by Issui Ogawa
“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 CO2 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.
Officially, there were two reasons for choosing Gotoba. Because of the islands’ stunning coral atolls, many of the proposals related to tourism. But the Gotoba plan was unique in combining surface recreation with an undersea leisure facility. As Gotoba’s planning division put it: “Close by the shallow waters surrounding the islands, the continental shelf drops off to a depth of two thousand meters. Along with the coral and aquatic life of the atolls, these deeper waters contain rarely seen abyssal fauna. Research into these little-known life-forms can only be carried out here.”
The second reason was that the undersea facility could be useful for surveying the sea bottom. In addition to the three passenger shuttles, Gotoba’s plans for Dragon Palace included a long-range commercial exploration sub. The combination of undersea base and exploration sub would allow detailed exploration of seabed resources, an endeavor difficult to coordinate from the surface.
There was also a hidden agenda behind the Spratly Islands Development Consortium’s selection of Gotoba’s proposal: the desire to exclude Western companies, which submitted more than half of the proposals, from any involvement. Even if they could no longer rely on military power to help enforce the spread of globalization, the West was still wedded to the old economic strategy: seize any opportunity to tie national markets into a global network for the ul
timate benefit of a small number of investors. To combat this, Japan was the perfect partner—a diplomatic superpower that had abandoned its experiment with militarism, had preserved its constitutional commitment to peace, and was strictly neutral. Construction had begun in 2021. The project had three main components. The first, subject to careful environmental assessment, was expansion of the diving resort on Swallow Reef to accommodate more tourists and researchers. The second component was mooring facilities for the shuttle subs, complete with a floating dry dock. Finally, the undersea city: seven thirty-meter domes, two kilometers down on the seabed and five kilometers off Swallow Reef.
Once construction began, another reason for choosing Gotoba Engineering became clear to the consortium: no other company could have handled the job.
Drawing on the expertise of engineers who had precisely positioned the anchorages for the world’s longest suspension bridge in the fast-flowing currents of Japan’s Inland Sea, Gotoba’s engineers placed the six-hundred-ton footing blocks for the domes on the seabed without breaking a single stalk of coral. In a mere six months, they completed the floating dry dock for maintenance and repair of Leviathan and her sisters with components and materials sourced exclusively from the consortium partners, accommodating their different languages and commercial customs in the process. To oversee this task, Gotoba tapped a maritime logistics expert who, during the Persian Gulf War, had managed the routing of tankers from the North Sea and the Gulf to Japan without delaying a single liter of oil.
But the real tour de force was the placement of the seven domes on the seabed. The domes were built in Japan, sealed, and towed all the way to the Spratlys. The sight of these enormous concrete structures moving through the ocean like icebergs was unforgettable. But when Gotoba’s handpicked team deployed a five-thousand-ton sea crane to place the domes on their footings with an accuracy of fifty centimeters—controlling everything from the end of two kilometers of cable—the consortium knew it had witnessed a superhuman feat of engineering. After the two-week operation was completed, Gotoba’s project supervisor just smiled. “The submerged tube tunnels in Tokyo Bay became our reference point. Those tubes were laid over the Yurakucho Layer. That’s softer than tofu. We had to take our competitor’s senior engineer out to the best club in Ginza. The evening cost us a fortune, but what he told us was enough to tweak our approach.”
Gotoba Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd. What sort of entity was it? How did it assemble such a crack team of engineers? How did it develop its techniques? As the rest of the world began to sit up and take notice, people were astounded at what they discovered.
Gotoba was behind the enormous Sahara Regreening Sector project—complete with an artificial precipitation generator—in a region where year-round humidity stood at zero. Gotoba erected the pitchblende refining facility for uranium extraction on Antarctica’s East Ongul Island, where temperatures fell below minus forty degrees. They designed and built the year-round Upper Atmosphere and Cosmic Ray Observation Facility on the Abruzzi Spur of K2—the world’s second-highest peak, in the Karakoram—with a twenty-five-kilometer aerial tramway access system that boasted a 4,400-meter free span between ropeway towers, the world’s longest. In the field of extreme-environment engineering projects, Gotoba was matched by no organization on earth.
The company’s president was fifty-seven-year-old Takumichi Gotoba. Born toward the end of Japan’s high-growth era, he majored in earth science at Kyoto University. In the early 1990s, during the heyday of Japan’s economic bubble, he joined a top construction firm. After working on planning for some of the futuristic projects that were so commonly proposed in those heady days, he quit and spent the next three years networking a broad range of movers and shakers inside and outside the industry.
In 2000, he founded the company that bore his name. Since then, this brilliant manager had applied his formidable expertise in civil engineering and applied technology, as well as his carefully nurtured personal connections, to build a leading specialist construction company in a mere twenty years.
As Dragon Palace approached completion, it came to light that the Taiwanese representative for the Spratly Islands Development Consortium had known Gotoba well during his days as a foreign student in Japan—they had bunked together in a tiny apartment for two months because the man was penniless. This fact was kept out of the papers, but no one in the consortium viewed it as a conflict of interest. It was obvious that Gotoba Engineering was the only entity capable of carrying the project to a successful completion.
