Nomad

by Matthew Mather

  “That’s what happened.” Jess pointed at the screen. “All the other planets, Nomad passed at different distances than it passed the Sun, they all experienced a different gravitational acceleration from Nomad.”

  “But the Sun and Earth experienced the same gravitational acceleration?” Giovanni asked, still not quite getting it but smiling all the same.

  “Exactly!” Jess clapped her hand again. “All the other planets accelerated at different rates, so they were pushed in random directions. But not the Earth. The Sun and Earth were both pulled the same amount in the same direction, even though the sun is three hundred thousand times heavier. Pure luck of geometry. I mean, there’s a lot more going on, but that’s the big brush strokes.”

  “So…we’re saved…?” Giovanni said tentatively.

  “Look at the simulated global temperatures. Hovering right between 14 and 15 degrees.”

  Giovanni pondered this for a second before responding, “Then why is it so cold outside? It should be fifteen Celsius at this time of year. It’s at freezing and dropping.”

  Jess ran the simulation again, marveling at it. “That’s the ash and dust thrown up into the atmosphere. Hundreds of volcanic eruptions have covered the Earth in a thick blanket. We’re not getting much heat from the Sun.”

  “And the Gulf Stream. I’d bet that’s why Europe is so much colder than anywhere else. Nomad churned up the oceans. Those researchers we talked to in Greenland? Might have pulled off enough of the ice cap to disrupt the Gulf Stream.”

  Giovanni tapped his teeth together. “And so?”

  “At this rate, Tuscany is going to freeze colder than Antarctica in a few weeks.”

  Giovanni rubbed his face, nodding. “Then we need to get south. Most of Africa survived intact. It’s even raining in the Sahara.” He tapped his pile of scribbled notes. “And we have a branch of our family that lives in Tunisia. They have a villa in the Atlas Mountains on the edge of the desert.”

  “Have you contacted them?” Jess asked breathlessly. Sheer hopelessness had suddenly transformed into a bright, burning possibility.

  “Not yet.” Giovanni shook his head. “And Hector’s parents were in Africa. If they go anywhere, I would guess they would try to reach our family in Tunisia.”

  Jess glanced at Hector.

  “So we go south?” Giovanni asked.

  Jess bit her lip. “That’s our only hope. The Earth isn’t stressed anymore, so the eruptions should calm down. And it might take years, but when that ash settles, it will cover the ice in a black coating—”

  “That will absorb the Sun’s heat, start to warm back up.” Giovanni continued the thought for her. He balled his fists. “We have food, water. We have weapons and gold, and we have the Humvee and Range Rover in the garage I think we can salvage, maybe even the old Jeep.”

  “We need to move.” Adrenaline spiked into Jess’s veins. A plan. Hope. “The longer we wait, the more the snow and ash will make roads impassable. But how do we go south? Around the Mediterranean?” If they went around, they’d have to go through the Middle East. The nuclear wasteland.

  “No.” Giovanni shook his head. “We don’t go around.”

  “There aren’t icebreakers in the Med, and I’d bet it’s already freezing over. We can’t take a boat.”

  Giovanni pursed his lips and smiled. “We walk.”

  “We what?”

  “We walk. If it’s getting as cold as you say, then the Mediterranean will freeze over. I’ve done treks of hundreds of miles over ice in the Arctic. It’s a hundred miles from Sicily to Tunisia. I have sleds and equipment in storage above.”

  Jess stared at him. That just might work. She looked at her computer screen and frowned. The simulation had stopped, nineteen months from now. But she hadn’t pushed a key to halt it. What was going on?

  Giovanni was already on his feet, looking at the crates stacked against the walls. “We pack everything up, we could be on the road tomorrow—”

  “We might have another problem,” Jess said quietly, pointing at her laptop screen.

  Giovanni squinted and followed her finger.

  “In nineteen months, the Earth might collide with Saturn.”

