“Okay, Crow,” Winslow said. “How about we let Dr. Mears get settled before we interrogate her life choices?”

  “You emphasized her title as a subtle rebuke,” Crowbar said. “To encourage me to be more respectful. But I have no inherent respect for the standards of higher education in human cultures, so my opinion cannot be shaped by such signifiers. I will form an opinion of Dr. Mears based on direct observation. I will share my determinations once I have gathered more data. I am going to check the aft communications array now.” Crowbar scuttled off and disappeared behind a crate.

  “He was… very direct,” Delilah said.

  “Have you spent much time with the Free?”

  That’s right–”the Free” was what Liars called themselves among themselves. At least sometimes. At least some of them. The aliens were hard to generalize about. “Not really. There are only a few of them on Earth.”

  “As a rule they aren’t fond of gravity wells. They like to leave their exit options open. I’ve known… many of the Free. They’re just like people. Some are wonderful, some are awful, and most are a little bit between. Crow comes from a group, or a tribe, whatever, called the truth-tellers. They hate deception, and always tell the truth as they see if. For some truth-tellers, that comes across as refreshing frankness. For others, it’s more like rudeness.”

  “A Liar who tells the truth?” Everyone knew Liars were fundamentally untrustworthy – as a species they were pathological liars, spinning an outlandish array of stories about everything from the mundane to the cosmic. Every group had its own version of reported reality, and none of them were consistent with the others.

  “The Free,” Winslow said, and this time Delilah noticed the tone of subtle rebuke. “You get used to it. Crow is really… sort of an intern. One of the captain’s old friends is a member of the Free from the same sect, and she asked him to give Crowbar some work experience. The captain will be doing most of the actual piloting.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Delilah said. “The job listing just said ‘long-range research mission.’”

  “I’ll let the captain tell you about that,” Winslow said. “We have an all-hands meeting in three hours. I’ll show you to your cabin and you can rest or wander around the ship in the meantime.”

  The ship was an odd mixture of state-of-the-art and… well, junk, honestly. One of Delilah’s uncles back home had hit the lottery and, rather than buying a new house, had chosen to renovate his falling-down old shack, shoring up crumbling foundations and tacking on new rooms and floors, when a complete tear-down would have been more advisable. The Golden Spider had a similar aesthetic: shiny new plates alongside patches of epoxy, scuffed corridor floors but top-of-the-line adaptive lighting overhead, old-fashioned vents with metal grates pumping in air cleaned by the finest new scrubbers. The engine room was a similar mishmash, and she shook her head over ancient exposed cooling pipes running alongside gleaming induction coils. The reactor at the heart of the Tanzer Drive was brand new, at least, and the radiation shielding was way better than spec.

  She prowled through the space at the heart of the ship, familiarizing herself with its peculiarities and trying to predict where failures might occur. She paused before a peculiar object – a greasy-looking black cube about the size of her head, stuck into an alcove cut into the wall. Was it some kind of backup power supply, or something related to the artificial gravity? She followed the cables (jammed seemingly arbitrarily into its sides) and found they were hooked into the navigation system. Some kind of emergency distress beacon maybe? What was it made of? Liars – no, the Free – had sophisticated material technology, but she’d never seen anything like this.

  A bright yellow repair drone the size and approximate shape of a human hand crawled across the wall toward her. “Mears!” Ashok’s voice emerged from the machine. “I see you’ve discovered my secret device of enigmatic mystery! That’s why you had to sign all those non-disclosure agreements, you know. This little thing has been my project for the past few years – it’s a fully-functional copy of a piece of alien tech my old crew found on an Axiom space station.”

  “The Axiom. Wow.” There was a lot of debate among the people of the Inner Planets Governing Council about whether the so-called Axiom were real, or just a propaganda trick made up by the Jovian Imperative and the Trans-Neptunian Alliance. Both Delilah’s mothers thought it was the latter, and that the upstart polities just wanted people to think they were special, saving the galaxy from ancient alien horrors. Delilah was reserving judgment about the whole issue. “What does it do?”

  “It’s a bridge generator,” Ashok said. “It opens wormholes from here to… well, anywhere in the galaxy.”

  Delilah didn’t want to say “That’s impossible” to her new captain, but her heart sank, because it was. The bridges that linked the colony worlds together weren’t generated by anything, let alone a greasy black cube. The bridges were ancient, invisible structures of unknown provenance, activated by streams of radiation pointed at a specific point in space. Those bridgeheads were usually “anchored” near large celestial objects (Jupiter, in the case of this solar system). The Liars had arrived through the Jovian bridge centuries before, and shown humanity the combinations necessary to activate them and reach the twenty-eight other systems that became human colonies. When it came to fast interstellar travel, though, those twenty-eight systems were the whole deal; if you wanted to go anywhere else, you were stuck with Tanzer drives.

  Ashok saying he could create wormholes was like saying he had a star in his pocket. “Wow,” Delilah said. “That’s amazing.”

  “You don’t believe me!” the chipper little bot said in her captain’s voice. She wondered where he was transmitting from. “Who can blame you? Personal wormhole generators violate everything we know about physics. But then again, the fixed bridges do that, too – wormholes were predicted for a long time as theoretical objects, but when you enter a bridge, you spend twenty-one seconds in darkness before emerging on the other side, no matter how fast you’re going when you enter or where you’re coming out, and nobody knows why. ‘Weird alien shit’ is the best explanation we’ve got. Same as artificial gravity – it doesn’t make sense, it shouldn’t work, but there it is. Here’s a secret: the Axiom built the bridges. We think of the known bridges as wonders of the universe, but for the Axiom, they were more like toll booths or checkpoints – ways to control where lesser beings were allowed to go. The Axiom’s own ships were equipped with these smaller bridge generators, and they had the freedom of the galaxy.”

  “Winslow told me the Axiom invented the gravity generators, too, but that you figure out how to replicate them.”

  The bot chuckled. “A guy needs a hobby, I guess.”

  “Winslow also told me you refused all profit from the generators.”

  “Did he. Well, the TNA needed it more. And anyway, all I did was some reverse engineering. My name’s on the patent, but the real inventor is probably called Gorgax the Eviscerator or something and he’s been dead for ninety thousand years. We hope. The Axiom invented all kinds of things, and their technology was so advanced that, for them, the laws of physics were more like… gentle suggestions.”

  This was all just too much. “I don’t even know if I believe in the Axiom, captain,” Delilah said. “You make them sound like gods, and that… doesn’t help.”

  “Huh. This is why they call Earth the ‘Show Me’ planet, I guess? The Axiom aren’t gods. They’re more like demons, or else one of those pantheons where the gods were jealous jerks. We don’t know a ton about them, but as a culture they were vicious, controlling, and murderously competitive, and that’s why, even with all their tech, their empire fell apart. I welcome your skepticism, Delilah. It’s a healthy quality, as long as you’re capable of changing your worldview in the face of new evidence.”

  Delilah nodded toward the bridge generator. “You mean, like seeing that thing in action? If you can actually open a wormhole, like you said… then I’ll have to revise my worldview a lot.”

  “Believe me,” Ashok said, “it’ll be good practice for the rest of the trip.”

  Crowbar and Winslow sat on the other side of the pitted white galley table from Delilah, arguing good-naturedly about which additional modules for the ship’s Hypnos suite they should download before they moved beyond the reach of the Tangle and other communications. “We need the new update to An Epicure’s Delight,” Winslow said, “It includes the new restaurants opened in the Vanir system, and that place on Owain where every ingredient is sourced within five klicks of the kitchen. Believe me, after a month of eating my cooking, you’ll want the variety, even if it’s all flavor and no filling.”

  “Meditation Challenge Four is a better use of our recreational budget,” Crowbar said. “I have mastered Meditation Challenge Three, even the final stage, where one must maintain focus, breath, and calm while space pirates bombard your ship and breach your meditation chamber. The new version promises further challenges, including an invasion by eldritch horrors from beyond the back of the stars–”

  “Family meeting!” Ashok crowed over the ship’s PA system, startling Delilah. “I know, we aren’t quite a family yet, but begin as you mean to go on, right?” Wasn’t he going to join them in person? She hadn’t actually seen him since – well, ever, really. Their only face-to-faceplate interaction had been in a simulation.

  The captain went on. “Now, I’ve been a little coy about the mission parameters, but before we undock and head to the edge of the solar system, I want to tell you our destination: we’re aiming for a spot halfway along the New Outer Arm, just about as far as you can get from here without actually leaving the galaxy.”

  Winslow whistled. “And I thought the Vanir system was off the beaten path. What’s way out there, captain?”

  “A mystery,” Ashok said. “One we’re going to crack open. Winslow and Crowbar, you both know about the Axiom-eradication missions, but it’s news to Delilah, so let me fill her in: a while back, my old boss Kalea Machedo got her hands on a list of coordinates for Axiom facilities, scattered all over the galaxy. For the past several years, with the support of the Jovian Imperative military, she’s been checking out those facilities, using her own bridge generator – the one I finally replicated successfully here. You’re from Earth, right Mears? So you know about wasp nests?”

  “I… Sure?”

  “Picture Callie Machedo poking a bunch of wasp nests with a big stick and killing everything that comes out of them with fire. They’ve bombed a whole bunch of weird space stations and hollowed out moons, and this one asteroid they found covered in fungus, and turned them all into radioactive dust.”

  “You’re saying they destroyed alien artifacts?” Delilah said.

  “In their defense, most of the artifacts tried to destroy them first,” Ashok said. “The Axiom themselves are mostly long dead, with some unpleasant exceptions, but they left lots of nasty security systems behind. A few of the locations they visited seemed harmless – there’s a planet with these giant bug-like biomechanical life forms crawling around, but they don’t do anything, so we just pop in and check on it every once in a while, in lieu of figuring out how to blow up a whole planet. A few other locations were shells, places that once held personnel or tech, but they’d been stripped, and we blew those up, too, for the sake of completion. At this point, every Axiom facility we know about has been dealt with or placed under observation… except for one. They tried to blow that one up, and they couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Crowbar said.

  “Who knows!” Ashok said. “What happened was, they launched nuclear missiles at the thing, and the missiles exploded, or started to, and then they… stopped exploding.”

  “The nuclear reaction was interrupted?” Delilah said.

  “Somehow! We don’t know of anything that can stop a nuclear reaction in mid-boom. Callie and her team pulled back to a safe distance, expecting retaliation, but nothing happened. The station just sat there. We’ve never seen a purely defensive reaction from an Axiom facility before – usually they go full-on kill-crazy at anything that wanders close. That station is really far from inhabited space, so they just withdrew and flagged the place for further study.”

  “Long-range research mission,” Delilah said.

  “That’s right!” Ashok said. “The subject of our research is: why won’t it blow up, and can we change that? There are actually two missions though. Not exactly a primary-secondary thing, more like… co-primaries. They sent a miniature fleet through Callie’s wormhole, but they didn’t all come back. One of the Jovian Imperative scout ships went missing.”

  Delilah shivered. “Did the thing… station, object… do something to the ship?”

  “If I had a head, I’d be shaking it right now. The Pikeville was nowhere near our mystery object when they lost contact. It was one of several small scout ships, each with a two-person crew, that spiraled out in a search grid. That’s standard procedure, because Axiom facilities sometimes have associated objects and installations nearby, and it’s good to know about them before you start poking around for wasps. The Pikeville lost contact with the fleet, and when the other scouts went looking for it… nothing. Now, like Shakespeare said, ‘space is big,’ and in theory it’s easy to lose something as small as a rather small ship, but Callie did a search from the Pikeville’s last known position, and found traces of the radiation signature from its Tanzer drives. They followed that trail until it just… stopped. Which suggests the Pikeville lost its engines at some point. That should limit how far they could drift, but even an army – navy? – of probes dispersed in every direction didn’t find any sign of them, no debris, nothing. A few of the probes disappeared, too, but you expect a certain amount of breakage, since they’re not smart enough to avoid crashing into space rocks and stuff. Eventually the search petered out and everyone went home. They weren’t prepared to be out that long anyway.”

  Delilah considered “So was the Pikeville… taken? Picked up by some unknown larger ship?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Ashok said. “Though not the only one. We’re supposed to keep our eyes open for either signs of the Pikeville, or what happened to the Pikeville. So. That’s the situation. If anyone wants to hop off the ship because what I just outlined sounds like a terrible no fun very bad idea, now’s the time. Otherwise, well. We’re going to be real far away from anywhere soon, and at that point, there’s no turning back for a while. The bridge generator takes time to recharge between uses. Callie’s generator, the real original, is ready again after about seven hours, but that’s one point where my version isn’t so successful – the one on this ship takes just under four days before it’s capable of puncturing space-time again. Axiom power sources are so efficient they might as well be perpetual motion machines, but I had to work within the limits of known physics, like some kind of cave person or an animal in a zoo.”

  This was a lot to take in, and Delilah was already feeling supersaturated with impossibilities, so when Ashok said, “What do you all think?” she had no immediate reply.

  Winslow snorted right away. “You know I’m going. I figured it was some kind of Axiom shit.”

  “I was aware of the nature of the mission from the beginning,” Crowbar said. “My kindler told me.”

  “Kindler?” Delilah said.

  “My… parent, mentor, teacher, guardian. The one who opened my incubator and taught me the ways of the world.”

  “That’s my friend Lantern,” Ashok said. “She knew about the mission, and suggested Crowbar would be a good addition to the crew.”

  That wasn’t quite the “he’s an intern” version Winslow had told her, but maybe the truth was in between.

  “What do you think, Delilah?” Ashok said. “Is all this too weird? You can still take a job at Almajara Corp. Even if they’re annoyed you blew them off, I know a guy, and I could make a call, he’s pretty high up, they’d treat you right.”

  Delilah was slowly getting the sense that Ashok was some kind of legend out here on the edge of the solar system, so she believed him. He could smooth her return to a more predictable sort of life… but he could also offer her access to a different sort of life, couldn’t he?

  She said, “If this is real… if you can really travel that far, to see things created by aliens – aliens besides the Free – that’s the kind of opportunity I never imagined having. How can I say no?”

  Ashok said, “You just put your lips together, and ‘no.’ But I’m glad you went yes instead. Welcome to the crew. I’ll undock, and off we’ll go. You can head to the observation port in a few hours, if you want to see the bridge generator in action.” His comms clicked off.

  “This is all real?” Delilah said to her crewmates. “The Axiom, and everything?”

  Winslow nodded. “The Axiom themselves are mostly dead, and any who aren’t dead are likely all in hibernation, because even their lifespans aren’t infinite… but they were real, and they still have servants, tending their machinery and looking after their ancient agendas. You heard about the Vanir system?”

  “Sure. The forbidden system.” The Vanir system was accessible through the twenty-ninth gate, and had been cut off from contact with the rest of the colony worlds for decades – until several years ago, when it abruptly rejoined the rest of galactic civilization. It turned out a group of Liars calling themselves the Exalted had seized control of the bridge in that system and performed horrific experiments on the human inhabitants, until a rebellion overthrew them.

  “That’s where I’m from,” Winslow said. “The Exalted were worshippers of the Axiom.”

  He was from the Vanir system? She’d never met anyone from there.

  “The Axiom ruled over my people for millennia,” Crowbar said. “Some sects remain loyal to those old masters, and hope to usher in their return. The rest of us are the Free. The Axiom are very real… but almost extinct now, we think, thanks to the efforts of my kindler and her old crew.”