The Scarlet Empress (2 page)

That was where the Shadow Voice, or the Voice of Freedom, came in. Its goal? To make sure the events of 1776 repeated themselves: a full-fledged rebellion in Central, leading to independence and democracy as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. But to accomplish that, the Voice claimed to need me.

I was the equivalent of Paul Revere’s ride, the Boston Tea Party, and Yankee Doodle all rolled into one. I stood for freedom and democracy, Uncle Sam and apple pie—everything that had been lost when the USA became part of the UCE. If you think I saw myself in those terms, rest assured I did not. I
didn’t want to be the revolution’s mascot any more than I wanted to be the Voice of Freedom’s muse. This wasn’t my world. It wasn’t my war. My duty was to find Cam, and that was all.

The Voice was patient, though. Or perhaps it knew me better than I wanted to admit. Using quotes by the Founding Fathers, it grabbed my attention. Playing on my patriotism and my inbred sense of duty, honor, and country, it lured me closer. “ ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands
now
deserves the love and thanks of men and women.’ ”

It worked. I took the bait. That was how I ended up in the middle of the Indian Ocean, waiting to make contact with a nameless, faceless rebel instead of searching for Cam, all while praying that the guilt of that decision didn’t eat me from the inside out. Yet, given the chance to save my country and everything it stood for from extinction, how could I refuse? I sure as hell couldn’t. Neither, it turned out, could Cam.

Those earlier adventures I recounted in
The Legend of Banzai Maguire,
but what you know is far from the final chapter. I am an old woman now; it has been over seventy years since Cam and I began our journeys, and high time, she says, that I finish telling the rest: how in a world turned upside down, two men vied for our trust—and more. One was supposed to be an enemy; the other an ally. Both gentlemen, we soon learned, were a little bit of each. Their love for us and ours for them proved essential to the destiny we were born to fulfill. Our exploits, they say, are legendary. But more than that, they are true.

Now, sit back and let me tell you a story, a story of the heart. Four hearts, to be exact
. . .

“
I am well aware of the toil and blood it will cost you to come to me, Banzai Maguire, but come to me you must. Hear my words; heed my call. I am waiting for you.”
—The Voice of Freedom, heard on the Trans-Malaysian Interweb, October 2176

Rocks pelted a sleek black sedan making halting progress through the streets of New Washington, DC. Hastily erected electronic barriers restrained an angry mob. Black-clad UCE police were too overwhelmed trying to keep the protestors in one place to worry about the few who got free.

A small group ran onto the road and emptied their arsenal of rocks at the approaching sedan. A proximity alarm beeped inside the vehicle, and the driver braked.

“Go!” UCE Supreme Commander General Aaron Armstrong rapped his knuckles on the clear barrier separating him from his driver.
Do not stop,
he mouthed to the sergeant, who floored the accelerator. There was a thud, a jerk of the steering wheel. A body tumbled over the bumper, striking a corner of the windshield before rolling off into the street.

How am I to avoid hitting them when they throw themselves
at the car?
Once more, he pressed the phone to his ear. “Back with you, Mr. President—”

A flaming pipe glanced off the hood and whacked the shatterproof windshield.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Armstrong grumbled. “Next time I’ll take a heli-jet.”

The sedan accelerated. Armstrong could no longer see the individuals in the crowd or read the slogans on the signs they carried. The gaudy American flags—it seemed every protester brandished such an artifact now—became a broad, neutral blur. Speed had canceled out the fury of the mob.

The general relaxed against the rear passenger seat. It was recently upholstered in UCE blue; he could smell the new leather. He lifted the phone back to his ear. Before he could speak, a communicator resting in his other hand vibrated: once, twice, three times. His fingers flexed convulsively around the unit. It repeated the code, as he’d hoped.
Finally.
He had waited long enough for this moment. Too long, he often feared of late.

“Hello? Are you there, Aaron?” the president was shouting into the phone.

“Indeed I am.” A smile curved the general’s mouth. “And with news. Good news.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone line. It was the closest he’d ever heard Julius Beauchamp come to breathless anticipation.

“We found her,” Armstrong told him.

“Banzai Maguire s . . .”

