Shin Haeryang stared for a few more seconds at the man’s blood-covered face, then answered as if he had no idea.
“Too much happened at the undersea base. I can’t remember right away.”
“……Could the killer who murdered this man be hiding somewhere inside the submersible port?”
“I checked as soon as we came into the submersible port, but there was no one hiding anywhere they could ambush us from.”
No wonder, as soon as he entered the submersible port, he hadn’t gone straight to the corpse but had made a wide circuit of the interior to check it. Had he thought someone might attack from behind while we were distracted by the mining team man’s body?
What kind of life did you have to live to think like that? When he checked the corpse, he did it alone and called us over later. Was there a reason for that? ……There probably was. Don’t tell me someone might hide a booby trap like a bomb on a corpse.
Kim Jaehee pointed with her hand at the footprints made of blood.
“There are several sets of footprints. It looks like there’s more than one killer.”
“……He was attacked by people he knew. He was stabbed in the stomach first, and afterward he tried to defend himself with his arms and hands, but failed.”
Shin Haeryang gestured here and there with his hand in the air above the corpse as he spoke.
“You can see that while one person with a knife was confronting the deceased team leader, a third person attacked this man’s forehead. Judging by the shape of the wound on his forehead, it seems to have been the corner of a pad. From the way the blood spattered, there was also someone holding down the team leader’s defending arm. At least three people attacked him together. There’s a high possibility it was personal resentment toward a superior.”
I decided not to ask how he could tell the wound on his forehead had been made by the corner of a pad. Even if I heard the answer, it didn’t seem like it would be good for my mental health.
Shin Haeryang explained it calmly, as if a mutiny had broken out like a bolt of lightning, but since Shin Haeryang’s position was team leader, even I, who had no relationship with him and nothing to do with it, felt awkward.
While I was mentally conducting a self-inspection on whether I had been a decent coworker to the people around me, Kim Jaehee finally threw a bomb she didn’t have to throw.
“Ah-ha. So while everyone was frantic trying to escape, the team members took care of the team leader they’d never liked?”
Kim Jaehee said it as if something interesting had happened and looked at her own team leader’s face. Shin Haeryang felt Kim Jaehee’s gaze and turned his head from the corpse toward her.
“Do you have a complaint against me?”
“Not particularly.”
Hearing her answer, delivered with a silly grin, I felt the question was unreasonable. Shin Haeryang. You’re a team leader. If a team leader asks that at work, what team member would answer honestly? ……Now that I think about it, Seo Jihyeok or Kang Sujeong might actually say honestly what they didn’t like. After hearing Kim Jaehee’s answer, Shin Haeryang went one step further.
“Is that so? Then what about the other team members who have complaints against me?”
Was he telling her to inform on them? Kim Jaehee answered in an unexpectedly resolute voice.
“That’s something I can’t tell you even if you torture me, Team Leader.”
Hearing that, Shin Haeryang gave a faint laugh. He looked at Kim Jaehee and laughed as if she wasn’t even worth torturing, then immediately asked back.
“Jihyeok or Sanghyeon, right?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Without a shred of loyalty, Kim Jaehee answered at once. At the sight of her mercilessly tattling on colleagues she worked with, I was so dumbfounded all I could do was laugh.
“Sanghyeon in particular looked like he had a ton of complaints about you, Team Leader.”
“What part of me did he say he was dissatisfied with?”
Well. If you lined up everyone who had complaints against Shin Haeryang and made them say just two or three sentences each, a week would probably fly by in this undersea base. I think I’d be standing in that line too. First. In my entire life, after my father and Seo Jihyeok, you’re the third person who’s ever made me feel this hurt. Second. You’re also the first person to increase my workload like this at a job. And so on. It would never end.
“He said he hates everything, from joining this place to your very existence, Team Leader. He said he’s a much more impressive person and shouldn’t be stuck somewhere like this. And he said he feels like you’re watching his every move, so it’s suffocating.”
Shin Haeryang listened to Kim Jaehee’s tattling, nodded, and said,
“With Sanghyeon’s skills, our team is exactly right for him. And it’s not that he feels like I’m watching him. I actually am watching him.”
“Really? Isn’t Sanghyeon going to take a knife to you someday too, Team Leader?”
“He looks like he’s never even held a paring knife. If he’s going to do it, tell him to hurry up before I resign.”
Kim Jaehee quietly looked at the blood-soaked face of the mining team leader, then took a towel from her pocket and wiped his face without much sincerity. When the swollen face, more than half-hidden by bright red blood and hair, was revealed, Kim Jaehee let out an exclamation and said,
“Ah. This is that guy. The one who told his team members not to eat, not to sleep, and to work so he could raise their mining output. He threatened them not to even go to the bathroom and just work, and when a male employee had an accident, he took a picture and publicly posted it on the undersea base bulletin board. I remember him. His name was Raphael something.”
“……Raphael Yannick.”
It seemed Shin Haeryang had also realized who the other man was.
“Why would he do something like that?”
