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  A uniformed attendant nodded at him, saying, “Buon giorno, Professore Rollins,” and stepped back to pull open a large glass-and-brass door.

  Air-conditioned coolness swept over Ben as he walked onto the thick carpet of the hotel’s entranceway. Glittering chandeliers hung beneath gilt frescoes. Hurrying up the expansive main staircase, past a menacing lion marble statue, Ben stared at an image of God painted on the ceiling. The Creator hurled bolts of fire down at mankind from the heavens.

  Someone grabbed Ben by the shoulder, almost spinning him around. “Identification please.”

  A large man in a dark suit held him gently but firmly in place. Ben produced his IAU all-access conference pass. The man nodded and held up some kind of scanner, and Ben tried to wave his pass in front of it.

  The man grabbed his hand. “Sorry, I need a DNA scan, Dr. Rollins,” he said as he pressed Ben’s thumb against the device.

  “Hey!” Ben tried to pull away, but the man held him firm until the machine pinged.

  “Apologies, but I have orders.” The big man stared impassively at Ben. “Please step inside, sir.”

  Ben saw complaining would be wasted, and the man was polite if firm. Shaking his head, Ben pushed through the doors to the main ballroom. Even more elaborate crystal chandeliers hung under dazzling sky-blue frescoes. Desks arranged in neat rows lined each side of the room. Ben decided to stand at the back.

  Dr. Müller had already started his presentation. The lights dimmed and a projector displayed the blue-and-white NASA logo next to the bright red block letters of JPL—the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratories. The group of five astronomers from the previous evening had expanded to thirty. Many, Ben realized on a quick sweep, recommended by him.

  “…everyone has heard of the Pioneer Anomaly?” Dr. Müller asked from the front of the room.

  Everyone in the room nodded at Dr. Müller’s question, murmuring their familiarity. When the Pioneer spacecraft—the first probes launched into the outer solar system—reached the edges of interstellar space in the 1980s, they accelerated at rates that couldn’t be explained by the sun’s gravity alone. After two decades of guesswork, the commonly accepted solution was a slight acceleration from their internal heat radiating into the ultra-vacuum around them, but still many people weren’t convinced.

  “As you know,” continued Dr. Müller on-stage, “we lost communications with Pioneer 10 at a distance of 12 billion km in 2003. We observed similar anomalies with the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they left the solar system and ventured into interstellar space, which we attributed to the same causes.”

  Ben nodded along with everyone else. Common knowledge. Every space probe launched into the outer reaches experienced some form of the same thing, and so did some comets observed at great distances.

  Dr. Müller stopped to clear his throat. He picked up a glass of water at the podium, pausing to take a drink. The image on the screen behind him changed from the NASA and JPL logos to a graphic detailing the spiraling paths of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2 on their journeys out of the solar system.

  He took a deep breath and put the glass down. “Several months ago, from a distance of over 20 billion km—five times the distance to the orbit of Neptune, our outermost planet—we began receiving unusual acceleration signals from Voyager 1…”

  Ben had read about this in online journals, along with speculation about problems with radioisotope electrical systems, or gremlins in the ground communications.

  “…but what has not been made public, yet,” Dr. Müller continued, “is a sudden spike in these signals four weeks ago. We initially attributed this to some kind of on-board system failure, but soon afterward, we had a similar spike in readings from Voyager 2.”

  Dr. Müller adjusted his glasses.

  “We know now that this was no anomaly in sensor reading. The Voyager spacecraft are, in fact, working perfectly.” He coughed. “I know you are all familiar with the accepted solutions, but today I am going to explain how we have all been wrong.” He pulled off his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand before looking around the room. “How we have all been terribly wrong.”

  A murmur rose from the crowd in the room.

  “What we now know is that a massive and previously unknown object is on its way toward us at extremely high speed.”

  “Wouldn’t we have detected this in our radial velocity searches?” asked a voice from the left side of the room.

  Ben squinted. Who was that? A young man wearing a knitted cap pulled halfway back on his head, a scarf carelessly hung around his neck, silver earrings dangling—he looked too stylish to be an astrophysicist.

