Read Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 54

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  He left for Eridia the next day. Even with jump-gates it was a three-week journey to the old homeworld, which he hadn’t visited in over nine hundred years. He had been having too much fun in the wide and wild universe to give a crap about that dull, depopulated green-and-blue nursery.

  He landed his cruiser at a spaceport on the east coast, about seventy miles north of Drell, which had dwindled from a thriving metropolis to a largish fishing village surrounded by mossy ruins. There weren’t enough people on the planet for there to be metropolises anymore.

  From the port (technically known as the Mashkiter Wampoliter Memorial Spaceport, though who or what the fuck Mashkiter Wampoliter was, Reynard had no idea), he traveled by warp train, a ridiculously old-fashioned mode of transport in this day and age, to a town called Fa’lill’e, about which his PsyCom chip offered no information beyond its location and population. It was dark by the time he arrived, so he got a room at Mimizz’ii’naa’s Inn, grabbed a bland dinner at the Inn’s food synthesizer, and went straight to bed.

  The following morning, after consulting the most recent topographical map of the area his PsyCom chip could find (a whopping 313 years old!), he bought a backpack and some food and set out on foot due north.