"Get away from that phone!"
On the display, the little girl seemed to look past Wil. Her eyes widened. She was the last thing W. W. Brierson saw.
There were dreams. In some he could only see. In others, he was blind, yet hearing and smell were present, all mixed together. And some were pure pain, winding up and up while all around him torturers twisted screws and needles to squeeze the last bit of hurt from his shredded flesh. But he also sensed his parents and sister Beth, quiet and near. And sometimes when he could see and the pain was gone, there were flowers - almost a jungle of them - dipping near his eyes, smelling of violin music.
Snow. Smooth, pristine, as far as his eyes could see. Trees glazed in ice that sparkled against cloudless blue sky. Wil raised his hand to rub his eyes and felt faint surprise to see the hand obey, to feel hand touch face as he willed it.
"Wili, Wili! You're really back!" Someone warm and dark rushed in from the side. Tiny arms laced around his neck. "We knew you'd come back. But it's been so long." His five year-old sister snuggled her face against him.
As he lowered his arm to pat her head, a technician came around from behind him. "Wait a minute, honey. Just because his eyes are open doesn't mean he's back. We've gotten that far before." Then he saw the grin on Wil's face, and his eyes widened a bit. "L-Lieutenant Brierson! Can you understand me?" Wil nodded, and the tech glanced over his head - probably at some diagnostic display. Then he smiled, too. "You do understand me! Just a minute, I'm going to get my supervisor. Don't touch anything." He rushed out of the room, his last words more an unbelieving mumbling to himself than anything else: "I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever get past protocol rejection."
Beth Brierson looked up at her brother. "Are you okay, now, Wili?"
Wil wiggled his toes, and felt them wiggle. He certainly felt okay. He nodded. Beth stepped back from the bed. "I want to go get Mom and Dad."
Wil smiled again. "I'll be right here waiting."
Then she was gone, too. Brierson glanced around the room and recognized the locale of several of his nightmares.
But it was an ordinary hospital room, perhaps a little heavy on electronics.
.. and still he was not alone in it. Alvin Swensen, dressed as offensively as ever, sat in the shadows next to the window. Now he stood up and crossed the room to shake hands.
Wil grunted. "My own parents aren't here to greet me, yet Big Al is."
"Your bad luck. If you'd had the courtesy to come around the first time they tried to bring you back, you would have had your family, and half MSP waiting for you. You were a hero."
"Were?"
"Oh, you still are, Wil. But it's been a while, you know." There was a crooked smile on his face.
Brierson looked through the window at the bright winter's day. The land was familiar. He was back in Michigan, probably at Okemos Central Medical. But Beth didn't look much older. "Around six months, I'd guess."
Big Al nodded. "And, no, I haven't been sitting here every day watching your face for some sign of life. I happened to be in East Lansing today. My Protection Racket still has some insurance claims against your company. MSP paid off all the big items quick, but some of the little things - bullet holes in outbuildings, stuff like that - they're dragging their heels on. Anyway, I thought I'd drop by and... see how you're doing."
"Hmm. So you're not saluting the New Mexican flag down there in Manhattan?"
"What? Hell no, we're not!" Then Al seemed to remember who he was talking to. "Look, Wil, in a few minutes you're gonna have the medical staff in here patting themselves on the back for pulling off another medical miracle, and your family will be right on top of that. And after that, your Colonel Potts will fill you in again on everything that's happened. Do you really want Al Swensen s Three Minute History of the Great Plains War?"
Wil nodded.
"Okay." Big Al moved his chair close to the bed. "The New
Mexicans pulled back from the ungoverned lands less than three days after they grabbed you and me and Jim Turner...." The official Republic view was that the Great plains Action was a victory for the decisive and restrained use o f military force. The "roving gangster bands" of the ungoverned wastes had been punished for their abuse of New Mexican settlers, and one W. W. Brierson, the ringleader of the northern criminals, had been killed. q 1m, dead?" said Wil.
"Dead enough for their purposes." Big Al seemed momentarily uneasy. "I don't know whether I should tell a sick man how much sicker he once was - but you got hit in the back of the head with a five-millimeter exploder. The Newmex didn't hurt me or Jim, so I don't think it was vengeance. But when they blew in the door, there you were, doing something with their command equipment. They were already hurting, and they didn't have any stun guns, I guess."
A five-millimeter exploder. Wil knew what they could do. He should be dead. If it hit near the neck, there might be some forebrain tissue left, but the front of his face would have been blown out. He touched his nose wonderingly.
Al saw the motion. "Don't worry. You're as beautiful as ever. But at the time, you looked very dead - even to their best medics. They popped you into stasis. The three of us spent nearly a month in detention in Oklahoma. When we were `repatriated,' the people at Okemos Central didn't have any trouble growing back the front of your face. Maybe even the New Mexicans could do that. The problem is, you're missing a chunk of brain," he made patted the back of his head. "That they couldn't grow back. So they replaced it with processing equipment, and tried to interface that with what was left."
Wil experienced a sudden, chilling moment of introspection. He really should be dead. Could this all be in the imagination of some damned prosthesis program?
Al saw his face, and looked stricken. "Honest, Wil, it wasn't that large a piece. Just big enough to fool those dumbass New Mexicans."
The moment passed and Brierson almost chuckled. If self-awareness were suspect, there could scarcely be certainty of anything.
"Okay. So the New Mexican incursion was a great success. Now tell me why they really left. Was it simply the Schwartz bomb?"
"I think that was part of it." Even with the nuke, the casualties had not been high. Only the troops and tankers within three or four thousand meters of the blast were killed - perhaps twenty-five hundred men. This was enormous by the standards Wil was used to, but not by the measure of the Water Wars. Overall, the New Mexicans could claim that it had been an "inexpensive" action.
But the evidence of casual acceptance of nuclear warfare, all the way down to the level of an ordinary farmer, was terrifying to the New Mexican brass. Annexing the Midwest would be like running a gradeschool where the kids carry slug guns. They probably didn't realize that Schwartz would have been lynched the first time he stepped off his property if his neighbors had realized beforehand that he was nuke-armed.
"But I think your little phone call was just as important."
"About using the tornado killers?"
"Yeah. It's one thing to step on a rattlesnake - and another to suddenly realize you're up to your ankles in 'em. I bet the weather services have equipped hundreds of farms with killers - all the way from Okemos to Greeley." And, as Wil had realized on that summer day when last he was truly conscious, a tornado killer is essentially an aerial torpedo. Their use was coordinated by the meteorological companies, which paid individual farmers to house them. During severe weather alerts, coordinating processors at a met service headquarters monitored remote sensors, and launched killers from appropriate points in the countryside. Normally, they would be airborne for minutes, but they could loiter for hours. When remote sensing found a twister, the killers came in at the top of the funnel, generated a fifty-meter bobble - and destabilized the vortex.
Take that loiter capability, make trivial changes in the flight software - and you have a weapon capable of flying hundreds of kilometers and delivering a one tonne payload with pinpoint accuracy. "Even without nukes they're pretty fearsome. Especially if used like you suggested."