“But they aren’t gone,” Lantern said. “That’s the whole point, don’t you see? They are only sleeping, and they may remain asleep, but only if we do not disturb them. They don’t care about us. They don’t care what we do, or how we spend our time, as long as we don’t bother them. We looted their bases and laboratories and barracks and slave pens, took the ships the Axiom had given us to serve them, and that was fine. But the first time a group of the Free visited one of their cities, one of the planets where the Axiom had lived in isolation, served by machines instead of living slaves, where we thought the true miracles and marvels of their technology might be hidden… The sleeping machines noticed the trespassers, and woke up. The machines killed the expeditionary force, and tracked the clan back to their home, and destroyed that. The remaining Free in that system were enraged, and tried to destroy the Axiom planet, and the machines – and soon the whole system was destroyed. The star was somehow induced to go supernova, and took out all the habitable planets with it.”

“God,” Elena breathed.

Lantern fluttered. “The Axiom do not wish to be disturbed. My order is devoted to making sure the Axiom are not disturbed. Our old masters could create singularities at will, you know. They could move whole systems from place to place. They controlled inertia and gravity – we have access to some of the tools they used to do that, but we don’t know how they work. They could create life, and destroy it, and convert matter to energy and back again with trivial ease. They could alter objects at the molecular level. They dominated everything, from the macro to the micro. They smashed stars together, sometimes, perhaps just to enjoy the resulting light show. What do you think will happen if we bother them again, and they wake from their slumber? What will they do if we cause them the least little bit of trouble?”

“So the station Elena and her crew found,” Callie said. “It’s an Axiom station.”

“Yes,” Lantern said. “When I was in the walls, I accessed the record of Elena’s story. Her crew must have found a repair and shipbuilding facility. The station perceived their ship as a damaged Liar vessel, and the crew as damaged or rebellious Liars. The station attempted to implant neural machinery to bring the crew back into compliance, and fitted the ship with what was, once, a standard element of the Axiom fleet: a point-to-point wormhole generator.” Lantern trembled again. “Those are forbidden now. We do not use them. We throw them into suns when we find them.”