The [i]Tunguska[/i] should have been called the [i]Hubris.[/i]

How many planets were destroyed to create this?  How many worlds, siphoned of resources, stripped mined to the core, all for this monument to vanity?  She knows the answer for the [i]Spear[/i]--knows how many resources were spent in its sky-blotting construction--and this at least matches that in size. 

All for a branch office.

A branch office.  A portable bank, coming straight to your door, secure in its readings, confident in its orbital calculations, barren of offerings to see them safe through the void.

It's a temple to avarice, a monument to personal achievement, an enormous, hubristic emblem of glorious, wasteful consumption. Look how much money I have. Look what a building I can afford to construct. Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Pay no heed to the gods. Offer them no sacrifice--not unless they prove themselves, not unless they pony up, not unless they come to the bargaining table and offer some genuine quo for our quid. Fight them as you would any other enemy, force them to surrender to your might, slaughter Poseidon's children as you would the other species you've brought to extinction.

Their hubris would be terrifying, if it weren't so pathetic. To invoke the gods in the name of, of selling kitchen knives?! 

The [i]Tunguska[/i] is a monument, still, but from the other side of the table. See what they built. See how they thought.

See what we did to them.

She stalks the corridors, confronted at every corner by the neon mistakes of the past, and wonders how it must feel to be so confident, and so fatally, terribly wrong.