I thought quickly. I was being invited to speak heresy. If Vandor was sincere, doing so might ingratiate me to him, and earn his trust. If this was a trick, a trap, a test of my piety, then failing it could lead swiftly to my death. In the end, I decided what to do via the simple expedient of falling back on my nature and my habit: I am Lantern, and whenever possible, I tell the truth. “Except the Axiom aren’t the biggest and the strongest anymore. If they were, how did the humans destroy so many of their works? They turned the weapons of the old masters against them, and the galaxy changed.”

  “Very good, Elder Lantern.” Vandor practically purred. “Admirably clear-sighted. The Axiom aren’t coming back, at least not in anywhere near the strength we expected, and so revering them, serving them, preparing the way for them – it doesn’t make sense any more. And while it may be true they were the best hope of the universe for surviving heat death or whatever other ultimate fate awaits us…” Another expectant look.

  “That is a long time away, Elder,” I said. “So long away, it might as well be forever.”

  “Yes. It makes sense, to me, to focus on more immediate concerns.”

  I wanted to say, “So we’re going to worship the humans instead now?” But I thought that level of cheekiness might get me in trouble.

  Vandor scuttled over to a terminal, made a few passes, and then turned toward the center of the room. The dais where he’d waited for me sank down into the floor, and after a moment, a gleaming tub of black stone, easily ten meters across, rose up, dominating the room. Vandor clambered into the tub, water sloshing over the rim, and settled comfortably into place, pseudopods stretched out along the sides, the picture of relaxation. He did not invite me to join him. “When the Axiom returned, our sect was supposed to gather the remnants of the so-called Free. We were going to call in our siblings from their deluded rambles in the galaxy and remind them of their true purpose: to serve the old masters. Those who came willingly and served would be permitted to live. Those who fled or refused or fought would be exterminated.” Vandor splashed the water playfully. “Obviously, we won’t need to do that anymore. But what is the ultimate purpose of our sect, then, with the Axiom gone?”

  “It would seem we have no purpose, Elder,” I said.

  “A person without a purpose is like a ship without a pilot, Lantern. It just… drifts, until it crashes into something, or is forever lost. We needed a new purpose. One not too dissimilar from our old one, lest it break the minds of my fellow council members. So I suggested: why not gather the Free anyway? Why not unify our fragmented species? Why not… offer them a home?”

  Vandor rolled back in the tub, looking up through the crystalline dome at the ocean beyond.

  “So you chose World,” Lantern said. “To be that home.”

  “We will call them all together,” Vandor said. “We will spread the word that our legacy has been rediscovered. Do you think they’ll come, Lantern?”

  My people wandered the galaxy, making up stories to explain how they got where they were and where they came from. If they were offered an alternative? One that was plausible? One they would believe to be true, because the truth-tellers told them so? “Many of them would come, Elder. I think perhaps even most.”

  “Isn’t it a beautiful idea? They will arrive at this place, first in twos and tens, then hundreds, thousands, and millions. They will rebuild the cities, aquatic and terrestrial. We will form our own government, allowing the Free a unified voice in galactic affairs – by definition the most powerful voice. There is a moon here that is ripe for terraforming, too, should the population on World become too large. Even for those of our species who choose to live elsewhere, the knowledge that they have a home world, a place they can go, and be welcome, would be a great comfort, would it not?”

  “It would, Elder,” I said.

  Elena – I meant what I said. Yes, it was a lie. Yes, World wasn’t really our long-lost home. But unlike most of the untruth the leaders of my sect told over the millennia, this wasn’t an ugly lie, but a beautiful one. Don’t the Free deserve their own culture? Their own society?

  “We will seed the temples of this place with artifacts, stories, myths,” Vandor went on. “We will create a tale of the way we were before the Axiom found us and changed us to suit their needs. We will have our own heroes to model ourselves on, our own reformers, our own gods that we worshipped until we outgrew them. The finest confabulators on the council are putting those stories together now – a new history, painted to look ancient, and one that will serve as an inspiration for all our people. What do you think, Lantern?”

  “I think… I did not expect this, Elder.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I… a plan to save the Axiom, I suppose, or destroy the humans, or… something like that.”

  “Save the Axiom? No, as I said, I think we’ve outgrown that. Once your gods prove fallible, they cease to be gods. The Axiom have shown themselves unfit to be the rulers of the galaxy. I no longer want to serve the Axiom.” Vandor paddled around in the pool on his back. “I want to replace them.”

  There it was. My heart (metaphorical) sank; my hearts (literal) began to beat faster. “I see.”

  “We have access to a little of the technology of the old masters, and understand it better than the humans ever could. We were the technicians, the engineers, the operatives of that dead empire. Yes, many of us have died, but among our people expertise is seldom really lost. We have a trove of neural buds, waiting to be consumed, that will teach our new nation everything we need to know to use Axiom technology.”

  I decided to be hopeful, or pretend to be. “What do we have? Xenoforming engines, gravity generators, medical technology, things like that? To make the lives of our people better?”

