Free Titanborn by Rhett C. Bruno Page A

stick together so that nobody was ever alone and in danger. Call me a romantic, but I had a hard time with being promised to my clan-sisters, even if it wasn’t technically incest. My daughter was born off the grid after I ran away and I was proud of that.
    The constant reminders of mass annihilation were the biggest reasons I could never bear to stay on Earth any longer than I had to. It usually took longer for them to wear on me, but the older I got the more I preferred the blackness of Sol and all its mysteries. For if Zhaff was completely accurate about the chances of another colossal meteorite hitting, then almost every policy the USF decreed was as big of a waste as those of the Church of the Three Messiahs…
    And we were all just as big of fools.
    Longing for a drink to quiet my mind, I peered through my eyelashes to see if the train had gotten anywhere while I was lost in thought. I saw the profile of a factory on the edge of the New London Industrial Node. It sat like an island of steel amid the barren landscape. There wasn’t anything green in sight.
    Billows of black smoke rose from the stacks poking through the top of the factory the train raced by. They were quickly absorbed by a layer of dark clouds hanging overhead.
    Unlike everything else, apparently Earth’s sky was already too damaged to worry about.

Chapter 7
    Somewhere along the ride the soft vibrations of the maglev train had lulled me into a deep sleep. I woke abruptly to a tap on my shoulder. Zhaff’s face was hovering above mine, the Cogent’s head cocked to the side and his yellow eye-lens shimmering.
    “We’re here,” he said.
    I rubbed my face and followed him off the train. As we stepped outside frigid air slid down my throat like a rope of knives. I immediately decided to take smaller breaths from there on out before reaching into the pocket of my trench coat and pulling out a pair of gloves. Once they were on I inspected my surroundings.
    Glazov station, which was closer to a platform, was in the glacial heart of Old Russia—a slum that stretched for hundreds of kilometers from where I was standing in either direction along the Euro-String. The luster of New London was completely lost there. Rusty metal shanties were crammed together on either side of the rail as if it were an ancient Middle Eastern city, so close that it was hard to tell where one ended or another began. A few bright ads and signs flickered along their corrugated surfaces, many of them displaying outdated products. The grid of snow-covered streets connecting all of them was almost entirely empty, and security consisted only of a pair of guards huddled up in a security post on the train platform. It looked like they were playing cards as they drank to keep warm.
    I turned to Zhaff, wondering if the Cogent had intended not to bring a coat. He didn’t seem affected by the temperature at all. “We should head to the USF security post, see if they’ve heard any reports of a Ringer in the area,” I said.
    “Unnecessary,” Zhaff quickly responded. His face was buried in his hand-terminal. “While you slept I made contact with every USF outpost in Old Russia. Surveillance in the area is scarce, but a camera spotted a man matching my description enter a hauler repair shop nearby. I am presently uploading the location.”
    I tried not to let my wounded pride show. I knew Cogents were supposed to be efficient, but I had no idea
how
efficient. “Well, hurry up, then,” I grumbled.
    While I waited I moved beside an ad screen for a three-year-old line of heavy jackets designed by Venta Co. It at least emitted some warmth. I cupped my hands over my mouth and then looked up past the rail station’s rippling canopy. It was snowing, and like most of Earth the sky of Old Russia was congested with the usual mixture of dark clouds polluted by both centuries-old dust from the first M-day and human-made toxins. Often I wished that I’d known the blue and sunny skies of old. The