“Where are you, my friends?” she whispered, barely hoping to hope.
Staring up, the dots of stars appearing as the roof’s mouth shuddered open. The tail of Ursa Minor rewarded her. And then Ursa Major. The simple pleasure of something so familiar tingled the back of her scalp. Something of her old world remained in this dark, alien place she’d been transported into.
“What are we looking for?” Giovanni asked, stamping his feet. On each breath, a white plume of vapor circled his head in the glow of his headlamp.
“Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,” explained Jess, “they’re all visible to the naked eye, but I really want to find Venus. It’s the third brightest thing in the sky, after the sun and moon. It’s what you see at sunset, at twilight before sunrise, the yellow disk that people think is a star. But it’s not. It’s Venus.” Even if they didn’t use the telescope, the observatory tower was the best place to get a view.
Giovanni shivered. “Okay, a yellow disk.”
Jess finished winding the roof back and walked to the telescope, inspected it. Not damaged at all. She wheeled the gimbals and it swung back and forth. Perfect.
Looking up and south, she found the Libra constellation, hanging just over the top of the dim black cloud bank. Libra. She squinted. At this time of year, Jupiter should be just in the middle of the four stars forming the base of Libra. She didn’t see anything, but she wheeled the telescope around.
Nothing.
Jupiter was gone.
Not gone, it had to be somewhere else. But where?
She looked further south. Venus should be just there, but it wasn’t. She scanned her head back and forth, looking for the shimmering red dot of Mars, the yellow disk of Venus. Nothing.
Giovanni tapped her shoulder. “I’m no astronomer, but…” He pointed behind her.
Jess turned. In the northeast, the sliver crescent of a waning moon rose over the black clouds. She smiled.
Old friend, you’re still with us.
She looked harder. It seemed bright, but was it as bright as it usually was? Were they further from the sun? Did Nomad drag the sun away behind it? The moon reflected light from the sun, the Earth occluding the light falling on the moon. It was still about the same phase as she remembered it from three nights ago. That was something, right? The pieces fell together, a small part of her world still intact.
When she was a child, she remembered her father teaching her all about the constellations, the moon, the tides, the sun. A gift whose value he could have never imagined.
Giovanni tapped her shoulder again. “And is that your Venus?”
Jess turned. A yellow dot near the horizon. “That’s Venus.”
She’s in Leo. The hair on Jess’s arm prickled. What the hell are you doing there?
The excitement of seeing the moon faded into dread. If Venus was all the way over there, where was the Earth? She swung the telescope around and looked through the viewfinder, pulling out the pad of paper from her jacket pocket and scribbling notes and star positions.
Half an hour later, they found Mars just as the clouds rolled back in, the crescent moon skimming the tops like a silver surfer riding black fog. In the beam of Jess’s headlamp, plump gray snowflakes drifted in a suspension of twinkling ice crystals.
Far to the east, the black sky lightened into blue, then pink. For an instant, the sun burst over the horizon. In the jumbled, broken courtyard, Leone and his workers stopped what they were doing and stared up. In the ray of sunlight, a single green leaf fluttered on top of L’Olio, the ancient olive tree.
The clouds closed up. Darkness descended.
Jess stood and stared at where the sun had been, an impenetrable haze enveloping them. It was the sun, but was it as bright as she remembered?
It seemed weaker.
Colder.
She blew on her hands, and returned to the stairs to winch the roof cover back.
OCTOBER 26th
43
CHIANTI, ITALY
SHHHH…SHHHHHHH…RADIO static hissed.
Giovanni picked up the microphone and clicked it. “Say again, Jolly Roger?”
Jess sat across from Giovanni, her back to the rock wall of the cave, her leg stretched out for her foot to soak some warmth from the wood burning stove Leone had managed to kludge together in the main room, with a metal duct-work chimney snaking out the tunnel to the sheer cliff face. She fought the sensation of being buried alive. Even going topside, it felt oppressive, the darkness and ash and snow drowning out the world. Nothing lived out there. Nothing.
