“Your people were not enslaved for millennia by beings of vast power and cruelty. And, thanks to the vigilance of my sect? They never will be. I know you think our methods cruel. But sometimes, when a person has the crawling rot, you must chop off their limbs in order to save the body.” She sighed. “Or so I was taught. I was raised and trained to believe that no price was too high to pay, if it even slightly reduced the chance of waking the Axiom machines, let alone the Axiom themselves. But I have my doubts. A few of the younger people in my sect do. I argued against cleansing Meditreme Station. Strenuously. When the engineer you spoke to saw the Axiom artifact, and recognized it for what it was, and fled, along with all the others of our kind, they notified us, at our base in the Oort Cloud. We were divided about how to respond. I argued for taking a small team, and trying to steal the generator back. I wanted to prevent loss of life, but the elders don’t care about that, so I said it was simply safer that way: it would spare us scrutiny. Destroying the station would be too noisy and obvious, I said, and the humans might suspect us, and investigate. But my elders have fresher memories of the Axiom and their machines, and that makes them fearful and decisive. They ordered a full sanction instead. When we realized we’d timed our attack badly, and that you had escaped – that all those humans had died for nothing. Oh, the horror. The shame. The regret. So when I spoke up again, and said they should send a small boarding force, led by myself, to confirm the generator was on board your ship, they were shaken by their earlier mistake, and agreed. Unfortunately, you were better armed than we realized. You destroyed most of the pods. Only mine evaded your attack. I used our stealth displacement technology to create an image of my pod missing its rendezvous with your ship, so you would think I’d passed you by. Before I could get on board, though, the elders panicked, and attacked… which triggered some sort of security protocol in the generator, it seems. Now, here we are.”

“It’s quite a story,” Callie said. “More internally consistent than most Liar confabulations. But why should I believe anything you say? Our theory about a Liar conspiracy to keep all the goodies in the galaxy for yourselves is a lot simpler and more plausible than all this crap about a godlike race of monster-alien bogeymen.”

“You should believe me because I didn’t need to tell you anything at all,” Lantern said. “I could escape any time I wish.”

“Bullshit,” Callie said, but she said it to an empty table, because the Liar had vanished, the restraint straps falling empty to the bed.

Chapter Seventeen