“A thousand years of killing each other,” Celeste whispered back.
Her mother’s olive skin was bronzed from years of doing geological fieldwork, and her blond hair, now proudly streaked with gray, perfectly framed her high cheekbones and strong aquiline nose. No wonder their tour guide kept glancing her way. She was a striking beauty even in her mid-fifties. People said Jessica was a mirror image, and she hoped she’d look so good in middle age—but a part of her doubted she’d live that long. Making it to twenty-six seemed an accomplishment, and one against the odds.
“A fortification has stood on this mountaintop, at the western edge of the Chianti region, for time beyond history.” Nico smiled at a collection of three elderly couples, the other people in their small tour group. “The foundations are built atop ancient ruins. Three-thousand-year-old Etruscan caves burrow deep into the mountain below us.”
In front of Jessica, one particular dagger caught her attention—bejeweled with rubies and sapphires, its glitter was hypnotic. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
Nico smiled. “Ah, yes. 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. “The Medici was used to cut the throats of the last of the Albizzi.”
The tour guide watched the dagger a little too long, his expression just a little too fixated. Jess knew that look. She had her own fascination with weapons.
“In the next room,” Nico said in a loud voice, breaking his own spell, “we move up through the centuries…” He strode around the corner to the next display area.
Jessica took a long, yet covert, look at their tour guide—much to admire there—then paused to gaze out the window. Rolling mountains stretched into the blue distance. Dense forests covered the landscape, dotted with groves of olive trees and formations of the iconic cypress standing at attention. Oak, juniper, and thickets of fir trees grew 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 cottage many years before. Jessica pushed a memory from her mind, surprised by its sudden return, of a face disappearing into a black hole ringed in white.
Celeste stood behind Jessica. “So do I meet the exciting Riccardo? Is he coming 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 told her she had a special surprise.
“Riccardo and me, we’re done. That’s over.”
“Really?”
“Splittsville.”
Celeste retreated a few inches. “What happened?”
“I’m fine. It wasn’t serious.” Jess returned her mother’s stare with a wry grin. “I could ask you the same thing. How’s what’s-his-name, Dr. Frederick?” It was Jess’s turn to study her mother’s face. “Are you okay?”
Celeste looked at the floor. “He’s just a friend.” The edges of her mouth creased into a smirk. “Nothing serious. I’m fine.”
Jess’s grin widened into a smile. “Me, too.” She squeezed her mother’s hand and followed the tour guide into the next room, finding row upon row of muskets, revolvers, and a whole range of everything in between.
“The Ruspoli family were experts in weapons, building many of these themselves,” Nico explained, once the whole tour group had made it into the room. “Renowned the world over for their precision weapons, the Ruspolis were major suppliers of the Genoese crossbowmen that signaled the end of armed aristocratic knights in the Middle Ages.”
“So what is it then? If not the exciting Riccardo?” Celeste whispered to her daughter. “What did you want to talk to me about that I had to fly across the Atlantic?”
Jess gulped down the remainder of her fourth glass of wine, and set it down on a shelf near the entrance. The timing was awkward, but this was her mother. Slipping away to one side, free from the other people in the group, she spoke under her breath. “I got into some trouble.”
Celeste’s eyebrows knitted together. “What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that involves the police.”
3
Rome, Italy
Ben ROLLINS 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 motorcycle flying by just inches from his face.
A close call. 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. A fetid aroma wafted from garbage piled near the corner. The collectors were on strike. Unseasonably hot weather for Italy in early October. French-shuttered windows lined each story of the tiny alley up to three stories above him, a jungle of cables and wires stretching from one side to the other.
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, and that he needed him at an information session shortly. He hadn’t seen Müller in years before last night, not since Müller was his thesis advisor at Harvard. He’d heard the old man had gone into the private sector; either that or retired.
Apparently not.
Ben both loved and hated being in charge of the exoplanet group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Sometimes, the excitement ran through his veins, such as when he discovered one of the first planets orbiting another star in 1992—a source of some friction between himself and Müller—but ten more planetary discoveries took ten more years of drudgery after that.
Along the way, though, he’d become a minor celebrity, thanks to his television appearances that helped people marvel at and understand the universe.
