This is my favorite volume so far. It has a steampunk aesthetic which is a nice change. I like how each episode of Wake is wildly different and self-contained. Buchet’s art is once again great, with tons of detailed designs and concepts.
The setup has a simple hook: Wake has discovered an unexpectedly advanced civilization on a primitive planet. There is a secret installation of particular interest. Also, the new dominant species appears similar to humans. Navis, eager to learn anything about her origins, is sent to investigate.
She dons a living camouflage and travels through a warp gate to reach the planet. These gates connect Wake to any planet the convoy has previously visited.
Next, we are introduced to the planet and its inhabitants. It’s a planet of perpetual winter whose architecture and technology resemble 19th century France. We meet a band of revolutionaries and a despotic government. After a protest is brutally suppressed, the rebels resort to terrorism, attacking a government train. Most of them die but the leader is rescued by Navis. The two storylines (Navis and Clement) intersect with clean efficiency.
SPOILER
Navis tells Clement about the secret installation, and he agrees to help her find it, believing his brother might be held prisoner there.
They are spotted by soldiers but escape via jumping into a bone-grinding machine.
They contact the father of a fallen rebel, and he agrees to smuggle them out of the city. They disguise themselves as workers in a ranching operation.
They train with snow scooters and rifles. They run into the native population of goat creatures (who have the same facial markings as the humanoids), relegated to slums. Navis sympathizes with them but Clement thinks they’re scum.
In a short interlude, we see the high-peer visit the secret facility for a meeting with an old human slumbering in a high-tech cryo-chamber.
Navis discovers the ranchers massacring yaks and is enraged. She leads the yaks to safety and flees the ranchers with Clement.
They go in search of the facility, but Princhard, the leader of the ranchers, hunts them down. (An ally turned enemy) They manage to defeat him with dynamite.
The benevolent, pacifist goat people help them recover and point them towards the facility.
They battle a giant robot and defeat it with a native plant (set up in the previous scene).
Once inside the facility, they discover a spaceship under construction, but are soon spotted. Navis is captured, but Clement escapes.
We then get major revelations, shown through a recorded message intended for the amnesiac architect of the facility. A human geneticist, crashed on the planet millennia ago. The sole survivor of a French expedition into space. He used his skills to create a hybrid race from himself and the goats, and has guided their development of advanced technology, in the hope that they would one day build a spaceship that would allow him to escape. Every 50 years, he revives from cryo sleep to instruct them. The ruling class, including Clement’s brother, know all this and are on board with the plan.
Navis is brought to the geneticist, but before she can learn anything Clement assasinates him. Clement’s brother refuses to leave and stays behind with the high-peer when the facility blows up.
Navis and Clement escape. Navis returns to space and is depressed because she lost the chance to meet another human. Clement assumes control of the ice planet, but without the geneticist’s vaccines, the hybrids gradually begin to degenerate into goat men and there is mass unrest, mirroring the opening scenes. Clement, however, accepts his downfall, as he has seen firsthand that violence doesn’t accomplish anything.