Nigel Thompson

PHEIA

For divers everywhere.

This Edition

I write my stories for fun. Most of my books have been written in the early morning at Starbucks before going to work (in the days before I retired). The cost of my coffee and a croissant or bagel ran to about $6.50 a day. When you add that up over a year or so it costs a lot to write a book.

I produce my books as Kindle books because the process is simple and free. I sell my books on Amazon for $0.99 because that is the lowest price Amazon allows for a Kindle book. I make them free for five days out of every 90, which is as often as Amazon allows me to. At the rate my books sell, which is around one a day on a good week, I’ll have paid off the cost of writing them in about five years. So, in case you were wondering, I don’t make any money at this. That’s OK with me. It’s a hobby not a living.

I edit my work myself which, as any writer can tell you, is a terrible idea, but it is cheaper that way. Hiring someone else to do an edit pass would cost me thousands of dollars. I make half a dozen or so full editing passes over a book which means that I’ve read it an awful lot before you get to see it. I take all the feedback I can get from beta readers during the writing and after publication. It is because of that feedback that I update the text to fix spelling and grammar occasionally. If you buy the book from Amazon, you automatically get the update. I do not alter the story line (although I have been tempted in some cases.)

Most readers don’t write reviews unless there is something about the book they don’t like. This means that reviews are often either bad or terrible, which is why I mostly do not look at them. Having said that, please take a few minutes to write a review for every book you read whether you like it or not. Not just for my books but all the books you read. Authors appreciate the feedback, and a few decent reviews make it all seem worthwhile.

Colorado Springs, July 2016

MUIR

(Sea Level)

Dr. Paul Martin stood in the biggest auditorium the Maine Institute of Undersea Research had to offer in front of a large projection screen. The screen showed a water color picture of a small Greek town. The auditorium was about half full. The audience was a mix of scientists, engineers and members of the press.

Martin was a little disappointed by the turnout. He had worked hard to juggle the class schedules to get this room, expecting it to be jammed. This was after all a very exciting expedition. At least he was excited.

He glanced up at the clock. It was two minutes after the official start time. “I guess this is it.” he muttered to himself.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.” Martin started in his Boston accent. “What you see on the screen behind me is an artist’s rendering of the city of Pheia in Greece which disappeared into the sea after an earthquake somewhere towards the end of the fifth century. As some of you know, I was involved in an archaeological expedition in the 70’s to explore what remained of the city under the sea. And as you can see from the picture, it was a very beautiful city and the artifacts we recovered from it revealed that it was home to some talented artists.“

He pushed a button on the remote in his hand and the picture changed.

“I am pleased to introduce you to the institute’s new deep sea exploration habitat — the Pheia. As you can see from this picture taken while she was being manufactured, this is a large habitat capable of housing a team of twelve scientists and support crew.”

Dr. Kate Moss sat in the audience a few rows from the front watching Martin. She and the people sitting with her were very familiar with the Pheia. They had spent the last year planning the expedition Martin was about to describe. They had visited the boat yard where the Pheia had been built and spent time in a 3D simulator getting used to what living inside the habitat would look like. Sitting here now, waiting for Martin to describe the expedition to the press, Kate still couldn’t quite see the attraction of the name. The city of Pheia had met with a rather dramatic end and sunk below the water. She was sure Martin had named it because of his own expedition to recover remains from the sunken city, but she felt it was a poor choice all the same. In any case, none of the team called it the Pheia. The official name had only been applied in the last few months. Throughout design and construction is was just known as the new habitat or hab for short.

Martin had changed the image on the screen again.

“What you see here are tube worms living near a hydrothermal vent. This particular group was photographed in the Pacific ocean. Our expedition will visit a new series of hydrothermal vents discovered deep in the Cayman trench just over a year ago.”

He switched to a map of Grand Cayman which had a red cross drawn by hand in the sea just off the West coast.

“This site is the deepest hydrothermal vent site yet discovered. It is approximately three miles down. The Pheia has been designed and built specifically to visit this site. And not just to visit briefly and take a few pictures, but to stay on site and allow our team of scientists and support divers to visit and explore for several days.”

He paused for a second and looked to his right to make sure the other speakers were ready.

“As you may know, sending divers to extreme depths requires either that they be in a pressurized submarine or that they use saturation diving techniques and breathe special gas mixtures. The Pheia is a saturated diving system with a twist. Our next speaker has spent most of her research career working on ways to improve saturated diving systems. Please welcome Dr. Nicole Ford.”

There was some polite applause as Ford walked onto the stage.

“Thank you. I have prepared a short paper on the systems the Pheia will use. You will find a copy in the press packet. The essence of the problem is that at great depths, high pressure nervous syndrome or HPNS causes detrimental effects to divers such as tremors, nausea, dizziness and reduced mental performance. The specific effects and depths at which they happen varies with each diver but at the depth the Pheia will be going, HPNS is a factor for everyone. My research centers around chemical stabilizers which prevent the onset of HPNS when used with hydreliox gas mixtures. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, hydreliox is a mixture of oxygen, helium and a little hydrogen. It is the hydrogen which is important to the suppression of HPNS. Our lab has conducted several tests with the U.S. Navy and we are satisfied that this expedition is both practical and safe. The expedition members have been fully briefed on HPNS and my team’s work, and have all volunteered to be part of my own experiment as part of this mission.”

Ford reached into the pocket of her pant suit and pulled out a small plastic box. She opened the box and took out what looked like a horse pill. She held it up in front of her. A close up of her hand appeared in a corner of the screen. It wavered around slightly as the camera tried to track her movements.

“This is a self contained bio lab with a short range radio transmitter. It is capable of doing a full analysis of the dissolved gasses in the body. It is also described in the paper you have. This device has been a major factor in the success of our research. Never before have we been able to observe the effects of tissue gas saturation in real time with such accuracy. We will use these pills to track the state of every member of the hab’s crew for the duration of the expedition.”

Ford added more details about the operation of the device but kept it brief. Most of the audience were either fully familiar with her work or members of the press who were unlikely to grasp the details in one sitting. She moved on.

Dr. Ford reached into her other pocket and pulled out a syringe.

“This syringe contains a combination of agents we have developed in our lab to combat HPNS. The exact combination is subject to a patent application so I’m going to speak generally. There are two main functions. The first is to prevent bubble formation in body tissues as pressure is reduced. This is a minor development from other work. The second is to prevent the neurological effects we know as HPNS. The mechanism is described briefly in your handout and fully in our patent application.”

She paused briefly expecting questions but the audience was silent.

“I’d like to thank the Navy for their generous support of my lab in developing this HPNS suppressor. Thank you.”

She walked off to polite applause and Martin returned.

“Thank you Dr. Ford. Our next speaker is Marie Babin who is the architect and chief engineer on the Pheia.”

Martin walked off stage and Babin replaced him. It was obvious she was nervous.

“Good afternoon.” She pressed the clicker Martin had handed her and the image on the screen changed to a schematic of the Pheia.

Kate fidgeted in her seat. She had seen all this before — several times. She really wanted to go for a run. The weather was fine and she was thinking ahead to several weeks of travel and confinement in the Pheia. This might be the last chance for a run in the sunshine.

Babin turned to face the audience. “I will start with and overview of the compartments in the Phea, then go over some of the systems in detail. Please hold your questions to the end.” She pointed her laser at the screen. “As you can see from this schematic, the Pheia consists of two vertical aluminum cylinders connected by two short tunnels.” She pointed a laser at the left-hand cylinder. “This is the operations cylinder. It has a diving section at the bottom with a moon pool exit to the ocean. Above it is the operations room which contains the control computers and communications equipment.” The laser circled the area at the top. “And this is the gas generation and reactor space.”

A scan of the audience showed no hands. She continued. “On the right you can see the crew cylinder. The bottom section is mostly storage for food and the equipment the crew will need to set up an observation grid on the bottom. We do not store water as the on-board desalination plant makes that.”

The pointer circled the top of the crew cylinder.

“This is the crew bunk area. It has room for twelve people. You’ll note that we do not have separate male and female areas.”

Kate heard whispering behind her followed by a suppressed laugh. She turned around and saw Mike Duncan, the dive leader and his two buddies engaged in some private joke.

Babin continued. “This area also contains the head and shower facilities.” She moved the pointer to the center. “And lastly, in the center is the galley.” We have room for the crew to sit and eat together. We have designed this area to also be used as a meeting room.”

Kate turned back to the screen in time to see Babin point to the reactor again.

“I suspect that most of you are concerned about the reactor. This small nuclear reactor provides electrical power to the Pheia. It was developed as part of the Russian space program and we are very grateful to Vikor Bazhanov for his work with the Russians to allow us to use this device. It was developed for use in space, and consequently requires no maintenance or even any monitoring. It is capable of surviving reentry through the atmosphere. Compared to other power sources we considered, this is both safer and more reliable and in addition gives us all the electrical power we could ask for.”

Babin went on to describe the Pheia’s gas and drive systems in more detail. Kate was desperate to get out. She thought Babin was done but one of the journalists asked a question about the reactor. People were so terrified of reactors. She imagined the entire press coverage of their expedition would be about the Russian reactor. Few people would care about the tube worms. It was a sad fact that most people didn’t care about science or engineering unless it could kill them or get them high.

The reporter seemed satisfied with Babin’s answers about the reactor and sat down. Another hand went up.

“Sir? At the back,” Babin said.

A tall man in baggy clothes stood up holding a notepad.

“Could you tell us where the Pheia was built?”

Babin nodded. “Yes, of course. There are some pictures from the construction in your handouts. The two large aluminum cylinders were rolled and welded together for us by a company in California which makes rocket boosters. They came out to Maine by truck and were machined and fitted out here in Maine at the Powers Shipyard. The two short tunnels, which are also welded aluminum were made in Detroit by a company that makes specialized auto body parts. The completed structure was welded together at Powers, and that’s where we did all the internal fittings. We used a variety of sub-contractors for the gas and electrical systems.” She paused. “If you would like more details please see me after and I’ll take your contact information.”

The reporter nodded and sat back down.

There were no more hands. Martin walked back on the stage and the image on the screen changed to show an org chart with pictures of institute staff and a box marked ‘Pheia Crew’.

“As Ms Babin has indicated many people were involved in the construction of the Pheia and many more in the expedition to Cayman. Don’t worry, I’m not going to drag them all up here. I just want to mention a few more people who have important roles outside of the expedition science.”

He pointed the laser pointer in the clicker at a bearded face at the top of the screen. The caption under the picture said Williams.

“This is David Williams. He is the director of undersea programs here at MIUR and as you can see from the chart, he is my boss. David spent a lot of time with the British Navy before he came to us. He will be directing the overall operation from the surface support barge in Cayman. I will be coordinating the program from inside the Pheia and providing the media with information about the progress of the expedition. David is currently in Grand Cayman preparing for the arrival of the Pheia on its support barge.”

He pointed at another face on the screen.

“And this is Dr. George Carver. George is a behavioral scientist. He and Dr. Ford will be monitoring the crew of the Pheia both for signs of HPNS but also for any negative effects due to being confined to the Pheia for about two weeks.”

He scanned the audience. There were no hands up.

“Thank you all for coming today. As I mentioned, the Pheia is on its way to Cayman and the team will depart next week. We will have another press conference by phone once everyone is assembled in Cayman. Thank you.”

The audience got up and started making its way out. One or two people stayed to ask questions. Kate was on her way through the door when she heard Duncan behind her talking. She turned to face him.

“What was so funny Mike?” she asked.

Duncan pointed to one of his dive team.

“I was saying that Perez here is going to have to put his love life on hold.”

Perez scowled at him.

“That’s not quite what you said.”

“There’s a lady present.” Duncan replied

“Like that’s stopped you before.”

The divers turned down the hallway outside the auditorium.

“Later Kate”. Duncan said as they walked away.

Kate liked Duncan. He was a no BS kind of guy. She was thinking of catching him up and asking him to run with her. She usually ran alone but Duncan was a great runner and when she ran with him she pushed herself a bit harder.

“Hi Kate.”

Chas Dunsworth had walked up beside her.

“Hi Chas. Didn’t see you in there.”

“I was at the back reading. I hate these press things. They are always just so much hand waving crap and no science.”

Dunsworth was a technician who worked in Kate’s lab. She knew he had a crush on her big time, but although she found Chas to be pleasant and a very capable assistant, she had no romantic interest in him.

They walked along the hall to the outside door which was propped open letting in the sunshine.

“I’m going for a run.” Kate said. “Wanna come?”

She knew Chas would say no. He wasn’t a runner and she teased him about it occasionally. He always took it well. At least that’s what she thought.

“Nope. Got a date with a cheeseburger over the road.”

Kate looked at her watch. It was lunchtime. Maybe she should eat now and run later. She also had a lot of work to tidy up before she left for Cayman next week. The warm sun felt wonderful.

“OK. Enjoy. I’ve got to run in the sun.” She smiled at him and jogged off towards the gym.

Martin was still in the auditorium with Babin and another engineer called Leclerc. A reporter from Boston was grilling the engineers about the systems in the Pheia. Martin saw that the reporter was very interested and obviously very bright but could not see him writing any of this in his paper or even in his own online blog. Most people would care nothing about the Pheia. They would only be interested in what they found down in the bottom of the Cayman trench. And only then if it was some new life form. In Martin’s view, most of the public cared less about science than they did about where the gas for their cars came from — and they didn’t care much about that as long as it was cheap.

Martin cared deeply about the Pheia. It had taken him a long time and a lot of hard work and lobbying to raise the huge amount of money required to build the habitat and fund the expedition. The institute had several deep sea submersibles but only one was manned, and that one was a pressurized design large enough for just three crew members. Keeping the Pheia unpressurized allowed them to send a much larger crew.

The expedition to the bottom of the Cayman trench would be a massive step forward for undersea research, and when they got there he desperately wanted the institute to get all the credit it deserved.

Kate ran along the bike path by the sea. It was a beautiful calm day. Tiny breakers rolled onto the beach making gentle swishing noises. Her mind was full of details of her work and in particular what she would be doing in just over two weeks when they reached the bottom of the trench. In the distance she saw someone sitting on one of the many benches. These were popular places to sit and watch the sea on sunny days. As she got closer she saw the small cloud of smoke from the cigarette and recognized the dirty windbreaker. She was just thinking of a wave and running right past when the figure stood up in her way making her stop.

“Hello miss Moss.”

“Hi Boris” Kate replied.

Segei Bazhanov, or Boris to the people who knew him well, was the son of a Russian space engineer. It was Boris’ father who had arranged for the nuclear power plant in the Pheia. Boris was on the team to monitor the reactor — despite many assurances from the Russians that it could take care of itself. He was a competent mechanical engineer and so doubled as one of the mechanical support staff on the Pheia.

Kate found Bazhanov to be very good at whatever he applied himself to but rather too fond of himself for her liking. She imagined he saw himself as charming but that was not how she saw him.

“Going for run?” he asked.

“I was.”

“Ah yes. Sorry. I am in your way. I do not wish to stop you. Please continue.” He waved his arm in a grand sweep in the direction Kate had been running.

“Thanks” she said, and jogged past him.

Once she was about 20 yards away, she glanced back. Boris waved at her and she wished she hadn’t looked. “Don’t need to encourage him.” she thought.

Martin finished with the reporter and walked out of the empty auditorium. He was feeling pleased with himself but a little disappointed that more people from the press had not attended the event. He made a note to work on publicity over the next week or so before the dive started.

Back in his office he checked his email. The surface support barge carrying the Pheia was on its way down the coast. It would be several days before it got to Cayman. The weather forecast was excellent and the tug crew were anticipating a smooth trip to the island.

He pulled up his TODO list. It was still very long. He checked off ‘Press Conference’ and scanned the rest of the items. They were mostly things his staff or members of the expedition would take care of. His job now was to make sure nobody forgot anything and to do a little coordination with the Cayman authorities to ensure things went smoothly there.

Martin had only been to Grand Cayman once before and was looking forward to going back again. They would be spending most of their two or three weeks on the surface barge but he would have at least a few days to sit on the beach in the sunshine and read.

He was slightly concerned with the way the locals worked though. They worked on Cayman time which had no allegiance to any clock. People he had engaged to do work for the expedition tended to show up when they felt like it. And that wasn’t necessarily on the same day Martin had booked them. It wasn’t that they were lazy. They worked well enough. They just seemed to have different priorities. If they had a job scheduled but plenty of cash from previous work, they might decide to sit on the beach for the day instead of working.

Martin had spoken to several ex-pats living there on his last visit. They had horror stories of home construction or repairs that took two or three times as long as they had been expecting. In some cases the owner had gone through several different local companies to get the work completed.

Martin had tried to convince the Cayman authorities to let him bring his own people for everything but they had politely declined. So he had hired a number of locals through an Englishman who had lived there for over 20 years and seemed to understand what he wanted. He had been promised that they would be ready to help at the dock when the barge arrived and that all the fruit and vegetables he had ordered would be fresh and waiting to be loaded. No problem.

He thought about phoning the contractor but decided there was no point. The man had given him all the assurances anyone could wish for. Martin just hoped they were true. In any case, Williams was on site now and should be able to deal with anything before the Pheia arrived.

Boat Yard

Edwin Gross stood outside building number seven in the morning sun smoking a cigarette. He looked around the yard at the cranes, assembly jigs and material stands. He liked it here. This was his real home. He had been a machinist at the company for 10 years before deciding to become a welder. It was late in life to be making a big change but he felt the need for something different after his divorce. The training had been easy. He took night classes at the local community college and amazed himself at how quickly he picked up the science behind welding and the techniques to make it work in practice. It was fortunate that the teacher had also worked at a boat yard. They had a lot in common and Edwin spent a lot of extra time after class practicing while the teacher recounted tales of his own work experience.

Five years later Edwin was the one they put on the bigger, more complicated jobs. He was still very nimble and had no problem climbing through the assembly jigs to get set up for an overhead weld. The younger welders called him Mr. Tig. They had built a myth that he could weld anything given the right shield gas. The truth was that Edwin loved his job. He kept up on welding research and practiced new techniques whenever he heard about them. If new alloys showed up in the shop, Edwin was always there looking for offcuts to try a weld on. He was on the top of his game.

A seagull flew over the shop and dropped its load in front of him of the concrete pad. Edwin looked up as it flew out towards the bay. The sky was cloudless. It seemed a shame to go back inside but his cigarette was finished and he had a lot more work to complete before the day was over. He threw the butt in the 50 gallon drum by the door that served as a trash can and went back inside.

The huge assembly shop was dark despite the numerous overhead floodlights. No amount of electric light could compete with the power of the sun on a clear day. Edwin paused a moment, took off his sunglasses and put them in the inside pocket of his welding jacket. In front of him stood the massive structure he was working on. Two cylinders of aluminum nearly forty feet high with domed tops and bottoms stood a few feet apart in a massive assembly jig. Between them were two tubular tunnels. The top tunnel had been tack welded in place by Edwin earlier in the morning. The bottom one was held in place by its jig.

Edwin walked up to the lower tunnel and checked the fit. The machinists had done a nice job making the flange ends to the tunnels. They fitted the main cylinders perfectly. He ran his finger over the welds that held the flanges to the tunnel sections. The work was nice. Someone with some talent had done them. He pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket and looked closer. The weld was very regular. No undercut. About the right shape and no signs of pits or inclusions. Nice work. He could have done it himself.

Edwin looked at the area where the flange on the tunnel met the cylinder. His apprentice had cleaned it well. All the surface oxide was gone and the bare aluminum shone brightly in the overhead lights. It was a pleasure to weld when the preparation was done properly. He’d taken a lot of time with his apprentice explaining how the weld was affected when the oxide on the surface wasn’t removed completely. The kid was patient and didn’t seem to mind the grunt work of doing the cleaning. He was also showing signs of becoming a good welder himself. He had the right temperament and a good interest in what was going on in the metal.

One of the tasks Edwin had given over to his apprentice was the sample testing that had to be done when new jobs arrived. Aluminum came in a lot of different alloys and it was important to know which one he was working with before welding it. The alloy dictated the type of filler rod he needed and sometimes affected the choice of shield gas, although that was mostly just argon or helium, depending on whether he was welding down or overhead. The argon was denser than air and floated down. The helium floated up and was better for overhead jobs. The apprentice was responsible for identifying the alloy and getting the right filler rod from the stores. Edwin checked his work less often now. The kid was always spot on and it pleased Edwin that he had quality help. What he didn’t know was that his apprentice had made a simple mistake on this job. He had tested the material from the main cylinder parts but not from the tunnels. He had assumed it was all the same. But the tunnels had been made at a different plant and the alloy was not the same.

Edwin snapped his jacket closed, put on his helmet and picked up his gloves, then climbed up the jig to the top of the tunnel. His TIG torch was hung over a rail on the jig ready for him next to his boom box which was held to the same rail with a bungee cord. Edwin turned on the boom box and Springsteen filled the air. He knelt down, put on his gloves, checked the gas flow from the torch, picked up a piece of filler rod and began the first tack weld, singing along to Born in the USA.

First Dive

(100 ft)

The dive group were assembled in the circular moon pool room in the bottom of the ops cylinder. The scientists stood on one side, Duncan, White and Perez on the other. Between them the circular exit to the ocean looked black and slightly forbidding. The sea swelled up and down through the exit as the habitat moved up and down slightly in response to movements of the surface barge from which it was suspended. Everyone was in their dive suits. Dive tanks were in the racks behind them and each person held a face mask and a pair of fins.

Duncan scanned the five scientists again. He’d had serious reservations about taking amateur divers on an expedition like this, but during training in Maine they had shown a level of professionalism he hadn’t expected. They had asked a lot of questions. Mostly about the equipment. They’d also told him a lot about the marine environment that he hadn’t really understood despite a career as a Navy diver. After several training dives he’d become comfortable with them.

“Everyone ready?” Duncan asked and they nodded. Chas gave him an OK.

“Before we get into the water I’m going to go over the dive plan again, but before we do that we need to do a comm check. Ms Young?”.

Megan held up her full-face dive mask. “Everyone please put on your masks now and make sure your ear buds are in place. We’ll check sound levels.”

She slipped on her own mask and walked to the end of the group of scientists so she could see them all. One by one she addressed them over the communications system and each responded. Chas gave her an OK with his hand.

“No Chas, I need you to talk to me so I can hear you.

“Sorry he said” and gave her another OK.

Megan looked at the Navy guys. She knew they were all long ex-navy but she still thought of them as the Navy guys. They sounded off in order.