  It took Ben a second to realize he was looking at Ufuk Erdogmus. He’d only ever seen him on TV before. After earning a fortune of hundreds of millions on Internet start-ups in his twenties, he turned that into tens of billions by founding the world’s first private space-launch company and an electric car company, and by developing human life-extension technology. Not bad for a forty-year-old.

  Erdogmus was best known, however, for launching Mars First, a one-way, privately funded mission to send humans to Mars. The Apollo program took less than a decade from John Kennedy’s famous speech to landing men on the moon, and five years ago Erdogmus had boasted that he could do better. And he made good on his promise—just three years after he announced it, the Mars First mission was launched two months ago. Eight humans, in hibernation sleep, were now aboard a one-way, three-year, long-trajectory flight path to Mars. The one-way part of the mission description was controversial, to say the least, but hundreds of people had volunteered for a chance to be the first to walk on Mars.

  Ben had thought the project was madness; a suicide mission dreamed up as a promotional stunt for Erdogmus’s empire. But on reflection, he realized that real explorers of the past usually were on what amounted to suicide missions. We just didn’t have the risk appetite anymore—maybe Ufuk was right in what he was doing.

  All that aside, what was Ufuk Erdogmus doing in this room right now? Then Ben remembered reading that he was doing the keynote speech for the IAU meeting. And regardless, Ufuk’s question was exactly the right question to ask; the reason why the exoplanet people had been called into this meeting.

  The search for planets around other stars used several techniques, one of them called “radial velocity,” which detected the “wobble” in a distant star based on the change of its speed toward or away from us. Radial velocity measurements were extremely precise—Ben could record differences in speed down to meters per second, about how fast someone walked, when measuring a star trillions of kilometers away moving at hundreds of kilometers a second. And it could certainly measure whether the Earth, and the solar system with it, was falling toward some nearby object.

  Dr. Müller turned and smiled. “The answer, Mr. Erdogmus, is that we have measured the presence of this object in our radial velocity searches. We just didn’t know it. This independent verification is why I have called all of you here today. I’ve gone through NASA’s own data and analyzed our ‘fudge factors’—and time after time, the signal is there, staring at us in the face. An acceleration factor that we had previously attributed to dark matter in the nearby spiral arm of the Milky Way.”

  Fear jangled again in Ben’s fingertips. He was hearing the full explanation for the first time, and he hadn’t been entirely convinced the night before.

  When measuring radial velocity to search for an exoplanet, only the wobble was of interest, not the constant effects. You subtracted the Earth’s rotation, the movement of an orbiting observatory, the motion of the Earth around the sun, the motion of the Sun around the galactic core—everything pushed and pulled apart by gravity—and after that, even allowed for the heating or cooling of the device itself, down to the tiniest of imperfections in the system. Each observation team had a long list of “fudge factors” they used for their own systems.

  The question Dr. Müller now posed: was there an overlooked
factor they all shared?

  If so, what exactly was it?

  4

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  JESS STARED AT HER mother.

  “Jail?” Celeste winced. “Again?” Her shoulders dropped but hitched back up quickly, her lips pressing together as she took a long look at her daughter. “Is that why you rushed me all the way out here?”

  “No, the reason we’re here is to have a girls’ trip,” Jess half-lied, taking a step back. “And to find this long-lost cousin of yours.”

  Her mother had received a Facebook message from an Italian relative a few weeks ago, asking her to come and visit. Totally unexpected. As far as her mother knew, none of their family still lived in Italy after moving to America generations ago. But this wasn’t the real reason. The surprise was going to be reconnecting Celeste with her estranged husband, Jess’s father. But that wasn’t something Jess was going to reveal, not yet, because if she did her mother was just as likely to get straight back on a flight to JFK.

  Celeste broke eye contact and tilted her chin downward, shaking her head. “Okay, so what are you in trouble with?”

  “I need money.”

  “For what?”

  “A lawyer.”

  “For what?”

  Jess gritted her teeth. “It’s complicated. This guy I was dating, Ricardo—”

  “The one you just dumped?”

  Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Jess said, “I need to hire a lawyer. The police are looking for me.”

  “So what did you do?” Celeste asked once more.

  Jess closed her eyes. “Ricardo and I got into a fight, and he hit me, so I decided it was enough. I grabbed my things and took off. I sold my car to get cash, but it was registered under his name. He got mad and called the police. He said I stole it, but I didn’t.”

  It was a stupid fight that had spiraled out of control. She’d lived in Rome with Ricardo for the past three months. It wasn’t serious. Or at least, it hadn’t been. Now it was. To be honest, she hit him first, and much harder. Shame burned Jess’s cheeks. More proof of her own inability to act responsibly. Her anger always brimmed just under the surface; too often it darted out to taste the air, and disappeared just as quickly.

  “Someone hit you?” Her mother didn’t seem so much concerned with her daughter getting hit, as amazed the offending party wasn’t in the hospital. “And they want to arrest you for that?”

  “No.” Jess shook her head. “But I’ve been working here illegally, and Ricardo can be a real asshole. I don’t want to get stuck—”

  “Everyone,” Nico said loudly from the front of the room, “I’d like your attention please.”

  Jess looked away from her mother’s eyes, glancing at the tour guide before feeling a presence behind her. The door to the room must have opened while they were talking, and someone had stepped in behind them. Moving forward, Jess turned and mumbled an apology, but stopped and blinked twice.

  A man stared at her, a deep scar creasing his forehead under a mop of black hair. The man smiled, fixing Jess with penetrating brown eyes. Where had she seen him before? In the parking lot on the way in, she remembered. She had almost run into him. Tattoos didn’t impress Jess, but scars were another matter. The temperature in the room seemed to rise. “Scusi,” she mumbled in Italian, getting out of the way.

  “No, I apologize,” said tall-dark-and-scarred. He smiled awkwardly, nodding at the floor.

  Looking down, Jess found a pair of small eyes staring up at her. A boy held the man’s hand. Jess took another step to the side to let the two of them pass.

  “Today we have a very special honor,” Nico continued from the front. “We have the Baron Giovanni Ruspoli and little Hector joining us. This is their castle—their home—we are visiting.”

  Baron Ruspoli stepped forward between Jess and Celeste, smiling. He turned and offered his hand to Celeste. “Giovanni Ruspoli,” he said, nodding as Celeste took his hand.

  “Celestina Tosetti,” Celeste replied.

  Jess thought she detected the faintest of shadows pass across the Baron’s smile, but it vanished in an instant. She glanced at the boy, Hector, holding the Baron’s hand. Not more than four years old, he stared back at Jess with wide brown eyes under a mass of black hair. She stared back at him, feeling her pulse skip a beat, an image of children chasing each other through a snow-covered field flitting through her mind.

  “A pleasure,” the Baron replied to Celeste. He turned to Jess.

  “Oh, sorry,” Jess said after a moment, tearing her eyes away from the little boy. The Baron’s hand hovered empty in the air between them. She took it. “Jess—”

  The Baron bowed and kissed her hand.

  “—ica.” Jess finished her name in barely more than a whisper, the Baron’s lips leaving her hand. If the temperature in the room seemed to rise before, now someone had turned on a burner. Her face flushed.

  “A pleasure,” repeated the Baron. He looked down. “And this is Hector.”

  “Buon Giorno,” little Hector said to Celeste and Jess.

  “Buon Giorno,” Jess and Celeste both chimed back.

  They all stared at each other for a moment.

  The Baron leaned over and said softly, “Vieni, Hector, let’s greet our other guests.” He straightened up and smiled at Celeste. “I am trying to teach him English,” he explained, then turned and walked to the front of the room, holding his hand out to the other tourists. Hector trailed Giovanni, his eyes still glued to Jess.

  “I think he likes your hair,” whispered Celeste to her daughter.

  “Who?” Jess was still flustered. “The Baron?”

  Celeste laughed. “No, Hector.” She reached to hold her daughter’s hand. “I think Baron Giovanni was interested in more than your hair.”

  “Mom!” Jess’s cheeks burned.

