He dragged her, harder than she liked, through a door that opened seamlessly in a wall of screens at his approach. He dragged her along a corridor, into an intersecting hallway, around another corner – eventually she lost track of their turnings, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way back. Finally he stopped in a long, narrow rectangular room. He took her shoulders and turned her so she faced a smooth, dark wall. Then he put his arm around her and drew her in close. “Behold.”

Sebastien waved his hand, and the wall lightened and became transparent. Beyond the glass was a huge shipbuilding bay, easily fifty stories high and just as wide, full of mechanical arms, floating drones, and unfinished ships floating in weightlessness, in the process of being built. The ships looked a little like the thing the Anjou had been made into: fat spheroids bristling with angular fins and spikes, like sand spurs, or the spiked heads of maces, each one the size of a house. Elena started to count the ships and stopped when she got to fifty. There were at least ten times that many.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Sebastien said. “Every one equipped with a point-to-point wormhole generator, ready to be dispatched to our solar system. My initial plan was to gather intelligence from Earth, and then move on to any other colony systems, founded by goldilocks ships or other means. You’ve simplified things, though, by bringing me natives of this time. They’ll provide information about other inhabited worlds. There are doubtless maps and navigation details in their ship. We have expanded to the stars, I assume? Surely some of the goldilocks ships reached their destinations?”

“I… There are twenty-nine inhabited systems, or so I’m told. But one of them is unreachable, because it’s controlled by… Wait. Sebastien. What are all these ships for? One would be enough to get you home. Why do you need a fleet?”

“My home crumbled to dust centuries ago, Elena, and I turned my back on it before that, when I joined our mission. The past holds minimal interest for me, except as a cautionary tale. I’m looking to the future. That’s not a fleet. That’s evolution. Once I understood how the station worked, setting all this in motion was simplicity itself. Creating an armada like this is a trivial use of the power available to me here, and this station is itself an insignificant backwater facility of no particular distinction. Once we have access to the full resources of the empire, think what we can achieve.”

“The empire?”

He rubbed the back of his head, caressing the silver spider’s back. “Of course. You don’t know anything about them. The beings who made this station. In our language we might call them… the First Principle? The Underlying?”

“The Axiom?” Elena said.