Nomad ripped the solar system apart, threw most of the planets into radical new orbits or slung them away into interstellar space—but because of the lucky geometry of the encounter, Earth’s orbit had only shifted slightly into an elliptic orbit around the Sun.
Pulling herself onto the second floor balcony, Jess paused to catch her breath.
Lucky.
This stinking hell was lucky. A mass extinction event as the Earth hadn’t seen in two hundred and fifty million years. Nothing survived. The plants, the animals, everything was dead or dying.
But not everything.
Like warm-blooded cockroaches, humans couldn’t be stamped out so easily, not that quickly. Everywhere, from the gloom appeared bloodied and battered human animals. Electric grids and most electronics were fried in the intense barrage of solar irradiation during the event, but some older solid-state electronics, like shortwave radios, had survived. Giovanni had already contacted dozens of survivor groups, and they started passing growing enclaves of people with generators buzzing, tiny dots of artificial light appearing like luminous mushrooms in this fractured underworld.
Jess reached the second floor balcony and stopped, straddling the railing to pull her gloves back on to warm her hands. Leaning out, she saw one of the scavengers coming out from the pile of car wreckage to take a pot shot at her Humvee. Almost everything was dead, yet we still seemed determined to kill whoever was left. Pulling off her gloves, she stuffed them back in her pockets and pulled herself onto the railing. Good thing she was an expert climber; a talent now more practically useful than she’d ever imagined it would be.
“In position,” Giovanni’s voice whispered over the walkie-talkie.
Jess hauled herself onto the roof, scanning it for signs of movement. Nothing. “One second,” she whispered back.
Reaching the edge of the roof, she pulled her rifle from her back and unscrewed the cover of its sight, dropping to her knees and then flat onto her stomach. She sighted down the rifle, focusing on the lead scavenger who had almost reached her Humvee. “Okay, in position. Drop those grenades.”
Slowing her breathing, Jess steadied herself, zeroing the crosshairs on her target. He turned, almost facing her, and her breath caught. Just a boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen. She gritted her teeth and centered herself. Still, he was trying to kill her, to hurt her family. From the corner of her eye she saw the shadows of Giovanni and Raffa lobbing what she assumed were the grenades. The crosshairs on the boy’s chest, Jess’s finger twitched, but she released.
Never give up, but never lose your humanity—her father’s last words to her echoed in her head. How many had she killed already? Jess shifted the sight down, at the boy-scavenger’s leg, and pulled the trigger just as a flash of light lit up the scene.
A whomping concussion was followed by a second one moments later, the windows of the building in front of her flashing as the grenades exploded. Glass shattered.
Screaming. A man ran out of the building beneath her, on fire, and rolled in the snow. Another ran out, his gun pointed in the direction of Giovanni. Jess swung her rifle around and fired, this time aiming mid-torso. Blood spattered and he dropped. Jess glanced to her right. The boy-scavenger held his leg, hopping back toward the wall. More screaming. An engine roared, and a second later a vehicle came skidding out of the garage entrance.
Jess had to blink twice, trying to understand what she was looking at. It had the body of a Volkswagen Beetle, but with the wheel wells ripped out. Large circular rollers with jagged spikes were welded onto the back axle, replacing the tires, with rudimentary skis welded onto the axles on the front. Skidding to a stop, the boy-scavenger hopped into the open door, while two more of the scavenger-men sat in the front-boot, firing randomly in Giovanni’s direction. Jess lifted her rifle, pulled a round into the chamber, aimed and fired. Her bullet dented the roof. The two men ducked as the driver accelerated, kicking up a spray of dirty snow. It accelerated up the street, disappearing into the gloom.
Just scavengers. Easily scared. She looked down. The man she shot lay motionless, a pool of black spreading around him in the light of the Humvee headlamps.
“Help.”
Was it that the man in the snow? Jess held her breath.
“Help me,” came the voice again.
Was Giovanni hurt? In a hushed silence, Jess strained to hear.
“Please, help me.”
No. It was coming from inside the building, and the voice wasn’t Italian; it was distinctly American-sounding.
Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca appeared from the shadows on the other side of the street. They looked up at Jess and she nodded. Yes. She heard it too. Stepping through the foot of snow and ash covering the roof, Jess found the stairway down. It was locked, so she chambered a round and fired into the lock. The door swung open. Clicking on her headlamp, Jess made her way down to the first landing slowly. It could still be a trap.
“Please, help me,” came the muffled call for help again.
Jess cleared the next floor, her stomach tight, constantly looking behind and up. Something about this was weird. It didn’t make sense. Even scavengers would have been more prepared, put up more of a fight. Clearing the last set of stairs, she entered the lobby and opened the door to the garage. In the light of their headlamps, Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca stood encircling three people, all of them tied up, hands and feet, to a radiator with bags over their heads.
“Please, whoever it is, please let me go,” said one of the tied-up people, a man.
That voice. Jess strode to the side of the room, toward the pleading man. Giovanni shrugged. “Go ahead,” he muttered, but she could see he already knew.
Jess pulled the bag off the man’s head and stared in open-mouthed disbelief. “Roger?”
Hope you enjoyed 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 next section I discuss the science and research work behind Nomad, and recent findings of other star systems that have crossed into our solar system. In the final section are instructions for watching the video of me running the 3D simulation of the Nomad encounter, with instructions on how you can even do it yourself.
