Dr. Chen Linwei's laboratory was a place of deep, simmering frustration. The air hummed with the low-grade energy of dormant electrical equipment and smelled of ozone and hot metal. Her life's work, the culmination of years of brilliant, obsessive research, was laid out before her: complex diagrams, meticulously assembled vacuum tubes, and coils of heavy copper wire. But it was incomplete. A beautiful, perfect engine with no fuel.
She was at an impasse. Her theoretical work on the nature of the Emperor's power was complete, a towering achievement of physics that no one else in the world could even comprehend. But she could not prove it. She could not build the final stage of her "resonance chamber" without the exotic materials and, more pressingly, the operating funds that the increasingly useless American agent, Donovan, was supposed to provide.
A frantic, burning impatience gnawed at her. It was more than just a desire for discovery. It was a terrifying fear of being second. She had read the Imperial Edict establishing the new Institute of Physics. She knew the Emperor, with his impossible, intuitive grasp of science, was on the same path she was. She felt like a runner in a desperate race against a god, and she was terrified he would reach the finish line first, leaving her brilliant theories as nothing more than a historical footnote.
The heavy iron door to her lab burst open, slamming against the brick wall with a deafening clang.
Agent Donovan stumbled in, his face a waxy, pale mask of terror. He was breathless, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and wild. He slammed the door shut and threw the heavy bar across it.
"They have him," he gasped, leaning against the door as if to hold back the entire world. "They have Wu. Shen Ke's men. I saw it. Right outside the bank. They took him."
He pushed himself off the door and staggered toward her, his words tumbling out in a frantic rush. "The money is gone. He'll talk. They'll make him talk. He knows about this lab. He knows about you. We have to go. We have to burn the research and run. Now!"
Dr. Chen stared at him. She heard his words, but she did not feel his panic. Her mind, a machine of pure, cold logic, was already processing the new data, calculating the changed variables. Fear was an inefficient emotion. Running was failure. Her entire life, her legacy, her proof of her own genius, was here in this room. To abandon it was to die a death far worse than any Shen Ke's torturers could devise.
She looked at Donovan, at his trembling hands and his terrified eyes. He was no longer a useful asset. He was a compromised tool, a liability. And then her gaze fell on the heavy satchel he was clutching to his chest like a holy relic.
"What is in the bag, Mr. Donovan?" she demanded, her voice cutting through his panic like a scalpel.
"It's… it's the sample," he stammered. "The uranium salts. I was supposed to deliver it to the dead drop after Wu confirmed the funds were deposited."
Dr. Chen's world snapped into a new, brilliant, and terrifying focus. The money was gone, but the fuel had arrived. The equation had changed. She had the catalyst. In that instant, she made a momentous and utterly reckless decision.
"We are not running," she declared, her voice ringing with a new, fanatical certainty.
Donovan stared at her as if she were mad. "Are you listening to me? They're coming! They could be here in an hour!"
"Then we do not have an hour to waste," she replied, her eyes gleaming. She strode toward the main workbench, her movements now filled with a feverish energy. "We are finishing this. Tonight."
"Finish what?" Donovan said, bewildered. "You said yourself you needed more parts! The beryllium, the graphite…"
"I cannot build the perfect instrument," she interrupted, her hands flying across her equipment, adjusting dials, connecting wires. "The resonance chamber I designed would be a precise and controllable device. A scalpel. But I no longer have time for a scalpel."
She looked at him, her face illuminated by the green glow of a cathode-ray tube, and he saw the abyss of her ambition. "I will have to improvise. A crude apparatus. Unshielded. Imprecise." She gestured around the lab. "It will be dangerous. It may do nothing. It may create a cascade failure that irradiates this entire city block." She gave a thin, chilling smile. "Or, it may just work. In any case, they will not take my research from me."
Donovan realized, with a surge of absolute terror, that she was completely insane. Her pride was so immense, her ambition so absolute, that she would risk a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions rather than admit defeat. He was trapped in a room with a woman about to light a fuse on an atomic bomb, and he was her only accomplice.
"Help me," she commanded, pointing to a heavy power cable. He was frozen for a second, but the fear of what Shen Ke's men would do to him was even greater than his fear of her experiment. Numbly, he obeyed.
She worked with a terrifying, focused grace, her desperation lending her speed and clarity. She jury-rigged her existing equipment, creating a crude parody of the device in her blueprints. At the center of a maze of humming vacuum tubes and copper coils, she placed a simple, thick glass beaker.
She took the lead-lined box from Donovan's nerveless fingers. She opened it and, with a steady hand, poured the dull, yellowish uranium salts into the beaker. The powder settled in a small mound at the bottom.
"The power coupling, Mr. Donovan," she said, her voice eerily calm. "If you would be so kind."
He connected the final, heavy cable, his hands shaking so violently he could barely secure the clamp.
Dr. Chen stood before the monstrous, improvised device. This was it. The culmination. The proof.
"Let's see if we can get the Emperor's attention," she whispered, more to herself than to him.
She reached up and grabbed the handle of a large, ceramic knife switch on the main power board. With a single, decisive movement, she threw it down.
The effect was instantaneous and terrifying.
The lights in the laboratory dimmed dramatically as a massive surge of power was diverted to the apparatus. A deep, deafening, low-frequency hum filled the air, a sound so powerful it vibrated in their bones, shaking the teeth in their skulls. The copper coils began to glow a dull red. The vacuum tubes shone with an intense, otherworldly light.
And in the beaker at the center of it all, the pile of uranium salts began to glow.
It was not a normal glow. It was a sickly, vibrant, and utterly unnatural green light, a color that did not belong in the natural world. It pulsed, seeming to breathe, and with every pulse, the hum grew louder, the vibrations more intense.
Far away, in the deep, quiet sanctum of his private chambers in the Forbidden City, Qin Shi Huang sat in silent meditation. He was practicing his control, trying to calm the turbulent energies within him. Before him on a low table sat a simple porcelain bowl filled with clear, still water. He was focused on holding it perfectly motionless, a simple exercise in discipline.
Suddenly, a lance of pure, unadulterated agony shot through his skull. It was a pain unlike any he had ever known, a psychic shriek that overloaded his senses. He cried out, clutching his head, his vision exploding in a flash of green-tinged static.
On the table before him, the water in the bowl, without any source of heat, violently, instantly, and utterly flashed into a cloud of hissing steam. The tremor had arrived.