Only after my additional explanation had rambled on incoherently did Kim Jae-hui nod. Judging by her expression, it seemed Kim Jae-hui had finally understood what I was saying.
“Ah. You feel guilty toward Cheloni, who sacrificed itself for us, so that’s why you’re thinking that way? Hmm. We have two of the Engineer Korean Team’s top handsome men right here, and you showed no interest in them. Yet you give your heart to a faceless hunk of metal made of numbers that merely did what it was supposed to do. You’re rather cold-hearted, and… frightening, really.”
…It seemed we were not understanding each other at all. I was sure Kim Jae-hui and I were speaking the same language. Kim Jae-hui said something even more frightening.
“If I’d been in the place of that tin can that got torn off, would you have cared more about me?”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
Shin Haeryang said to Kim Jae-hui, who was fooling around.
“If you have time to spout nonsense, help bring the submersible up.”
Kim Jae-hui sighed and looked at her team leader as if he were a monkey trying to dam a river with a leaf, then said,
“Team Leader, you don’t know what’s important. The submersible arriving at the Second Undersea Base isn’t that important.”
“It is to me. Do you want to die here?”
What was Kim Jae-hui talking about while the submersible was sinking right now?
“It’s important to me too! Are you not going to escape from the submersible?”
Kim Jae-hui shrugged and said,
“I’m suddenly brimming with motivation. Team Leader. What should I help with?”
“Reboot the ballast control system and keep checking the air concentration… When we get out of here, come see me later.”
“I’m going to live in this submersible now.”
Even as Kim Jae-hui ran her mouth, her hands were pressing buttons and working various devices, and she seemed to be faithfully carrying out what Shin Haeryang had ordered.
“Have you ever hit a team member?”
I had seen Shin Haeryang get smacked on the back by his team members, but I had never once seen Shin Haeryang lay a hand on them.
“Not yet, but I think today will be the day.”
“Savior. Are you perhaps worried I might be hit by Team Leader Shin?”
“No. I’m worried the submersible will sink while the captain and the deputy captain are fighting.”
Operating the submersible manually looked, from a third party’s point of view, like an extremely troublesome and finicky task. With Cheloni gone, they had to check the screen themselves to see how many meters we had reached, and the captain and deputy captain had to personally check the temperature, the pressure inside the pressure-resistant habitation area, the state of the hydraulic equipment, and so on—things that had previously been handled automatically. The engineers began to grow busy.
My modest plan to learn how to operate the submersible by watching over their shoulders and then run far, far away from this undersea base was quickly abandoned. Without the AI installed in the submersible, there was no way I could have gotten up this far alone. And I had the feeling that some computerized measures had been put in place so that a layman like me couldn’t easily hijack a submersible. If not, dozens of submersibles would already have been sold all over the world by the engineers of the North Pacific Undersea Base.
“You said earlier that the ballast tank was broken. What kind of device is that?”
“When the ballast tank fills with seawater, the submersible descends, and when the seawater is emptied, the submersible rises. At the Second Undersea Base—”
The instant another thud sounded, everyone fell to the floor at once. Water sprayed all over my face as I fell, and I wondered what was happening. When I raised my head and looked, there was a hole the size of a human head in the floor at the corner of the submersible. And through it, seawater began gushing in.
Why was there a hole in the floor of the submersible? Goosebumps rose over the back of my neck, and a chill ran down my spine. Water surged up as if being blasted out by a pump. It was truly terrifying to watch water occupy the spot where I had just been sitting. Even after seeing this, Shin Haeryang spoke in a calm voice.
“It seems the submersible that had the accident earlier made a similar choice to ours. And while entering the Second Undersea Base’s submersible port at a similar speed and by a similar method, it attacked our submersible and damaged the bottom of the hull.”
Could a person stay calm when water was coming in through the floor of the submersible? Yes. If Kim Jae-hui or Shin Haeryang, instead of me, had screamed that we were all going to die and started crying, I would have trembled and cried along with them.
Beside me, Kim Jae-hui was saying things like how getting wet was annoying, and Shin Haeryang was reciting the explanation that there was a hole in the vessel so emotionlessly that I, too, had no choice but to act rationally.
“But the submersible port is right in front of us, isn’t it? Ah. Is that why this accident happened?”
“Fortunately, the hole is in the floor.”
It was fortunate that there were two people more positive than me in this situation. I had been thinking, So this is how I die. Since all three of us here were probably already thinking that it would have been best if the submersible hadn’t gotten a hole in it, I asked something else.
“It’s fortunate that there’s a hole in the floor?”
I asked in a daze while looking at the water that had already risen to my ankles, and Shin Haeryang answered without taking his hands off the controls.
“If the ceiling had been punctured when we first collided, we would all already be dead.”
If there was a hole in the floor of the submersible, did that mean we would die slowly?
“If it had been the ceiling, the air would have escaped upward quickly, and the entire submersible would have filled with water. But since the hole is in the floor, the air inside the submersible won’t escape and will remain inside. It’s similar to turning a glass cup upside down and putting it underwater; even underwater, air gathers inside the cup. Seawater will come in until the external water pressure and the air pressure inside the submersible equalize, and then it will stop.”
