Czardas
06-05-2007, 01:48
It transcended ordinary logic. For months, nay years afterward, people would be questioning how exactly it had happened. As one Southeast Asian volunteer worker had later claimed, “It was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen.”
Ultimately the explanation would be found, after months of research and reconstruction; but half of it was guesswork, and the culprits themselves certainly weren’t talking. Parts of it had naturally been visible from orbit, as a catastrophe of this nature would; but to those who knew better, it was not the means by which it had occurred, but rather the events that had led up to it. After all, there was only one possible cause of such a phenomenon...
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s return to the beginning.
~ Muesilania. Thirty-Eight Years Ago. ~
“Bloody thing,” Sergeant Devan Hines muttered, slamming a cartridge into his rifle. It was a weapon that had seen better days; back when bolt-action was new and the words Doom Corp brought funny looks. Hines raised his eyes to the shot-off sights by instinct, then cursed as he remembered they were no longer there, firing blindly into the night and the oncoming troops.
The fires glinted off windows, sending scarce light into the night sky and illuminating the contours of faces that came too close to the checkpoint, some of them mangled in horrible ways. One face had time to emit a terrible scream instants before Hines emptied his cartridge into it, wiping someone else’s blood from his face as he searched his pack for another cartridge, then threw the pack aside and fitted his bayonet to the gun.
It was a melée, and a particularly ugly one. Hines was fairly certain Muesilanian irregulars were attacking them; their orders were to hold the checkpoint at all costs, and now those costs were becoming perilously high as Hines’ squad followed his lead, fitting their bayonets and drawing sidearms to provide ballistic support. The sidearms were barely necessary or useful at such close ranges; the irregulars were launching coordinated attacks against the weak points, and troops thronged to defend them, a multilayered line of almost two hundred men stretched across the avenue.
A Private named Geryon Johnson was Hines’ immediate neighbour; shoulder to shoulder they stood, backs to the wall, facing off the communist hordes with steel and bullet. Hines saw them as crusaders standing like a rock against which the raging seas of evil dashed themselves in vain; representative of the Libertarian Colossus that bestrode the world, running global economies and maintaining the liberty of all. Back at home Hines would be almost certain to be a gun owner waving a Czardaian flag and maintaining land mines in his front yard.
Hines nudged Johnson. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked as his bayonet took a foolhardy Muesilanian through the throat; the majority had retreated to form a perimeter, attempting to take down the defenders with rifle and small arms fire, and repeatedly being confounded by smoke, the darkness, and the confusing whine of mortars and rockets.
Johnson was most decidedly not enjoying himself. Unlike Hines this was his first experience of melée combat; not to mention that his uniform, which he prided himself on keeping spotless and cleaned with an almost fanatical regularity, was completely spattered in blood—his own and that of others. And bullet wounds are generally quite painful; Johnson had racked up three so far. Nonetheless, he put on a brave smile for his commanding officer; “I’m doing my best, sir.”
“I’m disappointed in you, then,” Hines rebuked. “If that’s your best, you wouldn’t last five minutes in a real situation.”
Johnson was left to ponder on how unreal exactly this situation was. At that moment, a contingent of enemy troops broke off from the main line and charged into the wall, and the hand-to-hand fighting started anew.
There are no soldiers in war. No enemies. There is only the blood, and the noise, and the death and killing. And there is the comradeship. Your squad becomes your family; your rifle a lover; your home is wherever you rest for the night, or for eternity. This was scarcely a war. It was a minor battle in a small insurrection which had suddenly turned massive after Czardaian aircraft had been shot down and men killed; after a few rogue soldiers had corrupted the whole detachment. Hines was one of those rogue soldiers. As the melée raged Johnson thought of this again and again; the rogues were anarcho-capitalist fanatics, a people unwilling to fight for Czardas on ideological grounds; and he was one of them now, brought together by blood.
It might have been minutes, or hours, before the Muesilanians withdrew again; of two hundred men, the Czardaians were down to fifty, and possibly six hundred more bodies lay in the streets in a massive pool of blood, a barrier of flesh; and as dawn began to break the Muesilanian troops—still outnumbering their Czardaian counterparts—withdrew to the sides, wearied and bloodied, the smoke and fire still omnipresent, but the darkness lifting. And as the streaks of pink outlined the darkling sky, Johnson saw why they had withdrawn. Or rather, felt why.
It was at first only a dim rumbling, like a distant earthquake. But as it progressed it grew louder and yet louder; it seemed to come from all sides, but Johnson saw the first tank from in front of him. They could not yet be behind; for behind the checkpoint was the gateway into LaFleur’s quarter, an inaccessible and shelled-out area guarded by thousands of men and tanks and aircraft. They were massive, thrice the size of an ordinary tank, and even as they came into Johnson’s line of vision they stopped, and slowly—with a great creak—angled their guns.
And fired.
The first shot hit the center of the checkpoint, blowing it apart like a child smashing a doll. From the buildings on either side came RPG rounds with a great whoosh of air; the explosions barely dented the tank’s armour, and within moments the buildings themselves were crumbling to dust, the dead civilians buried inside, the soldiers dead. And as they approached the checkpoint the machineguns began to clatter, while guns and missiles leveled at the ground sent up explosions where the proximity mines had been set.
Johnson’s last view was from one side of the checkpoint wall—he couldn’t tell which; shrapnel had shattered his chest, and his uniform was torn. He lay in a pool of his blood and Sergeant Hines’ beside him, and that of many more; and he watched as the tanks rolled slowly across the broken checkpoint wall, towards the centre of the occupied sector. The gates had been breached, and now there was only a scarce bit of time left for the rogues to escape.
Checkpoint Nineteen had fallen; and with it, although no-one present could know at the time, fell Czardas.
* * *
It had been a doomed endeavour from the start; urban warfare was simply not the Czardaian Army’s strong suit. In fact, the Czardaian Army really had no strong suit. Nonetheless, to quell a Muesilanian insurrection the Army had deployed; and the subsequent disagreements over command policy—an otherwise minor incident—had led to the downfall of the Czardaian state. A certain Cpt. James LaFleur had deemed the Czardaian support of what he called “communists”—in reality democratic socialists—a travesty, and when his commanders refused to listen and maintained then-General Ogden’s orders, LaFleur had seceded.
