Nomad (42 page)

Metal screeched across metal. The observatory roof looked undamaged from the ground, but it was battered, dented. Slowly the dome awning squealed open as Jess frantically cranked the mechanical winch by the stairs. She had no idea how long the opening in the clouds would last. Could the Earth have been knocked over? No, it spun like a top, a giant gyroscope. Even if it was sucked away from the sun, the northern hemisphere would still point the same way.

“Where are you, my friends?” she whispered, barely hoping to hope.

Staring up, the dots of stars appearing as the roof’s mouth shuddered open. The tail of Ursa Minor rewarded her. And then Ursa Major. The simple pleasure of something so familiar tingled the back of her scalp. Something of her old world remained in this dark, alien place she’d been transported into.

“What are we looking for?” Giovanni asked, stamping his feet. On each breath, a white plume of vapor circled his head in the glow of his headlamp.

“Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,” explained Jess, “they’re all visible to the naked eye, but I really want to find Venus. It’s the third brightest thing in the sky, after the sun and moon. It’s what you see at sunset, at twilight before sunrise, the yellow disk that people think is a star. But it’s not. It’s Venus.” Even if they didn’t use the telescope, the observatory tower was the best place to get a view.

Giovanni shivered. “Okay, a yellow disk.”

Jess finished winding the roof back and walked to the telescope, inspected it. Not damaged at all. She wheeled the gimbals and it swung back and forth. Perfect.

Looking up and south, she found the Libra constellation, hanging just over the top of the dim black cloud bank. Libra. She squinted. At this time of year, Jupiter should be just in the middle of the four stars forming the base of Libra. She didn’t see anything, but she wheeled the telescope around.

Nothing.

Jupiter was gone.

Not gone, it had to be somewhere else. But where?

She looked further south. Venus should be just there, but it wasn’t. She scanned her head back and forth, looking for the shimmering red dot of Mars, the yellow disk of Venus. Nothing.

Giovanni tapped her shoulder. “I’m no astronomer, but…” He pointed behind her.

Jess turned. In the northeast, the sliver crescent of a waning moon rose over the black clouds. She smiled.

Old friend, you’re still with us.

She looked harder. It seemed bright, but was it as bright as it usually was? Were they further from the sun? Did Nomad drag the sun away behind it? The moon reflected light from the sun, the Earth occluding the light falling on the moon. It was still about the same phase as she remembered it from three nights ago. That was something, right? The pieces fell together, a small part of her world still intact.

When she was a child, she remembered her father teaching her all about the constellations, the moon, the tides, the sun. A gift whose value he could have never imagined.

Giovanni tapped her shoulder again. “And is that your Venus?”

Jess turned. A yellow dot near the horizon. “That’s Venus.”

She’s in Leo. The hair on Jess’s arm prickled. What the hell are you doing there?

The excitement of seeing the moon faded into dread. If Venus was all the way over there, where was the Earth? She swung the telescope around and looked through the viewfinder, pulling out the pad of paper from her jacket pocket and scribbling notes and star positions.

Half an hour later, they found Mars just as the clouds rolled back in, the crescent moon skimming the tops like a silver surfer riding black fog. In the beam of Jess’s headlamp, plump gray snowflakes drifted in a suspension of twinkling ice crystals.

Far to the east, the black sky lightened into blue, then pink. For an instant, the sun burst over the horizon. In the jumbled, broken courtyard, Leone and his workers stopped what they were doing and stared up. In the ray of sunlight, a single green leaf fluttered on top of L’Olio, the ancient olive tree.

The clouds closed up. Darkness descended.

Jess stood and stared at where the sun had been, an impenetrable haze enveloping them. It was the sun, but was it as bright as she remembered?

It seemed weaker.

Colder.

She blew on her hands, and returned to the stairs to winch the roof cover back.

OCTOBER 26
^th

43

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

SHHHH…SHHHHHHH
…RADIO static hissed.

Giovanni picked up the microphone and clicked it. “Say again, Jolly Roger?”

Jess sat across from Giovanni, her back to the rock wall of the cave, her leg stretched out for her foot to soak some warmth from the wood burning stove Leone had managed to kludge together in the main room, with a metal duct-work chimney snaking out the tunnel to the sheer cliff face. She fought the sensation of being buried alive. Even going topside, it felt oppressive, the darkness and ash and snow drowning out the world. Nothing lived out there. Nothing.

They hadn't found Roger. His body must have been swept away, or buried under the crush of rubble somewhere. The northerly wind continued to blow, mercifully bringing clearer air. A thick fog of particle and vapor still clogged the air, but it wasn’t as thick or oppressive now the wind blew away from Monterufoli. Clearer air, but colder. Much colder.

