He backed away, still smirking. “That how they taught collectors to use them in your day, old man? I wouldn’t want you to waste any lessons on me with your new partner right here.”
I took a deep breath and allowed my hand to fall away from my holster. “You’re lucky there’s work to be done or I’d give you one,” I said as I shoved past him. Zhaff followed me wordlessly.
“I’m all ears, Graves!” he shouted as I walked away. “I’ll tell you what: After I find the bomber I’ll use the credits to buy you a cane. You can teach your new pet a hell of a lot with that!”
I stopped and started to turn around, but when Zhaff walked by me I decided against it. Causing more issues with Venta Co would only infuriate Director Sodervall more. That was the last thing I needed. I swallowed my pride and continued on. Trevor had a problem with pushing people too far, and I had little doubt he’d get his one day.
“I’ll beat you with it,” I grumbled under my breath.
“What was that, Malcolm Graves?” Zhaff asked, completely calm.
“Next time keep your mouth shut,” I said to him. “Let’s move.”
Chapter 6
Never had I seen the gridded streets of New London so vacant during the daytime. Garbage from the M-day festivities drifted aimlessly across the streets, and most of the outdoor activity came from USF patrols policing the city. Even the homeless were nowhere to be seen. Security hover-cars flitted high across the skyline, their bright spotlights sweeping across the faces of buildings and plunging down dark alleys.
The New London rail station where Zhaff and I were headed was the only place that appeared busy with pedestrian foot traffic. Enhanced security had the inspection line stretching out past the entrance of the station. Citizens living beyond the city limits were desperately trying to get out of New London before anything else went wrong. A portion of the northern platform had of course been knocked out by the explosion, but all the others remained operational.
“I’ve never seen the streets this empty,” I said to Zhaff. “On M-day no less. What a shame.”
The nightlife in New London usually couldn’t hold a torch to that of offworld colonies. True, Earthers, in general, were a conservative bunch. On most nights you could barely spot anyone on the streets after midnight unless they were up to no good. M-day was different. Revelry would rock the city, and lights would be shining until the sun rose the next morning; until citizens’ stomachs were turning and their eardrums were ringing. Presently, I could barely hear the soft beat of music emanating from indoor bars and clubs. Security was making sure none of it spread outside.
“It continues inside,” Zhaff responded. “It will be easier to monitor there.”
“It’s still strange to see,” I said. I glanced over at Zhaff and noticed how he was staring forward without batting an eye at the abnormal sight. “This is your first time here, isn’t it?”
“That information is classified.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, frustrating as his answer was. “Trust me, I can tell. Even your face wouldn’t be so calm seeing it like this if it weren’t.”
Zhaff didn’t respond.
When we reached the rail station a group of evangelists were obstructing the entrance ramp. They held up screens displaying only the word STAY and were dressed in tattered brown robes with braided ropes for belts. The one in the center held the hefty tome of the Final Testament against his chest.
As we passed he began preaching at us in an incensed whisper. It grew louder with every word, and the emptiness of the city made his voice echo. “The ring of flame will swallow us all! This is our punishment for trespassing in the realm of heaven! Repent, brothers. We must repent!” He didn’t get a chance to say much more before a security hover-car positioned itself above.
“Disperse, now!” someone blared through the onboard speaker of the vehicle.
“So long as Earth remains, our feet are secure on her surface!” the evangelist hollered back. Then there was an earsplitting crack as the officer in the hover-car fired a pulse-rifle down at the feet of the protestors. All of them fled right away except for their leader. At least until a second shot came inches from striking his head.
I didn’t bother to watch the rest. I heard the pitter-patter of their bare feet slapping against the metal street as they scrambled away. The lead preacher shouted, “You will burn!” over and over again the entire time, until his voice was a hoarse and distant echo.
“Soon as anything on Earth goes wrong the fanatics come out of the metalwork to lay blame,” I said as Zhaff and I continued into the station. “Some people never learn.”
“Judging by their beliefs, it does not appear that they ever will,” Zhaff responded.