The communications equipment they were using was similar to that used by commercial divers but had been fitted to a new mask design which was supposed to be more comfortable during long dives. The masks were custom fitted to the user’s face by a chemical enzyme process which temporarily softened the plastic of the mask and made it flow over the user’s skin. After a minute or two the plastic became more solid again leaving a perfect seal. The idea had come from a research lab at MIT where it had been used to create exact fitting prosthetics. One of the technicians in the lab was a diver and had come up with the idea of using it to form dive masks.

Duncan had been a little doubtful about the idea of having plastic moulded to his face but compared to the navy issue masks his felt like it wasn’t there. There was no way he was ever going back to the old gear — provided it held up. He had many hours on his now and so far it seemed durable enough.

Duncan addressed the divers. “Ok, one at a time. Tanks and masks on, then down the ladder. You can put your fins on up here or once you are in the water. Once you are ready with your fins on, drop down to the bottom of the weight stack. We’ll gather there, then set off with me in front and White at the rear. Remember please, nobody in front of me. We aren’t too concerned about depth here but try to keep at about the same depth I am. White will bring up the rear. Perez will stay here in case anyone needs to come back. Exit procedure is the reverse. Come up through the bottom of the weight stack to the moon pool ladder. Come up to the surface, establish positive buoyancy then pull your fins off one at a time and hand them to Perez. Don’t drop your fins. It’s about 5,000 feet to the bottom and my free diving skills aren’t quite that good.”

Duncan put on his gear and jumped through the small exit, fins clutched to his chest. Two seconds later he was below the ladder holding on to the weight stack .

Perez checked everyone had tanks and masks on. “Final buddy check please, then into the water”.

Boris went first, and the scientists followed with Ramirez at the end. When Ramirez was in the water, White put his own gear on quickly and followed him down.

Eric Ramirez had been looking forward to the dive. He’d enjoyed all the training dives in Maine and the shallow dives in Cayman they had gotten in to check out the gear before entering the habitat. As he dropped down the ladder and out from under the weight stack he saw the wall for the first time. Even from 30 feet away the sponges and corals were quite clear. He turned around. White was right behind him and gave him an OK. Ramirez responded with an OK of his own and glanced up at the hab. It looked much bigger outside than it felt inside. Above the hab was the umbilical that led up to the surface barge. The barge was clear against the surface. The visibility here was over 200 feet. Ramirez watched as the small positioning thrusters on the barge kept it exactly in place.

White tapped him on the leg and indicated he needed to swim to the group which was now at the wall. Ramirez gave a few good fin kicks and drifted off from the hab towards the wall. With each kick the wall got closer and the detail got better. He pulled his dive light out from a pocket and shone it at the corals. The powerful LED light put back the reds that even at this depth were now missing from the sunlight . The barrel sponges were quite red where the light lit them up. Quite different from their dull brown color when the light wasn’t on them. His light caught the eyes of a caribbean lobster hiding under an elephant-ear coral. The lobster backed up a bit more leaving only the tips of its antennae visible. Ramirez smiled to himself. This was what diving was all about. The smile creased his face and let some water into his mask. He put two fingers on the top of the mask, lifted his head slightly and blew out through his nose. Once the mask was clear of water he continued towards the wall.

When he was a few feet from the wall he turned right to follow the group which was now about 20 feet in front of him. It was wonderful here. So much to look at. Such a pity they didn’t have time to explore more. “I must come back here on vacation and do some more diving,” he thought. As he finned to catch up with the group he drifted out a little way from the wall. He wanted to be sure his fins didn’t kick any of the coral formations. They took so long to grow and were quite delicate.

In the control room on the Pheia, Ford, Carver and Martin were watching the bio displays. Nobody had expected the bio pills to work far outside the hab because of signal attenuation by the water but someone had thought to add an antenna that could be lowered below the moon pool before the dive, just to see if they could track the divers. And as they looked at the displays, it was evident that it could track them at quite some distance from the Pheia.

Carver noticed that some of the heart rates were a bit elevated. Nothing to be concerned about and probably due more to excitement than anything.

“Hmm, those heart rates are a bit high for the level of effort. Looks like Ramirez and Young are either a bit excited or just plain old nervous.” Dr Ford looked at Carver. “Ramirez had a good time during training at home. I thought he was a bit overly paranoid about checking his equipment but he did well on all the dives. Mind you that was at 40 ft.

Eric Ramirez looked at his dive computer again. It was showing 85 ft. He’d done a couple of wall dives earlier in the week with their support team to 100 ft and enjoyed it a lot. But that was in a swimsuit with a normal scuba tank full of air. Now he was in a full dive suit with a complicated gas mix system and a load of chemicals in his blood. He didn’t trust Dr Ford or her research. She didn’t dive. She just injected other people and watched how they did in the chamber. Ramirez noticed he was at the back of the group again with Matt. Matt gave him an OK signal and Ramirez responded with one of his own. He finned a bit harder to catch up with the rest of the group. He’d mostly been looking at the corals which grow out from the wall. There were few fish down here and he was very surprised when the group ahead all pointed at the wall. Someone was banging his tank with a dive knife and had his other hand on his head in the shark sign. Ramirez looked at the wall and sure enough a 6 ft reef shark was swimming along right next the wall. It had already passed the front group and was making its way towards Ramirez and White. Ramirez started to breathe faster. The shark was as big as he was and slightly below him on the wall. He waved his arms to rotate himself away from the wall and kicked hard. Over the comm system he heard White. “Hey, where are you going? Keep still. It’s going to swim right by.” Ramirez didn’t respond and kicked harder to get more distance from the shark which had slowed down right between Ramirez and the wall. Ramirez reached for his BC inflator. “This isn’t right. I don’t like it.” He pushed down hard on the inflator button and immediately started to rise. He had risen about 3 ft when he felt something grip his ankle. “Dump some air.” It was White’s voice. He had grabbed him. Ramirez pushed harder on the inflator button and the pair rose together. White pulled himself up Ramirez’s leg and grabbed the back of his BC. He reached around and yanked on the dump cord and a huge cloud of bubbles poured from the top of the BC halting their ascent. “Calm down. You’re fine.” White said but Ramirez was still holding the inflator button down. “Let go of the inflator.”. White grabbed Ramirez’s hand and pulled it down until Eric let go of the BC’s inflator valve.

In the Pheia, the crew had been listening to the conversation. Carver pushed the talk button on the desk mic. “Eric, you need to calm down. Mr. White, can you bring him back please?”

“Roger,” White responded and started to turn Ramirez back towards the Pheia. As they turned around Ramirez saw the last flick of the shark’s tail as it disappeared around a distant coral head. “It’s gone now,” White said but Ramirez didn’t respond.

“What’s going on?” It was Mike Duncan’s voice.

“Ramirez got a little spooked by your shark. I’m taking him back to the hab.” White gave Duncan an OK and finned a bit harder pulling Ramirez with him.

Ford looked at the Bio display. “His heart rate’s through the roof.”

“I guess he doesn’t like sharks.” Martin said. He’d come into the ops room a few minutes after Ramirez had seen the shark. “Odd for a biologist. You’d think he’d know better. He’s not really lunch sized for a reef shark.”

Carver looked at Martin. “You might cut the kid a little slack. An interest in biology is no match for thousands of years of evolution. Lots of people are afraid of sharks.”

“I’m not.” Martin replied and looked out of the portal to see if the divers were close yet.

White pulled Ramirez under the Pheia’s moon pool. As he broached the water surface he saw Perez reach down and grab the back of Ramirez’s BC and haul him up onto the landing. “Welcome back. Good dive?” Perez had not been listening to the comm so he had no idea what was going on.

Ramirez yanked off his mask. His face looked white — even accounting for the cold water he was very white. “You OK?” Perez asked.

“I don’t like sharks.” Ramirez responded.

Behind him floating in the water, White pointed a finger at his head and made circular movements. He mouthed ‘Nuts” to Perez who grinned.

White looked down into the water then back up at Perez. “Everyone else is back. Let’s get out of the way.”

Perez and White helped Ramirez out of his gear and gave him a towel. “Here. Dry off and we’ll get you out of here.” Ramirez looked hard at Perez. “I’m not going back down there. I want to go home now”.

Dr Carver sat with Ramirez in the bunk room. It was about as private a place as was possible on the Pheia. “You’re sure you want to go back to the surface?” He asked Ramirez.

“Yes. I wanted to do this dive but now I just want to go home. They don’t really need me anyway. Dr. Moss doesn’t like my work and Duncan thinks I’m an idiot.”

Carver made notes on his tablet. “OK, then. I’ll talk to Martin about how we get you out of here.”

“I’m not going back in the water. You have to take the habitat back up.”

“I’ll talk to Martin,” Carver said, and left Ramirez alone in the bunk room.

In the crowded operations room, Martin was talking quietly to Duncan and White about the dive.

“Do you think he’s safe?” Martin asked them. He glanced around to make sure they were not being overheard.

Before either could answer, Carver chimed in. “It doesn’t matter what they think, Eric has had enough. He wants us to take him back to the surface.”

“If he wants to go up, we can have Duncan take him. The crew needs to stay here to complete the pre-dive cycle. If we go up now, we’ll lose at least a day.”

Carver nodded to Martin then turned to Duncan. “Can you take him?”

“Sure,” Duncan replied. “I can take him”

“He might be difficult to get back in the water,” Carver said.

“Great,” Duncan replied.

Martin sighed. “I’ll talk to him. I’m sure he’ll understand we can’t all go back up”.

Martin’s conversation with Ramirez was difficult. He could tell Ramirez did not want to go back in the water but the scientist in him recognized that he was perhaps being irrational.

“I just don’t want to meet any more sharks.” Ramirez said looking at his feet.

“I think Duncan expects the two of you to do a slow ascent right up the umbilical to the support barge. Given the time we’ve been down, Duncan says you’ll need to do a decompression stop to be safe but otherwise it’s a straight trip to the surface.

Ramirez continued to look at his bare feet. “OK. I guess that’s OK.”

A little while later, Carver and Martin went down to the moon pool room to see Ramirez off. When they got there, Duncan and Ramirez were geared up and getting into the water.

As Duncan and Ramirez dropped below the surface of the moon pool, Carver looked at Martin and said: “Thank God that didn’t happen at the bottom.”

“Hmmm,” Martin replied. “Why didn’t you know about his issues? You profiled everyone months ago. Does this mean we might have issues with other people?”

Before Carver could respond, Nicole Ford said: “Well, to be realistic Dr. Martin, the sorts of tests that George has done might possibly have identified Ramirez as a problem but since everyone was already qualified as a sport diver, what he was specifically asked to look for were the kind of traits that might indicate a susceptibility to nitrogen narcosis. If you remember, we did air dive tests to 135 ft and had everyone do numerical problems to detect any nitrogen narcosis effects. Almost everyone had some measurable effect and Ramirez’s results were about normal. There was nothing to indicate he’d have any worse issues than anyone else.”

Martin nodded. “OK, but at no point did we not ask him if he was afraid of sharks?”

“No, of course not” Carver replied. “We did lots of standard psychological tests but we didn’t have a list of specific fears. It would have taken forever, and in any case none of that has any bearing on susceptibility to nitrogen narcosis which is what Dr Ford was most concerned about. She told us it was about the best indicator we’d have.”

Ford added: “I know it seems odd to be looking for nitrogen effects when we are in a hydreliox atmosphere, but susceptibility to nitrogen narcosis was the best test I could come up with that related to what we would be doing.”

Martin looked at Ford then Carver. “OK, then. Let’s hope we don’t have any more personnel issues. Once Duncan gets back down, we can resume the pre-dive sequence Dr Ford?”

“Well, yes. There really is nothing more to do other then to spend tomorrow at this depth to ensure everyone is stable on the hydreliox. Then we can begin the descent.”

Martin looked down into the moon pool. The water below them was quite black. It was hard to imagine being 4,000 feet further down. They had only made it 100 feet before the first problem had happened. It was a lot further to the bottom.

Duncan had decided that taking Ramirez all the way to the top himself was unnecessary. He had called the surface barge and spoken to one of the crew who he knew to be a competent diver. He had asked Jorgensen to come down and meet them at the Pheia. By the time Duncan and Ramirez were out from under the weight stack, Jorgensen was on his way down.

Getting from the surface to the top of the Pheia only took a few minutes. As Jorgensen arrived at the top of the Pheia he saw Duncan and Ramirez below him. Their bubbles were streaming up past him. He waited for the two divers below him to come up to his level.

Duncan spoke to Ramirez over the comm system.

“This is Jorgensen. He will take you up to 20 feet and do a decompression stop there with you. On no account must you get above Jorgensen until he says your deco time is up. OK?”

“Yes, I understand.” Ramirez replied. “And I’m sorry again for the trouble.”

“No problem man. Enjoy the sunshine.”

Duncan pointed to Jorgensen then at Ramirez, then held his two index fingers together in the buddy sign. He looked at Jorgensen and gave him an OK sign to ask him if he understood.

Jorgensen Replied with an OK sign then pointed at Ramirez and gave Duncan the buddy sign.

Duncan then held up his hand in the stop sign then flashed ten fingers twice.

Jorgensen signed OK. He would stop at 20 feet as they had discussed when he was on the comm link from the surface.

Jorgensen looked at Ramirez and gave him the thumbs up and OK signs asking if he was ready to go up.

Ramirez responded with a thumb up and then an OK and they began their ascent.

Duncan stayed at the top of the Pheia and watched until he saw them stop at 20 feet. Once he was sure Jorgensen was doing the decompression stop he flipped over and swam back down the side of the hab.

In the crew compartment Kate was sitting on her bunk talking across the small room to Chas Dunsworth.

“It’s a shame to lose Ramirez. I’m sure he would have been OK if it wasn’t for that damn shark. He was as excited as anyone to be on this expedition. “

Dunsworth nodded. “Yes. Bummer for him.”

“And,” Kate continued, “I now have to do his work as well as mine. OK, actually it’s all my work. But he was supposed to assist.”

Chas saw an opportunity to spend more time with Kate.

“Is there some way I can help? I won’t have much to do once we get down there other than organize gear and I was scheduled for at least one or two dives. If you need a hand setting up the grid or holding stuff or whatever, I can do that.”

“Thanks. Yes, I will need some help. Mostly with taking pictures. I will need you to either hold the ruler I use to get comparative size data or take pictures while I’m pointing at something. It’s kind of grunt work really but it’s important to get the right kinds of pictures.”

“Piece of cake,” Dunsworth said.

“You might find it more difficult than it seems. You absolutely must not touch the worms or the bottom for that matter as that will stir up the silt and screw up the pictures. Mostly you’ll need to float slightly head down and stay in one place. It’s not too hard if you control your buoyancy with your lung volume and only use your fins for movement — no hands. You can swim backwards right?”

“What, with fins?”

“Yes. With fins.”

“I don’t know if that’s even possible is it?”

Kate laughed.

“Well you might not think so but with a bit of practice you can actually move back slightly by flexing your ankles. It’s not fast or anything but if you are floating too close to the subject with the camera in both hands it’s all you’ve got. You can practice the next time we go out.”

“OK. I’m up for that.”

Kate knew Chas liked her but since they had to work together at the institute occasionally, she had tried to gently discourage him. But in her experience, men were not easy to discourage gently. It usually took a more brutal technique and then they got all pissy.

For the rest of the day, most of the crew tried to get used to living in the hab. Space was tight but it was manageable so long as everyone behaved themselves and tried to be polite and considerate.

For George Carver this was an interesting situation. Most of the people he studied had the opportunity to walk away from his analysis sessions. In this case his subjects were captive in a large tin can. He also had an interesting mix of ex-military types and academics which in the sci-fi world equated to a mix of matter and anti-matter. He thought there would be at least a few people who couldn’t maintain their composure if the right situation arose. It promised to be an interesting trip. He was slightly anxious himself about being pressurized and injected with Dr. Ford’s miracle drugs but he had made his decision to be a part of the expedition months ago. And it was far too late now to back out.

When they had arrived in Grand Cayman, Carver had been surprised by the heat and smell as they exited the airplane down the steps to the runway. He had not been to the Caribbean before. The combination of the hot air and the humidity had him sweating before he’d walked the short distance to the immigration room.

Once inside, he’d felt better. It was a lot cooler but packed with people. The lines to the two open immigration desks were full. Some of the people he recognized were from his flight but there must have been another flight that had landed before them.

He had scanned the line that snaked back and forth in front of him to the immigration officer. Several of the Pheia crew were together and comparing immigration forms. He could hear the discussion clearly. Martin was telling Duncan and the other divers that they could not put down the Cayman Trench as their place of residence while on the island. He had arranged with the Cayman government to use the hotel they were staying in tonight as their official residence address while in Cayman.

Carver watched the discussion. The divers thought it was all rather funny but he could see Martin getting annoyed. Martin was ahead of them in the line and went up to the booth first.

Carver watched as the official looked at Martin’s papers and handed them back. He could see Martin pointing to the divers and saying something. The official waved him on and said “Next.”

Duncan stepped up to the counter and handed over his documents.

“Good afternoon Mr. Duncan. What is the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m with the expedition team.”

“And how long are you staying in Grand Cayman?”

“Just tonight. Then we will be under the sea for two weeks.”

“Yes. That was my understanding. Where are you staying tonight? You are presumably not sleeping in the Cayman Trench?”

The immigration official had a completely passive face and Duncan could not read the man at all.

“We’re in a hotel in Georgetown somewhere.”

“You need to fill that information in on your form. Please go and do that then rejoin the back of the line.”

“Really?”

The immigration didn’t respond to Duncan. He looked at the line and said “Next.”

Duncan grabbed his paperwork and walked back to the line. “Don’t bother. This dick wants hotel info on the form.” he said to the others.

The dive team made their way back to the counters at the back of the room and worked on filing out the forms.

The rest of the crew had passed though immigration, found their bags, and gone though the cursory customs check to the hot sunshine outside.

Carver wasn’t the only one wondering how things would play out. Kate was actually glad to get into the Pheia but Cayman had looked like it might be a nice place to hang out if she were on vacation. Getting to the hotel the day before had been interesting. As she lay on her bunk, staring at the ceiling she recalled the trip from the airport.

A large local man in a t-shirt with a dive flag on it had been holding a sign that said “Pheia Expetition”.

Kate had been tempted to tell him that his sign was spelled wrong, but decided not to.

They had all piled into a slightly rusty bus. The air conditioning was running full blast but once the whole crew was crammed into the seats with bags on their laps it was still very hot.

Chas had been squashed between Kate and Boris.

“Why are we not moving?” Chas had asked.

“No idea.” Kate had said.

Boris had seemed very relaxed. “This is like Russia. We will move when the driver is ready. Nothing except large bribe can affect that.”

Kate had stared at him. “I doubt Russia is this hot.” she had said.

“No but situation is same.”

When they had passed through the center of Georgetown, the streets had been packed with tourists. There were three giant cruise ships in the harbor. The driver hardly slowed down for the numerous pedestrians trying to cross the street. He had simply said, “Good place to buy Rolex or t-shirt.”

Kate had glanced at her own dive watch, an Invicta she had bought online. It looked a bit like a Rolex submariner but was about 100 times cheaper. She had looked at the shops which all seemed to offer t-shirts, jewelry and coral. She hated the idea that coral was pulled from the sea to be sold to tourists. Some islands like Mauritius had been almost completely denuded of corals because of the tourist trade.

When they had arrived at the hotel about half an hour later, it had taken forever to get everyone registered and issued room keys. Kate was beginning to understand the term: Cayman time. The staff had seemed polite but in no hurry to do anything.

Kate came back to the present and rolled over to look at the wall clock. They had been underwater for several hours now but she had no real sense of time. The lack of daylight and the constant, quiet sounds of the hab gave no indication of the passing of time. They had a week of this before they got to the work site at the bottom of the trench.

She sat up, dug into her backpack and pulled out her Kindle. At least there was time to read.

Descent

The entire crew had assembled at Dr. Martin’s request in the operations room. It was crowded with them all in there at the same time. Martin stood on a large black Pelican case someone had helpfully placed in front of the control desk.

“Is everyone here?” He scanned the small room. Duncan, Perez and White were all at the back of the room around the hatch to the moon pool room below. Perez was giggling. “I sure hope nobody farts” he said to White. “We’ll die for sure.”

“What was that? Perez, did you say something?” Martin asked.

“Uh, no, not really”

“OK, then. Let’s get started. I’m sure you are all pleased that the Pheia has no way to project Power Point slides so I won’t be able to stand up here and insult you all by reading them to you.”

Kate grinned at him. She’d always hated Martin’s slide presentations. He always had too many bullet points on each slide and insisted on reading them verbatim to the audience. She was slightly curious as to how he’d manage to get through the briefing without them.

Martin continued: “As you all know we have begun the first part of the descent. The surface barge will lower us at a rate of about 500 feet per day until we get to 2,500 feet which is a little over half way to the floor. At that point we will do a complete systems check and another test dive. If everything goes well, we’ll disconnect from the umbilical and continue with powered descent at the same rate until we are just above the floor. We will stay close to the wall all the way down. I’m afraid that the trip will be quite uninteresting and the view from the portals will become rather drab as we go below the coral level and get to see mostly rock and the occasional debris from the many wrecks that have happened in these waters.

Duncan looked at the other divers. “Great. We’re in a tin can under the water and he’s talking about wrecks.”

“Mike?” asked Martin.

“Nothing Dr. Martin. Just saying how exciting it is to be doing this.”

Kate looked back at Duncan. He’d never looked excited about anything. She was sure it was sarcasm but Martin seemed unperturbed.

“At about 4,500 feet, or 50 feet above the bottom, we will anchor the hab to the wall. Once we’re fixed in place we’ll use the ROV to do an initial inspection of the bottom. If all looks well we’ll begin dive operations. We believe the vents are very close to the wall in this area so we expect to be able to either swim across the bottom to them or we’ll use the two-man tow adapter on the ROV to take divers to them. Obviously the plan will get amended once we are down there and have a better idea of the local topology.”

Martin paused and scanned the faces. He’d expected some questions, mostly because when he gave presentations there was always someone who had an issue with what he said. But the crew stood quietly waiting for him to continue. They all knew the plan of course. He’d been over it many times with them preparing for the dive. He looked around once more, then continued: “Dr. Ford would like to go over the medical aspects of the dive and then Dr. Carver will say a few words.”

Martin stepped off the Pelican case and Nicole Ford took his place.

“Stand on the case,” someone said.

