Alicia Whistler sat in the kitchen, trying not to scowl. She knew that anger was wrong, here, but there wasn't a lot to be un-angry about. She'd just gone through the entire apartment, locating the few unopened bottles of cheap hooch the government stores provided to residents of Chi-Town, along with all the ones that were half-empty, or had a few fingers' worth at the bottom of the bottle. The open ones were poured down the sink; the sealed ones, at a neighbor's house--she could trade them, later, for something useful for the girls. After they had a discussion.
Her husband woke a few hours later. She could hear him stumbling around, muttering, and finally, he came in and saw them all sitting there. "What's this? Where's my whiskey?"
She looked at him levelly. "Not another drink, not another drop, Alex Whistler. Not until you've truly come back to us."
He looked confused, disoriented for a bit. His eyes fell on the girls, Lisette, almost old enough to take the placement tests, and little Belle, in pigtails and a pink dress, and he tried to shake off his rising petulance. "What do you... I AM home!"
"No. You know full well what I mean. Six months is long enough to spend at the bottom of a bottle, without even telling us why. You haven't even explained those scars on your throat. You're carrying a burden, Alex, and it's breaking you. We're your family--and family shares the load."
(Retired) Lance Corporal Alex Whistler looked at his wife in shock. This wasn't the timid woman he'd left behind when he first got assigned as Lyboc's attache and sent to Tolkeen. This was a woman who'd spent a year running a household on her own, raising two girls, and then keeping him from poisoning himself in the half-year since his return. She was different, stronger, and....
She has no idea... no, of course she doesn't, how could she? You got passed-out drunk that first night, and haven't spent five hours straight sober since. What must the girls think of me... He rubbed his face, the scratchy, unshorn stubble rasping audibly. "Okay. Okay, you're right. But I'm going to need something to get--"
Her tone softened immediately. "Coffee's in the pot. Extra strong." He smiled at that. He wondered what sort of saint he'd been in a past life, to have her in this one. He poured the coffee into the largest mug he could, sat down, took a deep drink, patted Belle on the head gently, like he used to before he left, and gave Lisette a melancholy smile, and started to speak.
"Okay, I know you've heard some of the rumors about Tolkeen. That's where it started, really. Some parts of the CS... we just went insane, for a little while. The camps..." He shook his head. "The camps were everything you've heard, but worse. Pet project of a 'rogue element' in the high command. Near the end of the war, as we were making the final push, Lyboc found out about them, and we went on an unannounced investigative tour. I won't tell you everything I saw there. As bad as it was I managed to keep my head clear. But... well, my job was Lyboc's attache. I had to take notes on everything for him. And the prisoners... they got to know me, better than I thought, apparently. You have to understand--we barely could see them as people, even the human captives--they wre so wretched and... hollow."
He took a ragged breath. "So, there I was, in the camps, and we got to one, under the command of Colonel Angriman. Never a better name for a person--he was always pissed about something. But he got maddest when Lyboc confiscated some of his files, saying he was going to take them back to High Command for 'proper research'. There was a man--a prisoner, looked human, at least then--in Angriman's offices, but I barely even registered his presence."
"So, you know about the end of the war. We won, and won ugly, and tried to bury everything about the camps and the horrors of the battles and all that. And then Lyboc declared I was going to serve another tour of duty with him, and, well, I didn't have a whole lot of choice, you know that."
Alicia frowned, but nodded. If he'd refused a direct order of service, they would've revoked his pension, at the least, and maybe even his--and her the girls'--citizen status. They were too old to have to start over. She'd hated it when he told her he was being immediately rotated back to field duty, but she'd understood.
"So, it turns out, sometime during all that, Lyboc decided to become a 'rogue element', himself. He got obsessed with finding new ways to destroy the D-Bees without direct military action, you see--he didn't want another Tolkeen. So, he used some of the files he confiscated from Angriman and... Hell, I still don't know how it all worked. Made a deal with some gangsters, a family named Sharp. But I know he was trying to wipe out an entire city with some device--some
magical device, for Prosek's sake--that he'd gotten the plans for from the camp. The idea was that if you could eliminate the population without giving them a way to fight back, you could win without ever actually taking enemy fire."
