In the silent heart of the Forbidden City, the war had become an abstraction. The screams of dying men in the Burmese jungle and the crackle of flames on the Huangpu River were reduced to the clean, emotionless brushstrokes of an aide's report. The Guangxu Emperor stood before a vast naval chart of the South China Sea, a great expanse of blue that, for a century, had been nothing less than a private British lake. He listened, his face as still as a bronze statue, as the aide summarized Shen Ke's latest dispatch from Shanghai.
"...the primary cargo was completely destroyed, Your Majesty. However, the Spymaster confirms the nature of the attack was a diversion. A smaller, specific set of crates containing the chemical precursors were expertly stolen during the chaos. Spymaster Shen Ke is confident that this act, while a material loss, has given him a definitive lead on the traitor's network. He has already begun tightening the net."
A lesser man might have focused on the loss of the priceless German machinery. A lesser man might have raged at the traitor's audacity. The Emperor simply gave a slow, deliberate nod, his gaze never leaving the blue expanse of the map.
"The serpent has taken the bait and revealed its fangs," he said, his voice a low rumble. "Good. The loss of the machines is regrettable, but replaceable. A confirmed trail to the rot within my court is invaluable. Shen Ke will handle the rest." He dismissed the entire, explosive affair with a wave of his hand. It was a problem of sanitation, of exterminating vermin. His mind was already engaged on a far grander battlefield.
For a hundred years, Great Britain had ruled the world not with armies, but with ships. Their power was projected from the steel hulls of their cruisers and battleships, a dominion built on the unshakeable idea that Britannia was the unchallenged master of the seas. An idea, the Emperor knew, was far more powerful than a fleet. And it was this idea he intended to sink first.
He looked at his aide, a young, brilliant scholar who still struggled to comprehend the scale of his master's thinking.
"The British Admiralty believes a fleet is a collection of guns on floating platforms. They measure power in the tonnage of steel and the caliber of cannon. They think in two dimensions: forward and back, left and right. They have forgotten the wisdom of the ancients. They have forgotten Sun Tzu." He reached out, his long finger tracing a path through the main shipping artery that connected the British fortresses of Hong Kong and Singapore. "The greatest victories are not won by meeting strength with strength. They are won where the enemy is not looking, in the space he does not believe is a battlefield."
His finger stopped, tapping on the empty blue of the chart, far from any landmass.
"Today," the Emperor said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, laced with the cold promise of a new age, "we teach them to fear the depths."
The air in Dragon's Tooth Cove tasted of the future. It was a thick, chemical cocktail of sea salt, hot steel, diesel fumes, and the metallic tang of ozone from the charging batteries. Here, in a secret pen carved from the volcanic rock of Hainan Island's coast, the Emperor's abstract strategy was given a brutal, physical form.
Commander Li Jie ran a bare hand along the cold, sweating flank of his vessel. Long Jiao 01. Dragon Shark 01. To a German engineer, she was a clumsy, bastardized hybrid—a coastal torpedo boat's hull crudely encased in a rounded, watertight shell. She was a temperamental, dangerous, and ugly beast. But to Li Jie, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He did not see a clumsy machine; he saw the sharpened tooth of the Imperial Dragon, about to be plunged into the soft underbelly of the British Empire.
He swung himself down the narrow hatch into the submarine's interior, the clang of the metal ringing in the confined space. Down here, the air was already foul, recycled and heavy with the smell of twenty men's sweat and the ever-present film of oil. This was their world, a cramped steel tube barely a hundred and fifty feet long. The claustrophobia was a physical presence, a weight on the chest, a silent promise that the sea, with its crushing, unimaginable pressure, was only a few inches of riveted steel away. A constant, maddening drip of condensation from the curved ceiling onto a hot pipe sizzled, a sound that would become the rhythm of their lives.
Li Jie felt the vibrations of the humming electric motors through the soles of his worn leather boots. His new vessel was alive, and he was learning to feel its pulse, to understand its groans and sighs. His crew, a hand-picked mix of the Qing Navy's bravest and Germany's most experienced, moved about their tasks with a tense, practiced silence.
His mind flashed back to his final briefing a week ago, in this very cove, with the man who had taught him this dark, three-dimensional art of war. Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen, the veteran commander of the German U-boat U-9, had stood with him on the pier, his weathered face grim, his eyes the color of a winter sea.
"She is not a beauty, this boat of yours," Weddigen had said in his gruff, heavily accented Mandarin, gesturing at the Long Jiao with the stump of his cigar. "She is a pig. She will leak, she will groan, and given half a chance, she will try to kill you and your entire crew. Her engines are weak, her dive planes are slow. Do not ask her to be a thoroughbred."
Weddigen had taken a step closer, his gaze intense. "But her teeth," he had growled, tapping his finger on the forward torpedo tube hatches, "her teeth are pure German steel. G/7 torpedoes. They do not miss if you do your job. Trust the torpedoes. Trust your calculations. And when the numbers fail you and the sea is trying to crush you, trust your gut. The sea does not reward hesitation, Li Jie. It rewards the man who strikes first."
Li Jie had nodded, his heart a cold, tight knot of determination. He would not hesitate. For a century, his country had hesitated, had bowed, had negotiated. No more.
He moved to the small, impossibly cramped control room, the nerve center of the steel shark. "Stations," he said, his voice calm and clear. "Prepare to cast off."
The orders came in a clipped, efficient mixture of two languages, a testament to the strange alliance that had birthed this mission.
"Leinen los!" the German chief engineer called out.
"Vent forward ballast tanks! All ahead slow!" Li Jie commanded.
With a low thrum, the Long Jiao 01 began to move, sliding out of its hidden pen into the pre-dawn gloom of the cove. Li Jie climbed the short ladder into the conning tower, the damp sea air a welcome relief on his face. He watched as they cleared the cove's narrow entrance, the black, volcanic rocks slipping past them. He looked back once at the hazy, mountainous coastline of Hainan, the last piece of the Empire he would see for what felt like a lifetime. A profound weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders, but beneath it was a fierce, burning exhilaration. He was not merely a ship's captain. He was the tip of a spear forged in the Emperor's fire, about to deliver a wound from which the world's greatest power might never recover.
They reached the open sea as the first hint of grey lightened the eastern horizon. The diesel engines roared to life, pushing them out into the deeper, international waters. They ran on the surface for an hour, gulping in the last of the fresh air. Then, Li Jie gave the order he had practiced in his mind a thousand times.
"Clear the bridge! Prepare to dive!"
He took one last look at the empty expanse of the sea, then dropped down into the control room, sealing the heavy hatch above him with a solid, final clang.
"Alarm!" he commanded. "Tauchen!"
The jarring, metallic bleat of the klaxon horn filled the tiny submarine, a sound that signaled their transition from one world to another. The deck canted sharply forward, and with a great hiss of venting air and churning water, the Long Jiao 01 slid beneath the waves, leaving nothing on the surface but a vanishing swirl of foam.
Down below, in the dim, perpetual twilight of the control room, illuminated by the red glow of the instrument panels, Li Jie stepped up to the periscope. He gripped the cold brass handles, a silent prayer on his lips, and raised the eyepiece. His world, and the world of the British Empire, was now reduced to the small, shimmering circle of light in his lens.
The hunt had begun.