The air in the control room of the Long Jiao 01 was thick enough to drink, heavy with the exhaled tension of twenty men balanced on the knife-edge of history. Every sound had ceased. The soft hum of the motors, the creak of the hull, even the frantic beating of their own hearts seemed to have been swallowed by a profound, expectant silence. All that existed was the moment, and the voice of their commander.
Li Jie stood before the tactical plot, his eyes closed for a single, fleeting second. He saw the cruiser in his mind, steaming placidly on its course. He saw the invisible tracks of the torpedoes converging on its hull. He saw the numbers, the angles, the culmination of all his training. He opened his eyes. They were cold, clear, and devoid of all doubt.
He raised his voice, and it cut through the silence like a blade. "Rohr eins… Feuer!"
A crewman slammed his fist onto a large, red button. A deep, resonant WHOOSH of high-pressure air echoed through the submarine, and the entire vessel shuddered, a palpable jolt as the first one-ton torpedo was violently ejected from its tube. The boat listed for a moment before the trim pumps whined, correcting the imbalance.
"Rohr zwei… Feuer!" Li Jie commanded, his voice overlapping the sound of the first launch.
The second shudder came, identical to the first. The dragon had spat its teeth.
Now, they were blind. Now, they were helpless. Their fate, their mission, their very lives were now in the hands of the intricate clockwork mechanisms of the two G/7 torpedoes, speeding away from them at forty knots. The sonar operator, a young man with headphones pressed so tightly to his ears his knuckles were white, leaned forward, his body rigid. He was the only one who could hear them now, the faint, high-pitched whine of their tiny propellers.
Sixty seconds to impact.
Li Jie stood motionless, his hands gripping the back of a steel chart table. He did not look at the chronometer. He counted the seconds in his own head, a slow, deliberate cadence. One… two… three… The silence in the control room was no longer expectant. It was unbearable. It was a physical weight, pressing down on them even more than the tons of water above.
Twenty-four… twenty-five… The young sailor, Chen, was staring at the depth gauge, his lips moving in a silent prayer. Klaus, the German torpedo master, had a strange, almost serene look on his face, the expression of a craftsman waiting for his masterpiece to be unveiled.
Forty-one… forty-two… Li Jie could feel the sweat trickling down his back, cold and clammy. Had his calculations been correct? Had he accounted for the cross-current? Had the British ship changed its speed by even a single knot? A dozen variables, a thousand things that could go wrong, screamed through his mind.
Sixty-two… sixty-three…
A dull, distant BOOM came first. It was not a sound, but a concussion, a heavy, solid blow that traveled through the water and struck the hull of the submarine like a giant's fist. It threw men against bulkheads and sent loose equipment clattering to the deck.
It was a hit.
Before the first, ragged cheer could even begin, a second, far more powerful blast followed. This one was sharp, violent, and catastrophic. It was the sound of a warship's magazine exploding, a sound of immense, foundational violence. The shockwave slammed into them again, harder this time, and the submarine's single incandescent bulb flickered and died, plunging them into absolute darkness, save for the hellish red glow of the instruments.
The darkness was broken by a single, wild, exultant roar. It was a primal, triumphant sound, a release of unbearable tension that had been building for days, for weeks, for a century. The voices of Qing sailors and German specialists, men from opposite ends of the earth, rose as one, echoing in the cramped steel tube. They were no longer just a crew. They were giantslayers.
On the bridge of His Majesty's Ship Psyche, Captain Alistair Weatherby was enjoying his mid-morning cup of tea. It was a ritual he cherished, a small bastion of civilized English order in the vast, monotonous emptiness of the sea. The weather was perfect, the water a placid sheet of sapphire blue. He was remarking to his first officer on the surprising lack of merchant traffic when a shout from the lookout shattered the tranquility.
"Wakes! Wakes to starboard!" The lookout's voice was high and thin, cracking with a terror and confusion that no one on the bridge had ever heard from a seasoned Royal Navy sailor.
Captain Weatherby and his officers rushed to the starboard railing, their teacups rattling in their saucers. They followed the lookout's frantically pointing finger. There, churning through the blue water, were two impossible, parallel white streaks of foam, moving with an unnatural, predatory speed, aimed directly at the heart of their ship.
