The Reaper's Toll

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1

On a clear night, anyone in the central East Pacific who looked closely into the night sky would observe a number of faint stars where stars had not been but a couple of years ago. For some nations they appeared in Draco, for others they appeared in Orion, and yet others Gemini.

A closer observer would see something rather different. In low orbit hung dozens of shapes, from a few hundred meters to several kilometers in length, exotically curved shapes in glistening black and red. These were the ships of the Kandarin Navy’s 13th Fleet, deployed on semi-permanent station to the East Pacific in general and Xiopothos in particular.

For two years, the Kandarinese under Lord Vire Khaz of House Damis had blockaded the nation of Xiopothos, cutting off access by land, sea, or air upon pain of precision bombardment of violators. It was economically devastating, politically confusing, and worst of all, completely inexplicable - the Kandarin Federation was not known to make such interventions. When asked, Khaz and his associates always gave reasons that made little sense, citing Xiopothan aggression against Kandarin and some sort of universal biological threat. For the most part, East Pacifican intelligence agencies had discounted these allegations, but that achieved little to explain the Kandarinese actions. Representatives of the Federation elsewhere, for their part, generally declined to comment or claimed no connection.

As the blockade entered its third year, there were no clear signs of resolution. It would appear that the status quo, unpleasant as it was, would go on.

2

Western Xiopothos
Dusk

Custer Lewis put out his cigarette. It was a filthy habit, he reminded himself, but given where he was and where he was going, he couldn’t help but feel the stress. Stress demanded relief. Stress like this trumped the risk of future lung cancer. And in his line of work…Lewis doubted he’d live long enough to get the cancer.

Cursing, Lewis picked up the pack and lit up the next cigarette. It was normally not a difficult feat while driving, but on the mountain roads leading in to Mount Horn, any interruption could be fatal. Oh yes, he reminded himself, he was going into Mount Horn. At that recollection, the scientist’s mind was filled with memories of his last visit. Memories he’d rather forget. Still, duty was duty.

Cigarettes, he thought. More than cigarettes were needed to calm one’s nerves at a time like this. He idly flipped on the radio and tuned it to the nearest NXCB station*. Smooth, slow cello music. He tried other stations, but everything was static here in the mountains. NXCB it was. As dusk turned to the scintillating darkness of a cloudless night without city lights or streetlights, slow cello music gave way to a sad country melody and in turn gave way to an hour of upbeat jazz solos.

It was at the end of the jazz hour that he saw the hitchhiker. It was a woman, middle-aged, with unkempt hair, a dirty face, and frayed clothes. She had a small bag slung over her shoulder, and clutched a poorly-written sign:

Need a ride to Mount Horn
God Bless

Lewis passed her by. There was no way she’d be allowed on a military reservation, leaving aside the question of why she wanted to get in in the first place or even how she knew about the place. Besides, he was on a tight schedule and Mount Horn was still an hour away even on these country roads.

As the road climbed higher into the mountains, Custer Lewis heard a strong wind blowing through the craggy bluffs beside which the road wound. It was a cold wind - he could feel it, even in a heated car, chilling him to the bones. And then, as abruptly as it came, it departed. It was then that he saw the hitchhiker again.

It was clearly the same woman, but her hands were emaciated and her face was terribly gaunt. The clothes she wore were ragged and flapped in the breeze. She held out the same sign. Again he passed her by, shaking his head in a desperate attempt at disbelief. He knew that this sort of thing happened near Mount Horn, but never like this. Not so far away.

Almost immediately, he saw the hitchhiker again. Her corpse rested precariously in a half-slump on the guardrail, a wide-mouthed expression frozen on her maggot-eaten face. The sign lay at her feet, unchanged. Alarmed, he swerved aside, only to see the hitchhiker stand up and turn toward him in the corner of his eye just as he passed. She raised a hand - Grasping? Accusing? He would never know, for he hit the gas and sped down the winding road.

A minute or two after speeding up, Lewis abruptly hit the brakes. The road was crowded. Not with cars, but husks of cars, some the remnants of terrible pileups, others alone. Their twisted metal frames littered the road, but only enough that they had to be navigated around. Curious, Lewis looked into one of the wrecks and saw four bleached human skeletons, still dutifully strapped to their seats. Immediately, they grappled with their belts and flailed at the hollows of the windows. Reaching for him, desperate to make another share their fate. Lewis heard whispers, as if in his mind, but could not make them out.

