Austrian

Chapter 1: Welcome to Mercy Island

The flight to Mercy Island had been somewhat less than one of his best in memory. One of the strangely shaped and eerily inhuman looking "Black Helicopters" of Arachnos had landed in the Klagenfurt Flughaf and the near completely silent pilot had allowed only one passenger to board his craft. Paul Steiner or, as some elements of the criminal and terrorist underworld had taken to calling him, "The Austrian", was the only person to approach the vehicle, as it sat menacingly on the landing strip. He had half-expected the twin-linked laser blasters mounted underneath the thing's equivalent of a cockpit to open fire and tear him apart as he advanced cautiously toward it, down the tarmac. But the blasters never opened fire or swivelled away from the default position. The pilot and his or her craft (Paul couldn't discern the gender of the armoured Arachnos operative and wasn't even entirely sure the pilot was human) were here to take him, and only him, to the woman who had called him two nights prior: Lady Return.

The flight from Europe to the Caribbean had been a rough one. It hadn't been the turbulence. Far from it, actually, as the craft seemed to glide smoothly across the stormy winds of the Atlantic with a speed and finesse unlike any other aircraft he had ridden on before. The roughness of his flight had come from, at first, the little things: the cloying stench of some oil or lubricant wafting up from the aft of the "helicopter", the silence of the pilot who he was now certain was not human. The lack of a weapon to clean or equipment to check over left his mind unoccupied and free to wander into uncertain territories and dark corners.

Why had he accepted this job anyway? It wasn't as though he desperately needed the money. His last job, stealing weapons and ammunition from the Chinese People's Liberation Army for Kasmiri rebels, had been very rewarding. He could have taken a few years off for a vacation and still have been able to retire as a wealthy man at the age of 40. But he didn't take that vacation while he was still a young man of barely 25 years. He didn't run off to some palace of pleasure and decadent self-indulgence in Las Vegas or Dubai. Instead, he accepted a mysterious job offer from a woman he had never met which would have him working at, quite literally, the ends of the Earth. He hadn't bothered to negotiate the terms of his employment nor demanded a formal business meeting with his prospective employer to discuss terms and gauge the seriousness and professionalism of the woman. And now he wasn't even sure his allies in Arachnos were human. He hadn't done much research on the criminal organization but he had a feeling that their true nature wouldn't be published on the Internet for all to see. They could be aliens, automated robots, or cyborgs, for all he knew. He had no idea.

The more he thought about the job, though, the more he mulled over the faxed contract and the telephone conversation with Lady Return, the more uneasy he became. So when the Black Helicopter landed in Mercy Island, he was relieved to be done with the ordeal. Finally, he could leave his thoughts behind and take comfort in the one thing he enjoyed the most: action. It was where he felt the most comfortable: in the middle of a fight or being rushed about preparing for one. He expected just that when he disembarked. He expected a hurried briefing from the woman who had called him in Graz, followed by a brisk kit issuance as soon as he stepped off of the landing platform. Then there would be some violence, a little killing, and then he'd be heading back home a richer man. Maybe, if this Lady Return was as attractive and charming as she sounded, he'd stay in the Rogue Isles for a week or two after completing the work she had for him. Maybe he'd ask her to accompany him and show him what the Isles had to offer in terms of entertainment and tourism. He didn't allow himself many opportunities to enjoy the company of a member of the opposite gender. But he felt that he was in dire need of some relaxation and the chance to dine and sunbathe and flirt with an actual "Lady", a noblewoman, was too great to pass up. That was, of course, assuming she was actually a noblewoman and not just someone who liked to play around with honourifics and titles.

Without a word, the Arachnos pilot rose from its seat, opened the exit hatch to the craft and gestured for Paul to leave. He snarled a thanks to the creature as he walked past and stepped out of the vehicle that had borne him across the Atlantic in what seemed to be record time.

He stopped in his tracks as he saw the woman standing before him. She was beautiful. Flawless, even. A black tunic trimmed with purple graced her lithe but voluptuous form and she stood with her hands held behind her back in an intriguingly accurate and precise imitation of good British military drill. He doubted she was former British military but then he had thought he'd detected a slight hint of a British accent in her voice. Or perhaps it was simply good breeding and the rudiments of quality education in the English language. He'd have to ask her, he supposed, as he glanced at her hair.

