Thirteen Broken Pods

Several people were already gathered in front of the escape pods. Nikita, who had come at a run, Yook Geum-yi, Carlos—who had been missing—and the Russians were all there together.

I walked toward them, wringing water from the hem of my worn shirt. I was thinking how much better it would be to duck into some corner where no one was looking, peel off the soaked clothes, wring them out, shake them, and put them back on, when the black-haired man sitting beside the escape-pod dock turned around.

The moment I saw his face, I lost every word I had. I had thought Vladimir handsome—pale blond, a firm jaw—but this was a different species of good looks. A few wet strands lay halfway across a smooth forehead, and even with black hair covering more than half his brow, he was so strikingly fine that the sight of him knocked the sense clean out of me.

If that face had been mine, I could have sat in the middle of the city and made a living off nothing but letting people look at it. Passersby would have seen it, conceded of their own accord, and paid before they went on. The way your heart stirs when you look at something as cute as a puppy or a kitten—I learned then, for the first time, that looking at someone too handsome turns the inside of your head to blank paper. For several seconds I simply wasn't there. I only watched the man rise from where he had been sitting.

The closer he came, the more clearly his face resolved, and the shape of his head and the line of his jaw were genuinely astonishing. A precious golden ratio, like a sample too valuable not to preserve for the next generation. He swept me once from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, and spoke.

"Shin Haeryang. Are you hurt anywhere?"

A fairly low baritone carried the words. Wow. Even the lips and the teeth are handsome. God. How is any god this unfair? Then again, if God were fair, a man like that would never have been shoved three kilometers under the sea. I stared blankly at the man from the rumors, then managed an answer.

"No. I'm Park Moohyun. ...Why aren't you escaping?"

"So you're the new dentist. Every intact escape pod has already been launched, so we were trying to decide what to do now."

Of every sentence I had heard in my life, that ranked third for raising the hair on my arms. A chill went through me. I looked around. There were quite a few people: Shin Haeryang, Seo Jihyuk, Baek Ahyoung, Yook Geum-yi, five from the Russian team, Carlos, and a child. Did that mean there were no escape pods left that these people could actually board? On the monitor, forty-two launched pods were pouring upward toward the surface like missiles. Staring at the screen in a daze, I asked.

"And the ones that aren't intact?"

"There are thirteen failed escape pods, but riding those out would be worse than moving to another residential wing."

Swallowed up against a frame more than two meters tall, it had been hard to tell the child was even there. When Victor set the child he had been carrying down onto a stretch of floor with no standing water, every face but mine became a sight to behold.

"Does anyone know who brought the child?"

The look in Shin Haeryang's eyes was cold. No one answered. From the atmosphere, it was plain there was no quiet understanding—no under-the-table compact a newcomer like me had never been told—that a minor could live on an undersea base. When I carefully dug through the bag that held the cat and drew out a plastic pill bottle, Yook Geum-yi came over, read the English on it, and frowned.

"These are sleeping pills."

"Sleeping pills?"

"You were the last one out of Baekho-dong, I believe. Which room did you bring the child from?"

"The child was asleep in Room 80."

Sofiya, who had been using a room somewhere in the seventies, spoke as if she were scoffing.

"That room's empty."

The air went cold. Not because I was wearing clothes soaked through with seawater—it felt as if a Siberian wind had made a full circuit of the place. Minors were not permitted on the undersea base. In this atmosphere, I couldn't begin to guess how much further everything would fall apart if I produced the two pets the base did not allow.

I quietly swung the two bags I had been carrying in front around onto my back. Snake, cat—not a sound. If you've lived in the quarters this long without being caught, you've got some old skill at keeping quiet. Use it. Shin Haeryang brought up a three-dimensional schematic of the undersea base on his pad, floated it in the air, and pointed.

"My team and I will move to the nearest wing, Hyunmu-dong, and look for escape pods again there."

At that, Vladimir shoved the schematic aside and indicated another wing.

"We just watched it flood. Hyunmu-dong's under too. Better to head for Jujak-dong, no?"

Baek Ahyoung of Engineer Team A shook her head.

"Going to Jujak-dong is dangerous."

"Why?"

"Our team was outside repairing the outer hull when we came back in. Right then, we saw the Jujak-dong Research Center vanish completely."

"Jujak-dong is the biggest facility on the 4th Undersea Base. How does that just disappear?!"

At Baek Ahyoung's answer, Yook Geum-yi—a researcher who all but lived in Jujak-dong—bit her lip, then spoke.

"Then what about taking the Central Elevator up to the surface? Counting the ones still under construction, there are fourteen. Couldn't we ride one that's still sound?"

Shin Haeryang, who had been listening, opposed it.

"If we take another shock like the one twenty minutes ago, or if something goes wrong halfway up, that's the end. Escape pods are far safer."

While the others talked, each proposing a way out, I folded my arms and settled in to watch. I knew nothing about the undersea base anyway. Even if someone said the best plan was to swim for it this instant, I would have had nothing to say against it. Would an engineer who had been here for years know the place better, or a dentist who had arrived a week ago?

I had drawn a little back from the talk and was only listening to the engineers. Beside me stood Baek Ahyoung, watching her team leader the way you watch a Pokémon you've just let off the leash. I asked her quietly.

"Ms. Baek. Um... something from earlier left me curious. I'm sorry, but would it be all right if I asked you one thing?"

