idnight covers the valley, stifling movement. Nothing near him moves, no air, no branches, not the thin grass brushing under his chin. Lobatos slows his breathing. He attempts to focus his natural vision on their target, the small, movement-sensitive, tungsten-56 cell embedded in the facing hillside. He dares not use his night vision equipment.
Lobatos slowly glances left and then right, again checking his men's status -- four on the left, four right, a line running parallel to the base of the hill. Though they lie in open view of the windowless cell, they are virtually invisible. The cell's sensor scans for body movements, eye heat, new electron fields, minor sound waves, and even artificially cooled assault apparel. But that was this type of sensor's current limit.
Lobatos's unit formerly wore apparel that simply transmitted reverse signals -- cool temperatures in place of tell-tale body heat, concave sound waves for convex, and so on. That had worked well for thirty-four such rescue missions, from 2088 to 2095 A.D., but the various kidnapping parties had improved their sensors. For the past ten missions -- all of which Lobatos had served in, though commanding only the last eight -- the unit wore assault apparel that exactly duplicated the immediate terrain's temperature, waves, fields, and a hundred and sixty-seven other factors. The unit's intelligence department assured them just before leaving that their opponents had not yet caught on. But intelligence had been wrong before; Lobatos remembers and winces.
No time for petty doubts now. He starts rehearsing to himself each step of this final phase, expressing his thoughts in vigorous twenty-first century Spanish, the language of choice in the Protestant territories, his home.
The unit's members allow their thigh and shoulder muscles to unwind, loosening the pains coiled around their bones, after an evening of scaling and sprinting across this jagged foreign terrain. Lobatos also permits his frame a moment's peace against the soft ground. At twenty-six, he is the oldest man in the unit -- married two years ago. He had to part from his wife and infant son for this rescue mission, a division he hadn't previously faced.
Lobatos examines the small fortress and matches its exterior features to his memory of its mapped layout. He estimates the distance and time to entry, determines the best assault positions, recalls the warm smell of his new son, Martine -- sweetly soured mother's milk -- as the boy peacefully dozed against his shoulder. Gloria smiling at them satisfied.
He presses his eyes closed. Focus, idiot. There are soldiers depending upon you. Missionary lives at stake. Masochistic kidnappers ready for blood.
He rechecks his weapon and considers its energy settings, considers Martine's big brown eyes, like moonbeams,... eyes that will absorb the faith and sins of his parents. How to provide a house of faith? How to show him God's mercy? Nothing shipwrecks faith like a parent's hypocrisy. Nothing sanctifies a parent like the terror of causing a little one to betray Christ, to hate His commandments. Oh, the fear of being an Eli, a father responsible for his children's misery and rebellion. What could be worse? O Lord, how is anyone fit for such a task? ...But my father did it. And my grandfather. Now it's my turn. O Lord, produce your Fruit in me...for Martine's sake... I should be home! Lobatos's ear sensor moves, "We have a reading," reports the disembodied voice.
Inside the steamy fortress the three missionaries are propped against the far wall, staring blankly, hiding their pity, their limbs restrained in a way to maximize pain. Mountain dirt streaks their shiny skin and gathers in unshaven clumps. One of the captors monitors the sensor for any movement in the valley, twitching and perspiring on his trigger. He has already reduced several jackrabbits and owls to dust. Two other captors crouch in opposite corners of the cell and stare at each other.
Gilles-eight, with a desert chiseled face and city body, slowly paces between the two tables, as if preparing a speech. He stops. He turns, and with a suppressed smile or look of understanding, he kneels in front of the missionaries, staring through them.
He imagines them screaming at their public dismemberment and breathes deeply. Without taking his eyes from them, he starts giving terse, almost inaudible orders to his two men in the corners. "Dress these three in our extra uniforms. Get us all head covers. Sit one in front of the sensor. The others at the table with disabled weapons in front of them. We will sit against the wall."
