The Legend of Banzai Maguire Page 6

  Last year he’d found his name in the top ten of two lists: world-class adventurers and the UCE’s most-eligible bachelors. The latter, he knew, had far more to do with his father’s permanent position as the UCE’s supreme military commander than his own efforts—or more accurately, his lack thereof—to marry. Yet, there it was. Ty could only hope that United Colonies Extreme Sports was a better judge of his interests than People. He’d climbed Everest, twice, and had won a spot on the race-hike across Antarctica in the ‘68 Olympics; he’d ridden the currents boiling out of the cone of an active volcano in the Pacific Rift, free-fallen from near space, but when it came time for socialites and social events, duty had a way of intervening. Or he made sure it did. He was a dedicated UCE fighting man, after all.

  His dangerous job served him well as a good excuse, but in truth he avoided romantic entanglements because he’d never been able to shake the gut feeling that something different and far better lay in store for him. Was whimsy to blame, or his ego? He didn’t know, but none of the women he’d met so far had “permanent” stamped on their foreheads. If loneliness was the trade-off for living with a sense of destiny, so be it. He had a knack for finding activities to fill the void.

  Like this expedition, he thought. He’d wanted to uncover the truth behind the legend of Banzai Maguire for years. Now, finally, everything had come together, thanks to a grateful pirate lord whose life he’d spared. Compensation was the last thing on Ty’s mind at the time, but when offered a highly accurate, underwater map of the region as thanks for saving the man’s life, he didn’t hesitate to take it. Only fools turned their backs on providence. Without the chart, he knew he stood only a slim chance of finding the submerged cave, the most likely location of the two missing pilots. As if that weren’t enough, the appreciative pirate insisted he hadn’t come close to paying off his blood debt. While Ty didn’t take him up on the offer of his daughter and a rather large collection of jewels, it was nice to know someone in the Raft Cities thought he owed him a favor. Only he hoped he never found himself in a position to need it.

  Ty opened the map. One sweep of his hand made the pirate’s chart glow in three-dimensional detail. What was it really like, inside the Asian Kingdom? Some said the citizens were prisoners. Others believed that no one wanted to leave a land that was Shangri-la. Ty could only guess. Few had seen inside the borders since the Bai-Yee colonial wars over a century ago ended with the Asian Economic Consortium breaking from the UCE. One of Kyber’s Han ancestors had led the revolt. They’d declared independence and kept their borders sealed ever since—with the exception of an occasional foreign bride imported by the Han family. But the blue-blooded queens never reported back with details. Maybe part of the pre-nuptial agreement was a vow of silence. On the other hand, if it really was paradise that they’d married into, maybe they didn’t mind.

  Outside the tiny vehicle, submerged rocks towered. Ty marveled at the immensity of the boulders, and at occasional carcasses of buildings destroyed in the war. He was surprised no one had carted off the pieces, for salvage if nothing else. Everyone else in the world had dismantled their sunken coastal cities. If Kyber hadn’t kept up with housekeeping, it meant anything could be here, lost and forgotten. Including a couple of pilots.

  The UV mirrored the seabed’s gradual rise toward shore. Ty slid two fingertips over his map to a shadow he hoped was the opening to the underwater cave he sought. One look ahead confirmed it. Sediment kicked up by the UV’s maneuvering reduced forward visibility to almost zero. An error now would mean disaster: capture and a DNA-check, which would connect him to his father, one of the most powerful—and hated—men on Earth. The political fallout of his stealthy mission would be ugly, something Ty didn’t want to imagine, let alone experience. He’d rather free-fall with a frozen parachute.

  Ty secured the UV800 in an underwater niche hidden from the entrance to the cave. Silent jets would keep her in place until he was ready to return.

  Ty pushed away from the console and gathered his equipment. He tightened swim fins over his boots, locked night-vision goggles on the frame of his facemask. His SEAL commando training made him equally adept in operations at sea, air, and land—thus the name SEAL, an acronym in use nonstop since the unit’s creation in the early 1960s, long before the United States became the United Colonies of Earth, long before the SEALs were tasked to pursue and destroy terrorists in every sea, in every world port; and long before he broke out from under his famous father’s shadow, making a name for himself as an officer who’d earned every medal and every promotion on his skill and not his name.