  44

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  IN THE DIM eternal twilight of this new Earth, Jess stared across the twisted remains of the Castello Ruspoli, blanketed in ash and dirty snow, then out across the destroyed landscape below—the blackened valley of Saline, knots of frozen magma climbing the hills in the distance, steam and vapor crawling across them. Menacing clouds blanketed the sky, almost close enough to touch. Behind her, Leone and his work crew stacked crates and boxes inside the Land Rovers they’d salvaged from the underground garages.

  “So, we go south?” Giovanni stepped beside her, putting his left arm around her shoulder. They both wore thick arctic coats and gloves, all of it four sizes too big for Jess, but they’d managed to scrounge cold weather gear for their whole crew.

  “As soon as possible,” Jess agreed. Every day they waited, the ash and snow would get deeper and the temperatures colder.

  “Once we get out of the hills, it should warm up a few degrees, and more as we go south.”

  “Not too much, we need the Mediterranean to freeze over.”

  Giovanni nodded. “We’ll find a way.”

  “Did you contact them yet?” Jess asked. She meant his relatives in Tunisia.

  “Not yet.” Giovanni took a deep breath. “And the simulations? Did you get anywhere?”

  She shook her head. In nineteen months, the Earth would pass very close to Saturn, that much was sure. Whether it would hit the gas giant, that was still up in the air.

  Up in the air.

  Jess smiled grimly.

  The accuracy of her scribbled notes, the diagrams of Venus and Mars she saw in the sky against the stars, translated into a large margin of error in figuring out the exact path of Nomad, and thus the exact path of the Earth and Saturn.

  She looked up.

  There was no way anyone was getting another look at the stars from anywhere on the surface of Earth. That night she saw the stars, right after the event, was a freak occurrence. Now the entire planet was covered in a thick blanket, that much they’d managed to gather from talking to survivors around the world. It might be years before they saw clear sky again. For the next few years, Earth, and everyone on it, would be flying blind.

  Any satellites in orbit were fried by the massive solar storms, either that or pulled from orbit, so nobody was getting any more views from space. But NASA, or another agency, must have had a chance to fix Nomad’s exact position, speed and mass just after it appeared from behind the sun, before everything was destroyed. Someone out there had to have that data.

  From the information her father had managed to infer, Saturn and the Earth would come close, but it might be ten million miles, still a hair in cosmic terms, or hundreds of thousands of miles. But even a miss of hundreds of thousands of miles with Saturn was perilous. Its rings stretched out that distance, and its collection of dozens of moons reached out a million miles. To know exactly might mean the ability to get out of the way, to hide on the opposite side of Earth from whatever might be coming.

  But there was a way to find out.

  “We need to decode my father’s data.” Jess patted the backpack, the one she found sandwiched between the dead bodies of her mother and father. “And we need to find someone from NASA who recorded the event.”

  Now she understood why her father had gone outside. Why he had risked it.

  She’d read his notes. In those old tape spools and floppy disks were the exact coordinates of Nomad from thirty years ago. It would provide the long axis for Nomad’s trajectory and provide the last few hundredths of a degree of accuracy—enough to see what asteroids could come close, what might hit the Earth.

  They had detailed simulation data on her father’s laptop. The first step would be to decode the disks and tapes, and to get even better resolution,
to find someone who had data on Nomad from just before the event.

  But how to do that, in this wrecked world?

  Giving Giovanni a kiss on his cheek, she stepped through the boulders to the remains of the front walls. She stopped, clicked on a floodlight. It illuminated a placard atop a pile of rubble, a headstone: “Here lies Benjamin Rollins and Celeste Tosetti, husband and wife, loving parents.”

  It was all she could think of.

  All that needed to be said.

  And at least they came together, in the end, and now rested together. Forever.

  Jess glanced over her shoulder, at Lucca and Raffael swinging Hector between them, running beside Giovanni. She’d always scoffed at the idea of having a family, but now she had one to protect.

  And she would, to her last breath.

