Nomad (24 page)

As soon as they passed Zurich, they could turn on the phones. That was his plan. To get out of Germany, be far enough from Darmstadt that Dr. Müller wouldn’t be able to use the local authorities to stop him.

Soon, the news about how close Nomad was would be announced. Ben had left the LIGO data on Dr. Müller’s desk in the middle of the night, detailing their suspicions about the gravity waves confirming Nomad was a binary black hole. By now, Müller had to know, and soon, the whole world would, too.

But Ben had an edge of a few hours, a head start to get south as quick as possible to find Jess and Celeste. He hadn’t heard from them, not since news of the bombing in Rome. A hundred thousand feared dead, but the detonation was only a massive conventional bomb, not a nuclear weapon. It was the only good news Ben had heard in the past week. He hadn’t heard from them, but somehow, Ben knew Jess and Celeste were alive.

And he had to find them.

Twelve hours to Rome, that was the driving time from Darmstadt.

There was still time.

Time—a funny thing for a physicist. It didn’t even exist, not in the deep recesses of quantum physics where Ben’s mind often wandered. Time had no strict direction in physics, but in the real world, in the here and now, every second ticking by felt wasted. A moment that could never be regained. Every moment was precious.

Hundreds of thousands dead in Rome, but this was just the first raindrop of the coming storm. The world was already in convulsions, and when the update about Nomad hit the news, Ben was sure chaos would follow. He made his decision to leave the moment they deciphered the LIGO data, and discovered that Nomad would be here in three days.

Not even three days now.

He was obsessed with the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. He looked again and did a mental calculation: seventy hours and thirty minutes till their best guess at Nomad’s closest approach. Armageddon now had a date and time: six a.m. on October 24th.

Plus or minus an hour.

And plus or minus tens of millions of kilometers.

Neither NASA nor ESOC had managed to get a visual fix on the damn thing yet. An invisible ghost. If they hadn’t had deep space probes out there, they might not have even noticed it coming yet. Even surrounded by all our technology, Nomad might have dropped from the sky on an unaware world.

And maybe it would have been better that way. Maybe it was better just to die in an instant, to not to know what’s coming. The whole thing still felt unreal, but there was a sense of finality to it. Like entering a doctor’s office and being told you have days to live, with some terminal disease named. In the back of your mind, your whole life, you always knew it would end, and now—as terrible as it was—at least you knew how.

Realizing there was no running away, no escaping, Ben’s thoughts turned to his loved ones, to Jess and Celeste. Why had he kept them away? Why hadn’t he spent more time with them? Ben had gone through the stages of shock and depression as he sat alone in a bathroom stall the night before, numb and crying. Thinking of Jess, of Celeste, guilt overcame him. Guilt of not being a better husband. Of not being a better father. Of abandoning Jess.

If there was no escaping Nomad, he at least had to escape Darmstadt.

At 3 a.m., with only a skeleton staff on hand in the ESOC building, Ben had snuck into the press lounge and stole an ID from a CNN reporter. He stole the reporter’s car keys as well. Ben had never stolen a thing in his life, not even a pack of gum, and he’d never imagined that he would one day steal a car. What might he be forced into doing tomorrow?

Ben revved the engine of the reporter's rental car and stared at the back of the tractor-trailer in front of them. Both of their cell phones were still turned off. They had the car’s satellite radio tuned to BBC World, but the announcer was only rehashing stories from the previous day.

Roger’s laptop was plugged into ESOC’s satellite data network and downloading regular updates from Gaia and LIGO. His connection was anonymized into the Internet, but even so, Ben had only allowed him to turn it on once they passed into Switzerland.

Inching the car forward, Ben glanced at Roger. “Anything yet?”

Roger shook his head and nodded at the same time, his head circling. “Some amateur astronomers in Australia just posted a report about Neptune and Uranus shifting more than predicted…”

Ben nodded grimly. It wouldn’t be long until the world figured it out, one way or the other. Moving forward another few feet before stopping, he cursed and jammed the ball of his hand into the car’s horn. “Come on, damn it!” Seventy hours till Armageddon, and they were stuck in traffic.

“Did you find out what Ufuk Erdogmus wanted?” Roger asked.

“No, I didn’t talk to him again.”

“Pushy guy.” Roger buried his face in the laptop screen. “Guess that’s how you get to be a billionaire.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I guess.” He replayed the short conversation with Ufuk Erdogmus in his head. Had the billionaire been offering some kind of safe house? He said something about sanctuary. He should have talked to him.

And was it his imagination, or had Roger seemed to
not
want him to talk to Erdogmus?

Ben looked at Roger. He was surprised when Roger had scurried out of the ESOC building in the dead of night to join him. Roger still had his booking on a flight back to New York that morning. It was probably the last opportunity for him to get back to the States, but Roger had insisted he come with Ben, mumbling something about it being safer with him. Ben hadn’t argued and was happy to have him along. Stealing a car in the middle of the night scared him enough that his hands shook as he had tried to get the key in the door.

Their escape was uneventful. The half-asleep guard at the entrance hadn’t cared who exited the compound. He only had strict instructions on who could enter, Ben had guessed. Minutes later Roger and Ben were on the
Autobahn
, speeding south with dawn coloring the horizon. They didn’t need maps or GPS. They just had to follow the Rhine south till the border with Switzerland—not more than three hours—then cross past Zurich, climb through the Alps and drive down into Italy on the other side.