Along with the soldiers under his control and all those loyal to him, LaFleur inspired anticommunists throughout Czardas. His foolhardy insurrection against his superiors and against the Scellian and Muesilanian authorities gained him admiration, even respect; like a folk-hero. Schools in nations like Kregaia and Doomingsland taught his story, and held him up as a justification for avoiding democracy. (“Even in purported democratic societies, men like LaFleur—who uphold what is right—are vilified and labeled criminals, simply because they disagree with the majority.”) Many of the anticommunists resided in LaFleur’s home town, the Catholic city of Dorandor; and facing a lukewarm reception elsewhere, many more began to move to that area, until they numbered near a hundred million.
But where was LaFleur himself? His face hideously scarred in his attempt to escape Muesilania, he always blamed Czardas for his failure; for allying with Scellia at all, which he viewed as imperialist and communist. LaFleur and his followers were responsible for much of the anti-Scellian sentiment that very nearly led to war. He fled to Tilooka, where he began to assemble, very quietly, money and influence. Later moving through places like Barkozy, MassPwnage, Doomingsland, and The Silver Sky, he made money through selling arms and uranium, through investing the significant capital he’d inherited from many generations of familial steel mining (close to $10 billion) in thriving and fast-developing global economies; within a quarter of a century he was one of the world’s wealthiest men, although almost nobody knew this.
LaFleur had been amassing his wealth and power for a reason, however, and it was a cause he would not neglect to fulfill; twenty years before the present day, he moved back to his ancestral mansion in Dorandor, where he became an influential and respected community leader. He also began slowly introducing Doomani Manus Dei operatives into the Dorandor area, who treated it as an impoverished country, setting up Catholic schools and “replacing” priests and ministers with more like-thinking clergy. All this was part of LaFleur’s final plan: to destroy Czardas once and for all...
Sixteen years ago, LaFleur had initiated what became known as the Czardaian Civil War, mainly by arming the Dorians with Doomani weapons. Armed and inflamed by anti-Czardaian rhetoric, they and other dissatisfied Czardaians gathered across the country to protest the Czardaian Government’s eight-month-long occupation of the Doomani port city of Arretium, which was costing billions per month at no real profit. Toppling the unstable Czardaian government was deceptively easy. Here the real clusterfuck began.
The entire country descended into chaos and warfare. While LaFleur’s Dorium declared independence and began marching its mighty—or at least enthusiastic—armies across the plains of southern Czardas, Socialist and Loyalist forces tangled with a front called the Meritocracy in Czarna and Palma, while other groups battled for control of strategic areas. Cities burned and millions died; but LaFleur quickly realised that Czardas was itself not dead.
It had, however, radically changed. Much of the West was destroyed; small towns and villages had been razed, and only larger cities survived. The once-beautiful environment had turned ugly, choked with filth and debris; only in the eastern mountains, covering fully half the country, did Czardas still look the same. The natives of the East suddenly found themselves without a country, but aside from that little had changed there. Czardas withdrew into gigantic walled city-states, each packing in hundreds of millions of people. The defence systems were equally gigantic, naturally. Ultimately the city-states, formerly perpetually warring, even formed a loose alliance; this was four years after the civil war.
LaFleur, however, had a mission. In his studies at university, years ago, he’d majored in the social sciences; it was said that no-one in Czardas knew how better to exert control. Thus, he’d planned his actions carefully: introducing religion into Dorium in order to produce a new generation of loyal fanatics to instigate a war, as well as attracting Doomani investors. Both of these were of paramount importance; the war might plunge Czardas into anarchy or destroy it utterly, but within a few generations the Dorii could rebel against the feudalistic theocratic state their forebears had embraced, causing the fall of the state. Here the profit factor came in; foreign investors would be quite unwilling to let a profitable market such as Dorium simply die. LaFleur had also charted a path for Czardas proper; a mess such as the Civil War would make the Sovereign League highly resistant to interference in it, sparking anti-SL sentiment and possibly leading to a withdrawal from the alliance. In that case, it seemed almost inevitable that someday in the future, Czardas would align itself—in fact if not in word—with the other major bloc, consisting of GASN, NATO, and Gholgoth, and to which both the SL and many of the investors in Czardaian and Dorian companies were diametrically opposed.
It was a picture that did not form itself in his brain with perfect clarity; and indeed along each step of the way LaFleur had had no idea of its ultimate outcome, or a faint one at best. But now that he had reached his seventieth year, the future path was beginning to light itself in his head. LaFleur barely needed to do anything anymore; the most probable future had been set in motion, and it would lead to the destruction of Czardas. In truth, LaFleur was no longer certain why he was so intent on the destruction of Czardas; perhaps it was simply to make his own mark on the political landscape of the present and future.
All that remained to him was one simple task, and one that could be accomplished in ten minutes at a computer. James LaFleur was going to write a will.
* * *
~ Dorandor, Czardas. Shortly before present day ~
It was a lonely position, and lonelier now that everyone he had known and worked with was dead. Nonetheless, there was something to be said for being a Cardinal. Education and terrorism were two of the world’s deadliest weapons, far more destructive and influential than any nuclear bomb or battle-dreadnought. In that respect Marinus S’anjin, sometimes known as “Doombringer”, was satisfied with his life; it had nearly run its course, although looking at him one might not know that. S’anjin’s eyes were still bright and twinkled with the fire of youth; the lines of his face were still strong and gaunt, like an anchor; even his hair was only just beginning to turn to iron.
The same could not be said for his position. Manus Dei was the only thing holding Dorium together at this point; with the Allied Czardaian Union threatening war and a third of the population unemployed, homeless, or both, faith in the Catholic Church was faltering. Daily did acolytes bring reports of some new agitator delivering inflammatory and anti-Catholic remarks from a soapbox, or worse; meanwhile the bulk of the Dorii Army had been deployed north towards the border with the ACU, and was suffering prohibitively heavy casualties to boot.
In short, if S’anjin did nothing, Dorium would be torn apart from within and without. Yet in the eyes of all of the Archbishops, Priests, Chaplains, and the like that attended upon the Cardinal, nothing was exactly what he did. The Warclergy were almost out of ammunition; the schools and homes were falling apart; running water was becoming regarded as a luxury; yet S’anjin did nothing. It was almost—the acolytes murmured among themselves heretically—as though he wanted Dorium to be destroyed.
Of course, that was exactly what he planned. S’anjin, after all, had read LaFleur’s will; he was its executor, the last one left to determine Dorium’s fate. And the fate of Dorium had been almost predestinated from the start. It was not intended to last. In fact, its mock “republic” had been only a political ploy to weaken Czardas into the state it was now, and ripen it for destruction. S’anjin knew well that many of the people of Dorium, indeed of Czardas, had come to see LaFleur as a spiritual leader of some kind; and now that he was laid to rest in a small cemetery in Jerusalem, it was only fitting that they hear his last message to the world.