“The mining teams compete over mining output, and I heard the team leader in first place and the team leader in last place can have a difference of more than ten million won in their monthly pay. Since their salaries change depending on how they work their team members, the mining team leaders supposedly go crazy and run wild.”
“Even so, the undersea base system, MARIA, can only recognize eight hours of work time, so they shouldn’t be able to work more than that.”
“They can just work without recording their hours.”
“……”
Kim Jaehee’s answer left me momentarily speechless. It felt like hearing that I’d signed a contract with the company to clock in at 9 a.m., but in reality I had to come in and work from 5 a.m. My mind was going hazy.
“Do the employees not protest?”
Shin Haeryang, who had been examining the corpse, lifted his head and looked toward where the submersibles were positioned as he spoke.
“Most mining team employees are contract workers. The mining team leaders threaten them by saying they won’t renew their contracts, or by pouring personnel-related complaints about those employees into the dispatch companies. He’s gained at least twelve kilograms compared to before and dyed his hair, so I didn’t recognize him, but he’s the team leader who put a turtle into an ROV and drove it.”
Kim Jaehee, who had been listening beside him, silently snapped her fingers.
“I did hear something happened with that turtle story before I joined, but no matter how much I asked, Jihyeok-hyung wouldn’t explain it. He just cursed up a storm.”
“……One of the mining employees found an injured turtle washed up on the shore of Daehan-do, treated it, and raised it in the dormitory. Team Leader Raphael said he was curious what would happen if a turtle rode in an unmanned submersible, so he forced it into a remotely operated vehicle, an ROV.”
Was it even okay to put an animal in an unmanned submersible? If it was an unmanned submersible, it seemed like a place made so people couldn’t ride in it, so surely you weren’t supposed to put an animal in one either.
For an instant, Shin Haeryang’s face looked as if he wanted to bring the dead Raphael back to life just so he could kill him again, but when I flinched and looked again, it was his usual expressionless face.
“The problem is, he piloted that ROV badly and nearly killed two of my team members who were working outside in atmospheric diving suits.”
An ROV must be something like a large underwater drone or underwater car.
“What happened to your team members? Were they all right?”
“Aeyeong sprained her ankle, and Jihyeok fractured his wrist.”
Just from Shin Haeryang’s explanation, I couldn’t tell whether those two had sacrificed themselves to protect the other team members well, or whether those two had simply been unlucky enough to get hurt. What was certain was that as soon as Shin Haeryang returned from work outside the undersea base, he had probably grabbed Team Leader Raphael by the collar first, or thrown a punch first.
“It’s a relief they weren’t hurt too badly. ……Did the turtle survive, by any chance?”
Kim Jaehee answered with a regretful expression.
“Someone made a turtle grave on the artificial hill on Daehan-do.”
Poor turtle. Poor team members. Worried that the engineering team might be just as hellish as the mining team, I asked cautiously.
“Does the engineering side have this kind of performance competition too?”
At my question, Shin Haeryang shook his head slightly.
“There is no performance-related competition on the engineering side.”
“Ohh. That’s a relief. ……Isn’t that how it should be in the first place?”
“I heard they tried to create one before I came, but it was abolished because of protests from the engineers.”
Shin Haeryang turned his gaze toward the place where the submersibles were and said,
“If something like that had existed, this undersea base would have already been gone three years ago because of shoddy repairs.”
Performance competition for maintenance and repairs. Just thinking about it was horrifying. They’d do a patchwork repair, report that it was done, then quickly and sloppily maintain something else too.
No. Wait. If it had been gone back then? Wouldn’t that mean I wouldn’t have had to join this place and repeat such painful days? While I was immersed in that dangerous yet tempting thought, the two of them quickly lost interest in the dead mining team leader.
Shin Haeryang told me that if anything happened, I should shout loudly and call them, then began walking around the spacious submersible port with Kim Jaehee. From far away, the two seemed to be pointing at the manned submersibles one after another and saying something, then discussing the other submersibles again.
All I knew about submersibles was that they were divided into two types, manned and unmanned, and that unmanned submersibles were further divided into two types: unmanned submersibles controlled remotely and unmanned submersibles that moved according to an AI’s judgment. I didn’t know much else. Why were there so many unmanned submersibles under the sea?
The undersea base guidebook had allocated quite a thick section to submersibles, but since I thought I’d never ride one in my life, I had skipped that entire part. I had diligently read the sections on the location of the fresh fruit juice vending machine and the slipper vending machine that was supposedly sold near the beach, but now that I thought about it, regret came crashing over me like waves.
In the ceiling, unmanned submersibles that looked to weigh at least a hundred kilograms were waiting in areas labeled Remotely Operated Vehicle, ROV, and Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, AUV. If one of those flew at me under the sea, I didn’t think I could possibly dodge it.
The submersibles looked as if they were parked in order in a massive parking lot called the submersible port. The two engineers wandering around the manned submersible area in the distance looked as if they couldn’t find anything suitable to ride out to sea in.