Tearing his eyes off the nightmarish road as much as he could, Lewis turned them to the trees above, and became aware that they, too, held macabre secrets. Hundreds - no, thousands - of bodies were hanging from the high branches of the trees above. They were in various states of decay - some were skeletal, some putrescent. A few appeared to be still alive and struggling. He shuddered and paid attention to the road again, only to find that it was clear. The wrecks and all had vanished, and the only sign of anything abnormal was a deer grazing at the side of the road, which Lewis deftly avoided.

In the distance, he now saw, winked the lights of the radio towers and satellite dishes of Mount Horn. Mount Horn - the government’s key to the gates of hell.

*(OOC: The National Xiopothos Citizens’ Broadcast is the Xiopothan equivalent to America’s NPR)

3

When the jeep came to a stop within the compound parking lot, Chandra Haize dropped the cigarette she’d been smoking, grounding it with her foot. The P.h.D. in Biology slowly approached the vehicle as Lewis stepped out.

“Good evening, Doctor Lewis,” the middle-aged woman said kindly as the man stepped out of the vehicle, “welcome back. How are things?” Haize smiled as Lewis turned to her, revealing a set of perfectly maintained teeth, which only fit a perfectly maintained body. “Why, Mister Lewis, you don’t look well at all. Is…everything alright?”

4

“No, can you tell?” Lewis fidgeted, lit another cigarette, and promptly stomped it out. “I can’t think of another line of work where you can figure out how badly the project is going from an hour away. Thank God for the reservation, or we’d have the neighbors complaining.”

The parking lot was lit up by intense, almost stage-like lights. Of the facility itself, only two stories showed, built as it was into the side of the mountain itself. It was deceptive, for Mount Horn had at least forty layers; at least, that Lewis was aware of. “So yeah. Not so great. What’s it been for you? And is Alainte still in Characoi?”

5

“He just got back a few hours ago,” Haize replied, “apparently continuing to talk Freehold up about program successes.” The woman sighed. Doctor Rufus Alainte was the greatest proponent of developing the Letum Miles, the original developer of the commonly denoted “Krechen,” and the current head of Project Harbinger. That made Alainte, so far as Haize was concerned, a crazed lunatic.

The woman pushed personal thoughts from her mind, however, instead addressing the comment of Doctor Lewis. “The project continues as it has for months. The creatures become stronger everyday, smarter everyday, more capable everyday. A couple breached containment just after ya left – killed three people before being recaptured.”

Haize shivered. “The psychological effect is what is really noteworthy. We’ve had two more breakdowns since ya left and the effect sphere is spreading rapidly. Of course, I’m sure Alainte didn’t mention any of that to Freehold, which I’m guessing is why the great leader of Xiopothos just increased project funding.”

It was no secret that Haize disliked Geitz Freehold. It was no secret that Haize hated Project Harbinger, too, which made almost everyone at the facility awkward around the Secret Service liaison (at best). Custer Lewis remained in the tiny minority that didn’t mind the woman. H

6

“Er…where is he?”

The tech rotated the camera as Haize and Lewis crouched over the viewscreen. The cell the camera observed was painted solid white, with concrete walls and a heavily-reinforced titanium door. The concrete, too, was well-reinforced, after the first breeds had adapted to boring.

“How about if you…here, go to the hall camera. I think it covers that room.”

The screen flickered and changed, showing the cell from the outside. Sure enough, beneath the camera (and outside of its field of vision) was crouched a dark shape. It was a head smaller than a man, but every inch was blackened carapace and claw. The overall shape of the thing would have been remotely familiar to a biologist who studied insects but deeply familiar to no one. As the lights in the hall camera came on, it turned to face it with a leering, inhuman face with too many jaws. As soon as it did so, it ducked out of sight - and into the field of vision of the first camera.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” Said an older man with a short beard and a white lab coat. Rufus Alainte stepped into the viewing chamber, a pleased look on his face. “They started doing that last week. That’s how the last breakout happened. The shift techs sent someone in to investigate why it was gone, and…well. That is how it is lately. They are always testing us. Always improving. Like cat and mouse, no?”

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Lewis.” he added, almost as an afterthought. “And you, Ms. Haine.”

7

“The problem is that the creature is quickly becoming the cat, Rufus, and we’re quickly becoming the mice.” Haine straightened up, turning on the head scientist. “Out of curiosity, how many Xiopothans have died in this facility, now? These creatures have no strategic use whatsoever – they’ve outgrown the original mandate given to this project?. How many more deaths will it take before your government realizes this fact?”