As S’anjin roused himself from the viewscreens bringing real-time updates of the bloody combat on the front, an acolyte detached himself from his post and tentatively approached the Cardinal. “Eminence, what is your desire?”
S’anjin smiled grimly. “To be young again, so I might watch today’s events and those of the next fifty years in peace. —But, in the realm of the possible, I would like to order a special broadcast, over Czardaian as well as international TV.”
“I will see to it, Eminence.” The acolyte disappeared. For a moment S’anjin was left in peace; he looked out through the dusty room, a single ray of sunlight piercing it from on high; a ray that vanished as overhead came in clouds to cover the sun with grey monotony. The viewscreens in the room flickered with more information with which to batter his tired senses; below them was the room in which his audience might sit, in several rows of chairs separated by an aisle of which the center was painted like a cross. There were no stained-glass windows to lend the room a baroque air; indeed, were it not for the darkness and the tall pillars erected here and there, and the symbols of Manus Dei, one might mistake it for a modern corporate headquarters.
The acolyte reappeared. S’anjin observed that he was young and naïve; as were almost all followers of the sect. It was almost a pity that he would have to die in the coming days and weeks. “Eminence, the broadcast will be ready to begin at your convenience.”
“Thank you. Have it connected to my computer screen.”
“It will be done, Eminence.”
S’anjin opened LaFleur’s Will, section nine.
Ten minutes later, the same message began to appear everywhere, in stark white serif on a black background, each word like the toll of a solemn bell, the herald of death. It was written like a church document, but it was not; and to the ignorant mobs of Dorium, of Doomanum, of a dozen other countries, it could be seen as a threat from beyond the grave, a sign of divine intervention.
It reads:
I, James LaFleur, lately high executor of the Holy Imperial Dorian Republic, have observed that the lands of Czardas and Dorium are falling into a state of anarchy and disarray; and more so, that an attack on the Dorian people, and thus on Christianity itself, is threatened.
Therefore, I call forth God’s vengeance upon this filthy land. I call upon the Lord to destroy the subhuman Czardaian scum, and the land they occupy. He shall unleash nine plagues upon Czardas.
The waters shall turn to blood; the streets shall be overrun by vermin. Boils shall afflict the people of the land; diseases shall kill their cattle. Wild beasts shall roam the land, and locusts shall follow in their wake, devouring everything in their path. There shall be fire, and pillars of smoke. Finally, all of the first-born spawn of Czardas shall be slain unmercifully.
Once all these omens are fulfilled, He shall strike with lightning and flames from the sky, and cleanse the land of Czardas from all that occupies it; He shall remove the taint of evil from its shores. For those nonbelievers that reside within the realm of Czardas, now is your chance to convert and possibly hope to achieve salvation in the afterlife; but no mercy shall be shown to you here on earth. Czardas’s fate is sealed.
“Rather dramatic, isn’t it?” S’anjin said, chuckling. Then he realised there was no-one for him to speak to. All the Czardaian authorities of his day were gone. LaFleur was dead; Henrik Ogden dead; Ezekiel Shaestri in retirement in Velkya; Adrian Longleaf recovering from a stroke; Alma Finlay only God knows where. S’anjin remembered vaguely that Finlay was one of the few others who had studied along the same lines as LaFleur, and thus it was likely she was out of the country by now; S’anjin half-smiled, and began making arrangements for a private flight to Doomingsland. What was left for Manus Dei to do, it could do without him.
* * *
Naturally, one wouldn’t take such an announcement seriously. LaFleur could have been delusional in his last days; no-one knew what exactly he’d been thinking at the time. It could have been an attempt to scare the Czardaians from attacking Dorium, but if it was, it failed. Internationally it was dismissed and parodied as the work of a maniac, or perhaps (in countries like Doomingsland and Kregaia) seen as a just statement of retribution for a nation and people that had long “had it coming”.
It’s fair to say that almost everyone was surprised when it started coming true. At first it was only taps and bathtub faucets that yielded the thick red fluid; within a couple of weeks the rivers were all tinged with pink, and anyone drinking from water that hadn’t been filtered a few dozen times over tended to end up at least violently ill. Shortly thereafter a mysterious and sudden increase in the rat and mouse population was recorded, and rodent-borne diseases became more and more common.
LaFleur had not mentioned that the plagues were cumulative; each one continued for the duration that the others were brought in. It was about now that reports and communications from Czardas became more and more spotty, and more and more hysterical. People broke out in boils; livestock and domesticated animals died of mysterious illnesses, perhaps borne by the hordes of rats that rummaged through the streets in broad daylight. Matters became stranger and stranger by the moment, as one of the few instances of live video footage to emerge from Czardas showed packs of wolves racing down city streets and running down passers-by, literally tearing them apart; meanwhile, newspapers and other media reported attacks by bears, coyotes, and wild pigs throughout the nation. Communications with outlying cities and the like simply ceased, the last frenzied reports being of the sky darkening with creatures that ate through houses, crops, even people.
God was apparently determined to keep through with his promise to the bitter end. Vast fires engulfed forests and towns, burning through everything in their path; pillars of smoke were even photographed rising from diverse locations up and down the coast; finally, and most frighteningly, were the reports of hundreds of millions of children simply keeling over and dying en masse, falling ill and passing away within half an hour of each other.
And then... nothing.
An eerie silence on all communications. Satellites reported some kind of explosion, but with communications over Czardas jammed (by whom?) and dust and smoke in the atmosphere blocking much detection, it was unclear to what extent this explosion had been responsible for the comms silence or whether it had even affected anything.
Throughout this incident, the governments of the world had been strangely quiet on Czardas. Most likely they thought the reports were a hoax, or pro-LaFleur propaganda. Perhaps they dismissed at least some of the events as coincidences. After all, following that broadcast everyone would be looking for Nine Deadly Plagues, so they’d find them anywhere. The later reports were also so fractured and hysterical that their veracity could scarcely be trusted. It’s also well documented that most of the world’s leaders could care less about Czardas. But now that all communications had ceased, they may have been starting to wonder what was up.
At any rate, it was only now—a week after the start of radio silence—that the first group of volunteers had been mustered to travel to Czardas and find out what was wrong. Reluctantly, several intelligence groups had revealed that they had sent men to Czardas before the cutoff; men that had never been heard from again. But this only fueled the desire of the volunteer workers. It is one planeful that arrives today; and it shall be satisfactorily surprised.
