While Lu Zhou was returning to his hotel, Minister Novak was standing in a computer room at the Unified Energy System of Russia, St. Petersburg branch. He stared at a group of technicians who were working at their computers.
Standing next to Minister Novak was the manager of the branch, Olig. This pale-skinned middle-aged man had a thick beard with a beer belly, making him look like a balloon in his tight Armani suit.
He had been talking non-stop for the past two hours.
“Mr. Minister, I can promise you that our grid operation has been perfect, and there are no problems! The engineers at our department have been monitoring the system since this morning. We are fully prepared for the Helios fusion power station energy, however, we haven’t detected any voltage change from the Helios energy inlet at all—”
Minister Novak spoke with a poker face.
“I will decide if there are any problems or not.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I think you should trust us.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, Minister,” Olig said. Seeing how Novak began to look annoyed, Olig quickly shut his mouth.
Rosatom and the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation weren’t the only ones that didn’t expect such a thing to happen, the Unified Energy System of Russia, which was responsible for operating the power grid, also didn’t expect this.
During the project development phase, people from the Unified Energy System of Russia inspected the power station site. After making sure there were no problems, they approved to connect Helios to the grid.
After hearing the news that the fusion power station couldn’t be ignited, Olig’s eyelids began twitching.
He didn’t know why Novak thought that the problem wasn’t with the power plant, but with the power grid!
This was ridiculous!
Time quickly passed by. They weren’t able to detect any problems. Olig was wondering if he should tell Minister Novak that enough was enough. However, a technician suddenly stared at his computer screen and spoke.
“Sir…”
Olig immediately looked over and asked, “What’s wrong?”
The technician could feel the pressure of the gaze on him. He gulped and said, “There’s something wrong with our EMS system—”
Olig suddenly realized that he might be wrong. He quickly interrupted the technician and dragged him out of the room.
“Come with me…”
Minister Novak immediately stopped the two.
“Stop!”
Minister Novak looked at the technician and spoke seriously.
“What happened? Tell me now! You will be personally responsible if you attempt to hide anything!”
The technician was scared, he ignored his chubby boss and spoke quickly.
“When we checked the EMS memory, we found several abnormal response records. When the system received an output request from Helios, it did not process the relevant request, but returned an approval message…”
Basically, the upstream sent a message that a flood was coming, while the downstream received the message, and reported that it was opening the floodgate. However, the floodgate was never opened.
Academician Sivali frowned and said, “Is it a system bug?”
“It doesn’t look like a bug…” the engineer said. “I found some lines of code that don’t look like a bug. It looks like someone manually changed it.”
Olig began to sweat, and he quickly asked, “How is that possible? Did you misread it?!”
The technician knew he would probably be fired after this anyway, so he said, “I’m 90% sure! Maybe our safety director can look at it, I’m sure he will come to the same conclusion.”
This time, Olig wasn’t the only one sweating. Minister Novak, Academician Sivali, and officials from the energy department all broke out in cold sweat.
Someone did this!
Someone locked the energy input port for the EMS system!
If the nuclear core was successfully ignited, the huge surge of electrical energy generated would paralyze the entire transmission line and affect the nearby transformer stations. It would also cause a series of cascading damage to the nuclear core itself.
Fortunately, Helios’ active protection system shut down the reaction…
Minister Novak thought about the hundreds of millions of degree plasma inside the fusion reactor.
He snapped back to reality and growled.
“Find out who did this! Who is responsible for maintaining the power grid system… F*ck sake!”
Olig looked at Minister Novak and spoke in a trembling tone.
“Minister, maybe it’s just a system bug, we don’t have to overreact—”
“Mr. Olig,” Minister Novak said, “I advise you to cooperate, otherwise you will be a suspect.”
Olig’s eyes widened as he pointed toward himself.
“I’m a suspect? Jesus, why would I do such a thing?”
“Everyone is a suspect.” Minister Novak looked at the computer room and said, “This is a well-planned, organized attack. There is no doubt there are quislings sitting among us!”
“This isn’t an energy issue, this concerns national safety!”
Minister Novak looked at Olig, Sivali, as well as Lermontov from Rosatom. He spoke in a cold tone.
“I’m contacting the Federal Security Service, they will take this matter into their own hands.
“I’m sure they will be able to solve this quickly.”