The Wau knelt on one knee, on a formation of silica. Under the diffracted light of the golden moons, he could clearly make out a large cluster riddled with holes—or rather, several clusters that had, over time, grown into each other, creating cavities.
A presence approaches… by hopping. The Wau is so surprised he tumbles backward. For all his giant size, he is smaller than this Xeno: a large frog with a slender body, two huge stalked eyes, long webbed legs, and feathered skin. The Xeno rotates its head around its neck like an owl, and the Wau recognizes it instantly.
You are an Owl from Booz, aren't you? The ones who can see the future? he thinks using his psi powers, transmitting images rather than words.
The Owl enters his mind and shows him various images: its species colonizing the planet, flying in ships, celebrating with humans… then the distinctions between these images dissolve into one: a people living in swamps and feeding on legged fish.
The Wau understands that the Owls don't merely see into parallel worlds—they use them to communicate. Truth and fact, to them, are not acknowledgements of the real world, but the exclusion of parallel possibilities.
He resumes his posture, and the Owl watches him. He extends his consciousness and tries to perceive what is thinking down here. In the caverns. Two members of the Brotherhood, harpoon in hand, hunting. Six Fleet soldiers, also hunting. Over a hundred Owls. They can see the future, so they avoid the patrols—but there are dead ends. The Wau arrived just in time.
He concentrates and subtly influences the team leaders' decisions, who, unknowingly, head back toward the exits. Then they run into each other and open fire. The Owls, frightened, flee the caverns with a flurry of wings in disorienting chaos. Two soldiers are down, stunned but mostly unharmed; the pirates are well-armed and in their element. The Wau mentally encourages the Owls to flee further west, away from Babylon. He clouds the minds of all the men so they scatter and lose one another. Believing himself under the hallucinatory influence of an Owl, a Brother stumbles to a Raven, floundering in the mud and screaming in terror.
The Raven rises into the sky, trailing an orange line behind it. In five seconds, it will be overhead. The Wau exchanges a mutual feeling of gratitude with the Owl, and, as the Raven passes above, he leaps vertically sixty meters, fracturing the silica rock. He grabs onto the Raven, which jolts from the impact. The pilot panics, skimming the ground and the silica formations to shake off the Wau, whose armor smashes through all obstacles. The Brother thinks he's rid of him, but the Wau suddenly reappears, like a devil, on the cockpit window and smashes it with a punch. Terrified, the pilot loses control and the Raven crashes once more into the swamp, this time sinking for good a few meters deep.
When the Wau pulls himself from the depths and reaches the Raven's wreck, the pilot is dead. He examines the body: is there still time to save him? No—the man's brain mass was crushed against the control panel. What a pity. Guilt and regret rise within him, forming a soup of unease, and he welcomes this feeling—its presence—while enduring its discomfort. He leaves the body to the animals of Booz.
His AIs hack the Raven. Evidently, the Pirate was returning to Babylon, where there was a marked target labeled HQ, precisely two hundred meters away.
Weighted with guilt, the Wau turns northeast. Onward to Babylon, through this mud that swallows everything... He leaps onto a tree—a real one this time, a swollen pseudo-baobab where each branch bears a nest. He is joined, also in a leap, by an Owl.
The same one? he asks.
Several images of Owls accumulate in his mind: wandering in the caves, crouching in the mud, hunting fish… merging into a single image—the Owl facing the Wau earlier, on the rock. It's the same one. For a moment, the Wau wonders if there is only one Owl, and all the others are imported from parallel worlds.
The creature once again transmits a feeling of gratitude. Then it brings its small head and large eyes closer. The Wau allows it. The head touches the Wau's helmet.
Contact, asks the Xeno.
The Wau lifts his golden mask to reveal the smaller face of Cassandre, embedded in the gold of the hyperchalk. The Xeno continues and their two heads touch—soft human skin against small damp feathers.
She is projected into the future. It is a dimensional and physical journey, as if a great hand had seized her and hurled her in a single movement—though not upward or downward, nor in any direction in space—yet hurled nonetheless. The inertia is real, felt.
Cassandre finds herself in the Armor, in an open-air dark place, a black stone platform atop an unknown planet. Piercing the clouds, immense burning ships fall in different directions across the horizon. A cold wind tells her they're at high altitude. In front of her, Ada, rifle slung over her shoulder, skips like a child. Cass doesn't move, and a familiar figure beside her passes ahead—Andreï—who turns back with a smile uncharacteristic of him. For a moment, she has the dizzying feeling that they form a family, each born under a different star, but who, amidst the chaos of war, managed to find each other. She looks at her hands—gauntlets of armor. They are worn, and her knuckles ache. What did she strike hard enough to damage the indestructible? Ada calls out to her, asking to be lifted. A familial image again. Cassandre steps forward, grabs Ada by the waist, and lifts her onto her shoulders.
And the temporal hand grabs her once again, for a swift journey, and the Wau becomes once more the Wau, covered in mud, in the unfamiliar branches of a Booz tree. The famed visions of the future from the Owls... but the Wau can't see how what she just saw could ever come to pass. When it comes to the future, it seems the what is less surprising than the how.
Onward to Babylon.