  Looking south, Jess squinted into the darkness, ash and snow falling gently over the tortured earth. Her father’s last words to her echoed in her mind—survive, no matter what.

  It was time to go.

  Thanks for reading!

  In the next section is the first chapter of Sanctuary, book two of the Nomad trilogy, now available for advance purchase on Amazon, just click here or search for “Mather Sanctuary” on Amazon.

  In the section after that, there is a discussion on current research into Nomad-like events, along with a YouTube video of the author, Matthew Mather, running a 3D physics simulation of the Nomad encounter. You can even run the Nomad simulation yourself.

  FROM THE AUTHOR…

  If you’d like more quality fiction at this low price, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Amazon. For self-published authors (like myself), the number of reviews a book accumulates on a daily basis has a direct impact on sales performance, so just leaving a review—no matter how short—helps make it possible for me to continue to do what I do. Oh, and please try not to mention that Nomad is a black hole—no spoilers please!

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  OTHER BOOKS BY MATTHEW MATHER…

  CyberStorm

  Award-winning CyberStorm depicts, in realistic and sometimes terrifying detail, what a full scale cyberattack against present-day New York City might look like from the perspective of one family trying to survive it. Click here or search for CyberStorm on Amazon.

  Darknet

  A prophetic and frighteningly realistic novel set in present-day New York, Darknet is the story of one man’s odyssey to overcome a global menace pushing the world toward oblivion, and his incredible gamble to risk everything to save his family. Click here or search for Darknet on Amazon.

  Atopia Chronicles (Series)

  In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world’s elite flock to Atopia, an enormous corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind’s insatiable appetite for natural resources. Click here or search for Atopia on Amazon.

  SANCTUARY

  Book two of the NOMAD trilogy

  1

  BANDITA, ITALY

  “SCATTER!” JESSICA ROLLINS screamed at Lucca and Raffa, motioning to her left and right.

  The two brothers stared at her, their teenage faces white even in the dim light. Clang! A bullet ricocheted off the open truck door, followed by another punching a frosted hole through the windshield, lodging itself in the metal screen behind the seats. Jess crouched lower, stealing a glance around the door. She looked back up at the boys. “Andare!” she yelled.

  That did the trick. Keeping low, Raffa slithered over the driver seat, opened the opposite door of the Humvee and disappeared. Shaking, Lucca climbed over Jess and gracelessly tumbled into the snow at her feet. Jess pointed at her own eyes, then at a pile of garbage ten feet away. One, two, she mouthed silently, and on three she swung around the truck’s door and squeezed the trigger on her AK-47 assault rifle. Pop. Pop. Two controlled rounds. She rolled through the gray snow, scrambling behind the mound of frozen garbage with Raff. Crack, and a bullet whined overhead.

  An ambush, the pile of car parts blocking the street just a little too neat, just a little too close to the bottleneck of encroaching buildings.

  Her intuition might have saved them. Jess had stopped short of the road’s choke point, but there was no easy way to back out, and who knew what nasty surprises might lurk if they did. Get to cover. Stop and assess. Gather tactical information.

  “Giovanni,” Jess grunted into her walkie-talkie in as low a voice as she could manage, sucking air in and out of her lungs, trying to control the flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. Her hand shook. “Do you have Hector?”

  The walkie-talkie crackled. “He's in the brick schoolhouse half a block back,” came Giovanni’s reply.

  Jess peered through the murk to see an arm waving, a hundred feet back on the opposite side of the street, behind the Range Rover and Jeep. Schoolhouse. It looked like any of the other shattered piles of rubble. “And Leone?”

  “He’s with me,” Giovanni replied. “What can you see?”

  What can I see? Jess almost laughed. Not much. In the dying light, dirty snowflakes fell from the indistinct soup above. Daytime was an eternal brown twilight, with nights so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The atmosphere was transformed into a murky aerosolized soup stinking of rotten eggs, the foulness burrowing its way into the brain and filling the lungs with coughing phlegm. The air itself seemed to suck out light, drowning the feeble rays of flashlights and headlamps, smothering everything in a pasty layer that scratched eyeballs and coated tongues.

