The star had suffered no harm; the image of it had been distorted by intense gravitational lensing. Two more repeated images followed, as if the star navigated through a chamber of mirrors, reflected and its reflections reflected.
Beyond it, I could sense an artificial construct, an enormous habitat that I deduced was Synarche Station itself, seat of government and hub of our confederation of species. It was more populous than most worlds, and for a moment I felt choked up as I considered it.
But I focused my attention on what Singer wanted me to see, and I could make it out. There was a complicated series of concentric lines that looked like ripples, or a standing wave.
If you could squint with the inside of your head, I squinted. “There’s a pattern.”
“It’s a frequency spectrum generated with a diffraction spectrograph,” Singer said confidently. “And it’s detailed enough that I can determine what light source it’s modeling, I’m certain, given enough cycles.”
“It’s an X on a map,” Connla said. “Isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Yes.
They were both quiet for a bit, thinking. That nagging, off-balance sense of spin was still there also, so I turned my attention to examining it more closely, pointing my crewmates at the relevant senso. “I think there’s something else weird going on.”
“Something massive near the event horizon,” Connla suggested. He’d been quiet, just observing. “Something the Saga-star is co-orbiting? A second black hole?”
“Wouldn’t they merge, if they were that close?” I asked, completely dodging the question of what could be massive enough to put a wobble in a black hole something like 44 million kilometers across. “There’s a second orbiting black hole in the system, but that’s a couple of light-ans out.”
“I don’t know,” Singer said. “There are several ways in which the Well does not conform to expectations, but I have no data to indicate that it’s lopsided.”
“So there’s something down there,” Connla said.
“There can’t be something down there,” I argued.
I was arguing more often, I realized, feeling weird about it as I did. Arguing wasn’t in my profile.
“Well, not past the event horizon.” He smoothed his ponytail, offended. “Maybe close to the edge? Is that even a thing that can happen?”
A cat was bumping against my sternum. I cuddled her and said, “Hey, Mephi,” before realizing a moment later that it was Bushyasta. “What are you doing awake?”
“Statistically, it had to happen sooner or later.” Singer, dryly.
Bushyasta headbutted me and purred. I scritched her, staring into space.
Literally staring into space, I suppose—or into the wavering vortex of the black hole’s distorted accretion disk. The Well is a remarkably inefficient engine of total annihilation. It actually manages to consume less than 1 percent of the matter and energy that fall prey to its enormous mass, because the incomprehensible vastness of its gravitational power imparts so much angular momentum to whatever accretes to it that most of that stuff has to be fired back out again to allow even a small amount to fall in.
“What if you put a white bubble inside a black hole’s gravity well,” I said, “but, you know, outside the Schwarzschild radius. Could you park something there? Something you didn’t want people to find until they had the technology necessary to get it out again? Do you think that could make the Well feel lopsided?”
“Like data?” Singer asked.
“Like data,” I agreed. “Or like a ship?”
“Oh,” Connla said.
Bushyasta’s purrs vibrated against my chest.
Singer asked, “Can you feel something down there?”
“Something.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“Let me see.”
I wasn’t sure, exactly, how to grope my way around inside the Well without feeling as if I were staring into a star while trying to focus on a tiny, backlit insect. It wasn’t glare, exactly. But it was metaphorically glare. Glare-like, maybe.
It was uncomfortable and intense, but it didn’t take me long to find it—now that I had an idea what I was looking for and where to look for it. And after decians of practice, I was getting pretty decent at spotting white bubbles, if I do say so myself.
The Koregoi senso gave me a perception of being immersed in a strong current as I reached out toward the anomalous wobble. I had both an awareness of being swept along, sliding down the Well as if down a curved hull surface, and simultaneously of a more holistic knowledge. I was embedded in space-time, permeated with it, but also a removed observer with a long, large-scale view.
The anomaly was, indeed, an anchored, stationary white bubble, or something very like one. Except the scar it had left on the surface of space-time was massive. I don’t mean to say it was large, though, because in terms of scale it was not long or wide or tall. It was just . . . heavy, if that word can be said to mean anything under the circumstances.
Heavy enough to create gravitational eddies within the Well’s accretion disk, like a rock beside a whirlpool. And it was that that I had been sensing as a wobble.
“Somebody put that there on purpose,” I said.
Singer added, “And made it easy to find, if you had the right tools for looking.”
“Look inside, already,” Connla replied.
“It’s not that easy.”
But there was the parasite, after all. It wasn’t like looking, exactly—more like groping around blindly in a large velvet bag, uncertain if you were going to pull out a handful of emeralds or a handful of wasps.
I found the thing inside the white bubble. And as I noticed it, surfing through the Koregoi tech to get a feel for the location, I felt the thing inside the Koregoi bubble notice me. The first contact was feather-light, like brushing fronds; slowly and nonthreateningly, it grew stronger, and I realized that I was kicked into the time-buried Koregoi artifact’s senso. It was a peculiar experience, not in the least because gravity and time dilation are essentially the same thing, so I found myself with a mayfly sense of being exposed to a slow and ponderous attention.
“Oh my,” I said, blinking. “It’s a ship all right. And, Singer, it’s talking to me.”
CHAPTER 14
HOW DO YOU GET SOMETHING out of the bottom of the biggest hole in the galaxy?
That wasn’t even the first argument we had to have. The first argument we had to have was whether we even should. Singer was a big proponent of archaeological value in situ—but on the other hand, the archaeological value of a site you can’t reach is questionable.
As we were discussing that, I tried tuning in closer to the Koregoi ship’s signal. It wasn’t communicating a lot of information: what I was getting was more of a steady ping than actual conversation. But the mystery did nothing to reduce the excitement thrilling through me.
Neither the conversation with Singer and Connla nor my attempts to communicate with whatever lurked at the bottom of the Well kept me from pressing my face to the viewport and watching the incredible spectacle as the black hole’s orbiting stars lensed in and out of apparent locations, multiplying and subtracting themselves. Not too much later, Singer interrupted the debate to inform us that Synarche ships were moving toward our position. The Well is not terribly big, as such systems go, and it would not take them long to reach us. Singer pointed out that he would be obliged to leave us when they arrived, as his extension on Synarche service would be up. I knew that I would almost certainly be required to surrender myself as well.
So we had to work fast.
We agreed that we had, basically, two options, and a bunch of tactics to achieve them. Once we agreed on retrieval, we knew that we could attempt to move the parked artifact—in its white bubble—remotely. Or we could attempt to get to it somehow and take control. Basically, raising or wreck-diving.
There were beacons within a few light-minutes, and in the interests of filing the paperwork, Singer fired off a series of tight-beam packets staking our claim to the Koregoi vessel and registering our intent to a salvage operation. That accomplished, we were at least arguably legal, and the next step was getting there.
You’re not supposed to be able to communicate with objects in white space. But I was doing my damnedest, and the Koregoi senso made the impossible possible. The ship didn’t seem to have a shipmind—there was no awareness in there that I could determine or contact. But I managed to at least get the systems to notice me. Like when a presence-controlled light blinks on when you enter a cabin.
So I could see the ship. And the ship could see me. Whether I could get control over any of the ship’s systems was another question—one I wished I had a few decians to explore rather than the space of time it would take the Core ships to reach us on EM drive.