“I am.” Nicole said a little defensively to some laughter.

“We have all been breathing the hydreliox mix for a while now and nobody has reported any problems. You will all be taking the sensor pills every day for the duration of the dive. The computer system has been monitoring and recording everyone’s status and so far it has not found any anomalies. I expect it to stay that way. The meds we started during pre-dive confinement will also continue to be administered every two to three days. The schedule is being set based on analysis of data from the smart pills but obviously this cannot take into account any psychological effect you may feel. So it is most important that if you feel any effect whatsoever, you let me know. I want to emphasize that. Don’t wait until you have a problem. Even if it’s just a headache, or you feel a bit off color, let me know.“

At the sound of her raised voice several heads nodded. Nobody was keen to start showing signs of HPNS, as this would mean the end of the dive. There was no way to send a single person back to the top. Either they all stayed or they all went back up.

Ford continued: “I’m not talking about seeing pink elephants, although you should certainly report that too. What I’m most interested in are the subtle precursors such as headaches, muscle tremors, visual effects such as spots in your vision and so on. You have all heard me on this topic several times now. I know that some of you will ignore a headache or other minor signs because you don’t want to jeopardize the dive but if just one of you gets really affected we’ll need to start the ascent right away because the treatment you would need is a long way from here. So let me say just one more time: any effects at all, let me know. Thanks.”

Ford stood down from the box and disappeared into the small crowd.

Martin looked around. “Dr. Carver please”

Carver stood at the front ignoring the box.

“Can you all hear me? You don’t need to see me for this.”

“Get up on the box,” came a voice from the back. “We can’t see you.”

“Very well then.” Carver got up on the black plastic case carefully.

“Obviously Dr. Ford’s interest is in biological effects of the dive. My own interest…”

Duncan whispered: “is if we go nuts”. White nodded but kept watching Carver.

Carver continued. “…is in psychological effects such as those brought on by confinement, lack of privacy, or the bad food.” He looked at Miller. “Just joking Kayla. The food is excellent.” He went on: “I’d also like to reiterate my comments during training about the contrasts you might experience between the relative quiet and boredom of the ten days of our descent, and the thrills and anxiety you may experience as we begin diving when we reach the bottom. Having ten days to anticipate what you might encounter or experience is potentially quite stressful so please let me know if you are going to bug out so I can provide the right drugs.” A few people raised eyebrows and there was some laughter. Martin shuffled his feet. He wished Carver would be more professional.

“Just joking. You don’t need to get weird to get the drugs.” He smiled at them. Someone whistled. Inwardly he was evaluating the faces. The incident with Ramirez was mild compared to what might happen if just one of the crew started hallucinating. If more than one was affected it was going to be like a loonies convention down here and he seriously doubted that anything short of knocking them out was going to be of much use until they could reduce the pressure by ascending.

“Is that all doctor?” Martin asked.

“Yes, I think so for now” and he stepped down.

Martin got back up on the box and there was a loud crack as he sunk down a few inches.

“Our podium has obviously had enough,” he said to some laughter, “So I think we’ll leave it at that for now for the scientific details. On a different note, we will of course be conducting continuous systems monitoring as we descend and Mr. Bazhanov will be conducting regular radiation monitoring of our most important power source. Do you wish to say anything about that Mr. Bazhanov?”

Segei Victorovich Bazhanov or Boris to most of the crew pushed his way to the front.

“Reactor is operating perfectly as has done for last year. This model is most reliable and has powered many Russian spacecraft. Reactor will not be problem so long as nobody hits it with hammer.”

It was hard to tell if Boris was trying to be funny or simply not communicating well. His English was generally very good thanks to him having lived in the US for most of his adult life but his attitude to Russian technology was very much that of his father who had been an innovator in the Russian space program and had been instrumental in promoting these small reactors for scientific and engineering uses. Most of the engineering community at the institute was somewhat skeptical about the safety of these reactor/generator systems but the low cost and high electrical power output made them very attractive for projects such as the Pheia. The Russian engineering companies that made the reactors were now private operations. They were now making plenty of money from foreign exports and were very keen to continue to do so.

Martin got back up on the case. “One more thing. Mr. Newell asked me to remind everyone that unless you want your dive watch crushed as we descend, you should unscrew the winder once a day to let it equalize pressure.”

He concluded the meeting and most of the crew left the operations center leaving only Martin and Newell the logistics coordinator.

“So Jason, are all our supplies in order?”

Newell raised an eyebrow. It was a bit late if they had forgotten anything. “Yes, we’re all set. We didn’t get the backup ELF system as you know, but the primary system is operational and in any case it’s unlikely we’ll need it.”

For the next four days the Pheia descended the wall at about four inches a minute. The rate was so slow that a casual glance out one of the portals showed only slight movement of the wall upwards. After the second day of the descent the Pheia was over 500 feet below the surface and there was no sunlight left from above. The Pheia’s floodlights lit up the section of the wall immediately in front of the portals but all the light revealed was a drab grey rock with frequent sand patches and an occasional plastic bag or other man-made artifact. The sheer volume of trash in the ocean was amazing. Most of the plastic trash floated near the surface but once in a while a bag with something denser inside would drift down to find its final resting place in the dark on the side of the wall. With no UV to break down the plastic, most of the garbage at this level was likely to be here for many years until either a section of the wall calved off and took it deeper, or an unfortunate fish attempted to eat it.

As the Pheia descended below the surface and left the warm Caribbean sun above, the sea temperature dropped sharply. The aluminum structure of the hab contracted as it descended beside the Cayman wall. The Pheia’s gas system adjusted the gas pressure inside the hab to exactly equal the outside sea pressure. The water level in the moon pool room’s exit moved up and down slightly in response to the adjustments made by the gas system. The Pheia was in balance.

Jason Newell knew almost every inch of the Pheia. He had helped to select the companies chosen to manufacture the hull and the major systems. It had been hard work and kept him at his office for long hours as he reviewed bids and selected the suppliers.

As the Pheia descended, Newell wandered through the structure looking at all the pipes, fittings and control systems that made the hab work. The contraction of the hull occasionally made ticking sounds as metal surfaces adjusted lengths slightly. Newell heard the faint sounds as he moved around admiring the work. He had noticed that nobody else seemed to hear them. They were all busy talking, filled with excitement for the expedition

The non-pressurized design allowed the hull to be made from much thinner material which was both much cheaper and a lot lighter. The choice of aluminum for the hull material had been made over two years before the expedition and was based on availability, ease of manufacture and suitability for the purpose. The Pheia had been built from parts from more than one supplier. As Newell opened the hatch from the moon pool room into the lower tunnel that connected to the storage room in the other cylinder he looked at the round aluminum walls and remembered his first trip to the small company in Detroit that had made the tunnel sections. He had been pleased to award the contract to the small company which now occupied a site where his father had once worked on an automobile assembly line.

The company employed just five people; all skilled machinists, and was struggling to keep its head above water. The Pheia’s tunnel sections were really just a small bone thrown to a hungry dog but Newell was pleased to have been able to help them.

After a few steps he reached the door into the storage room. He turned around to admire the tunnel again. It was just a small piece of the Pheia but for him it was quite personal.

What Newell didn’t know was that the company that built the tunnels had ignored the specification for the material and used some stock left over from a previous project that had been cancelled part way through. The alloy was slightly different from that used to make the hull sections. It looked the same and nobody had tested the material before the tunnel sections were welded to the hulls.

Aluminum is tricky to weld correctly. Modern techniques have greatly improved the process but it is still important to use the right materials and the right fill materials and shield gasses. The assembly company in Maine had gone from the specifications in the plans. They had tested a sample of the hull material but assumed that the tunnels were the same. The result was a set of welds that looked perfect but which had not bonded well to the tunnel material.

Newell closed the hatch in the storage room and started his inspection of the stores before moving up through the crew cylinder. He was pleased with how things had turned out.

The rest of the crew of the Pheia settled into a routine of monitoring the habitat’s systems, taking the smart bio pills and receiving shots from Dr. Ford when she thought it appropriate. A lot of the time was spent either lying on a bunk reading or sitting in the galley drinking coffee and eating Kayla Miller’s food.

Kayla had ended up on the Pheia by accident. She had started her medical career as an ER doctor. Her parents had pushed her through med school and her father had arranged for her first job. Kayla’s interests were more for cooking than repairing gunshot wounds and she had wanted very much to open her own restaurant since she had been a teenager. He father’s money had paid for her medical training so she had started work at the hospital without any debt which was very unusual. Most medical graduates had huge student loans to pay off when they first began work. Kayla stuck with the ER work for two years before she found a restaurant for sale about two miles from the hospital. After a particularly brutal day in the ER dealing with the aftermath of a school bus accident she walked into the real estate office and signed for the restaurant hoping like hell she could cover the initial costs and persuade her father to loan her the rest of the money.

After quitting the hospital job, she found her father very unwilling to support her new role as an impoverished restaurant owner wannabe. She tried to find other backers but it became clear very quickly that her options were to go back to the hospital or find different work. Her father refused to fund the restaurant but offered to unload it for her so she could go back to work. Kayla signed over the restaurant to him, said thanks, and walked away. She drove from the hospital in Chicago to the Maine coast and got a job working in a diner. A chance meeting with a customer from the institute who was spending the weekend fishing led her to apply for the job of chef on the Pheia.

Once Dr Martin found out she was an ER doctor, he offered her the combined job of chef/medic. Kayla accepted at once and moved to a small apartment near the coast about two miles form the institute. She had learned to dive on a Mexican vacation but had no idea about anything more than about 50 feet below the surface. But that wasn’t important to Kayla. She had found a job where she could cook. And what’s more, the crew had no choice. It was her food or starve, so she looked forward to many happy days with vats full of chili or spaghetti.

Her role as the Pheia’s chef began a long time before the actual dive in Cayman. The crew had been assembled for training months before the dive and Kayla trained along with them. Nobody much cared for the cafeteria food at the institute so Kayla found herself cooking for them all in her apartment or one of the crew’s homes many days a week. She gained herself a family that liked to eat, and she had found a group of happy customers.

Half Way Down

(2,500 Feet)

Kate woke up to find Bazhanov staring into the bunk room mirror poking at his nose. The room felt clammy and a little chilly. She watched Bazhanov poke at his nose. He saw movement in the mirror and turned to see Kate rolling off her bunk.

“Good morning Kate.”

“Hi Boris. Working on some zits?”

“It seems that combination of humidity and Miss Miller’s food is not good for skin.”

“Not radiation burns are they?”

Kate didn’t like Bazhanov very much and found his interest in her distasteful. She tried her best to put him off but it didn’t seem to work. Bazhanov was immune to sarcasm, ignoring him, and direct attempts to fend him off. So Kate satisfied herself with occasional verbal jabs when she was in the mood and the opportunity arose.

“Reactor does not leak like American space reactors. Design is in use in many research locations for many years now.”

“I know that Boris. Just making a joke.”

“Good you can joke about radiation burns. Let us hope you never have to see them.”

With that he climbed down the ladder from the bunk room to the galley.

Kate thought that she might have been a bit hard on him. There was just something about Boris that brought the worst out in her.

When the Pheia had been designed, the crew bunking area had been arranged to sleep twelve. No thought had been given to how that might work with a mixed sex crew. Its current crew had divided the room into male and female bunk areas and a large bath towel featuring the Disney Nemo character hung from a pipe that crossed the ceiling to demark the female area. It didn’t provide any privacy but it was respected by all. A point that Kate found unlikely. The professional divers on the team were all ex-Navy and she presumed they had received plenty of sexual harassment training, but the academics, the males at least, were more likely to have been trained by online porn. Nonetheless the towel seemed to work as a reminder that this was a mixed crew. The single head/shower room served them all and was probably the point of highest contention as there was a natural need for everyone to want to use the head at the start of the day. Several males in the crew had taken to peeing in the moon pool. Kate had found this out one morning when she had gone in there to retrieve her wooly hat, left there from the previous day’s work. Two of the crew were standing next to each other trying to see how far out they could pee. Kate coughed deliberately causing surprise and then a great deal of laughter. Perez had finished then turned to her: “We’re done. Your turn.” He had left with Duncan still laughing.

Kate put her one sweatshirt back on after giving it a sniff. No chance for laundry down here and no room for much in the way of spare clothes. She didn’t really care. It was no different from the weeklong backpacking trips she had done with her father when she was younger. Kate was happy sitting in the dirt wearing the same shirt all week if that’s what was needed. In an odd way life aboard the Pheia was a lot like backpacking. You only had what you could carry on board, the food was freeze-dried and you tended to wear the same clothes every day. At one point Boris had pointed out that the obsession with soap was a strictly American problem. Russians were happy with their natural smells. Kate thought that was fine for a week or two, but not as a way of life.

She zipped up her sweatshirt and climbed down the ladder to the galley, leaving the bulk of the crew still asleep.

In the galley she found Boris and Chas Dunsworth drinking coffee. Kayla was by the stove as usual.

“Do you sleep Kayla?” Kate asked her.

“Sure do. Just not all day like you folks.”

She waved the coffee pot in the air.

“Yes please” Kate said.

Shoes appeared on the ladder from the bunk room, followed by the legs of Dr. Martin, recognizable by the dress pants he always wore.

The rest of the crew who were not on night watch arrived in the galley over the next ten minutes. It was always loud in there during meal times. The metal walls echoed the talk and everyone always seemed to be talking at once.

Martin tapped his empty coffee mug on the table. “Everyone. Everyone, can I have some quiet please?”

The chatter died down.

“We are half way down. That’s 2,500 feet and deeper than most other dives with the exception of some research dives the Navy has done. Today is a big day for the Pheia as we will disconnect from the surface umbilical and begin the remainder of the descent under our own power. But before we can do any of that we will run compete systems checks today. The dive team will also conduct another checkout dive to be sure the equipment is all OK and to be sure that everyone is happy operating at this depth. I’m very pleased to say that Dr. Ford is happy with everyone from a biological point of view and Dr. Carver says you are all in excellent mental health.”

A few looks from some members of the team questioned that last statement. Megan Young summed it up best: “We are all nuts to be down here. That’s what he really means.”

Duncan stood up and banged a spoon on his mug.

“Listen up. All divers need to be down in the moon pool by 10 hundred to prep for today’s dive. See you there”.

Duncan opened the hatch to the other part of the hab and he, White and Perez crossed the short tunnel that connected the galley to operations. From there they descended the ladder to the moon pool room and began to get dive gear ready.

Kate followed the divers through the connecting tunnel into operations where she saw Newell sitting in the center chair with his feet on the desk. He was snoring.

“Jason. Time for breakfast.” Kate said.

Newell didn’t move so Kate crossed the room and waved her coffee mug under his nose.

“Wake up. Your shift is over.” Kate poked him in the shoulder with her forefinger.

Newell woke up. “I was just resting my eyes. What time is it?”

“Time to get your self some breakfast.” Some watchman you are. How long have you been asleep?”

“Not long. Do you have any idea how boring it is to sit and watch these computer screens, especially knowing that the computer is actually monitoring everything anyway? If we had a real problem, there is likely nothing I could do anyway. I think Martin just feels the need to have one of us sit here.”

He rose and stretched. “Right. Breakfast it is.” He left leaving Kate alone in the operations area.

Kate looked at the small patch of wall illuminated by the Pheia’s lights outside the portal. The wall wasn’t moving. She supposed Martin was right and they’d reached the halfway point and the surface barge had stopped lowering them. She was thinking of calling the surface vessel when Martin and Bazhanov joined her. They were talking about the reactor and gas systems.

“Kate, aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for a dive?” Martin asked her.

“Yes, I suppose I should get down there,” she replied and walked the few steps to the ladder that connected operations to the moon pool.

Martin pressed the talk button on the desk mike.

“Pheia to surface. Martin here.”

“Go ahead Dr. Martin.”

“We are beginning our systems check and our second test dive. We expect to be ready to uncouple at about 13:00.”

The voice over the speaker from the surface came back. “We concur. Plan to uncouple at 13:00. We are monitoring your systems which all look OK to us. We’ll continue to monitor until disconnect. Surface out”.

“Thanks.” Martin replied. “As soon as Chas gets here we’ll start the systems check.”

Dunsworth arrived just as Martin was finishing his sentence.

“Ready to start the checks boss?”

Martin looked at Bazhanov who nodded back to him”

“Yes we are.”

The three men took seats at the control consoles and began working their way through a long checklist for the entire systems in the Pheia.

In the moon pool, Duncan was organizing the divers.

“This will be the same sort of dive as the one we did during pre-dive confinement with of course the exception of Mr. Ramirez who is working on his tan.”

He continued, “We’ll drop through the moon pool and assemble on the wall-side of the Pheia at the top of the weight stack. That puts us level with where we are now. Matt will stay behind for shore duty. I’ll take the lead and Mr. Perez will take up the rear. Once we’re all on top of the weight stack we’ll do a comm check and then we’ll cross to the wall and swim up-current for a way. Let’s all try to stay together please. I know it’s only four of us but nobody goes in front of me. Chris will stay behind whoever is at the back. Please try to resist the urge to go sight seeing — not that there is much to see down here. Questions?”

Megan Young asked: “What’s the sea temp?”

“Cold.” Duncan replied. “But you’ll be nice and cozy in your suit.”

Kate shook her head. She just wanted to get in the water. It was going to be very interesting to dive at 2,500 feet below the surface. Of course, in a sense they were already diving — they just weren’t wet yet. But being in the Pheia under pressure wasn’t the same as being in the water. Sitting around in a metal tube wasn’t diving.

Duncan continued. “Please also make sure your ear buds are seated properly so you can hear the comms. I know you all learned not to use ear plugs when you did scuba training but two things are different here. First, these ear buds have a water channel in them to allow the water to pass into your ear. Second, and this is the best part, we are far enough down now that altering your depth won’t affect the pressure on your ears. So please make sure they are well seated. I also had a hard time hearing some of you on the last test dive. Please speak slowly and clearly. It is not necessary to shout. We are not in the movies. Shouting just distorts the sound and makes it impossible to understand what you are saying.”

The full face dive masks took some getting used to. The Navy guys were used to them but the rest of the crew having trained with separate masks and regulators found it a bit odd not to have the regulator in the mouth.

Kate had initially found the comms a bit intrusive. She liked the solitude of her dives. Duncan and his crew spoke very little but the scientists tended to be more like a group of teenage schoolgirls. On some of the earlier training dives it had been hard to get a word in between the chatter.

Duncan scanned the group to make sure they were all ready. Over the comm system he said: “Buddy check and into the water. See you outside.” He hugged his fins to his chest and put a hand on his facemark then jumped into the water.

As he sank below the Pheia, Duncan looked up while pulling on his fins. He saw the first of the scientists enter the water. He knew right away it was Kate. She was the only one of them who also put her fins on in the water. The first time he’d seen her do that he thought she was copying him but she looked too familiar with the process. She wasn’t focused on putting her fins on. She just got it done while she looked around. It was obvious that she was happy in the water. And her buoyancy control was amazing. She behaved just like a fish. She could hold a steady position in the water at any attitude. He would have loved to put her in front on some of the divers he’d trained in the Navy. She would have shamed them into trying harder.

The rest of the group arrived in their buddy teams. He was impressed with them all really. With the exception of Kate, none of them had much time underwater but they mostly followed his directions without too much prodding. His biggest problem with them was that they tended to wander off when they saw something interesting. And it seemed to him that they found almost everything interesting.

When he saw Perez enter the water, he started to move away from the Pheia swimming on his back so he could watch the group. He pulled out his dive knife and tapped on his tank a few times to get their attention. When they were looking at him he gave them an OK with one hand and waited until he got a response from everyone. Then he he used two hands to indicate “come to me” and kicked away from them. He much preferred to use hand signals instead of the comm system. Hand signals always worked and in his opinion, it was good to practice them regularly.

Duncan had decided to give them a slightly different experience on this dive. He had originally planned to take them over to the wall and swim along its side for a while but at this depth there wasn’t much to see and he wanted to show them what blue ocean diving was all about. He kicked his fins lazily and swam on his back out from under the Pheia away from the wall. He saw one or two of them look around at the wall but they all followed him.

As they moved away from the Pheia, it came into full view. Duncan thought it looked marvelous. It’s shiny aluminum and stainless steel construction reflected his dive light like a massive jewel. Its floodlights lit up a large section of the wall, but beyond that was darkness.

He watched the divers shining their dive lights around. There was nothing to see. They had over two thousand feet of water between them and the surface and about the same to the bottom. All they could see was the hab, a small section of the wall behind them and darkness. He noticed that Kate, who was at the front of the group, had her light off. She was also swimming on her back looking at the Pheia.

Kate was enjoying herself immensely. She loved to swim away from the wall on deep recreational dives and just look back at it. She was a very tiny fish in a very big ocean. She was glad that Duncan had decided to swim away from the wall. She doubted the other felt the same. She saw one or two heads turn around to look at the wall. Chas had opened both hands in the “What gives?” gesture. Kate had given him an OK and kept finning gently backwards. She was surprised when her head bumped into Duncan.

He had watched her coming and decided to see just how comfortable she really was. When Kate felt her head hit Duncan she knew what she’d done. She tucked and rolled upright and with a small fin kick spun around to face him. She smiled at him and saw the smile in his eyes.

They were about 200 feet out from the Pheia and it looked quite small now. Everywhere they looked was dark except for the small section of wall lit by the Pheia’s lights. The hab itself looked dark except for where a dive light reflected back from it.

Duncan hung stationary in the water. This was a lot more fun than most commercial diving he did, and a hell of a lot more fun than most of his military diving experience. For one thing, the water here was fantastically clear. It made a real change from diving in harbors where the viz was often only a foot or two.

He waited until the group had caught up with him and studied their bubbles. By watching the bubble patterns and how much they moved up and down in the water as they breathed he could judge how anxious they were. A happy diver was relaxed and breathed shallow breaths that were far apart and didn’t cause much change in buoyancy. An anxious diver breathed hard and fast.

Duncan faced the group and opened his arms wide, then over the comm circuit he said. “Welcome to the ocean. It doesn’t get much better than this. Everyone OK?”

He waited while they replied or gave him an OK hand signal. They all looked like they’d survive the rest of the trip. One or two were breathing a bit faster than they should be but being this far out in the dark was a real test. He’d seen far more experienced divers get unnerved when they were down in the dark with nothing close to use as a reference.

“On me,” he said and swam slowly under the group, back towards the wall. He thought they might as well tour the wall for a bit before they ended the dive. Anyone who was feeling a bit nervous out here was going to be a lot happier looking at the rocks and it was always good to end training on an up note.

