The communications room deep within the Foreign Office was a chamber of jarring contrasts. Here, the traditional, wood-paneled solemnity of the British Empire collided with the crackling, electric hiss of the 20th century. Ornate mahogany furniture stood beside a complex switchboard of brass and vulcanized rubber. The air, usually smelling of old paper and leather, was sharp with the scent of ozone from the humming equipment. A new, dedicated transatlantic telephone line—an almost mythically expensive and fragile piece of technology—was the room's unholy centerpiece.
Prime Minister Arthur Balfour stood beside it, his posture ramrod straight, his face a mask of patrician calm that did little to hide the profound tension in his jaw. Beside him, Michael Abernathy, the lean and watchful head of the Secret Intelligence Service, was perfectly still, his expression unreadable. He looked less like a government official and more like a predator that had been unexpectedly confined to a small cage.
From the receiver of the telephone, a voice crackled across three thousand miles of ocean, imbued with a furious energy that seemed to defy the metallic distortion. It was the voice of President Theodore Roosevelt, and it was the sound of a world order coming undone.
"...not a metaphor, Arthur! Do you understand me?" Roosevelt's voice roared, a mixture of static and rage. "We are not dealing with a mere monarch. The scientific data is undeniable. The man in Beijing is not simply an Emperor. He is a force of nature. A walking calamity with a human face. He can manipulate physical matter with his will. Our analysts believe he was the source of the Krakatoa event. The energy signature matches."
Balfour's knuckles were white where he gripped the back of a chair. The news from Pennsylvania had been shocking enough—an act of industrial terrorism on a scale that suggested a foreign power. But this… this was the raving of a lunatic. A lunatic who happened to command the most powerful new nation on Earth.
"Theodore," Balfour said, his voice a carefully controlled baritone, "the gravity of the situation is not lost on us. But what you are suggesting… it moves beyond the realm of statecraft and into that of… of fiction."
It was Abernathy who spoke next, his voice quiet but cutting through the tension like a scalpel. He leaned closer to the receiver. "Mr. President," he began, his tone one of detached, professional inquiry. "Michael Abernathy here. Forgive my intrusion, but I must ask for clarity. You are stating, as an official fact, that the Qing Emperor possesses supernatural abilities?"
"I am stating that my nation is under attack by them!" Roosevelt thundered back. "For God's sake, man, this isn't an academic debate! I have a fire burning a hole through Pennsylvania that our best men can't explain! My top agent in China is being hunted through the streets of Tianjin by an intelligence service that seems to know his every move before he makes it! We have the testimony from a captured Qing scientist—Dr. Wu—and preliminary research from another, a Dr. Chen, who is playing her own dangerous game. They both point to the same impossible conclusion. We are fighting a god-king, and we are losing."
Abernathy's mind, a machine built for parsing deception, went into overdrive. He filtered out Roosevelt's emotion, his fury, and analyzed the raw data of his claims. His first instinct was profound, almost overwhelming, skepticism. This was a ploy. It had to be. A brilliantly conceived American gambit to frighten the British Empire into a subordinate alliance, to force London to hand over its entire intelligence apparatus in Asia. Roosevelt was a known adventurer, a man of action and passion. It was entirely possible he was emotionally compromised, seeing monsters in shadows cast by a more conventional, albeit brilliant, Chinese spy service.
"Mr. President," Abernathy continued, his voice still unnervingly calm. "Let us assume, for a moment, that your hypothesis is correct. You say he caused the Krakatoa eruption years ago. An act of geological power on an unfathomable scale. Why, then, has he resorted to such… subtle methods now? Why orchestrate industrial sabotage and espionage? If he can sink islands, why not simply sink the American Pacific fleet as it sits in harbor? The power profile you describe is wildly inconsistent."
There was a pause on the line, filled only by the hiss of the ocean between them. Abernathy had struck a nerve. He was asking a question of strategy, not of faith.
"We don't know," Roosevelt admitted, his voice tight with frustration. "Our analysts believe it exacts some kind of price from him. A physical cost. We believe the grander the act, the greater the toll. But that is a theory. The fire in my country is a fact. The explosives that have no earthly chemical signature are a fact. The Emperor's ability to repair his entire nation's telegraph network in an instant is a fact witnessed by our assets. Are you going to wait until he boils the Thames before you accept the truth?"
Balfour, the politician, saw his opening. He stepped in, placing a calming hand on Abernathy's shoulder. "Theodore, the British Empire stands with the United States. That is not in question. However, the nature of this threat requires a proportionate and considered response. An alliance formed on such an extraordinary premise must be built on a foundation of absolute, shared truth. We will need to see this data for ourselves. All of it. The testimony of this Dr. Wu. Your files on Project Prometheus. Everything."
"Done," Roosevelt snapped, the single word a testament to his desperation. "I am ordering my naval intelligence to transmit the entire unredacted Prometheus file to you immediately. I am sharing the greatest secret of my nation because I have no other choice. This dragon's ambition will not stop at the Pacific. This is a threat to the entire civilized world. We form a joint task force now, or we fall alone."
The agreement was made. A secret, unified command. Shared intelligence. Combined resources. On the surface, it was the birth of the most powerful clandestine alliance in history. But Abernathy knew better. It was an alliance born of fear and held together by suspicion.
After the line went dead, the silence in the room was heavy and profound.
"Well?" Balfour asked, turning to his spy chief.
"We proceed as agreed," Abernathy said, his eyes distant. "We form the task force. We accept their intelligence." He paused. "And I will task my best men with two missions. The first will be to analyze the American data. The second, far more discreetly, will be to verify it. We will watch the Chinese, and we will watch the Americans watching the Chinese. Until I have my own proof, I will not commit the full resources of this service to chasing Theodore Roosevelt's phantoms."
Just then, the teletype machine in the corner of the room began to clatter to life. The first pages of the Prometheus file were arriving. Abernathy walked over to it, pulling the sheet of paper from the machine as it printed.
He had been expecting frantic prose, speculative reports, the stuff of panicked field agents. He was not prepared for what he saw. It was cold, hard science. Densely packed equations describing harmonic resonance and energy transference. Geological survey data from the Sunda Strait cross-referenced with atmospheric ion readings from 1883. Spectrographic analysis of blast residue from Pennsylvania, showing molecular bonds that shouldn't exist.
And then, a line from the transcript of Dr. Wu's interrogation: "You are looking for a weapon. You should be looking for a cage. You cannot kill a law of physics."
Abernathy stood frozen, the paper trembling almost imperceptibly in his hand. His professional skepticism, his carefully constructed wall of logical doubt, was being systematically dismantled by the cold, empirical data scrolling out of the machine. He thought of his own reports from Sumatra, of Meng Tian's impossible, bloodless victories. He had dismissed them as exaggerated propaganda.
Now, a far more terrifying possibility presented itself. He had not been lied to. He had simply been told a truth his mind was incapable of accepting. The game was not what he thought it was. It was infinitely larger, infinitely more terrifying, and he had been playing it with a blindfold on. The world had not changed. It had simply revealed its true, monstrous face.