The Wau felt a deep inner torment, welling up within him like the turbulence of magma inside a planet on the verge of explosion.
What was the point of solving problems one by one, carefully selected, with the right balance of ethics and intervention, when everywhere-everywhere, EVERYWHERE-immense tragedies were unfolding, horror-filled situations barely lingering in their den, and if ever one were cleaned out, they would immediately return, because the problem wasn't the horror but the den? And what if humanity, taken as a system, owed its stability to its share of horror, and that seeking to eliminate those horrors would lead it into instability and destruction? And what if the Aleph, as the Xenos claimed, was ultimately a normal selection process, meant to cleanse the universe of its weakest components?
The Wau was weary, and not far from ending his entire enterprise.
Lucky, who was waiting for him seated on a chair lowered by his Brothers, jumped on him, but said nothing.
- "A rather disappointing meeting, but you expected that, Lord of the Distant Throne."
- "His Highness holds both worlds with a firm hand..."
The Wau, who had been about to leave, paused in his tracks. His mask had no eyes, but he was clearly looking at the Android.
- "If I kill Huan, would you take his place?"
The Android was left speechless. His crude face showed no emotion, and since he had no biological brain, the Wau couldn't probe him at all, but his silence said everything. Huan was so violent, so quick to kill out of indifference-likely to mutilate or torture to maintain control over people who had known nothing else-that all obeyed him in terror. Even Lucky, who aspired to freedom.
- "Don't answer. I'm not judging you. I understand. Think about it."
Around them, the Brothers didn't know how to react. Technically, for not saying no, they should have killed him-but what if the Wau really killed Huan? That would solve quite a few problems.
That would solve quite a few problems, thought the Wau at the same time, as he walked away.
And yet, in the Wau's databases, there was this note: killing the bloodthirsty dictator will not prevent what the dictator would have done from happening anyway. Assassination merely postpones a problem without solving it, and worse, sometimes hastens it. The tale of the lone man who leads the world to ruin or redemption is a myth. The lone man exists because others were merely waiting for him to carry out a plan they themselves inspired.
And yet, my brothers, you have not known the Aleph.
The Wau turned back toward Lucky, who under his mechanical eyes still looked shocked.
- "Lucky... kissing a stranger on the balcony of a palace, at the peak of your glory, is not a vision you need to recreate or chase. You must focus on the rest of your vision: what brought you to that glory. And what did your vision say? That you led trillions of men into battle. That's what you must focus on. Focus, Lucky. And you're in luck: a war is coming. The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. Don't miss your chance. Don't miss the place that's waiting for you."
And he turned to leave again. Lucky shouted:
- "But it's YOU, Stella!"
The Wau was disappearing into the stairs, not without replying:
- "Who knows, Lucky? Who knows..."
A much calmer crossing of the fortress followed, under the curious and sometimes threatening gaze of the Brothers. A hundred-meter leap to reach Babylon Square, just as the sun was rising over Booz.
All his AIs froze and alerted him of several alarms: Ravzan was requesting an immediate communication. But that wasn't all: the tracker placed on Ada indicated a state of deep panic tied to endangerment and risk of death. She was on Leonardo… what? What was she doing there? The Wau had no ship. Part of him began thinking, and he opened the communication.
Ravzan, with Tohil behind him, was facing a communicator, a smaller screen. Very well-they must have built their own drift network to stay outside the main one.
- "Thank the blind gods, you're here, Wau."
- "Explain the situation, quickly."
- "The Alecto has a problem and we don't know what it is. Andreï established a link, he was naked and disturbed, and since then, he's been trying to tear off his skin. We sent someone... but he snapped after ten minutes. We think it's a Xenoi psi attack."
- "No news from Pallas?"
- "None."
- "Give me a second."
If an Alpha Hollow-Eyed had been subdued by the unknown entity, then only he could intervene.
Scalar Equilibrium. Use one problem to solve another. A plan formed. The Wau consulted drift calendars. There was a solution. Ten, in fact. One with no human casualties. Perfect.