For a fatal, frozen second, their minds refused to process the image. It was alien. A freak wave? A strange species of dolphin? The very concept of an underwater attack, here, in the placid waters of their own imperial lake, was so ludicrous, so utterly beyond the realm of possibility, that their brains simply could not form the word.
Torpedoes.
The realization dawned in Weatherby's mind with the force of a physical blow, a moment of pure, ice-cold horror. He opened his mouth to scream the order—"Hard to port! All engines full astern!"—but the words never left his throat.
The world dissolved into fire and a deafening, sky-splitting roar. The first torpedo slammed into the hull just below the bridge, in the unarmored section housing the forward boiler rooms. The deck buckled beneath Weatherby's feet, throwing him into the air like a child's toy. He had a fleeting, surreal impression of the ship's mast folding in on itself, of a column of water and twisted steel erupting a hundred feet into the sky.
The second impact was not an explosion. It was an ending. The torpedo struck farther aft, its warhead ripping through the thin hull and detonating inside the ship's main fuel bunkers and aft magazine. The resulting blast was apocalyptic. The HMS Psyche, a proud vessel of the King's Navy, was torn nearly in two, its steel spine snapped with a sound that was heard for miles. Captain Weatherby's last sensation was of an all-consuming, incandescent heat, and then, nothing at all.
Li Jie was already at the periscope, his hands gripping the handles so tightly his knuckles were white. The triumphant cheering of his crew was a distant, meaningless buzz in his ears. He had to see. He had to bear witness.
He raised the lens just above the churning surface of the sea, and his breath caught in his throat. The HMS Psyche was a dying animal, a horrifying spectacle of fire and ruin. She was listing heavily, wreathed in a shroud of black, oily smoke and brilliant orange flames. Her bow was already gone, slipped beneath the waves. He could see the tiny, desperate figures of men—some on fire—leaping from her canted, burning decks into the sea.
Her death was astonishingly swift, a testament to the catastrophic violence of the attack. Within three minutes of the first impact, it was over. The stern of the once-proud cruiser rose high into the air, her propellers glinting for a final, forlorn moment in the sunlight, before she slid backwards into the depths with a great, final sigh of escaping air.
She left behind nothing but a great, spreading stain of black oil on the blue water, a smattering of wreckage, and a few dozen desperate, struggling survivors.
Li Jie slowly, mechanically, lowered the periscope, the sounds of his celebrating crew slowly filtering back into his consciousness. There was no joy in his heart. There was no triumph. There was only a cold, profound, and terrible sense of finality. He had become a new kind of warrior, an unseen executioner who dealt death from a realm his enemies did not even know existed. He had just proven that the largest, most powerful navy in the world could be bled to death, one ship at a time, by a thousand invisible cuts.
He turned to his crew, his face a grim, unreadable mask.
"Dive," he ordered, his voice quiet but carrying the absolute weight of command. "Dive deep. Rig for silent running. Set course for home."
Days later, in the Emperor's study, an aide entered, his face pale, his hands trembling slightly as he held a single, decoded message. He read it aloud, his voice hushed with a reverence usually reserved for prayer.
"Target engaged and destroyed. British light cruiser confirmed sunk. Long Jiao 01 returning to base. Signed, Commander Li Jie."
The Emperor showed no emotion. There was no smile of triumph, no celebratory gesture. There was only a quiet, deep, and chilling satisfaction in his eyes. It was the look of a master architect watching a keystone slot perfectly into place.
He picked up a brush dipped in rich, crimson ink. He turned to the vast naval chart on the wall, the one that showed the South China Sea as an unbroken expanse of British blue. With a single, steady, deliberate stroke, he drew a thin red line through the main shipping lane connecting Hong Kong to Singapore. A new line on the map. A wound that would never heal.
He set the brush down, the silence in the room absolute. He looked at his aide, whose face was a mixture of terror and awe. The Emperor's voice was calm, the voice of a man ordering more ink for his study, but his words were the heralds of a new age of terror on the high seas.
"Send a message to our German partners," the Emperor said. "Their design is… adequate."
He paused, letting the word hang in the air for a moment.
"Tell them to send us five more."