“Yes. We’ve a positive location. The team is in place.”

“Grab her! Despite our every effort to stop those broadcasts, the damage done, Aaron . . . it is incalculable.
Banzai’s ability to escape us has reached mythical proportions amongst our citizenry. They say she turns to air to slip out of any trap, that she catches bullets with her teeth! She can change the minds of men with a single look.”

“Surely you don’t believe that, Mr. President.”

Beauchamp growled. “I want her heart on a platter.”

“A bit medieval, that, but it can be done.”

“Banzai is the worst threat we’ve faced in two centuries. Her weapons? Passion. Inspiration,” the president spat. “That’s my job, Aaron—
my
job to inspire the people, not this outsider’s. She doesn’t know jack about our world. Her actions prove it. She doesn’t understand how only we, the UCE, stand between world peace and chaos. I want her silenced. I want her
gone.
”

Armstrong smiled. “All but done, Mr. President. All but done.”

“And the second pilot? Lieutenant Tucker? Could she have been raised, too, like the legends suggest? Any sign that she survived?”

“None yet. She wasn’t in the cave where Banzai first surfaced, though they were said to be buried there together.”

“A paradox. How do you explain it?”

“Interference by an outside party is my hunch. Someone wants her as badly as we do. If Cameron Tucker’s alive, Mr. President, I’ll find her. Meanwhile, we soon will have Banzai.”

Ahead, several hundred protesters broke through a barrier and surged into the street, setting off the black sedan’s proximity alarm once more. A soft computerized voice repeated the warning:
“Stop. Obstruction in roadway. Stop.”

The general exchanged a sharp glance with his driver. The car didn’t slow.

“Don’t let Banzai get away, Aaron,” the president warned.

“Have no worries.” The general flicked a speck of dust off the steel toe of his boot. “The team is moving in. There’s nowhere for her to go.”

They say she turns to air to slip out of any trap, that she catches bullets with her teeth! She can change the minds of men with a single look. . . .

The president might very well fret the growing legend, but Armstrong had an advantage no one else did: he knew Banzai’s Achilles’ heel, her one weakness. The chink in her armor was his son.

By the time the first of the rocks began hitting the windshield, the general had ended the encrypted call. Crossing one leg over the other, he settled in for a turbulent ride to the White House. Nothing could affect his mood now. At long last, Banzai Maguire was his.

The Raft Cities were the kind of place you ran to when you needed to hide. The region belonged to no nation, no world order. Sea gangsters lived alongside former Maldivian islanders and the scrappy ancestors of the Lucky Ones, survivors of the unintended nuclear war between India and Pakistan a century ago. In this cobbled-together hive of bandits, mercenaries, and lost souls, U.S. Air Force Captain Bree “Banzai” Maguire sought refuge from the assassins on her trail.

Temporary
refuge. She was willing to bet on that. After inadvertently managing to piss off nearly every world leader to the point that either they’d ordered her killed on sight or issued warrants for her arrest, she had the feeling it would take more than a game of hide-and-seek to make them change their minds.

At the controls of a speedboat, she raced over choppy seas. Thunderheads sprouted on the horizon like spunglass mushrooms: rain to soak the lush grounds of
piratelord Ahmed’s estate, which weren’t grounds at all, but structures and landscaping sunk deep in dirt hauled generations ago, shipload by painstaking shipload, to this nameless, town-sized raft, one of thousands anchored over submerged islands once known as the Maldives.

Bree could almost taste the thunder in the air, the crackling anticipation, the humidity. It was going to pour good and hard—a real toad-strangler, her friend Cam would have predicted—and before nightfall, by the looks of it.

She’d arrived at the pirate’s stronghold just in time. Then again, timing—
good
timing—was everything, wasn’t it? It was the only reason she was still alive.

Infamy was a bitch.

To the sound of distant thunder, she yanked back on the throttle of the speedboat and decelerated in a wide arc as her partner watched for threats through the enhanced sights on his rifle. Tyler Armstrong. Protector, confidant, lover. The top UCE general’s son, he no longer acted the part. With over a week’s worth of scratchy growth on his jaw, he resembled a UCE SEAL commander even less.