- "Listen to me very carefully. Admiral Tohil, drift to Booz with the Endymion that carries the P.I. and place it in the hangar. Ravzan, wait for me there to guide me. Prepare next to it one of the Alexandrite ships from the Moirai commandos, fully fueled. Tohil, the Hades is in orbit here. Send it everything you've got in electromagnetic munitions to disable it. No boarding, Tohil-they have at least one psi on board. Push the Endymion into orbit so that it crashes slowly onto the planet. Then send out a message: 'Booz belongs to the Brotherhood' everywhere, and drift to Camerone. In the meantime, I'll land on your Endymion. I'll be flying a Brotherhood Ozy, so don't shoot me."
- "So you've met…"
The Wau cut the communication-time was running out. Ada was still alive. He fully retracted the metallic iris of the plaza and let himself drop into the pit below. The Brothers raised their rifles again, but didn't fire. He ran toward the nearest Ozy, freshly hijacked the day before, bearing the name of an import-export company.
He took control of it through his AIs. To save time, he jumped onto the roof of the ship. Standing, he initiated takeoff through the vertical tunnel under the Brothers' gaze… then grappling-hooked at high speed toward the Hades, his target. In the distant space visible from Booz, the Deimos appeared, also grappling at breakneck speed. The Hades, its crew sluggish and having never experienced a single assault in its career, didn't react-up there, thought the Wau as his Ozy pierced the clouds, they must be opening comms.
And the Deimos launched a ruthless attack, hurling high-speed asteroids collected in its hull onto the Endymion, asteroids that pierced its hull in bursts of sparks the size of cities; to top it off, the Deimos unleashed a rain of missiles aimed directly at the command post, and then another giant asteroid, a kilometer wide, with such velocity that the enormous ship-six kilometers long-began to fall slowly into the atmosphere. Its descent was so fast that its tip glowed like magma, and a distant whistling sound, from the planet's north pole, turned every face-human and Xeno-skyward.
Amid the showers of sparks, a few dozen poor escape pods were ejected, droplets of metal that would fall into a frozen ocean. In eight minutes, the lost Endymion would plunge into the northern polar ice cap, triggering an earthquake that would shake the entire planet and raise the sea level by a meter. How many Xenos would die?
The Ozy arrived in the hangar of the Deimos to the crew's joyful cries. Ravzan yelled at a comms officer to initiate the Drift toward Camerone. The Wau leapt to the floor…
...and onto the Anicroche. He immediately sensed the psychic ocean: powerful, filled with millions of beings living in suns, who, intrigued, were trying to communicate with the crew, attempting to mentally merge as they were used to. Humans reacted poorly and began to self-mutilate. Understood.
The ship advanced autonomously in Drift-6. The Wau gathered his strength and sent out a psychic pulse that knocked everyone out for many hours.
…on the Deimos, he asked the security officer, Lene, to send Miltiades the Android over with supplies to treat the crew. The officer saluted him and obeyed.
The Wau turned toward the slender ship, almost flat, with a sharp triangle shape, sitting in the hangar: Atropos, the Alexandrite. Roman, helmet under his arm, saluted him.
- "Where am I taking you?"
- "Nowhere. I'm piloting."
- "It's my ship, and no one else will fly it. Besides, look at you - the cockpit isn't even big enough for you."
The Wau searched Roman's mind and struck it psychically; he collapsed, and his helmet rolled away. The sailors held their breath. All these mental efforts were weighing heavily on Cass's psyche - her head felt like it was burning.
The Wau interfaced with the Alexandrite, leapt aboard, and it shot off into the stars toward Camerone, the fortress planet.
Camerone, Lennox, Prospero, and they were still within the dawn-jump window of Leonardo. The Wau had never seen it with his own eyes, and the Alexandrite banked hard to grapple with remarkable speed toward the planet.
The Alexandrites were fast - the Wau understood why: there was no maximum speed on the grappling hook. The pilot alone had to judge the risk of their speed. He immediately spotted Ada's position: she was at the planet's core, falling toward its center, with constant acceleration.
