Nomad (44 page)

Up in the air.

Jess smiled grimly.

The accuracy of her scribbled notes, the diagrams of Venus and Mars she saw in the sky against the stars, translated into a large margin of error in figuring out the
exact
path of Nomad, and thus the exact path of the Earth and Saturn.

She looked up.

There was no way anyone was getting another look at the stars from anywhere on the surface of Earth. That night she saw the stars, right after the event, was a freak occurrence. Now the entire planet was covered in a thick blanket, that much they’d managed to gather from talking to survivors around the world. It might be years before they saw clear sky again. For the next few years, Earth, and everyone on it, would be flying blind.

Any satellites in orbit were fried by the massive solar storms, either that or pulled from orbit, so nobody was getting any more views from space. But NASA, or another agency, must have had a chance to fix Nomad’s exact position, speed and mass just after it appeared from behind the sun, before everything was destroyed. Someone out there had to have that data.

From the information her father had managed to infer, Saturn and the Earth would come close, but it might be ten million miles, still a hair in cosmic terms, or hundreds of thousands of miles. But even a miss of hundreds of thousands of miles with Saturn was perilous. Its rings stretched out that distance, and its collection of dozens of moons reached out a million miles. To know exactly might mean the ability to get out of the way, to hide on the opposite side of Earth from whatever might be coming.

But there was a way to find out.

“We need to decode my father’s data.” Jess patted the backpack, the one she found sandwiched between the dead bodies of her mother and father. “And we need to find someone from NASA who recorded the event.”

Now she understood why her father had gone outside. Why he had risked it.

She’d read his notes. In those old tape spools and floppy disks were the exact coordinates of Nomad from thirty years ago. It would provide the long axis for Nomad’s trajectory and provide the last few hundredths of a degree of accuracy—enough to see what asteroids could come close, what might hit the Earth.

They had detailed simulation data on her father’s laptop. The first step would be to decode the disks and tapes, and to get even better resolution, to find someone who had data on Nomad from just before the event.

But how to do that, in this wrecked world?

Giving Giovanni a kiss on his cheek, she stepped through the boulders to the remains of the front walls. She stopped, clicked on a floodlight. It illuminated a placard atop a pile of rubble, a headstone: “Here lies Benjamin Rollins and Celeste Tosetti, husband and wife, loving parents.”

It was all she could think of.

All that needed to be said.

And at least they came together, in the end, and now rested together. Forever.

Jess glanced over her shoulder, at Lucca and Raffael swinging Hector between them, running beside Giovanni. She’d always scoffed at the idea of having a family, but now she had one to protect.

And she would, to her last breath.

Looking south, Jess squinted into the darkness, ash and snow falling gently over the tortured earth. Her father’s last words to her echoed in her mind—
survive, no matter what
.

It was time to go.

Thanks for reading!

In the next section is the first chapter of
Sanctuary,
book two of the
Nomad
trilogy, now available for advance purchase on Amazon,
just click here
or search for “Mather Sanctuary” on Amazon.

In the section after that, there is a discussion on current research into
Nomad
-like events, along with a YouTube video of the author, Matthew Mather, running a 3D physics simulation of the
Nomad
encounter. You can even run the
Nomad
simulation yourself.

FROM THE AUTHOR…

If you’d like more quality fiction at this low price, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Amazon. For self-published authors (like myself), the number of reviews a book accumulates on a daily basis has a direct impact on sales performance, so just leaving a review—no matter how short—helps make it possible for me to continue to do what I do. Oh, and please try not to mention that
Nomad
is a black hole—no spoilers please!

IF YOU WANT MORE…

For free monthly give-aways, advance reading copies of books, low-cost promotional offers and bonus content,
click here to join Matthew Mather’s community.

Or visit us online at:

MatthewMather.com/Nomad

OTHER BOOKS BY MATTHEW MATHER…

CyberStorm

Award-winning CyberStorm depicts, in realistic and sometimes terrifying detail, what a full scale cyberattack against present-day New York City might look like from the perspective of one family trying to survive it.
Click here
or search for CyberStorm on Amazon.

Darknet

A prophetic and frighteningly realistic novel set in present-day New York, Darknet is the story of one man’s odyssey to overcome a global menace pushing the world toward oblivion, and his incredible gamble to risk everything to save his family.
Click here
or search for Darknet on Amazon.

