“I never wanted to stay away for so long.” We entwined our greater pseudopods in a greeting of warm affection, sort of like your big hugs, Elena. “I’d hoped to arrange a trip to the museum, to show my kindlings their heritage, but, well.”

  “Yes, well, indeed!” Carn said. “Things did rather take a turn, didn’t they? I have been so worried about you. So much responsibility, thrust upon you so suddenly. I wish we’d been able to better prepare you for your role, but I must say, you rose to the occasion.”

  “I failed, Elder.”

  “No more than all of us did.” A warm glow of absolution. “We did our best. What more can we do? There is no fault there. And now, from the wreckage, we will rebuild, and make something beautiful and new. Will you walk with me? Bring your helmet, just in case.”

  I followed Carnuflex out of my cabin, and we proceeded out of the hub, down one of the buried ship’s arms, down to an airlock. “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we’d take a little tour,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you’re comfortable with… all this. I thought, if you did have reservations, seeing what our future could hold might help.”

  We went through the airlock and into a transit tube, riding a lift. “This goes to another lock, and then a hatch on the chamber of the sea floor,” she explained. “We’ve got a submersible shuttle waiting for us.”

  We clambered up, and eventually into the belly of the small vessel, a little two-seater, its walls almost entirely transparent. Carn took the pilot’s chair, and I settled beside her. We rose from the sea floor and slowly proceeded, passing among the spires and pillars and rising toward the surface. “The water is highly oxygenated, and this planet supported life forms very similar to our own, before the… interventions.”

  The genocide, I thought.

  “The ocean wasn’t entirely emptied of life, even then,” she said. “The Cleansing Corps always focused on eradicating things with nervous systems, so there is still ample plant life, and a variety of microscopic organisms. We have plans to re-introduce larger forms of life – things that can feed on the floaters, then things that can feed on the feeders, and so on. Give us a year, and this place will be teeming with aquatic life, every species chosen for its beauty and nutritional value.”

  “I’m sure it will be a remarkable place, Elder,” I said.

  “Please, Lantern, I wiped the fluid of the incubation pod from your face when you were kindled. Call me Carn.” She gave me the equivalent of a concerned sideways glance. “How are you coping with… all this? Elder Vandor’s plans?”

  “Are they not also your plans, Carn?”

  “I agree wholeheartedly with certain parts of them,” she said. “Despite what Vandor may have told you, all the details are not settled yet.”

  Oh, how my heart (metaphorical) sang. “What do you mean?”

  “The entire council has agreed that claiming this place as our home world is the best first step. Uniting our people, and giving them a sense of community, is the most important thing. World is a lie, but–”

  “A beautiful lie,” I said. “I had the same thought, Carn.”

  “The council is split about what to do after that. Specifically, we have disagreements regarding how to handle the humans. You’ve spent a lot of time with the aliens, Lantern. What do you think of them?”

  “They vary as widely as the Free do. Some are kind, some are cruel, some are thoughtful, some are reckless. Most of them just want to live lives of peace and plenty, and take care of their loved ones… though there are always outliers who gravitate toward destruction and violence, for various reasons. It is difficult to generalize.”

  “Try to generalize anyway,” Carn said. “I’ve never even met a human. Give me something to go on.”

  All right then. “Their lives are short,” I said. “We live for centuries, and even with their best therapies and medical care, they can make it to perhaps a century and a half. As a consequence, they are not as adept at long-term planning, and can act with what we might perceive as a dangerous level of impulsivity.”

  “The Axiom said the same thing about us, because they could live for thousands of years. I suppose we are to the humans as the Axiom were to us.”