After half an hour of swimming back and forth along the wall, Duncan guided them back to the Pheia. He hung in the water a few feet below the moon pool and waited as the group went up past him and got out of the water. As Perez passed him, Duncan took a last look at the wall. This was fun. He was looking forward to seeing the bottom in person. A dive at that depth would certainly be one for his log.

As each diver climbed up the short ladder into the moon pool room they pulled off their scuba gear and sat it in the racks around the wall. When Duncan surfaced he looked at White and got an OK back indicating that the whole group was back on board.

Duncan climbed out of the water and pulled off his face mask. “Nice job people.”

Chas smiled back. “That was definitely a bit creepy out there in the dark.”

Kate smiled at him. “You did great.”

Duncan looked at Kate. “So, Kate, are either of your parents fish?”

Perez and White both laughed. They knew what he meant but it was lost on the others.

“Yes, both.” She said.

“What does that mean?” Chas asked her.

“Nothing really,” she replied. “I just like being in the water.”

Most of the group was chatting about the dive by now. Duncan tapped a dive weight on the wall a couple of times. “Let’s get the gear rinsed properly and stowed people. We don’t need any equipment problems.”

The group became silent. They had all had lectures on how to rinse and dry the dive gear. The biggest worry was that salt crystals would form in the regulators and make them malfunction. On a sport dive, a stuck regulator was something that could be dealt with easily. At 4,000 feet there were going to be less options, and everyone understood that.

As the gear got put away, the group made its way one at a time through the tunnel to the storage room and up the ladder into the galley. Kayla Miller had laid out coffee, juice and freshly baked muffins. The galley was very noisy with tales of the dive.

Kate found herself between Duncan and Perez. “You guys having a good time?” she asked Duncan.

“Yes we are,” he answered honestly. Perez nodded. Duncan continued, “Your group are great to work with and we are all enjoying the job. It’s a real change from inspecting pier pilings or hunting for lost undersea cables.”

“Roger that.” Perez added. “Way better. Especially the food.”

Duncan laughed. “Yes, we usually get to survive on pre-packed sandwiches and stale coffee. I think we might try to recruit miss Miller for our next job.”

Kayla was behind him when he spoke. “I’d be up for that,” she said. “This underwater stuff is way more interesting than I’d expected and there are a lot less dead people down here too.”

Duncan turned to look at her. “What?”

Kate supplied the answer. “Kayla was an ER doc.”

“OK then,” Duncan added, “We can sign you up as medic and cook.”

Kayla refilled the coffee mugs. “So long as I get to do more cooking than body repairs, we have a deal.” She laughed. “And I never make pre-packaged sandwiches.”

Martin had come into the galley from the ops room in search of some fresh coffee. The ops room had a small sink, a kettle and some powdered coffee, but he much preferred Kayla’s. He had been standing in the doorway for a few minutes listening to the conversation and watching the group. It was obvious that most of them got on well together. He was very pleased with the team selection. It was looking like it was going to be a very successful expedition.

Anchoring

(4,500 feet)

Kate woke to the sound of the alarm on her phone. She looked at the phone wistfully. It’s not really a phone down here she thought. It’s a camera and an alarm clock. Phone service was now 4,500 feet above her at the surface of the warm Caribbean water. She briefly imagined the sunny beaches they had left behind. She missed the feel of warm sand between her toes as she strolled along the beach looking at the small waves lapping the shore.

“You up then?” Chas asked her. He too had woken at the sound of her alarm.

“Mmm. sort of. We must be about at the bottom. Damn that was a long night.”

Chas, Boris and Kate had been on watch duty the previous night as the habitat sank slowly on autopilot towards the bottom. Dr. Ford had administered meds to the entire crew just before they ended their shift and headed for their bunks. The night had been entirely uneventful. The computer system had kept the hab 30 feet from the wall and maintained position approximately under their surface barge as it descended. The sonar transducers on the hab that faced the wall and into the abyss below had kept watch for any large outcroppings of rock that the hab might run into on its descent.

Kate had spent most of the night reading, and occasionally watching the floodlit wall moving slowly upwards from the portal in the operations room. Boris and Chas had been playing chess. Boris had won every game, some of them very quickly but Chas was enjoying playing again. He had played as a kid in high school but given it up when he went to college. He viewed himself as mildly useless as a strategist but the romantic in him enjoyed the titles of the pieces and he always imagined himself on a horse as he moved his knights.

Kate found it unlikely that Boris and Chas could spend that much time together. Their personalities were so different. Boris was absorbed mostly by his own love for himself and Chas spent a lot of time in puppy dog mode when he was around Kate. Kate sort of liked the affection but wasn’t interested in Chas. He was just too much of an introvert for Kate. He almost never disagreed with her and mostly shied away from leading a conversation. She found him nice enough but that was not what she was looking for.

“I’ll wake Boris”, Chas said. “Breakfast? Or do you want to see where we are first?” he asked Kate.

“Let’s go to ops and see what’s happening,” she replied.

In the operations room, almost the entire crew were standing around except for the divers who were in the moon pool below getting prepped to go out once the hab was anchored.

Today’s main task was to anchor the hab to the rock in front of them. The hab was equipped with several telescopic arms that had explosive bolts at the ends to connect them to the rock. The use of the explosives had been very difficult to negotiate with the Cayman government who were very protective of their wall. Paul Martin had brought along several of the hab’s designers to the meeting and a lot of charts and photographs showing how the anchors worked. He had shown a video of some tests that had been run off the coast of Maine using a large concrete block to simulate the rock of the wall. The concrete of the test wall had been formulated to behave like the surface of the Cayman wall. The government people had watched as three thin rods extended towards the test wall. When all three were in contact there was a short pause followed by a small flash from the end of each rod and then a large cloud of bubbles.

Dr. Martin had explained that the explosives were quite small and operated a lot like a bang stick that divers used to defend against sharks. Their purpose was to fire some 12 inch long stainless pins into the wall. At the end of each pin another small charge caused barbs to be forced outwards securing the pins into the wall.

After a long discussion about the dangers of the wall collapsing (which Martin had worked very hard to explain would not happen) the Caymanian government people had signed a permit.

Martin now stood in front of the portal in operations looking at the wall. “What is our depth please?” he asked.

Newell looked at the main control display. “Four thousand five hundred and six feet” he read from the display.

“And our height above the bottom?” Martin asked.

“Looks like about two hundred and fifty feet”, Newell replied.

Martin pressed the button on the intercom for the moon pool. “Duncan, are you there?”

“Roger” Duncan’s voice came back over the intercom speaker.

“Can you see the bottom?” Martin asked.

In the moon pool, Duncan, White and Perez looked down into the moon pool opening.

“It looks just like it has for the past five days.” Perez said. “Black”.

“Turn on the floods” Duncan said to White, who turned around and flipped a switch on the wall console. Four bright lights slung under the hab’s weight stacks came on. Duncan had expected the back-scatter from the particles in the water to obscure anything they might see, but to his surprise he found that the water was crystal clear and they could easily see the bottom below them. The wall curved gently out for what looked like it must be a hundred feet to what looked like a patch of sand. He went back to the intercom on the wall.

“Yes, we can see what I assume is the bottom. Viz is excellent. The wall curves out some and ends in what looks like sand. I can’t tell if this is really the bottom or if it’s a very big ledge. We don’t have enough field of view. We should put in one of the ROVs to be sure. Over”.

In the operations room, Martin looked across to Newell.

“Are you sure it’s the bottom below us?”

“Yes” Newell replied. We have done a wide angle scan with the downward facing sonar and we can see the wall curve out and become horizontal to the extent of our scan which is about 500 feet wide at that depth. I’m inclined to agree with Duncan though. We should drop the ROV to be sure.”

Martin pressed the intercom again. “Duncan, get the ROV ready. We’ll hover here until you have a chance to look at the bottom. I don’t want to anchor in the wrong place.”

“Roger. In work,” came Duncan’s voice over the intercom.

Martin turned to face the crew.

“OK, we are likely where we need to be but we’re going to drop in the ROV to be sure. Once that’s confirmed our position, we’ll do the anchoring.”

Nobody moved. They all just turned to look at the big monitor above the control console that was used to display the video from the ROV’s cameras. It was currently showing the image of Perez’s lower legs and feet. Then his face appeared inverted and he waved a hand.

Martin hit the intercom button. “We have good video up here.”

Kate turned to look at Chas. “They will be a while. Breakfast?”

Chas nodded.

“I also will have breakfast.” Boris replied.

Kate opened the tunnel door and the three of them walked back through the connecting tunnel to the galley area. Inside the galley, Boris closed the tunnel door behind them and spun the wheel. The indicator light next to the door showed a good seal.

“I make pancakes,” he announced.

“Really?” Kate asked. “I could go and get Kayla. She’s only watching the ROV video and we can put it on in here.”

“I make excellent pancakes,” Boris replied and turned his attention to the galley storage cabinets.

“I’ll make coffee then,” Chas said.

Kate thought this was Chas not wishing to be outdone by Boris. It was cute and also a little tedious to be constantly in the middle of this pointless competition. From her point of view neither of them was going to win. At least they were not going to win her if that’s what either of them imagined.

“I’m getting my Kindle,” she announced and went up the ladder to the crew room.

Boris got the stove fired up and started making batter. Chas finished getting the coffee maker primed and reached up and turned on the monitor above the galley counter. An image of the wall came up.

“Looks like the ROV is in the water he said.”

The image was rotating slowly and the wall drifted up as the ROV drove itself down. The rate of descent much faster than the hab had been making. The ROV didn’t need time to adjust to the increasing pressure like the humans did. The image changed suddenly to a view of the bottom below. Chas could see sand, a few rocks and not much else.

The view changed again to the ROV’s forward camera which was now pointing away from the wall. The sandy bottom stretched out into the distance where a rock outcropping could be seen.

Then the view changed again to the bottom of the hab which started to get closer.

“I guess they are done with that then.” Kate said.

Chas had not heard her come back down the ladder. He had been too absorbed by the video.

“I think I saw some large tube worms way out in the distance he said. I really hope we can get out there soon and look for ourselves.”

“Ready when you are she said,” smiling. “I smell pancakes. I’m ready for those too Boris.”

In the operations center all eyes were on the portal. Two of the twelve anchoring arms could be seen. Each cylinder of the hab had three arms at the top and three at the bottom which together formed a set of four tripods. The arms were extended out about ten feet.

“Hold the arms there please” Martin said. “Let’s get the hab closer to the wall. I want to be about fifteen feet out when we anchor”

“OK”, Newell replied and typed the new distance into the hab’s autopilot which was holding them steady in the water with the hab’s large collection of electronic thrusters.

The image of the wall started to get closer very slowly as the hab moved into its new position.

“We’re at fifteen feet now,” Newell announced. “Extend the arms?”

“Yes, please.” Martin responded. “Let’s get them all into light contact.”

Newell selected the first contact setting on the arm control screen.

Through the portal, the arms could be seen extending out towards the wall. As each one made contact it stopped. Pressure sensors in the arms allowed each arm to make very light contact so that all the arms could be positioned without overcoming the force from the hab’s thrusters which were keeping the big structure in place.

“How’s that look?” Newell asked.

“Looks OK to me. What are the contact readings?”

“All twelve show contact at the light setting. One is a little heavy but not unduly so.”

Martin turned to face the crew. “Anyone not think we should anchor here?” he asked. He wasn’t really asking for opinions. He just wanted to gauge the mood. All the faces seemed calm to him. He noticed that even George Carver was watching the portal not the crew, which was unusual for him. Whenever there was some key activity being conducted, Carver liked to keep an eye on the crew to look for signs of stress.

They had originally planned to anchor closer to the bottom, but the curve in the wall lower down would have made it difficult to get the Pheia’s arms all in contact with the hab still upright. Being further from the bottom meant a longer swim down for the divers but they had told him it was no big deal. When the expedition was still in the planning stages, Martin had wanted to be able to set the Pheia on the bottom, but the survey that had found the hydrothermal vents showed areas that were very fissured and unstable. The whole team had agreed that it was too risky and had come up with the idea of anchoring to the wall. Martin was more concerned now with getting the Pheia set in a solid position for the next week than he was with the exact location.

“OK, then.” Martin continued, “Let’s set up camp. Set the arms to the high pressure setting please”.

Newell tapped the setting on the control screen and there was a slight movement in the hab as its thrusters increased power to counteract the force the arms were now exerting.

Newell looked carefully at the display. “Good pressure on all arms. Ready to anchor.”

“Anchor.” Martin said.

Newell tapped the anchor control and entered a confirmation code.

Immediately all twelve explosive tips fired. There was a slight thud heard through the wall of the hab accompanied by flashes of light from the tips of the arms and clouds of bubbles which quickly rose out of view.

“Status?” Martin asked as he looked out of the portal trying to see all twelve contact points.

“We have nine solid anchors but the three of the arms on the lower end of this cylinder are showing slightly low contact pressures. I think they are OK though. Pressures are well above what we’d see if the rock had fractured.”

Martin looked down at the arms protruding below him. “They look OK from here. No sign of any fracturing that I can see. Have the hab do the jiggle test”.

Newell started the test which used the hab’s thrusters to attempt to move the hab up, down, left and right to ensure the anchors were solid.

The crew heard the whine of the thruster motors through the hull but nothing moved.

Newell stopped the test. “Everything looks good. I think we are locked in place.”

The room filled with cheers and clapping which subsided as Martin asked for quiet.

“Look’s like we are on finally on site. I’m sure all of you are eager to get on with the main purpose of our project here. The trip down was uneventful to say the least. Some might say it was boring even, but I think we’d all rather have that than technical problems.”

In the galley, Kate was on her third pancake. “These are very good Boris. I might have to have more of these”.

“You are welcome Kate.” Boris answered, and reached for the coffee pot on the counter.

As he reached for the pot there was a loud sound of grinding metal through the hull and the galley dropped about a foot. Boris dropped his mug on the floor where it broke into pieces; the coffee running over the now slightly slanted deck plates.

“What the hell was that?” Chas asked.

“I don’t know,” Boris replied. “Let us see,” and he reached for the wheel on the door to the connecting tunnel. As he started to turn the wheel he stopped and listened. There were shouts and screams coming from the other side. He let go of the wheel. He could hear the sound of rushing water.

“We may have problem.”

Kate got up from the table and moved to the door. As she reached for the wheel on the door, Boris held her arm. She listened to the sounds coming through it.

“Oh my god. What is going on?”

She pushed the intercom button for the operations room. “Hello. What’s happening.”

Nothing.

She pushed the button for the moon pool. “Anyone in the moon pool?”

Nothing.

She turned at looked at Chas and Boris. “What just happened?”

As Chas started to say something another loud thud came through the hull and the hab canted further to one side and dropped another few inches.

Chas looked at the tunnel door. “Look,” he said pointing to the small round window in the door. “The tunnel is full of water.”

Kate immediately went to the ladder and looked down to the storage room below her. “It’s dry down there she said.”

Boris looked at the other two. “Lights are still on so we have power. Reactor system must be OK. But I think crew not in such good shape.”

Kate looked through the small portal in the tunnel door. “The tunnel is broken. I can see a gap between the end of it and the other cylinder.”

Outside the hab small pieces of rock continued to fall from the wall and tumble lazily down giving off trails of coral dust. A large section of the wall that the crew cylinder arms were connected to had given way. As it slid down several feet, it pulled the hab out of position.

As the Phea had descended the wall, micro cracks had formed in the welds that held the tunnels to the hab’s cylinders. The force on the two cylinders created by the wall section pulling on the arms had created enough torque to make the small cracks widen rapidly and form tears in the welds holding the tunnels to the cylinders.

The two tunnels that connected the hab’s cylinders had been ripped away from the control cylinder by only a few millimeters but that was enough. The crack, although narrow, went completely around the tunnel’s connection to the hab and let the hab’s gas escape rapidly. Water flowed in through the moon pool exit flooding the moon pool and operations rooms in under a minute. The divers in the moon pool room were taken by surprise. They had been playing cards, waiting for instructions, when the floor shifted. As the water rose rapidly they climbed up into the crowded ops room.

The movement of the large mass of water caused the Pheia to shift its position. The drive system was still running and tried to adjust the attitude. That added more force to the lower tunnel which also separated from the ops cylinder.

There was nowhere to go. The water rose rapidly in the operations room as the gas escaped from the crack around the tunnel that joined it to the other cylinder.

The last person to die in the operations room was George Carver who happened to be at the highest point and kept his head in a small pocket of air for a few more seconds until the hab had shifted the second time and the pocket slid from him across the roof of the room and disappeared out of the gap by the tunnel door leaving him holding his breath. A minute later, his breath gave out and he had unwillingly breathed in a mouthful of cold seawater. His vocal chords reacted violently and shut off his lungs. He thrashed wildly, pounding on the metal ceiling until he blacked out and died floating quietly with the rest of the crew in the now dead operations center.

Realization

Kate was alone in the galley. Chas and Boris had gone up to the crew area to sleep about two hours ago, after the three of them had argued about how to deal with the aftermath of the accident. Kate had stayed in the galley on her own trying to think of a way out of their situation.

Her back hurt. It always hurt when she was stressed, and right now her stress level was at about eleven.

She got up from the table and stretched her arms up as far above her head as she could reach. In this position she could just touch the pipes that ran across the ceiling of the compartment.

Looking up at the collection of pipes she tried to imagine the incredibly tall column of water that separated her from the surface. The water pressure here was over 2,000 PSI. If it wasn’t for the hydreliox gas mix and Dr. Ford’s meds, they’d all have been dead a long time ago.

Before Boris and Chas had gone to sleep, they had checked the gas mix from the small system monitor panel by the galley door. Thankfully the hab designers had thought to add these in every compartment. Each cylinder of the hab had its own gas mix monitoring system. Power in the crew and galley cylinder came from the nuclear generator in the ops cylinder but that seemed also to be OK for now. The crew cylinder also had a large nano-battery pack in the domed area above the crew compartment that could power the cylinder for a day or two. Nobody imagined that the batteries could run the hab in place of the reactor but they were there in case the reactor needed to be shut down temporarily. Kate had no idea what circumstance would require the reactor to be shut down only temporarily. According to Boris, the reactor was designed to produce electricity until it ran out of fuel. It had no maintainable parts. It was, after all, designed to support space missions.

Kate put water in the electric kettle and set about making herself some tea. Tea was good. Making tea seemed somehow productive. As the kettle heated the water she tried not to think about the crew but her eyes kept glancing over to the window in the tunnel hatch.

Chas came down the ladder just as Kate was sitting down with her mug of hot tea.

“I can’t sleep,” he said to her. “Boris is sawing logs up there. He’s not freaked out at all by this. How are you doing?”

“My back hurts like hell, but apart from that I’m OK. Want some tea?”

“No, not really. How are we going to get out of here Kate?”

“I don’t know. We need to find a way to disconnect the anchor legs from the wall and then some way to control our ascent. We can’t just float up. We’d decompress way to fast. We’d be dead long before we got to the top. And there’s another problem that I just though of. We need to make sure we keep taking Ford’s HPNS meds or we’re going to have serious nervous system problems pretty soon.”

“Those are stored below aren’t they?” Chas asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been with Ford when she was prepping them but my guess is they are somewhere in the storage area. At least that’s dry down there. Why don’t you wake Boris up. I’ll go down and see if I can find them.”

Kate found the meds in Ford’s storage area with no problem and brought up a case of syringes to the galley. By the time she got back up there, Boris was making coffee.

“I found the meds. Who wants to play doctor?”

Boris looked at her. “Not primary problem. We have at least 12 hours before we need to take next dose and we have to find way to re-pressurize control room so we can blow the anchors.”

“How can we do that?” Chas asked. “The place is flooded with sea water and the electronics in there will have been fried by now. Seawater and electronics are not good bedfellows as any sailor can tell you. And in any case I don’t see how we re-pressurize the ops center. Any gas we try to pump in there is going to escape through whatever hole it escaped from in the first place. We went over all of this hours ago.”

Kate was worried about Chas. He was clearly trying to hide his feelings but it was clear to her that he was scared. Hell, she was scared too. And she couldn’t image that Boris wasn’t too, it was just difficult to read him.

Boris poured himself a mug of coffee. “Electronics will be OK. Entire control system is filled with gel. This was lesson learned from American Apollo 13 mission. When you have people breathing and cold surfaces, water condenses on the surfaces and can invade the electronics. Hab is designed to prevent that. Bigger problem is going to be getting gas back into ops cylinder.”

“Can we use the scuba gear?” Kate asked.

“That’s in the moon pool.” Chas answered. “And it’s probably flooded too. My guess is that the moon pool and ops are totally flooded. Since we have power, I guess the reactor and gas room is OK.”

Boris nodded. “I am in agreement with Chas. I think both tunnels were ruptured and lower two thirds of ops cylinder is flooded. This must be case or we would have heard sounds from survivors by now.”

That made Kate think of the bodies. Even if they could get into ops, most of the crew would still be in there. The idea of seeing them floating there made her feel sick.

Boris continued. “Kate has good idea. I use scuba gear to inspect ops cylinder. Only problem is how to get into moon pool without flooding this cylinder.”

“What if we move what we need in storage to up here and then open the lower hatch? The water won’t come up here right? We are all at sea pressure.” Chas asked.

Kate looked down the ladder into the storage room. She had just been down there and there was a lot of stuff in that room. “I guess we don’t need much food for the ride to the surface. Enough for five to ten days — we’ll need to figure that out of course. But Boris, how will you get a dive suit? They are all in the moon pool.”

“When storage room is flooded, I will swim in there and get suit. Then I come back, get warm and suit up.”

Chas looked at him. “Well, that sounds easy.” he said sarcastically. “But how will you get the tunnel hatch open?”

“Not problem. Same pressure both sides. So long as hatch is not damaged it will open easily. “

For the next ten minutes they talked about the plan. It seemed very dangerous to Kate because Boris would have to swim through very cold water to get a suit, and he’d have to hold his breath at least until he found a tank with gas in it. And even then it wasn’t likely he’d find a tank with a regulator attached. He was going to have to haul the tank, regulator, suit, fins and mask back up through the storage room into the galley. It just didn’t seem possible.

“I will make two trips.” Boris said simply. “On first trip I must find a mask, then…”

Kate cut him off. “No need” I saw masks in the storage area below. Perhaps there are fins and a suit too?”

