Nomad (39 page)

“The man was deluded,” Celeste said.

Jess took a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess so.” But she understood Nico. His wife and daughter—he had something precious beyond comprehension stolen from him. In the final moment, she understood. She forgave him. But why would he lie about sending the Facebook message? At the end, she saw rage and pain in his eyes, but no deception.

Ben took off his eyeglasses and wiped his face with one hand. “Speaking of Nico, he’s really gone?” He put his glasses back on and looked Jess in the eye. “Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” Jess said, her voice quiet and flat. “I almost did, but I let him go. He tried to escape on a cable car that connects to the other hilltop. He fell into the valley. Into the…” She wasn’t even sure how to describe what was out there.

“Good,” Ben whispered. “Good.” He looked at his hands and clasped them together.

Jess wasn’t sure if he meant that Nico was dead, or that she wasn’t the one that killed him.

“What’s happening, the world will be changed forever,” Ben said after a pause. “I need you to promise me something.” He looked at Jess again.

“What?” Jess took his hands in hers. “Anything. What do you need?”

“I want you to promise me that you’ll never give up, that you’ll always struggle to survive, no matter what.”

An ear-splitting detonation shook the cavern. The lights flickered, dust spilling onto them from the cavern walls. Jess held her breath. The shaking subsided. “Why are you saying it like that?” she asked her father. “Of course, we’ll be together.”

“I need you to live, to
want
to live. For us. For Billy. For Giovanni and Hector.” Ben took Jess’s and Celeste’s hands in his and squeezed hard. He looked her in the eye. “Promise me.”

Jess stared into his eyes. “I promise.”

His grip eased, but just a little. “And don’t lose your humanity. Never give up, but not at the expenses of sacrificing your humanity.”

Jess stared deep into his eyes. She hadn’t told me about the Aberto, the boy she killed at the villa, or Enzo. One thing at a time, and now definitely wasn’t the time. “I promise.”

Ben smiled. “Good.”

He let go of her hands, and put then down to push away from Jess and Celeste. He sat cross-legged in front of them. “What they said about me. That research paper, the one they said I hid—”

“I know you didn’t,” Jess said. “Why would you?”

“But somebody leaked that,” Ben said grimly. It was a short list of suspects. But why? “As soon as this is over, we need to try and get in touch with a man called Ufuk Erdogmus. Use the shortwave, try and track him down.”

Jess frowned. “You mean the famous entrepreneur? The Mars First mission guy? You knew him?”

“Not really. I mean, a little. He was at the hotel in Rome when Dr. Muller discussed Nomad. And he was in ESOC, at Darmstadt. He said he needed to talk with me, no matter what, but I left to come here.”

“What did he want?”

“He said something about sanctuary. Maybe he has a bunker? If anyone could survive this, he’d be the one to do it.”

“We’ll do it together.”

“Yes.” Ben pressed his hands against the rock floor. “But just in case, remember that name.”

It wasn’t a difficult name to remember. Erdogmus was famous. “Okay,” Jess replied.

Ben looked left and right. “I have a question.”

“What?”

“When you were with Roger, back in New York…”

Jess looked away and exhaled. “I was going to tell you about that.”

“No, no, that doesn’t matter.” Ben inched closer to his daughter. “Was Roger…ah, how do I put this…was he religious? I mean, not Catholic, but Taoist? Did he have yin-yang symbols on stuff, maybe tattoos?”

The question took Jess completely off guard. “Huh?”

“Like a special cellphone, I saw a yin-yang symbol on it. Not a sticker, but engraved. Ring any bells?”

Shaking her head, Jess shrugged. “No. I mean, no, he wasn’t the least bit spiritual.”

Ben held her gaze for a long moment. “Okay.”

“What’s this about?” Jess asked.

“I’m not sure…” Ben looked up, over her shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”

Jess swiveled her head around. Roger walked toward them, coming from the other cavern. He glanced at them, but avoided looking at Jess.

“Roger,” Ben called out, “why don’t you come and sit with us?” He pushed down with both hands and got to his feet.

“I think I’m going to check on Giovanni.” Jess got to her feet as well. She flashed a tight-lipped smile at Roger and walked past him.

Ben watched his daughter walk away while Roger tried not to watch her go. Even entombed in the heart of a mountain, the world around them disintegrating, jealousy and pride reared their ugly heads.

“Lucca and Raffael finished assembling the table,” Ben said to Roger. He strode over and clicked on a butane kettle he’d filled a few minutes earlier. “How about a cup of tea?”

Nodding grimly, Roger picked his way through the bags and boxes. “Tea? Like we’re in a London tube station during the Blitz.”

On cue, the ceiling trembled again, a distant roar echoing.

Ben nodded. “And we’re lucky to be here. This place is a goddamn fortress, dug into the granite heart of a mountain a thousand feet above sea level. Could withstand a nuclear strike.”

“I think it just about is.”

The walls shook, glasses inside the crates rattling.

Ben, Celeste, and Roger sat together at the table. To Ben, it felt like they were kids, hiding in a fort, the fear and terror subdued by the joy of being together with Jess and Celeste. Only hours ago, all had seemed lost—he never thought they’d survive this long, never imagined he’d be reunited with his family. Now there was a chance, one he hadn’t allowed himself to even consider. Despite the eruptions, the massive earthquakes, and the flooding oceans, the Earth hadn’t opened up and swallowed them. Not yet.

The kettle pinged and turned itself off.