  I found that statement chilling, but – Carn was the kindly one, the one who encouraged, the one who nursed wounded bodies and spirits. I hoped, Elena. I hoped she was different. “You don’t agree with Vandor’s plans to, ah…”

  “To plunge the entire human military into the center of a star?” She laughed. (Not literally, but she indicated genuine amusement.) “I am not convinced that’s the best solution to the human problem, no.” The submersible rose and broke the surface, and I gasped, looking up, because the sky was there in all its bright vastness. On a planet with no light pollution at all, the stars were dazzling and bright. A moon, rounded and pale pink, hung close to the horizon. “It’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?” Carn said.

  “It really is.”

  “We must be worthy of World, Lantern. Is this a homeland for cowards, who would trick the humans into destruction?”

  “I… do not think so, Carn.”

  “Nor do I. Our people have been beaten down, subjugated, oppressed. We need to change our perception of ourselves. We won’t do that by executing a sneak attack, and committing mass murder via subterfuge. Do you agree?”

  “I do agree.”

  “Yes,” Carn said, pleased. “This should be a home world for heroes. For the brave. For the ferocious. For people who seize their destinies with every pseudopod. I believe we should meet the humans on the field of battle, and crush them utterly in combat, and at long last enjoy the pride of victory, after our long history of losses. Will some of us fall in that battle? Of course we will, but the fight will be worthwhile, because we will sacrifice those soldiers for something greater than ourselves.”

  I managed not to pause or, I think, show my heartbroken devastation. “Yes, Elder. I mean, Carn.” But she could tell I was upset by her words anyway.

  “Oh, dear. Have you come to… like some of the humans?”

  “I… a few, I admit.”

  She patted me with a pseudopod. “We won’t kill them all. Vandor is right about that part. For one thing, the total extermination of such a numerous and scattered people is simply not practical. We’ll give the survivors meaningful work, and we’ll have to do something about their tendency to breed – there are so many of them, and more all the time! But my point is, you can keep your favorites as servants and helpmeets, as long as they aren’t a threat.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Carn.”

  “I want you to be happy, dear. I know we’re asking a lot of you, to be the face of our reunification efforts. Are you ready to meet with the rest of the council? We have a lot to go over. This is the sort of operation that will take years, perhaps even decades, to fully come to fruition, but this – this is where it begins.”

  “I am ready, Carn.”

  We sailed along the surface of the waves, over the empty waters, until we reached a rocky shore, with a wall of sea cliffs. “We’ll have avian creatures, I think,” Carn said. “Some of the human colonies have, what are they called – birds?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll have some of those. They can burrow into the cliffs and nurse their young there.”

  “Most live in nests, Carn. They lay eggs.”

  “You’re the expert,” Carn said affably. “I’m sure you’ve spent more time down gravity wells than I have.”

  The time I’ve spent on planets could be measured in weeks, not months, but even so, I suspected Carn was right. The council tended to stay on the museum, traveling to different points in space. They kept their distance. They were the people who watched the people who watched the humans.

  The shuttle rose into the air and passed from water to land, rising just fast enough to clear the sea cliffs. We emerged onto a plain of long dry grasses that rippled in the wind of our passage, beautiful and shimmering in the moonlight. “See, plants,” Carn said with satisfaction. “We’ll get some herbivores. We might have to tweak the local vegetation, or I suppose more likely the animals, to make everything digestively compatible, but we’re good at fixing problems like that. The humans used to have some interesting plant-eating creatures on their home world, didn’t they?”

  “Giant sloths,” I said. “Glyptodons. Paraceratherium. Sure.”

  “Wasn’t there one called the giraffe?”

  “There was.”

  “Wonderful. Maybe we’ll get some of those. The fabrication engines can copy organic systems, too, of course, and for those, you don’t even need a fully operational exemplar – a little bit of DNA will do. World will have the best of everything from all over the galaxy.” Carn patted me again. “You’ll be given excellent quarters here, once you’ve completed your work for the council. We can be generous in our rewards for good service. We all know what a lot of pressure we’re putting you under.”

  “I am here to serve, Elder.”

