But there was no answering call to his prayers, no signs, no telephone calls or emails. It was just the universe, ticking over, oblivious to the wants of humans, even the billions now praying with Ben—and certainly oblivious to the individual needs of Benjamin Rollins.
And so what if a few hundred thousand people were killed? In months they’d all be dead anyway. What was coming, nothing could stop.
“My big question.” Roger sat in his cubicle, bent over his laptop with scraps of paper littered around it. “If Nomad is a black hole, how did it get moving so fast?”
Ben stared at the TV, the image of blackened corpses laid out beside the Tiber. Is one of them Jess? Celeste? Something inside Ben told him, no. If something had happened to one of them, he’d know. Something inside of him would know. For a man of science, the sudden belief in a mystical connection seemed beyond argument.
“Not one black hole—but two.” Ben forced part of his mind back. “Nomad is a binary pair of them.”
It was the only explanation for the rising intensity of gravitational waves LIGO measured. Now that they suspected the readings weren’t a glitch, Ben was trying to match the data to theoretical models. They’d sent a request for all of LIGO’s data from the past three days. If Nomad was a binary pair, two black holes sweeping around each other in tight orbits, this information could confirm it.
They hadn’t told Dr. Müller yet. The ESOC teams were focused on the Gaia observatory and new radial velocity measurements coming in from around the world. The LIGO connection could still be a red herring.
But if it wasn’t, LIGO could pinpoint the incoming velocity of Nomad. So far they only had one data point: LIGO measurements from the end of the day before. In a few minutes, they should be getting all its readings from the past three days. Any changes in intensity should give a straightforward answer to the speed of Nomad. So far, the new radial velocity measurements only provided an order-of-magnitude of a thousand kilometers per second, on a route inside the orbit of Saturn.
Ben glanced back at the TV on the wall. Massive street demonstrations in Karachi and Baghdad.
“…officials in Washington pin the attack in Rome on the Islamic Caliphate terrorist organization. The Caliphate is denying involvement for the attack, but claiming this is the starting signal for a final jihad before the hand of God wipes the Earth clean…”
If the world was thrown into shock at the announcement of Nomad, now it was a mix of equal parts panic and anger. For some people it meant a finite amount of time to prove that they were right—one last chance for vengeance. The ultimate last words were about to be spoken.
“But over a thousand kilometers per second?” Roger furrowed his brows together. “Nothing should move that fast.”
“Not true,” Ben replied. “A billion light years away, whole galaxies are moving away from us at 20,000 kilometers a second.”
“But that’s on the other side of the visible universe. And other galaxies are moving away.”
In 1929, Edwin Hubble had famously discovered that all other galaxies moved away from us; that the universe was expanding. Except that not all galaxies moved away from us.
“Not our closest galaxy, Andromeda,” Ben said. “It’s moving toward us at over a hundred kilometers a second. In four billion years, it’ll collide with the Milky Way.” He smiled wryly. “But that’s a problem for another day.”
“Sure, Andromeda’s moving toward us at a hundred kilometers a second,” Roger agreed. “And our solar system is moving around our galactic core at two hundred kilometers a second, but thousands of kilometers a second? Even in the detonation of a star, the expanding material has to push against something to accelerate it. With black holes, there’s nothing to push against—even a supernova wouldn’t give it that much kick.”
Ben shook his head. “This wasn’t pushed, and I don’t think Nomad was ever a part of our universe, not really.”
“…the Pentagon raised the alert status to DEFCON 2,” said the news anchor on the TV. “…only seen a few times before, during the Cuban missile crisis and after the 9/11 attacks…”
Ben looked at the TV again. The idiots. By the time Nomad arrived, humans might have already destroyed the world. Maybe this was the hand of God wiping the Earth clean.
The TV announcement was enough to pull Roger from his computer screen. He watched with Ben for a few seconds before asking, “So what do you think Nomad is, then?”
“I think Nomad is a black hole pair, formed during the creation of our universe.”
“Still doesn’t explain how it’s moving so fast.”
Roger wasn’t thinking deep enough. “Ever hear of gravitational recoil?” Ben’s laptop pinged. The data from LIGO. He opened the attached spreadsheet and looked at the data from the day before.
“Ah…” Roger squeezed his eyes shut so hard it looked like it hurt. “When two black holes merge?”