  Suited up, Ty shimmied into a cramped pipe and sealed it behind him. Bracing himself, he opened a hatch. The sea roared in, pummeling his body. Where the temperature regulators in his wet suit were perhaps a little slower to react than they should be, he felt the press of cold salt water. Adjusting his mask and goggles one more time, he kicked his legs and finned toward his goal.

  Normally, he’d have two men keeping watch for him from inside the UV, but tonight he was on his own. Re-breather gear captured his exhalations, preventing bubbles from rising to the surface and alerting anyone who might be watching. Ty doubted anyone was, but he was taking no chances. Using the pale green luminescence of his night-vision goggles, he scanned for threats.

  Rocky pillars defined the entrance of the cave, but he wouldn’t have seen them unless he’d known exactly what he was looking for. The landmarks he saw next matched the information on the map. Ty gave a kick of his fins, flattened both hands on a ledge. Rocks scraped against his wet suit and mask as he squeezed through a narrow opening that opened into a larger area. The water was shallower here. The surface flickered above him. With his marine pistol loaded and ready, he finned toward it.

  He broke the surface, his pistol held at the ready. Water trickled off his goggles and mask as he peered into the darkness of a cave. The area was in worse shape than he’d thought. He assumed he’d find one large room. But the ceiling had collapsed, forming stone dividers with fissures wide enough to insert a remote camera but not for him to enter. Or maybe the builders had structured the lab this way. He’d never know. The people who’d worked here in secret were dead.

  Ty hoisted himself up to dry land. After pulling the breather from his mouth, he left the apparatus hanging from his weapons vest. His fins fit in a holder at his hip. He smeared the entire length of the waterline with a paste containing EWTs—early warning transmitters in the form of microsized computers designed to “talk” with the communicator and computers he wore on his wrists and belt. If someone breached the line, Ty would get an instant warning.

  The air was still, silent, and ripe with salty dampness. In the distance, he heard faint trickling. How long had it been since anyone had stepped here? How long had this air existed, undisturbed? As he searched the chamber, he felt the weight of history pressing down on him. They were here, those two pilots. Dead or alive, they’d be a great find.

  Ty scaled the first fallen wall and dropped into a dark chamber. He entered a room so large that his goggles couldn’t illuminate the far reaches. Exploring the area section by section, he walked for quite a while on a platform before he realized it had once been a wall. Where it had buckled and lifted, it almost hid a cylindrical white container, large enough to hold a human being.

  His pulse picked up speed. The container was similar to the kind used in early experiments in bio and cryo suspended animation. From within the pod, faint lights glowed. Power? Possibly it had sustained what lay in the pod all these years—if the juice had continued uninterrupted. Would he find a live body inside or a mummy? His money was on the mummy. His hopes were on the living body.

  Ty approached the pod in measured, reverential steps, as if making his way to an altar. A layer of sand hid the glass. With a gloved hand, he moved aside the silt, revealing the snug interior. The oyster, he mused. Did it contain a pearl?

  He wiped away the silt and looked inside. His oyster did indeed contain a
pearl, perfect and whole. It was Banzai...Banzai Maguire. She existed. She was alive!

  Fingers splayed on the clear cover, he savored the sight of his treasure. Her eyes were long-lashed and closed, her hair, glossy and dark, swept back from a pale face. No, that old photo hadn’t done her justice.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” he murmured.

  The pilot from the past might be a legend to most, but she was a woman to him. He’d never admit it, though. Navy psychiatrists didn’t take kindly to combat soldiers who pined after dead women they’d never met. But he’d met her—had loved her and made love to her—in his imagination. And she’d remained there, in his mind, from the first time he read her tragically shortened biography, relegated to a footnote in a comprehensive data-volume on twenty-first-century warfare he’d received as a gift from his father.

