The White House Cabinet Room, usually a place of boisterous debate and confident, forward-looking energy, had taken on the somber, hushed atmosphere of a funeral parlor. The men seated around the great table were the architects of America's rise, captains of industry and titans of politics, but today their faces were ashen, their postures slumped with the incomprehensible weight of a national trauma.
President Theodore Roosevelt sat at the head of the table, a statue of impotent fury. The boundless, restless energy that defined him, the force of nature that had charged up San Juan Hill and busted corporate trusts, was gone. It had been replaced by a cold, black, and burning rage, a rage made all the more terrible because it had no target, no enemy he could see and fight and break.
At the far end of the room, a young naval admiral, a survivor plucked from the sea, was giving his testimony. He was the commander of a destroyer squadron that had been on the outermost edge of the fleet, far enough away to escape the weapon's primary effect but close enough to bear witness. His face was pale, his hands shook uncontrollably, and his voice was a hollow, haunted monotone, as if he were recounting a nightmare from which he would never awaken.
"…there was no sound, Mr. President. That was the most terrible part. No explosion. Just the light… a false sun… and then a grey… a grey silence. The flagship, the Connecticut, the Vermont, the New Jersey… all of them… sixteen battleships… they just… came apart. Like sandcastles in the tide. One moment they were there, the pride of the nation. The next, just… dust. A cloud of dust on the water."
Roosevelt listened, his knuckles white where he gripped the arms of his chair. He was deep inside his own mind, a place of torment he had never before experienced. His life had been a testament to the power of the human will, of courage, of what he called the "strenuous life." He had believed that any challenge could be overcome with sufficient grit and force. But how could will and force prevail against this? He had sent the best and bravest of his nation's sailors, armed with the mightiest machines ever built by human hands, into a supernatural slaughterhouse. He, Theodore Roosevelt, who had dreamed of leading America to its rightful place as the world's policeman, had instead led its sons to a mystical execution. He felt a profound, burning shame that was almost worse than the grief. He had underestimated his enemy on a civilizational scale, and the price had been paid in the lives of twenty thousand men.
He looked around the table at the faces of his cabinet. He saw not strength, but shock and fear. The industrial might, the economic power, the sheer, boundless optimism of America had been broken against an impossible, alien rock.
His Secretary of State, John Hay, finally broke the horrified silence. His voice was weary, defeated. "Mr. President," he said, his gaze fixed on a knot in the wooden table before him. "We have received… communiques. From our embassies in London and Paris. The British and French governments… they are no longer asking for an expansion of our alliance." He took a deep, shaky breath. "They are asking us to join them in suing for a global armistice. A ceasefire. They want to open immediate negotiations with the Qing Emperor."
Roosevelt's head snapped up, the cold rage in his eyes flaring into a hot, blazing fire. He slammed his fist down on the polished mahogany of the table, the sound a thunderclap in the funereal quiet.
"Negotiate?!" he roared, his voice a force of nature that made the windows rattle. "Negotiate with what?! We have no battle fleet left in the entire Pacific Ocean! The British have no army left in India! The man in Beijing holds a weapon that can erase fleets and mountains from the face of the Earth, and they want to negotiate?!" He rose to his feet, pacing like a caged lion. "What kind of negotiation is that but unconditional surrender?! To crawl on our bellies and beg for terms from a tyrant who has just demonstrated the power of a vengeful god? Never! Not while I am President!"
But even as he spoke the powerful, defiant words, the cold, pragmatic part of his mind knew the truth. What was the alternative? To send another fleet to be turned to dust? To wait until that terrible, silent weapon was turned on San Francisco, or Honolulu, or the Panama Canal? For the first time in his life, Theodore Roosevelt, the ultimate man of action, was paralyzed. To continue the fight was to invite the potential annihilation of his own cities. To surrender was to betray the very soul of the nation he had sworn to lead. He was trapped.
He waved a dismissive hand at Hay. "Send a non-committal reply. Tell them we are… considering all options. Buy me time." But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that time was the one thing he no longer had.
The news of the annihilation of the Great White Fleet rippled out across the world, a shockwave of terror that shattered the last vestiges of Western resolve. The world, which had been teetering on the brink of a new kind of world war, simply… stopped.
In London, the House of Commons erupted into chaos. The carefully managed facade of wartime unity crumbled. The opposition, horrified by the loss of the American fleet and the cascading disasters in Asia, smelled blood in the water. Cries for Prime Minister Balfour's resignation echoed in the chamber. The calls for a negotiated peace, once the whispers of a radical fringe, were now a thunderous roar. Why sacrifice another British life, another British pound, to defend an empire that was already lost? The will of the world's greatest empire to fight had been broken not by an army, but by a single, incomprehensible telegram.
In Paris, the mood was one of quiet, terrified pragmatism. The grand, bloody offensive into Alsace-Lorraine, the one that was supposed to bleed Germany and save the world, was quietly and indefinitely postponed in a closed-door session of the military high command. The generals, who had been prepared to sacrifice a generation of Frenchmen for the sake of the alliance, were not prepared to do so for a lost cause. France would not immolate itself on the altar of a war that had already been won by a madman in Beijing. The French army would dig in, strengthen its fortifications, and pray the storm in the east never turned its gaze west.
In St. Petersburg, in the gilded halls of the Winter Palace, the news was received with a strange, almost fatalistic calm. The Tsar, his Siberian armies already annihilated and his nation teetering on the brink of revolution, saw the hand of God in the news. This was a divine judgment on the hubris of the Western powers. Through the neutral Swiss embassy in Beijing, a secret peace feeler was dispatched. Russia would cede all of its territories east of the Urals. It would recognize the Qing Emperor's dominion over all of Asia. It asked for nothing in return but peace. The Russian bear was not merely retreating; it was offering its own paw to be amputated in exchange for its life.
And in Berlin, the Kaiser was in a state of manic, terrifying glee. He saw the destruction of the American and British navies not as a terrifying escalation, but as a personal vindication. The "Anglo-Saxon naval tyranny," the thing he had railed against his entire life, was over, shattered by his brilliant, ruthless ally. He strode through his palaces, declaring to his generals and ministers that their moment had come. With Russia broken, Britain paralyzed, and America crippled, the continent of Europe was ripe for the taking. He gave the order to begin preparations for an immediate, all-out assault on the wavering French lines. The alliance of convenience with the Dragon Emperor was, in his mind, now a partnership for total global domination.
The world held its breath. The alliance of the doomed had crumbled into a panicked, every-man-for-himself rout. The great powers of the West, which had dominated the planet for four centuries through a combination of technological superiority and unshakeable self-confidence, had been defeated. Their technology was irrelevant, and their confidence was shattered. A great, terrifying silence fell over the chancelleries of Europe and the halls of Washington.
The path to global dominion for the reborn First Emperor was, for the first time, completely and utterly clear. There was no one left to stand in his way.