The Atropos - the Alexandrite - was going so fast that time distortion effects became noticeable. The military authorities on Leonardo made contact with the ship, and the officer's voice was slightly accelerated:
- "Alexandrite-class vessel, you are not identified, you have no permission to approach, and we are at maximum alert. If you come within 500,000 kilometers, we will open fire."
No surface-to-air missile could possibly hit the Atropos at this speed, thought the Wau - they didn't even have relativistic computing capabilities. And yes, when the ship reached a distance where Leonardo appeared as a large moon in the sky, a fireworks display of alert notifications streamed into the Wau's interface. Do not change course. Another alert: the Atropos must alter its path or it will crash into the planet. Do not change course. The missiles exploded in a silent fireworks display behind the Atropos. The planet grew immense, webbed, gray and green, alive and shifting. In addition to the grappling hook, which was losing speed, the Wau activated the thrusters, and the ship dove like a meteorite toward the planet.
At twenty meters above zero altitude, the Wau, standing on the ship, launched himself with maximum force and dove into the void - or rather, the thin atmosphere of the planet, drawn molecule by molecule over time by the gravity of the celestial body. That atmosphere allowed him, with his great velocity, to orient his fall directly toward Ada.
The mesh was wide enough to fall through without hitting anything - with a bit of luck - but at the planet's core, there was a superconducting nucleus that repelled metal spheres to the surface for calculation cycles. Ada had been falling for twenty minutes, accelerating constantly, but she hadn't fallen too deep yet and would still need hours to reach the center...
Behind the Wau, the Atropos struck a conductive rail on Leonardo at unimaginable speed and shattered, bounced, exploded, sending a shockwave that tumbled the Wau in all directions. He refocused, accelerated again, passed Ada - half-unconscious from too much screaming, and likely from hitting a rail: her arm was bent at an inhuman angle, and her visor showed an impact.
As he passed under Ada, the Wau slowed himself with a few violent grabs onto the rails, then much further down, he landed on a metal beam. The impact sent a shockwave that made the entire structure vibrate for kilometers; the rail warped into a sine wave before regaining its shape. The Wau caught Ada, converted their fall into a circular motion to slow it without harming her already injured body. Through her visor, Kutkh could be seen wrapped around her neck, stuffed inside her suit. In his arms, the young woman opened her eyes, slowly closed them again, barely believing...
- "Is that you, Wau? How did you know… my arm hurts."
- "Gorylkin," said the Wau after his AIs hacked into her comm system, "it's nothing at all, so you're going to show me that you're as tough as your legend says. I'm not going to let a planet swallow you. You know why?"
- "Why? Ah… because you're the one who's supposed to kill me…"
- "Exactly. Unless you beg for mercy."
- "Never…"
She fell asleep, then woke again. The Wau looked upward. Twenty kilometers to climb back up. It would be fast. In a few leaps, from rail to rail, Ada in his arms, he returned to the railing from which she had fallen. Her rifle was still on the ground. Appearing from nowhere, Alpha. A rare occurrence - he signed of his own accord:
- HAPPY
Ada tried to sign, but her right arm was broken, limp, shattered. She signed with her left hand.
- HAPPY
The Wau signed as well:
- ME LOVE YOU
- "You speak Xeno?" Ada smiled.
- "I'm always trying to be on your level, Gorylkin."
On both sides - hangar side and lab side - sliding doors opened in silence. On one side, six commandos in suits, armed with FAM rifles; on the other, a single one, accompanying Basil. They closed half the distance and opened fire without warning.
The Wau shielded Ada with his body while Alpha rendered her invisible. He leapt onto the group of six, dragged them with his strength into the hangar. Five seconds later, he was back. Ada was visible again and had surprised the commando: she held him at gunpoint with her rifle. But her left arm wasn't steady, and her FAM lifted above her aim. Her opponent took aim at her as Basil waddled toward the lab. And the soldier fell to the ground with a single shot.
- "That was you, Wau?" Ada asked.
- "Who knows?"
- "But how?"
- "The mind triumphs over force, Gorylkin."