“…initial reports of a blast radius of two thousand feet, suggesting this was a small nuclear device…”
Two thousand feet. Ben walked from the Vatican to Piazza Navona a few days ago. Piazza Navona was what? At least a mile, Ben calculated in his head. Five thousand feet. And they weren’t at the apartment. There was still a chance…
“Ben!” Roger shook his arm. “You gotta look at this.”
“What?” Ben blinked. What could be more important than the destruction of Rome?
“The gravitational wave detectors at the LIGO facility have been set off.”
“By a bomb over the Vatican?” Ben was stunned, his mind scrambled.
Roger shook his head. “Of course not. That wouldn’t affect LIGO.”
“LIGO?”
“The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, the physics experiment joint venture between MIT and CalTech, remember? One end in Livingston, Louisiana, with the other two thousand miles away in Hanford, Washington. It was built to measure fluctuations in space-time—”
“The gravitational wave detector, of course I know what LIGO is.” Ben’s brain recovered from shock and clicked Roger’s words into sense.
Roger paused before turning his laptop screen to Ben. “So then look at this.”
Ben blinked and reminded himself to breathe. The room receded from his senses. He turned to look at Roger, then at the screen. LIGO. They spent hundreds of millions on the gravitational wave detector, but it hadn’t spotted a thing. No gravitational waves. It was one of the last of Einstein’s predictions remaining unproven. A few months ago, LIGO was taken offline and new sensors were put in to boost its sensitivity.
What Ben saw on the screen wasn’t some marginal signal, though. He zeroed his attention on the graphs and tables. LIGO was like a giant guitar string, stretched two thousand miles, waiting to be plucked by a perturbation in space-time, but it wasn’t just vibrating—LIGO sang. LIGO screamed.
“When is this from?” Ben asked.
“The advanced sensors came online three days ago with readings almost off the charts. They figured it was an error and recalibrated, but…”
“It has to be Nomad,” Ben whispered.
“Maybe, but then what is it…?”
A slim list of options.
While anything with mass produced a gravitational field, creating gravitational waves required events of almost unimaginable violence. His colleagues at the LIGO facility said they were waiting and hoping that something violent enough would occur close enough to Earth to be noticeable.
They may have gotten their wish. Nomad was ripping apart the very fabric of space and time around the planet now.
Ben pressed his hands together as if praying. “Make a list of what could cause this, and link it back to all the other data. I’ve got to talk to Dr. Müller.”
“I’m on it.” Roger said and swallowed.
Ben looked back at the TV, at the mushroom cloud rising over Rome. “My God…”
19
ROME, ITALY
JESS CLAWED HERSELF upright. Her ears rang.
A hot wind blew through the alley, scorching her skin, the sickening stench of burnt hair and flesh in her nostrils. She blinked. Tears streamed from her eyes. The ground shook, reverberated through her bones. A deafening roar overloaded her senses. An earthquake? The searing wind slackened, then reversed course, sucking bits of papers along the street in the opposite direction. She blinked again. No, not an earthquake. A mushroom cloud roiled into the dark skies above her, fiery orange flames wrapped in fingers of billowing black smoke.
The reversed wind intensified, dust and debris dragged by it biting against Jess’s exposed arms and neck. She strained to keep her eyes open, transfixed on the surreal billowing blackness that grew above; rising, crackling in red and orange, folding into itself as it climbed toward the cloud layers above. The wind howled around her, whistling through the alley.
“Jessica!”
She turned to look at the café entrance.
Her mother hung onto the railing. “Jessica!” Celeste screamed again.
“I’m here,” Jess croaked, her throat sandpaper. She sat upright, stunned. The ground vibrated cyclically, a dying thunder echoing between the buildings.
Celeste staggered down the stairs and turned to the sky and stared. The mushroom cloud roiled ever higher. “My God….” Tearing her eyes away, she stumbled to Jess.
“Somebody, please help.”
Jess rubbed her eyes and glanced to her left.
The couple at the table next to her were splayed on the ground, the woman leaning over the man. She looked at Jess with wild eyes. “He’s bleeding,” she whimpered.
Celeste scooped Jess into her arms, pulled her tank top up. “Baby, are you okay?” She inspected Jess’s stomach, turned her to look at her back. She held Jess’s head in her hands and looked into her eyes. “Jess?”
“I’m fine,” Jess replied automatically.
But she wasn’t sure.
Her ears rang, her body felt numb. She fought the feeling of deja vu. The day she lost her leg crowded her mind, images of blood and fire flashing into her senses.