“And have you refuse me? I couldn’t take that chance.” Sindri cast him an impish smile. “Besides, the Cydonia Compound has such a long tradition of abduction that it would be remiss of me not to uphold it.”
“On the station, you said we could leave shortly.”
Sindri stopped in front of another iris hatch. “So I did, and so you did. Didn’t you leave Parallax Red and in fairly short order, too?”
Kane started to snarl out a curse, but the hatchway irised open and Sindri stepped through. After a second’s hesitation, Kane followed suit.
The room was big, dome-shaped and full of furniture, but it smelled of damp and mildew. Old water stains streaked the walls beneath small metal vents. Tall bookshelves stood here and there, and Kane let his eyes rove over the titles visible on bindings as he walked past.
He saw Auerbach’s Mimesis , seven volumes of The Cambridge Medieval History , Tarkington’s Complete Penrod , Burroughs’s Gods of Mars , Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities , Nietzsche’s Selected Discourses , Darwin’s Origin of Species , D’aulaire’s Norse Gods and Giants and Melville’s Moby Dick . Two entire shelves appeared to be only technical manuals, most of them spiral bound.
Since Kane wasn’t familiar with any of the works, he couldn’t glean any insight on Sindri’s personality from them. A knowledge of literature, classic or otherwise, hadn’t been part of his ville upbringing.
A quartet of male trolls stood stiffly at equidistant points around the room, hands behinds their backs in parade-rest positions. Grant and Brigid sat at a disk-topped table and when they saw Kane, they stood up, their faces reflecting conflicting emotions. In their expressions he read relief, anxiety and anger.
There was another emotion glimmering in Brigid’s eyes, a shame she struggled to contain or come to terms with. Grant, like him, sported beard stubble.
Plates of food, plastic dinnerware and bottles of water were on the table, and Sindri pointed Kane toward it. “Dig in, refresh yourself. Your friends refused to eat until you joined them. Mealtime manners are one of the few qualities I admire in Terrans.”
Kane pulled out a chair that felt and looked like lightweight plastic and sat down. After exchanging silent glances, they started to eat. If the food was strange, their stomachs, if not their palates, accepted it as adequate.
After a few minutes of silence, broken only by the clicking of eating utensils against plates, Sindri sighed deeply. “Come, come, people! Where is the sprightly conversation? You’re on Mars! Aren’t you the slightest bit excited by the prospect of exploring a strange new world and seeking out new life and civilizations?”
Grant picked up a plastic, blunt-pointed knife. He pointed it at Sindri like an accusatory finger. “Come over here, and I’ll show you how fucking excited I am.”
Sindri made a tsk-tsk sound of disapproval and strode quickly to a wall switch. “Perhaps you need visual aids. A dining room with a view ought to stir the blood.”
At a touch of the switch, the walls of the room seemed to vanish in yard-wide, floor-to-ceiling increments. By segments, the room became transparent.
Outside they saw a low collection of buildings, nearly all of them domed and made of a dull, lusterless metal. They were interconnected by tubes composed of the same material.
“Cydonia Compound One,” Sindri announced. “A poor place, but mine ownand hopefully for not much longer.”
Beyond a fenced-in perimeter spread a seemingly endless desert of orange-red sand. Low ridges rose naked from the desolate landscape and grew into a distant, barren mountain range.
Miles to the west rose a vast bulk of stone, a smoothly contoured formation that resembled a slightly squashed mesa.
“Be calm,” said Sindri. “Accept. You are now thirty-five million miles from the planet of your birth. The temperature outside at noon will be a balmy fifty degrees Fahrenheit and around two hundred degrees below zero at midnight.
“The surface gravity is less than half that of Earth, and its atmospheric pressure is about eight millibars. The air is composed mainly of carbon dioxide. If we were not safe inside this pressurized habitat, we would all die within minutes.”