Ex
-SEAL commander. His military career was finished. He’d jettisoned his bright future the day he helped her evade the charge of treason his country had foisted on her—that same nation for which his father, Aaron “Ax” Armstrong, ran the military under the telling and chillingly accurate job title of supreme commander.

Bree alone knew that hidden under Ty’s shirt was a scar from the bullet that had almost killed him—put there by an assassin on the UCE’s payroll, a soldier whom Ty feared the Ax himself had dispatched with orders to kill
anyone standing in the way of taking her out. Ty had been half-dead from blood loss when he voiced that opinion, and since recovering, he’d never mentioned it again. She hadn’t forgotten, though. Was that all he was to his father—collateral damage? It was clear where the general’s loyalties lay, and they were not, to her disgust, with his son.

Bree turned more sharply than she needed to and opened the throttle. Water sprayed over the bow. The raft town looming ahead was huge. Beyond-imagination huge. Ty had described it to her, but she hadn’t expected a man-made island.

They’d been in the Raft Cities for about a week now, quietly learning the lay of the land—and the water—until they deemed it safe to contact Ahmed. Lying low, they’d restocked supplies, anchoring out at sea, never on one of the rafts. Much of the region was poor; she’d seen a lot of squalor. But this raft? All she could say was that the pirate biz must be good.

Coasting up to their assigned rendezvous spot, Bree killed the engine and deployed the autoanchor. The speedboat looked like a gnat sidling up to a dinosaur. The boat pitched precariously, throwing salt water onto the deck, splashing Bree’s boots. “Holy Christmas, Ty.” Wiping damp strands of off her forehead with the back of her arm, she lifted her gaze higher and higher until she found the top of the structure towering over her. “This thing is huge.” Shiny black pontoons bristled with parasitic flotsam, jetsam, and guns—big guns, resembling cannon. Except these puppies glittered with LED lights and sensors. If the great sea captains of the past were looking down from heaven, it was in a fit of must-have envy.

“I was impressed the first time I saw it, too. For different reasons. I’d come here to infiltrate.”

She turned slightly, met his bracing blue eyes. “I bet
that
was exciting.”

“No more so than today.”

He’d fought in the Pirate Wars, a prolonged campaign to combat sea terrorism. It had been his first command. He’d lost men there. Lost them
here
.

“It must feel strange coming back,” she said, quieter.

“It does,” he admitted. “But the circumstances . . . they couldn’t be more different. Then, I fought to keep my country from harm. Now, it’s to keep my country from doing harm to me.”
So that I can stay alive to protect you,
he left unspoken. Ty was a career soldier. His life came second to the mission. His mission, he said, was her.

Ty secured the safety on his rifle before stowing it in a holster slung over his back. The wind rippled across the fabric of his faded, olive-green T-shirt, which he wore tucked into equally bleached-out camouflage pants, secured at the waist by a weapons belt from which a variety of killing devices dangled. It hit her how hard and battle-ready he appeared. Bree doubted that he had an ounce of body fat left on him. Any smidgen of softness had turned rock-hard the past few weeks with the brutal physical training program he’d put them both through. She would have liked to say that she, too, was now the proud owner of buns of steel, but no. Biology (or was it heredity?) had played a cruel trick on her. But hey, a girl couldn’t have everything.

“It’s far from being the largest of the rafts,” Ty said. “But it is among the best protected.”

“It had better be.” She gave the raft another once-over. “Or we’re screwed.”
Again
. . .

More thunder rumbled, a hollow sound. Wind ruffled strands of hair that had come loose from her ponytail, drawing Bree’s attention away from the raft to the sea, where the sun rode ever lower in the sky. Sunsets at the equator seemed to last forever: long, drawn-out, and utterly gorgeous spectacles. When night finally fell, it’d be blacker than any she’d ever known. Her scalp crawled as she imagined a rifle scope trained on her head.

Assassins are like roaches; for every one you kill, there are ten more to take its place.

Or at least it seemed that way. The first person to take a crack at killing her was a guard at Prince Kyber’s palace; the second tried doing her in by dropping acid from a plane; and the third shot at her while she slept—and very nearly was successful.