Jess had her father’s laptop on her knees, plugged into an extension cord connected to a generator running outside. The laptop’s screen was filled with a 3D model of solar system simulations he’d been running on software called Universe Sandbox. It was a detailed physics simulation of the entire solar system—all the planets, their moons, their rings, even thousands of asteroids and smaller objects. She hit reset, and the dot representing Nomad streaked through the middle of the solar system, scattering the planets and dragging the sun behind it.

“Jolly Roger, are you there?” Giovanni tried again.

The radio crackled. “…yes, mate…my name’s Leaming, engineer onboard the RNLB Jolly Roger out of Gravesend station, just south of London…”

Giovanni scribbled notes on a pad of paper:
Survivor testimony #GR14; Event +62hrs; Name: Aubrey Leaming; Reported location: England, undetermined.
He compiled a log of all the survivors he contacted.

This morning, at least morning on their clocks, there was a rush of excitement when Giovanni contacted their first other survivor group. Excitement and tears. They weren’t the last people on Earth. All digital electronics aboveground had been fried in the solar storms, but some older electronic equipment seemed to have survived, things like shortwave radios.

Giovanni leaned his ear toward the speaker of the shortwave. He’d run another antennae up the way up the tunnel, patching together wiring he scavenged up top, all the way to the observatory tower.

“…your location?” the speaker asked.

Giovanni clicked the microphone. “Italy, we are Station Saline, again, repeat, Station Saline in northern Italy.”

Jess paused her simulation. The Earth and planets stopped moving, frozen in space. She zoomed in, locked her viewpoint into the Earth, then panned to celestial north and looked for Venus. Her father’s notes were scattered on a pile of barrel wood beside her, the backpack open, the tapes and spools spilling out of it.

She pushed reset on the simulation, adjusted Nomad’s trajectory, and let it fly again, tearing through the middle of the solar system. Increasing the speed of the simulation, to one week for one second, she watched Mercury shoot away from the Sun as if it was fired from a cannon. Venus looped outward past Mars, while Saturn was dragged backward into a retrograde orbit, rotating around the sun in the opposite direction. The Earth, though, that was the key: in this simulation run it was dragged into a high elliptic orbit.

It didn’t look like it would leave the Sun, not entirely.

Opening a climate simulation tool within the software, she watched the estimated average global temperature of the simulated Earth. Normally, this hovered at an almost-constant global 15 Celsius. As the Earth in Jess’s simulation climbed in the elliptic, the global average temperature dropped rapidly, to below 8C, then started rising as the Earth dropped back toward the sun. 15C. 20C. 30C.

Too hot.

Everything on that planet was fried. She stopped the simulation and rubbed her eyes.

“Temperature here is…” Giovanni paused to convert from Celsius, relaying information to this new band of survivors he got in touch with. “…twenty-nine Fahrenheit and dropping. What is your temperature? Do you have cloud cover?”

He glanced at Jess. This morning, they’d even contacted someone in America. On a pad of paper beside him, Giovanni scribbled names, locations, frequencies of anyone or anything they contacted. Shortwave operated by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere, skipping them inside the Earth’s atmosphere, sometimes all the way around it. Atmospheric conditions were unpredictable. The ionosphere was probably still glowing. Communications were patchy and sporadic.

Still, Giovanni had spoken to pockets of survivors all over the world. Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Baghdad, Kampala, Nairobi, even Brasilia in South America. They hadn’t spoken to anyone in coastal cities, except this one Coast Guard ship from England that had somehow survived. Africa seemed to have been the least affected.

They were starting to piece together a picture of the new Earth.

Whole areas of the Middle East, India and Pakistan were destroyed by nuclear strikes, becoming irradiated wastelands before Nomad even had a chance to tear them apart. The radioactive fallout must have carried up into the atmosphere, mixing with the vapor clouds and ash from hundreds of simultaneous volcanic eruptions.

Temperatures had plummeted around the globe, although the fastest and most dramatic was in Europe. Clouds covered the skies everywhere they talked to people, and were getting thicker and darker as freshly opened volcanic rifts spewed ash across the continents.

“Temperature here is five Celsius,” the radio crackled, coming to life again. “Thick cloud cover, almost as dark as night during the day. How many people are you, Station Saline…?”

When Giovanni told Jess he found someone in America, she got excited, but this quickly turned to numb terror. A contact in the Pennsylvania mountains had detailed what he’d pieced together staying in touch with other radio operators when Nomad hit.

It started with a huge quake in the Pacific Northwest, destroying Seattle and Portland, sending towering tsunamis up the coast. The San Andreas fault had followed, laying waste to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, and then the New Madrid fault had devastated Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee.

This was only the beginning.

Power grids and electronics were fried in the massive solar flares just as the Yellowstone supervolcano had erupted. It had covered the entire Midwest, from Iowa and Montana out to Illinois and down to Texas, in two to four feet of thick ash, smothering everything. The final blow was a wall of water a thousand feet high that swept in from the North Atlantic, destroying New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami. Washington was gone.