Like a train on a straight track that stretched to the horizon, it seemed almost stationary as it approached, but take your eye off it for a second—and only in the last few hundred yards do you realize how fast the train is coming. In this case, the last few hundred yards was the last few hundred billion kilometers—the distance Nomad had traveled in the past year—just a fractional distance in cosmic terms.
Nomad was heading straight into the center of the solar system at eight thousand kilometers a second. A cosmic runaway freight train on a bullseye course.
And it wasn’t twenty billion kilometers away.
It wasn’t even ten.
Nomad—two tiny invisible objects spinning around each other, each barely ten kilometers across yet with a combined mass forty times that of the entire solar system—was already inside the orbit of Uranus, halfway from there to Saturn. Less than three billion kilometers away, and Ben and Roger were the only people on the planet who knew.
But not for long.
Tomorrow morning, Uranus was going to look like a toy grabbed by a dog and thrown around the sky.
His mouth dry, Ben glanced at the TV. “…the United States and NATO are preparing for a retaliatory nuclear strike…”
In three days, Nomad would destroy the Earth.
If we didn’t destroy it first.
NOMAD
Survivor testimony #AR84;
Event +112hrs
Survivor name: Ain Salah;
Reported location: Al-Jawf, Libya;
Rain, so much rain. Where are you again? Italy? (coughs) Yes, it is dark here now as well, days of darkness, but also rain. I’ve worked in oilfields deep in the Sahara for ten years. In all that time I’ve seen it rain here, one day of rain in ten years. There are mud brick buildings in the old town that have stood for a thousand years in the baking sun, and now they’re gone. Washed away. It hasn’t stopped raining in three days.
The temperature here? Usually forty degrees—a hundred and ten in your Fahrenheit—but now it’s cool. Maybe fifteen degrees. But so much water, I’ve never seen so much water…it’s as if God…rivers, lakes forming in the depressions…
Transmission ended in static. Freq. 7442 kHz/NSB.
Subject reacquired pgs 15, 24, 38…
OCTOBER 21st
22
CHIANTI, ITALY
“LET ME OUT!” Jess screamed, her face pressed against the cold metal bars of the door. She had worried about ending up in jail, but could never have even imagined this. Her mind reeled, skidding off the tracks of reality. A bile of anger rose inside her, how can he treat us like this? What were they doing to her mother?
This couldn’t be happening. But what was happening?
Through the metal bars of the stable door, she watched the crescent moon rise. She was left in the stable all night, freezing cold, in near pitch-blackness. It smelled of damp stone and hay. She didn’t pace around. Balanced on her crutches, with just one foot swinging between them, she didn’t want to slip and fall into a pile of horse manure. So when she got tired of yelling, she sat on a bench against the wall, in the dark, or stood, resting her armpits on her crutches, and looked out the window to stare at the stars. The sky was calm, serene, but every hour was another hour Nomad approached.
This was a complete clusterfuck.
“Giovanni!” she screamed, her voice hoarse from hours of pleading. She leaned against the stable door, her face against the metal bars, her thigh burning from supporting her body. “Why are you doing this?”
There were no lights on in the courtyard, no lights in the castle. And apart from the rustle of the oak trees, no movement or noise in the empty blackness for hours. On the horizon, the stars began to wash away in the pre-dawn twilight, only Venus remaining, its yellow disk burning bright.
“Wrong?” The words floated from the darkness, poison in them. Ghost-like, Giovanni’s face appeared in the faint light, a few feet from Jess. “Have you done something wrong? I think, perhaps, that is a matter between you and God.”
He stared at her, his eyes piercing Jess’s soul. What was he talking about? And then—did he know her secret? But how would he know? Did he talk to Celeste? Did she even know?
Gripping the metal bars, her knuckles white, Jess turned her fear inside out, transformed it into anger. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she spat. “If you hurt my mother, I’ll kill you.”
“That might be the first thing I believe from your mouth all night.”
“What…? Have you been listening?” She’d been ranting for hours, alternating between threats and begging for help.
In the gathering twilight, the outlines of the courtyard became visible from the blackness, with old L’Olio, the ancient olive tree, the eldest Ruspoli, standing in the center—judging her—its gnarled roots digging into the hard earth. Giovanni dragged a wooden bench from beside the wall in front of the stable door and sat on it.