“Why is it so important to destroy the bridge generator?” Callie said. “Even if your story is true, how does that justify murdering fifty thousand people to destroy one piece of alien tech? Is it just a religious thing in your cult?”

“No. It is a practical reason. I– There is a pest on Earth called an ant, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Imagine you are with your family on Earth, at a table, eating on, what is it? A patio, just outside your house. Humans do this, yes, on your homeworld? It is nice day. You are enjoying your meal. Then you see a single ant crawl across the table. Perhaps you ignore it. But imagine a second ant crawls after the first, and tries to get to the food on your plate. You might feel a flicker of annoyance, and squash this ant, or flick it away. Then imagine a third, a fourth, a tenth, a twentieth ant, a hundredth. What then? You rise from the table. You fear the ants will get into your food, into your clothes, they will ruin everything, make you uncomfortable, spoil things. So you kill the ants. Why not? They are a pest, meaningless and numerous. But the ants keep coming. You begin to think, what if they go into my house? What if they crawl inside my walls? What if they swarm everywhere, crawl inside my electronics, ruin my comfortable existence? So you decide to trace their path all the way back to their nest. You pour gasoline into that nest. You set it on fire and burn them all and destroy them utterly. Do you understand?”

“We’re the ants,” Stephen said. “If one of us stumbles into Axiom space, the Axiom might ignore it, or think it’s trivial, or settle for killing the invader and then going back to sleep. If more and more of us show up, though, they might grow annoyed, wake up, follow us back to our source, and wipe us out.”