Chapter 18: The dark unit

The Wau made its way back to the astroport with its steady, measured pace. Technicians and pilots were taking images of its ship—The Halcyon.

Halcyons were exceedingly rare vessels, and even the Wau knew of only one: its own. A black bird with fine golden streaks, resting on the tarmac, as large as an Ozymandias, sculpted with straight, geometric lines that might have belonged to some Xeno Atlantis.

The Halcyon opened at its arrival, imposing a respectful silence upon the gathered crowd. Like much of Wau technology, The Halcyon was also an Armor—absorbing the Wau as much as it welcomed it inside.

With a single impulse, the vessel lifted itself, the grappling mechanism carrying it smoothly into the sky. Then, in a maneuver that left all the pilots watching in awe, it immediately engaged Drift and vanished.

The black bird, nearly invisible in space, reappeared two seconds later above Francisco-1, the fractured planet.

A thousand years ago, this planet—once rich with developing flora and fauna—had shattered for unknown reasons. A geological catastrophe of massive scale, a runaway Transient artifact, or an invisible weapon—no one knew. What remained was a world split in two from pole to pole: one hemisphere, now blackened, held a thin atmosphere only a few centimeters thick—just enough to sustain mosses, lichens, and microscopic insects. The other hemisphere had broken apart into space, revealing seas of hardened magma, moons of diamond and precious metals, and a colossal iron core, all hidden within billions upon billions of drifting planetary fragments.

Anyone traveling to Francisco almost always stopped at Orion Prime, a massive space station—originally a scientific outpost but later overrun by mining prospectors when the planet’s resources were opened for exploitation.

The delicate hyperchalcum ring had swollen with added modules—astroports, factories, refineries, and, of course, hundreds of pleasure hubs where miners could spend in one night the thalers they had toiled for a month to earn.

Today, Orion Prime had grown into a rough, misshapen sphere of metal and rock, twelve kilometers in length, infamous across the SH for its extreme political instability.

But The Halcyon, invisible to the naked eye and beyond the reach of any civilian detection system, plunged into Francisco-1’s fragmented hemisphere, navigating through one of the densest, most hidden asteroid clusters.

One of the asteroids bloomed open like a flower, welcoming The Halcyon inside.

The Legends Are True: The Wau Have a Stellar Base—But Not Only That.

This base was the Wau’s personal sanctuary. No other member of its Order had crossed its threshold since it took up its mantle—though there had been another Wau here before.

The base was a sphere of hyperchalcum, embedded into an asteroid, composed of a landing platform for The Halcyon, a living and rest area with a large bay window (reinforced with an interface capable of connecting to any SH surveillance camera).

At the far ends were two Entangled Gates—structures as rare as they were costly, priced at approximately twenty billion thalers per pair.

Outside of Prospero and Earth, no world possessed more than a single Entangled Gate, typically reserved for ship or train transit.

These gates—derived from Transient technology and still incomprehensible to humans (or the Wau)—remained continuously open to another gate, regardless of distance.

To the left, the gate led to a modest apartment on Lennox, where the Wau conducted various operations incognito—without the Armor.

To the right, the gate led to the Sanctum, a place even the Transients could not reach.

The lower section of the Stellar Fortress housed a sprawling, tentacular apparatus of cables and central units processing information across quantum planes, multidimensional constructs, decimal and fractal models, universes, and temporal periods.

It also featured an experimental implementation of the “Veritatis”—a Xeno method used by a species known as the Freemen, located near the Transcendence.

The Veritatis allowed for determining the truth or reality of a theorem without requiring proof.

At the heart of this labyrinth of servers and cables hummed a unique exosuit called The Dark Unit.

Oh, There Was Much Work To Be Done—But One Thing Took Priority: Sleep.

The Wau Order had a directive—ideally, sleep for ten continuous hours every two months, to allow the subconscious to purge itself.

The Wau was at three months, and, every so often, small hallucinations haunted its thoughts.

