WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 183: Under Black Water (1)

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The day turned over in different worlds. Gyeoul returned to the bleak dream of the afterlife with his heart a little warmer. But morning in San Francisco arrived with bad news.

'Was Anne's premonition right?'

A sudden withdrawal order had gone out in the early dawn. As of the present moment, the pursuit of Changcheng 9 was to be suspended entirely. There were no other instructions, but in the end, it meant the worst final solution the FBI agent had feared was about to become reality. America would never simply leave an anarchic nuclear threat alone.

But how?

The plan Joanna had mentioned involved personnel planting warheads. She had said it was to avoid detection by the Chinese military. Yet now, everyone was waiting to withdraw. Had the preparations already been finished? Or had they decided there was no more time to drag things out and found another method?

Either way, one thing was clear. The president had made a quick decision. If it was a necessary evil they would have to accept anyway, then the longer they delayed, the greater that evil would become. That was the feeling.

Someone spoke to Gyeoul as he was lost in thought.

"You don't look too good, Lieutenant."

"Corporal Wolf."

One of the few people here Gyeoul could call even somewhat close. Corporal Dwayne Wolf leaned against the railing beside him and stared toward where the maritime city should have been. But all they could see was gray fog. The morning sun was only a pale, whitish blur of light beyond the gray sky. Still, the weak and violent lives of people who had lost hope came echoing over, letting them know there were still streets rippling out there.

"I wanted to take one last look at this sickening view, but this is what we get."

"......"

"All those people are going to die, aren't they? Damn it. What the hell was all that work for?"

He was not only talking about the effort they had poured into the whale hunt. There were the structures they had built, including the sea farms, hoping to leave at least some hope behind even if they had to leave. The purpose may have been the mental stability of the personnel participating in the operation, but even if the plan had been calculating, its execution could not be reduced to that.

"I feel it every time I'm deployed on a mission, but I think I'm too small."

The Corporal scratched his head irritably. Scritch, scritch. White dandruff showered down over his shoulders.

"I always do my best. But there are far too many things that can't be done even with my best effort. The world is always moving somewhere I can't see, and it keeps tossing things I can't do anything about right in front of me. I hate that helplessness. Having to just accept it."

Gyeoul nodded slowly.

"I understand that feeling."

How could he not? The boy had wanted to dream a beautiful dream. On the twenty-seventh time, this time that might truly be the last. But the afterlife was a mirror that endlessly reflected reality.

This city, San Francisco, felt to Gyeoul like one unpleasant metaphor. He had been forcibly separated from the story he had been building, from the Gyeoul Alliance, and had still done everything he could to bring about a good outcome. Yet this moment was the result. It felt as if someone malicious were declaring from beyond his reach: this is the limit of what you can do. No matter how far you stretch your limits, there will always be something beyond them.

"At least we saved those people."

At the Corporal's self-mocking words, Gyeoul looked over at the frightened group gathered on one side of the deck.

Should he call them lucky? They were refugees the Intelligence Agency had judged worth saving. High-level personnel, such as physicists and chemical engineers. Major Ju Wei stood out among them too. He had heard the Department of Defense public affairs office wanted her, and in the end, she was being evacuated. Gyeoul turned his head before she noticed him.

'Kurt Lee is going to disappear here anyway...'

White foam rose from the sea alongside Pequod. A sign that a submarine was surfacing. Even with netting set up to block sight lines, if not for the fog, the withdrawal would not have started until after nightfall, when they could avoid observation. He could see small, anxious people climbing down rope ladders onto the submarine deck.

The next group descending had a different air about it. They were not refugees, and they were not combat personnel. He wondered if they were CIA agents, but their faces did not suggest that either. They had a kind of intellectual innocence about them. An unusually large number wore thick glasses. They looked better suited to pens than guns, to office desks than field cots.

'There are a lot of faces I haven't seen before for operation personnel.'

Then again, it was hardly strange. Pequod was a large vessel, and it housed a correspondingly large number of people. Gyeoul had not even met all the frontline strike team members yet. Since it was a special operations vessel, it probably needed specialized technical personnel as well.

The submarine, filled to capacity, closed its hatch. Its oval hull quietly took in water and disappeared beneath the surface. Several more submarines would have to come before everyone withdrew.

The armed personnel, including Gyeoul, were scheduled to leave last, together with the CIA situation room control operators. He had heard that immediately after the control operators and strike teams got off, Pequod was supposed to self-destruct. The ship was full of classified information, so an incineration system had been prepared from the beginning.

"Gyeoul."