  Her goggles off, she rubbed her eyes and strained to see through the semidarkness. The temperature dropped ten degrees in the past two hours, another frigid night descending. The Humvee’s headlights pierced conical pools of light into the swirling snow and muck. There. A head peered around a corner from an open garage entrance. The person stood and came into view, not more than a hundred yards forward.

  “Who is it?” Giovanni’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

  A second person appeared from around the corner, exposing himself. These weren’t professionals. “Don’t know. But they look like amateurs.”

  “What do we do?”

  Jess flicked snowflakes off her face and pulled her gloves back on. Two three-story buildings lined the street, most of the windows still oddly intact. The destruction was like that. Almost everything was flattened, with buildings reduced to piles of brick and steel, but every now and then a reminder of civilization stood unaffected, like the delicate marble statue standing defiant at this town’s entrance. The two figures doubled-over and ran behind the jumble of car parts blocking the middle. Whoever it was, they must have saw Giovanni exit the Range Rover and run into the school. Jess hadn’t fired back yet, so they had no idea if her party was armed.

  It was their ambush, but surprise was on Jess’s side now.

  “Leave Leone with the shotgun to protect Hector, and take Raffa and Lucca down the south side street, flank them.” Jess looked at Lucca, gripping his rifle in tight fists. She exchanged her AK-47 for his rifle and flicked her chin in Giovanni’s direction. Lucca nodded, crouched and took off at a half-run. “I’m going up to the roof. When you get in position, lob two grenades into the lobby of the red building. That’ll flush them out. You open fire from one side, and I’ll pick them off from the other.” A flush-and-flank maneuver.

  Static hissed over the walkie-talkie. “Jessica, are you sure? Perhaps we should offer something?”

  Jess clenched her jaw. The two figures peered out from behind the burnt-out car. “They don’t want something, they want everything. I said this was going to eventuall
y happen, and now it’s happening.”

  A hissing silence. “Okay. I have Raffa and Lucca.”

  “Good. Tell me when you get there.”

  “Jess, you’re sure?” Giovanni asked again.

  She closed her eyes and tried to take a deep lungful of air, but a wet cough erupted mid-breath. “Just do it,” she gasped.

  A pause. “We’re on our way.”

  Trial by fire. Her army consisted of two teenagers, the elderly Leone and the Baron Giovanni Ruspoli, who Jess suspected had never shot at anything more dangerous than a clay pigeon. Still, seeing another of their attackers peer carelessly out from the doorway ahead, these were scavengers. A few grenades and sniper fire should be enough to scare them off.

  She hoped.

  Jess slung the rifle over her back, tightening the strap snug. Keeping low she shuffled behind the Humvee on her knees and kept going until she reached the cover of fallen wall on the other side of the street. Stopping, she listened and peered into the gloom before getting to her feet and making for the drainpipe going up the side of the three-story building. She took off her gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of her parka, then blew on her hands and gripped the pipe to climb, pulling herself up onto a snow-covered ledge.

  How many days now? Seven since the destruction, since the Earth’s near-miss with the passing Nomad black holes repaved its surface, churned its oceans to submerge the continents and tore the crust apart to belch a miles-thick layer of dust and vapor to blanket the globe. America was gone, the Midwest torn apart and covered in a chest-deep blanket of ash from the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, the coasts blasted by thousand-foot tidal waves and rocked by apocalyptic earthquakes. Sea levels surged up as the glacial icecaps tipped into the oceans, drowning anything left behind. The Baikal rift had detonated, wrecking Asia’s interior, along with dozens of secondary-but-massive eruptions around the Pacific Rim and mid-oceanic ridge. In just days Europe—and the entire planet—had been plunged into a shadow world, the dawn of a dark new ice age.