* * *
~ Czardas. Present Day ~
With a low roar the aeroplane descends through the clouds—some of them natural, some of them made up of smoke and dust thrown up from the land below. Apprehension and tension run high, filling and stifling the air like a grim hand; as yet they can see nothing except the grey sea, dashing itself against the Czardaian coast which is as grey as the sea itself. From a thousand metres up, the volunteers can see nothing through a thick mist that penetrates everything; but there are no buildings here, no harbours, no signs of development; which is also a bad sign.
The plane rolls to a halt on a relatively level plain, and the volunteers stare out into the desolate landscape. They can barely see ten metres from the plane, so thick is the mist; but what they can see consists of a fine pulverized dust covering everything as far as the eye can see, until it meets the sea a short distance beyond; a sea that can only be heard in the peculiar silence.
As they don NBC suits, a Czardaian expatriate guide says, “This was the city of Mariosz; formerly home to fifty-two million citizens and history and culture dating back five thousand years.”
The men and women file out of the aeroplane. Chilling winds from the sea sweep across the land; there is almost no radiation in the atmosphere, and no crater. As they wander across the blasted and ruined land, they come upon some relics of the buried past; the twisted and charred foundations of buildings, a few tree stumps, even some bits of asphalt and gravel mixed with the pulverized dirt. No bodies. Perhaps it’s just as well. This may well be what it looks like when the hand of God is raised in anger against a nation...
It is the first volunteer team to land in Czardas, and it’s like landing on Mars: there are no signs of life, few geographical formations, but here and there subtle clues to the existence (and comparatively recent existence, at that) of life past. Subsequent teams will report, among other things, that the great Zaïr River is almost completely dry; the findings of massive coal deposits where forests and cities were torched; in the mountains the inhabitants had soon degenerated into a primitive state, killing and stealing what they needed; few of them remembered, or cared about, Czardas. The volunteer work continued for almost a year before the governments of neighbouring countries designated Czardas a “special research zone” and kicked out the volunteers, cynically confiscating the few surviving naval ships and aircraft that had survived in the process.
Nonetheless, the question remained. Nations don’t simply vanish like that; and Czardas had very little nuclear weaponry with which it could have wrought such damage upon itself by accident. Besides, the soil was not irradiated, and there were only a few craters embroidering the landscape. While the “plagues” had been undoubtedly highly destructive to the people, they were not apparently so destructive to the land; unless such constructs as “fire” and “pillars of smoke” were universally applied. Many, also, were of scientific bent and thus refused to accept that what was frequently termed “a big invisible dude in the sky” had wreaked such destruction.
The accepted theory was that, in the rising chaos, a faction had obtained deadly weaponry and used it indiscriminately, setting off a nuclear civil war which destroyed the entire nation. No craters were found because the entire country was one big crater, and no radiation because no fission-type warheads were used. However, this theory was not accepted in the scientific community, as it contradicted the evidence; it was mainly used to placate the masses. Among scientists, it ultimately fell to a small group to produce the closest any theory could come to the correct one, given the knowledge at the time.
This group, operating out of Hamptonshire and the Freethinker Commonwealth, postulated that the “plagues” were a preplanned set of orders to a detachment of Doomani soldiers (either regulars or Manus Dei milites) attached to Dorium. Each plague corresponded to a tactic either known to be in use by Doomanum, or widely suspected to be in use by Doomanum although such use had yet to be actually proven. Following the broadcast, the think tank claimed that these troops had introduced toxins into the groundwater, released hordes of vermin into major cities, and the like. The paper noted that the locusts could correspond to the so-called Akavarian locust, a bug said to be genetically engineered in New Akavar’s barren tundra in such a way that its saliva contains powerful enzymes and acids that can break down virtually anything. As for the wild beasts, they could have been imported from and trained in Urbis Doomanum gladiator tournaments.
The various diseases that struck Czardaians could be biological weapons, as could the “slaying of the first-born” (which could be a bioweapon tailored to attack childrens’ immune systems). Fire and pillars of smoke could be the results of napalm and low-yield nuclear weapons, respectively. Nonetheless, all this was not intended to destroy Czardas, claimed the think tank; instead, that was only an unintended result. Delving into records close to fifteen years old, they noted that Yurkan, Kregaian, Parthian, Shenyangi, and other ships had reported encountering some type of missile-defence system along the Czardaian coast. However, the volunteer teams had discovered no evidence that any such systems had existed; no launchers, no control centres.
The research paper postulated that as a result of the plagues, the control centres were rendered inoperable and self-destructed; perhaps the missile defence system had been programmed to release its missile complement against the hostile targets in that event. Crimsdale Articas Doomanum authorities had estimated the number of missile launchers to be in the neighbourhood of two hundred thousand up and down the coast; the group theorized that this could mean upwards of four million missiles, noting that almost $250 billion a year had gone unaccounted for from Czardaian defence budgets, and suggesting that it had gone to upkeep of this system.
Thus, when launchers from throughout Czardas hit the control centres with nuclear weapons, or FAEs, or any number of other weapons, the missiles had targeted the areas from which those weapons were launched, and fired everything available at them. Perhaps collateral damage had thrown various missiles off course, where they hit other areas of the nation; it was possible that once a certain target was destroyed, they moved on to destroy its surrounding areas, and so until all missiles were expended. More likely was that a malfunction had caused some of the missiles to explode while loading, setting off a chain reaction that ended up destroying all of the missile launchers and causing parts of the coast to fall into the sea.
The theory was not widely regarded. There was no direct evidence that Czardas ever had maintained such a missile system; even if it had, there was no evidence that it would operate in precisely the way they had suggested. Most of the biological and physical weapons the tank had attributed to the Doomani or their allies had never been employed anywhere else, and there was no direct evidence for their existence either. It was, in fact, all conjecture and circumstantial evidence; and virtually any government official would not fail to reassure you of that fact.
There were perhaps four or five people still living who did indeed know that CAMERA had once existed, and of them only one knew its full scope and understood why it had caused the destruction it had. Even that one person was never to know the whole truth. Then again, no-one would ever know the whole truth; and within a few months, or a year, the matter would be forgotten entirely.
ooc If you haven’t guessed already, I’m leaving NS. On what is, ironically, my third anniversary here. (Czardas wasn't my first nation, but meh.)
1) Nobody wubs me, boohoohooo... errr, I mean, I don’t have much in common with the playerbase.
2) Real life is more important, etc. etc.
3) I anyway did not have much impetus for RP or anything like that, so consider this my final contribution.