"And then, when trouble broke out, he radioed me and sent me to watch the device. He told me the access code to be able to tweak it, but also told me in no uncertain terms what he'd do if I failed him." Alicia looked about to ask, but when he flicked his eyes to Belle and Lisette, she understood, again, and fell silent. Lisette might have caught it, at least a bit, but Belle was blissfully unaware, which was a blessing.
"So I had to run out there as fast as I could--but by the time I got there, another person was already there. He was obviously trying to dismantle the machine...." He chuckled, darkly. "You know how you sometimes have to correct my language in front of the girls', Love? Well, this guy... this guy was on a whole different level of cursing. I literally stopped dead in my tracks, just stunned by it. But he heard me, and looked around... And then he hissed, almost like a snake. '
Whistler!' He knew my name!"
"I was so stunned, I took a moment too long to try to run. He jumped forward, and grabbed me--not just with his arms, but his tail, too, right around my throat. And then he popped the faceplate on his armor, so I could see him." Alex shuddered. "It was him--the prisoner from Angriman's camp. Apparently, he'd designed the infernal machine, under Angriman's orders, or something--I never got the full details there. But he was enraged that it'd been built, let alone used."
"His eyes... they were unfocused, I don't think he could see very well. There were even marks on his face, like he usually wore glasses or something. But he dragged me over to the machine, and spoke... His voice. It'd changed, somehow, sounding like grinding rocks, but... I swear, I didn't imagine it--he spoke with the same accent we had in my old home in the Upper Penninsula. It was like I was getting grilled for intel by a former neighbor."
"Still, I refused to talk. Lyboc... you don't cross Lyboc, if you want to see another sunrise." Again the flicker of the eyes, and it very cleear that it was not only his own life he'd been worried about. "And he just snarled at me again, and somehow... I felt him IN my mind. Ripping the numbers right to the surface, where he could read them plain as day. He punched the numbers in, and then he had a moment while the machine itself was powering down some sort of automated defenses that had been bothering him. And during that moment, he turned his full attention on me."
He took a long, deep breath. "He brought up that damned tail--weird, he looked human except for that thing, and I would SWEAR he didn't have it when he was at the camp--maybe Angriman had cut it off and it grew back, like a lizard's. Who knows, with D-bees? Anyway, he wrapped it tight around my throat again, looked me in the eyes, and said to me,
'You cogs in the Coalition war machine... you are nothing but murderers for hire. Removing one of you won't make a damn bit of difference to anyone.' And then he stopped, and he seemed to lose focus for a minute. I honestly thought he was having some sort of psychotic break, but then he muttered out loud, 'Him? What could he possibly have that's worth sparing him for?' I didn't know what else to do, so, gripping as hard as I could to loosen the tail, I managed to choke out--'Belle. Lisette.'"
Alex's eyes were full of tears, by this point. "I thought I was never going to see any of you again. And he looked at me, and loosened the grip just enough to let me draw another breath, and asked me who you were. I told him, 'My daughters'."
"I'd hit him a few times when we first grappled, but his armor was too thick for my punches to do anything. But when I said that, it was like I'd given him an uppercut straight from the boxing vids. He swayed for a moment, then took a deep, ragged breath, released his grip again and said, 'Breathe. Take a breath.' I was so desperate for air, it wasn't like I couldn't do what he said, even if I'd wanted to resist his orders. Then he said, 'That breath is a debt. A debt you owe to Libertas Magicorum. That breath, and every one you take after it, is a debt you can never repay. Go home, soldier-man, go home to your family, and know that every breath you ever take, you take because of me. Remember to thank me, once in awhile.' And then he let me go, and I ran, ran like the hounds of hell were on my heels, and I never looked back."
"I guess he and his associates managed to stop Lyboc. High Command says Lyboc is dead, but I never saw the body. That story they put out about how the CS troops saved Whykin--you NEVER contradict that to anyone else, okay? Far as you're concerned, that's what happened. But... yeah, I don't think so. But when I got back, I made my report. I guess they decided I was telling the truth about being a clueless stooge, because they released me, with my discharge, and told me to keep my mouth shut."
The kitchen was silent, dead silent, for several long moments, and then little Belle got down from her chair, walked over to her daddy, and hugged him tightly. "Thank you, Lib'tas." That was all it took; the four of them hugged, and cried, and he kissed his wife. They later traded the whiskey for other, more useful goods in Chi-Town's unofficial grey market, and went on with their lives. But every once in awhile, Alicia would hear Alex say, under his breath, "Thank you, Libertas."
