“Wait!” the Liar cried.

Callie walked close to her, the muzzle of her pistol half a meter from the Liar’s body. “What’s wrong? Can’t do your teleportation act again? It’s impressive, but if you could do it any time, as often as you want, you wouldn’t bother with boarding pods, would you? You’d just teleport onto the ships you wanted to infiltrate. My guess is, it’s either a one-use emergency thing, or something that has to recharge, just like the big bridge generator we have wired into this ship. Goodbye, Liar.”

“I can show you how to use the generator!” Lantern said. “I know how to operate it properly. And, if you insist on returning to the Axiom station, I can help there, too. I am familiar with such places: I have seen the schematics, and consumed neural buds from those who worked in such installations. I insist you take me along. Perhaps I can minimize the damage you do, erase the records of your arrival. We have techniques for avoiding Axiom notice.”

Callie didn’t lower the sidearm. “How did you do the teleportation trick?”

“I have a device. A variant on the point-to-point generator: it opens a small portal and draws me through, but far more rapidly than the larger versions, so quickly it is difficult to perceive the transition.”

“Can you use this device to get back to our solar system?”

“No. I told you, we forbid the use of bridge generators because they open up the universe in a dangerous way. This device is very short-range. It can transport someone a distance of a few kilometers at most. Its mass limitations are also much greater than the device that transports your ship. My sect restricts the use of these devices heavily, even so. We don’t want humans to have these, because they might reverse-engineer the technology, and then develop more long-range instantaneous travel.”

“Give the device to me.”

“I can’t. We are forbidden to let humans have them.”

“You can give it to me, or I can take it off your corpse.”

A beat. “All right. My sect is pragmatic.” The Liar did something, and the suit went slack, the helmet portion unsealing. Lantern slithered out of the suit. Callie hadn’t seen many Liars in the bare flesh. Lantern’s skin was the slick gray of a dolphin’s, and she had over a dozen eyes scattered around the domelike bulge of her “head”, with 360-degree vision, quite likely offering insight into parts of the spectrum invisible to Callie, if not Ashok. Lantern had seven tentacles, five of them thick, two of them finer and more delicate, the latter lined with suckers. She had a small cube-shaped device attached to one of the thin tentacles, halfway up, held on with a strap not unlike that of a wristwatch. Lantern slid off the device and offered it to Callie.