After the projection of Demona Helo?ste dissipated, Tasìa checked the NeoPalm power supply. It was down to less than ten percent owing to the enormous expenditure of energy Demona's digital resurrection had caused.
She replaced the battery with one enmeshed in a kinetic coil. As she worked the tongs loose, Tasìa noticed that Rojo was watching her.
He seemed so placid with his legs folded beneath him as he sat in his chair. She had to remind herself of the cold-blooded murder of Nande, a woman whose sweet nature surpassed even that of her husband's.
Tasìa was growing too comfortable with the presence of the ghost.
"You have something to say?" she asked Rojo.
The entity ignored her crosséd tone as he answered.
"Demona, she is ever ambitious. Even in death, she thinks herself a general." Rojo cackled as he repeated Demona's message with disdain. "'I hope that my sacrifice was worth it to our cause, my brother. I expect you to proceed to The Woken Child with all due haste'. A command with a cryptic message attached. Would you expect anything less from the vainglorious Demona Helo?ste?"
Tasìa smiled with a rueful sneer. Demona evidently had many detractors. Right-wing death merchants and Maoist guerillas mocked her with equal derision.
"I've never met Helo?ste before, until just now. She believes that she serves a higher power and a sublime purpose."
Tasìa did not know why she downplayed Helo?ste was a diabolist. Where was this sympathy for the deceased spook coming from?
Rojo shook his head with more intensity than Tasìa had thought the entity capable of.
"She serves only the web of her own delusion. The only higher power that truly exists is the Spirit of the People."
The NeoPalm let her know the beacon was now relaying a signal. She needed to assemble her gun, but the last phrase Rojo spoke caught Tasìa's attention.
She was reminded of the words of a tale she heard in the seminary, supposedly a true one. The story of how a cadre of spooks used drug-induced mind control to turn a popular priest into an atheist who fled from the Old Church in a most dramatic fashion.
He rent his garments and ran through the streets like a madman. It was thought that he joined with the guerillas.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
That phrase she had even heard elders of the Anewed, her father's creed, use:
El Espíritu de la Gente superará todo.
-The Spirit of the People will surpass all.
Unlike Rojo, who seemed to be quite literal, they only meant this in terms of the political guidance of a righteous public in the context of their usage of the term.
She squinted at Rojo once more as if to gauge if he, as a man, could measure up to this story.
"Are you the Red Priest, Rojo?" she asked.
With his hands folded together, Rojo bowed his head in a nod.
"That dreadful day came when the bells and chimes of Arequipa sounded hollow to my ears. Where before they had always brought me joy, they now made me nauseous and filled my blood with angry venom. No rhyme nor reason to this malcontent I felt. Nothing at all in all the world sparked my discontent. It was all of a sudden. It just was. And I fled to the foothills. I fed upon what nature provided."
As she listened, Tasìa realized that perhaps she knew more than even he did of what had occurred.
"Rojo," she asked. "Have you ever heard of the Incompleteness?"
With a guileless gaze back at her, Rojo shook his head as he answered, "No."
Her fingers grappled on the desk; she leaned forward on her arms.
"Strange that you haven't. You are their most renowned test subject. When the spooks replace a person's personality with an artificial construct, the new self sometimes becomes intuitively aware of their condition—the Incompleteness."
His face twisted in a struggle of disbelief. Muscles twitched in collision with wrinkles. Veins throbbed beneath brown skin.
"But I became whole again through my own struggle. When I saw the Espíritu de la Gente in a vision and it was made known to me what was needed, I could no longer be a priest. I was made a warrior!"
"Rojo, how complete are you now? Are you going to sit there and read from your book until all the energia in this valley is spent?"
Rojo grinned from ear to ear as he smacked the book on its leather-bound cover.
"It is complete."
Opening it up, he returned his attention to it.
Tasìa turned her own attention to the placement of the scope into the TAC-50 interchangeable modular socket designed for sighting systems.
Her NeoPalm buzzed.
What now?
"Hello."
"Ms. del Alma-Gris, Lt. Colonel Sol, here. Incoming warbirds are swooping towards Ballano's location. They are not my men. I've ordered mine to stay back. Unfortunately, they do not have time to intercept. Brace yourself; they are likely searching for you. Out."
She heard a scurry above as harsh in sound as a clash of metal talons from robotic eagles. Competitive mechanical bird duels were popular outdoor sporting events, but they tended to be so very loud.
Tasìa completed the rest of the assembly within a dozen seconds. She grabbed a magazine of .50 caliber cartridges and darted to the door and gazed up.
Above, dropping in a twirl, was the red and white striped Sikorsky S-92. It plunged the last hundred feet and crashed beside the glowing pit.
Four warbirds flew separately to the opposite sides of the valley. Two skydivers jumped out of each of the warbirds in free fall. They fell with their asses bent towards the ground, their feet and hands touching.
The jet-stop packs on their backs made for ripe targets.
She shouldered her rifle. A breath count tensed down in her gut was all Tasìa needed to slow down her perception of time.
The first round ripped through a jet-stop pack with a satisfying explosion.
As she targeted the next one of the seven remaining doomed skydivers, only one little matter worried her. The warbirds were not the Series 8 she had spent so much time hunting for vulnerabilities to exploit.
They would not go down so easily.