In the last decade, 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 similar in size and orbit to Earth. What Dr. Müller had come across was definitely not another planet, and yet the data Ben had collected over the years could be useful to his former mentor.
Ben still had a headache.
The evening, before being hauled into the meeting, 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 around the world were assembled here in Rome, back at the place it all started—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. Celebrations, however, came with morning hangovers.
“So this is where you’re hiding,” a voice said.
Turning, he discovered the smiling face of Roger—the graduate student attending the IAU meeting with him—wearing 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 return the smile.
“The Grand Hotel isn’t grand enough for you to enjoy your coffee there?” Roger said, laughing. “Oh, man, you look terrible. Too much vino last night?”
Ben shrugged limply. “You know what it’s like when us old boys get together.”
“Sure, with extra emphasis on old.” Roger sat opposite Ben, his hands cupped 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.
“Will you make it to the morning seminars?” Roger asked. “Or should I rephrase—are you capable?” The IAU meeting schedule lay open on the table between them.
Ben gazed up at the thin strip of blue sky between the rooftops overhead. Was destruction really coming? 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 morning meeting.
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—dwarfs, red giants, black holes, dark nebulae—sounded more like fantasy than reality. 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. Rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, he turned and met Roger’s quizzical smile with an awkward grin.
“Sorry. Rome brings up a lot of memories.” He folded his arms. “And to answer your question, no, an emergency meeting has been called.”
“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 share his secret. “Something big must be up.”
“Bigger than the famous Dr. Rollins?”
Ben did his best to look mystified. “They invited all the senior exo-hunters, that’s all I know.”
“But not me.” A frown flitted across Roger’s face, before his smile returned and widened. He picked up his espresso, and popped a pill before taking a sip. “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 his student on the shoulder. “I’m late. Can you pay?”
His brain was still recovering from an excess of wine and lack of sleep, all wrapped in a tight fist of anxiety.
Roger picked up the program schedule. “Sure, it’s your budget, and in that case, maybe I’ll get some bubbly.”
The twinkle in his grad student’s eye said he was joking, but those eyes looked a little glassy as well.
“Thanks.” Ben squeezed the younger man’s shoulder and strode off down the alleyway, turning the corner to the Grand Hotel.
A uniformed doorman bowed slightly and said, “Buongiorno, Professore Rollins.” He stepped back to admit him and pulled open a large glass-and-brass door.
Air-conditioned coolness swept over Ben as he walked onto the thick carpet of the hotel’s entranceway. Glittering chandeliers hung beneath gilt frescoes. Hurrying up the expansive main staircase, past a menacing lion marble statue, he caught sight of an image of God painted on the ceiling. The Creator hurled bolts of fire down at mankind from the heavens.
Ben was grabbed by the shoulder, and spun almost completely around. A stranger had a look on his face as judgmental as God’s on the fresco above him. “Identification, please.”
A large man in a dark suit held him gently but firmly in place. Ben produced his IAU all-access conference pass. The man held up some kind of scanner, and Ben tried to wave his pass in front of it.
The man grabbed his hand. “Sorry, I need a DNA scan, Dr. Rollins,” he said as he pressed Ben’s thumb against the device.
“Hey!” Ben tried to pull away, but the man held him firm until the machine pinged.
“Apologies. Orders.” The big man stared impassively at Ben. “Step aside, please, sir.”
Complaining would be wasted. The man remained polite but firm, and Ben pushed through the doors to the main ballroom. Even more elaborate crystal chandeliers hung under dazzling sky-blue frescoes. Desks arranged in neat rows lined each side of the room. He chose to stand at the back.
Dr. Müller had already started his presentation. The lights dimmed and a projector displayed the blue-and-white NASA logo next to the bright red block letters of JPL—the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratories. The group of five astronomers from the previous evening had expanded to thirty. Many, Ben realized on a quick sweep, had been recommended by him.
“…everyone has heard of the Pioneer Anomaly?” Dr. Müller asked from the front of the room.
The scientists murmured their familiarity. When the Pioneer spacecraft—the first probes launched into the outer solar system—reached the edges of interstellar space in the 1980s, they accelerated at rates that could not be explained by the sun’s gravity alone. After two decades of guesswork, the commonly accepted solution was a slight acceleration from their internal heat radiating into the ultra-vacuum around them, but many were not convinced.
