Deadly Wands (9 page)

While everyone said the world was at war, the
only real battles were at the Empire’s perimeter. Each conquest
added to the world’s largest market. The Khan governed two-thirds
of the world’s population, and three-quarters of its wealth.
Genghis argued that the only way to have lasting peace was if one
government ruled everyone. While critics equated the Empire with
institutionalized slaughter, the Mongols said every conquest
brought them closer to world peace.

And most of them actually believed it.

While Peking was rightfully called the
capital of the world, because it housed the Mongol government,
Karakorum could accurately be called the richest place on Earth
because three centuries of tribute literally piled up there. It was
less of a city and more a vast storage facility. Not bad for an old
yurt town in Mongolia’s oldest farmland. It’d take one hundred
thousand quads, each hauling one hundred kilos at a time, weeks to
move all that wealth. Plus everything on the wagon train.

Genghis stored his riches in Karakorum
because the world’s best air force protected it. Far from the
nearest city, it’d be hard to loot even if no Mongols protected it.
There was no where to take it to. The formidable Gobi Desert made
the trip to China hard, Siberia’s frozen wasteland lay to the
north, the vast Stans to the west, and the empty Manchurian forests
to the east. Plus, it only had four gates and was nearly surrounded
by two rivers.

What never occurred to anybody -- before
William -- is that the Pacific Ocean is only a thousand kilometers
away. Landlocked, the Mongols never thought to fear the sea.

The Great Khan soon led a vast air force
north, only for one hundred thousand Americans to bomb them with
incendiaries the first night they camped in Manchuria’s vast
forests. Several square kilometers of trees ignited like a huge
bonfire, roasting the Mongols. The well-rested long-distance
Americans engaged the tired Mongols day and night for an exhausting
week. The mostly short-range Mongols had to fight sleepy, hungry,
and dehydrated as the Americans burned their supplies, tents, and
food. Genghis assumed the Americans would run, then assumed he
could overwhelm them, when what he should have done is sent his
marathoners around the American blocking force to intercept the
wagon train full of gold plodding towards the coast.

But, because the long-distance Mongols left
the slower ones behind, Genghis lost his best quads in that initial
ambush. Having half the endurance of the Americans meant they
needed twice the quads just to match parity, but the weaker Mongols
streamed in over several days, so the Americans always enjoyed air
superiority.

The Mongols would have withstood the assault
better if they had traveled slower, but together, instead of flying
all out for a week. In contrast, the Americans slept the afternoon
before the attack, and enjoyed dinner first. William had them pack
a million food kits and water sacks so they could eat and drink in
the air.

It’s so much easier to kill quads on the
ground than in the air, so the trick is exhausting them so they
cannot fly, and then give them nowhere to hide. Burning the forest
forced the survivors into the air, where they had to fight
individually in the dark against formation fliers. Then they had no
cover when they needed to rest.

Genghis Khan led two hundred fifty thousand
quads, but only had one hundred thousand of the best when he got
ambushed. The Americans finished them off in time to sleep before
the next fifty thousand arrived. And the next. Genghis had to leave
just to find replacements. By the time a large enough force
arrived, the Americans had sailed. With another half a million wand
sets and a quarter-million more coin sacks.

When the ships returned to San Francisco,
American University carefully counted it. Entitled to half of the
spoils, William knew he couldn’t spend it in a thousand lifetimes,
so he started an organization to fund highways linking the largest
cities in the Americas. The first highway would pave over the old
dirt trail from San Francisco to Anchorage to speed up heavy
supplies.

Losing that much wealth shook the Mongol
Empire to his core. And the Peking Stock Market fell into a
financial coma, losing 90% of its value as soon as investors
appreciated the magnitude of the disaster.

Maybe he was delusional, but William could
hear his grandma laughing hysterically.

CHAPTER 11

With the Mongol leadership racing north,
Billy was free to duel during and after the Olympics. But now he
fought two at a time, so opponents would still volunteer, and did
not limit himself to one hundred duels daily, injuries permitting.
Instead, he dueled literally from dawn to dusk, day after day, when
not competing in Olympic races.