The Southeast Asias of the world may keenly observe that many of my puppets are staying behind. This is purposeful; I’ve given most of them away to people who will (hopefully) continue to log in to them. Czardas however, and all nations that share its name, will die a symbolic death in about 28 days. Also, please don’t repeat the “No-one ever leaves NS...” quote. I find it very tiresome. /ooc
Ultimately the explanation would be found, after months of research and reconstruction; but half of it was guesswork, and the culprits themselves certainly weren’t talking. Parts of it had naturally been visible from orbit, as a catastrophe of this nature would; but to those who knew better, it was not the means by which it had occurred, but rather the events that had led up to it. After all, there was only one possible cause of such a phenomenon...
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s return to the beginning.
~ Muesilania. Thirty-Eight Years Ago. ~
“Bloody thing,” Sergeant Devan Hines muttered, slamming a cartridge into his rifle. It was a weapon that had seen better days; back when bolt-action was new and the words Doom Corp brought funny looks. Hines raised his eyes to the shot-off sights by instinct, then cursed as he remembered they were no longer there, firing blindly into the night and the oncoming troops.
The fires glinted off windows, sending scarce light into the night sky and illuminating the contours of faces that came too close to the checkpoint, some of them mangled in horrible ways. One face had time to emit a terrible scream instants before Hines emptied his cartridge into it, wiping someone else’s blood from his face as he searched his pack for another cartridge, then threw the pack aside and fitted his bayonet to the gun.
It was a melée, and a particularly ugly one. Hines was fairly certain Muesilanian irregulars were attacking them; their orders were to hold the checkpoint at all costs, and now those costs were becoming perilously high as Hines’ squad followed his lead, fitting their bayonets and drawing sidearms to provide ballistic support. The sidearms were barely necessary or useful at such close ranges; the irregulars were launching coordinated attacks against the weak points, and troops thronged to defend them, a multilayered line of almost two hundred men stretched across the avenue.
A Private named Geryon Johnson was Hines’ immediate neighbour; shoulder to shoulder they stood, backs to the wall, facing off the communist hordes with steel and bullet. Hines saw them as crusaders standing like a rock against which the raging seas of evil dashed themselves in vain; representative of the Libertarian Colossus that bestrode the world, running global economies and maintaining the liberty of all. Back at home Hines would be almost certain to be a gun owner waving a Czardaian flag and maintaining land mines in his front yard.
Hines nudged Johnson. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked as his bayonet took a foolhardy Muesilanian through the throat; the majority had retreated to form a perimeter, attempting to take down the defenders with rifle and small arms fire, and repeatedly being confounded by smoke, the darkness, and the confusing whine of mortars and rockets.
Johnson was most decidedly not enjoying himself. Unlike Hines this was his first experience of melée combat; not to mention that his uniform, which he prided himself on keeping spotless and cleaned with an almost fanatical regularity, was completely spattered in blood—his own and that of others. And bullet wounds are generally quite painful; Johnson had racked up three so far. Nonetheless, he put on a brave smile for his commanding officer; “I’m doing my best, sir.”
“I’m disappointed in you, then,” Hines rebuked. “If that’s your best, you wouldn’t last five minutes in a real situation.”
Johnson was left to ponder on how unreal exactly this situation was. At that moment, a contingent of enemy troops broke off from the main line and charged into the wall, and the hand-to-hand fighting started anew.
There are no soldiers in war. No enemies. There is only the blood, and the noise, and the death and killing. And there is the comradeship. Your squad becomes your family; your rifle a lover; your home is wherever you rest for the night, or for eternity. This was scarcely a war. It was a minor battle in a small insurrection which had suddenly turned massive after Czardaian aircraft had been shot down and men killed; after a few rogue soldiers had corrupted the whole detachment. Hines was one of those rogue soldiers. As the melée raged Johnson thought of this again and again; the rogues were anarcho-capitalist fanatics, a people unwilling to fight for Czardas on ideological grounds; and he was one of them now, brought together by blood.
It might have been minutes, or hours, before the Muesilanians withdrew again; of two hundred men, the Czardaians were down to fifty, and possibly six hundred more bodies lay in the streets in a massive pool of blood, a barrier of flesh; and as dawn began to break the Muesilanian troops—still outnumbering their Czardaian counterparts—withdrew to the sides, wearied and bloodied, the smoke and fire still omnipresent, but the darkness lifting. And as the streaks of pink outlined the darkling sky, Johnson saw why they had withdrawn. Or rather, felt why.
It was at first only a dim rumbling, like a distant earthquake. But as it progressed it grew louder and yet louder; it seemed to come from all sides, but Johnson saw the first tank from in front of him. They could not yet be behind; for behind the checkpoint was the gateway into LaFleur’s quarter, an inaccessible and shelled-out area guarded by thousands of men and tanks and aircraft. They were massive, thrice the size of an ordinary tank, and even as they came into Johnson’s line of vision they stopped, and slowly—with a great creak—angled their guns.
And fired.
The first shot hit the center of the checkpoint, blowing it apart like a child smashing a doll. From the buildings on either side came RPG rounds with a great whoosh of air; the explosions barely dented the tank’s armour, and within moments the buildings themselves were crumbling to dust, the dead civilians buried inside, the soldiers dead. And as they approached the checkpoint the machineguns began to clatter, while guns and missiles leveled at the ground sent up explosions where the proximity mines had been set.
Johnson’s last view was from one side of the checkpoint wall—he couldn’t tell which; shrapnel had shattered his chest, and his uniform was torn. He lay in a pool of his blood and Sergeant Hines’ beside him, and that of many more; and he watched as the tanks rolled slowly across the broken checkpoint wall, towards the centre of the occupied sector. The gates had been breached, and now there was only a scarce bit of time left for the rogues to escape.
Checkpoint Nineteen had fallen; and with it, although no-one present could know at the time, fell Czardas.
* * *
It had been a doomed endeavour from the start; urban warfare was simply not the Czardaian Army’s strong suit. In fact, the Czardaian Army really had no strong suit. Nonetheless, to quell a Muesilanian insurrection the Army had deployed; and the subsequent disagreements over command policy—an otherwise minor incident—had led to the downfall of the Czardaian state. A certain Cpt. James LaFleur had deemed the Czardaian support of what he called “communists”—in reality democratic socialists—a travesty, and when his commanders refused to listen and maintained then-General Ogden’s orders, LaFleur had seceded.
Along with the soldiers under his control and all those loyal to him, LaFleur inspired anticommunists throughout Czardas. His foolhardy insurrection against his superiors and against the Scellian and Muesilanian authorities gained him admiration, even respect; like a folk-hero. Schools in nations like Kregaia and Doomingsland taught his story, and held him up as a justification for avoiding democracy. (“Even in purported democratic societies, men like LaFleur—who uphold what is right—are vilified and labeled criminals, simply because they disagree with the majority.”) Many of the anticommunists resided in LaFleur’s home town, the Catholic city of Dorandor; and facing a lukewarm reception elsewhere, many more began to move to that area, until they numbered near a hundred million.
