Nomad (45 page)

Static hissed over the walkie-talkie. “Jessica, are you sure? Perhaps we should offer something?”

Jess clenched her jaw. The two figures peered out from behind the burnt-out car. “They don’t want something, they want
everything
. I said this was going to eventually happen, and now it’s happening.”

A hissing silence. “Okay. I have Raffa and Lucca.”

“Good. Tell me when you get there.”

“Jess, you’re sure?” Giovanni asked again.

She closed her eyes and tried to take a deep lungful of air, but a wet cough erupted mid-breath. “Just do it,” she gasped.

A pause. “We’re on our way.”

Trial by fire. Her army consisted of two teenagers, the elderly Leone and the Baron Giovanni Ruspoli, who Jess suspected had never shot at anything more dangerous than a clay pigeon. Still, seeing another of their attackers peer carelessly out from the doorway ahead, these were scavengers. A few grenades and sniper fire should be enough to scare them off.

She hoped.

Jess slung the rifle over her back, tightening the strap snug. Keeping low she shuffled behind the Humvee on her knees and kept going until she reached the cover of fallen wall on the other side of the street. Stopping, she listened and peered into the gloom before getting to her feet and making for the drainpipe going up the side of the three-story building. She took off her gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of her parka, then blew on her hands and gripped the pipe to climb, pulling herself up onto a snow-covered ledge.

How many days now? Seven since the destruction, since the Earth’s near-miss with the passing Nomad black holes repaved its surface, churned its oceans to submerge the continents and tore the crust apart to belch a miles-thick layer of dust and vapor to blanket the globe. America was gone, the Midwest torn apart and covered in a chest-deep blanket of ash from the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, the coasts blasted by thousand-foot tidal waves and rocked by apocalyptic earthquakes. Sea levels surged up as the glacial icecaps tipped into the oceans, drowning anything left behind. The Baikal rift had detonated, wrecking Asia’s interior, along with dozens of secondary-but-massive eruptions around the Pacific Rim and mid-oceanic ridge. In just days Europe—and the entire planet—had been plunged into a shadow world, the dawn of a dark new ice age.

Nomad ripped the solar system apart, threw most of the planets into radical new orbits or slung them away into interstellar space—but because of the lucky geometry of the encounter, Earth’s orbit had only shifted slightly into an elliptic orbit around the Sun.

Pulling herself onto the second floor balcony, Jess paused to catch her breath.

Lucky.

This stinking hell was
lucky
. A mass extinction event as the Earth hadn’t seen in two hundred and fifty million years. Nothing survived. The plants, the animals, everything was dead or dying.

But not everything.

Like warm-blooded cockroaches, humans couldn’t be stamped out so easily, not that quickly. Everywhere, from the gloom appeared bloodied and battered human animals. Electric grids and most electronics were fried in the intense barrage of solar irradiation during the event, but some older solid-state electronics, like shortwave radios, had survived. Giovanni had already contacted dozens of survivor groups, and they started passing growing enclaves of people with generators buzzing, tiny dots of artificial light appearing like luminous mushrooms in this fractured underworld.

Jess reached the second floor balcony and stopped, straddling the railing to pull her gloves back on to warm her hands. Leaning out, she saw one of the scavengers coming out from the pile of car wreckage to take a pot shot at her Humvee. Almost everything was dead, yet we still seemed determined to kill whoever was left. Pulling off her gloves, she stuffed them back in her pockets and pulled herself onto the railing. Good thing she was an expert climber; a talent now more practically useful than she’d ever imagined it would be.

“In position,” Giovanni’s voice whispered over the walkie-talkie.

Jess hauled herself onto the roof, scanning it for signs of movement. Nothing. “One second,” she whispered back.

Reaching the edge of the roof, she pulled her rifle from her back and unscrewed the cover of its sight, dropping to her knees and then flat onto her stomach. She sighted down the rifle, focusing on the lead scavenger who had almost reached her Humvee. “Okay, in position. Drop those grenades.”

Slowing her breathing, Jess steadied herself, zeroing the crosshairs on her target. He turned, almost facing her, and her breath caught. Just a boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen. She gritted her teeth and centered herself. Still, he was trying to kill her, to hurt her family. From the corner of her eye she saw the shadows of Giovanni and Raffa lobbing what she assumed were the grenades. The crosshairs on the boy’s chest, Jess’s finger twitched, but she released.

Never give up, but never lose your humanity
—her father’s last words to her echoed in her head. How many had she killed already? Jess shifted the sight down, at the boy-scavenger’s leg, and pulled the trigger just as a flash of light lit up the scene.

A whomping concussion was followed by a second one moments later, the windows of the building in front of her flashing as the grenades exploded. Glass shattered.