Athletes prepare for the games their entire
lives. They had teams to optimize their performance. Companies paid
enormous sums to sponsor likely winners. Only for the Boy Wonder to
make them look pathetic as Billy dominated every wand event the
Olympics offered.

As expected, the assassination attempts began
as soon as the games ended and the tourists left. Elizabeth hired
the quads wise enough to not duel her son. She thought a few
hundred super-quads would deter attacks, but instead it only turned
them into battles.

Betting huge on the implosion of publicly
traded companies paid unexpected dividends. When those
counter-parties could not pay in full, Elizabeth seized their
assets. She never before fully appreciated having a family full of
bankers. Virtually overnight, Global Bank became China’s largest
property owner. The month before, William had sent for several
thousand English employees to manage the transition. Some of them
sailed a ship full of Billy’s winnings to Lisbon to lend more to
France and Spain.

Global Bank would sell the real estate,
eventually, but in the meantime Elizabeth used mansions built like
fortresses for protection.

Whoever Genghis put in charge of killing the
Boy Wonder tried mercenaries first. Several hundred attacked the
estate and lost badly. They tried ambushing Billy on his way to and
from the arena. Because she paid so well, Elizabeth had no trouble
hiring a few thousand super-quads, while the best of her own
relatives acted as an inner guard since she couldn’t trust her
mercenaries. Billy loved it. War was even better than dueling. He
ate up his first taste of battle and hungered for more. His
obsession with dueling broadened into an obsession with war. He
read more books that year than in the rest of his life
combined.

Then the Mongols started using regular
troops. They wore civilian uniforms, but even Liz noticed the
difference. Apparently the enemy was running out of mercenaries.
Her bank relatives were hiring in neighboring cities as fast as
they could, but Billy was still losing hundreds every week.

“I think we should run,” Billy told her as
the attackers descended from the night sky.

“There’s only a thousand of them.” It made
Liz feel weird to prefer fighting when Billy wanted to flee because
it was always the other way around.

“But they’ve trained together to fly in
formation. Our mercs can’t beat them.” Billy paused deliciously.
“But they can die trying.”

That was the beauty of hiring Mongols to
fight Mongols. Liz left with the English while Billy led his
bodyguards. After the initial clash, he kept rising higher to deal
with just several enemies at a time. His guards lasted until
midnight. Billy had to duel at dawn, so he disappeared to nap with
his English relatives. The soldiers blasted his compound to rubble,
but Billy had many more.

To counter this new threat, they hired
Peking’s largest criminal gang, called a triad, and offered to fund
ten thousand quads. Billy trusted the Chinese criminals more than
the Mongol mercenaries. The next time a battalion of regular troops
attacked, the triads caught them from behind.

Now it became a dance. Genghis took all his
good troops with him, so the Mongols had to import units to Peking.
Liz paid the triads to kill whoever could be responsible for the
attacks, starting with the Imperial Guard. If they could hire
Mongol mercenaries as fast as they lost them, Billy would have
continued indefinitely.

Peking had not seen battle in three
centuries. Tourists fled, business shut down, and civilians hid in
their homes. The news videos of huge firefights over the financial
capital of the world spooked the rest of the Empire. And the lower
the stock market fell, the more money they made.

Billy thought it awesome.

By the time William returned, Billy dueled
teams of four all day, and was still running out of opponents.
Elizabeth employed a virtual air force, had already bought another
ship, and replaced its crew with English sailors. The English had
been covertly transferring gold to the ship, but they still had
room for several thousand more tons. William had no trouble buying
a riverboat capable of such loads, but they couldn’t just move that
much gold without attracting attention.

They needed a distraction. A big one.

Billy didn’t want to leave his Mongol
bodyguards alive, and so suggested they go out with a bang. For the
first time, Liz hired Chinese mercenaries. A lot of them.