But where was LaFleur himself? His face hideously scarred in his attempt to escape Muesilania, he always blamed Czardas for his failure; for allying with Scellia at all, which he viewed as imperialist and communist. LaFleur and his followers were responsible for much of the anti-Scellian sentiment that very nearly led to war. He fled to Tilooka, where he began to assemble, very quietly, money and influence. Later moving through places like Barkozy, MassPwnage, Doomingsland, and The Silver Sky, he made money through selling arms and uranium, through investing the significant capital he’d inherited from many generations of familial steel mining (close to $10 billion) in thriving and fast-developing global economies; within a quarter of a century he was one of the world’s wealthiest men, although almost nobody knew this.
LaFleur had been amassing his wealth and power for a reason, however, and it was a cause he would not neglect to fulfill; twenty years before the present day, he moved back to his ancestral mansion in Dorandor, where he became an influential and respected community leader. He also began slowly introducing Doomani Manus Dei operatives into the Dorandor area, who treated it as an impoverished country, setting up Catholic schools and “replacing” priests and ministers with more like-thinking clergy. All this was part of LaFleur’s final plan: to destroy Czardas once and for all...
Sixteen years ago, LaFleur had initiated what became known as the Czardaian Civil War, mainly by arming the Dorians with Doomani weapons. Armed and inflamed by anti-Czardaian rhetoric, they and other dissatisfied Czardaians gathered across the country to protest the Czardaian Government’s eight-month-long occupation of the Doomani port city of Arretium, which was costing billions per month at no real profit. Toppling the unstable Czardaian government was deceptively easy. Here the real clusterfuck began.
The entire country descended into chaos and warfare. While LaFleur’s Dorium declared independence and began marching its mighty—or at least enthusiastic—armies across the plains of southern Czardas, Socialist and Loyalist forces tangled with a front called the Meritocracy in Czarna and Palma, while other groups battled for control of strategic areas. Cities burned and millions died; but LaFleur quickly realised that Czardas was itself not dead.
It had, however, radically changed. Much of the West was destroyed; small towns and villages had been razed, and only larger cities survived. The once-beautiful environment had turned ugly, choked with filth and debris; only in the eastern mountains, covering fully half the country, did Czardas still look the same. The natives of the East suddenly found themselves without a country, but aside from that little had changed there. Czardas withdrew into gigantic walled city-states, each packing in hundreds of millions of people. The defence systems were equally gigantic, naturally. Ultimately the city-states, formerly perpetually warring, even formed a loose alliance; this was four years after the civil war.
LaFleur, however, had a mission. In his studies at university, years ago, he’d majored in the social sciences; it was said that no-one in Czardas knew how better to exert control. Thus, he’d planned his actions carefully: introducing religion into Dorium in order to produce a new generation of loyal fanatics to instigate a war, as well as attracting Doomani investors. Both of these were of paramount importance; the war might plunge Czardas into anarchy or destroy it utterly, but within a few generations the Dorii could rebel against the feudalistic theocratic state their forebears had embraced, causing the fall of the state. Here the profit factor came in; foreign investors would be quite unwilling to let a profitable market such as Dorium simply die. LaFleur had also charted a path for Czardas proper; a mess such as the Civil War would make the Sovereign League highly resistant to interference in it, sparking anti-SL sentiment and possibly leading to a withdrawal from the alliance. In that case, it seemed almost inevitable that someday in the future, Czardas would align itself—in fact if not in word—with the other major bloc, consisting of GASN, NATO, and Gholgoth, and to which both the SL and many of the investors in Czardaian and Dorian companies were diametrically opposed.
It was a picture that did not form itself in his brain with perfect clarity; and indeed along each step of the way LaFleur had had no idea of its ultimate outcome, or a faint one at best. But now that he had reached his seventieth year, the future path was beginning to light itself in his head. LaFleur barely needed to do anything anymore; the most probable future had been set in motion, and it would lead to the destruction of Czardas. In truth, LaFleur was no longer certain why he was so intent on the destruction of Czardas; perhaps it was simply to make his own mark on the political landscape of the present and future.
All that remained to him was one simple task, and one that could be accomplished in ten minutes at a computer. James LaFleur was going to write a will.
* * *
~ Dorandor, Czardas. Shortly before present day ~
It was a lonely position, and lonelier now that everyone he had known and worked with was dead. Nonetheless, there was something to be said for being a Cardinal. Education and terrorism were two of the world’s deadliest weapons, far more destructive and influential than any nuclear bomb or battle-dreadnought. In that respect Marinus S’anjin, sometimes known as “Doombringer”, was satisfied with his life; it had nearly run its course, although looking at him one might not know that. S’anjin’s eyes were still bright and twinkled with the fire of youth; the lines of his face were still strong and gaunt, like an anchor; even his hair was only just beginning to turn to iron.
The same could not be said for his position. Manus Dei was the only thing holding Dorium together at this point; with the Allied Czardaian Union threatening war and a third of the population unemployed, homeless, or both, faith in the Catholic Church was faltering. Daily did acolytes bring reports of some new agitator delivering inflammatory and anti-Catholic remarks from a soapbox, or worse; meanwhile the bulk of the Dorii Army had been deployed north towards the border with the ACU, and was suffering prohibitively heavy casualties to boot.
In short, if S’anjin did nothing, Dorium would be torn apart from within and without. Yet in the eyes of all of the Archbishops, Priests, Chaplains, and the like that attended upon the Cardinal, nothing was exactly what he did. The Warclergy were almost out of ammunition; the schools and homes were falling apart; running water was becoming regarded as a luxury; yet S’anjin did nothing. It was almost—the acolytes murmured among themselves heretically—as though he wanted Dorium to be destroyed.
Of course, that was exactly what he planned. S’anjin, after all, had read LaFleur’s will; he was its executor, the last one left to determine Dorium’s fate. And the fate of Dorium had been almost predestinated from the start. It was not intended to last. In fact, its mock “republic” had been only a political ploy to weaken Czardas into the state it was now, and ripen it for destruction. S’anjin knew well that many of the people of Dorium, indeed of Czardas, had come to see LaFleur as a spiritual leader of some kind; and now that he was laid to rest in a small cemetery in Jerusalem, it was only fitting that they hear his last message to the world.
