The Tok ship admitted her, its airlock door closing behind her, sealing her inside. The air was breathable, tasting surprisingly fresh. Had the Tok breathed the same air? Or was it the other way around, and the atmospheres of inhabited worlds had been engineered to the designs of the Tok?
She raced down curving, white corridors, their appearance familiar from her time on Surtr's vessel. She'd chosen not to bring a blaster. If it came to a fight, she was doomed anyway. If there was a surviving Tok individual on board, and he had lured her there in some ancient plan to escape his prison, she would die with him.
She emerged into a spherical room, its walls completely transparent. Ahead of her, the plasma envelope of the black hole raged, terrifyingly close. Behind her, the rest of the galaxy. With the effects of the extreme time dilation, she could discern that, indeed, the stars did move.
An old man sat cocooned in a chair. His body sagged as if his tissues and even his bones were crumbling away. He had to have been truly ancient even before he took his final flight. His face was unmoving, sagging asymmetrically, his muscles paralysed, perhaps. He did not look like a malevolent demon; he appeared to be on the point of death. Yet, she recognized his form, the way his body was put together: that elongated skull that looked like it was housing a brain bursting out of its cavity; his height and his slender limbs. He looked impossibly fragile, as if he would snap at the slightest movement.
Despite his appearance, his mental voice was light and quick in her head. “I have watched you, Selene Ada. For me it has been only the last few moments of time, but I have seen your actions. I am Toruk.”
He apparently had no trouble interfacing with her tech or her language centres. The knowledge Surtr had given her doubtless helped. Which was just as well: three weeks had already passed by in external reality. She hadn't factored in the time it would take to dive in to reach the ship and make it to this room.
“You are one of the Tok?”
“I am.”
“Did they send you here, imprison you here?”
From the tone of his response, the idea appeared to amuse Toruk. “No, no. Quite the opposite; this was entirely my idea. My shameful secret. I knew I would be safe here unless a swoop ship jumped in to find me.”
“Have we endangered you by coming here?”
“Ah, that risk has long passed. I wasn't supposed to outlive my fellow Tok, you see, but when it came to it, I couldn't bring myself to accept the end. Cowardice, you might say. Perhaps I am no different to the others after all. There we are, I have contravened yet another sacred ethic. It is not the first.”
“What ethic?”
“We had agreed to leave the galaxy to its fate when we left, but I couldn't do it. As so often over my life, I found the decisions of the others puzzling. I'm sure I infuriated them, too. In my own way, I am also a renegade. It's likely they thought I was insane.”
The clock in her head said that the weeks were becoming months in the outside galaxy. But she needed answers. “Are you insane?”
“I don't think so, but would I know?”
A fair question – which got her nowhere. “Why have you waited here all this time?”
“In case there was the need. Of course, I was forbidden from communicating in any way with, forgive me, the child races we seeded around the galaxy. But I decided to do it anyway.”
“What was the need you foresaw? You couldn't have predicted Concordance's rise to domination.”
“Concordance are nothing; they are a twist of smoke in the winds of history. Soon they will be gone. They abuse our technology, but the great risk is that they find the Morn. The Morn are a scourge that will devour everyone and everything. You, me, Concordance, all of it. You have learned that, haven't you? We thought we'd locked them safely away, contained them, but I remained because I wasn't convinced. We were far too enlightened to commit the final genocide and destroy the Great Enemy utterly. Now, everything that I feared is coming to pass. It was our greatest failure, and it comes down to you to correct it, Selene. You and, perhaps, one or two others.”
“These are ancient stories,” she said, “I'm trying to defeat the real threat facing the galaxy.”
There was a note of anger in the Tok's voice. “Then you haven't understood! The two are intertwined. If your enemy and the Morn come together, everything will be over.”
This wasn't getting her anywhere. As she argued with Toruk, the months were accumulating, seeming to spin by faster and faster. Six months ticked up. Anything might have happened in that time. “What do I have to do? Tell me quickly.”
“Find the light at the heart of the galaxy. Find the Morn and destroy them. That is all that matters.”
“How?”
“We seeded waybeads around the galaxy. Most of my people did not want to do even that, fearing that the surviving Morn would be found by those who should not find them. That must not be your Concordance. Destroy both of them by all means, but it is the Morn you must eliminate.”
“Waybeads? Give me them before I go.”
The resentment in his tone was clear. “The ones you need were hidden long before my days. Such revered artefacts were never going to be given to a troublemaker like me. That didn't stop me making others, laying trails of my own. You've seen some, I think, used one to reach Ansider, and another to come here, yes? You must find two more: the green and the black.”
Waybeads. Seer stones. She'd seen a green and black pair at the Haven, in one of the stasis