  “Carn. I’m Carn, and you’re Lantern.” Another pat. “We were thinking about this location for the first surface city.” She pointed to a valley full of dry vegetation, with a river meandering down the middle, on toward the sea. “What do you think?”

  I thought it looked like a flood plain waiting for the rainy season. “Beautifully situated, Carn.”

  Her chromatophores flushed with pleasure. “We’ll break ground soon. We held on to some construction equipment from the old masters, ship repair drones and the like, that we can repurpose. We can have a functional settlement in a week and a beautiful one in a month.”

  “I can’t wait to see it.”

  “We’re going to call it New Skyport. The story will be, it’s built on the ruins of our old capital city, Skyport. We’re going to bury some artificial artifacts and things underneath, you know, to make it plausible.”

  “There were humans who believed the universe was only thousands of years old, not billions,” I said. “They believed this for religious reasons, and persisted in their belief even after the fossil remains of creatures millions of years old were discovered.”

  She flushed the color of I don’t know why you’re telling me this, but I’ll be polite. “Oh? How did they reconcile that contradiction?”

  “While those humans worshipped a god, they also believed in a sort of… anti-god, or evil spirit, they called the devil. They thought the devil placed the fossils in the ground in order to trick them, and test their faith.”

  “Ha! Yes, I see the comparison, but I hope you know our motivations are more pure than a devil’s mischief. Are there still humans who believe such things?”

  “A few. Including most of the inhabitants of the Coelesti system, or at least those who lived on Seraphim and its moon Cherubim.”

  “How do they incorporate the existence of our people into their worldview?”

  “Some say we are children of their god as well, but many others believe we are creations of the devil. Our people seldom visit Coelesti.”

  “And to think, the Free have a reputation for making up outrageous stories. We never needed to make up legends about an evil spirit, though – we had the Axiom. Although… I think I’ll mention this devil of yours to the cultural history committee. They’re building an ancestral religion for us from scratch, and at this point it’s mostly about fertility and sea gods. Having an antagonist could really make the whole mythology more compelling, don’t you think? Maybe we could even give our devil some Axiom characteristics, just a hint here and there, to create a chilling sense of foresight or some kind of foreboding in our collective unconscious.”

  “That’s an inspired idea, Carn.” It was, too. She was good at what she did. She just did horrible things.

  We flew out of the valley, across a broad plain. At first I thought we were approaching a hill… but then I realized the structure was too regular, its curves too mathematical in their precision. “Is that a building of some kind, Carn?”

  “You don’t recognize it? That’s your old home, dear Lantern. The museum of subjugation. Soon to be the palace of domination, if everything works out.”

  I hadn’t recognized the structure, not out of context – the last time I’d seen it, the museum had been floating in space among the stars, not half buried in the ground against a backdrop of distant mountains. The museum was an old Axiom station, and as such, did not share the radial symmetry my people favored in our own constructions. The museum had a tower – the hill I’d seen – but it wasn’t a central element, just a random oddity off to one side. Connecting tunnels stretched from the tower, sometimes making sharply-angled turns, to connect to various modules – cubes, rectangular prisms, a cone, a hemisphere, a sphere, and even something like a wheel. More tunnels sprang from those modules, stretching up or down or across, joining other modules at seemingly random points. Half the structure or more was buried underground, including the exhibit hall itself, a single oblate spheroid of a module almost as big as the rest of the station all together. In space, it hung, pendulous, like a piece of fruit ready to fall and rot.

  We flew toward the rounded tower, where a landing platform had been constructed, encircling the top of the structure. We touched down, and the shuttle doors opened.

  I couldn’t help but gasp at the air that rushed in – fresh and cool and tinged with salt. That’s the moment I fell in love with World, Elena. The council wanted to use the place for their own terrible purposes, but… it smelled so good. My people deserve a place where we can breathe our own air, don’t we?

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Carn said. “We had a few planets on our shortlist, and they all seemed roughly equal as options, just looking at the numbers, but when we actually visited this one – we all agreed. The air. It’s perfect.”