All three of them descended the ladder into the storage room. Kate eyed the tunnel hatch warily. There was a lot of very cold ocean on the other side. She looked through the small portal in the door and could clearly see the hatch at the far end of the tunnel. It was only a few feet away and it was closed. She could clearly see where the tunnel had separated from the hab. Lousy welding she thought.

“The hatch to the moon pool is closed,” she said.

“Yes, that is to be expected,” Boris replied.

Chas found a storage bin with two masks, a wet suit hood, and several pairs of fins. “Do you want the fins?” he asked Boris.

“No. I take only mask and wear hood. Better than nothing.”

Over the next half an hour, the three remaining crew of the Pheia moved everything they thought they might need to get to the surface into the galley above the storage room. When they were finished, the galley was quite crowded with a collection of cardboard boxes, plastic storage tubs and cans of food.

“God I hope this is all we need” Kate said. “I guess the cans will survive the water if we need to get more.”

Boris had stripped down to just his pants. He put on the wetsuit hood. Kate couldn’t suppress a giggle. “You look great.” she said smiling.

Chas wasn’t so sure. “You are going to freeze. Don’t you at least want your shirt?”

“No. Better to come back to dry shirt”.

Boris put on the face mask and descended the ladder. Kate and Chas watched from above. Even though they both knew the Pheia was at the same pressure as the sea, it was still unnerving to think that Boris was about to open a door to the sea.

Boris stood in front of the hatch. He looked back up the ladder. “I go now”

He slowly spun the wheel on the hatch. Even with similar pressures on both sides there was still a wall of water over six feet higher than his floor on the other side. He tried to open the hatch slowly but the pressure of water forced it fully open and the wave of water entering the room pushed Boris over and washed him to the far side. Luckily, he had been holding his breath. The water was very cold and he had to fight the urge to go back up for more air. The level of water equalized about a foot below the ceiling level.

Boris swam through the open hatch and along the short tunnel to the far cylinder. He grabbed the hatch wheel and spun it easily then pushed the hatch away from him into the moon pool room. He was running out of breath and contemplated going back but he saw a tank and a regulator still hung on its hook above the tank. He swam into the moon pool room and reached for the tank. As he stretched his arm out he caught sight of something to his right and turned to see the corpse of Duncan floating in the water. He fought hard not to panic. He had expected to see the bodies but the reality was much worse than he expected. It was pale but otherwise looked just like Duncan had looked the last time Boris had seen him. He grasped the tank by its valve and pulled it up out of the rack grateful for the buoyancy that gave the tank almost zero weight. With his other hand he grabbed the regulator and turned around to start his way back to the storage room. He thought about turning the tank on but decided it would take longer than the swim back.

A few seconds later he was gasping for breath as he pushed his head up into the air space by the ladder. “Help,” he said and Chas reached down for him.

“Take tank first,” Boris said to Chas and pushed the tank and regulator up to the surface.

Chas pulled them both into the galley and then quickly grabbed Boris who was shivering badly and pulled him up.

“Well done Boris,” Kate said and threw him a towel.

“Thank you Kate. I need to warm up. Coffee please.”

Boris made his way to the large galley table and sat down shivering. “Not so cold really he said and pulled off the wetsuit hood. His long hair looked wild and matted.

Kate poured him coffee. “Did you see the suits?” she asked.

“Yes, but I could not carry everything. Must make second trip as I said before.”

Kate looked at Boris. He really did seem OK, just a little cold and it looked like he was getting over that.

Chas had put the regulator on the tank and checked it. “You have tons of gas,” he said to Boris.

Chas had briefly wondered if he should offer to go on the second trip, but he well knew there were bodies of the divers in the moon pool room and he just couldn’t face them. He had been tempted to ask Boris if he had seen them but decided not to. He must have seen them. They had nowhere else to go.

Boris finished his coffee. “I get suits now. I also try to get BCs and more tanks. I will leave them in storage room. Then we can bring them all up in one go.”

Boris handed Kate his towel and put the mask back on his face. He breathed a couple of deep breaths, held the third one and dropped into the water.

He had forgotten to put the hood back on, and immediately noticed how cold his head was. He had to carry the tank as he had no BC to strap it into but despite that, just being able to breathe made the task of re-entering the moon pool room much easier.

It took him four trips to bring three suits and three complete sets of scuba gear back into the storage area. Once he had it all on the floor, he decided to go back once more. He needed to take a look up into the control room to see if the hatch there was intact. He was very cold now and could barely hold the tank valve he was shivering so badly.

Despite his discomfort he made it back to the pool room. He had to push the body of White out of the way to get up the ladder that led to the operations room. He pushed his head up far enough to see. The wall lights were still working and the view was clear and surreal. Bodies of the crew floated everywhere. He tried to ignore them and looked at the hatch. It was open and he could see the black sea through it. The tunnel must have been ripped from the side of the hab. He had seen enough and made his way back down to the pool room and from there back to the storage room.

When he got into the storage room he was too cold to do much more than grab the ladder and pull himself up.

In the galley, Kate and Chas helped Boris to sit down and dried him off with towels and then covered him with more dry towels. The towels had been a good find. A whole box of them in the storage room had seemed like something they didn’t really need but had nonetheless found its way into the galley with everything else.

Kate looked at Boris. He was shivering uncontrollably.

“I’ll get the gear,” she said and took the mask Boris had dropped on the table.

She stripped down to pants and the sports bra she preferred to wear when working. Donning the mask she dropped into the cold water.

Kate was horrified at how cold it was. The shock really surprised her and it took her a moment to remember why she was in the water.

She grabbed at the first things she could reach from the pile of gear and thrust it up above her head where Chas’ legs had appeared at the top of the ladder. A hand appeared and took the gear. Kate reached down again for another load and repeated the hand off to Chas. She was out of breath and getting very cold. She pushed her head above the water and gasped in a lung full of air. “Damn it’s cold”

Kate did four more dives to bring up all the gear and joined Boris at the table wrapped in her own pile of towels. Chas stood by the ladder looking at them. “You guys look terrible,” he said, then thought badly of himself for saying it. They were both working to get them all out of here and he was making stupid comments. “Sorry,” he said. “You look great. More coffee anyone?”

After they had all warmed up again, Kate assembled the dive gear and looked at the pile of suits Boris had recovered. Her own suit was on top of the pile. “Lucky me. I get my own suit, but it looks like you two will need to pick from these.”

Boris looked at the pile of suits. “One of us should stay here. Not necessary for us all to go.”

“I’m not staying here on my own” Chas said. “If you two don’t come back, I’m not being left alone.”

“I agree with Chas. We all go.” and Kate picked up her suit. She tossed suits to the other two. “Those look like they might fit” she said, smiling. One of the suits was obviously much to large for either of the men. “Let’s agree who is doing what before we get into the water.”

Boris got the large suit but didn’t seem to care. “I go first and close tunnel hatch. When it is closed, we try to get gas into chamber. While it repressurizes, we need to move the bodies down into the moon pool. They will stink up the place if we let them stay.”

Chas looked ashen. He had forgotten about the bodies. He looked at Kate who didn’t look much happier. “What do we do with them once they are in the moon pool room?” she asked.

“We tie weights to them and drop them out the opening. It will only take a kilogram or two. They are well saturated by now.”

“How can you be so dispassionate?” Chas asked him

Boris looked hard at him.

“I am not dispassionate, but I am a realist. If you want to see sunshine again there are many things we have to do, and I have no pleasure in doing them with the bodies of our comrades looking on.”

“I saw cable ties in the storage room.” Kate said. I’ll get some as we go through. We can use them to attach some of the dive weights to each body.”

“You too?” Chas asked.

“I guess so. I’d like to go home, and I also have no interest in doing any of this with a bunch of dead and decomposing corpses watching me.”

“What do we tell the families when we get back?” Chas asked.

Kate looked taken aback. “I… hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she said.

“It is tradition to bury the dead at sea.” Boris said. “This is a fitting place to leave them.”

Chas nodded agreement. “Yes, OK, you’re right but I’m not sure I can do it.”

“Then it’s my task” Kate said. “You can take care of the gas system.”

Each of them pulled a dry-suit over there normal clothing. Normally they would have used the fleece underwear that came with the suits but who knows where that was, and in any case it was going to be waterlogged and no use as insulation.

Kate had an odd feeling as they prepared to enter the water again. “Anyone else having difficulty leaving the one dry place we have?” she asked.

The other two either didn’t hear or ignored her.

Boris went down the ladder first followed by Chas. As Chas dropped below the surface Kate felt suddenly very alone.

“OK” she said to herself. “Let’s do this,” and dropped into the cold water.

As she entered the storage room, she saw Chas was already entering the tunnel. She also noticed how much warmer she was. She knew that wasn’t going to last but it was hard not to compare this relative luxury with the stark cold of her previous dive into the room. She adjusted her buoyancy so she could stand on the floor and walked with her arms making swimming motions over to one of the plastic storage bins that were all floating up under the shelves above where they had been stacked. She pulled out the one with the cable ties and opened it. A large bubble of gas escaped and the contents of the bin floated up with the gas bubble. Kate grabbed a bundle of cable ties and turned to face the tunnel. There was no sign of Chas or Boris now. She wished they had the full-face masks and comms equipment so she could talk to them.

Boris had made his way back up into the operations center. Chas was on the ladder behind him trying very hard not to stare at the floating bodies. He was dealing with them better than he had expected. They looked like pale mannequins from some kind of freaky clothing store.

Chas handed more dive weights up to Boris as he reached for them and Boris dropped them on the ops room floor. They had a small pile there now and Chas hoped that attaching them to the corpses wasn’t going to be a problem for Kate because he was pretty sure that no matter how he felt about these dead people now, he was never going to be able to touch them.

He saw bubbles in front of his face and looked down to see Kate below him. She was waving at him to move up the ladder.

Boris decided to leave the weights to Chas and Kate and moved over to the ops room tunnel hatch. It looked OK. It must have been open when the accident had happened. He pushed it closed slowly against the resistance of the water and looked very closely at the edge of the door as it came almost closed. He was wondering if it was warped. It closed snugly and he spun the wheel. Good. One less problem to deal with.

Chas had found the gas control panel and had been waiting for Boris to signal the door was closed. Boris waved at him and Chas opened one of the gas flood valves slightly. These valves connected to a set of tanks outside the hab that were filled with heliox all the time to help mitigate a small leak. This certainly wasn’t a small leak, but they had only to push out the water from the ops room not the entire hab. The moon pool could stay flooded. He figured they had enough gas in the scuba sets to make dozens of trips back and forth if they had to. That wasn’t going to be the main issue. The big deal was going to be just how much gas was in the Pheia’s tanks. He couldn’t do the math in his head but he knew that the water pressure down where they were meant that whatever massive amount of gas was in the tanks at sea level pressure was a lot less volume down here.

As he cracked the valve open, bubbles emerged from an opening in the ceiling of the compartment. He opened the valve fully and watched as the gas started to form a bubble at the top of the room. It was expanding quite fast but it was obvious that at the rate the gas was entering the room it would be a while before they could get out of the scuba gear.

Kate and Boris attached one or two dive weights to each of the dead crew and pushed them over to the ladder. Each body slowly drifted down out of sight but Kate knew this was only the first step. Once they had them all in the moon pool room, they would need to push them out of the hab exit to float the few hundred feet down to the sea bed; the place they had come down here to explore. She couldn’t help crying as she worked. The tears stung her eyes and she had to stop more than once to flood her mask and clear it. The seawater washed her tears away just as it took the bodies of her friends.

By the time all of the bodies had been sent down to the lower level, the room had a pocket of gas about two feet deep at the top. Boris gave Kate a thumbs-up sign and the two of them pulled up the ladder into the gas pocket.

“I need to look at gas generator system.” Boris said. “Can you go down and take care of the bodies?” he asked her.

Before she could answer, Chas’ head appeared on the opposite side of the room. He pulled his mask down around his neck. “Hey, Boris, I don’t think there is going to be enough gas to fill the room.”

“Yes, I expected that.” Boris replied. “I will see if the gas generator system is still working. There should be plenty of helium and hydrogen in the tanks. We just need it to make more oxygen.”

Boris put his mask back on and dropped back into the water. Kate followed, dreading the thought of dealing with the bodies again.

Kate stopped at the bottom of the ladder and saw that Boris was looking at the gas control panel. It seemed very unlikely that the systems would have survived the flooding but as Boris had pointed out, the actual control systems were above them in the reactor room and the control panels down here were all gel filled. They had been on the dive for about 20 minutes now and she was starting to feel a little chilly. The feel of the cold made her want to get the dive over with and she lowered herself down the ladder into the moon pool room. A few rungs from the bottom she stopped. The floor below her was covered in bodies. She pushed off the ladder with a good shove and floated down to the floor beside them.

Part of her wanted to say something for each one, and part of her just wanted them gone.

She bent over and grabbed the pant leg of the nearest body. It lifted easily from the pile and she directed it over the moon pool exit. Goodbye, she thought as it slowed dropped out of sight.

Kate looked at the pile of corpses and selected the next closest one. She grabbed it by the arm and pulled it over the exit. She was trying not to look at the faces but as she grabbed the next one, the face of Kayla Miller floated before her and Kate let out a sob that made here face crease and let water into her mask. Tears filled her eyes as she pulled the body over the exit and released it. She didn’t bother to clear her mask. She didn’t need to see any better than the blurry view she had now as she slowly pulled the rest of the dead crew over the exit and released them into the darkness below.

When they were all gone she lifted her head and cleared her mask. The moon pool room was empty. She stood there alone listening to the sounds of her bubbles as she breathed. It was peaceful. The same peace she had discovered on her first sea dives in the Caribbean with her family so many years before. Despite the chill she was feeling, she tried to focus her mind on remembering happy dives in sunny warm waters; her father looking for things to show her in this new world.

Chas’ feet appeared on the ladder and brought her back to reality. She looked at him and he made swimming motions with his fingers and pointed to the tunnel hatch. Kate nodded and moved towards the tunnel.

Back in the galley again, Kate dropped her scuba gear on the deck and started to unzip her suit.

“Help me out of this will you Chas? Where is Boris? Is he OK?”

“He indicated to me to come back. I think he’s working on the gas system controls. When I left, the room was about six feet deep in water still.”

“Do you think it’s going to work? Can we get the ops room working again?”

“From what I saw when I was in there, all the controls are working. Boris must have been right about the electronics. It looks as though it really is waterproof.”

Kate helped Chas out of his gear and found a can of soup. “Are you hungry?” She asked Chas. “I’ll heat this up. I’m starving. It’s been ages since we last ate.”

“Sure. But not mushroom. Mushroom soup is evil.” He smiled at her. This was the first time Kate had seen him look close to normal. “I’m glad the bodies are gone,” he added.

“Yes. Me too. I couldn’t stop crying but now that we are back here it seems oddly surreal. Like it was a dream.”

They sat together and ate the soup in silence. As Kate was getting to the bottom of the bowl she heard bubbles, and then saw Boris emerge from the storage room. He pulled off his mask and tossed it on the deck.

“Need help?” Chas asked and offered a hand.

Boris pulled up on Chas’ hand and stepped onto the deck. “Gas system is working,” he said and pulled of his scuba set. “I estimate about five hours to clear water from ops room but we can operate equipment before it is empty.”

Chas helped him out of his suit. “Can we get back to the surface?”

“Yes, this is possible. We must blow the pyros that hold the legs to the hab, then use the drive system to ascend.”

“Do we know the drives are OK,” Kate asked. “Did you test them?”

“No. They are not tested yet. One thing at a time. First we must check control systems are working. Then I can try drive motors before we detonate arm pyros.”

Kate waved the empty can of soup at Boris. “Want some soup?” she asked.

“Yes. Soup would be good.”

Control

The following day, Chas, Boris and Kate suited up once more and made the short dive from the galley through the storage room and moon pool up into operations. When they arrived, there were only a few inches of water covering the floor. They pulled off the scuba gear and in unspoken agreement they walked over to the portal. The wall was right there where it had been for several days. The arms holding the hab to the wall were clearly visible.

Boris checked the indicators on the gas control system panel. “Gas system is good. Reactor is providing normal power.”

“What about the drive systems?” Chas asked.

“I will check out control systems now.”

The hab’s control system consisted of an array of electric motors with caged fans. The motors mostly pointed down but were each steerable to allow thrust to be directed enough to move the hab around laterally while maintaining a fixed depth. The ops computer directed the fans as a group to maintain position based on an array of sensors. Pressure sensors provided fine depth control and sonar arrays provided a measure of distance from the wall. Optical systems complemented the sonar to provide stereoscopic visual images of the wall which were processed by the computer to provide distance and additional positional data. Maintaining a position underwater was tricky. No GPS signals made their way below the surface and there was a distinct lack of sign posts. The wall itself was largely featureless and for the bulk of the trip, the bottom was so far below them as to be of no use in determining their position. The surface barge had an audio transponder slung under it and the hab could ping it to find the distance from the surface with reasonable accuracy but even this was subject to the effects of the thermocline layer which they were now far below.

To Boris, the problem was simple: blow the pyro devices that would shear the arms holding them to the wall and add some thrust to the drives giving them a net positive upward velocity. Then wait. Eventually they would get to the surface. The power was on, the pyros were redundant designs used in space programs throughout the world and the drive systems also had some redundancy. Even with one or two motors out of commission, the computer would adjust thrust in the others to maintain attitude and velocity.

What worried him was that he had held the same feelings for the bulk of the hab’s systems before the dive and yet here they were stranded near the bottom of the Cayman trench. Most of the crew was dead, and the hab was badly damaged. As far as he could tell from the short inspection he had performed the day before, the two hab cylinders were still connected by the top tunnel, although it had pulled apart from the operations cylinder a few inches. The bottom tunnel was separated completely from the ops cylinder, which left them in a bad way mechanically. If any of the drive systems on either hab didn’t work, the computer would try to compensate, but this would put a lot of stress on what remained of the upper tunnel connection between the two cylinders. He was doubtful it would survive any torque at all. If the two cylinders separated, they would pull apart the wiring and gas line connections leaving the ops cylinder with drive motors on just three sides. He was doubtful the computer could cope with the loss of the other drives and the associated sensor systems.

He realized that someone was talking to him.

“Boris. Boris. Are you with us?” It was Kate. “Will the drives work?”

“Yes, I think that is so. Drive control system shows that motors are all ready. I can try self test cycle but this may stress upper tunnel and make more damage. So I think it best to just blow control arms and thrust up. If it works, all is good.”

“And if it doesn’t work? What then?” Chas asked. “We get out and push?”

Kate had been thinking about the ascent. “What happens if the hab comes apart Boris? We’d lose the food and water supplies and all the meds.”

“The computer may be able to compensate for the loss of the other thrusters but I am doubtful it can control the hab position as all thrusters on one side will be missing.”

“But we’d float up, right?” Chas looked nervous again. “Even if we don’t have all the motors, we still have upward thrust. It doesn’t matter if we stay in position. We still get to the surface and they will see us. Right?”

Kate agreed. “We have to try. Perhaps we should bring some of the stores over here in case we lose the other cylinder.”

They discussed this idea for a few minutes and Kate volunteered to go and get enough food, water and HPNS meds for the three of them for at least 15 days. Kate tried very hard not to think about the time it would take to get to the surface. The original plan was for three weeks of ascent so they could slowly decompress, and even then they had planned several days in relatively shallow water to complete the decompression cycle and switch back to breathing air. Doing the ascent in 15 days was the absolute fastest they could go with acceptable risk. It was quite possible they would arrive at the surface with their blood full of bubbles. If that happened, the surface crew would have three bodies to bury.

Boris said that he would run electrical continuity tests on the pryros and again on the motor controls and gas system. Chas had nothing to do, so he decided to go with Kate for the supplies.

It took Chas and Kate nearly an hour to move enough food and water into the control room. By the time they were done, they were both cold and tired. The water was gone from the control room and the air temperature was starting to return to normal now that the heating system was no longer trying to heat thousands of gallons of cold water. Boris had peeled off the upper part of his dive suit and had tied the arms together around his waist. “We are ready to depart.”

Kate and Chas nodded. Boris flipped up the pyro system switch guards and pressed the two red buttons below them. Kate looked out the portal and saw the flash from the arms just before a slight thud was felt through the hull. The drive motors came to life and added to the sounds of the hab as they pushed upwards.

The hab shifted slightly off vertical and stopped moving.

“What’s wrong?” Chas said.

Kate looked at the arms outside. The small clouds of bubbles from the pyro explosions had dissipated. Most of the arms had been separated about a foot out from the hab but one of the lower ones that connected the ops cylinder to the wall was still intact.

A groan of bending steel went through the hull and Boris reduced the upward thrust enough to keep the hab stable. “That was crew cylinder trying to leave us behind.” He said. “It seems to be stable again now”.

Kate turned from the portal. “We are still attached to the wall.”

Boris and Chas joined her at the portal. The lower arm was clearly intact.

Boris went back to the pyro control panel. “I try again” he said and pushed the pryo fire buttons. Nothing happened. He pushed them again and banged a fist on the panel.

Kate looked at him. “What now?”

“There are spare pyro cutters in a locker in the moon pool. Someone will have to attach one to the arm and we can blow it manually.”

“Chas turned towards the ladder. “Where are they? I’ll go.”

Boris explained where to find the explosive cutter. “You will plug it into the circuit at the base of the arm where the original cutter was connected. Just replace old wire with new wire. You understand?”

“Yes. Got it.”

Chas put his scuba gear back on and descended the ladder to the moon pool room. He found the cutter easily. He looked at the connector at the end of the wire. It seemed simple enough, and with the pyro cutter assembly in one hand he floated down through the exit. As he dropped down he looked towards the bottom wondering if he’d see the bodies but it was too dark.

He walked his hands over the structure that held the weight stack to the hab and found his way up to the support arm. He took a second to admire the view of the hab and the wall. It had all started out so well. He had really enjoyed being able to work with Kate and had hoped to be able to develop a relationship with her. That all seemed very surreal now, as he floated in the silence beside the hab.

He unwound the short electrical cable and turned so he could see the pyro electrical connector at the base of the arm.

He pulled out the old pyro plug and pushed in the new one. It was the last thing he did. The pyro circuit was still armed. The pyro cutter blew immediately and the shock wave knocked Chas’s mask off and banged his head into the hab. He sucked in a mouthful of water. His larynxes spasmed as the cold water hit them and shut of his throat. He fought harder to breathe in. As he did so the gas bubble from the explosion pushed him up and he floated up past the hab portal. His last view was of Kate and Boris staring out at him, Kate’s hands pressed against the plastic of the portal window.