They hadn't found Roger. His body must have been swept away, or buried under the crush of rubble somewhere. The northerly wind continued to blow, mercifully bringing clearer air. A thick fog of particle and vapor still clogged the air, but it wasn’t as thick or oppressive now the wind blew away from Monterufoli. Clearer air, but colder. Much colder.
Jess had her father’s laptop on her knees, plugged into an extension cord connected to a generator running outside. The laptop’s screen was filled with a 3D model of solar system simulations he’d been running on software called Universe Sandbox. It was a detailed physics simulation of the entire solar system—all the planets, their moons, their rings, even thousands of asteroids and smaller objects. She hit reset, and the dot representing Nomad streaked through the middle of the solar system, scattering the planets and dragging the sun behind it.
“Jolly Roger, are you there?” Giovanni tried again.
The radio crackled. “…yes, mate…my name’s Leaming, engineer onboard the RNLB Jolly Roger out of Gravesend station, just south of London…”
Giovanni scribbled notes on a pad of paper: Survivor testimony #GR14; Event +62hrs; Name: Aubrey Leaming; Reported location: England, undetermined. He compiled a log of all the survivors he contacted.
This morning, at least morning on their clocks, there was a rush of excitement when Giovanni contacted their first other survivor group. Excitement and tears. They weren’t the last people on Earth. All digital electronics aboveground had been fried in the solar storms, but some older electronic equipment seemed to have survived, things like shortwave radios.
Giovanni leaned his ear toward the speaker of the shortwave. He’d run another antennae up the way up the tunnel, patching together wiring he scavenged up top, all the way to the observatory tower.
“…your location?” the speaker asked.
Giovanni clicked the microphone. “Italy, we are Station Saline, again, repeat, Station Saline in northern Italy.”
Jess paused her simulation. The Earth and planets stopped moving, frozen in space. She zoomed in, locked her viewpoint into the Earth, then panned to celestial north and looked for Venus. Her father’s notes were scattered on a pile of barrel wood beside her, the backpack open, the tapes and spools spilling out of it.
She pushed reset on the simulation, adjusted Nomad’s trajectory, and let it fly again, tearing through the middle of the solar system. Increasing the speed of the simulation, to one week for one second, she watched Mercury shoot away from the Sun as if it was fired from a cannon. Venus looped outward past Mars, while Saturn was dragged backward into a retrograde orbit, rotating around the sun in the opposite direction. The Earth, though, that was the key: in this simulation run it was dragged into a high elliptic orbit.
It didn’t look like it would leave the Sun, not entirely.
Opening a climate simulation tool within the software, she watched the estimated average global temperature of the simulated Earth. Normally, this hovered at an almost-constant global 15 Celsius. As the Earth in Jess’s simulation climbed in the elliptic, the global average temperature dropped rapidly, to below 8C, then started rising as the Earth dropped back toward the sun. 15C. 20C. 30C.
Too hot.
Everything on that planet was fried. She stopped the simulation and rubbed her eyes.
“Temperature here is…” Giovanni paused to convert from Celsius, relaying information to this new band of survivors he got i
n touch with. “…twenty-nine Fahrenheit and dropping. What is your temperature? Do you have cloud cover?”
He glanced at Jess. This morning, they’d even contacted someone in America. On a pad of paper beside him, Giovanni scribbled names, locations, frequencies of anyone or anything they contacted. Shortwave operated by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere, skipping them inside the Earth’s atmosphere, sometimes all the way around it. Atmospheric conditions were unpredictable. The ionosphere was probably still glowing. Communications were patchy and sporadic.
Still, Giovanni had spoken to pockets of survivors all over the world. Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Baghdad, Kampala, Nairobi, even Brasilia in South America. They hadn’t spoken to anyone in coastal cities, except this one Coast Guard ship from England that had somehow survived. Africa seemed to have been the least affected.
They were starting to piece together a picture of the new Earth.