Gilles-eight watches as his orders are carried out. The missionaries now wear the frayed forest green uniform of the Gilles de Rais Party, named after the fifteenth century lieutenant, alchemist, sadist, and necrophile, who slaughtered hundreds of young boys across the French countryside. The Gilles de Rais Party numbers in the hundreds of thousands and operates as simply another influential sado-masochistic political party reviving the systematic debauchery/perversity clubs that were so popular at the time of the French Revolution. Such epidemics of deliberate perversity seem to appear in regular historical cycles every four or five hundred years.
The nation of Pacifica, which, prior to the secessionist successes of 2018, included the former U.S. territories of Arizona, California, Nevada, and Oregon, now revels in being the center of this self-conscious imitation of early French culture.
After several hours of waiting and perspiring, Gilles-eight stiffly turns to the missionaries and whispers, "Domination. Domination. That is your task. Why can't you understand? Why must you bring your oppression to Pacifica?... Haven't you already destroyed Afrique and Latine?... Stop your domination... But you won't,... so we must discipline you."
One of the missionaries gently runs his finger across the warm damp tabletop, pauses, and looks over at Gilles-eight. "We have no standing armies like you. We barely have governors. Your people are crying out to be freed,... freed from their bondage to sin... Christ breaks the bonds of sin--"
"You are so gatting naive." Gilles-eight briskly licks his teeth. "You really have no idea what you are saying. I pity you." Gilles-eight breaks the conversation, turning away, and then, almost spinning around, adds, "If we can't get you to the public dismemberment safely -- genuine justice -- then at least, at least, I will have the satisfaction of seeing you slaughtered by your own." He stares blankly at the missionaries. Then he shakes his head at the unnaturalness of Protestant ideology, its muting of biological impulse, its obsession with atonement. They ever divide, divide, divide.
Lobatos's team has now crossed the valley and sits two hundred yards from the tungsten cell. The air has turned cooler at the bottom of the hill. They wait and listen. Lobatos gives the signal to start inching closer. The stones pressing against his body begin taking on a less rounded shape. Crawling and hesitating, like chameleons, they see the small cell grow before them.
Lobatos slows again. Why must we keep sending missionaries to this forsaken culture? Pearls before swine. I'm too old for this... Gloria, sitting in the window sunshine, that soft cotton dress... Martine... Get control. I've lost my discipline. Too dangerous. Draw back. Draw back.
Gilles-eight stares carefully at the sensor and presses several dimensions for different readings. His moist fingers lightly smear perspiration over the sensor face. He rubs the back of his neck and wipes the moisture on his uniform. He curses and stares back at the sensor. "This is absurd! Why did they send us to such desolation and backwardness? I need air or I will die. No one knows where we are. Not even our own party."
He sets the sensor on highest sensitivity. Nothing. He moves to the door security panel, enters the configuration, and slides the vault-like door ajar and breathes in the cool air -- for a moment.
He bows his head to cool his back. Several unlit energy bursts tear through his skull, first stunning, then dropping him. Before his limp head touches the floor, the whole room is buzzing and smoking with energy, bodies flying, folding, screaming. Lobatos, now with mechanical precision, shouts a series of commands, his training having taken over, his men moving like one. The Gilles de Rais footmen never get a weapon raised before their world flashes out.
The missionaries sit calmly still throughout, one at the sensor, the other two at the table, disabled weapons in front of them. Lobatos's team never even hesitated in identifying their true targets. The identification transmitters implanted at the back of each missionary's eyesocket made their representations shine like angels in the rescue team's optical gear.
The haze of dust and blood settles, and the rescue team begins its shift into its closing activities.
"When will they learn?" asks a missionary. "Don't they know their track record?"
"Maybe they do," offers Lobatos, slightly raising his eyebrows. "Or maybe they learn when it's too late." Martine. Lobatos sighs quietly. "Come, we have a long trek to the pick-up site." As Lobatos exits, he asks over his shoulder, "Have you guys ever considered an alternate calling?" They all laugh.
