BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter XIII. Old Dog, New Tricks

XIII. OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS

IT HAD TAKEN THEM FORTY HOURS TO FIND HIS SORRY BAG OF BONES AND CHARCOALED FLESH in the middle of the Virginia desert where he had crash-landed the shiny new craft like a mach-ten skimming stone. Then it took them more than a year and a hundred operations to put all the pieces back together again.

If it had been anybody else, they probably would have given up on at least half of those hundred occasions but it seemed at that particular point in history the hopes and dreams of the world's entire peace-loving population - not to mention the Generalissimo's military budget - lay in his survival to return and lead the parry from the back footed stance the SlayHawks had stumbled onto following the day everyone's hero fell from the sky.

For twelve long months that heavy load had rested on the shoulders of the surgeons and doctors and nurses—all good men and women with real families and friends and lives of their own—who tirelessly worked around the clock on his comatose body while the world held its breath.

Then, one bright spring morning, in the year of his thirtieth birthday, his bandaged head jerked free of its coma, spurting out loud the word Gabriella into pitch black darkness, driving the room's monitors into a bleeping frenzy and reporting his new-found consciousness to the flurry of doctors and nurses who entered like a group of old friends, happily informing him that he was in one of his mother's clinics and she was on her way; that he would be able to walk out soon on his own legs, albeit with the aid of some nifty robotic implants. 

Yet their joyful voxes fell around him like silent ribbons and confetti for all he could think of was the moment just before he had been blown out of the sky; the moment he had decided he was going to do everything that remained in his power to become a real father to a little girl who thought she was his daughter and who had every reason to think that he had forsaken her.

Gab-ri-el-la: the one good thing left on this planet that could give reason to his existence beyond the soulless mission of avenging his wife's death - a mission that had so nearly cost him his sanity as well as his life. 

Gab-ri-el-la: he had spent the last decade looking backwards and now it was time to move on. 

Gab-ri-el-la: he had finally seen the light. 

Which was kind of ironic really, as the only thing they hadn't been able to fix up was his eyesight. He had been struck blind and for the life of them, the surgeons couldn't figure out what the problem was. 

Everything had been re-constructed, re-attached, re-connected and re-tested, over and over to the nth degree but nothing could be done that would generate the remotest optical signal to his brain.

So instead they offered to send him home with a tinted eye-visor, hot-wired with the latest military-grade thermal-imaging and jigar sensor technology that transmitted silhouettes of both warm and inanimate objects to the receiver chips they had implanted in his primary visual cortex close to the back of his skull. 

Fortunately, the result was remarkably similar to the heads-up image in his flight helmet when he was in night-hunter mode so he quickly got used to it. Technically, he wasn't actually 'seeing' what was in front of him - instead his brain was spatially recreating his vision in his mind's eye using the data transmitted from the miniature sensors built into the frame of the visor.

<It's thermally sensitive to a thousandth of a degree,> voxed the clinic's chief surgeon, his mother's ward, Doctor Vera Cranfield, as she lightly ran her fingertip along the wall, leaving a heat trail where her body heat had warmed the surface. <You can alter the required sensitivity at will via your vox,> she continued, but he was having trouble focussing on her words. Instead he couldn't help but notice the heat range of her body's contours, mapped out in warm reds and golden ambers beneath her shapeless surgeon's gown, generating some stirrings from beneath his bedcovers and reassuring him that at least things were still working down there.