As S’anjin roused himself from the viewscreens bringing real-time updates of the bloody combat on the front, an acolyte detached himself from his post and tentatively approached the Cardinal. “Eminence, what is your desire?”
S’anjin smiled grimly. “To be young again, so I might watch today’s events and those of the next fifty years in peace. —But, in the realm of the possible, I would like to order a special broadcast, over Czardaian as well as international TV.”
“I will see to it, Eminence.” The acolyte disappeared. For a moment S’anjin was left in peace; he looked out through the dusty room, a single ray of sunlight piercing it from on high; a ray that vanished as overhead came in clouds to cover the sun with grey monotony. The viewscreens in the room flickered with more information with which to batter his tired senses; below them was the room in which his audience might sit, in several rows of chairs separated by an aisle of which the center was painted like a cross. There were no stained-glass windows to lend the room a baroque air; indeed, were it not for the darkness and the tall pillars erected here and there, and the symbols of Manus Dei, one might mistake it for a modern corporate headquarters.
The acolyte reappeared. S’anjin observed that he was young and naïve; as were almost all followers of the sect. It was almost a pity that he would have to die in the coming days and weeks. “Eminence, the broadcast will be ready to begin at your convenience.”
“Thank you. Have it connected to my computer screen.”
“It will be done, Eminence.”
S’anjin opened LaFleur’s Will, section nine.
Ten minutes later, the same message began to appear everywhere, in stark white serif on a black background, each word like the toll of a solemn bell, the herald of death. It was written like a church document, but it was not; and to the ignorant mobs of Dorium, of Doomanum, of a dozen other countries, it could be seen as a threat from beyond the grave, a sign of divine intervention.
It reads:
I, James LaFleur, lately high executor of the Holy Imperial Dorian Republic, have observed that the lands of Czardas and Dorium are falling into a state of anarchy and disarray; and more so, that an attack on the Dorian people, and thus on Christianity itself, is threatened.
Therefore, I call forth God’s vengeance upon this filthy land. I call upon the Lord to destroy the subhuman Czardaian scum, and the land they occupy. He shall unleash nine plagues upon Czardas.
The waters shall turn to blood; the streets shall be overrun by vermin. Boils shall afflict the people of the land; diseases shall kill their cattle. Wild beasts shall roam the land, and locusts shall follow in their wake, devouring everything in their path. There shall be fire, and pillars of smoke. Finally, all of the first-born spawn of Czardas shall be slain unmercifully.
Once all these omens are fulfilled, He shall strike with lightning and flames from the sky, and cleanse the land of Czardas from all that occupies it; He shall remove the taint of evil from its shores. For those nonbelievers that reside within the realm of Czardas, now is your chance to convert and possibly hope to achieve salvation in the afterlife; but no mercy shall be shown to you here on earth. Czardas’s fate is sealed.
“Rather dramatic, isn’t it?” S’anjin said, chuckling. Then he realised there was no-one for him to speak to. All the Czardaian authorities of his day were gone. LaFleur was dead; Henrik Ogden dead; Ezekiel Shaestri in retirement in Velkya; Adrian Longleaf recovering from a stroke; Alma Finlay only God knows where. S’anjin remembered vaguely that Finlay was one of the few others who had studied along the same lines as LaFleur, and thus it was likely she was out of the country by now; S’anjin half-smiled, and began making arrangements for a private flight to Doomingsland. What was left for Manus Dei to do, it could do without him.
* * *
Naturally, one wouldn’t take such an announcement seriously. LaFleur could have been delusional in his last days; no-one knew what exactly he’d been thinking at the time. It could have been an attempt to scare the Czardaians from attacking Dorium, but if it was, it failed. Internationally it was dismissed and parodied as the work of a maniac, or perhaps (in countries like Doomingsland and Kregaia) seen as a just statement of retribution for a nation and people that had long “had it coming”.
It’s fair to say that almost everyone was surprised when it started coming true. At first it was only taps and bathtub faucets that yielded the thick red fluid; within a couple of weeks the rivers were all tinged with pink, and anyone drinking from water that hadn’t been filtered a few dozen times over tended to end up at least violently ill. Shortly thereafter a mysterious and sudden increase in the rat and mouse population was recorded, and rodent-borne diseases became more and more common.
LaFleur had not mentioned that the plagues were cumulative; each one continued for the duration that the others were brought in. It was about now that reports and communications from Czardas became more and more spotty, and more and more hysterical. People broke out in boils; livestock and domesticated animals died of mysterious illnesses, perhaps borne by the hordes of rats that rummaged through the streets in broad daylight. Matters became stranger and stranger by the moment, as one of the few instances of live video footage to emerge from Czardas showed packs of wolves racing down city streets and running down passers-by, literally tearing them apart; meanwhile, newspapers and other media reported attacks by bears, coyotes, and wild pigs throughout the nation. Communications with outlying cities and the like simply ceased, the last frenzied reports being of the sky darkening with creatures that ate through houses, crops, even people.
God was apparently determined to keep through with his promise to the bitter end. Vast fires engulfed forests and towns, burning through everything in their path; pillars of smoke were even photographed rising from diverse locations up and down the coast; finally, and most frighteningly, were the reports of hundreds of millions of children simply keeling over and dying en masse, falling ill and passing away within half an hour of each other.
And then... nothing.
An eerie silence on all communications. Satellites reported some kind of explosion, but with communications over Czardas jammed (by whom?) and dust and smoke in the atmosphere blocking much detection, it was unclear to what extent this explosion had been responsible for the comms silence or whether it had even affected anything.
Throughout this incident, the governments of the world had been strangely quiet on Czardas. Most likely they thought the reports were a hoax, or pro-LaFleur propaganda. Perhaps they dismissed at least some of the events as coincidences. After all, following that broadcast everyone would be looking for Nine Deadly Plagues, so they’d find them anywhere. The later reports were also so fractured and hysterical that their veracity could scarcely be trusted. It’s also well documented that most of the world’s leaders could care less about Czardas. But now that all communications had ceased, they may have been starting to wonder what was up.
At any rate, it was only now—a week after the start of radio silence—that the first group of volunteers had been mustered to travel to Czardas and find out what was wrong. Reluctantly, several intelligence groups had revealed that they had sent men to Czardas before the cutoff; men that had never been heard from again. But this only fueled the desire of the volunteer workers. It is one planeful that arrives today; and it shall be satisfactorily surprised.
* * *
~ Czardas. Present Day ~
With a low roar the aeroplane descends through the clouds—some of them natural, some of them made up of smoke and dust thrown up from the land below. Apprehension and tension run high, filling and stifling the air like a grim hand; as yet they can see nothing except the grey sea, dashing itself against the Czardaian coast which is as grey as the sea itself. From a thousand metres up, the volunteers can see nothing through a thick mist that penetrates everything; but there are no buildings here, no harbours, no signs of development; which is also a bad sign.
