged them, upended, under a small awning next to the apartment entrance. It offered some shelter.

Shivering, Jess took Celeste’s offered hand and hopped over to sit. They huddled together. Jess wore only a thin tank top and jeans. Celeste offered her soaked sweater, but Jess refused, told her to keep it.

“We can’t stay here, we’ll freeze to death.” Jess’s teeth chattered. Clenching her jaw to stop it, she wrapped her arms tight around herself. It had to be past ten. No shops were open. Reaching down, she rubbed the stump of her leg. Not used to being exposed, the cold and wet made it ache.

Celeste put an arm around her daughter and laughed. “You wanted some bonding time…”

Jess gritted her teeth, but despite herself, laughed as well. “Not quite what I had in mind.”

“I know. Come on, let’s think.”

That was just like her mother. Jess wanted to kick and scream, find someone to take her frustration out on, but Celeste was more cerebral. She said Jess was hot-headed like her grandfather, Giancarlo. “We need to get in touch with Dad, that’s what we need to do.”

“No, what we need to do is take care of you,” Celeste said, her voice low and soothing. “Get you some crutches, maybe a replacement.”

Jess pulled away. She hated feeling like a cripple. She didn’t need anyone’s help.

“Baby, come on.” Celeste gently pulled her back. “I’m your mother.”

Jess relaxed her shoulders and leaned back into Celeste. She was right. Without her prosthetic, without even crutches, she was a liability. The humiliation. Worse, she couldn’t protect her mother; not even herself. “There’s a hospital just across the river,” she sighed. “Maybe we can get a taxi there. I’m sure we could stay the night.”

Celeste smiled and squeezed Jess harder. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No.” Jess flashed a tiny smile and wiped her soaked, long blond hair from her eyes.

“And where could we get a taxi?”

“Three blocks on the other side of the Piazza, there’s a main road.” Jess straightened up. “And there’s a pay phone at the bottom of the square.”

“We can call the police.”

If they got to a police station, maybe they could call Darmstadt. “And we could get to the American Embassy.” It wasn’t far, half an hour walk from where they sat. Jess went there to renew her passport a few weeks ago.

A block away to her left, another group of people huddled. Homeless. Surrounded by piles of shopping bags and blankets. What Jess would give for one of those blankets. Glancing right, a shape came out of the dark rain, two people walking.

“Hello?” Celeste stood. “Please, can you help us?” She took two steps toward the people, stepped out into the pouring rain.

It was a man and a woman, tight together under an umbrella.

“We have an emergency.” Celeste reached toward the man.

He shied away, exclaimed, “Ehi!
Non mi tocchi!
” his body language screaming,
Get away
. They hurried off and disappeared back into the fog of the rain.

Jess stood, balancing with one hand against the wall. “Mom, don’t beg. Come on, let’s go.” One of the homeless people, a young woman, came closer and stared at them. Jess stared back at the woman, then looked away.