Whole areas of the Middle East, India and Pakistan were destroyed by nuclear strikes, becoming irradiated wastelands before Nomad even had a chance to tear them apart. The radioactive fallout must have carried up into the atmosphere, mixing with the vapor clouds and ash from hundreds of simultaneous volcanic eruptions.
Temperatures had plummeted around the globe, although the fastest and most dramatic was in Europe. Clouds covered the skies everywhere they talked to people, and were getting thicker and darker as freshly opened volcanic rifts spewed ash across the continents.
“Temperature here is five Celsius,” the radio crackled, coming to life again. “Thick cloud cover, almost as dark as night during the day. How many people are you, Station Saline…?”
When Giovanni told Jess he found someone in America, she got excited, but this quickly turned to numb terror. A contact in the Pennsylvania mountains had detailed what he’d pieced together staying in touch with other radio operators when Nomad hit.
It started with a huge quake in the Pacific Northwest, destroying Seattle and Portland, sending towering tsunamis up the coast. The San Andreas fault had followed, laying waste to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, and then the New Madrid fault had devastated Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee.
This was only the beginning.
Power grids and electronics were fried in the massive solar flares just as the Yellowstone supervolcano had erupted. It had covered the entire Midwest, from Iowa and Montana out to Illinois and down to Texas, in two to four feet of thick ash, smothering everything. The final blow was a wall of water a thousand feet high that swept in from the North Atlantic, destroying New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami. Washington was gone.
America didn’t exist anymore.
It was almost as bad everywhere else. Coastal cities and any low-lying countries seemed totally wiped from existence, and the Baikal Rift, another supervolcano at the edge of Russia and China, had erupted as well, blanketing wide swaths of Asia under a thick layer of ash. No electrical infrastructure had survived, and all satellite communications had ceased.
“We are six survivors,” Giovanni said into the radio. “In mountains outside the Chianti region.”
Six people: her and Giovanni and Hector, Leone and his teenage workers, Lucca and Raffael. Their family was in the south, past Rome. Of course they were desperate to try and get to them, but there was nothing to do right now. The lucky six.
Or maybe not so lucky.
She watched the Earth in her next simulation, spinning out past the orbit of Mars, slowly freezing.
Crackle. Hiss. Giovanni twiddled the dials on the radio but shook his head and sighed. “That’s it, can’t raise them anymore. Maybe we’ll get them later.”
Jess nodded, hitting reset on her simulation, adjusting the trajectory of Nomad once more. She slid her foot closer to the wood stove. Outside it was freezing, but deep in these mountain caves it stayed warmer. Still chilly, but not freezing, and the wood stove brought a cozy feeling.
Giovanni had stocked the place well.
They had water, food rations, and survival gear of all sorts. A comfortable nest in the heart of a mountain. The only problem was toilets. Even after just two days, and a musky permeated the caves despite their best efforts to use buckets and clean up. Six human animals made a lot of mess.
How long could they survive? Giovanni had stocked up bunker-style supplies of food: rice, chick peas, cans, survival bars, and he kept one of the massive, fourteen-foot-high wine barrels intact and filled it with almost forty thousand liters of water. They could live down here for three years or more, if it came to that.
Three years.
The walls closed in, crushing the air from Jess’s lungs. She gasped involuntarily, trying to push the space back open in her mind.
Spinning the dials, the radio hissed. Then a voice—loud, clear: “God’s will has been done, as in the time of Noah and Abraham, as it is now. The great Devil of America has been wiped from the Earth, the scourge cleansed. The Caliphate will rise from these ashes and repopulate the Earth—”
Giovanni clicked to a different frequency. “Enough of that,” he muttered.
Propaganda broadcasts from an Islamic fundamentalist sect. Not that the airwaves weren’t full of religious zealots, crying and screaming, asking why God left them behind. But there were also the extremists, both Christian and Islamic. To them, this was a new beginning, ordained by God, and the shortwave broadcasts were full of these rants as well.