Her head was lowered in a gesture of respect and her white-blonde hair hung so that it obscured his view of her eyes. He supposed it was good that she had bowed her head to him slightly as she would have seen him staring had she not. He closed his partially gaping mouth and wondered to himself what eye colour such a beautiful woman would possess. Usually blue, for someone with such blonde hair. But there was a possiblity that her eyes were green too. Or Hazel, like his. He'd find out soon enough. She'd raise her head and, God willing, grace him with a gentle smile and he would learn what colour the Lady's eyes were.

But the head stayed lowered slightly as a soft but strong voice murmured to him from beneath the white-blonde hair. "Welcome, Mr. Steiner, to Mercy Island. Welcome... to the Apocalypse Crusade."

Then she rose her head, at last, and Paul Steiner, the proud and hardened veteran of dozens of military campaigns and witness to countless ugly and deplorable crimes against Humanity, shuddered, despite himself, as he looked upon Lady Return's face in all of its mired and desecrated glory.

Introduction

Paul Steiner had been through a lot in his life. In fact, he'd been through a little too damn much. He'd fought in just about every hot spot in the world and survived, at least in the physical sense. In Croatia, he'd seen the horrors of genocide first hand and killed his first enemy combatant as a Bundesgrenz infantryman with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In Transnistria, a breakaway republic of Moldova, he'd fought as a Greznsatzgruppe Special Operative in the middle of a slugfest between the warring armies of Romania, Russia, Moldova and Ukraine. In the chaos that ensued during the Kurdistan War, he had killed his first civilian in a fit of rage and earned himself a dishonourable discharge from the military he would have given his life for.

Bitter with how quickly his beloved European Union and homeland of Austria had turned on him, he became a mercenary- a gun for hire. He couldn't help himself from accepting the jobs no one else would take. There was something that drew him towards the morally reprehensible assignments that were offered to him. So he found himself helping the new ultranationalist government in Russia in their bloody attempts to squash the rebellions in Chechnya and Ingushetia, training commandos for the totalitarian dictatorship in North Korea, waging a guerilla war against American law enforcement agencies on behalf of several Peruvian drug cartels. The list went on and on. The weight of his crimes and his experiences on his shoulders could have broken his proverbial back. But they didn't. Instead, they made him into a harder man. A harsher man. Each murdered civilian, each tortured prisoner, erased more and more of his conscience while simultaneously making him even more brutally bitter towards the rest of humanity.

At the end of his latest job, helping to suppress riots in Egypt by firing into key sections of the mobs of demonstrators, he was relaxing in his modest home in Graz. He found himself wondering what job to do next. He was bored with his usual work. He had fought everywhere from the jungles of Peru to the winter steppes of Kazakhstan to the beaches of North Korea. He had been everywhere and done everything. There seemed to be no challenges left, no work that would interest him. Then he received the phone call and the offer of a lifetime.

The Etoile Islands, also known as the Rogue Islands, had become a separate State with their sovereignty recognized by the United Nations. This exotic locale was, apparently, in need of some kind of military presence. The sheer fact that he had never been to this "Arachnos" controlled country perked his interest. But that wasn't the only thing that interested him in the offer that was being made to him in the comfort of his own living room.

The woman that had called him to make the offer, Lady Return, had such a soothing voice. It was full of cold authority but, at the same time, a comforting, almost motherly, inflection. The promise of actually meeting the undoubtedly beautiful woman who owned such a perfect voice interested him even more than the location of this possible employment. She sounded so... professional. So cool, calm and collected. Just listening to her speak was better than a day spent at some over-charging spa. It seemed like a perfect job. A perfect team. He knew he wasn't a smart guy but he could fight pretty well. She seemed to know exactly what was going on but, in his mental picture of her, she wasn't exactly a well-trained and well-tested soldier, hardened by scars left from the fires of a dozen Hells and a few molotov cocktails. Beauty and the Beast. He signed the contract she faxed him without hesitating. There was something in the contract about the job being "open-ended" or something like that. He imagined that he was likely selling his soul away to this "Lady Return" and her Arachnos superiors. He couldn't care less. He had nothing else to do. And, besides, how bad could slavery to such a divine woman be?