The Ice-Clogged Valve
At my urging, the naval controller seemed to make up his mind on the spot and barked into the radio.
“Hoist the crane! Lift the unmanned sub to the deck!”
Whiiiiiirrrr-!
With a shriek of machinery, the heavy crane began winding up the winch.
Cutting through the rough waves, the black hull of the next-generation unmanned sub emerged from the cold waters of the East Sea.
Water poured off the hull like a waterfall, and even now, though the power had not quite shut off completely, a faint engine vibration still hummed through the craft.
I narrowed my eyes and stared at the massive block of iron hanging in midair.
Let’s see... was the seal actually broken and letting in water?
My gaze moved toward the pressure tank near the torpedo launch tube.
Right around the gas release valve, which the Solaris bastards were convinced had been damaged.
If a part really had broken and left slack somewhere, there should have been an open, raw gap with dark-red edges, or sparks snapping out of it.
But that wasn’t what I saw.
Instead of something cracked, there was a blood-red, clotted bubble swelling right in the middle of the valve, sealed tight and steaming like a heat haze.
It was the textbook bottleneck effect you got when flow was blocked.
Then what about the unmanned sub itself?
I shifted my eyes to the internal weapons bay and main circuit area, where precision components worth hundreds of billions of won were packed together.
There, a smooth blue light shimmered as though clean water were flowing through it, and the whole section remained perfectly calm and stable.
Flooded? What a joke... not a single drop had gotten in.
I let out a disbelieving laugh.
That was enough to read the situation.
The problem was clear.
High-pressure gas hadn’t been able to escape, and it had frozen around the valve, clogging the outlet solid.
A classic freezing seizure.
Clank-!
With a heavy grinding sound, the unmanned sub settled fully onto the deck.
Just as I was about to head toward the iron monster, one of the naval engineers sprang in front of me, face drained white, and spread both arms wide.
“Don’t come any closer!”
Senior Engineer Yoon was blocking my way, pale as a ghost.
“This is no time for someone from another company to go wandering in there! The pressure seal burst. What exactly do you think you’ll accomplish by looking at it with your own eyes?”
“I’m not saying I’m going to rip anything apart. I’m just looking at it.”
“Cover it with a tarp and move it to the clean room immediately! If you fiddle with it carelessly on a rolling ship and even a little seawater gets inside, then the whole thing really will short out. We’re talking about equipment worth hundreds of billions of won!”
The man looked like he was half out of his mind.
According to what Manager Maeng had told me that morning, the chairman had called him directly after hearing about me, and apparently the poor guy had gotten absolutely chewed out.
They were already on a tight schedule, and then this happened on top of everything else. If I’d been in his shoes, my mental state would have turned to dust too.
I gave him a sympathetic look, then turned away.
Where I headed instead was the main console Yoon had been clinging to a moment ago.
I needed a line of logic that could translate my visual diagnosis into the language those tightly wound elites could accept.
Countless sensor logs and pressure graphs were displayed on the monitor.
And in my head, after fifteen years of rolling around among steel and grease, the blue truth I’d seen with my own eyes and the monitor’s data snapped together into a single conclusion.
“A big red error saying the pressure-tank seal was damaged, right? And that’s why you panicked and said it had to be hoisted and sent to the clean room.”
“Well, yes! How else would we fix something broken right here and now?”
“God, this is exhausting.”
I turned to Yoon with a look of utter pity and tapped the monitor with my finger.
“That error log is fake. Do you know what I learned from fifteen years in the field?”
“......?”
“Machines don’t lie, but stupid sensors go insane sometimes. Look properly. It says the pressure dropped by 30 percent, right?”
“Yes.”
“If the seal had really blown open under the insane pressure at 200 meters down, the pressure should have crashed to zero in less than 0.1 second. Seawater would have been forced in through the crack. So how does it just lose 30 percent and then stop, nice and neat? And look at the screen beside it.”
I pointed to another monitor.
“If seawater had been pouring in, the first thing to freak out should have been the weapons-bay leak sensor. But it’s green and perfectly normal, isn’t it? Not a drop got in. Right now.”
“Uh... w-well, but the pressure really did drop by 30 percent! If it wasn’t damage, then why on earth did the reading fall...?”
“Because the pipe’s blocked. The inlet of the valve got physically clogged, and the dumb sensor mistook the change in the internal gas state for a leak caused by seal failure.”
Yoon, a specialist in fluid mechanics, seemed to realize that my physical reasoning fit the facts perfectly.
