Zodiac (Zodiac, #1)(110)
“The shields were obviously sabotaged,” says Hysan, iciness in his tone. He glares at the captain. “Rho had nothing to do with that.”
Marq’s maroon cheeks flush a deeper shade. “Go with your ambassador, Guardian. We have enough to do.”
Sirna hurries me out of Captain Marq’s sight. “The Arieans have lost many comrades,” she whispers.
“They don’t want me on board, do they?”
Sirna sighs. “Marq gave me a stateroom. You can stay with me.” We skulk away from the bridge, and when soldiers meet us in the passageway, they glare.
“Where’s Rubi?”
Sirna’s face falls. “We lost contact.”
“Rho, I’m going to check with Neith, and then I’ll come find you,” says Hysan. He kisses my cheek before hurrying down the corridor.
Sirna’s stateroom is narrow and barren. She offers me a squeeze-tube of salmon roe. “Protein,” she says. “Eat as much as you can. You’ll need strength.”
She activates her Wave and calls up a scanner view of the fleet, then enhances the image with false color to make the ships easier to identify. Over half our vessels have been destroyed. Sirna magnifies the view of a wrecked pleasure yacht, and I bite my lip until I taste metal. “Those drifting particles, are they . . . bodies?”
Sirna nods and closes her eyes. “The Capricorns were assisting a disabled freighter when their steering went out. Head-on collision.”
She tells me our ships have scattered all over the sky, and every vessel still under power is limping back to its home world. Only two of the five Ariean destroyers survived. When Sirna shows me the latest casualty figures, the air in my lungs turns to sand.
I choke out a cough, shut my eyes tight, and see Mathias standing before me, ramrod straight in his dark blue uniform, strong and serene, only twenty-two years old.
How is it possible I’m still alive? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
“Rho.” Sirna takes my wounded hands in her own. Her expression’s sober, weary. “There’s something else you need to know. The Marad has come out of hiding. While we’ve been away, they joined the conflict on the Sagittarian moon. They’re arming the rebels, threatening to invade the planet below. We think they have hadron bombs. It seems what the army was waiting on . . . was for us to go.”
“You mean—this was a distraction?” I blurt. “Ochus used a feint?”
Sirna sighs. “We’re all in the dark here, Rho. But right now, we’re going back to Phaetonis. You’ve been summoned.”
? ? ?
Right now is a relative term in space travel. Lightspeed and relativity, time warps, wormholes. Ochus’s game is far more complex than I thought. He didn’t just manipulate Psynergy—he manipulated us.
He turned our own tactic against us.
Caasy’s warning echoes through my mind. He was right: I was deceived. Maybe I still am.
Time is my enemy now. We’ll need four galactic days to reach Phaetonis, and waiting is torture. I’ve been forced to spend the first eighteen hours cooped up in a life-support pod getting my hands repaired. Apparently, Psy wounds take longer to heal than normal injuries.
But time can be an ally, too. My long hours alone in the healing pod have given me a chance to mull things over. In particular, something Ochus said: Why should I wish for death when the glory of my House will soon be restored? You read the prediction written in the stars.
I think back to the vision I was seeing in the Ephemeris all along, past the Twelfth House. The smoldering mass where the constellation Ophiuchus used to be.
It wasn’t just appearing to me—it was doing more: It was warping the other constellations out of shape. Like they were making room for something.
The Thirteenth House is coming back.
? ? ?
When I leave the pod, it’s late. The ship’s bell just rang twelve chimes, and the interior lights have been turned low. Sirna’s working an extra shift.
In her room, I pull up some research on one of the ship’s screens, looking for clues about the Dark Matter. I still don’t understand how Ophiuchus was able to destroy our planets with Psynergy—or how he managed to take out most of our fleet.
It turns out our own Holy Mother Origene delivered a lecture on metaphysical time, speculating that it might be reversible, asserting that time is nothing but a mental construct we create to make sense of the physical world. Theoretically, we should be able to travel through time in all directions, even sideways. She was running tests to confirm this theory when she died.
Empress Moira, still in a coma, was also doing work on metaphysical time. She believed that since time has neither beginning nor end, it must be linked in a smooth, continuous circle. In that case, we probably travel through the same points in time repeatedly.
I think about the vision of time I saw in the Ephemeris. It fits both theories.
But if Origene and Moira were both running active experiments on metaphysical time . . . that must be why they both built the quantum fusion reactors. They were collaborating. Were they on the trail of the time-worm? Could that be why Ochus awoke?
There’s a knock on the door. “My lady?”
“Come in.”
When Hysan walks inside, the first thing I want is to feel his arms around me and his mouth on mine, to be embraced in his warmth and light. But as soon as the impulse manifests, a competing one is born. A faction of dissent—the part of me that can’t let Mathias go.