Nomad

by Matthew Mather

  NOMAD

  Survivor testimony #GR17;

  Event +68hrs;

  Survivor name: Eveline Goff;

  Reported location: Nuuk, Greenland;

  Ah, where to start, my God…I was part of a University of Cambridge expedition, studying the aquifers under the Greenland ice sheets. Makes the bedrock slippery. That was the idea, you know? We spent a month trekking across the high glaciers, installing cameras and sensors, and were on our way back when the buzz about Nomad hit. We got into Nuuk, but all flights were canceled. No way of getting to Reykjavik, but maybe that was a good thing…(long pause) Sorry. Right. On the day.

  About 4 p.m., the ocean swelled right up over Nuuk’s sea walls, and it just kept coming, flooded half of the city, but slowly, like a foot an hour. Everyone just got out of the way, hoping this was the worst of it. By 9 p.m., the sea started to pull out, but much faster, and the Northern Lights intensified. They aren’t unusual. But these, they flared. By midnight it was almost as bright as daylight, and that’s when we felt the first tremor. I was inside, glued to my monitoring station readouts, not believing my eyes. The ground shook continuously, and the glaciers, they weren’t moving at feet per year, they started moving at feet per second, sliding down off the highlands.

  That’s when Piers grabbed me, rushed us into the helicopter, a terrible roar filling the air. Barely got off the ground when Nuuk was razed, ice boulders the size of skyscrapers sweeping the city into the half-empty bay. We kept aloft until we were almost out of fuel, maybe four hours, circling over ice shelves sliding into the oceans. Hundreds of miles of it from what I saw on the sensors before they went dark. We found a patch of high ground to land on, but there are still tremors, and the skies are black with ash clouds that came with the easterly winds. We’ve set up camp, been trying to radio for help. Do you have any idea how much water…

  Transmission ended ionization static. Freq. 4135 kHz/NSB.

  Subject not reacquired.

  OCTOBER 20th

  17

  ROME, ITALY

  PITTER-PATTER, PITTER-PATTER.

  Jess opened her eyes. In front of her, in the middle of a crabgrass-infested courtyard, smoke curled from charred embers in a low concrete urn. Windowless, red brick walls surrounded her on all four sides. She looked up. Waxy light filtered down from a gray sky. Water dripped from awnings above her, onto the slick flagstones and puddles by her foot. She tried to move, but her bones ached. Her arms were stiff. A throbbing pressure banged behind her eyes.

  “Mom?” she whispered, stretching her neck forward.

  She shook herself awake.

  Adrenaline sharpened her senses.

  “Mom?!” Jess cried out. The three old men, the goblins around the fire—where were they? She threw off her nest of blankets. What did they do to her? She didn’t remember falling asleep. Was she drugged?

  “I’m here.” Celeste appeared from the gap between the buildings. She held out a Styrofoam cup.

  “What happened? Where is…”

  “Massarra? She left early this morning. You were asleep against the wall, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  Jess groaned and stretched. The morning air was cool, but warming up, and at least it wasn’t raining. She took the coffee, smelled it, and took a sip. She felt its warmth slide down her throat. “Oh, that’s good.” She looked at the cup. “Did you get some money?”

  “A nice man at the cafe across the street, I explained what happened. He gave me some coffee and loaned me ten Euros. Said he could call the police.”

  Jess relaxed, letting a small grin creep across her face and took another sip. Her mother could still charm anyone. She stiffened. The police. Her grin disappeared. “And did you?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.” Celeste sat on a box in front of Jess and crinkled her nose in an awkward smile.

  “Maybe we just go to the American embassy?” Jess suggested. After last night, she didn’t want to risk spending tonight in an Italian jail.

  “The hospital first?” Celeste leaned forward to put a hand on Jess’s knee. “Get you sorted out?”

  Jess tried to imagine waiting to fit a prosthetic leg in an Italian hospital. “No, let’s get in touch with Dad, or at least, try, and then head to the embassy. I’ve got crutches. We’ll fix my leg when we get back to the States.”