After dark, Billy led his remaining Mongols
on an attack against the largest enemy unit while the Chinese
attacked the police. Triads ambushed imperial guards. William had
found displaced Tibetans willing to loot luxury neighborhoods where
only rich Mongols could live. Several thousand English then
fireballed the city’s most combustible buildings, before moving
that gold onto their river barge. A few hundred wands propelled
that barge downriver and out to sea, where no one could see them
levitate the bullion onto their ship.

William took the other English to rob the
main Bank of Mongolia branch to make it that much harder for the
Khan to pay his panicky depositors. They each carried their maximum
weight to the ship. Perhaps even more valuable was the video that
William recorded showing the empty vaults of Bank of Mongolia. That
really panicked Mongol depositors.

Billy overtook the ship before dawn as it
sailed at full speed to San Francisco. His Mongol bodyguards and
the Mongol airmen had slaughtered each other. They forewarned the
triads so they could finish the survivors and take their valuables.
Every air base has thousands of extra wand sets that allowed the
triads to recruit more quads.

In just a few months, they took most of the
Empire’s portable wealth. William finally felt his parents rest in
peace, and was pretty sure he heard his grandma laughing
hysterically.

In San Francisco, William replaced his
English crew with American sailors and bought enough bombs to fill
the cargo bays. He paid thousands of two-wanders to turn every
edible animal between the Bering Strait and California into jerked
meat for the bunkers he started constructing the year before. Until
spring, their full time job was to hunt game and blast lakes,
rivers, and coastlines to kill fish so the Mongols had nothing to
eat.

Given the mountain of valuables they took,
William gave his raiders the next year off since they wouldn’t
return without first enjoying their newfound wealth. Almost one
hundred thousand villages would become rich overnight, boosting the
economy. Over a thousand tribes would share a common bond to bind
them together.

While the English set up more Global Bank
branches, William and Liz toured the defenses with the leaders of
American University. Warning them that the Khan would retaliate,
William paid them to build even more concealed bunkers and to stock
each with as many anti-personnel bombs as they could find.

William sent Billy, as the Baron, to visit
every tribe that contributed quads to the raid, with University
recruiters. Before the entire tribe, Billy would show off, flying
higher and faster than anyone believed possible. He let them
measure his flames and showed the various shapes and sizes of
weapons he could conjure up. His specialty was using all four wands
to blast a huge crater to destroy the myth that only Genghis Khan
could use boot wands for something other than propulsion.

He praised the quads by name who participated
in the raid, had them show off the priceless treasures they
acquired, and offered full scholarships to anyone who could fly
long distance. Then he offered free wand sets to every quad who
didn’t already have them. Thousands of teenagers who never had the
opportunity to test their wand abilities did so now, to tears of
joy from family and friends. Those with the strongest power
received the strongest wands, so they had to compete against each
other in front of everyone who mattered. Being hugged by the Baron,
as he gave them wands, coins, and scholarships, became the defining
moment for an entire generation of American quads. Several million
teenagers imprinted on the Baron like a baby duck to his mama.

Finally, Billy laid out backpacks full of
wealth for food, schools, and hospitals. Then he showed maps of the
highways they planned to build to unite the Americas in commerce.
But, before handing them over to tribal leaders, he told them the
price they’d pay:

“The wealth we took back from the Mongols
will fund food production, infrastructure, education, and
healthcare, which will create millions of jobs and power the
American economy, lifting millions from poverty. Your greatest days
lie before you. You will give your children greater opportunities
than you ever enjoyed.

“But the price you must pay is unity. Only
together are we strong. Violence against each other or your
neighbors weakens us. That’s how Genghis Khan has been able to
slaughter you for centuries. Let the Mongols duel to the death. I
need you to live for your families. Strengthen the policies,
systems, and institutions that enable you to resolve problems
without bloodshed. Warring tribes threaten the American system of
representative democracy, the core of the new American identity,
and therefore must be removed like a cancer.