“No, no” Kate cried out. “Chas.” She banged the palms of her hands on the portal as his body floated up past them. “Oh no. Chas,” she sobbed.

Kate pressed her face to the portal and looked up but Chas’ body was already out of sight. She slid down to the floor and covered her face with her hands. “What happened? What happened to Chas?”

Boris had been wondering that too. The pyro circuits were designed to be very safe. They could only fire when both fire control buttons were pressed at the same time. “The circuit must have retained the charge from the first attempts to fire it. Enough to set of the cutter when it was plugged in.”

“What do we do now?”

Kate was feeling very small and very helpless. She had not been close to Chas but she liked him and had always enjoyed working with him. She knew he had a bit of a crush on her, which made it seem all the more sad.

Boris looked out the portal. “We must try again. There are more cutters in the locker. I will attach another one to the arm.”

“What if the same thing happens again?”

“I will place it at the far end of the arm. The cable should be long enough. When I plug it in, if it fires, I will be far enough away that it will not hurt me.”

“You’re kidding right? If that thing goes off while you are in the water, the pressure wave is going to kill you.”

“No. I think not. Device is designed to force the cutters together. Explosive is in ring around cutter and has shield around that. Only small force will enter the water.”

“How do you explain what happened to Chas?” Kate was sobbing again.

“Perhaps he was holding the cutter when it went off. We cannot know. In any case, there is no choice. I must go out and try again.”

Boris pulled his suit back up and Kate helped him get zipped up, and then helped him with his scuba gear. “Please be careful,” she said with tears running down her cheeks.

“Yes of course. First I add slightly more upward thrust to the drive motors to help pull us free when the charge goes off. I will use tether to hull so as not to be left behind.” He smiled at Kate. “I make joke.”

Kate was not really listening and missed his terrible attempt at humor. Things were going downhill fast. It seemed very unlikely to her that she was going to get out of this alive. It helped to know that she had few choices. Sit still, do nothing and die here eventually as the oxygen ran out, or try again and perhaps die in the effort. It seemed an easy choice. Death by activity was always preferable to death on the couch. She got up from the floor. “I’ll help you,” she said, wiping her eyes, but Boris was already at the ladder.

He dropped down into the moon pool and Kate saw the bubbles stop rising as he moved out under the hab’s weight stack.

She moved back to the portal and watched as Boris appeared a few minutes later with a pyro cutter in his hand.

He worked his way out along the arm to where it was buried in the wall. Kate watched as he strapped the cutter to the arm then made his way back to the hab. She had to press her face against the portal to see him working below.

He reappeared and moved back out along the arm. “What are you doing?” she said out loud.

She watched as Boris went back to the cutter assembly and pulled the straps on it tight again. She could see him try to shake the arm. But nothing happened.

Kate watched as Boris shook the arm again. “What the hell are you doing?” she thought.

Boris looked at the arm where it entered the wall. The coral looked like a pile of small rocks. The explosive harpoon on the end of the arm must have fractured it when the hab was anchored. He reached out and grabbed a piece of the broken coral near the front. It moved slightly when we wiggled it. He grasped the arm with one hand and tried to wiggle the coral with the other. A small cloud of dust formed in the water as the coral shifted slightly.

To his surprise, the chunk of coral came free and he let it fall. He watched as it slowly tumbled down the wall giving off a cloud of dust as it rolled away, down into the dark.

Encouraged, he reached in further and grasped another chunk.

In the hab, Kate watched what Boris was doing but couldn’t understand why he didn’t just come back in and fire the pyros. Perhaps he was worried it wouldn’t fire, but surely he didn’t expect to dig them out? She felt the hab move slightly. The upward thrust from the drives had shifted it slightly. Through the portal she could see Boris was still working on a rock above the arm.

Boris pushed and pulled on the chunk of coral above the arm. Pressure from the arm was holding it place, making it hard to move. He could see the top part of the arm’s harpoon assembly so the arm was not buried far into the rock. If he could get this piece out, perhaps they could just thrust the hab out from the wall and it would free itself. That seemed far safer than trying to fire the explosives in the cutter. After what happened to Chas, he wasn’t very keen on trying the cutter at all. It might work just fine, but it might not fire at all and then he’d have to come back out and do what he was doing now. He was much better off just trying to get the rock free.

He wished they still had the comms masks. When the moon pool room had flooded, the comm battery packs had been in the chargers and the connections were not waterproof. The salt water and electrolytic action had eaten the battery connectors away making them useless.

He wanted to ask Kate to cut the thrust so the hab would drop and take the pressure off the rock. He turned and looked at the hab. He could see Kate at the portal and briefly wondered if he could make signs she would understand, but even if she got the idea, he didn’t think she knew the controls, and thrusting the wrong way could make things much worse. He turned back to the wall and yanked on the rock again.

Kate had wondered what Boris wanted when he turned to face the hab. He hadn’t made hand signs to her but it looked like he wanted to talk. She looked again at what he was doing. It was hard to see because of the distance and because Boris was often in the way. But as Boris shifted to one side to try working the rock from a different angle, Kate saw briefly what he was doing. It was obvious that he was trying to pull out a rock above the arm and it was stuck fast.

“Oh, he needs me to drop the hab,” she said aloud and moved over to the attitude control panel.

Kate could see it was set for a very slow rate of ascent and that the motors were all working hard to try to achieve it. The visual display showed the programmed rate of ascent and the thrust settings and directions for all of the hab’s drive motors. On each side of the touch screen was a line of buttons and next to each one on the screen was a menu item. She tapped the button next to ‘V Rate’ and a dialog opened with the current ascent rate in it. She typed in a single zero and pressed the ‘Enter’ button. The dialog went away. The ascent rate now showed zero with a blue box around it. “OK. So what now?” She pushed the ‘Execute’ button and immediately heard a change in the whine of the motors and a shift in the hab’s attitude.

She rushed back to the portal.

Boris had heard the motors change pitch and saw the arm drop slightly as the tension was relieved. He turned to the hab and gave Kate a big OK, with his hand and then another one to emphasize that Kate had done the right thing. He grasped the rock above the arm and it came free easily. There were more, smaller rocks deeper in the hole behind the one he had removed but it looked like they might come out too.

He pulled on one but it didn’t move. He could clearly see the harpoon assembly now. There was so little of the arm left in the hole, perhaps the hab could pull itself out now. He turned to face the hab and gave Kate a thumbs up sign which to a diver meant to go up. He hoped she understood. He saw Kate give him a thumbs up and then an OK. Then he saw her disappear from the portal and waited.

Kate went back to the control panel and set a small ascent rate. The motors whined louder and she felt the hab shift up slightly as it tried to move.

Boris saw the arm shift up, but clearly it was still trapped by the small rocks. It was infuriating. They were so close to being free. He thought about trying to get Kate to shift the hab out from the wall but he thought it might be hard to explain that, and in any case the settings for the hab’s attitude were more complicated to adjust than the vertical rate. “OK we try.” He thought.

Kate watched as Boris gave her the stop signal with a flat hand. She signed OK and went back to the panel and set zero ascent rate. The motors quieted down again and she went back to the portal. Boris was making more signals with his thumb but he had it pointed towards the hab. He signaled: thumb to hab, stop, thumb up.

“OK, right”.

Kate gave him an OK, then repeated the signals as best she could.

She saw Boris give her an OK back.

“OK then.” she said to herself. “How do we move out a bit?”

Kate scanned the menu items next to all the buttons on either side of the panel. She selected ‘Attitude’ and got a much bigger dialog with a lot of settings. After reading through everything twice, she found a lateral distance setting that looked about right for where they were from the wall. She entered a value two feet larger and closed the dialog, then pressed the ‘Execute’ button.

The hab lurched slightly and Kate smiled. “Alright.”

Boris felt the arm shift as the hab tried to move out from the wall. “Good, good,” he thought.

The arm pulled back about an inch and then stopped. A small rock was wedged between the harpoon assembly and a small ledge in the coral at the top of the hole.

He heard the motors stop. Kate had killed the lateral thrust. She would be programming the ascent rate again now. He had a few seconds to wiggle the rock while the arm was slack.

He pushed his hand into the hole and pulled on the small rock. It was loose but there was still not enough space to free it. He wished he had a pry bar. Anything to apply some force.

He shifted position slightly so he could get a better grip sideways on the rock and pulled. As he did so he heard the hab’s motors spin back up and felt the arm shift up as it tried to ascend.

The small piece of coral split in two and the arm moved up to fill the space crushing Boris’s hand in the hole. He screamed involuntarily at the pain and his regulator fell from his mouth.

Kate was back at the portal. She couldn’t see what was happening. Boris’ body was in the way but she saw a big group of bubbles rise above him and saw his regulator fall down at his side.

Boris had his right hand trapped in the rock and his regulator was down on his right side somewhere. The pain in his hand was incredible and it was very hard to focus. He reached around with his left hand for the regulator but couldn’t find it. He tried to shift his body position so the regulator would fall in front of him but another stab of pain rewarded his attempt. He had no breath in his lungs and his CO2 level was telling his brain to breathe in very strongly now. He inhaled instinctively against his closed mouth. His chest heaved and heaved again.

He forced himself to calm down and reached again for the regulator. He felt the hose with his fingers and grabbed at it. He had it now, but it was in the wrong position to get it into his mouth so he let go and quickly re-grabbed it with his hand from underneath the hose. The regulator went back into his mouth but he had no breath to clear it. He pushed the purge button briefly and inhaled at the same time, not waiting for the water to clear from the mouthpiece first.

The pulse of air pushed the water into his airway and he gagged.

He was close to blacking out now and was finding it very hard to control his actions. He desperately tried to cough to clear his throat. He sucked in again and got a small amount of air that made him cough again harder this time. He sucked in and got a lungful of air, rewarded again with more coughing. But he could breathe again now.

Kate had held her breath through the whole exercise without realizing it. She breathed in hard and banged on the portal giving Boris an OK. It was a question not a statement, but Boris couldn’t see her and she felt helpless again.

Boris needed to get Kate to stop the upward thrust but he couldn’t turn enough to give Kate a signal. How could he let her know what he needed? She was probably watching him but she could only see his back. He dropped down as far as he could. The pain in his hand was incredible every time he moved even slightly. He flattened himself against the wall and held up his other hand in a stop signal.

Kate saw the stop sign and rushed to the control panel and cancelled the upward thrust. The hab dropped slightly and stopped.

Boris felt the pressure of the arm on his hand disappear but the motion of the crushed bones in his hand caused another wave of intense pain. He tried to stay still and figure out what to do.

His hand had been forced up into a crack in the coral. The Pheia’s arm was now an inch or two below his hand and if he could force it down, it would be free. He was working up to doing this when the arm moved suddenly towards him. The hab was adjusting its attitude and had pulled out slightly from the wall. The end of the arm came free from the wall and drifted out slightly then stopped.

Kate felt the shift and saw that they were free. Excited, she banged on the portal but Boris was still flat against the wall and not moving. She knew something was wrong because his arm was still in the hole, but she couldn’t figure out what. Perhaps she should suit up and go out there? The hab was now floating free. What if it moved off without them? A rope? She could tie herself to the hab with some rope.

She didn’t think much more but she moved fast. Once down in the moon pool room she found a long length of the line they had intended to use to mark out a grid on the bottom. One end had a snap link and she wrapped a couple of turns of the line around a pipe and snapped the link over the line. She gave it several tugs to make sure it was firm. She snapped the other end to a ring on her harness and dropped through the exit.

When she was below the hab she moved out from under the weight stack and pulled herself up to where the arm that had held them to the wall was attached to the hab. She pulled along the arm, occasionally looking back to make sure the line wasn’t going to snag on anything. The line was almost neutrally buoyant in the water and hung there like a long thin, yellow snake.

The end of the arm was about two feet from the wall and just above Boris’ head. She tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.

Boris looked up at Kate. What was she doing out here?

Kate could see the pain in his eyes. She looked at where his hand was in the rock. She reached out to free it but his other hand grabbed her wrist.

She gave him an OK as a question.

Boris signed back with OK and then waved his hand. Kate smiled to herself, the crease in her face letting a small amount of water into her mask. He released his grip on her arm and she positioned herself so she could hold the hab’s arm with one hand and Boris’s wrist with the other.

She applied downward pressure slightly on his wrist again and he reacted by grabbing her arm and shaking his head.

Kate looked at the coral. It was cracked in many places. Perhaps she could split it. Her right hand patted her BC until she found the end of the small dive knife. This wasn’t the long, sturdy knife of the old underwater movies. This was the polite, short, almost useless modern tool now considered acceptable by the recreational dive community. It looked to her like it would be great for cutting cheese. She pushed the blunted tip into a crack in the coral about three inches above where Boris’s hand was trapped. The knife blade went in an inch or so and stopped. She moved it from side to side, trying to widen the crack. It moved just enough for the blade to slide in another inch. The short knife gave her very little leverage but it was better than trying to use her fingers. She pushed sideways on the blade as hard as she could hoping fervently that it wouldn’t break.

The knife gave way suddenly and a large chunk of coral broke off in a cloud of dust. A second later a much bigger section of the wall came away from above them. It dropped down in almost slow motion taking Boris with it. His hand was still stuck in the hole.

Kate grabbed for Boris with her free hand but she missed him by inches.

The chunk of coral pulled Boris rapidly down the wall. The sudden movement had sent an enormous wave of pain through his body and he blacked out. He continued breathing, unconscious as he fell, following the huge chunk of coral towards the bottom two hundred feet below.

Kate let go of the arm and tried to swim down. She dumped all the breath from her lungs to make herself negatively buoyant but without fins she only sank slowly down. By the time she passed the bottom of the hab, Boris was out of sight below her. She breathed in again and grabbed at the line tethering her to the hab. There was a lot of line and it took a while before she had any tension in it.

She held on to the line not moving, looking down into the dark, looking for a sign of Boris. Something in her head dug up a rule of diving: if you lose sight of your buddy, search for no more than a minute before surfacing. It was far easier to find each other on the surface than in the vastness of the ocean. “But I can’t surface,” she thought. She looked up at the hab. She knew she needed to get back inside. She really didn’t want to leave Boris. He might still be alive. The combination of the hydreliox mix and the meds they were on ensured he could handle the depth. After all what was 200 feet more when you were already 4,000 feet down? The tether wasn’t that long. Perhaps a 100 feet? There was no way she could get down there and back up again. The line was too short and she had no fins. A free ascent using the BC for buoyancy was very risky. Even if she could control the ascent, if she drifted away from the hab on the way back up she wouldn’t be able to get back to it. She couldn’t possibly hold Boris and swim with one arm.

All this went through her head as she hung on the line rotating slowly, looking into the dark with tears in her eyes. She was alone.

Alone

Kate sat on the floor of the ops room. Apart from the occasional whine from the drive motors it was quiet. She had dropped her dive gear where she now sat and pulled down the top of her dive suit. She was emotionally drained and very alone. Above her were four and a half thousand feet of seawater and somewhere 200 feet below her were the bodies of her friends. And there was nothing to see. No way to see up. No way to see her friends below. The only view was the small patch of wall outside the portal and a clean area of rock marking the spot where Boris had been taken to join the rest of the crew. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. They were all gone and she was here. Why was she still here?

The overwhelming sense of being alone took a grip on Kate. She sat on the floor of the ops room for a long time not really thinking of anything much at first. She felt totally drained. She had no emotional energy left even to feel sad. She was also starting to feel very tired — a combination of lack of sleep and the wild emotional ride of the last few days.

The ops room had dried out almost completely now. There were a few puddles on the floor where she had dumped her gear but otherwise the floor was dry. And it was noticeably warmer now. The electrical heating was working and so was the gas system — obviously.

She looked up at the consoles. They were all lit up and showing various bits of information about the hab. It seemed like alien technology. Kate noticed that her hands were shaking slightly. She brought them up in front of her face and tried to hold them still. Her fingertips shook as she watched them. It seemed odd. She wasn’t cold anymore. “Oh, crap, where are the meds?”

It had been a while since they had all taken a dose of Dr. Ford’s HPNS meds. The realization that she might be suffering from HPNS brought her awake. She needed to find the meds now or she was soon going to be very dysfunctional.

The food and gear they had dragged into the ops room was all piled in one corner. Kate tried to think where the meds might be. Had they even brought them over? She started to get worried as she dug into the piles of tinned food and bottles of water. She didn’t see any of the plastic cases that Dr. Ford kept the syringes in. The pile of stuff seemed massive now that she was alone. Food was not going to be an issue for sure. But where are the meds?

Kate had made a mess of the pile to no effect. She decided a more orderly search was needed, and in any case she should organize the food and water so that at least she had some idea of where everything was.

Five minutes later she had several organized piles but no box of syringes.

She looked at her hands again, holding them straight out in front of her. They were still shaking. She put her hands down and looked at the ladder to the moon pool below. The water was about a foot down from the deck and looked very uninviting. She had to have the meds. Without them she was likely to start having difficulty making decisions, and that wasn’t going to lead anywhere good.

Reluctantly she pulled the upper half of the dive suit back up, pushed her arms into the sleeves and pulled the zipper closed. She looked again at the water. It felt cold just to look at it.

“OK, we need to get motivated here girl.”

Kate picked up the scuba gear and made sure the gas was on. She took a breath from the regulator and then hauled the rig up off the floor and onto her shoulder.

Once in the gear, she felt better. She had something to do, and that felt OK.

She put on the mask, checked the gear one more time and started down the ladder.

She felt the water push the suit against her legs and felt the cold of the water. It wasn’t really cold but her mind was telling her it was cold and it wasn’t somewhere she needed to be.

She went down a few more steps and put the regulator in. She took a breath and stepped down further until her head was under the water. The cold hurt her head. “Damn. Why didn’t I put on a hood?” The shock of the cold, made her think more clearly. She dropped down to the floor of the moon pool room and moved into the tunnel to the storage room.

Inside the storage room she started scanning the shelves. She remembered seeing medical supplies in one place, but wherever that was, it wasn’t obvious now.

Many of the boxes had been displaced when they had ransacked the place earlier collecting food. Quite a few of them were scattered around on the floor now.

All the plastic tubs looked the same from above. Pale blue lids hiding whatever they contained.

Kate dropped down onto her knees and started pulling the boxes aside. “Ah, Ha.” She had found the box with the packs of pre-loaded syringes. She pulled off the lid and grabbed two packs. Way more than she should need for the trip back to the top. Wait. How long was that? At least 15 days. She grabbed one more pack and started back to the connecting tunnel.

The syringe packs kept slipping out from under her arm as she used the other one to pull herself along. In the end, she loosened the harness of her BC and crammed two of the packs inside, keeping the third in her hand.

The trip back up the ladder took some effort as she had one hand and one elbow to climb with but she was almost neutrally buoyant so it was mostly keeping pointing the right way rather than climbing.

Back in the ops room Kate took off the gear again and stacked the packs of meds on the small counter below the system monitors. She pulled the dive suit off completely and threw it in the corner on top of the scuba gear. She hoped she wasn’t going to need it again.

It took a while to work up to giving herself an injection in her buttock. She held the needle of the syringe just in contact with her skin for several seconds willing herself to push it in. She didn’t like needles very much and in addition she was worried about doing it wrong.

When Dr. Ford had administered the injections it had taken only seconds and Kate had simply looked away. “OK, then. Let’s play doctor.”

She pulled back the syringe a few inches and plunged it into herself, then pushed down on the plunger. When it was empty she paused a second before realizing it had to come out again. Yanking it out she dropped it on the counter, then put her hand over the entry point and applied some pressure. She looked around the room and saw the small first aid box on the wall. Keeping her hand on her butt she walked over and opened it, looking for bandaids.

Kate pulled her hand away and tried to look at where she had injected herself but couldn’t see. She wiped her hand over the area and looked at it. No blood. She shut the first aid box door and latched it closed.

For the next hour, Kate tried to make a plan to get back to the surface. The essence of the plan was simple: program the hab at a fixed rate of ascent and wait. Easy. She already knew how to set up the ascent rate. But what rate to set. The hab was currently in about 4,500 feet of water and Kate knew she needed to ascend slowly enough to allow her body to outgas the hydrogen and helium that had been forced into her tissues by the huge pressure she was under.

Failure to go up slowly enough could cause bubbles to form and cause the bends. She knew too that hydrogen and helium were absorbed way less than nitrogen and this is why they were breathing the hydreliox mix. What she had no idea about was exactly how much she might have absorbed or at what rate it was safe to get rid of it by going up.

The original mission plan called for three weeks to get back to the surface, but that was after being on the bottom for several days and Kate thought it likely included a big safety margin.

There was no way she could deal with being in here by herself for three weeks. Half of that, maybe. But half the time seemed like it might be pushing things too hard. She settled on 15 days. From where she was now that meant an ascent rate of 300 feet per day. That sounded like a nice round number.

At the control console, Kate entered the ascent rate and her finger hovered over the Execute button. “What am I not thinking of?”

Kate scanned the displays again. Most of it seemed reasonable. She laughed. “Oh, right, like you know.”

She tapped the Execute button and heard the drive motors spin up. The hab shifted slightly and the image of the wall outside the portal started to move. She was going up.

Ascent

Kate stood at the portal in the ops room looking out at the wall. The control systems on the hab were keeping it about 30 feet from the wall. Easily close enough to see details on the wall when the flood lights were on. The hab was rising at 300 feet per day which sounded like a lot but that was only twelve and a half feet every hour and Kate could see 30 or 40 feet of wall from the portal. It was agonizing to watch the incredibly slow movement of the wall, but it was somehow compelling. It was the only indication that the hab was rising at all.

Inside the ops room, the only evidence that the hab was in motion was the sound of the drive motors which mostly emitted a constant faint whine but which occasionally changed speed briefly to adjust the attitude or lateral position of the hab. It was boring.

But what bothered Kate more than having nothing to do was being alone. She didn’t generally mind being alone. She had regularly been backpacking on her own in the wilderness. She found it very peaceful and used it as a stress reduction exercise. When she hiked alone, there was no need to be responsible for anyone else. No need to keep up with a group or slow down so the group could keep up with her. Being alone just cut all that out. If she wanted to go faster, she went faster. If she had had enough, she could turn around and come back with no need to discuss it with everyone else. And if she wanted to sit down in the grass and count the flowers, she could do that too.

But sitting on the floor of the ops room wasn’t quite the same. Apart from very small changes on the control display panels, everything looked exactly the same, all the time. She had even tuned out the occasional beeps from the control system as it made a change to the attitude of the hab.