I see. We were dying slowly. What a comfort.
“So seawater will come into the submersible, but since there’s already air inside, it’ll fill with seawater excluding the volume of that air, right?”
“Yes. Instead, the air remaining inside the submersible will be compressed by the external water pressure. As a result, we’ll be exposed directly to extremely compressed air. Depending on how quickly we escape the submersible, we may suffer decompression sickness.”
Occasionally, patients who went diving would visit the dental clinic complaining of tooth pain, but decompression sickness was something handled by otolaryngology or emergency medicine. It had nothing to do with me. Until a few minutes ago. So people who rode submersibles could experience decompression sickness too. I had not wanted to find out like this.
Kim Jae-hui looked at the water rising rapidly and said. The water had already climbed past our knees.
“Aren’t you scaring us too much? With decompression sickness, you never know what a person will get. If you’re lucky, it ends with muscle pain.”
Shin Haeryang coldly injected fear into his crew.
“If you’re unlucky, it’s a heart attack or a stroke.”
“…I don’t think we’re very lucky.”
“I think we are lucky. The Savior exists right here beside me, so how could we possibly be unlucky?”
Jae-hui. …If I had any luck, I wouldn’t have joined this company. Shin Haeryang quickly shouted while checking the submersible’s controls and sensors.
“Absolutely do not hold your breath. Keep breathing even if you have to do it consciously, and exhale as much air from your lungs as possible.”
“What happens if we hold our breath instead of exhaling?”
“Your lungs rupture.”
Shin Haeryang had only said one simple sentence, but it made me want to lament my fate and cry. The water that had passed my calves was now up to my waist.
Shin Haeryang was clinging to the control panel and the control stick as he piloted the submersible, and it was astonishing that the submersible was still operating and moving even with water pouring in like this. Kim Jae-hui merely pressed several buttons in succession, and an emergency alarm blared noisily.
“I routed all the compressed air in the air tanks into our pressure-resistant habitation area. No matter how much water fills this place, we’ll be able to breathe.”
“Can’t we leave the submersible and swim toward the inside of the Second Undersea Base’s submersible port?”
Kim Jae-hui asked me as if she found that amusing.
“Where are you planning to leave from?”
“Through the hole in the floor, or that submersible hatch.”
“The hatch won’t open. The air pressure inside the submersible and the external water pressure have to be the same for the hatch to open. You see how the hatch handle is red, right? That means the door won’t open because of the pressure difference. It has to turn green before we can leave. And the force of the seawater coming in is too strong, so we won’t be able to get out through the hole in the floor. Most decisively, even if you did get out of the submersible, if you were exposed to water pressure like this, you’d die quickly before you even had time to feel pain.”
Shin Haeryang took something out from the inside of his wrist, and when I looked closely, it was Baek Aeyeong’s knife. He used it to cut a long strip from the seat belt on the floor, then wrapped it around the control stick and swiftly tied it in place. …He was turning manual operation into automatic operation by the most effective and primitive method.
The water that had been at my waist rose in an instant until it passed my chest. The control devices, controllers, and sensors shining in various colors all sank into the dark water. The control stick also went under the water and then disappeared completely. Even the observation window, which had shown nothing but darkness, could no longer be seen.
Since coming to the undersea base, I had experienced plenty of water-related disasters, but being submerged in such a confined space made a primal fear spread through my chest. I immediately grabbed the ladder located beneath the hatch as if it were a handhold.
My eyes met Kim Jae-hui’s as she forcibly injected the air from the air tanks toward the pressurized compartment. Kim Jae-hui was submerged in the water, but she looked calm. Because of her hair color, she looked like a lit candle standing there. Soon, the water rose to the smiling mouth of that candle. Shin Haeryang, standing beside her, swept his indifferent gaze over the water rising to his neck. Then he confirmed the number 21, which indicated the external water pressure, being submerged.
The crew all gathered huddled together with one hand hooked on the ladder, waiting for the color of the hatch handle to change. I was half in doubt about the engineers’ explanation that water would not enter the space occupied by the air already inside the submersible. Because the seawater kept coming endlessly into the submersible and showed no sign of stopping. Only after the water submerged the top of my head did the speed of its inflow begin to decrease.
I held the ladder handle and hung on with my whole body, pulling my face out of the water. Then I tried as hard as I could to keep breathing.
So my lungs wouldn’t burst.
Every time I exhaled, my body sank into the seawater, and when I inhaled, my body floated back out. There was already so much water that, at my height, my feet could no longer reach the floor. As Shin Haeryang had said, I tried to exhale as much of the air filling my lungs as possible, but when I breathed out, my body sank into the seawater, so if I didn’t want to drown, I had no choice but to inhale in order to use buoyancy.
Kim Jae-hui was hanging on with one hand gripping a handle on the wall, and Shin Haeryang tilted his head back as far as possible. Perhaps because he was tall, the water narrowly failed to enter his nose.