“Ahhh. Right. Otherwise you could end up in the middle of a star by accident. Oh, and there’s the emergency protocol trigger, right where it’s halfway logical to find it. But why did the protocol bring us here?”

“I am only speculating, but if the emergency protocol were ever triggered, then it would mean the crew had failed their mission, and so they would be deemed unsuitable for further service.” A long pause, and then Lantern said, “That planet down there. It was a very bad place.”

“What, like a prison?”

“A prison? No. The Axiom did not waste resources on feeding and sheltering those who failed them. The planet below is a rendering plant. A recycling center. Based on what I know of Axiom methods, I am fairly sure the crews would be extracted from their ship, taken below, and forcibly stimulated to produce neural memory buds, which would then be examined to see how the mission failed. The buds would eliminate any need to keep the crews alive, so they would be reduced to slurry, to be used as raw organic material for the cloning vats, or just to feed the newborns.”

“Wait. The Axiom killed their slaves and fed them to babies?”

Callie, listening in her room, shivered.

“Yes. We are fortunate the factory below is so badly damaged. There would normally be an automated system to collect us. It is difficult to overstate how terrible life was under the rule of the Axiom. That is why the Free go to such lengths to prevent those terrible times from returning.”

“I get it, but blowing up Meditreme? That was… It’s unforgiveable. And I know you agree with me, Lantern.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Come on. You’re not a zealot. You belong to a sect of zealots, totally, but you’re not one yourself. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. You were crawling around undiscovered inside the ship, listening in on us. You knew the bridge generator was on board. You clearly know your technical stuff. We’re a zillion miles from any human-occupied space. We both know what a zealot would have done in those circumstances.”

“Destroyed the ship,” Lantern said. “I should have. My elders would have done so, without hesitation: rigged all your torpedoes to explode in their bays, set your energy weapons to overload, caused your Tanzer drive to explode.”

Callie closed her eyes on her bunk, visions of her ship coming apart flooding her mind.

“But you didn’t,” Ashok said. “You tried to talk things out with us instead. Tried to make us understand, and come around to your point of view. You’re a persuader, not a genocider. Your bosses blew up Meditreme Station. You didn’t.”