Atopia Chronicles (Series)

In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world’s elite flock to Atopia, an enormous corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind’s insatiable appetite for natural resources.
Click here
or search for Atopia on Amazon.
 

SANCTUARY

Book two of the NOMAD trilogy

1

B
ANDITA,
I
TALY

“SCATTER!” JESSICA ROLLINS screamed at Lucca and Raffa, motioning to her left and right.

The two brothers stared at her, their teenage faces white even in the dim light.
Clang!
A bullet ricocheted off the open truck door, followed by another punching a frosted hole through the windshield, lodging itself in the metal screen behind the seats. Jess crouched lower, stealing a glance around the door. She looked back up at the boys. “
Andare!
” she yelled.

That did the trick. Keeping low, Raffa slithered over the driver seat, opened the opposite door of the Humvee and disappeared. Shaking, Lucca climbed over Jess and gracelessly tumbled into the snow at her feet. Jess pointed at her own eyes, then at a pile of garbage ten feet away. One, two, she mouthed silently, and on three she swung around the truck’s door and squeezed the trigger on her AK-47 assault rifle. Pop. Pop. Two controlled rounds. She rolled through the gray snow, scrambling behind the mound of frozen garbage with Raff. Crack, and a bullet whined overhead.

An ambush, the pile of car parts blocking the street just a little too neat, just a little too close to the bottleneck of encroaching buildings.

Her intuition might have saved them. Jess had stopped short of the road’s choke point, but there was no easy way to back out, and who knew what nasty surprises might lurk if they did. Get to cover. Stop and assess. Gather tactical information.

“Giovanni,” Jess grunted into her walkie-talkie in as low a voice as she could manage, sucking air in and out of her lungs, trying to control the flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. Her hand shook. “Do you have Hector?”

The walkie-talkie crackled. “He's in the brick schoolhouse half a block back,” came Giovanni’s reply.

Jess peered through the murk to see an arm waving, a hundred feet back on the opposite side of the street, behind the Range Rover and Jeep. Schoolhouse. It looked like any of the other shattered piles of rubble. “And Leone?”

“He’s with me,” Giovanni replied. “What can you see?”

What can I see? Jess almost laughed. Not much. In the dying light, dirty snowflakes fell from the indistinct soup above. Daytime was an eternal brown twilight, with nights so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The atmosphere was transformed into a murky aerosolized soup stinking of rotten eggs, the foulness burrowing its way into the brain and filling the lungs with coughing phlegm. The air itself seemed to suck out light, drowning the feeble rays of flashlights and headlamps, smothering everything in a pasty layer that scratched eyeballs and coated tongues.

Her goggles off, she rubbed her eyes and strained to see through the semidarkness. The temperature dropped ten degrees in the past two hours, another frigid night descending. The Humvee’s headlights pierced conical pools of light into the swirling snow and muck. There. A head peered around a corner from an open garage entrance. The person stood and came into view, not more than a hundred yards forward.

“Who is it?” Giovanni’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

A second person appeared from around the corner, exposing himself. These weren’t professionals. “Don’t know. But they look like amateurs.”

“What do we do?”

Jess flicked snowflakes off her face and pulled her gloves back on. Two three-story buildings lined the street, most of the windows still oddly intact. The destruction was like that. Almost everything was flattened, with buildings reduced to piles of brick and steel, but every now and then a reminder of civilization stood unaffected, like the delicate marble statue standing defiant at this town’s entrance. The two figures doubled-over and ran behind the jumble of car parts blocking the middle. Whoever it was, they must have saw Giovanni exit the Range Rover and run into the school. Jess hadn’t fired back yet, so they had no idea if her party was armed.

It was their ambush, but surprise was on Jess’s side now.

“Leave Leone with the shotgun to protect Hector, and take Raffa and Lucca down the south side street, flank them.” Jess looked at Lucca, gripping his rifle in tight fists. She exchanged her AK-47 for his rifle and flicked her chin in Giovanni’s direction. Lucca nodded, crouched and took off at a half-run. “I’m going up to the roof. When you get in position, lob two grenades into the lobby of the red building. That’ll flush them out. You open fire from one side, and I’ll pick them off from the other.” A flush-and-flank maneuver.