There were few individuals in the facility willing to speak to Alainte in that manner. Even fewer dared call the man by first name. Chandra Haine got away with it for two reasons: she didn’t fall under the command of Alainte and she technically equaled Alainte in rank. In fact, up until a year before that day, Chandra Haine had remained amongst the closest colleagues of Rufus Alainte.

That was no longer the case, at all. “Oh, right,” Haine said before Alainte could reply, “pleasure to see ya too, Rufus.”

8

“No use?” Other men would have turned red and shouted at this point, but Alainte kept his composition. "Outgrown? Ma’am, specimen populations are being carefully controlled. And if you think of another weapon we can use to match that lunatic in the sky- " he pointed upward, as if Lord Khaz was painted on the ceiling - “Be my guest.”

“As for how many people have died…we do what we can to keep it down. You make it sound as if we were testing on humans.”

9

“The unintentional nature of the deaths is irrelevant,” Haine replied, “and its an outright lie to claim that the specimen populations are being controlled. No one here has any control over the specimens, no one at all, Rufus. These creatures are no weapon – a weapon is a tool that can be specifically directed – these creatures can barely be contained. The Smalinsk Incident ought to have demonstrated that point.”

“I’m sure the Secret Service has had breaches in projects in the past,” Alainte replied, “but didn’t necessarily end those projects.”

The statement hit Haine like a freight train, but, the woman didn’t let it show. Rufus Alainte had no way of knowing about the Romero Project, no way at all, and Alainte certainly couldn’t know of the Okeanos. She continued with the argument as such, knowing that she was right, quickly pushing the Okeanos from mind. After a couple decades in the Secret Service, Chandra Haize could do that easily.

Matthew Terrus did not have that ability. The former President of the Federated Alliance had every reason to sink into blissful retirement. After forty years of government service, Terrus had the money to afford a truly wondrous lifestyle, and remained beloved by much of the Free Pacifican population. Yet the man could not stop thinking of the Okeanos, could not stop remembering the families of the eleven dead Coast Guardsman, and could not push from memory the details provided by the Navy that had so contradicted the findings of the investigative team.

That was what brought Terrus to the basement of his manor at 2 AM on a Sunday, wearing formal attire despite not having left the house in 48 hours. The former President motioned for his bodyguards to remain at the staircase then continued through the poorly-lit subterranean floor into a laundry room. It was there that the group Terrus had contacted waited, accompanied by an uncomfortable looking National Protection Agency operative.

“You’ll not be needed here,” Terrus said to the man, “please wait outside.” The agent nodded after a moment and then left the room. Matthew Terrus then turned to the group. “Which of you is the man I spoke with on the phone?”

10

ÊspîöDöv Headquarters
Republican District of Dovakhia

To get to the ÊspîöDöv Headquarters, there was a special unmarked tramway that only ran at 5:30 AM in the morning and 7:30 PM in the evening. Every morning, the old biofuel clunker would putter out of a nondescript, mostly employee-occupied neighborhood in the capital district and wheeze its ways into the greenbelt area. The intelligence agency’s concrete campus was about an hour out into this suburban wilderness. The brutalist-style buildings recalled a modernist Ankor Wat that had been swallowed by the surrounding temperate jungle.

Jân Sôldâm was recruited by the agency in the early 2000s. He had originally been a National Militia police officer in charge of guarding prefectural offices in Kêrâl. However, the Department of the Interior and ÊspîöDöv took a keen interest in his knowledge of the Elfin languages, the result of a lonely childhood out on a commune.

Sôldhâm would be a key expert in the newly-formed Division 6, high-tech and paranormal technologies. In the wake of the Continental War, Dovakhan’s isolationist policies would have to end as its regional neighbors, in particular Kandarin and Packilvania, moved towards dizzying technological highs. Division 6 agents were to research the obvious as well as the lesser-known facets of these national powers.

Sôlhâm’s area of research for the last five years surrounded the mysterious happenings during the Continental War. His investigation gave him reason to believe there was something to the xenomorph sightings in Krechzianko several years back. There was further reason to believe that Xiopothos was intimately involved.

Characoi International Airport
Characoi, Xiopothos

The airplane touched down in Characoi at dusk. The traffic at the airport was very light, surely a product of the Kandarinese blockade. Fortunately Sôlhâm had a credible alias. The Dovakhanese Department of Diplomacy had granted him a diplomatic passport for a dud mission to nominally close the Dovakhanese Embassy in Characoi. Hopefully the Xiopothans, and the Kandarinese for that matter, would go along with that story.

