Deadly Wands by Brent Reilly Page A

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