On her simulation, Jess lobbed another Nomad through the solar system, then paused it on yesterday’s date. She zoomed in to Earth point-of-view, spinning to look at the northern celestial hemisphere.
“Hello, hello, this is Station Saline, does anyone copy?” Giovanni said into the radio microphone.
Jess’s eyes went wide. She sat bolt upright. “Giovanni, you’ve got to look at this.”
“What?” He clicked the microphone with his left hand again, his right hanging in the sling. “Hello, hello—”
“GIOVANNI!” Jess yelled, pointing at her screen. “Look!”
Frowning, he put down the microphone and, wincing in pain, adjusted himself to slide sideways toward her.
Jess turned the screen to him. “Look at that.”
All Giovanni saw was a screen full of stars and the arcs of planets, the Sun glowing bright in the middle. “What am I looking at?”
“Venus, it’s right in the middle of Leo.” She pulled out the diagrams she scribbled the night before. “Look, it matches exactly. And Mars.” She pointed at the left side of the screen. “It’s almost perfect.”
Giovanni shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“This simulation I just ran. It puts Venus and Mars in exactly the right places, as viewed from Earth last night.”
“And…?”
Jess stared at him incredulously. “Don’t you see? Those two points constrain the solution. This is it.” She pointed at the line showing Nomad’s trajectory. “This is the path it took, the right mass, the direction. It matches observation.”
“And what does that do for us?”
Her hands shaking, Jess lifted one finger over a button. “If I push that, the simulation will run forward in time, show us where the Earth is headed.” The climate modeling window was open in the right corner of the screen, the average global temperature at 14.8C with the simulation paused. “We’ll see if we’ve been ejected into deep space, or will drop back into the sun, or if Mars will crash into us—”
“So hit the button,” Giovanni urged. She had his attention now.
Her finger hovered, shaking. Giovanni gently took her hand in his and pressed down.
The Earth and planets set back into motion, at one second per week of simulated time. Mercury was catapulted outward, Venus dragged away from the Sun violently as well, with Mars being pulled toward it. The Sun itself was dragged along behind Nomad, until Nomad sped away into space and released it. Saturn was dragged backward, into a retrograde orbit, circling behind the Sun. Just like Jess’s other simulation.
And the Earth…
Nomad pulled the Sun, but it also pulled Earth.
While the other planets were tossed around randomly, the Earth continued to orbit the Sun. Jess watched the climate simulation: the temperature dropped from 14.8 Celsius, to 14.4 and then 13.8…but then it climbed, back to 14.2. The Earth completed a full circuit around the Sun. Slightly elliptic, but well within the green-highlighted habitable zone. Jess stopped the simulation.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Giovanni was entranced.
“Running it again.” She hit the reset button, watched Nomad tear through the solar system, the planets scattering. But not the Earth. It lazily circled the sun as if nothing had happened.
How was it possible?
A mass forty times the Sun, passing half the distance from the Sun to the Earth, and the Earth remained in an almost stable orbit? Jess traced her finger along the path of Nomad, stared at the Sun and Earth, her face erupting in a smile. She laughed, clapping her hands together. “Yes, yes!” she cried.
Giovanni stared at her as if she were mad, but her smile was infectious. He grinned. “What does it mean?”
“It’s all in the geometry of the encounter,” Jess explained, pointing at the laptop. “The center of mass of Nomad passed almost in the solar plane, and passed the Earth and Sun at almost exactly the same distance, like a speeding bullet.” She took a deep breath. “Have you ever seen that video, where one of the Apollo astronauts, standing on the moon, drops a hammer and a feather side by side?”
Giovanni shook his head.
“The hammer and feather fall at exactly the same speed, they hit the ground at the same time. Same experiment that Galileo did from the leaning tower, dropping a pebble and a cannon ball. They both hit the ground at almost the same time. It doesn’t matter what the mass of an object is—a grain of sand or an elephant—if they experience the same gravitational field, they’ll accelerate exactly the same.
Nomad Page 28