A piece of cake.

The first few hours were peaceful, the rolling pastures of the lower Rhine Valley steadily giving way to electrical towers and tram lines near the Swiss border. They sped along a clear road, under a rising sun and blue sky.

Ben held his face to the sun when he could, marveled at it, amazed at how much he took sunrise for granted. How much he might miss it. He might be witnessing one of the world’s last sunrises. As the sun climbed higher, Ben felt like he could sense Nomad rising up behind it—like a deep vibration in the flawless sky, the growl of the monster that would swallow the world.

“Ben!” Roger said. “I just got an email from Jess. They’re okay!”

Ben gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his eyes tearing up. His face contorted into something halfway between a smile and grimace. “I knew it.”

“They’ve gone back to that castle, the one in Chianti,” Roger continued.

“They’re not hurt?” Ben gritted his teeth.

Roger scanned the email. “No, they’re fine. Nobody’s injured.”

Not that Jess would say anything, even if she were hurt. “Good. And that’s two hours closer to us.”

“…this just in…”
said the news anchor on the car’s radio.
“New fighting reported this morning in Kashmir, with India and Pakistan threatening nuclear strikes if the other doesn’t back down…”

The truck ahead of them jolted forward. Ben shifted the car into gear. They moved a hundred feet, out from under the shadow of a fly-over bridge, before grinding to a halt again. “Damn it!” Ben grunted, slamming the steering wheel.

Glancing left, past the bridge, he could see that the highway wound all the way into the hills in the distance. The snow-capped peaks of the Alps shimmered beyond that. Reflections from windows of cars and trucks glittered all the way along the road. This wasn’t just a traffic jam, Ben realized. It was something more than that.

People might not realize how close Nomad really was, but they knew something was happening. People were heading for the hills, for the seclusion and safety of the mountains and countryside. Ben didn’t want to get
into
the Alps, however, he wanted to get
through
them, to the other side.

“That castle in Chianti might be the best place to ride this out,” Roger said, echoing Ben’s own thoughts.

“Being in the Alps might not be a good idea when Nomad passes,” Ben agreed. “Those jagged peaks could tumble like dominos.”

“And my best guess still is a closest approach to Earth of about eighty million kilometers.” Roger sucked air in through his teeth. “Plus or minus eighty.”

Ben grimaced. “If it passes under ten million kilometers, it’ll pop the Earth like a water balloon hitting a wall. Under thirty million, tidal effects will be enough to repave the entire surface of the Earth in magma. Nothing would survive.”

“But sixty, seventy million?” Roger glanced at Ben. “That might be survivable, at least for a few days until the Earth’s atmosphere freezes after we’re flung away from the sun.”

Ben stared straight ahead. A few extra days. That was the calculus of life now. Would the extra days be worth living? Of course they would. Nobody wanted to die.

“Eighty million kilometers will trigger massive earthquakes and eruptions, but a bigger problem is going to be water.” Ben pressed his face into his hands. “The Earth’s oceans are going to slosh around like a toddler having a fit in a bathtub. But it won’t start until Nomad is almost on us, not until the last few hours.”

Roger nodded and looked up, performing some mental calculation. “Ten hours away, at three hundred million kilometers, the tidal forces are going to start overcoming the moon’s. On the coast it’ll just seem like an unusual tide.”

“Five hours later, at a hundred and fifty million kilometers,” Ben said, thinking out loud, “tidal forces will be fifteen times that. Open ocean tides measure about two feet, but tides at the coasts are governed by geography of the ocean bed—New York has six-foot tides where London’s are eighteen. Some places will be worse hit than others.”

“And the surface of the Earth is rotating on its axis at a speed of a thousand miles per hour.” Roger circled his hand in the air and then pointed upward. “With Nomad coming from behind the Sun, it’s going to pull a wall of water toward it, and that wall is going to race across the surface at thousands of miles an hour, obliterating anything in its path.”

“We’re lucky the Mediterranean has some of the lowest tides in the world.” Ben had looked it up. Near Rome they were less than two feet. “And that wall of water approaching from the Pacific and Indian oceans is going to have to squeeze through the Red Sea and Suez Canal before spilling into the Med. This mountaintop
Castello Ruspoli
is as good a place to ride it out as anywhere.”

“One thing we haven’t thought of.” Roger tapped on his keyboard, then turned the screen to Ben.

“What?” Ben shifted into gear and advanced another twenty feet.

“I’m getting new data from FLARECAST, that new early warning system for solar flares.”

Ben nodded. A combination of orbiting and ground-based observatories paired with high performance computing installations.

“They’re predicting
massive
coronal ejections if Nomad gets as close as we’re thinking,” Roger said. “Like orders of magnitude bigger than anything before.”

“Of course…” Ben realized Nomad would drag the sun along behind it like a puppy on a leash, but he hadn’t thought through the implications.

“A few hours before Nomad gets here, it’ll trigger huge solar storms,” continued Roger. “Bathing the Earth in a flood of high energy particles.”

“That’ll raise ground voltage—”

“And fry power stations and electronics.” Roger breathed deep and stared at the laptop screen. “Should be pretty, though. Light up the sky like a Christmas tree.” He rubbed his eyes and closed the laptop. “I can’t read any more of this.”

Ben put the car into neutral and stepped on the brake. He looked carefully at Roger. “Why did you come with me? Isn’t there someone at home you want to be with?”