Screaming. A man ran out of the building beneath her, on fire, and rolled in the snow. Another ran out, his gun pointed in the direction of Giovanni. Jess swung her rifle around and fired, this time aiming mid-torso. Blood spattered and he dropped. Jess glanced to her right. The boy-scavenger held his leg, hopping back toward the wall. More screaming. An engine roared, and a second later a vehicle came skidding out of the garage entrance.

Jess had to blink twice, trying to understand what she was looking at. It had the body of a Volkswagen Beetle, but with the wheel wells ripped out. Large circular rollers with jagged spikes were welded onto the back axle, replacing the tires, with rudimentary skis welded onto the axles on the front. Skidding to a stop, the boy-scavenger hopped into the open door, while two more of the scavenger-men sat in the front-boot, firing randomly in Giovanni’s direction. Jess lifted her rifle, pulled a round into the chamber, aimed and fired. Her bullet dented the roof. The two men ducked as the driver accelerated, kicking up a spray of dirty snow. It accelerated up the street, disappearing into the gloom.

Just scavengers. Easily scared. She looked down. The man she shot lay motionless, a pool of black spreading around him in the light of the Humvee headlamps.

“Help.”

Was it that the man in the snow? Jess held her breath.

“Help me,” came the voice again.

Was Giovanni hurt? In a hushed silence, Jess strained to hear.

“Please, help me.”

No. It was coming from inside the building, and the voice wasn’t Italian; it was distinctly American-sounding.

Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca appeared from the shadows on the other side of the street. They looked up at Jess and she nodded. Yes. She heard it too. Stepping through the foot of snow and ash covering the roof, Jess found the stairway down. It was locked, so she chambered a round and fired into the lock. The door swung open. Clicking on her headlamp, Jess made her way down to the first landing slowly. It could still be a trap.

“Please, help me,” came the muffled call for help again.

Jess cleared the next floor, her stomach tight, constantly looking behind and up. Something about this was weird. It didn’t make sense. Even scavengers would have been more prepared, put up more of a fight. Clearing the last set of stairs, she entered the lobby and opened the door to the garage. In the light of their headlamps, Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca stood encircling three people, all of them tied up, hands and feet, to a radiator with bags over their heads.

“Please, whoever it is, please let me go,” said one of the tied-up people, a man.

That voice. Jess strode to the side of the room, toward the pleading man. Giovanni shrugged. “Go ahead,” he muttered, but she could see he already knew.

Jess pulled the bag off the man’s head and stared in open-mouthed disbelief. “Roger?”

Hope you enjoyed 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 next section I discuss the science and research work behind
Nomad
, and recent findings of other star systems that have crossed into our solar system. In the final section are instructions for watching the video of me running the 3D simulation of the
Nomad
encounter, with instructions on how you can even do it yourself.

FROM THE AUTHOR…

As I mentioned, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Amazon. 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.

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Discussion of Real-World Nomad-like Events

From the Author

Matthew Mather

First off, thanks for reading Nomad! I hope you enjoyed it—and weren’t too frightened by the possibilities. Feel free to email me if you want to chat about it, my email is at the end of this section, and also on my website.

I’ve always been fascinated by black holes. I think it began when I was ten years old and watched the eponymous Disney film
The Black Hole
. The movie fueled my curiosity, and as a teenager I tore through black hole-related science fiction, from
The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman, to
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons, to
Earth
by David Brin.

The topic was as fascinating to me as it was to many others, spurring an abundance of books and short stories. Surprise, surprise, then, when I did some research and discovered that not a single book or film had ever covered the topic of the Earth encountering a medium-sized black hole. So, I decided to write
Nomad
, to fill that gap, but with a determined focus on making it scientifically accurate.

Before writing
Nomad
, I spent months talking to astronomers and astrophysicists to build up the science behind the encounter I envisioned. At first, the physicists said the event would totally destroy the Earth, but slowly, I managed to piece together a physics-based scenario where it was possible life could survive on the surface—otherwise it wouldn’t make for much of a story!

It might seem that the events unfolded extremely quickly when
Nomad
made its final approach, but I carefully modeled the tidal forces affecting the Earth accurately in time and magnitude. Tidal forces are inverse cubically proportional to distance, which is why the sun only exerts half of the tidal force on the Earth that the moon does, even though the sun is almost thirty million times its mass (and four hundred times further away—so 400 x 400 x 400 equals sixty four million, and thirty million divided by sixty-four million gives us the one-half tidal force of the sun versus the moon).

In the end, I managed to convince a team of post-graduate researchers build a full three-dimensional gravity simulation of the entire solar system to lob my
Nomad
black holes through the middle of. All of the elements of the story—all the forces involved and the paths of the planets afterward—are based on real-world physics. If you want to see me run this simulation, and see Saturn and Earth on their collision course after
Nomad
, just search for “YouTube Mather Nomad Simulation” or click the link below: