“So that’s a no, then. How about the Benefactor? One actual point of data about him?”

  “I don’t even know if ‘he’ is the right word. I base that entirely on the fact that his voice seemed masculine when he spoke to me, and there’s no reason to believe that’s his actual voice. The Benefactor might not even be an individual – they could be a collective of interested parties.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Callie said. “I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

  “I have come to realize I cannot influence what you believe, captain.”

  “I knew Shaper had a secret agenda here, and we figured it out,” Callie said. “I’m still wondering what the Benefactor’s secret agenda is.”

  “You’re so cynical, Captain Machedo. Do you think you’re the galaxy’s only altruist?”

  “I’m not an altruist. I just have a very expansive sense of self-preservation – one big enough to cover preserving all intelligent life in the galaxy.”

  “Except the Axiom – they’re probably the most intelligent life in the galaxy, and you want to exterminate them utterly, without even having a conversation with them first.”

  “You don’t debate with people who consider first contact an opportunity for genocide. My right to exist isn’t open to debate. The Axiom think every other species is vermin to be murdered or animals to be enslaved. When that’s your worldview, you forfeit your right to participate in civilization. Believing other people aren’t actually people is a dealbreaker. It’s a subject that’s come up way too often in human history, unfortunately, and as a result, we know how to deal with the sort of people who call wholesale murder ‘cleansing.’”

  “But these Axiom are harmless – just sleeping. Terminally ill and sleeping, no less.”

  “Their servants enslaved a whole system and conducted medical experiments on the inhabitants, Kaustikos. Sleeping or not, they’re monsters. What the hell are you talking about, anyway? Your boss wants to exterminate the Axiom as much as I do, or so I’ve been assured.”

  “I’m just playing devil’s advocate,” Kaustikos said.

  “The devil has a highly qualified legal team on retainer already, so how about you advocate for his victims instead?”

  “No one ever wants to debate me,” Kaustikos said. “This is a galaxy full of intellectual cowards.”

  “I brought you along to scout, spaceball. Go do that.”

  Kaustikos zipped wordlessly along the corridor, leaving Callie alone, which was briefly preferable and then creepy. This hallway was far larger than human scale, more like a tunnel, and was mostly unlit. She turned her suit lights on, but that just revealed hideous organic growths in patches on the walls. The hangar was an exception, then – the biological experiment happening on the outside of the station extended inside after all. There were gooey spots on the floor, too, more and more, slime molds and spongy patches that she skirted widely. “Shall, Lantern, what’s the word?”

  “– ight – ack – on – ay–” crackled in her suit comms. Ugh. She’d had communication problems on Axiom stations before. She considered going back for their report, but hailed Kaustikos instead. “Find anything?”

  His reply came through clearly, at least. “Perhaps. Bear left at the next turning. There’s a section of the station that’s lit up here.”

  Callie turned left at the next intersection and the tunnel brightened. Kaustikos floated ahead, in a round room full of transparent glass pillars two meters in diameter. There were hundreds of them, evenly spaced a couple of meters apart, all glowing with soft light from within, rising up from the floor and disappearing into the dizzying heights of the ceiling. Poetically, it was like a crystal forest. Less poetically, it was like a rack full of giant test-tubes. “What is this room for?”

  “Who knows?” Kaustikos said. “But look over there.” A thin laser pointer beam spiked out of his spheroid body and shone on the floor. Callie grunted. The red light illuminated the wrapper from the same kind of nutrient bars the resistance ate, which were in turn stolen from Exalted supply depots.

  “Someone stopped here for lunch. They might still be around. Step carefully.”

  “I fly.” Kaustikos zipped around the tubes and out of sight.

  Callie moved through the grove of crystal pillars until she found another doorway. “All clear,” Kaustikos signaled, and she passed through cautiously. It would help to have a scout she actually trusted.

  The next room was low-ceilinged and illuminated with lights she could barely see they were so far on the red end of the spectrum. There was dust on the floor, lots of it, scuffed and mussed in a trail that curved off clearly to the left. Callie followed the marks and found Kaustikos floating in front of a bright steel plate. The scuff marks on the floor ended at the barrier. Callie considered. “That plate isn’t original. Looks like somebody welded it on from the other side, doesn’t it? We’ll get Shall in here with a torch–”

  “I think I can manage.” Kaustikos extruded a manipulator arm, and the end flared with brightness. He began to cut through the plate.

  “Kaustikos, stand down. I’m going to get Shall so we have decent firepower when we go in there.”

  “I’m comfortable with my ability to handle the situation. What do we expect to find, anyway? Sick Axiom frozen in stasis, and a few Exalted desperately trying to escape?” He kept cutting.

  Callie had no intention of going into a potentially deadly situation with Kaustikos alone at her side. “You’re supposed to obey me, Kaustikos. Or do I need to press the button that makes you go boom?”

  The torch turned off, and Kaustikos withdrew the manipulator into his body. “Fine. At least let me go fetch them, since I’m faster than you?”

  “Aren’t you eager.”

  “The sooner we deal with Shaper, the sooner we can leave this disgusting system, and I’m eager to return home, that’s all.”

  “Fine. Hustle.”

  Kaustikos flew away. Callie glanced at her bracelet. Her teleporter was recharged.

  She was terrible at being patient, but who needed patience when you could be invisible? She could just pop over to the other side of the barrier in stealth and see what they were dealing with. She could always wait until Shall arrived to actually deal with it.

  She found more glass tubes on the other side of the barrier… and inside each tube, a floating body.

  Callie had never seen one of the Axiom in the flesh before. Those she’d encountered in the Dream were occupying digital avatars that bore no relation to real anatomy, and she hadn’t risked opening the pods where their actual bodies slept – they’d all had intrusion countermeasures anyway – so she’d just destroyed them, sight unseen.

  Now she knew what the Axiom looked like. It would have been amusing if they’d been small, pink, big-eyed, and fuzzy, but they were apex predators, and they looked like it.

  The Axiom were all nearly three meters tall, with purplish-black skin that looked hard and bark-like. They had long, muscular legs with too many joints, and their feet were multi-jointed, too, tipped with three toes sporting talons, plus a claw on the heel. They didn’t have external genitalia, which was a relief. They had tails, thick and doubtless prehensile, with a three-taloned claw on the end. Their torsos were long and lean, and they had two arms on each side (she was reminded uneasily of Drake and Janice’s new arms), each with two elbows and a wrist. They had seven fingers on each hand, with surplus knuckles. Their necks were thick and their heads almost saurian, covered as they were with bony plates and ridges. Their mouths wrapped halfway around their heads and were crowded with teeth made for shredding meat. They had four eyes, all closed in the sleep of stasis – two eyes in the front, like a human, and one on each side, where the ears would have been on a human. They were monstrous.

  She was glad they weren’t beautiful. It would have been terrible, somehow, if they’d looked like beings of radiance and grace and light.

  They were sick, too. She could tell. There were gray patches on their skin, blotting their torsos and legs and faces, ragged and leprous. There were eight Axiom here, silent, still, and frozen in time

  Callie would have destroyed them all right then with the weapons in her suit, except the other twenty tubes were full of naked human beings.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Callie?” Shall said. “Where are you?”

  “I teleported to the other side of the barrier.”

  “Of course you did. Shall we barge in?”

  “Barge carefully. There are human captives here.”

  Callie checked the rest of the room and found no sign of Shaper or any other Exalted, though she did find an operational terminal in a corner. She suspected it contained the controls for the stasis fields.

  Had Shaper known they were coming? Or, if not known, had he worried and made contingency plans? She looked at the twenty floating humans. Someone had left a trail in dust and food wrappers, leading right here. An incredibly obvious, impossible-to-miss trail.

  Hmm.

  The steel plate fell inward with a crash, and Shall’s war drone squeezed through the opening, followed by Ashok, Lantern, and Kaustikos. “No sign of Shaper?” Shall said.

  Callie shook her head, still thinking.

  Ashok wandered among the pillars. “So… this is what’s left of the Cleansing Corps? Pretty pitiful remnant of the scourge of the galaxy.” He crouched by the terminal – it was set at Liar height – and beckoned to Lantern. “Hey, come tell me if I’m reading this right.”

  Lantern joined him. “This is a stasis unit. We can release these people, get them to safety, and then… deal with the Axiom.”

  “Why are these people even here, though?” Callie said.

  “Human shields?” Shall said. “The Exalted know we won’t blow up facilities with human prisoners on board.”

  Callie shook her head. “We didn’t know there were people here, so it’s no kind of deterrent.”

  “Organ donors on ice?” Ashok said. “Keeping them handy for surgery?”

  “I don’t…” Callie looked at the leprous patches on the Axiom, and something in her mind clicked. “Ashok, come with me back to the hangar. I think we were supposed to find these humans. I think it’s a trap.”

  “What, are they full of explosives, like me?” Kaustikos said.

  “Worse, if I’m right,” Callie said. “Keep guard over this area, Shall, and Kaustikos. You should be safe, too, I think, Lantern, but keep your environment suit on anyway.” Callie retreated through the hole, followed by Ashok, and they double-timed back to the hangar.

  “What’s the worry, cap?” Ashok said.

  “Those people might be infected with something,” Callie said. “Shaper led us right to them. I think we’re supposed to find those Axiom, kill them, release the humans, and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Then we’d take the humans back to Vanaheim, and only find out later Shaper left us with a parting gift in the form of an engineered plague meant kill us all.” She paused. “Or maybe I’m being paranoid, and everything is exactly what it seems. But when is that ever the case?”

  “Whoa. How do we test for an unknown plague? Elena’s doing well in her studies, but she’s still only about halfway to being an actual medical doctor.”

  “Shaper could have whipped up a nearly undetectable pathogen, too,” Callie said. “I’m not confident in our ability to figure this out ourselves. When in doubt, outsource. Once we’re in range of the White Raven, we’ll call for help.”

  The white Liars had left contact information with Drake and Janice, and Janice sent out the call. While they waited for a reply, Ashok released all his drones, and Kaustikos and Shall ranged over the station, looking for Shaper. They brought the White Raven into the hangar in hopes that its superior sensors might find more from the inside, but it was no good. Searching for life signs was useless, because the grotesque biological portions of the station were alive, generating heat and pulsing with fluids.

  Callie and her crew were trying to search a vessel the size of a small city, and, even machine-assisted, it was a slow job. Callie stalked through passageways and ancient empty chambers, looking for some sign of Shaper… and the rest of the Axiom. If she was right, those eight floating in tubes were sacrificial victims, meant to satisfy her and get her to stop looking for the remainder of the Cleansing Corps.

  Maybe Shaper was already long gone with the rest of his patients, through a wormhole gate to an unknown destination to regroup and continue his dark work, but that line of thinking didn’t do her any good, so she discarded it for now.

  “We’ve got company,” Shall called, and Callie teleported back to the hangar bay.

  The hospital ship floated just outside. Callie had never seen it, and the others had never gotten a good look at it in its entirety. The ship was beautiful, a smooth, flat-bottomed dome of shiny black, nearly a quarter the size of the Axiom station all by itself. It could have swallowed up the Cleaning Fire and had room to gobble up the White Raven and the Blaze for dessert.

  The Liar who called himself Metal arrived in a small boarding vessel, carrying a black bag that looked very much like the one their old ship’s doctor Stephen had used. “We are here to help,” he said, fluttering pseudopods at Callie. “You are the captain who took in our Drake and Janice and gave them meaningful work. We approve you.”

  “It’s nice to meet you.” She led the white Liar through the gangrenous corridors to the stasis chamber. Metal gazed at the beings floating in the cylinders for a long time. “These are Axiom. In the flesh. Such have not been seen by many who now live. These ones are very sick.”

  “And close to death, I hope.” Callie stood on the other side of the doorway they’d blasted open. Even with the humans in stasis, and even in her environment suit, she didn’t want to get any closer until she knew those people weren’t bearing plagues. “I’m told you don’t fight, you only heal… but maybe you could see your way clear to euthanize these Axiom?”

  “We only do such things at the request of the sick, and even then, with great reluctance. Did you know that no Axiom ever committed suicide? Or so the records say. Even those grievously injured, ones who lost all limbs, even tails, would fight and fight and fight to live. No beings in the galaxy fought so hard to survive. Or perhaps when the Axiom found others with the same will to survive they killed them. That could also be. No, we will not euthanize. They are frozen and no harm now. We will try to help your humans though. Do not attempt to penetrate the quarantine field.”

  “What field – Oh.” The white Liar put down his bag, and when it touched the floor, a dome of sparkling blue light appeared, covering the entire room, with Callie just on the outside. Metal approached the terminal, and then one of the glass pillars stopped glowing and the human boy inside it slumped. The Liar slid open a panel on the tube – Callie hadn’t even realized there was a panel there, it was so seamless – and removed the boy with infinite tenderness. Metal gently placed the boy on the deck, and then scanned him with one of his silvery augments, this one mounted at the end of a tentacle. Metal returned to the terminal, then placed the human back in the tube and re-engaged the stasis, making the boy float again.

  The white Liar turned off the quarantine field. “Your fears were true and right. These ones are infected, but it is a crude plague, made in haste. It resembles an airborne necrotizing pathogen we have seen before. We can synthesize a cure.”

  “Necrotizing. So if we’d brought these people down to Vanaheim…”

  “The humans would have rotted from the inside to the out. Crude, yes, but very most virulent. You and the other human should return to your ship, for safety. Perhaps your friend the war machine could assist us with moving these patients to the place of rest and healing on our ship?”

  Callie and Ashok returned to the stasis room once all the humans had been taken away and the air cleansed. “Eight Axiom to execute,” Ashok said. “Four each?”

  “I don’t want to give them that much individual attention,” she said.

  “Firebombs it is.” Ashok set to work attaching explosives to the occupied tubes. “Seems kind of cold, cap, killing them when they’re sick and unconscious.”

  “This is the Cleansing Corps. They burned down whole planets before the inhabitants even knew what was happening.”

  “You make a good point. Timer or remote detonator?”

  “Remote. I’ll push the button if it makes you feel better.”

  “I appreciate that, captain.”

  Once the work was done, and each inhabited tube sported a shaped charge, Callie went to the terminal and deactivated the stasis. According to the white Liars, that field was so powerful that not even an explosion would harm the Axiom if they remained in stasis – there was no passage of time inside that field, and no change, destructive or otherwise, could happen there.

  So they weren’t killing the Axiom in their sleep after all.

  Callie rushed through the pillars as the Axiom began to stir. One howled, a sound with subsonic vibrations that made her bowels clench. Another started to pound at the inside of the tube, trying to get it open. Ashok had already withdrawn, and when Callie hit the doorway, she paused to look back.

  She briefly met the open eyes of the Axiom in the nearest tube. The two eyes in front lacked pupils and irises, and shone a single, electric color: blue.

  The Axiom opened its mouth wide to reveal rows of serrated teeth. Callie couldn’t tell if it was a snarl, a smile, or a yawn.

  Callie ran into the next room, ducked around to get her back to the wall, and triggered the remote. The explosions were a series of whump-whump-whumps, and bits of glass and gore spattered through the opening. Callie forced herself to walk back to the entryway and look inside. The tubes beyond were all shattered, and in the foul matter scattered on the floor, she saw no piece bigger than a clenched fist.

  “Good enough,” she said, and returned to the hangar.

  “We’ve checked every corridor, every hatch, every access duct,” Shall said. “We found lots of evidence of past habitation, but nobody’s here now. Shaper is gone. We missed him. He left that poisoned bait for us and then took off.”