  “Those things, of course. But it’s not just about making life better for our people. It’s about protecting our people from others, by making their lives very, very bad.”

  “With things like… terror-drones,” I said. “Scourge ships.”

  “Planet-devouring nanotechnology. Mind-control devices, for our unruly citizens. I suspect they can be adapted to work on humans, too. Death rays. Stasis fields. Inertial manipulation. Entropy engines. Portable singularities. Offensive wormholes. All those things are ours, Lantern, our rightful inheritance, and we don’t need to be afraid to use any of it, not anymore, because the Axiom aren’t around to punish us for daring to steal their fire.”

  “But… most of that technology has been destroyed, hasn’t it, Elder?” Callie has been very good about transforming the most dangerous elements of Axiom technology into very small particles.

  “That is true. But we managed to save a single Axiom fabrication engine, Lantern. It’s not functional yet, but our best engineer is working on repairs. The engine doesn’t have a database of schematics, unfortunately, but we can work around that.”

  “Without a database… the engine will need exemplars, Elder Vandor. You can’t create a fleet of scourge-ships unless you have a functional scourge ship to scan and use as a model.” The scanning process allowed a fabrication engine to copy any object down to the atomic level, but it destroyed the object in the process. “The humans have destroyed or disassembled all those ships. The same is true of the known terror-drones, and the nanotech swarm from the Taliesen system.”

  “Yes, yes,” Vandor said. “But you’re forgetting. We still have the museum of subjugation.”

  “Oh,” I said in a small voice. “You do?”

  “We brought it with us when we escaped. It’s here, on World. We’d hardly leave it behind, Lantern. Why, that museum is our heritage.”

  I have told you a little about the museum of subjugation, Elena. It was part of the home station of the truth-tellers, the place where I grew up, and spent the first centuries of my life, learning all the grim secrets of my people. I described the museum, I think, as an archive, with documentation detailing our millennia of servitude to the Axiom, and revealing the true history of my people, insofar as it was known. Perhaps you imagined a library, the sort of place you described from your childhood on Earth, with shelves and long tables and beams of narrow light. Our archive was not like that. It was a cheerless space full of terminals and racks of cloned neural buds, so we could experience the memories of those who’d come before us. The archive was really just a small part of the museum of subjugation, though.

  The larger part was the exhibit hall. I never went there except when I was forced to for my studies, in order to familiarize myself with Axiom technology. The horrible things we have seen on Axiom stations? All of it is there. The worst of it was, some of the technology was staged, presented as it had appeared in use. There were little mannequins of my people, trapped in a diorama of a flensing chamber. A scourge-ship, those thorny orbs of planet-searing devastation, floated near the ceiling, gravity generators holding up fragments of rock to simulate a post-destruction debris field around it. A terror-drone, its red lights gleaming ominously, hovered up there too, its pincers posed in the process of tearing into a model of a starfish ship. More, and more, so much more, but I’ve done my best to forget the hall, because those images of posed devastation haunt me still.

  Now Vandor wanted to use the exemplars in those exhibits to recreate the Axiom empire, with himself, I was sure, at the head.

  “What is my role in this plan, Elder?” I asked.

  “Oh, you have various parts to play. You’re well known in the Jovian system, and the Vanir system, and on Taliesen. Even the humans respect you – in your last report you said your kindlings were infiltrating some of their governments?”

  “Yes, Elder.” My kindlings weren’t infiltrating anything, but it was a useful pretense.

  “Then you’ll carry the good news about the home world being rediscovered back with you when you leave. You will notify all the Free in those systems where you have influence, and use your contacts to spread the word elsewhere. The news will take some time to reach all the wanderers, and I know there are tribes who’ve never even heard of the humans, drifting around out in the dark, but they will be gathered in eventually. All of the Free will be curious about home, and they’ll come and see. Lighting the fire of that curiosity is the first thing you’ll do for us.”

  “Yes, Elder. And… later?”

  Vandor briefly submerged fully, then rose to the surface again, spitting a stream of water in a fountaining arc. “Later, you’ll tell your friends in the human militaries that, in the course of repopulating World, we found the location of the Axiom home world.”

  “But… we have no idea where they come from. The rumor was that the Axiom destroyed their home planet millennia ago, in the course of one of their… factional debates.”

  “Lantern, you really must stop being so concerned about literal truth. The truth is what you make it! You’ll tell your human friends the Axiom home world is crammed full of stasis chambers, holding millions of slumbering Axiom, and that the whole place is protected by formidable planetary defenses, swarms of terror-drones and scourge-ships, all that. You’ll explain that the Free can’t possibly destroy the place on our own. We’ll need the greatest military coalition the galaxy has ever known, with the bulk of our forces drawn from every human government joined together, massed for a single surprise attack. We’ll provide the frequency key to open their fixed bridges and allow their fleets to pour through.”

  “And what happens on the other side?” I asked. “An ambush?”