“This is the worst of it.” Ben poured hot water from the kettle to plastic cups, then dropped tea bags into them. He looked at his watch. “We’re past Nomad’s closest approach.” He put the kettle down and looked at Roger. “Do you feel lighter?”

“What?” Roger’s face contorted in a scowl.

“Lighter. Do you feel lighter?”

“How do mean, lighter?”

The edges of Ben’s mouth quivered into the barest of smiles. “Judging by the way the oceans flooded, from what Celeste heard on the short wave radio, and the last data I saw from NASA on my laptop on the drive here—I’d put Nomad at seventy million kilometers away. Should be exerting…" Ben paused, closed his eyes and tapped the table top. “…about a tenth of Earth's gravity, straight up. If we had a scale, you’d be ten percent lighter right now. Incredible, isn’t it?”

Roger exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Trust you to be fascinated by this.” He picked up his cup of tea and tested it.

“A piece of creation is flying over our heads right now, a left over fragment of the primordial universe.” Ben looked up, his jaw flexing. “It’s hard not to be awed.”

Celeste took a sip of her tea. “I wish it would go away.”

Ben took her hand and squeezed. “And it will. That’s the amazing part. As fast as Nomad arrived, is just as quick as it will leave. In a few hours, it’ll stop bending the Earth’s crust and will release our oceans.” He stared into Celeste’s eyes. “We’re going to survive.”

Roger snorted and slammed the plastic tea cup down. “For what? A few days until we freeze to death? I think the lucky ones are the ones already dead.” He hung his head, winced and held his bloody left shoulder. “Nomad is going to toss the Earth into deep space like a child’s toy. Two days from now it will be as cold as the arctic here, and a few days after that, colder than Mars.”

Roger took a sip from the tea cup. “Global warming? All that carbon dioxide we’ve been worrying about?” He lifted his head and laughed. “It’ll be the first to liquefy at minus fifty-seven Celsius, and at minus eighty you’ll see carbon dioxide frost cover the ground. A few weeks from now the atmosphere itself will start to solidify, first oxygen at minus one-eighty, then nitrogen at minus two hundred. We’ll be a frozen chunk of ice, wandering through interstellar space. How long do you think burning those barrels will keep you alive?”

Ben stared at Roger in stony silence. The ceiling shuddered, sending down a shower of dust. “You’re probably right. Nomad is dragging us along behind it like a dog on a leash, but it’s also dragging the sun. Did you see the last of the simulations?”

He meant gravity simulations of the solar system. Ben and Roger ran them continuously on their laptops on the long journey in the car over the Alps.

“Of course I saw. I was the one running them.” Roger put his tea down, mashing his lips together as if he tasted something disgusting. “By now, Mercury and Venus have been ejected away from the sun by gravitational slingshot, and Saturn pulled into a retrograde orbit, and the Earth, well…”

“Exactly, it was right on the cusp. We don’t know the exact trajectory of Nomad. It all depends on the geometry.”

Roger shook his head. “And right now, we
could
be headed straight into the Sun.”

“At least we wouldn’t freeze.” Ben grimaced. A bad time for jokes. “But that’s not possible. We know the trajectory of Nomad down to one degree of resolution, and none of the solutions near that throw the Earth into the sun.”

This didn’t have the effect of cheering anyone up.

Ben took another sip of his tea and put the cup down. He squeezed Celeste’s hand, stared into her eyes, then looked back at Roger. “We need to go outside. Right now.”

Roger looked Ben in the eye. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“What?” Celeste pulled her hand out of Ben’s. “Why?”

“To get my backpack. I left it in that half-basement, outside the walls, when Nico kidnapped us.”

Celeste pulled Ben to face her. “What on Earth could be so important?”

“The long axis coordinates of Nomad appearing thirty years ago. That bag has my old data, maybe the only data that still exists that could pinpoint the exact trajectory.”

“What about all the satellites? The government agencies?”

“When Nomad finally appeared from behind the sun, we were bombarded by a massive solar flares. Hopefully my laptop was deep enough in that basement not to get fried by the radiation, but there’s no way any satellites survived that. They had an hour or two
at most
to get a direct view of Nomad when it came from behind the sun, and even then, it’d still be invisible. And who the hell would be sitting at a desk to monitor all this during Armageddon?”

“He’s right.” Roger balled both of his hands into fists. “Even if they did pinpoint it in space, that would be only one point. They’d need a long axis to determine the trajectory.”

Celeste looked back and forth at Ben and Roger. “And why would that be important, for God’s sake? It’ll be gone in a few hours. That’s what you said.”

“Because,” Ben said slowly, “if we know the exact trajectory, we can use modeling software to predict where the thousands of large and small asteroids and debris will be kicked out.”

“And if they might hit Earth.” Roger added.

“Exactly.”

“Assuming the planet doesn’t fall into the sun or freeze solid.” Roger took a deep breath. “I’ll go.” He glanced at the opening in the cave wall, to where Jess was. He sighed. “There’s nothing for me here, anyway.”

“I’ll go with you.” Ben squeezed Celeste’s hand. “You don’t know exactly where I put it. And two of us will be safer than one.”

Roger stared at Ben. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Ben returned his gaze. “Tell me on the way. The longer we wait, the more chance that it’ll get destroyed.”

“Can’t it wait?” Celeste begged, holding his hand tight.

Ben shook his head. “This is important. We’ve got to get it.”

Roger got up from the table. “Let’s go.”

Celeste stared into Ben’s eyes for a long moment. “Be careful.”

“I will.” Ben stood, then leaned down to kiss his wife. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He stared at her. “Promise me you’ll stay here.”