  Celeste frowned. “You sure?”

  “Going to the hospital will just waste time.” Voices echoed from the street, the growl of a scooter rising and falling as it passed. The city was alive again. It was time to get moving. The night before felt like a dream, a nightmare, and Jess didn’t dwell on the past. “There’s an Internet café three blocks from here, on the other side of Piazza Navona toward the Trevi fountain. We can make calls from there, even get money wired, and it’s on the way to the embassy.”

  “Are you sure?” Celeste repeated. She leaned forward and knelt in front of Jess, put her hands on each side of Jess’s waist and held her. “Those men assaulted you, stole everything we had. I think we should talk to the police.”

  Jess laughed. “If you remember, I’m the one who assaulted them. They mugged us, but I don’t think they wanted to hurt us.” She poured more coffee down her throat, felt her joints loosening.

  “Jess, they took your leg…”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have attacked him. That was stupid.”

  “It was stupid, but brave.” Celeste squeezed Jess. “And he bashed your head against the wall. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  A jackhammer pounded between Jess’s temples. “I’m fine.” She squeezed her eyes shut and exhaled. “I mean, I’ll be fine. I need some water.”

  “You mean you didn’t get enough last night?” Celeste laughed. “You’re crazy, you know that? They could have killed you.”

  Jess grabbed the crutches and stood, giving the empty coffee cup to her mother. “They weren’t going to kill anyone. They were bullies, that’s all.” She piled the sodden blankets on the bench. So Massarra had left her the blankets? That was awfully nice of her. “Hope I busted that guy’s arm.”

  Shaking her head, Celeste stood as well. “I think you might have.”

  Swinging forward on the crutches, Jess moved into the gap between the buildings, then hopped along it. People crowded the alleyway on the other side, and all the cafés were open. She glanced at Angela’s apartment, half a block down, and shook her head. At the corner was a military Humvee. A young man in Italian military dress stood by it. The fear and uncertainty of the night before melted into the reassuring presence of other people.

  “Come on, slowpoke, let’s go,” Jess chided her mother as she swung forward on the crutches.

  They walked back across the piazza, crowded again with tourists and street vendors, and past the street they’d waited at the night before. Everything looked so different in the light of day. Alive. Gray skies hung low over the piazza, the air humid and still threatening rain. They hurried past a line of stalls vending Papal calendars, artists selling sketches of the Vatican and posters of the Colosseum.

  “It’s here.” Jess stopped under an “Internet” sign. A couple sat with a map of Rome spread out on a table outside, with another table empty beside them. Jess held the crutches in one hand while she hopped up the stairs. Inside, she nodded at the man behind the cash register as she sat down at a computer station.

  She logged in, then started up her webmail. An email from her father popped up right away.

  “Look,” Jess exclaimed as her mother sat down beside her, “it’s Dad.”

  In the email, her father apologized profusely, said they rushed him out of the hotel, that they needed to use him for media to calm people down. He added that they took his laptop and cell phone temporarily, as a security precaution, but that he had them now. Jess nodded. That made sense. She was just happy that they finally got in touch with him.

  “He said to stay at the apartment.” Jess turned to Celeste. “An Italian military attaché was s
upposed to pick us up, to take us on a private flight to Darmstadt to meet him.”

  “I guess we weren’t there to meet them.” Celeste offered a plastic cup of water to Jess. “Come on, drink this.”

  Jess took it and gulped the water down. Military attaché. The Humvee parked on the corner. That had to be for them. She typed a quick email back to her father, saying that they got locked out of the apartment, but they were fine.

  “Should we go back to the apartment?” Celeste asked. “Or up to the Embassy? We’ll need our passports, won’t we?”

  “Not to travel to Germany.”

  Jess’s email pinged. A return answer from her father. Get back to the apartment, he said, there’s a military transport, a Humvee, you can’t miss it. He added that the driver was instructed not to leave for any reason, not until he collected Jess and Celeste. Ben attached his Italian phone number, an emergency number for Darmstadt, and the contact information for the driver picking them up. Jess and Celeste read it together.

