Yifan sighed. Cheng Xin noticed his sorrow, despite his effort to hide it. And she knew why. She understood that every time the pattern repeated on the broad belt, it meant that the shuttle had completed another orbit around Planet Blue at lightspeed. Even at reduced lightspeed, the demonic rules of the theory of special relativity still held. In the planet’s frame of reference, time was passing tens of millions of times faster than in here, like blood seeping out of her heart. A moment here; eons there.
