Inevitably, a lot of matter was falling into the black hole, most of it particles of dust that would, slowly, increase the mass and thus the gravitational pull of the singularity. She began to pick up something else, too: specks of matter with a clearly artificial structure. They were sparse – only one or two in a volume of space thousands of kilometres across – but they were there. More than anything else they resembled the nanosensors she and Ondo filled the galaxy with to acquire their slow telemetry, but these were of an utterly unknown design. She used the ship's senses to study a couple of the devices minutely. There could be no doubt that they were artificial. An energy signature was coming off them. They were active.
It took her a few moments to work out what they were. They could only be monitoring devices deployed by the Tok. The sensors must have been seeded around the galaxy in antiquity. Perhaps they, too, followed pre-programmed aggregation sequences so that, slowly, data was pulled in from all corners and delivered to this one location. The great expanse of time involved suggested that the devices had to be self-replicating. She could see no other explanation.
The implication was that the mysterious Tok individual had been monitoring galactic events for all that time. From his perspective, time would be moving much more quickly, the forward progress of the universe accelerating the closer he approached the singularity. He had to possess formidable processing power to absorb and correlate so much data from a galaxy that was, subjectively, moving on fast-forwards.
What was more, the particles had been there all along. If she or Ondo or Hessia or anyone else had spotted them, tracked their progress, followed the trail, then they'd have ended up at the black hole. Jalian had said there were other hidden paths that would lead to the Tok. The particles were one of them.
She picked out the anomalous object directly ahead of them at the same moment that the ship's functional AI layers saw it. Like everything being sucked into the singularity, it appeared to be stretched from outside, and slowly fading into eternity. This object, however, was neither as faint nor as stretched as it should have been. By some means she didn't understand, it was resisting the pull of the black hole, slowing its own inevitable destruction. Was it, too a swoop ship, capable of returning? She guessed not: if this individual had been marooned within the compass of the black hole, or had deliberately gone there, they wouldn't have a way of simply escaping when they wished.
She queried the outer layers of the Dragon's AI. “How long will we be able to sustain our position and have enough power to come out that close to the event horizon?”
“In the region of minutes. The limiting factor is the time dilation; the question is, how much time can you allow to pass by out here?”
It couldn't be long. Godel's supernova plan may have been thwarted, but her faction within Concordance were not going away. Another attempt to eliminate intelligent life within the galaxy would be made sooner or later. Selene could not simply disappear from the galaxy for a protracted period of time.
“We can let a few weeks go by. A month at the very most.”
“Then, given how close the anomaly is to the event horizon, we will have around thirty seconds to converse with any intelligence we find there.”
It wasn't enough, not nearly enough. Except, if her suspicions about the alien nanosensors were correct, the Tok would know she was coming and would know what questions she'd ask. Perhaps a few seconds would be all she needed. The ancient alien had apparently gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure his survival over millions of years; he had to have done so on the understanding that the messages he wished to pass on could only be brief.
Assuming he was even there and had survived. Assuming he wasn't some malign presence deliberately entombed in a black hole for eternity.
The Dragon's reaction drives were quiet now, the black hole's gravitational pull doing all the work of bringing them in. She began to pick up a rising background noise emanating from the fabric of the ship as it succumbed to the massive structural forces of the singularity. The sound set off discordant resonances in her head, like all the alarms she'd ever heard sounding at once. She breathed, trying and failing to let it wash over her.
Otherwise, the flight into the black hole was oddly normal. The anomalous object neared: a twisting, sinuous ship that, yet again, had to be a product of the civilisation that had built the Cathedral ships. Its layout bore a close resemblance to the spheres of Surtr's ship, too, although this vessel had three orbs, arranged without any apparent concern for symmetry, around a central spindle. Scanning it, she picked up definite electromagnetic signatures. It was alive, its unfathomable drive tech somehow resisting the pull of the black hole, like a stone in a river bed around which the torrent flowed.
When they were near, she raced down to the airlock, watching the Dragon manoeuvring via her fleck visualizations. With surprising gentleness, it nudged alongside the Tok vessel, holding steady against the brutal gravitational pull of the black hole. She could feel the strain thundering through the ship from the effort of simply not moving. The clock was now ticking on how long they could remain where they were. The other ship still hadn't responded. If it fired at them, there would be nothing she could do to retaliate.
She was about to transmit a plea to it when a previously-invisible doorway in its flank slid open. The Dragon adjusted its position, lining up its own airlock for an EVA.
Time to act. She granted her inner Ondo full access to her perceptions, then
