The Next Continent (2 page)

“I saw the sound right there.”

“What sound?” Without thinking, “What sound?” Without thinking, Sohya had raised his voice. He glanced quickly around. None of the passengers seemed to have noticed. He leaned forward and said quietly, “What kind of sound did you hear?”

“Booming sounds. Like someone kicking an empty oil drum.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Oh…didn't you leave the cockpit because you saw it too? You came back here right after it happened.” She looked down at the floor, contrite, but Sohya nodded. The timing matched. She must have heard the same sounds. He hadn't imagined them.

“Look, thanks for letting me know. Do me a favor, okay? Let's not tell anyone.” He started to enter the service compartment but was stopped again, this time by the old man.

“Just a minute, my friend. I don't think my granddaughter is finished yet.”

Sohya winced. “I'm sorry, I'm really in a hurry.” The old gentleman had a neatly trimmed white beard to match his thick hair and was dressed in a white three-piece suit accented by a red bow tie. He reminded Sohya of the life-size mannequins found outside a certain chain of fast food restaurants in Japan. As if to complete the effect, the old man was wearing the right sort of heavy, blackframed glasses. Despite his somewhat loud attire, he had an air of refinement similar to the girl's.

Sohya hadn't changed his tan Gotoba work jumpsuit in three days and was starting to feel a bit out of place. But this was no time to defer to wealth. “I'll come back when I'm done and you can tell me all about it.”

“Now look here, young man. This little girl's ears are quite sharp. Or shall we say, her sense of pitch. Either way, it will pay to hear what she has to say. You have my personal guarantee.”

“I'm not sure who I'm speaking to here, but—”

The man cut him off. “Go on, Tae. You heard something that worried you, isn't that right?” He gave her hand a squeeze. Sohya felt himself sliding toward a confrontation when the girl spoke up.

“Grandfather, don't be so insistent. I think this man has important business to take care of.” She lowered her eyes timidly again. Now Sohya was trapped. He sighed and squatted next to her seat. “Okay, I'm listening.”

“Very good, young man. A true gentleman always bends to the requests of women.”

“Don't preach, Grandfather,” said the girl. Then to Sohya: “Thank you. I know you must be very busy.”

He bowed slightly, caught up in the formality. Then something the girl had said struck him. “You said you saw the sound, not heard it. What did you mean?”

“Of course I heard it. But I saw the little faucet shake too.”

Sohya stared at the push-button water dispenser in front of her. Below the faucet was a simple cup tray. The faucet operated only with a cup in the tray, but water would continue flowing as long as the button was depressed. The system was not protected by an antivibration compensator. But why would it be? And why would the faucet move enough to be visible to the naked eye?

“Do you see it shaking now? The ship's drive makes things vibrate a little too, you know,” said Sohya.

“No. That's different. When I heard the sound, the faucet shook ever so slightly.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure. I know what I saw.” Tae peered at him intently. For a few moments, Sohya searched his mind for an answer. The pipes feeding the water dispensers extended under the compartment floor into the rear service area. From there they junctioned to a pipe that rose to the ceiling, where the water tank was installed. There was no pump, no control valves—the whole system was gravity fed. To simplify sanitation maintenance, the pipes were separate from the electrical conduits and climate-control systems. If some sort of impulse were traveling down those pipes, it meant the tank was involved.

Sohya turned this over in his mind.
The water tank…how did we implement that, anyway?

Mitsubishi's original shallow-depth plans had storage for a communications buoy where the water tank was now located. When the boat was submerged, the buoy would float topside on a cable tether, giving the pilot a communications link to the sub tender. This was not an option for
Leviathan
, which had to be capable of dives exceeding two thousand meters. Instead, a compact, ultra-low-frequency transmitter was installed on the hull, making communication possible even in the depths of the ocean.

So the tank was installed where the buoy was originally going to be stowed. Was that the problem?

