The Grave of Elites (2)
Basement Level 2.
The moment the elevator doors opened, a sharp stink of burning oil and a low mechanical hum that seemed to clog the ears hit me head-on.
"...This is it?"
The Third Powertrain Laboratory.
True to its nickname, the bunker, a heavy blastproof door barred the entrance from the very start.
I tagged my employee badge and stepped inside.
Hiss—
Thud.
When the massive door opened, the sight beyond it was nothing like the laboratory I had imagined.
The first thing I saw was a huge glass wall.
Just like an interrogation room, this lab was divided into two sections.
Inside was the test cell where the actual engine and transmission ran.
Outside was the control room, lined with dozens of monitors and measuring instruments.
I stood in a corner of the control room and looked through the glass.
There was a giant steel monster on the other side.
A hunk of steel the size of a house.
A powerpack combining a 1,500-horsepower engine and transmission sat bound up in a tangle of cables and piping.
And on either side of that powerpack were enormous cylindrical motors.
A dynamometer, usually shortened to a dyno, a machine for measuring output.
The principle was simple.
When the engine spun furiously to turn the wheels or shaft, the dyno applied resistance in the opposite direction.
Like the strain a runner feels on a treadmill, it could reproduce, right there in place, the immense load a tank endured when grinding through mud or climbing a steep grade.
"Two hundred eighty hours elapsed. Oil temperature, ninety-five degrees. Normal."
"Hydraulic ripple on line two. Error within 0.05 percent. Ignoring."
Even with the dyno running, the control room was taut with tension.
More than a dozen researchers had their noses practically buried in the monitors, reciting data without pause.
I had assumed that even elite engineers would have been worn down by years of failure after failure, their morale crushed beyond repair.
But their condition made a clean mockery of my expectations.
Their eyes were bright, their hands moving with machine-like precision.
"Raise the cooling fan RPM by five percent. Close hydraulic valve three for 0.2 seconds, then reopen it."
And right in the middle of it all stood Director Maeng.
With his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the central monitor, he looked less like a department head than a maestro conducting an orchestra.
Whiiir—
With his order, the noise from the steel beast beyond the glass dropped as if someone had flipped a switch.
It was flawless control, not even allowing a trace of vibration.
I could only admire it.
To control a machine’s vibration and noise so easily in a situation like this?
That was easier said than done. It was not, by any stretch, a simple task.
This wasn't some matter of pressing a button to shut it off.
That thing was a block of steel weighing several tons.
More than that, it was a huge machine generating an almost absurd amount of rotational inertia from 1,500 horsepower.
And yet Director Maeng had twisted the oil pressure and cooling fan speed with a precision so fine it could only be described as surgical.
In doing so, he had forcibly balanced the raging energy.
It was as if he had taken a charging bull and, with a single rein, turned it instantly into a docile sheep.
"Exhaust temperature holding at 650 degrees. Torque converter slip rate normal."
The sharp-faced man rattling off data beside Director Maeng like a machine gun was Senior Researcher Jo Seokhun.
I had heard he was a KAIST PhD and the department's leading theoretical analyst.
Why, then, did people so perfect keep failing?
As I wondered that and quietly moved closer behind them, Jo's voice suddenly hardened.
"From here on, we're entering the cursed stretch."
At his words, the air in the control room seemed to turn cold.
Director Maeng dragged a hand over his face, then growled low.
"This is the part with no data. From here on out, if we miss even one sensor reading or one vibration spike, the test fails. Everyone stay focused."
"Understood!"
They were aiming for a durability target of 300 hours, and they had just barely crossed 280.
They had reached the wall of grief that had defeated them over and over again, the barrier none of them had ever managed to cross.
"...Hmph."
I, too, watched through the glass with my nerves taut.
Wooowooom—!
As the engine speed climbed, the entire laboratory began to tremble faintly.
Across the powerpack in front of me, streams of vivid energy were overlaid in my vision.
The blue lines drew my eye most strongly.
The energy pouring out from the giant heart of the engine flowed smoothly through the transmission.
It was mechanical beauty itself, tens of thousands of parts meshing and turning like interlocked gears.
But that calm did not last long.
"Increase RPM! Entering maximum torque range!"
At Director Maeng's shout, the engine note climbed into a scream.
At that moment, I saw, right in the middle of the blue hydraulic line, one tiny point turn yellow and begin to tremble.