  “I guess we go back to the apartment?” Jess looked at her mother, then winced. Pain shot between her eyes, the pounding headache getting worse.

  “Sure, but let me chat with your Dad.” Celeste nodded at a Western Union money wiring sign over the counter. “I’m going to get him to send us some money, just to be safe. I asked the owner, he said it takes only a few minutes to wire cash from a credit card.”

  “Maybe we should call him?” Jess saw someone talking on an Internet phone next to the man at the register.

  “I’ll call him.” Celeste rubbed Jess’s shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down outside? I think the sun is coming out. Drink some more water, relax. I’ll take care of this.”

  Jess took a deep breath. “Okay. Perfect.” She stood, placed her crutches under her arms and swung forward to the entrance.

  Her clothes were just about dry, still slightly damp, and she could smell herself. Never a good sign. What she would give for a hot shower.

  “Cafe, madame?” asked the man behind the cash register.

  “Yes, please. And some water.” Jess held the crutches in her left hand, gripping the stair’s railing. “And do you have anything to eat?”

  “Croissant?”

  Jess smiled. “Perfect.”

  She hopped down the stairs and squinted in the brightening light outside. The couple was still there, staring at their map, and she sat at the table next to them. The sun poked momentarily through the heavy clouds overhead. Closing her eyes, Jess took a deep breath and relaxed into her chair. She’d almost forgotten about Nomad, but that was a problem for later, for when they met her father. And he would know better than anyone.

  Everything was going to be fine.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the couple beside her again. Holding hands. Leaning into each other. She thought of Giovanni, of her tour around the castle. She wondered what he was doing.

  A bright light flashed, a searing white that reflected off the windows and lit the sky. Jess blinked. Did someone just take a picture of her, pop a flash an inch from her face? The ground rumbled, glasses rattling on the table next to her, then a whomping concussion blew Jess backward, slamming her head against the concrete, a roar rising to overload her senses. A super-heated blast of air tore through the street, shattering windows, burning into Jess’s flesh.

  18

  DARMSTADT, GERMANY

  “STILL NOTHING?” ROGER asked. He sat on the gray couch of their improvised office, bouncing a plastic model of the Philae comet-lander spacecraft off the wall.

  A whole collection of European Space Agency spacecraft models were arranged on the shelf next to his workstation. He kept one eye on his plastic model, the other on images of star fields from the Gaia observatory flipping through on his laptop screen.

  But Roger wasn’t asking about the Nomad image search.

  Ben held his phone to his ear. Four rings, then five…“You know what to do,” came Jess’s singsong voice on her answering message. “Dammit.” He hung up.

  The driver sent to pick up Jess and Celeste at the apartment had called and said that nobody was there. The driver buzzed all the other apartments in the building, but nobody knew anything. He’d waited downstairs, in the alleyway with his Humvee, but no sign of them. The police complained about the truck blocking the alley, so the driver had been forced to move and park on a wider street five minutes away to wait.

  Ben checked his email again. Relief washed through him.

  There, in his inbox, was an email from Jess. “Thank God,” he muttered.

  Roger sat up on the couch, putting down his Philae lander. “What?”

  Ben read Jess’s message. “The girls got locked out last night.” He typed a quick response, telling them to get back to the apartment. “They’re just around the corner from the apartment I sent the driver to.” It was just in time—Dr. Müller was about to cancel the private jet he’d commandeered to get Jess and Celeste, after Ben twisted his arm. Literally.

  “Good.” Roger got up and returned to his laptop. “So they’ll be here, in what, two hours?”

  Ben nodded. “Something like that.” In time for the 4 p.m. flight from Frankfurt to JFK. Ben had tickets for the four of them, Roger included. He turned his attention to Roger’s screen, letting his mind return to Nomad. “Nothing unusual in the images yet?”

  “Nope.” Roger clicked some options on the visualization tools, clicking through different spectra. “If it was a black hole, shouldn’t we be picking up microlensing by now? Or Hawking radiation?”