  He’d grown up, of course, left home, gotten an education, gone on to fight in a war, but the impression Banzai made on him had never waned. A beauty who could kick some ass? Now that was a woman. Over the years, it had become somewhat of an obsession to find out what had happened to her. And now, it appeared, he had.

  If only waking Sleeping Beauty required a procedure as straightforward as a kiss. But it did not. Working quickly, and using the pod as a table, he opened the medical kit he’d brought with him. Wishful thinking, he’d thought at the time, but now he was glad he’d listened to his optimism.

  His equipment and weapons clattered in the silence. The entire pod was too large for the UV; he’d have to remove its occupant, but he’d prepared for that eventuality. He’d revive her enough to get unassisted respiration. He’d brought extra rebreathers for the return swim. It would have to be strapped to her face, but the water would help keep her body temperature down in the critical hours after waking. If you made a sleeper too hot too fast, he or she died on you. Full speed in the UV, the Invincible was six hours of driving time away. There, Ty would have access to a ship’s typical complement of medical personnel. It meant he had to keep Banzai alive for those hours. And, perhaps, her wingman as well. Those core-curriculum courses in cryobiology he’d taken at the university before abandoning his pre-med studies to join the UCE Navy at the beginning of the Pirate Wars would finally prove their use.

  Yet book knowledge didn’t equate to hands-on experience. Of that, he had none. He risked killing the pilots if he broke them out of stasis in less than ideal conditions.

  Was it moral to risk it? Should he leave them be?

  Ty’s gaze traveled back to Banzai’s face. He’d seen sleepers before; her expression should have been serene. It wasn’t. He was no expert in female-emotion interpretation, but in Banzai’s face he saw anger, and sadness,

  too. If he were to hazard a guess, he’d bet she’d choose the risk of him waking her over spending the rest of her days asleep in this underwater cave.

  Slipping his night-vision goggles over his eyes, Ty stood. “I’m going to find your wingman. Then I’ll bring you both home.”

  Home. It had a nice ring to it. But “home” would be a far different place than what she’d left.

  Ty went in search of the second cryopod. He crawled, climbed, or walked into every area large enough to hold him. When that yielded nothing, he inserted a viewer on a long flexible cord through cracks in the fallen walls. It allowed him to see where he couldn’t reach. The other sections of the cave had not fared as well as this one. It looked like seawater had filled the areas at one time before receding. Bomb damage was heavy, with fallen equipment sharing space with rocks, broken pipes, and twisted steel girders. The other pilot was here; Ty knew it. But he’d need heavier equipment to investigate and more men to assist him.

  Ty sat back on his haunches and exhaled. He couldn’t find Cameron Tucker. The disappointment wasn’t nearly as sharp as when he’d found the mutilated UV drivers in the raft city, but his guilt emanated from the same source. And, as it was on the raft mission, time was his enemy. He’d better get out—and get Banzai out—before someone figured out they were here.

  He returned to her pod. Revival from biostasis followed a rigid series of steps, but the most important one to remember was letting the pod control the recovery, intervening only in a case of complete mechanical breakdown. Impatience on the waker’s part had left more than a few sleepers at the mercy of what was at best a dicey resuscitation. Even in modern times, biostasis was an imperfect art. But they were getting better by injecting microscopic computers into the body before and after stasis. In Banzai’s day, true nanotech had still been a vision of the future.

  Ty reinstated power to the outside of the pod, sat back, and waited. Although he couldn’t see it, he’d started the slow process of waking her. Changes had begun on the molecular level. Inside her body, fluid chilling the internal organs warmed.

  Time passed. Ty watched Banzai’s skin turn from chalky to pink. As her face lost its waxy stiffness, her mouth relaxed. He looked at her lips, soft and full, and his chest clenched with an odd feeling. It finally hit him that she was real. Banzai Maguire. A woman from another time, a time long past. Someone who should have been dead all these years but had slept through them instead.