I could only clench my fist.
"Vibration detected in the third planetary gear! Up 0.05 G!"
Jo reacted at once.
Almost at the same instant I noticed it.
As expected of an expert, his reaction was fast.
"Lower the damper clutch pressure! Absorb the shock!"
"Adjusted! But the vibration isn't settling! 0.08 G... 0.1 G, and climbing!"
"Oil temperature is spiking! It's over 120 degrees!"
"Deploy the oil cooler! Open the bypass valve!"
The control room turned into chaos in an instant.
Director Maeng and Jo were responding by the book, flawlessly.
When heat rose, they cooled it. When pressure climbed, they lowered it.
On paper, it was impeccable treatment.
But the machine did not listen to them.
The trembling that had glowed yellow flared orange in an instant, and the flow began to churn as if a bottleneck had formed somewhere inside.
Without meaning to, I tightened my fist.
My hand was soon slick with sweat from the strain.
It was painfully obvious this was not a problem solved by lowering pressure or cooling it down.
The flow was... surging backward?
Energy trapped in front of a particular valve had nowhere to go and was refluxing.
I could see that massive wave driving straight toward a weak bearing.
And then, just as the orange turned a vivid, blood-red hue and immediately after that a dark, bruised red...
"It's going to burst..."
I murmured it under my breath, too softly for anyone to hear, and at the same moment...
BOOM!
A dull explosion detonated beyond the glass.
"Third gear slip! Hydraulic pressure lost!"
"Emergency stop! Shut it down!! Now!!"
Screeech—
Thud.
The dyno stopped, and the graphs plunged straight to the floor.
When the thunderous roar died away, the laboratory was left with only a chilling silence.
"Ah... shit..."
Someone's bitter curse.
Jo Seokhun hurled his mouse aside and buried his head in his hands, while Director Maeng dragged a shaking palm over his face.
The experts who had been controlling the machine with near-magical skill only moments ago had vanished without a trace.
What remained were only researchers collapsing in miserable defeat before a problem they could not understand.
"Analyze it. Now."
Director Maeng's voice had gone rough.
Jo and the other researchers began to review the data with dead eyes.
But the conclusion was obvious.
"The third planetary gear bearing... it's damaged. The vibration waveform is exactly the same as last time."
"We lowered the pressure. We even ran the cooling at maximum. And it still broke? How does that make physical sense?"
"There's no explanation unless it's a material defect. We need to file a claim with the bearing supplier..."
A maze with no exit.
No matter how many doctoral-level engineers put their heads together, all that came out was a sigh.
So this was how they had failed.
This was why they had spent years slowly crumbling apart.
If I helped them here.
If, because of that help, they succeeded in developing the powerpack transmission that Hanseo Defense had treated as one of its greatest impossible problems...
Then I would have a weapon in hand to land a heavy blow alongside Chairman Choi, right where it would hurt finance the most.
I took a quiet breath, steadying my emotions, and said in a low voice, "May I see the data?"
"...What?"
"I said let me look at the data."
I calmly walked into the middle of them.
Jo glared at me with a sharp look.
"Vice Manager Baek. What exactly do you think you're going to understand by looking at it? We're in the middle of..."
"Let him look."
Director Maeng said it in a voice weighted with resignation.
I heard Jo's startled protest, but I ignored it and stepped up to the main monitor.
Then I scrolled through the log data.
So what I saw was... right.
0.2 seconds before the vibration sensor reacted, there was a strange spike in the hydraulic sensor graph.
The bearing was only the result.
The cause was somewhere else.
I turned and looked at Jo Seokhun and Director Maeng.
"It isn't a bearing problem."
"What?"
Jo gave a hollow laugh, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just heard.
"Can't you see this waveform? If you'd taken even a basic intro to mechanical engineering, you'd know. It sounds exactly like a bearing failure!"
"Roll the data back by 0.5 seconds."
I pointed to a specific spot on the monitor.
"Right before the vibration started, the hydraulic pressure in the lock-up clutch line spiked abnormally. Then it dropped off a cliff."
The lock-up clutch.
It was the device that directly coupled the engine and transmission mechanically, so power could be transmitted smoothly through fluid and energy loss reduced at high speeds.
"When the director told us to lower the pressure, the lock-up clutch valve was already closed. The signal said it was open, though."
"...!"