  Carn clambered out of the shuttle, and I followed. The wall of the tower went soft and rippled away, opening an archway for us as we approached. It was amazing how wrong it felt, passing through that door. I’d grown up on that very station, but in recent years, my interactions with Axiom facilities had been limited to their destruction. How could my people found a better world when their headquarters was a house of horrors?

  I suppose because they wanted to make the whole planet, and the whole galaxy, into a house of horrors too.

  The council quarters were located in the tower, seven lavish suites of rooms arrayed around a central meeting area. I’d only been allowed into that sanctum, the seat of my sect’s power, when I first received my assignment to Veritat station in the Sol system. I’d been awed, then, at the place: its spaciousness, compared to the cramped conditions in the parts of the station where I lived; the soaring ceiling, narrowing to a point; the polished spawnglass table; the smooth floor, its colors constantly shifting; and, of course, the decorations.

  At the time I’d thought of those artifacts as solemn reminders of the grim seriousness of our duty, but now, knowing the true purpose of the truth-tellers wasn’t to protect the galaxy from the Axiom but to protect the Axiom themselves, I recognized those mementos for what they truly were: trophies of conquest.

  The walls were covered with objects from civilizations my sect had eradicated before they could develop space travel. Musical instruments, made of wood and sinew. Weapons – blades, shields, nets, spears, and guns, all hopeless against the might of the truth-tellers and their Axiom armaments. Banners and flags. A portrait of a figure like a beetle, brandishing a long silver pole, the canvas a little charred at one corner. Masks, dolls, bits of statuary and pottery. All the lost detritus of a hundred murdered worlds.

  Besides those decorations, there were the cabinets, full of shelves, each shelf full of bottles, each bottle meticulously labeled, and each containing murky fluid and some small body part – a mandible, a talon, the end of a tentacle, a finger, a toe, an eye, a tongue whorl, and various small internal organs of unknown purpose. (That’s when I got an idea, Elena. If only I had any hope of living long enough to make it come true.)

  I pointed to the cabinets. “Which one of those has the sample from this planet?”

  “Hmm?” Carn said. “Oh. I’d have to look it up in the station database. That was long before my time.”

  “Why do we… I never really understood…”

  “Why keep the specimens? It’s all a bit grim, isn’t it? I never liked that part of the job. But our founding charter directed us to collect ‘a set of biological samples from the dominant eradicated species.’ The records say that early on, representatives from the Cleansing Corp collected those samples. They were always obsessed with biological technology, creating plagues and so on. When the Axiom factional war heated up, the old policies broke down, but… we just kept collecting. Tradition, Lantern. We did so many things because of tradition, but now, we get to make a new tradition.”

  Carn led me to the conference table, and gestured to one of the seats, protean chairs made of smart material that molded and shifted to provide support and comfort in any position to any body. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Carn! I… those seats are for council members!”

  “Indeed they are.” One of the suite doors rippled open, and Vandor emerged, wearing his formal robes and taking his own spot at the head of the table. The spawnglass shimmered and threw up broken reflections of his majesty.

  Other doors opened, and four more of the Free appeared, all elaborately robed. I recognized a couple – Hister, Witlock – but the others were unknown to me, and had presumably joined the council after I left the museum. Soon six figures were seated, all gazing at me.

  Six. Of seven.

  “We have a vacancy,” Vandor rumbled. “We had a policy disagreement with Scoliax. She was… unwilling to accept our new reality. We voted to have her removed.”

  I wondered if she was one of the bodies I’d seen floating in the decontamination chamber. I remembered Scoliax. She’d always been especially fervent about the need to kill emerging sapient species before they attained space travel. Once, she’d directed the eradication of a species that had only just harnessed the use of fire a few years before. “We know where that leads,” I remember her saying. She wouldn’t be missed, not by me, but… “You don’t mean for me to take her position?”