Now Dragon Palace, a symbol of five nations’ desire for peace, was about to go into operation far beneath the South China Sea. The next chapter in the Gotoba saga was about to begin.
LEVIATHAN QUIETLY SETTLED into the docking trench in the seafloor below Dome I, the gateway to the complex. The sub’s two-hour journey ended when sixty air lock bolts snapped into place around its debarkation hatch. Submersible robots moved around the ship, examining the hull. Eventually, shuttles would be able to use an air lock dock in Dome VII, which was still being outfitted. This would allow manned maintenance at normal atmospheric pressure.
Sohya was first off the sub. He hurriedly briefed the waiting hospitality representatives—all in Hawaiian shirts to add to the resort atmosphere—on the unwanted cold shower the guests had just endured and ensured they would have first-class treatment at check-in. Then he quickly left. He had much more on his plate than leis and towels.
First he buttonholed one of the shuttle operations personnel to inform her of the incident. Next he visited the tourism manager to describe the unusual sighting of eel fry on the way to the complex. Then he made his way to the environmental control room to request a manned inspection of Leviathan by surfacing the boat ahead of schedule in Dome VII. But he was rebuffed by the supervisor on duty, who objected that there was not enough atmosphere in the dome to carry out the procedure.
All three subs faced the same danger, but the best way to address the problem was to carefully inspect the vessel where the problem occurred. Sohya’s background was architectural engineering, but since joining Gotoba, he had been force-fed a wide range of knowledge from other engineering disciplines, and he knew that a submarine was a structure with a far lower safety index than a building. A well-designed building might be immediately usable after a major earthquake, but a submarine was different. He was determined to perform an inspection.
As he argued his case with the Malaysian supervisor, they were joined by Takasumi Iwaki, a short, tough-looking middle-aged man wearing a Gotoba uniform. He said brusquely, “Where’ve you been, Aomine? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Mr. Iwaki, we have a problem. The water tank design is flawed. I want to do a visual inspection of the hull.”
Iwaki was the head of Gotoba’s Special Projects Task Force and Sohya’s boss. The task force was a standing unit responsible for assembling and managing specialists from other departments for unusually challenging projects. Though it was small and independent, the task force held division status, and its members were known as Gotoba’s “shock troops” for their rapid-response capability. As chief, Iwaki was naturally endowed with formidable intelligence. After hearing the bare details of the problem from Sohya, he nodded and raised his wrist to tap out calculations on the touch panel of his wearable computer. After a few moments he looked up.
“We brought one of the power units down early. The electrolytic oxygen generator is already in place. Use the spare power to generate atmosphere and get the rest of the water out of the dome. Keep the O2 tanks in reserve. It’ll take you twelve hours, but the VIPs are spending the night anyway.”
The environmental control supervisor started sputtering. “Are you sure? We aren’t scheduled to run the full power output test till just before oil exploration starts. If you do it now, you’ll scramble my whole timeline.”
Iwaki stared at him calmly. “Better to get it out of the way. It’ll make things easier later. Just move your timeline
forward.”
“But that will throw us out of sync with the entire—”
“It’s fine. I’ve already reconciled the plan.” Iwaki held out his wearcom for the supervisor to see. The man groaned.
“Okay, everything fits. But the plan has more than two thousand dependencies. How…?”
“Gotoba knows how to handle changes on the spot. This is routine. Leave it to us. All you have to do is follow the revised master plan and open Dome VII.”
The supervisor pulled out his phone—Iwaki had already emailed him the new timelines—and began contacting his counterparts in Materials Supply and Operations. Iwaki pointed to the exit. “I’ll handle this. Better get moving.”
“To Dome VII?”
“No. Dome V, the theater. The president’s looking for you.”
“Gotoba?” Sohya gulped. “What does he want with me?”
“I didn’t know before, but I do now. It must be about your little incident. Just be careful.”
Sohya gulped again. “Okay.” He hurried toward the tube that gave access to the other domes.
The theater on the first floor of Dome V was the largest single space in the complex. As the name implied, its main purpose was for screening films, but it could also be used for staging plays, as a restaurant, or as an event space.
Today the theater was hosting a party to celebrate the completion of major work on the complex. Sohya and Iwaki still had a daunting amount of work ahead of them, but the hotel dome, deep-sea aquarium dome, and convention dome had already begun operations. As he walked into the theater, Sohya saw more than a hundred guests from the consortium nations enjoying a stand-up meal. Some of the passengers from Leviathan were there too. Apparently the hotel’s express dry cleaning services were up and running.
Sohya spotted Gotoba almost immediately. He was standing in the center of the room, a broad-shouldered, vigorous-looking man with a drink in one hand. When Sohya saw him with the old man and the little girl from the shuttle, he understood why Gotoba was looking for him.