"You adjusted the pressure at the back end while the outlet was closed, so the trapped hydraulic fluid had nowhere to go and exploded. That shock wave hit the weak bearing."
Jo's eyes wavered.
He must have been running a simulation in his head.
If the valve had been physically shut, as I said it was... then all the bizarre symptoms up to now were explained.
But he shook his head.
"That's impossible. Why would the valve be closed? The electrical signal is normal!"
"It's not an electrical problem. A physical contaminant has jammed the valve."
"A contaminant? With that many filters? And to check the valve body we'd have to take the whole thing down and tear it apart, which would take four hours! If this is a waste of time, you're the one who'll be responsible!"
Jo's shout drew every eye in the room to me.
Whether they looked or not, I kept staring straight at him and said, "Then do you have another method? Aside from opening that up, do you even have a guess as to what's wrong?"
"...That's something we have to figure out."
"And how exactly were you planning to do that? I trust you weren't simply saying it was no good because it would take a long time and you had no alternative."
I held Jo's gaze.
He was frowning as he met my eyes.
He must have understood perfectly well that there was nothing else they could do right then besides checking the valve body.
Was he objecting because it wasn't technically sound?
Or because some bastard who had been dropped in from above on a parachute had gotten on his nerves, and he was objecting on reflex?
Just as that thought finished forming in my head...
"...Tear it open."
Director Maeng, who had only stood there listening to our exchange, finally spoke.
Jo's eyes went wide as he searched for something to say in rebuttal.
"Director?!"
"Do you have a better idea? If you're going to oppose it, then give me an alternative! Do you think we're in any position to reject ideas without offering one of our own? Right now we're the ones who need to grab at straw if that's all there is. If I say tear it open, then tear it open, damn it!"
Exhausted by yet another failure, Director Maeng barked the words out.
Jo, who looked every bit as worn down, bit his lip hard.
Four hours later.
Oil-covered researchers dismantled the lower section of the transmission and took apart the valve body.
Jo Seokhun was nervously chewing at his fingernails, staring at the microscope monitor.
"Checking the valve spool... entering."
The microscope camera illuminated the labyrinthine interior of the valve.
And at the same moment...
"Huh?"
Something appeared on the monitor.
A single tiny fleck of metal wedged between the smooth walls of the valve opening.
That small fragment had jammed the valve so tightly it could not move.
"This... why is this here?"
Jo muttered in a dazed voice.
"The filter was fine... how did it get in here?"
"The sensor was fine, too. It didn't pass through the filter."
"...It didn't?"
I answered flatly.
"It was probably metal powder created when internal cavitation scraped away the wall surface. It must have circulated around and, of all times, blocked that valve at the 280-hour mark."
The whole site was swallowed by silence, as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped over it.
And in the midst of that, Director Maeng was looking at me.
One corner of his mouth slowly curled upward.
"A problem that dozens of PhDs spent five years searching for... and yet here comes a guy who solves it in one shot."
Was it because of what Director Maeng had said?
The researchers' eyes began to turn toward me all at once.
Even Jo Seokhun's did the same.
Under the strangely oppressive pressure of the moment, Director Maeng walked up to me and said, "How did you know?"
"I could see it. What was wrong, and how. I happen to have a superpower."
"A superpower? You're an interesting one."
Director Maeng let out a snort of laughter, then continued.
"This thing. We sank money into it for five years and still failed. Can you help us get it built properly?"
"Of course. That's why I came here in the first place."
"That's good enough. Everyone take a short break, then let's have another meeting. Let's put our heads together and figure out what went wrong, and what we need to do to fix it."
"Yes, sir!"
"Vice Manager Baek. Stay behind for a moment."
"Pardon? Aren't you having a meeting?"
"The meeting is the meeting. There's something else you need to know."
Director Maeng looked around with an oddly stiff expression, then lowered his voice.
"Two weeks from now, a German Kanksa negotiating team is coming in."
"...Excuse me?"
"The management support office has already told us they're giving up on domesticizing the powerpack and want to slap a signature on an import contract. We have to fix this perfectly and prove it before that happens."
Director Maeng's eyes were burning with anger.
Only then did I understand the situation.
So this was why Chairman Choi had suddenly given me vacation and sent me here in a hurry.
"We have exactly two weeks left. We need to find a way, one way or another, before then. Can you do it?"
One mountain after another, honestly...