"What... go ahead."

"Like Ms. Yook said—can't we just take the Central Elevator, the one that runs direct? Isn't that the fastest way out to the surface?"

Fortunately, she did not laugh at me for being stupid. She only watched the escape-pod positions in Hyunmu-dong that Team Leader Shin was indicating with his finger, then turned her head and looked at me.

"You know we're three thousand meters underwater right now?"

I nodded. She seemed to hesitate over how to explain it to someone who knew nothing, then spoke slowly.

"There are fourteen elevators built to climb from where we are, at minus three thousand meters, up to sea level at zero. Only two of them run direct. One is the Central Elevator. The other is a freight elevator inside the Jujak-dong Research Center."

Coming and going from the base, I had only ever used the central direct elevator. No surprise there. I had been here five days, and it was hard enough not to get lost just moving between Baekho-dong, where the quarters were, and Jungang-dong, where the cafeteria and the dental clinic were.

You had to wait more than ten minutes for the Central Elevator, but set beside riding the subway or a bus, it was practically a savings of time. And if you stood in front of it you met every sort of person, so it wasn't a bad place for greetings, for learning names, for a little light conversation. Baek Ahyoung went on, unhurried.

"The other twelve don't run the full three kilometers in one trip. They move in stages. Three elevators run from zero meters to minus fifty. Three from there to minus two hundred. Three as far as minus one thousand. Three from there down to minus three thousand. And there's one more under construction in the bathypelagic zone."

Easy enough to remember. From Daehando, at level zero: three to Undersea Base 1, three to the 2nd Undersea Base, three to the 3rd, three to the 4th. Twelve, plus two that run the whole depth—fourteen in all. Is that a lot of elevators, or not many? No idea. Seeing the lost look on my face, Baek Ahyoung made it simpler.

"Imagine this isn't the seafloor, but somewhere around the roof of a skyscraper with a truly absurd height. If an earthquake hit that building, you'd know perfectly well whether riding an elevator down was safe or not."

I listened, putting in little sounds of agreement—right, I see—and nodded. I had heard that an ordinary elevator moves about sixty meters a minute. These, it seemed, did not. Just the descent to the 4th Undersea Base, three thousand meters down, took about ten minutes. From a passenger's point of view, painfully slow.

So if I boarded the Central Elevator in a situation like this, I would spend ten minutes in terror severe enough to kill me. Or I would simply die. Stairs would be safer, of course. Even I, if I lived on the two-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of a building on land and something struck, or an earthquake started, and I had to get out, would take the stairs before I trusted an elevator.

But once the height reached something like three kilometers, merely walking down all those stairs became its own impossibility. Would more elevators that ran direct make it less dangerous? Couldn't we board one that seemed less broken and go up? Are the escape pods safer? I spoke to Baek Ahyoung carefully.

"I'd be grateful if you'd take this as a question from someone who doesn't know the first thing. ...When they built the undersea base, couldn't they have built more elevators?"

Hearing that, Baek Ahyoung let out a small laugh. It was the first time I had seen a smile form at her mouth, and it did not seem like a smile made because she was pleased.

"A thousand-meter tower has at least sixty elevators, so why does a base crammed three thousand meters under the sea have only fourteen? That's what you're asking."

She didn't call the question stupid. She only answered, acidly.

"Because building an elevator on the seafloor isn't easy. The money is obscene. This facility was made for extraction in the first place, not so people could live here. These days they pour astronomical sums into developing the bases while talking about the first Pacific undersea base ever built, Earth's frontier and final hope, the last frontier short of space—but construction started before the environmental damage was even visible, so there wasn't much capital at the beginning. Most of it existed to send down drilling equipment and mining robots. The effort to make the place fit for human beings isn't even eight years old."

I hadn't expected the talk to turn to cost. A newspaper article I had dug through when I was hired came back to me, and I asked.

"I read that Canada alone invested at least fifty trillion won here. That isn't enough to add elevators?"

"This already is the expanded number. ...Everything you use on the seafloor is expensive. The price of that dental clinic alone would make you faint."

So it runs far past the cost of opening an ordinary practice. My legs hurt from standing, so I sat on the bare floor. I was not the only one who had put a backside down. The child was lying on the floor, and a man named Nikolai was sprawled there too, and no one paid either of them any mind. Once I was sitting, the area around my tailbone ached—maybe I had struck it wrong when I fell out of bed. Remembering, suddenly, the moment I had woken, I asked.

"Do you think an earthquake caused this?"

Just as Baek Ahyoung opened her mouth, Nikolai pushed himself halfway up off the floor, pointed at her, at Shin Haeryang, and at Seo Jihyuk, then at the escape pods.

"How about repairing those? There are three engineers right here who aren't drunk."

Then he stirred a drunken finger across the escape pods whose red fault lights were burning, and Baek Ahyoung answered the half-sprawled Nikolai in a voice like ice.

"You fix them."

So the Russians were engineers too. Apparently that didn't mean they could repair everything in sight. Seo Jihyuk, one of the three, shook his head.

"Those lights are on because the outer shell is warped, or the decompression unit is shot. All I've got on me is my bare hands, so I could patch them juuust adequately—but by the time we reached the surface, Nikolai the lump of lard would be Nikolai pounded into pulp."

They knew each other well enough. Nikolai and Seo Jihyuk traded middle fingers with warm affection.