  The last time she was awake, the United Colonies of Earth were still the United States, a nation that resembled and even remembered its revolutionary roots. Fifty white stars flew on the flag; people watched Fourth of July fireworks and knew the words to “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-spangled Banner,”—or most of them, at least. But in modern UCE culture, Americana was notably absent, the fact reflected in the flag itself, a simple block design: a white globe on a blue square in the upper left corner of a solid red banner. Totally revised, the national anthem further celebrated world unity and peace. No one sang the old songs anymore.

  Ty, on the other hand, knew them all. Whether or not his fascination with Banzai Maguire was the cause or a consequence of his interest, he felt a certain kinship with those who’d lived in the pre-colonial era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While his boyhood friends had gazed at holo-wall images of the nuclear-fueled Century-Saber craft that regularly flew round-trips to Mars, in Ty’s bedroom models of F-15 Eagles and F-22 Raptors dangled from tacks stuck in the ceiling. (His mother hadn’t been pleased with the damage done to the holoscreen, but since he’d rarely used it, the issue faded.) The country had no colonies in those days. It hadn’t spanned half the world; it still retained its roots as a struggling young nation with principles, which had freed itself from a bloated, imperial power.

  A bloated, imperial power like the UCE itself was now?

  Ty frowned. That charge was unfair. The UCE had brought stability to the world. There hadn’t been a major war fought since the late twenty-first century. But had the UCE created peace at the expense of something more precious?

  Late at night when he’d been out on patrol, the officers’ talk often turned to that subject, a trend far more dangerous than the grumbling of the enlisted men. They were leaders, the officers, loyal men tasked with incredible responsibilities. To be effective in their role, they had to believe in the power from whence their orders came. Ty saw their private doubts as the first symptoms of eroding faith.

  Certainly, they weren’t the only ones who were disgruntled. As always, the UCE had raised taxes on the colonies to finance the costly upkeep of its far-flung empire, and the military needed to keep the peace. But for the first time, the colonies balked against the taxes levied on them, and several threatened to protest by refusing to buy UCE goods. Boycotts would weaken an economy overly dependent on exports. Panic gripped the white marble halls of New Washington, spurring tough curfews and restrictions on organized public gatherings. And it only made things worse.

  But the UCE wasn’t the only source of discontent. Similar troubles plagued the Euro-African Consortium as well. If the same was happening in the Kingdom of Asia, no one had heard about it, but it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. To Ty, one thing was certain: Change was afoot in the world; he smelled it as accur
ately as he could scent coming rain. After so many years of calm, was the UCE prepared to weather the coming storm?

  Ty had asked that very question of his father, Supreme UCE Commander Aaron Armstrong, late one night when Ty was visiting on leave and they’d both had a few too many drinks, spurring them into sharing private thoughts that discretion normally kept masked.

  “It’s surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country,” his father had murmured in reply. “All nations in all ages have been subject to them. Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses. They produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before.”

  The general noted Ty’s perplexed expression. “Thomas Paine,” he explained. “A patriot of the American Revolution.”

  Ty wondered what was in his father’s liquor. “You think unrest may be good for the country?”

  A veil fell over his father’s eyes. Ty could no longer tell what was in them. “Those are his words, son. Not mine.”

  It was obvious that his father wanted to distance himself from the statement now that he’d uttered it. And Ty let him. A man in his father’s position had few people to trust. Ty would hope that he’d trust his son, but it appeared that he didn’t.

  Trust Ty with what, exactly? A few wandering scotch-laced thoughts? That’s all the words were.

  Ty glanced up to find his father watching him with an expression he wasn’t sure he liked. “I love this country, Ty.”

  “I don’t doubt that, sir,” he’d put in quickly.

  “I will never allow anyone to weaken it.” The general’s blue eyes turned as cold as the chips of ice in their drinks. “Never.”

  Ty lifted his glass in a toast, in part to lighten the atmosphere that had become strangely intense. “To Paine and his words. May we find good lessons in the past—if we need them.” Then he’d drunk a mouthful of expensive scotch and exhaled. “Reminds me of that expression: Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”