The plane rolls to a halt on a relatively level plain, and the volunteers stare out into the desolate landscape. They can barely see ten metres from the plane, so thick is the mist; but what they can see consists of a fine pulverized dust covering everything as far as the eye can see, until it meets the sea a short distance beyond; a sea that can only be heard in the peculiar silence.
As they don NBC suits, a Czardaian expatriate guide says, “This was the city of Mariosz; formerly home to fifty-two million citizens and history and culture dating back five thousand years.”
The men and women file out of the aeroplane. Chilling winds from the sea sweep across the land; there is almost no radiation in the atmosphere, and no crater. As they wander across the blasted and ruined land, they come upon some relics of the buried past; the twisted and charred foundations of buildings, a few tree stumps, even some bits of asphalt and gravel mixed with the pulverized dirt. No bodies. Perhaps it’s just as well. This may well be what it looks like when the hand of God is raised in anger against a nation...
It is the first volunteer team to land in Czardas, and it’s like landing on Mars: there are no signs of life, few geographical formations, but here and there subtle clues to the existence (and comparatively recent existence, at that) of life past. Subsequent teams will report, among other things, that the great Zaïr River is almost completely dry; the findings of massive coal deposits where forests and cities were torched; in the mountains the inhabitants had soon degenerated into a primitive state, killing and stealing what they needed; few of them remembered, or cared about, Czardas. The volunteer work continued for almost a year before the governments of neighbouring countries designated Czardas a “special research zone” and kicked out the volunteers, cynically confiscating the few surviving naval ships and aircraft that had survived in the process.
Nonetheless, the question remained. Nations don’t simply vanish like that; and Czardas had very little nuclear weaponry with which it could have wrought such damage upon itself by accident. Besides, the soil was not irradiated, and there were only a few craters embroidering the landscape. While the “plagues” had been undoubtedly highly destructive to the people, they were not apparently so destructive to the land; unless such constructs as “fire” and “pillars of smoke” were universally applied. Many, also, were of scientific bent and thus refused to accept that what was frequently termed “a big invisible dude in the sky” had wreaked such destruction.
The accepted theory was that, in the rising chaos, a faction had obtained deadly weaponry and used it indiscriminately, setting off a nuclear civil war which destroyed the entire nation. No craters were found because the entire country was one big crater, and no radiation because no fission-type warheads were used. However, this theory was not accepted in the scientific community, as it contradicted the evidence; it was mainly used to placate the masses. Among scientists, it ultimately fell to a small group to produce the closest any theory could come to the correct one, given the knowledge at the time.
This group, operating out of Hamptonshire and the Freethinker Commonwealth, postulated that the “plagues” were a preplanned set of orders to a detachment of Doomani soldiers (either regulars or Manus Dei milites) attached to Dorium. Each plague corresponded to a tactic either known to be in use by Doomanum, or widely suspected to be in use by Doomanum although such use had yet to be actually proven. Following the broadcast, the think tank claimed that these troops had introduced toxins into the groundwater, released hordes of vermin into major cities, and the like. The paper noted that the locusts could correspond to the so-called Akavarian locust, a bug said to be genetically engineered in New Akavar’s barren tundra in such a way that its saliva contains powerful enzymes and acids that can break down virtually anything. As for the wild beasts, they could have been imported from and trained in Urbis Doomanum gladiator tournaments.
The various diseases that struck Czardaians could be biological weapons, as could the “slaying of the first-born” (which could be a bioweapon tailored to attack childrens’ immune systems). Fire and pillars of smoke could be the results of napalm and low-yield nuclear weapons, respectively. Nonetheless, all this was not intended to destroy Czardas, claimed the think tank; instead, that was only an unintended result. Delving into records close to fifteen years old, they noted that Yurkan, Kregaian, Parthian, Shenyangi, and other ships had reported encountering some type of missile-defence system along the Czardaian coast. However, the volunteer teams had discovered no evidence that any such systems had existed; no launchers, no control centres.
The research paper postulated that as a result of the plagues, the control centres were rendered inoperable and self-destructed; perhaps the missile defence system had been programmed to release its missile complement against the hostile targets in that event. Crimsdale Articas Doomanum authorities had estimated the number of missile launchers to be in the neighbourhood of two hundred thousand up and down the coast; the group theorized that this could mean upwards of four million missiles, noting that almost $250 billion a year had gone unaccounted for from Czardaian defence budgets, and suggesting that it had gone to upkeep of this system.
Thus, when launchers from throughout Czardas hit the control centres with nuclear weapons, or FAEs, or any number of other weapons, the missiles had targeted the areas from which those weapons were launched, and fired everything available at them. Perhaps collateral damage had thrown various missiles off course, where they hit other areas of the nation; it was possible that once a certain target was destroyed, they moved on to destroy its surrounding areas, and so until all missiles were expended. More likely was that a malfunction had caused some of the missiles to explode while loading, setting off a chain reaction that ended up destroying all of the missile launchers and causing parts of the coast to fall into the sea.
The theory was not widely regarded. There was no direct evidence that Czardas ever had maintained such a missile system; even if it had, there was no evidence that it would operate in precisely the way they had suggested. Most of the biological and physical weapons the tank had attributed to the Doomani or their allies had never been employed anywhere else, and there was no direct evidence for their existence either. It was, in fact, all conjecture and circumstantial evidence; and virtually any government official would not fail to reassure you of that fact.
There were perhaps four or five people still living who did indeed know that CAMERA had once existed, and of them only one knew its full scope and understood why it had caused the destruction it had. Even that one person was never to know the whole truth. Then again, no-one would ever know the whole truth; and within a few months, or a year, the matter would be forgotten entirely.
ooc If you haven’t guessed already, I’m leaving NS. On what is, ironically, my third anniversary here. (Czardas wasn't my first nation, but meh.)
1) Nobody wubs me, boohoohooo... errr, I mean, I don’t have much in common with the playerbase.
2) Real life is more important, etc. etc.
3) I anyway did not have much impetus for RP or anything like that, so consider this my final contribution.
The Southeast Asias of the world may keenly observe that many of my puppets are staying behind. This is purposeful; I’ve given most of them away to people who will (hopefully) continue to log in to them. Czardas however, and all nations that share its name, will die a symbolic death in about 28 days. Also, please don’t repeat the “No-one ever leaves NS...” quote. I find it very tiresome. /ooc