His pupils shook wildly, as if an earthquake had struck inside his head.
“Ah...! B-but...!”
Still, he couldn’t escape the trap of elite-style manuals and liability.
Honestly, this was exactly why yelling at frontline staff whenever something went wrong was basically a form of self-harm.
It made their capability stat drop in real time.
“I-in theory, Executive Director Baek, you might be right! But according to the manual, when this error code appears, we have to carry out a precision inspection in the clean room! We can’t stake a national project worth hundreds of billions of won on the chance that it’s just a sensor error!”
There he went again, clinging to the manual.
How was I supposed to calm him down and convince him?
While I was thinking that over, watching his panic spiral, another voice cut into the exchange.
“Executive Director Baek.”
Park, the chief engineer, who had come down from the bridge at some point, spoke up in a heavy voice.
“I’m not doubting your ability, but as Senior Engineer Yoon said, this is far too dangerous. If things go wrong, you and Hanseo Defense could end up taking full responsibility. Don’t force it. Let’s just head back to port first.”
Responsibility.
That damn issue of liability.
I met Chief Engineer Park’s gaze head-on and didn’t back down.
“Chief. What’s the water temperature at 200 meters below the surface?”
“......?”
“At best, one or two degrees Celsius.”
“......?”
“What happens when high-pressure gas that’s been set up to work just fine in surface temperature comes out through a valve in ice-cold water at 200 meters? Rapid adiabatic expansion from the Joule-Thomson effect. The valve temperature drops to dozens of degrees below zero in an instant.”
Chief Park’s eyebrows twitched at the technical law spilling out of my mouth.
“The microscopic moisture inside the gas line freezes solid and clogs the valve shut. Classic freezing seizure. The valve freezes, the gas can’t get out, and the system mistakes that for a seal rupture and throws an error.”
“Ah...”
“It’s not damaged. It just froze and got blocked. And as proof, look at the weapons-bay leak sensor over there. It’s green and perfectly fine, with not a single drop of water inside.”
After my fact bomb, Chief Park walked over to the main console without saying a word.
His sharp eyes began cross-checking the graph showing the external water temperature drop against the timing of the tank pressure fall, looking back and forth between them in careful comparison.
One second, two seconds, three.
The moment he confirmed that the inflection points of the two graphs matched perfectly, with not even a 0.1-second error.
Chief Park, who had been staring at the monitor with such intensity, suddenly threw his head back and burst into booming laughter that seemed to shake the whole deck.
“C-Chief?”
Yoon asked in bewilderment, and Kang, the chief researcher from ADD who had been checking the screen beside Park, finally let out a deep sigh of relief as he grasped the full situation.
“Ha... so it really was just a sensor malfunction caused by simple contraction and freezing.”
“What? Chief Kang, malfunction? But the manual clearly said the seal had failed...?”
Yoon still hadn’t caught up and was only blinking, so Chief Park walked up to him with a hard expression and gave his shoulder a tap.
“Senior Engineer Yoon. The gas got cold and froze up, and the sensor threw a tantrum and called it a rupture.”
“Wh-what?!”
“If it hadn’t been for Executive Director Baek, you would’ve screwed up a national project today for no reason and been dragged through the mud for it later.”
At Chief Park’s quiet words, Yoon’s mouth finally fell open.
He realized they had nearly been fooled by one stupid sensor into wrecking the schedule of a project worth hundreds of billions of won.
His face flushed bright red with shock and humiliation.
He looked completely unmoored.
Once I’d confirmed that the situation was settled, I turned and walked away without looking back.
I grabbed a properly sized wrench from the toolbox and strode toward the unmanned sub, still dripping with seawater.
“E-Executive Director!”
The Solaris Ocean researchers gasped and moved to block me, but Chief Park raised a hand and stopped them.
I crawled under the massive block of steel and fitted the wrench onto the manual discharge valve of the pressure tank, which was frozen solid and steaming red haze.
I put in just a little force, turning it half a rotation.
Hissssssss-!
With a sharp shriek, the high-pressure gas and thin ice that had been clogging the valve blew out in a satisfying rush, almost absurdly easily.
As the gas escaped and the pressure balanced out, the red clots wavering before my eyes vanished without a trace.
“Huh? The error cleared! Pressure’s back to normal!”
From the control room came the operator’s frantic shout.
The red error windows that had been screaming madly on the monitor all turned green at once, and the system stabilized completely.
What had almost become a catastrophic crisis ended with one wrench and five minutes of time.
