A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [149]
And it was just like a man to disappear on her, too—though usually not in such a melodramatic fashion. She’d watched the strange alien machinery hum, the portal wall throb. An image of a weird lavender sky above an alien landscape had shone like a projection through the trapezoidal stone.
And then Davlin Lotze had vanished through it.
She hadn’t seen exactly what he’d done, how he’d caused the transportal to snatch him away. Shouting after him, she had run toward the stone gateway, wise enough to stop long before she touched the field. If only Davlin had been as cautious. Rlinda had seen a shadow of the man standing astonished on a distant world, looking back at her. Then the picture had vanished and the solid stone had returned.
Davlin was gone, and Rheindic Co was silent again.
She crossed her arms and heaved a sigh. “All right, now what?”
Rlinda waited four days. On the first night, she slept inside the ghost city, hoping to hear a hum of reactivating machinery, Davlin returning of his own accord. Fat chance. She hoped he wasn’t waiting for her to push random buttons and try to re-create the mess he had made.
All alone now, she slept with a hand weapon at her side, ears alert for creaking footsteps or skittering claws. She thought about the mangled body of the green priest, the uprooted worldtree grove, the bloodstains from the violent death of Louis Colicos. Rheindic Co might seem empty, but something had killed them.
But when Davlin didn’t return and nothing sinister happened, the spooky ruins became downright boring. This wasn’t what Rlinda had envisioned when she’d first formed a merchant company, subcontracted other captains, and gathered five good ships.
Back at the ship, she puttered around camp until she ran out of things to do. She had supplies aboard the Voracious Curiosity and enough fuel to depart whenever she wanted, but she couldn’t just abandon Davlin here. What if he did come back through the transportal, full of amazing discoveries and all the answers Chairman Wenceslas needed—only to find that she had flown off? Rlinda decided to wait.
And wait.
Davlin had made his own choices, and he’d been stupid to get himself into such a fix. If only she’d paid closer attention in the moments before he disappeared, but she had no intention of fiddling with the alien machinery or going after him. She would just stay here and contemplate what to do next. But Rlinda had never been one to kick back and daydream, not when she could actually be doing something.
Unfortunately, on Rheindic Co, what was there to do?
She felt uncharacteristically sorry for herself. Six years ago, before anyone had ever heard of hydrogues, she couldn’t have imagined how far she would fall. It didn’t seem possible, unless you believed in all that baloney about the “whims of fate.” First the Great Expectations had been destroyed by Rand Sorengaard’s pirates; then most of her remaining ships had been commandeered by the Earth Defense Forces. Rlinda had only the Curiosity left.
Maybe she should just settle down here and cut her losses. No one would bother her…or keep her company, either. Not a good enough trade-off.
She went into the Curiosity's galley and looked through the supplies. Most of the foods were mediocre mealpax, designed for their nutritional value rather than gourmet flavors. She began to open packages and raided her own personal store for some black chocolate and a bottle of her favorite wine.
She combined a few more of her private treats with special spices; it was an extravagant use of ingredients, but Rlinda had decided to splurge. She used only a splash of wine in a sauce for the succulent lamb. Noodles with pesto, buttery mushrooms…and a crumbly honey-and-nut pastry to go with the chocolate for dessert.
Rlinda set up a small table outside, complete with cloth and a single wide chair. She poured a large glass of New Portugal wine, ignoring the mess she’d left in the ship’s galley. She