As he considered the possibilities, Sohya froze. There would be some space between the buoy and the compartment walls—enough to accommodate a tiny amount of compression when submerged. At two hundred atmospheres of overpressure, even the ultra-highstrength steel hull would shrink by a few percent. All interior compartments and fittings were designed to take such shrinkage into account.

The tank was attached to the pressure hull. That meant hull shrinkage would directly affect the tank, and the system did not incorporate control valves. There was no overflow outlet. So the tank design did not allow for significant pressure shrinkage; but that was not a flaw. With a bit of free air space in the tank, the pressure would be neutralized.

Still, there was no operating protocol in place for limiting the amount of water in the tank. And if the tank were filled completely…

His thoughts were cut off by a shout coming from a few rows forward. “What the hell?!”

The next moments passed in slow motion. Sohya sprang to his feet and ran. The problem was no longer theoretical. He could hear water gushing under high pressure before he reached the seat of the well-dressed man who had asked for coffee. Perhaps the passenger had decided water would be better than nothing at all; in any case, the moment he pushed the dispenser button, the cork was out of the bottle. Sohya yelled back, “Don't take your thumb off the button! Keep pressing!” At the same time, he reached out for the nearest water dispenser. But he was too late.

“Damn!” The passenger took his thumb off the button. A sharp bang immediately reverberated through the compartment—exactly what Sohya had tried to prevent by opening another escape route for the pressure.
Water hammer!

Bringing the surging water to a sudden stop created a highpressure shock wave that propagated throughout the plumbing system in seconds. That transient spike was far outside the design limit of the dispensers. In the next instant, forty faucets in forty seat backs blew out of their sockets, spewing like fire hoses. The compartment was instantly plunged into pandemonium. Some of the passengers tried to escape by climbing up on their seats. A few were literally blown into the aisles as they tried to stand up. Sohya shouted, “Keep calm! We're not flooding!”

No one paid attention. The screaming, praying, and terror continued unabated. He rushed back aft. The girl was holding on to her beret with one hand and trying to divert the water with the other. He reached out to her. “You okay?”

“Yes. My clothes are soaked, but I guess this is one way to do the laundry.” She tugged at the hem of her dress and forced a smile. Her unflappable demeanor in the midst of this confusion was contagious. Sohya grinned.

“You're cooler than you look. You think this is the way to do laundry?”

“Not with seawater. But it's fresh…”

Sohya was thunderstruck. A bizarre inspiration flashed through his mind. He turned to the compartment and bellowed:

“Drink it!”

Instant silence. Some of the VIPs stared at Sohya as if he were crazy. He seized the opening.

“Go ahead! It's not salty. It's drinking water. We're not flooding!” A few of the passengers unfroze and began hesitatingly scooping water into their hands.

“He's right!”

“It
is
fresh water!”

“So what's going on? Did someone light up?”

“No sprinklers on board,” said Sohya. “Just a plumbing problem. Naturally, smoking is still prohibited.”

With this attempt at humor, Sohya managed to gain everyone's attention. He explained that the water tank had overflowed. With only fifty liters in the tank, the water would soon stop. Since the weight of the water was merely shifting from one place to another, buoyancy would be unaffected.

Sure enough, as he was speaking, the flow of water slowed and stopped. The passengers began to calm down. They were distinguished representatives from companies and countries around the world, and no one made a fuss once it was clear there was no danger—other than the one complaint Sohya was expecting.

“I went all the way to Savile Row for this suit. Will I have to ruin a four-thousand-euro suit whenever I use this shuttle?” Again, the coffee service guy. Sohya was appropriately apologetic and promised to ensure that compensation would be made.

Once the passengers had calmed down, Sohya went to the service compartment. A shock strong enough to blow off the faucets would not have affected the pressure hull, but the tank had to be checked. As he passed the last row, Tae's grandfather spoke up.

“Mind if we take a look?”

