Nomad (43 page)

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.

“That’s what happened.” Jess pointed at the screen. “All the other planets, Nomad passed at different distances than it passed the Sun, they all experienced a different gravitational acceleration from Nomad.”

“But the Sun and Earth experienced the same gravitational acceleration?” Giovanni asked, still not quite getting it but smiling all the same.

“Exactly!” Jess clapped her hand again. “All the other planets accelerated at different rates, so they were pushed in random directions. But not the Earth. The Sun and Earth were both pulled the same amount in the same direction, even though the sun is three hundred thousand times heavier. Pure luck of geometry. I mean, there’s a lot more going on, but that’s the big brush strokes.”

“So…we’re saved…?” Giovanni said tentatively.

“Look at the simulated global temperatures. Hovering right between 14 and 15 degrees.”

Giovanni pondered this for a second before responding, “Then why is it so cold outside? It should be fifteen Celsius at this time of year. It’s at freezing and dropping.”

Jess ran the simulation again, marveling at it. “That’s the ash and dust thrown up into the atmosphere. Hundreds of volcanic eruptions have covered the Earth in a thick blanket. We’re not getting much heat from the Sun.”

“And the Gulf Stream. I’d bet that’s why Europe is so much colder than anywhere else. Nomad churned up the oceans. Those researchers we talked to in Greenland? Might have pulled off enough of the ice cap to disrupt the Gulf Stream.”

Giovanni tapped his teeth together. “And so?”

“At this rate, Tuscany is going to freeze colder than Antarctica in a few weeks.”

Giovanni rubbed his face, nodding. “Then we need to get south. Most of Africa survived intact. It’s even raining in the Sahara.” He tapped his pile of scribbled notes. “And we have a branch of our family that lives in Tunisia. They have a villa in the Atlas Mountains on the edge of the desert.”

“Have you contacted them?” Jess asked breathlessly. Sheer hopelessness had suddenly transformed into a bright, burning possibility.

“Not yet.” Giovanni shook his head. “And Hector’s parents were in Africa. If they go anywhere, I would guess they would try to reach our family in Tunisia.”

Jess glanced at Hector.

“So we go south?” Giovanni asked.

Jess bit her lip. “That’s our only hope. The Earth isn’t stressed anymore, so the eruptions should calm down. And it might take years, but when that ash settles, it will cover the ice in a black coating—”

“That will absorb the Sun’s heat, start to warm back up.” Giovanni continued the thought for her. He balled his fists. “We have food, water. We have weapons and gold, and we have the Humvee and Range Rover in the garage I think we can salvage, maybe even the old Jeep.”

“We need to move.” Adrenaline spiked into Jess’s veins. A plan.
Hope.
“The longer we wait, the more the snow and ash will make roads impassable. But how do we go south? Around the Mediterranean?” If they went around, they’d have to go through the Middle East. The nuclear wasteland.

“No.” Giovanni shook his head. “We don’t go around.”

“There aren’t icebreakers in the Med, and I’d bet it’s already freezing over. We can’t take a boat.”

Giovanni pursed his lips and smiled. “We walk.”

“We what?”

“We walk. If it’s getting as cold as you say, then the Mediterranean will freeze over. I’ve done treks of hundreds of miles over ice in the Arctic. It’s a hundred miles from Sicily to Tunisia. I have sleds and equipment in storage above.”

Jess stared at him. That just might work. She looked at her computer screen and frowned. The simulation had stopped, nineteen months from now. But she hadn’t pushed a key to halt it. What was going on?

Giovanni was already on his feet, looking at the crates stacked against the walls. “We pack everything up, we could be on the road tomorrow—”

“We might have another problem,” Jess said quietly, pointing at her laptop screen.

Giovanni squinted and followed her finger.

“In nineteen months, the Earth might collide with Saturn.”

44

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

IN THE DIM eternal twilight of this new Earth, Jess stared across the twisted remains of the Castello Ruspoli, blanketed in ash and dirty snow, then out across the destroyed landscape below—the blackened valley of Saline, knots of frozen magma climbing the hills in the distance, steam and vapor crawling across them. Menacing clouds blanketed the sky, almost close enough to touch. Behind her, Leone and his work crew stacked crates and boxes inside the Land Rovers they’d salvaged from the underground garages.

“So, we go south?” Giovanni stepped beside her, putting his left arm around her shoulder. They both wore thick arctic coats and gloves, all of it four sizes too big for Jess, but they’d managed to scrounge cold weather gear for their whole crew.

“As soon as possible,” Jess agreed. Every day they waited, the ash and snow would get deeper and the temperatures colder.

“Once we get out of the hills, it should warm up a few degrees, and more as we go south.”

“Not too much, we need the Mediterranean to freeze over.”

Giovanni nodded. “We’ll find a way.”

“Did you contact them yet?” Jess asked. She meant his relatives in Tunisia.

“Not yet.” Giovanni took a deep breath. “And the simulations? Did you get anywhere?”

She shook her head. In nineteen months, the Earth would pass very close to Saturn, that much was sure. Whether it would hit the gas giant, that was still up in the air.