Kate was lonely. She could almost feel the pressure of the enormous column of water above her holding her down. Keeping her away from the people on the surface.

To keep herself busy she had rearranged all the food and other items they had brought in to the ops room once more. She had laid out a few towels on the floor as a mat and tried sleeping on it. It might work if she was really tired but it was impossible to sleep. Her head had too many things swimming around in it. She had spent over an hour just looking through all the menu options on all the control panel displays. This had turned out to be a lot less helpful than she had first thought it might. There were a lot of systems that kept the hab operating but the designers of the Pheia had sensibly automated almost everything, and there was very little Kate felt the need to look at in detail. As long as it kept running and the hab kept ascending, at some point she would reach the surface, and the people on the surface barge could pick her up. Then it would be over.

At the present rate of ascent that was 14 or 15 days away. She just had to keep it together for that long. There were a few practical issues she had to resolve. Food wasn’t a problem. She had a good collection of freeze-dried foods and a kettle to heat water with. It was really just like backpacking, and she had decided early on to avoid the teriyaki chicken. The last time she had eaten that on a trip had not been fun. And that reminded her of the big issue, where to poop?

The one head in the facility was in the crew quarters at the top of the other cylinder. If she wanted to use the bathroom, it involved a dive to the other side and back again. It hadn’t become a problem yet. She was eating so little, there hadn’t been any need but she knew that at some point it would be, and knowing her luck it would be one of those emergency events where you get the feeling that you need to go about fifteen seconds before you really, really need to go.

Kate had wondered about using the opening by the ladder that led down to the moon pool. She felt OK using it to pee into and had tried it once to be sure keeping her feet on the deck and one hand on the side of the ladder. Not too elegant but she’d hit the water and not the deck. Score one to her.

But she thought about floaters and sinkers a lot when she thought about pooping in the same hole. If they sank, that would be OK. And most poop sank didn’t it? She tried to remember a time when she might have had floating poop, but really, who looked? There was some medical fact about floating poop that she thought she remembered, but whatever it was it didn’t matter much right now. All she cared about was that poop might float and the thought of being stuck in the ops room beside a couple of floaters wasn’t appealing. And what if she had to do a dive to the other side for some reason? She was getting into the water with her own poo. No way.

“OK, enough about the poos,” she thought. “This is borderline obsessive.”

And so Kate settled into an uneasy routine of eating dried food once or twice a day supplemented with a can of peaches or some other thing she found in the food pile. Not all that exotic perhaps but manageable. She looked at all the monitor screens every hour or two and spent a lot of time watching the wall crawl by outside the portal as the hab slowly ascended.

At least she didn’t need to scratch the days on the wall. The computer systems had plenty of date and time indications as well as the more depressing information about depth and distance from the wall.

The hours dragged by very slowly and she found herself in tears more than once and couldn’t even explain why.

The Pheia had a ship’s log as part of the computer system and Kate had made a few entries just to pass the time. Initially these were very brief: “Had Spaghetti again”; but later she tried to write down what had happened to the crew and some thoughts about each person. She had found it very hard to visualize all the faces. It wasn’t that she couldn’t remember what they looked like, rather that it was very painful to bring their faces back into her present thoughts.

In some cases she realized that she didn’t really know much about the person. She knew what their function aboard the Pheia was but not anything about who they really were. This bothered her a lot. At times she felt very distressed that she would have nothing to say to their family when she got to the surface. She had to keep reminding herself that it wasn’t her fault they were dead, but she had a good dose of survivor’s guilt that she just couldn’t shake.

The hours dragged on and Kate tried to keep her monitoring schedule on the top of every hour as something to look forward to doing. She also added notes in the ship’s log about the items of trash that she saw on the wall. There wasn’t much to see but spotting anything felt like an event that she needed to record.

On the surface, David Williams had become frantic about the total lack of communication from the Pheia. In the communications shack, he kept asking the same question: “Why haven’t they replied to any of our messages?”

The technician running the comms system had given up providing the “I don’t know sir” answer and just left Williams’ question hanging.

The last message Williams had seen was that the Pheia was anchoring itself to the wall. This was an automated ELF transmission consisting of just three letters: ANC.

The team had spent a lot of time working out a set of three-letter codes for every possible situation they could think of. Some had obvious meaning like SOS, but after thinking up the first few themselves, they had just let the computer pick them. After all, the computers in the ELF radios could do all the translation to or from English. The operator just picked the message to send and the computer keyed the ELF sequence into the transmitter. When the ELF receiver picked up a message sequence it translated it and put it on the screen. Messages were sent three times a few seconds apart to ensure they were received correctly.

Williams knew something was wrong about an hour after the anchoring message had been received because they should have also received another status report to say that the anchoring had been completed OK and the Pheia was stable.

At first, the consensus amongst the support crew had been that the main ELF transmitter had failed. The unit was an experimental portable design and had not had a lot of field testing. It was also possible that the antenna wire that the Pheia trailed above it had become disconnected from the hab. He thought there might be spare antenna wire sets on the Pheia, so the crew should have figured out the problem and deployed a new one by now. Williams thought that any simple problem like this should already have been fixed.

At a review meeting held six hours after last contact, it was revealed that the backup ELF radio had not arrived in Cayman until after the Pheia had descended. This added to the theory that the ELF receiver or transmitter was broken.

The support crew had lowered a passive sonar listening device to 200 feet below the surface in an attempt to pick up sounds from the hab. They had hoped to hear the sounds of the Pheia’s drive motors if it was still in free flight or perhaps the sounds of the crew. Nothing had been heard from below. The waters around Cayman are full of dive boats and fishing boats so there had been a lot of other clutter which may have masked any sounds from the trench. It was also likely that any sounds from the Pheia were simply bouncing of the thermocline and never reaching the surface.

It had been suggested that they try to get a Navy vessel with a powerful active sonar to ping the Pheia but Williams had discounted that idea when he spoke to the crew.

“Even if we could direct the energy straight down the wall, there are lots of factors that might preclude a good echo. For one, the Pheia is very close to the wall and there are numerous protrusions all over the wall, likely including above the Pheia. Another factor of course is the thermocline. I don’t know a lot about the Navy sonar systems but a little reading has led me to believe that it would be difficult to get the signal down through the layer in the first place and most of the return signal would also be scattered by it. But the biggest issue in my mind is that even if we got a good response from the Pheia, all that would tell us is the depth she is at. It tells us nothing about her condition or the condition of the crew. Neither does it afford us a mechanism with which to communicate with the crew. Our esteemed comms technician suggested we might modulate it into Morse code and send messages that way but we have no idea if anyone aboard knows Morse code. I looked through the personnel records to see if anyone had listed ham radio as a hobby and also inquired if it was common practice for Navy divers to learn Morse. I shall not repeat the response I got to that last question, but it was essentially negative. So in the short term I do not think we have any way to contact the Pheia and we must instead maintain our listening station in case they manage to repair the ELF system. The crew of the Pheia has a good combination of ex-military personnel and academics so between them they should be able to find a solution to the communications problem. I might add that I have sent out a short press release stating that we have a communications problem that we hope will be resolved shortly. Thus far it has had no response. I have also had a short statement about the communications problem posted to our Facebook page. In contrast to the press release, there was a huge response, some of it quite helpful and along the lines we have considered ourselves. There was also the usual collection of alien theories.”

Williams had not intended to make a speech but as he began talking it seemed important to lay out the facts as known. People loved to speculate, and he needed their attention on monitoring the systems in case the Pheia sent a message. He had also had to fend off the assorted rescue ideas. The Pheia was far too deep for any kind of manned rescue mission that they could organize. The U.S. Navy was capable of reaching that depth but it might take weeks to organize that help if it was possible at all. Not to mention that the Cayman government would have to authorize the operation and while they were capable of being reasonable they also had a very obstinate streak when it came to dealing with other governments. The best idea they had come up with was to fit out an autonomous ROV with the spare ELF radio and send it down there. The idea had a good deal of merit. The ROVs they had available had plenty of battery life if they kept the big lights off, and in any case this need only be a one way mission so all the ROV needed was to be set up with a slight negative buoyancy and then use its drive motors to maintain position from the wall. The potential power drain was well inside the battery capacity.

The problem with the ROV idea was that they were not rated for the depth the Pheia was at. The compartment that held the control electronics and kept it dry would probably collapse way before it reached the hab’s location. The Pheia's own ROV had gone down in the hab's gas atmosphere and would only have been sealed for a dive when it was needed.

Williams had been in discussion with the institute about modifying an ROV to use the same gel fill as used in the Pheia’s electronics and they were already working on a way to inject the gel and run some pool trials. If that was successful, they might have the ROV on site in a week.

In the mean time they needed to listen. Williams wished there were a way to get any kind of message to the Pheia to let them know they were trying to get in contact. At one point he had been standing on deck looking over the railings into the dark water below the barge and wondered about dropping a few rocks. It had actually made him laugh.

Antenna

After two days of watching the wall creep past, Kate was again tapping menu buttons on the control systems looking for some way to communicate with the surface. She had found the ELF radio a day ago and tried sending an SOS message, but there had been no indication that it had been sent, and nothing in the received messages list from the surface. She had also found the control page for the backup ELF radio, but all that page displayed was a “Not installed” message.

“So much for the backup then.”

Kate lay down on her towel mat, put her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling with its collection of pipes. She imagined gas and water flowing through the pipes.

“How do you know it’s flowing? How do you know there is anything in there at all?”

She looked at the pipes more closely but there was nothing to see. Most of them turned up into the gas and generator space above the ops room.

Kate got up and stood in front of the control console again and found the ELF radio control page.

“How do I know if you are working? Surely there is some way to know?”

She had been through all the menu items one at a time and read the short (and useless) help text for each one but nothing looked like diagnostics or testing. She had also found a log viewer and read through the log records. Each record had a timestamp and the most recent one was at the bottom of the list. She saw where she had tried to send the SOS message. The log entry showed the letter ‘I’, followed by the date, time, the SOS letters, and then: “Message sent”. This was repeated three times a few seconds apart.

“I know that.”

The log was pitifully short. She started at the top where there was a message that the system was powered up. The timestamp showed yesterday, and Kate realized that in her attempts to wander through all the menus she had at one point selected the system reboot option.

“Hmmm.”

She looked at the next entry which was marked about 30 seconds later. It began with the letter ‘E’ and the message: “POST failed. Review diagnostics.”

“Ahhh. Helpful. Houston, we have a problem. And where are the diagnostics? And what the hell is a POST? People Overhead Signal Transmitter? Purple Object Sock Test?”

“Test. Some test failed. OK, so it’s broken. We, the crew of me, had guessed that. Why do you nerdy types have to be so damn cryptic with your messages? Is it some sort of cult thing or are we just trying to keep the riff-raff from understanding what’s going on? And where are these so called diagnostics?”

Kate stood back from the panel. At least she knew the ELF transmitter had a problem. If she could fix it, she could talk to the surface. She knew they couldn’t really help her. She needed to trudge her way back up, outgassing as she went and nothing could make that go any faster. But having them know she was on the way seemed like a good thing.

She went back to the top-level page for the ELF radio and looked again at the menu options. There, right in front of her face was POST. “How’d I miss that before?”

She tapped the screen and immediately a dialog appeared asking her to confirm: “Run POST?”

“Run to post. Run around post. Run with post. What is POST?”

She tapped the Yes button and the confirmation dialog was replaced with a popup showing a progress bar at the top and a list of line items that looked like tests.

Kate scanned the list as each test was run. The initial set of tests that seemed to be concerned with power systems all passed. Then there was an encoder loopback test that passed and a few more cryptic test names that she had no idea what they were but they passed anyway. And then transmitter loopback test, with FAILED next to it. The word FAILED was underlined and she tapped it. Another page popped up with a much more detailed set of test steps. There, right near the bottom was: “Antenna impedance test: FAILED. Possible cause: antenna missing or too short.”

“All right!”

And then she realized that she had no idea what the antenna looked like, where it was connected to the Pheia, or if they might have a spare one.

She glanced at the piles of food across the room. There was absolutely nothing in the piles of tins and packages that could even remotely be pressed into service as an antenna, and that meant doing another dive into the storage room. Best case, she would find a box marked ‘ELF antenna — instructions for idiots inside’. Or perhaps some wire. Why would there be wire? What possible reason would there have been to store wire? They were on a biology mission, not setting out to wire up the ocean bed. But antennas looked like poles right? Perhaps some metal poles she could join together? They certainly had those for marking out the grid on the bottom. Somewhere there was a big stack of metal poles and miles of nylon cord to string between them.

“How am I going to join them together? How do I connect them to the hab?”

“Oh crap. It needs to float up too. I need a float.”

This was starting to look a lot more difficult and Kate was having serious doubts about her ability to build a new antenna. She had no idea how long it needed to be but she’d already decided just to make it as long as she had materials for. If the POST thingy said it was too long, she could shorten it.

The problem of how to connect the antenna to the hab bothered her the most. She had no idea where it was supposed to be connected other than it was likely to be on top of the ops cylinder somewhere. And what if it needs a special plug?

Kate looked at the scuba gear and her dry suit. With a sigh she picked up the suit. “Time to get wet.”

The Pheia was moving up the wall very slowly. Kate didn’t have any worries about it getting away from her from a speed point of view, but she’d heard enough stories about single handed yachtsmen going for a swim on a calm day and not being able to get back to the boat because a gust of wind took the boat.

She decided to use some rope to make a safety line and to search the moon pool room for some fins. At least then she’d be more mobile outside.

Down in the moon pool room again, Kate paused and looked around. She wanted to make sure there were no bodies. She knew they were a long way below her on the ocean floor but she still needed to look. The room was empty and well lit by the overhead lights that were now about a foot above the water surface.

Fins turned out to be easy to find in one of the storage bins, and she wondered why she hadn’t looked for them before. The rope she had tied herself to the hab with when she went out to help Boris was still attached to the ladder. The rest of it had been pulled down the moon pool exit by the weight of the snap-link on its end. She pulled it back up and left it floating in the moon pool room.

With the fins on it was an easy swim back through the tunnel into the storage room and five minutes later she had found the stakes and rope supplies intended to make the grid on the bottom. She pulled out an extra coil of rope and swam back into the moon pool.

Once the rope from the storage room was uncoiled and attached to the piece she’d used before, it all hung like a limpid snake in the water. Kate checked the end that was attached around a rung in the ladder. She gave it a tug and it felt solid. She looked at the loose end and decided to add a few more hitches with that to prevent the main knot from coming undone. A lot of time spent rock climbing had taught her how to be safe with ropes and anchors. It was a skill that showed its usefulness more often than she had imagined it would when she first learned some knots.

Satisfied the anchor end would hold, she found the other end of the rope and secured it to a ring on her BC the same way. She gave it a good tug and tugged again at the anchor end. Then she coiled up the rope the best she could so she could hold it all in one hand.

As she floated down through the exit she let the rope pay out from the coil in her hand. It was an easy swim out to the edge of the weight stack and from there up the side of the hab to the top. She stopped and looked around. On one side was the wall illuminated by the hab’s floodlights. It went up forever and down forever into the black. The direction away from the wall was just black. It was creepy. It was totally clear water and totally black. Not a hint of anything that might be out there. The rational part of her brain kept telling her that at this depth there wasn’t a whole lot of life out there anyway and she’d be lucky to see anything. “I don’t need to be that lucky.”

Kate turned on the dive light clipped to her BC. The top of the hab cylinder had two large lifting eyes welded to it and not much else other than a few pipes. Right near the center was a short metal tube about a foot high with an insulator on top and a wire trailing from it over the side of the hab. Kate swam over the wire and saw where it dropped down the far side of the cylinder. She followed it down and found that it trailed between the two cylinders and ended a few feet below the hab. If she’d have turned around when she had swum out of the moon pool she’d have seen it right there. It had a metal connector at the end and Kate thought there must have been some kind of float that had become detached.

She left the wire where it was and swam the few feet back into the moon pool entrance. She needed a float.

At the surface of the water there were several BCs which had floated up off their pegs on the wall. “Excellent”.

Kate grabbed one and pulled it down. It had enough air in it to make it awkward to swim with so she dumped out the rest and clipped it to her own BC.

The safety line she had attached to the ladder was still there and she realized she had forgotten about it and let it trail behind her. She checked the ring on her BC and it was still attached. “Stupid. It could be all tangled out there now”

She followed the line back out the way she had come in, gathering it up as she swam. On top of the ops cylinder she let the line float and pulled up the antenna wire. She tied a figure-eight loop in the end of the wire and clipped the BC to it. Then she took a breath and let her regulator drop from her mouth. She put the inflator from the line’s BC in her mouth and blew a lung full of gas into it. The BC inflated slightly and became positively buoyant but not enough to pull up all the wire. Kate got her regulator back and took another breath which she then used to fill the line’s BC. She had one foot hooked under one of the pipes on top of the cylinder to stop the BC from pulling her up. After a couple more cycles it was getting hard to keep hold of the BC and she released it.

The BC floated up easily pulling the antenna wire with it. As the wire came taut, Kate looked up. The BC was clearly visible when she pointed her dive light at it. “Good,” she thought.

She collected the mass of safety line floating in the water into a loose coil and followed it back into the moon pool. A few minutes later she was back in the ops room. She shrugged the scuba gear off but kept the dive suit on.

At the control panel she wiped her damp hands on her legs then tapped the POST menu item again. After a few seconds the result came back: FAILED. The ELF was still not working.

Kate’s shoulders dropped. She was sure that was it. She read the log and found that the ELF was still reporting that the antenna was too short. The piece she had tied the BC to must have been just part of it. How long did it need to be? ELF stood for Extra Low Frequency and she knew that lower frequencies needed larger antennas, and with antennas in general it seemed to her that bigger might be better. Or did it have to be an exact length? “How the hell should I know? I do biology not physics.”

Her mind went back to what she’d seen in the storage room. There were a lot of ground stakes made of some kind of metal but she had not seen any wire. If she used the stakes, she’d need some way to connect them together in a long string. She decided to go back and look some more. The diving was getting easier. She was adjusting to the fact that she was alone and needed to look out for herself.

The scuba tank was getting low on gas mix. She’d need to pick up another one from the moon pool room on the way back. One more thing to remember.

In the storage room, Kate floated along the shelves. Some of the plastic containers were full of dense stuff and sat on their shelves, others had enough buoyancy to float up either to the bottom of the shelf above or out of the shelf and up to the ceiling of the compartment. In a way this helped the search. Any container with a lot of wire in it wasn’t likely to be floating.

Kate found the ground stakes where she’d seen them before. “Did you think someone would have moved them?”

She picked up a bundle and was surprised at how easily it came up. “Must be aluminum,” she thought.

She put a little more air in her BC to compensate for the weight of the stakes and with a couple of kicks, swam back into the tunnel where she put the stakes down. As she was turning back to get another bundle she noticed that the ends of the stakes had holes in them. That made sense. There had to be some way to attach the ropes that were going to be used to mark the grid out on the bottom. It seemed unlikely that the rope had to be threaded through the holes. The lengths of rope were too long for that and it would be a bitch to do that underwater without the line getting horribly tangled. Cable ties? Maybe. “You could put a loop of line through the hole, pass it over the top of the stake and pull it tight. That would hold. It doesn’t help me much though.”

Kate hated speculation. It wasted so much time and energy. If there was a way to find the actual answer, either by just waiting or by doing work, that was always preferable to just guessing.

She decided that she had enough gas to do a thorough search of the storage room and she set about working her way from one corner around all the shelves. At first she read the labels, then she opened the lids to be sure the boxes contained what they said they did. After a while she quit reading the labels. “If I’m going to open every box, there isn’t much point in reading the labels.”

But then she found a box that contained some tools she didn’t recognize. The label on the box said: “Hose Crimp Tools.”

“Someone expected to be doing repair work on the gas systems?” She thought that seemed unlikely. It wasn’t that they expected to be down here long enough for equipment to fail. “Just being cautious, I suppose.”

She moved on through the boxes until she found a box full of carabiners used for rock climbing. “What the hell do we need these for?” And then she realized they were for attaching the ropes to the ground stakes. She took one from the box and swam back to the stakes. Each stake had a hole in one end and the biner fit through the hole easily. But the other end of the stake had a pointed end. It looked like a different material and was quite solid. There was a rivet holding the pointed tip into the aluminum tube that made up the bulk of the stake. There was no obvious way to attach a biner to this end, which was a shame because that would make it easy to create a long chain of the stakes and that might make a decent antenna.

A short series of beeps made her stop looking at the stake in her hand. “What was that?”

She looked around but there was nothing in the tunnel at all other than her and the pile of stakes. “Oh crap.” She looked at the gas gauge for the scuba gear. It was in the red.

Kate dropped the stake on top of the rest of the pile and swam into the moon pool. Time to find a new tank.

In the moon pool room, Kate found a tank with a small amount of gas still in it. It didn’t have a regulator attached so she grabbed one from the wall rack and ascended the ladder into the ops room. Once above the water, she attached the regulator to the tank and holding it in her arm, dropped back down to the moon pool room. She knew she would need to fill a tank, and she might as well fill several while she was at it in case she had more diving to do.

The moon pool room had a rack for two tanks above which was a set of gauges and valves. Trailing from the valves were two fill whips. She found a couple of empty tanks and set them in the rack. The steel structure of the high pressure tanks kept them negatively buoyant even when empty.

Kate hesitated before attaching the fill whips. There would be some sea water trapped between the fitting on the end of the fill whip and the tank valve. Did that matter?

She decided to try one tank first. Kate dropped the fitting over the tank valve and tightened it in place. The tanks were rated to 5,000 PSI. A necessity for very deep diving since the water pressure was huge down here and a tank filled at the bottom would have to contain the full pressure during ascent without exploding. A safety valve ensured that the tank couldn’t be filled past its safe operating pressure. Kate knew all this from sport diving combined with the briefings they had had before she boarded the Pheia. Still, she was nervous about putting high pressure gas into the tank.

The sea water in the fitting still worried her. “How can I get that out?”

Kate thought about how she cleared her regulator when she put it in her mouth underwater. She undid the fill whip from the tank so it was just sitting loosely on the tank valve and then she cracked the fill valve open on the panel above the tanks and saw the stream of gas coming out of the gap at the tank valve. She pushed the fill fitting into place and tightened it as best she could with the gas still escaping. The pressure built up quickly and made it hard to get it to seal.