FROM THE AUTHOR…
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Discussion of Real-World Nomad-like Events
From the Author
Matthew Mather
First off, thanks for reading Nomad! I hope you enjoyed it—and weren’t too frightened by the possibilities. Feel free to email me if you want to chat about it, my email is at the end of this section, and also on my website.
I’ve always been fascinated by black holes. I think it began when I was ten years old and watched the eponymous Disney film The Black Hole. The movie fueled my curiosity, and as a teenager I tore through black hole-related science fiction, from The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, to Hyperion by Dan Simmons, to Earth by David Brin.
The topic was as fascinating to me as it was to many others, spurring an abundance of books and short stories. Surprise, surprise, then, when I did some research and discovered that not a single book or film had ever covered the topic of the Earth encountering a medium-sized black hole. So, I decided to write Nomad, to fill that gap, but with a determined focus on making it scientifically accurate.
Before writing Nomad, I spent months talking to astronomers and astrophysicists to build up the science behind the encounter I envisione
d. At first, the physicists said the event would totally destroy the Earth, but slowly, I managed to piece together a physics-based scenario where it was possible life could survive on the surface—otherwise it wouldn’t make for much of a story!
It might seem that the events unfolded extremely quickly when Nomad made its final approach, but I carefully modeled the tidal forces affecting the Earth accurately in time and magnitude. Tidal forces are inverse cubically proportional to distance, which is why the sun only exerts half of the tidal force on the Earth that the moon does, even though the sun is almost thirty million times its mass (and four hundred times further away—so 400 x 400 x 400 equals sixty four million, and thirty million divided by sixty-four million gives us the one-half tidal force of the sun versus the moon).
In the end, I managed to convince a team of post-graduate researchers build a full three-dimensional gravity simulation of the entire solar system to lob my Nomad black holes through the middle of. All of the elements of the story—all the forces involved and the paths of the planets afterward—are based on real-world physics. If you want to see me run this simulation, and see Saturn and Earth on their collision course after Nomad, just search for “YouTube Mather Nomad Simulation” or click the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11yMkLUzCY.
There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of the ecosystem of asteroids and comets, planets and even our Sun, and that from time to time, an object may hit the Earth, or the Sun may flare, triggering catastrophic events. But what hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.
It might sound far-fetched, but it isn’t.
In fact, much of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars (still random, but on a much larger scale). In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years of distance. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static.
But it’s not.
In February of 2015, researchers were dumbfounded to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.
Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars. So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31519875 )
A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2125533/Global-warming-55m-years-ago-triggered-changes-Earths-orbit.html). And scientists now think that a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star.
Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun. Which leads to speculation about the root cause of some large comet/asteroid impacts, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about.
And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.
But they’ve found nothing. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe.
It was Stephen Hawking who first proposed that the missing dark matter may be in the form of invisible “primordial” black holes that were formed when our universe itself was created in the Big Bang (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/418126/why-black-holes-may-constitute-all-dark-matter/).
Primordial black holes might have formed when Big Bang created a super-dense soup of particles, with densities high enough to spontaneously form black holes. Recent research results using the Kepler satellite have restricted the size range of possible “black hole dark matter” candidates, but it is still a viable theory.
Some theorists think it’s possible that these intermediate-sized primordial black holes coalesced into the super-giant black holes that form the cores of galaxies, with the left over matter of the universe cooling around these to form stars. If so, some of these primordial black holes might still be wandering the cosmos, ejected at high speeds from galactic cores during the process of merger by something called gravitational recoil.
Perhaps farfetched, but perhaps not—truth is often stranger than fiction—and this is the story of Nomad.
I hope you enjoyed it, and that you continue the adventure in Sanctuary, book two of the Nomad trilogy.
All the best,
Matthew Mather
July 27th, 2015
PS: Feel free to email me with questions at [email protected]
For free monthly give-aways, advance reading copies of my books, low-cost promotional offers and bonus content, click here to join Matthew Mather’s community.
Or visit me online at:
MatthewMather.com/Nomad
Nomad Video and Simulation
To see Matthew Mather running a 3D physics simulation of the Nomad encounter, just search for “Mather Nomad Simulation” on YouTube or click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11yMkLUzCY
If you want to run your own physics simulation of Nomad, that’s easy too! The folks at Universe Sandbox have amazingly provided the tools to the general public. Just search for “Universe Sandbox” online and follow the instructions for loading their software (it is a full, 3D physics-based model of the solar system). The cost is $25. Once you have it loaded, click the top left of the screen to access the menu, then click “Open Existing Simulation, ” select “Fiction,” and click the “Nomad” tab to start the simulation. Or, just search for the “How to Run Nomad Simulation” video on my YouTube channel.
NOMAD
MATHER INC.
Tomorrow’s books today.
Copyright © 2015
Matthew Mather ULC
ISBN: 978-1-987942-02-6
Cover image by Damonza.com
This is a work of fiction, apart from the parts that aren’t.
Table of Contents
Thank you for downloading Matthew
Mather’s NOMAD.
OCTOBER 16th
OCTOBER 17th
OCTOBER 18th
OCTOBER 19th
OCTOBER 20th
OCTOBER 21st
OCTOBER 22nd
OCTOBER 23rd
OCTOBER 24th
OCTOBER 25th
OCTOBER 26th
SANCTUARY
Discussion of Real-World Nomad-like Events
Nomad Video and Simulation
NOMAD
Nomad Page 30