  “He kissed your hand, not mine, and the way he stared at you?” Celeste smiled at her daughter. “A barone.” She pronounced the word in Italian, baro-nay. “Now how much money do you need for this lawyer business you’ve—”

  The door behind them swung open again. A grizzled face lined with deep creases poked its way in; above the furrowed brow, fly-away white hair sprouted in clumps from a deeply tanned scalp. The old man pulled a pipe out from between his teeth with stumpy fingers on a hand like a meat hook. “Barone,” the old man growled, “Polizia all'ingresso.”

  The Baron turned from chatting with the tour guests. “Polizia?” he asked the old man. “Qualcosa con… controversia?”

  The old man shook his head. “Non la controversia.” He turned his eyes from the Baron to glance at Jess. “Qualcos'altro,” he grunted, frowning at Jess before closing the door.

  Even with Jess’s limited Italian, she understood: Police. At the entrance. The other part she didn’t understand—something about a controversy? That part didn’t seem to have anything to do with her, but from the old man’s body language, it was clear these police were here for her. How did they find her so fast?

  Swearing under her breath, Jess remembered leaving an itinerary for this trip pinned to Ricardo’s fridge. “Mom, can we go?”

  The third floor of the museum was one large hall, sixty feet long, separated into three twenty-foot square rooms connected by a wide hallway down one side with large windows facing the courtyard. Jess and Celeste stood by the door to the main entrance, next to the windows, with the tour guide and the other couple standing on the other side of the room. Down the hallway from Jess and Celeste, at the opposite end, was another exit that led onto a balcony.

  Jess glanced over her left shoulder, through one of the large lead-glass windows. Two police officers, in short-sleeve blue shirts with red-striped pants and peaked hats emblazoned with a gold feather, stood at the closed iron gates of the castle. “I need to get out of here,” she whispered, flicking her chin at the back entrance down the hallway.

  Celeste saw the panic in her daughter’s eyes and gripped her hand tighter.

&n
bsp; “Excuse me.” The Baron stood in front of them again.

  Jess thought he was going to grab hold of her, drag her outside for the police—that somehow the old man had communicated something to him—but he eased himself between Jess and Celeste and opened the door behind them. He stopped and turned. “Could you watch Hector for a moment?” he asked Jess and Celeste. “Please? Nico is here, in all cases.”

  Panic rising, Jess looked down. The boy stared up at her. Why was the Baron asking them to look after his son? Why was a Baron even talking to them at all?

  “Of course,” Celeste replied. She took Hector’s hand. The Baron disappeared out the door.

  Celeste and Jess both craned their necks to look out the window across the gravel courtyard. The Baron had already made his way down the two flights of exterior stairs. The old man stood by the gate, staring at the police. They gesticulated, seemingly to convince the old man to open the gates, but he stared at them coolly and puffed his pipe.

  Jess looked from the window at her mother, now holding little Hector’s hand. Hector tried to reach up to Jess as well, but she shrugged him off. “I’m going out the back,” Jess said over the top of Hector to her mother, “I’ll call you later.”

  Celeste grimaced. “Jessica, we can talk to them, you don’t always need to run away.”

  But Jess had already turned to stride off, glancing left through the windows as she passed them, leaving her mother's admonishing words behind. The Baron was talking to the police now. He glanced up at the museum. Jess looked back at her mother, still holding Hector’s hand, watching in disbelief as Jess fled.

  Jess reached the back door, and without hesitation she grabbed and tried to turn the handle. It was jammed. With both hands she gripped the door handle, and after two tugs it turned. She stepped outside onto a small deck leading down a rocky slope into a grove of fir trees lining that side of the castle.

  Stepping onto the slope, her left leg wobbled, alcohol and adrenaline competing to confuse her senses. Shouting erupted behind her. Jess glanced back at the entrance to see the Baron flicking his hands at the police. Stumbling forward, she lost her balance on the loose soil. Jess gasped as she pitched sideways, sending her tumbling down the rocky embankment. She automatically tucked into a forward roll, spotting a rock on the edge of the steepening incline she could swing her foot onto to stop her momentum.