The driver of the cart said, “Admiral, I am Lieutenant Ping Hai. It is an honor to escort you.” He said it slowly, as if he had memorized it.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Wang. “But I’d prefer to walk. All I’ve done is sit for the past eighteen hours.”

“Sir?” said Ping, confused by the admiral going off the planned script. “Walking here is very difficult.”

“Why don’t we give it a try?” said Wang.

Wang started following the luminescent markers at the edge of the four-lane road that curved gently downward. After he’d walked ten paces, the cart pulled alongside, its electric engine faintly humming. With the cart his sole command responsibility, the young officer apparently could not fathom leaving it behind. The admiral glared at the expectant lieutenant, who interpreted the look as a green light to begin chattering.

“Admiral, I read your ‘Third Island Chain’ essay with great interest last year,” said Ping. “It was very bold. Visionary. I did not find it controversial at all.”

Wang felt his desire for silence grow with every step. But he knew the nervous lieutenant would keep talking no matter his response.

“A welcome assessment,” said Wang. If anyone ever needed a reason for why the Directorate had ended the one-child policy, this lieutenant was it, thought Wang. The young officer prattled on. His accent was at first difficult to place, but the more he talked, the more his country roots showed. Hubei Province. Was sending this idiot chaperone a message? Why was Wang’s own aide kept aboveground while a fool like this was allowed to take him to the Directorate’s inner sanctum?

“Just stop,” said Wang. “I will get into the cart. You are right, there is no time to waste.”

The lighting brightened to daylight levels as the electric cart entered a waiting elevator that could have swallowed two fighter jets.

“Admiral, our journey ends here,” said Ping, capping a rambling disquisition on his strategic vision for force dispositions along the northern border.

“Thank you,” said Wang. “You have given me much to think about. And for that, you deserve this.”

The young officer took the challenge coin Wang had gotten from the U.S. chief of naval operations with reverence. He was, at last, speechless.

Wang remembered an old adage: In wartime, even idiots can be useful.

Wang discreetly allowed himself a single stim tab as he exited the elevator. He normally avoided taking such performance modifiers, knowing how they also tricked one’s emotions. But the flight had left him exhausted, and he knew he needed to be as sharp as possible.

The quartet of naval commandos escorting him were assaulters, big-shouldered beasts in their signature formfitting blast-resistant uniforms. Their liquid body armor’s exterior looked as if it were made from sharkskin. He took their presence as a positive, a reassuring sign the navy’s influence remained strong here.

At the entry to the large briefing room, Wang began his scan, just as he would study the horizon for threats while on a ship’s bridge. He saw Admiral Lin Boqiang with a cluster of other senior naval officers. Lin, the overall commander of the fleet, was among the most influential in the Presidium, the Directorate’s joint civilian and military leadership council. At the other side of the room, a cluster of army officers stood around General Wei Ming, the land forces commander. The two services rarely interacted, even in meetings. To Wang, though, the difference was simple. Wei and the army had the numbers in China, but as part of a force that dealt with distance, Wang and his fellow navy officers understood politics and power better.

More notable was the number of civilian suits in the military command room. The Presidium members rarely met in person, the civilian and military sides protective of their respective turf. The original deal had been hastily hammered out in a hotel conference room during the Shanghai riots, but it had held firm since, each faction having autarchy to run its own economic and security spheres to maximum efficiency, with a mutual goal of growth with stability.

Admiral Lin approached and greeted Wang with a haphazard salute that had not changed since their academy days.

“I must apologize for cutting your trip short, but you can now see that this is the general meeting you have long sought.”

“Yes, when I was first summoned, I thought I might come down here and never be seen again, like our friend General Feng,” said Wang, speaking every word with a purpose, mentioning the executed officer to test the waters.

“While Feng’s diversions were lamentable,” Lin observed, “the goal of your operation to destabilize the south was met. But now, the Presidium needs to hear your larger message. Your views have been most persuasive inside our service, but the civilians need to hear from you now.” He turned away from Wang and motioned to an aide to dim the lights, the signal for the meeting to begin. The Presidium members took their seats at a U-shaped table made from black marble.

The introduction was brief, focusing on Wang’s key role in reorganizing the Directorate’s command structure, clearly an attempt to establish his trustworthiness for the civilians. Wang knew that his efficiency at purging the old PLA’s Communist Party apparatchiks in the General Political Department was what had gotten him to this position, but he wished Lin had highlighted his reputation as a leading thinker and a capable naval commander as well.

“I am an admiral, as you know,” Wang said, “but today I would like to begin with a quote from a general: ‘On terrain from which there is no way out, take the battle to the enemy.’

“That is from Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, written just before the Warring States period of our history. I first used that wisdom as a young man almost twenty-five hundred years after it was written, citing it in my thesis on Master Sun’s texts at what used to be called PLA National Defense University.”

The reminder of their ancient and recent past was another deliberate choice to set the scene for where he wanted to take them next.

Wang pulled an imaginary trigger with his right pointer finger, and the smart-ring on it transmitted a wireless signal that initiated the presentation visuals his aide had sent ahead. Behind him, a 3-D hologram map of the Pacific appeared. Glowing red lines moved across the map, marking the history of China’s trade routes and military reach through the millennia. The lines moved out and then back in. Toward the end, a blue arc appeared, showing the spread of U.S. trade routes and military bases over the past two centuries. Eventually the blue lines reached across the globe. Then, as the decades closed in on the present, the red lines pushed back out, crossing with the blue. Wang didn’t need to explain this graphic; everyone knew its import.

“I began with Master Sun’s ancient wisdom to remind us that while we all would like to think that we have regained our historic greatness, in reality we face a situation in which there is ‘no way out.’ Indeed, the Americans had an apt phrase to describe a situation like ours, where your strength grows but your options become ever more limited: Manifest Destiny.

“Destiny drives you forward but ties your hands, for them, as for us. Indeed, their own great naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan foretold how their rise to great power gave them no choice. As their economy and then their military began to grow to world status, he told his people that, whether they liked it or not, ‘Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.’

“Must. Demands. These are words of power, but also responsibility. We now must face the demands that shape our own destiny. The Americans’ destiny led them to seek land, then trade, then oil, but they refuse to understand that the new demands of the age are now upon us as well. Even though they no longer need the foreign energy resources they once reached out and grasped, we must still endure their interference in our interests in Transjordan, Venezuela, Sudan, the Emirates, and the former Indonesia.