Taxiing on the runway, Sôlhâm took off his sunglasses and studied him passport and profile briefing:

— Begin quote from ____

Name: Mn.* Âlân-Êrîk Mârtînâ Föêrvâs

Occupation: Career Foreign Service

Date of Birth: 5 May 1976

Place of Birth: Tschmuschaboumtopolis

Parents: Mârtîn-Frêdrîk Êrîkâ Örâm, 15/06/1945; Ârmând-Mârî Sölô Föêrvâs, 22/12/1942

Education: Mâxîmîlîânî Rîkêlî Third Form (Economic & Social Track), 1994; Republican Institute of Political Science, 1999 (Mâêstrât - International Development Economics)

Spouse/Children: —

— End quote

Poor guy, Sôlhâm new for a fact that his alias had died of leukemia three years previous. Then again, he was supposedly being resurrected for the safety and security of the Dovakhan people.

  • Mn. = Mâêstrân (Master’s Degree Recipient)
11

“Which of you is the man I spoke with on the phone?”

“Clearly I did,” Mathias mused for a moment, shrugging his shoulders, and massaging his thigh to relieve some of the stiffness which was rapidly developing. It was many years ago and still the thick jagged grotesque scar traveled across his neck…the telltale sign of an unfortunate encounter with sharp objects in his past.

And yet…eyes darted to him at this question, instantly profiling him as the man who would have organized this meeting. Au contraire he thought to himself, having stumbled across this meeting by chance. It was only by chance that he planned to visit Kandarin to establish further diplomatic ties when he learned that Kandarin had uncharacteristically blockaded another nation for no apparent reason. The mystery of the event prompted further investigation and now here he was, sitting in a room full of eager men with a plethora of motives.

He removed a small pad of paper and a pen, as if to take notes. Archaic as it was, in the midst of rushing to this meeting, he had forgotten his “black board” back in his room thus rendering him at the mercy of the first writing objects he could find, a simple pen and a beat up pad of paper.

Mathias Bortniansky reporting Mathias’s neat script-like handwriting sprawled across the sheet. It was short and simple and hopefully said enough. He somewhat shamefully handed it to the man who entered the room, feeling like a fool for forgetting his common means of communication…as if it were something so easy to forget.

12

Old Soldier and Airmen’s Home
Central Characoi

«You know, I’ve never told anyone about this…»

«It’s OK, grandpa»

«Well, have you ever been out west? Well, I was stationed there for five years at a military base near the foot of Mount Horn. Some weird *$@ started happening around the last year I was there. At first, we were ordered to wave through busloads of white coats, but then some of the men started disappearing. That was when I started seeing stuff…»

The old patient became visibly disturbed and a stern nurse appeared to wheel him away.

«So, when do I get my cut?» the university-aged kid asked.

«Here, thanks for your help» Sôldhâm said as he gave the kid a cashier’s check for five-hundred FPS credits.

«What newspaper did you say you were from, again?» the kid asked as he examined the check.

«Don’t spend that all in one place, now» Sôldhâm said as he further tipped his obscuring hat and got in his rented convertible to speed down the expressway.

The Grand Hotel Metropolis
Midtown Characoi

The twilight roared to its conclusion as the sun melted behind the gleaming skyscrapers. Lights flickered on in the huge city park that the hotel overlooked. Gleaming car lights illuminated the skyways crisscrossing the city like the white and red ribbons that tied together a Winter Solstice gift.

Drawing the curtains on this fantastic scene, Sôldhâm thumbed through his files on the hotel room bed. The people at the embassy had done an excellent job doing all the background research he needed. He’d found that last contact from their extensive files on the psych ward at the hospital and its veteran’s annex. Who knows if they’d had any suspicions or were just carrying out their simple bureaucratic duties.

In any case, his next course of action was clear…

Manzanar Mining Camp
Western Xiopothos

The dusty intercity bus creaked to a halt in front of the entrance to the camp, about an hour away from the alleged military installation at Mount Horn. The forlorn faces of seasonal miners marched through the gates past the dried-up remains of an endoreic lake. Behind the head office rose columns of white debris and smoke, the byproduct of dirty silica mining.

«So, where are you from?» asked one of the miners.

«Well, now it’s Pax territory» said Sôlhâm bluntly.

«Is that why you’re here?»

«Yeah»

«I’m not sure it’ll be any less weird here»

«Probably not»

«That Mount Horn really creeps me out»

«What about it?»

«They say that there were people living there before Xiopothos was created, that it was some sort of holy site. Well, whatever they were doing there before, sometimes you’ll see weird lights in the sky or hear weird noises…»

«It’s probably just the weather»

«I guess you’re right…»