“The Alpha’s Single Bed”—a humorous phrase originating from UniPsi.

When a psi of major strength, say Alpha-class, sleeps, their dreams are shared with those nearby. As a result, they tend to sleep alone—though the fictional film In My Wife’s Dreams remained a PanSH classic, aired every year.

However, when an Omega-class Empty Eye, enhanced by Wau training, falls asleep and dreams—those dreams infiltrate the psyches of all sentient beings and sensitive animals across an entire star system and sometimes beyond, entirely uncontrollable.

What they dream becomes reality for billions—beings of wonder or horror appear, cities rise or fall.

It is nothing but illusion—yet capable of throwing entire populations into chaos for ten hours straight.

Thus, for psi of its caliber, the Wau Order had constructed Hypnos—the Rest Exosuit: a comfortable, transparent pod housed in a dimly lit, silent chamber, linked to The Dark Unit.

The Dark Unit would analyze the Wau’s psychic waves, invert them, and send them back at equal power to neutralize them.

The energy required for this counterwave emitter was so immense that only antimatter could sustain it.

Even in this advanced era, antimatter remained exceptionally costly and difficult to obtain—the Wau sourced it from an automated laboratory on Lennox.

In Short, The Simple Need to Sleep Required More Logistics Than Any Other Wau Operation.

The Wau allowed the automated maintenance system to remove its Armor and purge its interior.

At last, fresh air—confined for so long—flowed against its skin.

When not wearing the Armor, the Wau was Cass—an athletic woman with short black hair and golden eyes (a cosmetic choice; she had been born with black eyes), betraying an intelligence that never rests.

Nude, she felt the coolness of the floor against her bare feet before making her way to Hypnos.

She lay down.

And within a single second, she was asleep—such was the measure of her exhaustion.

She woke precisely ten hours later.

Even without an assistance AI, her mind had been trained for precision.

She emerged from ten hours of dreams—where Transients, dancers, planetary catastrophes, mathematics, a welding torch piercing Hyperchalc, snakes, and Xenos all intertwined.

She relaxed in the living space—a rudimentary kitchen and a bay window.

She requested to see the endless oceans of Iris beyond the Ariel Gate—an oceanic planet and nature reserve under Transient protection, devoid of tectonic activity or moons, where the water was as smooth as oil, and where one could study marine life through the patterns it traced on the surface.

A machine prepared a cup of coffee.

Wearing the Armor too often for her own good, her stomach had shrunk, and her intestines functioned at a minimum, sustained by the nutrients diffused through the Armor.

How would she survive, stranded without her Armor on a planet?

I’m weakening, she thought, noting that she needed to rebalance her physiology as soon as possible.

Right after the Clelia case.

Even though there was always another case.

She descended the steps toward the Dark Unit—another Armor, this one immense, imbued with the ultimate energy of the universe, the energy that arises from the annihilation of a thing by its opposite.

A sarcophagus within a box, itself in a pit of darkness, entwined by a shadowy forest of cables and all-powerful mathematical sentinels, designed by minds far superior to what humanity would ever become.

Like The Halcyon, like the Armor, the Sarcophagus absorbed her, and Cass became Wau again, processing billions of inquiries.

A part of her mind froze when she received a message from Ada:

From: Gorylkin

To: Wau Order

Message:

Wau Order, this is your adversary: Gorylkin.

You sent one of your henchmen to Prospero to look for me, but he wasn’t smart enough to find me.

I saw him.

You’re not as strong as you think.

But that doesn’t matter. I’ve thought it over, and I don’t think you were responsible for the destruction of Clelia.

In fact, I suspect you’re conducting some sort of investigation into the rock that appeared out of nowhere.

But you’re SH’s dogs—you don’t see everything.

We know the Wau.

If the Wau Order really wants to know who the true villains of this story are ... If you’re capable of accepting that these villains are people from the SH, ministers and bigwigs...