The Oval Office at night was a sanctuary of contained, restless energy. A fire crackled in the grand hearth, its flickering light glinting off the glass eyes of a dozen hunting trophies mounted on the walls—the heads of bison, elk, and a formidable grizzly bear stared down with silent, glassy intensity. The room was a perfect reflection of its occupant: a space of immense power, crammed with books on history and nature, artifacts from faraway lands, and the lingering scent of cigar smoke and intellectual vigor. It was a room that felt too small for the man who inhabited it.
President Theodore Roosevelt sat in a large leather armchair, not behind his desk, but close to the fire, the orange light illuminating his spectacles and his famous, bristling mustache. He was not reading a bill or a domestic policy report. He was reading the file delivered to him, under a seal of the utmost secrecy, by his Secretary of State. It was the collection of British telegrams, reconnaissance reports, and survivor testimonies. It was a tale of madness.
He read with a fierce, consuming concentration, his mind, a unique and potent blend of Harvard intellectual, Dakota cowboy, and born warrior, processing the impossible information. He read of the British cruiser, the HMS Psyche, sunk in the open ocean by a phantom attacker. He read the technical analysis speculating about an advanced, German-designed submarine. His grip on the papers tightened. The Kaiser, that strutting, vainglorious peacock, was playing with fire, upsetting the delicate balance of naval power. Roosevelt, the father of the Great White Fleet, took that as a personal affront.
Then he moved on to the reports from Burma. He read the account of the geological "erasure" of a mountain fortress. He read the raw, terrified testimony of the scouts, with their talk of a "second sun" and a silent, grey wave of "unmaking." He did not dismiss it as hysteria, as the British cabinet had first tried to do. His mind, steeped in the grand, sweeping narratives of history and saga, was more open to the possibility of great, world-altering leaps. He did not think of it as sorcery. He thought of it as a new, terrible form of physics, a weapon that had jumped a hundred years of scientific progress in a single, terrifying bound.
He put the papers down and stared into the fire, his mind racing. He was not a man who thought in the cautious, timid terms of neutrality and isolationism. He thought in terms of power, of national destiny, of America's proper place in the grand, brutal arena of the world. He saw the globe as a chessboard, and a new, terrifyingly powerful piece had just been slammed down onto the board.
His mind conjured historical parallels, and found them all wanting. Genghis Khan? Attila the Hun? Alexander the Great? They were conquerors, men who had mastered the art of war as it existed in their time. This Qing Emperor, this reborn Qin Shi Huang, was something else entirely. He was not conquering the world; he was breaking it. He was not playing by the established rules of imperial power; he was burning the rulebook and scattering its ashes.
And this world-breaker was in a full, ironclad alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm II, a man Roosevelt knew and privately despised as a volatile, insecure braggart who dreamed of glory but lacked the temperament for true greatness. The thought of the Kaiser, with his withered arm and booming insecurities, having access to this kind of power, or even just basking in its reflected glory, was a vision of global chaos. A world dominated by two ruthless, expansionist autocrats, one armed with a god-weapon and the other with the industrial might of Germany, was not a world in which the American experiment could safely flourish. It was a world that would eventually, inevitably, come for them.
He would not wait for that. Theodore Roosevelt was not a man who waited for history to happen to him. He was a man who grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and bent it to his will.
He stood, his restless energy too great to be contained by a chair, and began to pace before the fire. He saw the future with a sudden, startling clarity. He saw the British Empire, for all its pompous flaws and arrogant injustices, as a known quantity. It was a tired, old lion, but it was a lion that understood the rules of the game. This new Berlin-Beijing axis was a pair of young, hungry tigers, and they recognized no rules at all.
He jabbed a button on his desk. "Get me Secretary Hay," he barked at the aide who answered. "Now."
When his Secretary of State arrived minutes later, he found the President standing before a large globe, spinning it slowly with one finger. Roosevelt did not greet him. He simply stabbed a finger at the British Isles.
"We have two choices, John," Roosevelt began, his voice a low, passionate rumble, filled with the almost joyful intensity of a man who has finally found a challenge worthy of his spirit. "We can sit on our hands in our own hemisphere, hiding behind our oceans, and watch as the British Empire is dismantled by a sorcerer and a madman. We can watch as the Royal Navy, the shield that has inadvertently protected our own Atlantic trade for a century, is sunk by phantom submarines. We can wait for them to finish their meal, and then, fat and powerful, turn their hungry eyes on us. That is one choice."
He spun the globe, his finger tracing a path across the Pacific.
"Or," he continued, his voice rising, "we can act. We can choose a side in this fight for the future of the planet. And while I have no great love for the King of England and his red-coated empire, I'll be damned if I allow the twentieth century to be inherited by the Kaiser and a reborn Dragon Emperor who thinks he's God Almighty."
Secretary Hay, the cautious diplomat, raised the obvious objection. "But Mr. President, the people… Congress… they will never approve a declaration of war to save the British Empire. The anti-imperialist sentiment is too strong. They will see it as pulling Britain's chestnuts out of the fire."
A fierce, predatory grin spread across Roosevelt's face, a look that made him resemble the grizzly bear on his wall. "You are absolutely right, John. They won't."
He stopped the globe, his hand resting possessively on the North American continent.
"This will not be a war to save the British Empire," he declared, his eyes gleaming with a visionary fire. "This will be a war to replace it. This is America's moment. The old powers of Europe and Asia are about to bleed each other white, to exhaust themselves in a final, cataclysmic struggle. When the dust settles, the world will be left in chaos. It will need a new policeman. A new guardian to maintain order. A new, stronger, and more just power to guide it. And we, John, will be ready to answer that call."
The decision was made. The great, slumbering industrial giant of America was stirring. A rapid, secret montage of events was set in motion by the sheer force of the President's will. Encrypted telegraphs began flying between Washington and London, no longer discussing pleas, but terms of alliance. The US Navy's Great White Fleet, then on a global tour to showcase American power, was given secret new orders to change its heading. Captains of industry—Carnegie, Schwab, Rockefeller—were summoned to the White House for clandestine meetings, not about trusts, but about converting their factories for wartime production.
In the Forbidden City, Qin Shi Huang was slowly recovering. The profound, soul-deep exhaustion was receding, replaced by the familiar, cold fire of his ambition. An aide entered the Hall of Mental Cultivation, his face grim, and handed the Emperor a single, decoded intelligence report from their spy network in Washington.
It was short, and to the point. The American President, Theodore Roosevelt, had bypassed his Congress and signed a series of executive orders. The first authorized an immediate and massive "lend-lease" program of military aid—steel, oil, weapons—to Great Britain. The first convoys were already being prepared in the shipyards of Norfolk and Philadelphia. The second, more alarming order, had redirected the American Pacific Fleet. The sixteen battleships of the Great White Fleet had left their last port of call in California and were now steaming west, across the Pacific, under sealed orders.
Qin Shi Huang read the report. A long, slow, genuine smile—the first true smile of predatory delight he had shown in months—spread across his face. The final, powerful piece had, at last, entered the board.
"Good," he said, his voice a rasp, but strong and clear. "The final decadent power of the West reveals itself. They seek to prop up a dying empire with the wealth of a new one. Let them come."
He looked at the map, his eyes tracing the vast, empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
"We will give them a tomb."