“So you don’t believe in any gods?” I asked. I knew the answer to that question the moment I met Zhaff, but I was curious to hear how a Cogent might respond. Curiosity…another side effect of my job I could never turn off.
“I have read all five thousand and ninety-two pages of the Final Testament and have seen nothing to justify any of its proclamations. Questions without answers are a waste of time.”
“Amen,” I joked. Zhaff didn’t appear to get it.
We reached the platform for trains running to Glazov station. The people who were waiting in line to get onto passenger cars were being scanned and patted down three times over. It would’ve taken an hour to reach the front if we were civilians, but that was another one of the perks of being a Pervenio collector. We presented our IDs and were led right onto the train bound for Glazov station. They reprogrammed it to dispatch immediately so we wouldn’t waste any time. We could’ve requested a Pervenio airship, but it would’ve taken a little while for one to scoop us up with the current turmoil. The maglev rail lines threading the surface of Earth were still the fastest way to get around in a pinch.
I slumped down in a window seat as far from any other passengers as I could get and closed my eyes. Zhaff sat beside me.
“Do you, Malcolm Graves?” he asked as the train started up.
I looked at him, confused. “Do I what? And please, for the love of Earth, just Malcolm.”
“Do you believe in any gods, Malcolm?”
For a moment I thought about saying yes purely to push the Cogent, but I had plans to sleep through the hour-and-a-half trip to Glazov.
“No,” I answered firmly.
I’d been to too many places beyond Earth, and seen too many horrible things in my life, to have faith in some form of higher power watching over me. Plus, any god willing to drop a meteorite on Earth didn’t seem to me like a power worth praying to. The majority of humanity shared my opinion. Surviving the apocalypse compelled most people to forget about faith and cling instead to the tangible things that helped them survive, and to those with enough wealth and power to provide it all in our shattered world.
That was how the USF and its corporations came into being in the first place, but there were still factions of people who believed the Meteorite served as cosmic punishment for our transgressions. The preacher we had passed belonged to the most prevalent of those groups—the Church of the Three Messiahs—which took the texts of what I’m told used to be Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and blended them into what became known as the Final Testament. Somewhere along the line those ancient teachings became a warning against traveling into space lest God complete the job he started with the Meteorite. It sounded silly to me, but I have to admit I was envious of anybody who could have such unshakable faith in something beyond themselves.
“But I understand the appeal,” I added.
“It is foolish to believe another meteorite that size will strike Earth,” Zhaff stated. “It was a scientific anomaly that will likely not occur again for many millions of years, if it ever does. At the current rate of human expansion, a similar instance in the future would barely dent the population.”
“You know what I believe in? Getting sleep whenever I have the chance. If you’re going to be a collector yo
u might want to consider adopting that policy.”
Before Zhaff could reply I turned away, leaned my head against the window, and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep right away since my mind was churning, but I was tired of conversing with the Cogent. I already missed working alone.
Zhaff was right, though. The chances of another sizable meteorite hitting Earth were definitely minuscule, yet the fear of it happening again was all that drove us. Everything the people who remained on Earth had done since recovering from the Meteorite was done under the creed that humanity’s extinction was being made impossible. The expansion into Sol. The way the Earth’s settlements were reconstructed. How Earthers reproduced. Even the train I sat on.
Cities once expanded endlessly in every direction and rose to scrape the clouds, but in my time everyone on Earth lived along strings of conurbation that stretched for hundreds of kilometers but rarely exceeded a kilometer in width. Six tracks of high-speed maglev trains ran down their centers like spines, and along them nodes of residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural infrastructure alternated. This way the areas remained spread apart, but if one segment of a string were to be cut off from the rest, it, and they, could survive independently. Like an earthworm growing two heads after being sliced in half.
New London was the largest bulge in any string, but even it only spread to nearly two kilometers in width. It also housed the USF Assembly Building, which at fifty stories was actually the tallest building on the planet that wasn’t a half-sunken ruin from the last age. The city fell along the Euro-String—the longest of the strings—which ran from the center of the European continent to the heart of Old Russia. Being that the aftereffects from the Meteorite had drowned half of Earth’s habitable land, and billions of people with it, settling along the middle ridges of continents was the best way to ensure that it didn’t repeat.