“As you know,” continued Dr. Müller on-stage, “we lost communications with Pioneer 10 at a distance of 12 billion km in 2003. We observed similar issues with the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they left the solar system and ventured into interstellar space, which we attributed to the same causes.”
Ben nodded along with everyone else. Common knowledge. Every space probe launched into the outer reaches experienced some form of the same thing. So did a number of comets observed at great distances.
Dr. Müller stopped to clear his throat. He picked up a glass of water at the podium, pausing to take a long drink. The image on the screen behind him changed from the NASA logo to a graphic detailing the spiraling paths of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2 on their journeys out of the solar system.
He put the glass down. “Several months ago, from a distance of over 20 billion km—five times the distance to the orbit of Neptune, our outermost planet—we began receiving unusual acceleration signals from Voyager 1…”
Ben had read about this in online journals, along with speculation about problems with radioisotope electrical systems, or gremlins in the ground communications.
“…but what has not been made public, yet,” Dr. Müller continued, “is a sudden spike in these signals four weeks ago. We initially attributed this to some kind of onboard system failure, but soon afterward, we had a similar spike in readings from Voyager 2.”
The old scientist adjusted his glasses.
“We know now that this was no anomaly in sensor reading. The Voyager spacecraft are, in fact, working correctly.” He coughed. “I know you are all familiar with the accepted solutions, but today I am going to explain how we have all been wrong.” He pulled off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand before looking around the room. “How we have all been terribly wrong.”
A murmur rose from the crowd in the room.
“What we now know is that a massive and previously unknown object is on its way toward us at extremely high speed.”
“Wouldn’t we have detected this in our radial velocity searches?” asked a voice from the left side of the room.
Ben squinted. Who was that? A young man wearing a knitted cap pulled halfway back on his head, his coffee-colored skin smooth, a scarf carelessly hung around his neck, silver earrings dangling.
Ben took a second to realize he was looking at Ufuk Erdogmus. He’d only ever seen him before on TV. After earning a fortune of hundreds of millions on Internet start-ups in his twenties, Erdogmus had turned that into tens of billions by founding the world’s first private space-launch company. Not bad for a forty-year-old.
Erdogmus was best known, however, for launching Mars First, a one-way, privately funded mission to send humans to Mars. The Apollo program took less than a decade from John Kennedy’s famous speech to landing men on the moon, and five years ago Erdogmu
s had boasted that he could do better. And he made good on his promise—just three years after he announced it, the Mars First mission was launched two months ago. A human crew, in hibernation sleep, was now aboard a one-way, three-year, long-trajectory flight path to Mars. The one-way part of the mission description was controversial, to say the least, but hundreds of people had volunteered for a chance to be the first to walk on Mars.
Ben had thought the project was madness; a suicide mission dreamed up as a promotional stunt for Erdogmus’s empire. But on reflection, he realized that real explorers of the past usually were on what amounted to suicide missions. We just didn’t have the risk appetite anymore—maybe Ufuk was right in what he was doing.
All that aside, what was Ufuk Erdogmus doing in this room right now? Then Ben remembered reading that he was giving the keynote speech at the IAU meeting. And regardless, Ufuk’s question was exactly the right question to ask, and the reason why the exoplanet people had been called into this meeting.
The search for planets around other stars used several techniques, one of them called “radial velocity,” which detected the “wobble” in a distant star based on the change of its speed toward or away from us. Radial velocity measurements were extremely precise. Ben could record differences in speed down to meters per second, about how fast someone walked, when measuring a star trillions of kilometers away moving at hundreds of kilometers a second. And it could certainly measure whether the Earth, and the solar system with it, was falling toward some nearby object.
Dr. Müller turned and smiled. “The answer, Mr. Erdogmus, is that we have measured the presence of this object. We just didn’t know it. This independent verification is why I have called all of you here today. I’ve gone through NASA’s own data and analyzed our ‘fudge factors’—and time after time, the signal is there, staring us in the face. An acceleration factor that we had previously attributed to dark matter in the nearby spiral arm of the Milky Way.”
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