“Be my guest,” Sohya answered stiffly. He was not used to looking after passengers but was too tired to object. He opened the door to the service compartment and walked past the circuit boxes and CO
₂
scrubbers toward the back of the small room. He stared up at the tank. It was a simple sheet metal box, but the sides had ballooned outward, as if something had detonated inside it. Tae stood next to him, gazing up and nodding. “So that noise was the sound of this box expanding. I'm sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“I should have told you sooner. Then no one would've gotten wet.”

“You don't have to apologize. I should've at least tried to make sure
you
didn't get wet.”

“No need to take it so hard,” said the old man. “You're not one of the crew, are you?”

“No. I'm with Gotoba Engineering. We built Dragon Palace and the three shuttles.”

“Then this isn't your problem. Well, no—I guess it is. But it's not important. You handled the situation perfectly. ‘Drink!' That was a stroke of genius. ‘Drink!'” The old man laughed briefly. “And your name?”

“Sohya Aomine. I work for Gotoba's Engineering Task Force.”

“I'll remember that. Let's be going, Tae.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

The old man took the girl's hand, and they headed for their seats. Sohya called after them, “I'm sorry, but who are you?”

“Oh, you'll see us again soon enough. Who we are isn't important right now. Perhaps you'd better get your passengers some towels?”

This obvious measure had escaped Sohya completely. He hurriedly returned to the passengers to explain how to access the blankets under their seats. Back on the bridge, he met a barrage of questions from the pilot, who had had to stay at the controls throughout the entire incident.

By the time Sohya finished his explanations,
Leviathan
's navigation lights had pierced the darkness to reveal a number of gigantic egg-shaped domes laid out in a geometric pattern on the ocean floor. It was Dragon Palace, the multipurpose undersea city of the Spratly Islands.

[2]

TWO THOUSAND KILOMETERS
south of Japan, in the South China Sea between the Philippines and Vietnam, an archipelago of more than 650 reefs, atolls, and islands lay like pebbles scattered across the ocean surface. Since the end of World War II, the Spratly Islands had been the focus of a struggle for territorial rights between China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

The prize at stake was not the insignificant bits of land peeking out above the sea. It was the vast, deep-ocean oil fields in the surrounding waters. The islands had been used as an anchorage since the time of Ming dynasty Fleet Admiral Zheng He, and China's territorial claims were the most insistent. The Chinese had surveyed the area and estimated that it held as much as two hundred billion barrels of oil, nearly as much as Saudi Arabia's known reserves. In fact, since the end of the twentieth century, Malaysia had been producing millions of cubic feet of natural gas every day from offshore platforms. That enormous treasure lay beneath these waters was a certainty.

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, oil had become increasingly precious, and friction between the five nations surrounding the Spratlys had intensified. They began competing to build structures on the islands, and occasional exchanges of gunfire erupted between rival patrol boats. In 2018, after eighty-five crewmen died when a Chinese frigate exchanged fire with a Philippine missile cruiser, the five nations decided the situation had become too dangerous.

By this point, the overall international political climate had turned toward reconciliation and cooperation. The wars between the United States and the Islamic world during the first decade of the century had subsided after an undignified American retreat forced on the president by public opinion. Since then, use of military force in pursuit of national aims had fallen out of sync with the international political climate. No matter how great the value of the Spratlys' oil, the idea of going to war over it was unacceptable. The five nations agreed to set aside long-held grudges and find a path to peaceful cooperation. They formed a joint consortium to develop the Spratlys, and after casting about for a way forward, they agreed to start with a joint construction project that had no connection with resource exploitation. The project would serve as a symbol of their commitment to avoid armed conflict.

The consortium issued a call for competitive submissions from urban planners and civil engineers around the world. Proposals ranged from amusement parks and resorts to a peace memorial, a network of enormous spans to link the islands, and even an eight-hundred-meter observation tower looking out over mostly empty ocean. The winning proposal was Dragon Palace, Gotoba Engineering's vision of a multipurpose undersea city.