A familiar voice called to the boy as he was thinking.

"Anne?"

The FBI agent was unexpectedly lightly equipped. Lightly meant she was not carrying field gear or a backpack like the others. And that lightness was tactical. She wore black safety glasses, her hair was tied up in a single tail, she had on body armor, and her vest was packed tight with magazines. The way she carried her weapon made her look ready for a firefight to break out at any second.

She spoke quietly.

"There's something important. Could you spare me a moment?"

Something important? At this point? Gyeoul was puzzled, but the agent looked utterly serious.

When Gyeoul excused himself, Corporal Wolf threw out a dry joke.

"It's all right. Interfering with other people's love affairs isn't a hobby of mine."

"I told you, Anne and I aren't like that. Excuse me."

After receiving the farewell, the Corporal turned to look into the distance again. He put a cigarette in his mouth, a soldier adding a handful of smoke to the fog.

Leaving him behind, Joanna led Gyeoul into the passage inside the bridge. She waited until no one was passing, entered a side cabin, and immediately locked the door. Then she pressed her ear to the wall and checked for signs of anyone nearby. Next, she pulled a rod-like device from her waist and swept it over the wall.

"What are you doing?"

He could guess, but he asked just in case. This time, she checked the ceiling as she answered.

"I'm worried we might be bugged."

In other words, this was a conversation the Intelligence Agency could not be allowed to hear... Once the Bureau agent finished searching, she turned toward Gyeoul. Only after scanning the boy's entire body one last time did she finally put the device away. She took off her black glasses, revealing eyes filled with concern and anger.

"Gyeoul. I think unauthorized human experimentation has been carried out on this ship."

"...Human experimentation?"

"Yes. You remember there were areas that even I, the supervisor, was forbidden from entering. That place was a laboratory. They brought refugees in through a separate cargo hatch and used them as test subjects. The Intelligence Agency's armed agents, SAD, operated alone in the city because they were procuring the Morgellons pathogen needed for the experiments."

"How did you find out?"

"...I planted a listening device on Team Leader Chadwick a while ago. Though I only found out for certain after midnight yesterday."

Damn. Reflexively, Gyeoul pictured a fight that might break out inside the ship. The distances were short, and the spaces were narrow. In this kind of combat environment, Gyeoul was invincible, at least in a gunfight. The number of people who could fight at once was limited. No matter how many enemies there were, he could overwhelm them through reaction speed alone.

But the story changed if they used methods other than firearms. Full-body protective suits, for example.

'In the worst case, I'll have to fight the strike team...'

Navy SEALs, Delta Force, the Ranger Regiment, Special Tactics Squadrons, and others. The elite of the elite, all with outstanding backgrounds. They were even more dangerous because they knew Gyeoul's abilities.

If the human experimentation was not an officially approved operation, the chance of clashing directly with the strike team would be low. In that case, only the Intelligence Agency's own armed force would become potential enemies.

Gyeoul asked, "Is there no chance it's a separate operation approved by the government?"

Instead of answering, Joanna took a recorder from her pocket. It was ruggedly designed, clearly built with durability and reliability in mind as much as performance. After several fast-forwards and rewinds, she found the call she wanted.

Only Team Leader Chadwick's voice, one side of the call, could be heard. What the person on the other end was saying was hard to catch even with Gyeoul's enhanced hearing. Only short words reached his ears now and then.

Gyeoul repeated the name they used for themselves.

"True Patriots? That doesn't sound like a simple expression of pride."

Joanna stopped the playback and nodded in agreement.

"They're presumed to be a private organization formed across the CIA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Maybe more than that. In the first place, if this were an operation approved by the government, there would be no problem informing me, the supervisor. Reporting it would only lead to someone higher up burying it."

She then mentioned the current administration's tendencies.

"Although the president has now approved the final solution, there is no way a president who has been conciliatory on the refugee issue would have allowed something like this. Even if it were allowed, there would be no reason to choose a place like this."

Of all places, would they really choose such an unstable base? There were any number of more stable locations. Fort Roberts, for instance. If they had, Gyeoul would have noticed. Over apocalypse after apocalypse after apocalypse, he had become all too familiar with such signs. The weak disappearing one day without warning. As the streets of refugee camps grew cleaner, only bodiless rumors spread thick.

'Human experimentation is the most effective way to develop a vaccine.'

For a disease that infected only humans, the test subjects had to be human.

It was true that the more a world relied on human experimentation, the faster infection suppressants came out.

But in the end, they were only temporary suppressants. Gyeoul had never seen a perfect vaccine either. He only had knowledge learned through system correction. 「Plague Immunity」 would be the key.

