“Not regularly,” Lantern murmured. “The Axiom were thorough. Space is very big, but the Axiom went everywhere, and destroyed almost every promising garden of life before they even discovered us. We have been forced to cleanse only a handful of planets in the past ten thousand years. With humans, it was too late, and we were forced to take a different approach.”

“You gave us bridge technology, though,” Callie said. “Why give us even limited keys to the galaxy if you’re afraid we’ll stumble on something we shouldn’t? Wouldn’t it have been better to just ignore us and keep us isolated?”

“Humans like to explore,” Lantern said. “We discovered this early on. You sent out goldilocks ships. You would have built generation starships, or developed stasis technology, or found a way to upload your minds and send small fast probes full of your ghosts out into the universe. You would have spread out in every direction, endlessly. So we made a calculated choice. We placed fixed bridges at certain points, in systems where we knew there were no Axiom artifacts or facilities, and where there were planets you could colonize, or terraform, with enough resources to keep you busy. We hoped that would be enough. So far, it has been. Humans have been happy to explore those systems, and as a result, they’ve stayed out of more dangerous areas. We have other systems set aside, too, in case you ever grow restless – we can say, look, we discovered a new bridge, have a new world to explore. You see?”

“You put up baby gates, to keep us from falling down the stairs,” Elena said.

“I do not understand the metaphor, but if you mean we restricted your movement for your own safety? Yes. But mostly we did it for our own safety. Then you found a point-to-point wormhole generator. We cannot let humans have such a thing. You could go anywhere. Even without your conscious effort, it brought you here, to a factory planet. The sensors below could have noticed us. The Axiom machines may be stirring. It’s bad enough you have a generator, but humans share. They show off, they want to better the lot of their people, they want to sell things and become wealthy. What if you demonstrated the generator for someone else? Or took more ships to the station, and arranged to have those fitted with generators? What if you found a way to replicate the technology yourselves? Usually when we share tech with humans we cripple it, make it stupid, make it self-destruct, or hard to copy. But pure Axiom tech? If you figured out the mechanism, made a fleet of ships with generators, went out into the universe…” That tremble of tentacles again. Elena thought it had to be a shudder. Body language saying: I am afraid to even think about this.