Every policy I could think of made perfect sense by that line of thinking. It was the world I’d always known: one of a people locked in constant vigil. Earthers weren’t even allowed to reproduce without clearance from doctors that the genes of the parents didn’t have any chance of resulting in disease. Most of us grew up in clan-families that numbered into the hundreds, mine being a family centered a few dozen kilometers outside New London. Matching candidates for parenthood would join together to reproduce in phases and 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 omnipresent shroud was one of the many gifts bestowed upon Earth by the Meteorite.
The climate never fully recovered after it hit. Temperatures worldwide dropped, making seasons impossible to differentiate. Among the places that remained above water, New London was considered warm—and I couldn’t remember it ever getting above ten degrees Celsius there in my lifetime. That was at least tolerable compared with Old Russia. Any farther north from where we were and we may as well have been standing outside on Titan. An exaggeration for sure, being that the orange moon’s surface was freezing enough to turn a man into a Popsicle in seconds, but at a certain point I don’t think it matters. Cold is cold, and I hated it.
“It is only half a kilometer from us,” Zhaff said, finally.
“You’re telling me he went through all the trouble of falsifying his identification to get here only to clumsily be caught by one of the few surveillance cameras in Glazov? Right around the corner from the rail station no less.”
“It is likely he expected to be followed and is trying to confuse his pursuers.”
“Maybe, but I’m not going to stand around here waiting until I’m a block of ice. We’ll see what we find at the shop, and go from there.”
Zhaff nodded, to my relief. “I agree. Also, Malcolm, during our trip the body of Jack Fletcher was found in the bathroom of the Molten Crater after they cleaned up what remained of the bar. It was missing an eye.”
“Right under my damn nose,” I said under my breath, making sure to turn my face away from Zhaff so he wouldn’t see how embarrassed I most likely looked. Again the notion that maybe the directors were right about me slipping popped into my head. I promptly shoved it out of mind. Arresting the first Ringer to ever bomb New London was too good an opportunity to allow doubt to get a hold on me. “That means that other collectors will be bearing down on us in no tim
e now, and I have no desire to watch another one cash in. We better not waste any more time. Let’s go.”
We marched down one of the bleak cross streets of the slums, my long duster kicking up the accumulated white powder. The sound of electronic music echoed on either side of us, through thin metal walls and windows plastered with glowing advertisements. I could hear boisterous laughter and people hollering from inside in the Russian-English lingo typical of the area. As in New London, most of the M-day celebrations in Old Russia had been forced indoors, though for them it was due to the unrelenting cold and not a bomb.
A few bearded Earthers lounged against the walls outside, but that was all. They accompanied the countless bottles rolling lazily across the metal-paved walkways. One bumped into my foot and I knelt down to pick it up. It was empty, a layer of frost built up around the nozzle.
“You’d think it’d be easier to get a drink today,” I groused.
“It is not wise to ingest alcohol, Malcolm,” Zhaff said.
“Now, or ever?”
“Both.”
I chuckled and before I could think of some sage piece of advice about how after so many years on the job it was the best thing for you, Zhaff stopped.
“This way,” he instructed. He turned with soldierly precision and headed left down a narrow alley.
A group of emaciated Earthers with scraggly beards were standing there, clustered around a grille that spit up billows of hot steam. They wore heavy coats that would’ve been enough to keep them warm on their own if they weren’t so worn down.
“Zdravstvuj, friends,” one of them croaked as we approached.
Their sullen eyes watched us nervously, and I knew why. One look at us and they knew exactly why we had come: There was a collection to be made. It was an expression I’d recognize no matter what colony I was on, although at least on Earth people mostly stayed quiet and kept their distance so they didn’t get hurt. Once Zhaff and I passed I heard them let out a collective sigh, relieved to know that one of them wasn’t the target.
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