"Did you report this?"

At Gyeoul's question, Joanna shook her head.

"If all I have is my testimony without evidence, it will be useless. An investigation would start, yes, but I doubt it would proceed normally in times like these. Those bastards won't just sit there and take it."

She told him about the Bureau's manpower shortage. With social unrest dragging on, every investigative agency was overloaded. Compared to the Intelligence Agency, which handled foreign intelligence, it was only natural that the Bureau, which handled domestic matters, carried a heavier burden.

"Isn't it obvious just from the fact that I'm the only supervisor on an operation like this?"

The smile she added to those murky words was stained with exhaustion and gloom.

"On top of that, if my report is intercepted, they'll start destroying evidence immediately. Unfortunately, the Bureau doesn't have an encryption system for something like this. Even if we did, there's no way the Intelligence Agency wouldn't know about it."

In other words, formally reporting it and conducting a search accompanied by strike team members was out of the question. If a cornered Chadwick immediately started Pequod's incineration procedure, the result would be everyone dying.

"Then what do you want to do from here, Anne? How can I help?"

"Before we withdraw, I want to secure evidence by any means necessary."

Then the supervisor spoke as if chewing through each word.

"I thought about it all night. What meaning could this possibly have?"

The melancholy Joanna felt was the moral debt of the final solution.

"Even if it hadn't been human experimentation, they were people who were all going to die anyway. It's not as if I've always lived with clean hands either... What changes if I uphold law and principle at this point...? When everyone is accepting necessary evil to protect the greater cause of humanity's survival, I wondered if me alone trying to keep my conscience was nothing but self-satisfaction..."

Perhaps Team Leader Chadwick, and the people with him, were more correct in the end. That was the question she swallowed.

"I don't think so."

Gyeoul denied it firmly.

"Even if someone is going to die anyway, until the moment they die, anyone has the right to live like a person."

"Do the people out there live like people?"

"At least they can struggle to survive. They can try to have hope. They can stay beside someone they love. No matter how dirty and miserable it looks, ending it is their right. If they thought death was better, they would have died."

Gyeoul's life before death would have looked miserable to anyone. But if someone else denied that life based only on what they saw, Gyeoul would not have been able to accept it. His short life had held little laughter and many tears, but the warmth of two precious people alone gave that life boundless worth.

"The right to stay even one second longer with someone I want, and someone who wants me. Team Leader Chadwick stole that right. It's far too great a wrong to erase by saying they were going to die anyway."

That was what he believed. Gyeoul, who had once desperately wanted even one more second, comforted Joanna.

============================ Author’s Note ============================

#Q&A

Q. kaley-nim: @Author-nim, I thought you were not a normal "person" but a normal "Old One" overflowing with childlike innocence. I guess this reader was mistaken... mmph mmph.

A. The author's standard for classifying people is intelligent beings with personhood. Therefore, the expression normal person was not wrong.

Q. Kyogre-nim: @Ah, if you keep that up, I'm afraid Author-nim might become a butter-grilled Old One, Tunguska flavor.

A. If you spread butter on me and grill me, I become president.

Q. Calpis-nim: @Author-nim, if you publish this novel, I want to buy it. I'll make it a family heirloom and pass it down, so please sign it. If you do that, I'll live licking it morning and night. p.s. If Silv publishes a book too, I'll definitely buy it! (bowing)

A. Well now... This is a problem. There are many readers with unusual tastes who want signed copies... I plan to make only about fifteen signed copies... Of course, they won't be stock going out to bookstores. I'm thinking of signing the author's personal gift copies and sending them to a few people...

Q. svjk-nim: @Hmm, now I'm suddenly curious about the Chairman too. Is he someone who built that much wealth from nothing? Or is he someone who grew up learning only transactions in that kind of environment?? If he grew up in a company that pursued only transactions, the part of him that pursues transactions that are not unfair to either side feels like it doesn't quite fit.

A. It is a little... haha, for the author to explain everything about a character in the work. Try imagining it. What kind of environment would make a person like that?

Q. NeoGGM-nim: @I went to the V Noble blog and learned that the Great Old One's writing will be released next month, and since I happened to lose my pot stand while moving, I wish to purchase it. What is the method for acquiring a signed copy?

A. It is not for sale! As for the acquisition method... that is still a secret.

Q. Kaif-nim: @Isn't the control personality way too cowardly? Beating people down with facts only...

A. Wouldn't the world be very peaceful if everyone were like the control personality?

Footnotes:

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