I tossed the wrench back into the toolbox and said carelessly, “It wasn’t broken, so send it back down and fire away. I want to get to the after-work dinner already.”
* * *
A little later.
After all systems had been checked and confirmed normal, the unmanned sub descended once again into the cold depths of the East Sea.
Target depth 200 meters reached. Target lock complete.
With everyone on deck holding their breath, the controller’s voice crackled through the speakers.
—Countdown. Three, two, one. Fire!
Kuuuuung-!
A heavy boom rolled across the sea, sending vibrations all the way up to the surface.
The internal dampers caught the shock at the exact 0.01-second sweet spot, swallowing it perfectly, and the torpedo tore through the deep sea completely wrapped in a bubble sheath.
A monster moving at 300 kilometers per hour.
The supercavitation torpedo, its steering controlled flawlessly in the real 200-meter deep ocean rather than a tank, reached its target point.
Kwaaaaaaang-!!!
Far, far beyond the distant horizon, a huge water pillar the size of a building shot up into the sky.
It was a perfect hit.
“Waaaaaaahhhhh!!!”
A thunderous cheer exploded from the deck.
The researchers from the Agency for Defense Development, including Chief Kang, threw their arms around one another and jumped up and down, while Manager Maeng and Senior Engineer Jo from our Powerpack team raised their fists and roared.
By contrast, the expressions on the faces of Senior Engineer Yoon Jin-ho and the others from Solaris Ocean were complicated.
They should have been celebrating, since this was a national project they had led, but their faces were twisted with humiliation and relief rather than joy.
They looked like people who had been completely stripped of the initiative and had no choice but to admit technical defeat.
* * *
That evening, after returning to land.
The largest private room in a high-end sashimi restaurant near Geoje Port, with an absolutely stunning view.
“Khhh! Executive Director, your eye for detail is uncanny! You’re a real machine ghost!”
“That’s right! Did you see Senior Engineer Yoon’s face back there? I swear his jaw dropped so hard I thought it would hit the floor!”
Over tables loaded down with fresh seafood and chewy sashimi, Manager Maeng Gi-yong and Senior Engineer Jo Seokhun were clinking glasses and talking excitedly nonstop.
We had stormed into the rival company’s own backyard and solved their biggest headache with such open contempt that it was only natural for these two, both from Hanseo Defense, to puff up with pride.
And on top of that, we’d secured total technical dependence. The rewards and treatment waiting for us back at headquarters were obvious.
“All right, everyone worked hard. Eat up.”
In the noisy atmosphere, I lifted my chopsticks and put a thick slice of flatfish sashimi into my mouth.
Then I took a long swallow of cold beer between the springy, chewy bites.
“Ahhh.”
The carbonation slid down my throat and washed away the fatigue and irritation that had piled up over the day.
I had squeezed out control of a national project worth hundreds of billions of won from someone else’s house, and I’d even successfully secured the after-work food tour I’d been desperate for.
Listening to the sound of Geoje’s night sea breaking outside the window, I smiled with complete satisfaction.
It was, honestly, a perfect finale.
And then, the next day.
I woke up early in the morning.
It was a morning in a hotel on Geoje, not at the shipyard.
The project had succeeded perfectly, and now I had nothing particular to do.
In other words, I could just flop around in bed and rest in peace.
I brewed a capsule coffee that was sitting in the room.
Just as I was savoring the aroma and taking a sip, my private phone buzzed.
The caller was Cho Yerin.
“Hello, Executive Director Cho. What’s up?”
—Senior. Do you have any plans this weekend?
“Plans? Hey, I’ve been busting my ass in Geoje for days. What kind of plans would I have? I was just going to relax a bit, recharge, and recover.”
—Recharge? Good timing. My father got the situation report today. He said you did really well, so he prepared a gift for you.
“...A gift?”
A gift from Chairman Cho?
Before I knew it, I swallowed hard.
In my head, the list of gifts Chairman Cho had given me for doing a good job unfurled one item after another.
The biggest one by far had probably been the bonus.
Something like over two billion won...?
“Can I ask what kind of gift it is?”
—A toy. A very nice, very cool one. A helicopter will be coming down to Geoje at lunchtime today. You can come back on that, and they’ll have the carrier delivery sent to your Pangyo house by the time you arrive.
“Carrier delivery? So the gift is a car?”
I asked in disbelief.
A car as a gift?
And then it occurred to me that, if the person was Chairman Cho, that might actually be entirely plausible.
—A supercar.
At Cho Yerin’s next words, all I could do was swallow again, hard.
A gift... was a supercar?
My God.