Chapter 8 — The Cable Splicer Beneath the Sea

Sleepless Night on Deck

Sơn got out of the decompression chamber at eleven o'clock at night, his body exhausted but his mind strangely alert, a state familiar to him every time old memories resurfaced. Instead of returning to the cabin, he walked out onto the back deck, where the wind was much stronger than in the morning, bringing salty steam to his face.

Minh Thư was sitting there, leaning against a roll of spare cable, holding a half-cooled cup of hot tea, looking out at the dark sea with no lights other than the ship itself.

"Not sleeping yet?" Sơn asked, sitting down at a reasonable distance from her, not too close, not too far.

"Can't sleep," Thư replied, turning the tea cup in her hand. "My mind keeps replaying everything I learned today, from the OTDR to the decompression time table. I'm afraid I'll forget something important tomorrow."

"That feeling won't completely disappear, even if you do this job for ten years," Sơn said, his voice was somewhat comforting. "But it will change shape, from fear of forgetting knowledge into a more beneficial form of vigilance."

Thư turned to look at him, the deck lights casting a dim light on both of their faces. "Mr. Bách told me this afternoon that he used to be the most daring person in the team," she said, choosing her words carefully, not sure if she was touching forbidden territory or not. "I don't mean to pry into your personal affairs, I just want to understand, to work with you better."

Sơn was silent for a moment, looking out to sea, where the waves began to have white foam glistening under the moonlight hidden behind the clouds. "Three years ago, I lost a teammate during a dive," he spoke, his voice even, as if he had practiced how to tell this story without letting it consume him every time he mentioned it. "His name is Duy. He is the one who taught me most of what I know about this profession."

"I'm sorry," Thư spoke softly, not knowing if there was any other more appropriate response.

"There's no need to apologize, you didn't do anything wrong," Sơn replied. "I'm not telling you to pity you, but because you're asking honestly, and I think you deserve to know why I do things this way, instead of just thinking I'm an annoyingly over-cautious person."

He recounted, not as fully as what had just appeared in his mind just now in the decompression chamber, but enough for Thư to understand the core: a decision to continue work based on numbers that were still within the safety threshold, an unexpected vortex, a stuck wire, and minutes that were not enough to save a life despite their best efforts.

"From there I learned that the safety threshold on paper and the safety threshold in reality are not always the same." Sơn concluded. "And I never want to have to learn that lesson the same way a second time."

Thư sat quietly for a moment, letting the story settle down before continuing. "Can you tell me why you chose this profession?"

Sơn nodded, turning his attention to her.

"I have a younger brother, four years younger than me, who had severe asthma when he was young." The letter began, her voice slowing down, as if she were flipping through a carefully stored memory. "My house is in a coastal commune, nearly twenty kilometers from the district hospital. One time, when I was sixteen years old, my younger brother had a severe asthma attack in the middle of the night, just as the whole area lost network connection due to an incident at a nearby broadcasting station. My father couldn't call an ambulance via the app like usual, the switchboard number was constantly busy because the whole commune had a signal loss at the same time. In the end, I had to drive my younger brother on a motorbike for more than half an hour to get to the hospital."

"Is your brother okay?" Sơn asked, although he partly guessed the answer from the way Thư told the story.

"It's okay, but it almost wasn't okay," Letter replied. "The doctor said that if I had been another fifteen minutes late, I might not have made it. Since that night, I've always thought about that fifteen-minute gap, and how just because of a connection problem, that gap almost became the gap between life and death." She looked down at the completely cooled cup of tea in her hand. "So when I went to college, I chose telecommunications engineering, not because I was passionate about technology from a young age, but because I wanted to do something related to keeping those connections from breaking, especially in remote places like my hometown."

"He, Duy, has a strange habit," Sơn added, surprised with himself for voluntarily continuing the story without Thư asking. "Before every difficult dive, he always asks the team a question that has nothing to do with work, like what is everyone's favorite food, or if they won the lottery, what would be the first thing they would do? He says he does this so everyone remembers that above the water there is still a whole life waiting for them to return, not just pipes and joints."

"Sounds like someone who knows how to keep team spirit," Thư said, smiling slightly even though the story had a sad tone.

"That's right." Sơn also smiled softly, the rare time that day that smile reached his eyes. "I gave up that habit after he died, not intentionally, I just couldn't think of any more questions to ask. Maybe it's time for me to pick it up again."

"So what will your question be today?" Thư asked, half joking and half serious, as if trying to see if she had just opened up something small but important.

Sơn thought for a moment, looking out at the dark sea. "If everything goes well tomorrow, what's the first thing you'll do when you get back to the mainland?"

"Call your parents and tell them everything, even the parts that worry them, because I think they deserve to know what their daughter is actually doing." The reply didn't take long to think about, as if the answer had been in her head for a long time, just waiting for someone to ask the right question. "And you?"

"I will..." Sơn paused, realizing that he had never really thought about that question for himself during the past three years, because most of the time he was only focused on completing the next shift, not allowing himself to think beyond that. "I think I'll call Duy's mother, for the first time in a long time. Just to check on her, not to talk about the past." Thư didn't say anything more, just nodded slightly, as if understanding that the answer was much heavier than its simple appearance, and not every moment needed to be filled with words.

Sơn looked at her for a long moment, realizing something he had never thought of in this way: both of them, despite coming from two completely different stories, were doing this work because of the same deep-seated fear — the fear of the gap between when help was needed and when help actually arrived.

"That's why the work I'm doing is much more important than a typical repair contract," Sơn said, his voice low. "Not because of Mr. Trung's progress numbers on paper, but because at the other end of that cable line, there is always someone who needs a shortened distance, just like I needed those fifteen minutes."

The wind blew stronger, forcing both of them to sit closer to the cable reel to avoid sea water droplets shooting up from the side of the ship. In the distance, a flash of lightning quietly flashed and then died, closer than the last time, enough that a few seconds later, a deep and distant thunder sounded, as a reminder that this quiet time was also getting shorter.

"Do you think you'll make it in time?" Thư asked, no longer asking about her own fifteen-minute distance, but about the general distance of the whole ship, the whole island, and the approaching storm.

Sơn did not answer immediately. He looked out to sea, where darkness and water merged into one without boundaries. "I don't know for sure," he spoke honestly, not wanting to use an empty word of reassurance to fill the silence. "But I know I will do everything the right way possible, step by step, without skipping any steps just because I'm in a hurry. That's the only thing I can promise." Thư nodded, accepting that answer as a more trustworthy truth than any firm promise. The two sat in silence for a while, listening to the sound of the waves pounding against the ship's hull, until the cup of tea in Thư's hand cooled completely.

Before standing up and returning to the cabin, Sơn gently touched the metal chain on his wrist, a gesture Thư had seen him repeat several times a day and she now clearly understood its meaning. She didn't ask anything more, just stood up and followed him, they both walked inside, leaving behind the empty deck with the sound of the wind howling louder and louder in the darkness that was gradually tightening around the ship.