  “When Steve”—Ben was on a first name familiar basis with the famous physicist—“proposed black holes as the invisible 90% ‘dark matter’ of the universe in 1974, I bet he never suspected the Earth would be the experimental guinea pig to test the idea. But a ten-solar-mass black hole would emit his Hawking radiation too weak to pick up at billions of kilometers.”

  “Nomad had to pass through the Oort cloud of comets and debris on its way into the solar system,” Roger said, furrowing his brow. “Wouldn’t any material it encountered be spun around it in a super-heated accretion disk? That should light up right across the spectra from x-ray to visible, right?”

  Ben shrugged, maybe.

  “If Nomad has been passing through the Oort cloud for hundreds of years,” Roger continued, “there had to be something out there it would’ve hit. Somebody would have had to see something.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Right?”

  Ben sensed the leading question. “Maybe.” If a black hole traveled through the Oort cloud, eventually it might suck in a comet or other object. Depending on the geometry of the event, it could create a brief accretion disk—a flash of light in the sky.

  Roger narrowed his eyes. “What’s in the bags, Ben? What did you get Mrs. Brown to courier to the hotel?” He flicked his chin at the backpack by the door, the white courier package delivered at the hotel just poking out through the open zipper.

  “Old data.”

  Roger stared at Ben. “I read that paper.” He raised his eyebrows. “That one you wrote in grad school.”

  Ben didn’t need to ask which one. The way Roger looked at him, he knew. But it was never published. “How did you get it?”

  “I’m trying to get my PhD. You don’t think I did a little digging on the guy who’s supposed to give it to me?”

  “Mrs. Brown gave it to you.”

  Roger grinned and nodded. “I told her I wanted to know everything about your research. You proposed evidence of a black hole hiding in our solar system’s Oort cloud using data from the Red Shift Survey.”

  “More idle speculation than anything else.” Ben leaned back in his chair. “Just a grad student with too much time and imagination on his hands.”

  Ben hadn’t told anyone else about the old data he had Mrs. Brown send him, but Roger was like family. Ben suspected Müller dragging him out to Darmstadt wasn’t only based on Ben’s media credentials. Müller was covering his ass.

  “Müller
was the one that convinced me not to publish, did you know that?” Ben asked.

  Roger shook his head. “How could he have known?” He stared at Ben. “Wait a minute. Do you suspect…what? What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.” Ben rubbed the back of his neck. Müller might be trying to cover his ass, but having Ben here was smart, too. It made sense. “Nothing. There’s no way he could have known. I didn’t even know. It was just a wild guess at the time.”

  Roger leaned in close to Ben. He pointed at the backpack and whispered, “So that’s the old Red Shift Data? Gliese 445?”

  Ben nodded slowly. “Not sure how we’re going to read it. There’s old magnetic drum tapes from the 70s, floppies from the 80s, CDs from the 90s…”

  Roger let his breath whistle out. “And who knows what formats. How could you even decode it?”

  “I don’t know. But what’s in there,”—he pointed at the backpack—“if that’s evidence of Nomad, it’ll pinpoint a starting trajectory, thirty years ago. Problem is, the data never fit theoretical models of a black hole accretion disk.”

  “But isn’t all the data in that paper you tried to publish?”

  “Not quite.”

  Roger stared at Ben. “Not quite?” He sat upright and pressed his lips together. “What do you mean, not quite?” He opened an email on his laptop screen, then began typing quickly.

  A knock on the door.

  “We’re busy,” Roger said loudly. He turned back to Ben and pointed at his laptop screen. “You gotta look at this.”

  A louder knock.

  “I said, we’re—” Roger started to say, but the door opened.

  A face appeared, smooth and olive-skinned with piercing green eyes above a manicured two-day-stubble beard, a brown knitted-wool cap set askew atop a thick head of jet-black hair. “Dr. Rollins?” Ufuk Erdogmas said, peering around the door. “You are here?”

  “Sorry, but this is a private room,” Roger said, getting up and standing between the door and Ben.