  “That would be inelegant,” Vandor said. “Here’s a secret known only to the central council: the Axiom set up a bridgehead inside a star. How they did so is mysterious – you’d think the first time a wormhole opened inside a stellar object, the consequences would be disastrous, but somehow, the configuration is stable. They used that star as a sort of incinerator, for very large pieces of trash. We have evidence that the Axiom once shepherded an entire rebel faction through a bridge and into the heart of that star. We’ll do the same thing to the human fleet. They’ll sail in, because you’ll convince them to, and we can fake enough evidence to trick their scouts and probes before they commit their main forces. Once they do commit… that will be the end of the human threat. It’s possible that thousands of Tanzer Drives appearing inside a star simultaneously will cause some sort of supernova, but we’ll be well away from the system when that happens.”

  “I see. Once the human military is gone, what will you do next?”

  “The options vary. The human civilians and whatever nominal forces they leave behind will fall easily to our new scourge-fleet. Some of my fellow council members want to eradicate human life, and there’s an appealing simplicity to the idea. But I…”

  “You want to enslave them,” I said.

  “I want to offer them the opportunity to loyally serve their obvious superiors,” Vandor corrected. “As we served the old masters, I’d like the humans to serve us: the new masters.”

  “It is a grand and ambitious plan, Elder Vandor. I am eager to play my part.”

  “I have no doubt. I’ve assigned you quarters. Go there and rest.”

  “Oh, I can simply return home now, Elder, there’s no need–”

  “Rest,” Vandor said sternly. “The other members of the council have to talk things over with you – your role is crucial, and you will be drilled until we’re sure you’ll say exactly the right things in exactly the right way. This was just an initial meeting, because some of the council… well, I’m sorry to say, Lantern, some of them thought you might have been compromised. You were inducted into the mysteries in a highly irregular and rushed fashion, after all. Historically, over half of the adherents who learned about our true purpose rebelled and had to be exterminated, and those were told in a far more planned and methodical way. Naturally some of us doubted your loyalties, and thought your claim to be a double agent working for our cause was… forgive me… a lie.”

  “I trust I have set your mind at ease, Elder?”

  “Completely and comprehensively, Elder,” Vandor said. “Now. Go. Rest.” He submerged again.

  I followed the directions the ship gave me to a small cabin, faintly musty-smelling, and settled down. I did a check for surveillance equipment, and, finding none, began to write this letter, as a way of organizing my thoughts as much as anything else. I always feel better when I talk to you, Elena, even if only in my mind.

  I need to convince the rest of the council of my unswerving loyalty, and gather intelligence, and return to tell you and Shall and Callie what the council has planned, and where this new home world is located. The council’s ambitions are vast, and the threat is real – they are very good at implementing long-term projects – but their resources, at the moment, aren’t terribly formidable. (Thank goodness the fabrication engine isn’t online yet.) We can still stop them.

  I am going to try to rest. I hope the next time I say something to you, I say it in person.

  Yours,

  Lantern

  My dear Elena,

  Things are not going well. I am currently crouched inside a model of an asteroid floating near the ceiling of the museum of subjugation, in a field of other such asteroids, and I am afraid. I have been this afraid before, but never when I was alone, and being alone makes it so much worse.

  I am not afraid of dying. Indeed, dying may be my best possible outcome now.

  I am afraid of living, and being changed, and hurting you, and all our friends. I’m making this record and encrypting it in my suit’s memory, set to auto-transmit as soon as the suit gets in range of New Meditreme again. I’ve protected the files and locked myself out of the program so I won’t be able to stop the transmission. Even if I change, the signal will remain.

  If I appear on the station, smiling and acting like everything is okay, and talking about the amazing discovery of the real true home world of the Free… if you’ve read this, you’ll know it’s a lie, and that I’m not really me anymore, at least, not in any meaningful way.

  Assuming I don’t sabotage things. I can’t delete these letters, or turn off the transmission, but I could switch environment suits, or break this one. I guess it depends on how complete the mind-control technology is. Will there be a secret part of me held back, watching from the core of myself? If so, perhaps I can lie by omission, and let the transmission proceed. But if I am truly transformed, and become the perfectly obedient tool they want me to be… I don’t know. I can only control those things I can control. I can only do my best. I am. I really am.

  I have no immediate plan beyond hiding in here, so I suppose I should fill you in on the series of disasters that put me in this position.

  I didn’t sleep, but I did rest, until I was summoned. Not by Vandor this time, but by Carnuflex, one of the elders I knew from the old days – she was administrator of the museum of subjugation when I was a kindling, and has since risen to a more rarefied position. Carnuflex was always the kindest of my teachers, gentle and thoughtful and patient and unhurried, and she struck me as unchanged when the door slid open and she walked in.

  Carnuflex is about my size, with seven pseudopods like me, and a perfect ring of eyes around her central dome, alternating blue and green. She wore no voicebox, and spoke to me in the old way – gestures, pheromones, colors, and the occasional natural vocalization. I realized how much I’d missed speaking that way, and soon fell back comfortably into the rhythm of our language. I’ll do my best to translate our conversations here into human words, though it will be a loose approximation at best.

  Imagine her voice as kindly and comforting. “Lantern, my dear one, you’ve come back to us!”