Jess bit her lip. “That’s our only hope. The Earth isn’t stressed anymore, so the eruptions should calm down. And it might take years, but when that ash settles, it will cover the ice in a black coating—”
“That will absorb the Sun’s heat, start to warm back up.” Giovanni continued the thought for her. He balled his fists. “We have food, water. We have weapons and gold, and we have the Humvee and Range Rover in the garage I think we can salvage, maybe even the old Jeep.”
“We need to move.” Adrenaline spiked into Jess’s veins. A plan. Hope. “The longer we wait, the more the snow and ash will make roads impassable. But how do we go south? Around the Mediterranean?” If they went around, they’d have to go through the Middle East. The nuclear wasteland.
“No.” Giovanni shook his head. “We don’t go around.”
“There aren’t icebreakers in the Med, and I’d bet it’s already freezing over. We can’t take a boat.”
Giovanni pursed his lips and smiled. “We walk.”
“We what?”
“We walk. If it’s getting as cold as you say, then the Mediterranean will freeze over. I’ve done treks of hundreds of miles over ice in the Arctic. It’s a hundred miles from Sicily to Tunisia. I have sleds and equipment in storage above.”
Jess stared at him. That just might work. She looked at her computer screen and frowned. The simulation had stopped, nineteen months from now. But she hadn’t pushed a key to halt it. What was going on?
Giovanni was already on his feet, looking at the crates stacked against the walls. “We pack everything up, we could be on the road tomorrow—”
“We might have another problem,” Jess said quietly, pointing at her laptop screen.
Giovanni squinted and followed her finger.
“In nineteen months, the Earth might collide with Saturn.”
44
CHIANTI, ITALY
IN THE DIM eternal twilight of this new Earth, Jess stared across the twisted remains of the Castello Ruspoli, blanketed in ash and dirty snow, then out across the destroyed landscape below—the blackened valley of Saline, knots of frozen magma climbing the hills in the distance, steam and vapor crawling across them. Menacing clouds blanketed the sky, almost close enough to touch. Behind her, Leone and his work crew stacked crates and boxes inside the Land Rovers they’d salvaged from the underground garages.
“So, we go south?” Giovanni stepped beside her, putting his left arm around her shoulder. They both wore thick arctic coats and gloves, all of it four sizes too big for Jess, but they’d managed to scrounge cold weather gear for their whole crew.
“As soon as possible,” Jess agreed. Every day they waited, the ash and snow would get deeper and the temperatures colder.
“Once we get out of the hills, it should warm up a few degrees, and more as we go south.”
“Not too much, we need the Mediterranean to freeze over.”
Giovanni nodded. “We’ll find a way.”
“Did you contact them yet?” Jess asked. She meant his relatives in Tunisia.
“Not yet.” Giovanni took a deep breath. “And the simulations? Did you get anywhere?”
She shook her head. In nineteen months, the Earth would pass very close to Saturn, that much was sure. Whether it would hit the gas giant, that was still up in the air.
Up in the air.
Jess smiled grimly.
The accuracy of her scribbled notes, the diagrams of Venus and Mars she saw in the sky against the stars, translated into a large margin of error in figuring out the exact path of Nomad, and thus the exact path of the Earth and Saturn.
She looked up.
There was no way anyone was getting another look at the stars from anywhere on the surface of Earth. That night she saw the stars, right after the event, was a freak occurrence. Now the entire planet was covered in a thick blanket, that much they’d managed to gather from talking to survivors around the world. It might be years before they saw clear sky again. For the next few years, Earth, and everyone on it, would be flying blind.
Any satellites in orbit were fried by the massive solar storms, either that or pulled from orbit, so nobody was getting any more views from space. But NASA, or another agency, must have had a chance to fix Nomad’s exact position, speed and mass just after it appeared from behind the sun, before everything was destroyed. Someone out there had to have that data.
From the information her father had managed to infer, Saturn and the Earth would come close, but it might be ten million miles, still a hair in cosmic terms, or hundreds of thousands of miles. But even a miss of hundreds of thousands of miles with Saturn was perilous. Its rings stretched out that distance, and its collection of dozens of moons reached out a million miles. To know exactly might mean the ability to get out of the way, to hide on the opposite side of Earth from whatever might be coming.
But there was a way to find out.
“We need to decode my father’s data.” Jess patted the backpack, the one she found sandwiched between the dead bodies of her mother and father. “And we need to find someone from NASA who recorded the event.”