Using two hands she slowly reduced the flow by closing the valve on the fill panel as she tightened the fitting on the tank. The bubbles stopped. “Good enough.” She thought, and opened the tank’s valve and then the fill valve on the panel. The gauge showing the tank pressure starting to rise.

The tank that she was breathing from was almost empty and she didn’t want to have to change tanks again so she hooked up the second tank and started filling that one too using the same procedure

Five minutes later she was almost out of gas in the tank she was holding but both tanks in the rack were full. She unhooked the fill hoses and pulled one tank from the rack leaving the other one in place so she knew where to find it.

Not having enough hands to hold everything, she took a breath from the regulator then spit it out and dropped the tank she was breathing from on the deck. She grabbed the full tank by the valve and breathing out a small stream of bubbles from the corner of her mouth she ascended the ladder to the ops room.

The full tank was heavy as she hauled it out of the water and laid it on the floor. She scanned the room half expecting to see other people. It was so weird to be alone in this place that had been so crowded a day ago. “Two days?” It was getting hard to keep track of time and she had no interest in trying to remember the events that had started her on her lone trip to the surface.

Kate swapped tanks in her scuba gear. The full tanks would be good for over an hour as long as she wasn’t doing anything strenuous.

It took ten minutes to get the collection of stakes and the box of carabiners into the ops room. By the time she had it all on the floor and had dropped her scuba gear on the floor beside it, she was tired and hungry. It was the stress. Even if she didn’t want to admit it, on a scale of one to ten she was about at thirteen now.

“Food,” she thought.

Kate boiled water and added it to one of the dried meals. She sat cross-legged on the floor thinking back to trips in the wilderness with her father. Happier times. Sitting in the sunshine — or the rain — eating these exact same meals, biting the heads off gummy bears and watching her dad cut up the last apple of the trip. After eight minutes were up, she opened the food pack to stir it. The smell of the food reinforced the memories of the camping trips and she burst into tears.

Kate ate the food slowly and tried to stop crying. It was just so hard to be here. “So let’s think about the antenna.”

“We need to be able to join the stakes together with the biners so we need a way to make a hole in the pointy end. How do we do that? Do we need to get the point out of the stake tube first? Maybe. Then make a hole in the tube big enough for a biner to go through. Aluminum is soft so perhaps I can punch a hole with something?”

She took one stake and placed the point on the side of the tubular part of another one. “Hammer?”

She saw a dive weight on the floor and put down the stakes to get it.

A test hit showed that the point on the end of one stake was hard enough to penetrate the thin aluminum tube. She beat the stake several times until the point was all the way through one side of the tube. She wiggled it out and looked at the hole. “Not big enough.”

She rolled the tube over on the floor and used the point on the second stake to beat a hole in the opposite side. Now she had two small holes. “Just need to make it bigger.”

Kate found some more dive weights and made two short stacks so that she could rest the tube on top of them and have room for the spike to pass through the tube without hitting the floor.

It was easy to enlarge the hole working a little from each side, but it took a while before the hole was big enough to pass the carabiner through.

She tried attaching the blunt end of one stake to the pointy end of the one she had beaten the hole through. They attached with a short overlap. The biner wasn’t long enough the clear the ends of both tubes. “That’ll work. Just 900 more to do.”

The thought of having to repeat the job on all the remaining tubes had two sides to it. On one side she was now sure she could join all the tubes together and end up with a fairly long antenna. On the other, it was going to take ages. But then again, she had nothing much better to do.

Two hours later, Kate had made holes in the pointed end of all the stakes and had put biners through all the blunt end holes. Each stake was about four feet long and she had around fifty of them. “Should be long enough,” but she wasn’t really sure. She had no idea what antenna length was needed. But this was what she had, and it was enough to try with.

The next problem was how to get them assembled in line and outside the hab without losing any of them or dropping the whole thing down the side of the wall.

Kate took one of the long lengths of line and attached it to the ladder in the ops room. Then she clipped every stake to the line by its biner. At the far end of the line she made a loop and tied a figure eight knot that she pulled as tight as she could. She clipped a biner into the loop.

She put her dive suit back on and then the scuba gear. After one last check to make sure everything was lined up right on the floor, she dropped down the ladder holding the end of the line.

In the moon pool room, Kate pulled another of the floating BCs down from the ceiling and dumped almost all of the air out of it. She clipped the line to the BC. She didn’t need it to float yet, just to prevent the biners from sliding off the line. Now she felt like she wasn’t going to lose anything. It was a lot like rock climbing. When you were setting up or breaking down an anchor it was really important not to lose any gear or inadvertently untie yourself. “Be slow, be careful, check it twice.”

She let the BC go and it floated slowly up to the ceiling of the moon pool room again. Kate climbed up the ladder and grabbed a few of the stakes and pulled them over the edge and let them go. They drifted down the line onto the floor below her. It didn’t take long before all the stakes were out of the ops room. Kate went back down the ladder. “Oh shit.”

The stakes were in a tangled pile with the rope. But at least they were all sat in one place.

Kate pulled down the BC on the end of the line. She attached a dive weight to it so it was slightly negatively buoyant and carefully let it go down through the moon pool exit. The rope slid through her hands from under the pile of stakes. She had to stop occasionally to fix a tangle. There was very little weight on the rope and she could hold it easily just by winding it around her leg. The fin made it a bit difficult but one loop was enough to stop it from sliding away on its own. Once all the rope had been let out, she took a look over the edge of the pool exit. The yellow rope disappeared into the darkness. The darkness was always there. There was no light down here and nothing much to light up anyway. If it weren’t for the lighting in the moon pool room, none of the rope would have been visible at all.

One by one Kate found the stake clipped closest to the end of the rope and attached the next one to it. As the increasing collection of joined stakes dropped down the line, Kate wondered if it was going to get too heavy to control, but the aluminum poles weighed almost nothing in the salt water. When she got to the last pole she still had a lot of line left over. She made a loop in the line and then formed a clove hitch into which she clipped the final biner on the chain of poles. Then she lowered the remaining line down the hole until it was taut. Kate grabbed another of the BCs from the ceiling, deflated it and with a final thought that there was just one knot up above in the ops room holding the entire thing up, she dropped down through the exit and slowly followed the line down until she found the start of the line of poles. Looking up, she could see she was about fifty feet below the hab. “That should be enough.”

She clipped the BC to the top of the first pole, finned slightly to be out from under the hab and then used the mouth inflator on the BC to blow it up. As gas entered the BC it started to counteract the weight of the stack of poles. Kate hoped that one BC would be enough to float all of them up. After several breaths, the BC was full and she was starting to rise slowly with the poles. “All right.”

As she came level with the top of the hab she stopped and let the poles slide up through her open hand. As the last few came into view she grabbed hold of the poles and swam over to one of the lifting eyes and grabbed hold of it with her other hand. She made a loop in the line after the last pole and tied it to the eye. She looked up to see a nice line of poles disappearing into the darkness above her. Checking the knot to make sure it was holding she moved over slightly and grabbed the end of the ELF antenna wire that also disappeared into the black above.

It took a minute to haul it down and clip it to the last biner on the line of poles. Checking the antenna was secured to the poles, she released the line from the lifting eye and watched the whole assembly float back up. The poles disappeared into the darkness and were followed by the antenna wire. She could just see the glint from the metal reflected in her dive light. The wire pulled taut and Kate gave it a tug to make sure it wasn’t being pulled up too hard. The tug pulled down the wire easily and when she let go it floated lazily back up. With a last glance in the direction of the wire she swam back down the side of the hab and up into the ops room.

The whole exercise had taken her about an hour. She felt pleased with the effort and excited to see if the ELF transmitter was going to work now.

At the console, Kate tapped the POST button again and waited a few seconds. The result lit up with a green “OK.”

She was still in her dive suit but far too excited to think about taking it off. She wanted to send at least one message to the surface. It was an easy choice. She scrolled down the list of pre-made messages and tapped on “SOS”.

“That should wake them up,” she thought.

Comms

In the comms room on the surface barge, Williams was asleep in a plastic chair with his feet up on the desk. Next to him, the comms tech was reading a book when the ELF receiver let out a loud series of beeps. The technician nearly dropped the book in his surprise. With his free hand he hit Williams on the legs. “Wake up sir. We have a message from the Pheia.”

Williams hadn’t been asleep long and it took him a moment to differentiate between a possible dream story and reality. “What?”

“We have a message from Pheia. It’s an SOS”

Williams looked at the console. There were three lines in red; each with the SOS message on them.

“OK, someone is alive down there and they need help. I guess that goes without saying. I don’t suppose the ELF unit could send this by itself could it?”

“No way. This is a bona fide, real, dyed in the wool E.L.F. message. How do you want to respond sir?”

“Let me think a second. We need to acknowledge we have received the message then send something short to say we are going to help. Can we also send a longer text message?”

“Sure. The three letter codes are fastest of course and we repeat those three times so there is no ambiguity at the Pheia. Then we can send your text message.”

“What can we send that makes sense? We have no idea who is down there watching the receiver so it needs to be obvious.”

“Why don’t we just send “OK” and then whatever else you want to say?”

“OK is only two letters.”

“Yes it is sir, but we’ll go crazy and pad it out with a space if that’s alright?”

Williams looked at the technician. Humor? Insolence? Did it matter?

“OK. Send the OK, then I’ll type something longer in if I may.”

The technician entered the OK response and committed it to be sent three times. Then he showed Williams where to type his message.

Williams wasn’t sure what to say. He had lots of questions but he needed to say something reassuring. “Oh to hell with it. They are all scientists and professional divers. They know that whatever I say is pretty meaningless until they get up to diver work depths.”

He swapped chairs with the technician and typed in his message: “Good to hear from you. State nature of problem in detail. Will assess once received. Williams”

“What do I do now?”

“Just push the “Commit” button.”

Williams pushed the button and saw a status indicator change to “Sending.”

“That’s it”

“Yes, sir. It’ll take a second or two to send that.”

Williams wasn’t really listening. He was fixated on the receiver screen. As it turned out, he had a long wait.

On the Pheia, Kate had decided she needed a real rest. The pad of towels was incredibly uncomfortable and she had decided either to sleep in the crew quarters or at least bring back a mattress pad from there. It would get soaked of course so she’d need a sheet of plastic or something to put on top. But if she wasn’t going to go crazy, she needed real sleep.

The problem was that she had no idea how well the two cylinders of the hab were attached to each other. She hadn’t heard any noises through the hull to indicate they were moving relative to each other but if whatever piece of material that was holding them together snapped, it would be all over very quickly.

“Well, if I have to dive, I might as well make it useful.”

Getting into her dive suit and scuba gear was becoming automatic now and she was conscious that with that familiarity and the lack of sleep that she might be getting sloppy, so she had found a marker pen and written a check list on the wall by the ladder. She looked at it. “What crappy writing.” A sure sign she had been tired when she wrote it. Kate read through the list twice. It seemed to be complete, and she had done everything on it. A second glance at her gas gauges showed she was OK for the dive. Grabbing the ladder with her left hand she pulled on a fin, then changed hands and pulled on the other. The fins made the ladder useless but the swimming was much easier. She dropped into the water and descended into the moon pool room. From there it was just a few good kicks to float over into the storage room.

Kate grabbed two coils of the yellow line and made a figure eight loop in the end of each one and clipped the loops to her BC. Then she picked up some more biners and made them into a chain which she clipped to the other side of the BC. Having done that she swam back through the tunnel to the moon pool and down through the exit.

Outside the Pheia she scanned the lower part of the ops cylinder with her flashlight for a place to tie off the line. Most of the cylinder was covered in gas bottles. The only clear areas were near the portal and where the tunnels attached the ops cylinder to the crew cylinder.

She got closer to the gas bottles and saw how they were mounted to the cylinder with short brackets. There was room to pass the rope through the bracket. She unclipped one of the coils of line and undid the clove hitch that held the coil together. Then she passed one end through the gas bottle bracket and tied a bowline. She put two half hitches in the free end. “Paranoid are we?” she thought.

A tug on the line confirmed it was solid. Kate pushed back from the hab and paid out line as she swam around it to the far side of the crew cylinder. She took a biner from the collection on her BC and tried to clip it to the gas bottle mounting bracket but the biner was too small to go around the wide metal. She clipped it back on the chain. “This really is just like climbing.”

Finding the end of the coil of line, she felt for her dive knife, intending to cut of a length of the line but was surprised to find it not there. A sudden flashback of the image of Boris disappearing below the hab reminded her where she had lost it.

She made the line into a coil again so it wouldn’t get tangled and tied the end to the bottle bracket. It took her only a few minutes to return to the moon pool room and find another knife. “Put the goddamn knife on the checklist.”

Back at the far side of the hab, Kate cut off a length of line and tied it into a loop with a figure eight knot then passed the loop of line through the bracket and back through itself. She clipped a biner in the end. “Nice anchor.” Happy that the line would not drop down below the bottles, she clipped the line through the biner and continued to pay it out as she swam the rest of the way around the hab to where she had started. She made another loop of line and clipped in another biner and the line through that, then went back in the opposite direction to the far side.

She placed her feet against the gas bottle and pulled on the line until it was taut, then pulled a bit harder. Nothing happened. The hab didn’t move. She had somehow expected to be able to pull the two cylinders of the hab together, but if she couldn’t move them, perhaps they were still joined solidly. No, that was crap. She saw the gaps every time she went though the tunnel. There was just too much mass perhaps and she hadn’t tried for long enough.

She took a loop of line around her wrist and pushed back hard with her legs. The line moved an inch. “OK, so the rope stretches.”

Resigned that she could not move the hab, she decided to just secure it as best she could and spent the next fifteen minutes going back and forth with the line. Each time she reached one of her anchor biners, she clipped in the line, pulled it as tight as possible and went back in the opposite direction. When the first line was used up, she did the same thing with the other one but on the other side so as to balance out the first line.

When she was finished there were quite a few lengths of line on each side and she felt happy that the two hab cylinders were not going to separate. Her gas gauges showed she was getting low and she returned to the moon pool room intending to swap the tank for the full one she had left there. When she got to the tank rack it occurred to her that there wasn’t an easy way to swap the tanks underwater so she pulled the full tank from the rack and swam it up the ladder ahead of her and pushed it up onto the floor of the ops room. Satisfied with that, she dropped back down and found another empty tank to fill. She checked her gas to make sure she had time and waited until the tank was full, then shut of the valves and swam back through the tunnel to the storage room.

One thing Kate liked about being at this depth was that swimming up and down even a hundred feet made so little difference in pressure that her ears didn’t even register it. It was so much nicer than shallow dives near the surface when only a foot of depth change registered on her eardrums. Her ears had never cleared easily and would not clear at all if she was tense. She had learned to take her time on the first part of the descent of a dive to let her ears adjust. If she spent just a little extra time doing this, then the rest of the dive was a charm. Down here there was no need for any of that, and she found that she was enjoying the dives despite the circumstances.

In the storage room, Kate looked around to see if there were any sheets of plastic, or tarps or anything that could be used to cover a soggy mattress. “It’s a deep dive expedition. Why would we have tarps?” There weren’t any, and she gave up looking quickly. She had most of the store room inventory in her head now and nowhere in the list were tarps. Trash can liners maybe? Join them with duct tape? But she couldn’t find any of those either.

She swam up the few feet to the galley. As she surfaced she pulled her mask off and put it on the deck. She paused, floating with her eyes just above floor level. It was very weird to see the room again. It looked just like it did when she had last been there with Chas and Boris.

She pulled off her fins and threw them on the galley floor. Then she climbed the few last steps of the ladder and pulled off the scuba gear, which she laid down on the deck. Having done that, she climbed the ladder to the crew room.

Kate scanned the bunks half hoping to see someone asleep but it was empty — just as she had left it. It was warm in the crew room and it felt comfortable. “Almost like home.”

She pulled off the dive suit and let it fall in a pile by the ladder.

Since she was here she thought that she might as well search the place for anything useful. It felt wrong to plan to go through the other crew’s possessions. Kate had always respected their spaces and never had any interest in what was stored there. But now, what? What might be there that could possibly help? Probably nothing. And even if she did find something useful like an iPod how would she get it back to the ops room without it getting wet? “Oh, whatever. Just have a quick look.”

Kate rifled through the crew storage lockers very superficially. She almost didn’t want to find anything because then she’d have to decide if she was going to take it. In the end she decided that whatever might be in there could stay there. She collapsed back on to her bunk and stared at the bottom of the bunk above. She was asleep before she could have another thought.

On the surface barge, David Williams was getting very frustrated. “Why haven’t they responded?”

“No idea. Perhaps their receiver is broken? Perhaps they are still writing a response? Perhaps the transmitter gave out after that last transmission?” The technician had answered this question at least four times now.

“It’s been over two hours since we sent the reply. Surely they could have sent some information back by now.”

“Perhaps your request for details has slowed them down?”

“Yes, you’re probably right. Dr. Martin is probably writing a dissertation on the whole episode along with a long series of recommendations for fixing the Pheia’s design and punishing all the engineers that built her. Not to mention a letter to his lawyer recommending a class action suit on behalf of the entire crew.”

He looked at the ELF receiver again. The last entry was his transmission requesting information.

“Can we send that again?” he asked.

“Sure. If you want.”

“Yes, please do. It’s better than just sitting here doing nothing.”

The technician tapped the screen and Williams’ message was transmitted once more.

Kate woke up six hours later. She needed to pee. When her eyes opened she saw the bunk overhead and momentarily thought she had been dreaming. She glanced over at the other bunks and saw them empty. She got off the bunk, saw her dive suit and looked down to the galley floor below. She saw her dive gear lying in a pile by the ladder. Reality set in. She felt damp from the high humidity and stiff from sleeping in one position.

Stripping off her clothes she stepped into the shower. “Not much competition today.”

She turned on the water and pulled her hand back quickly expecting it to be cold. To her surprise it was warm. She let it warm up a bit more and stepped under the stream. It felt wonderful.

After the shower, Kate found some clean clothes and got dressed. Something about being in fresh clothes really improved her attitude. And she was hungry too. She picked up the dive suit. It was damp inside. Everything was always damp but the suit was worse. She wished she’d pulled it inside out and hung it up. “Oh well.” Grabbing it with one hand she went down the ladder to the galley.

The galley was exactly the same as it had been for the whole dive except that there was nobody else here. The counter looked just like someone had made coffee recently. Coffee. Coffee sounded really good.

Kate set about making breakfast. “What time is it?” She had no idea and looked at the wall clock. The time seemed irrelevant. Too many hours under constant lighting in stressful circumstances had her completely lost as to what day it was and if it were day or night on the surface. It didn’t matter. She felt the need for breakfast.

There was an unopened container of milk in the fridge and Kate used it to make a large bowl of cereal which she ate at the table. It felt almost normal to be eating cereal. So much more civilized than a diet of dehydrated meals. “Pancakes.” She thought about pancakes. Pancakes were what she had when she came back from a backpacking trip. “Or a burger. OK — enough about food.”

She finished the cereal, then went to the sink and rinsed out the bowl and spoon. Satisfied that she was leaving the place tidy; “for who?”, she thought; she climbed back into the damp dive suit. She needed to get back into the ops room and check on progress to the surface. She suddenly felt worried. Was she still ascending? Were all the systems still working? “One thing at a time girl.”

Back in the ops room, Kate took off the scuba gear and got out of the dive suit which she pulled inside out and hung over a pipe in the ceiling. It was doubtful it would dry much in the high humidity but at least it would get aired out a bit. She kept hoping that she wasn’t going to need to dive again but it seemed sensible to be prepared. And in any case now that she had the hab tied together again, perhaps she would spend more time in the other cylinder. It was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the floor of the ops room and she still had thirteen or fourteen days left before she would be at the surface. Two weeks. Two weeks of being alone, eating dehydrated dinners. “But there is coffee in the galley and a LOT of cereal.” She smiled. “Just like backpacking when you find a chocolate bar in the bottom of the pack after five days and you thought they were all gone.”

Having arranged the dive suit on the pipe, she wandered over to the control console and checked the depth. 3,600 feet. A quick calculation in her head made that 12 days to the surface. Way better than two weeks. “Right. A whole two days better.”

Kate looked out the portal. The wall was right where it always was creeping slowly past as the Pheia ascended. Back at the console, she checked the displays for any yellow or red indicators. Everything was green except for the indicators for the moon pool room and storage area which both showed all sorts of problems as a result of being flooded.

She suddenly realized she hadn’t checked the ELF radio and tapped the button on the screen.

The ELF showed several transmissions from the surface, which Kate read quickly. “They heard me.” She read William’s note. “Problem in detail?” That was going to take some effort. What was she going to say?

She decided not to over think it. Williams might want details but right now she needed to give them the overall picture.

It took a minute to find out how to send a more detailed message. Kate thought for a second about what to say. How do you tell someone that everyone is dead? “They’ll panic,” she thought.

After considering a couple of ideas she settled on something simple and direct.

“This is Kate Moss. I am OK. All other crew dead. Hab is damaged but OK. Ascending.”

She tried to think of something more to say but just acknowledging the death of the crew made her very emotional. She tapped the Commit button and watched as the transmission was sent. She sent it again for good measure.

Now she could talk to the surface, at least she wasn’t going to be alone for the rest of the trip. But it felt odd. She was the sole survivor. And why was that? Luck? Fate? When she thought about meeting parents, loved ones, relatives of the crew she felt guilty. No, not so much guilty as frightened. What was she going to say to them? They fought bravely? Hardly. They died in an accident? It sounded so lame. She certainly had no intention of telling anyone that their loved one drowned to death in a sardine can at the bottom of the ocean. And she just knew they’d be angry and they’d ask her: “How did you survive?” And what about Chas? He died a hero, trying to save her and Boris. And Boris? Boris died because Kate made a giant chunk of coral break off and take him to the ocean floor. And then they’d ask where the body of their loved one was. How the hell was she going to explain that she had cable-tied a dive weight to them and dumped them over the side?

In the comms shack on the Pheia, Williams had stepped out to get coffee; more for something to do than the need to drink. The technician had gone back to his book. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the Pheia or it’s crew. He’d just spent too much time on dive missions where there were hours between communications and had learned not to expect crews to respond. They were generally busy, and as far as he could tell held a universal distain for the people who manned the surface support vessels. Sure, they’d all tell you how important you were to the mission when anyone outside was listening, but in reality they saw the surface crew as non-divers and that made them lesser entities. He flipped the page over. Just as he started reading the page, the ELF signaled the arrival of a message. He scanned it quickly. “Oh shit.” then shouted: “Dr. Williams!”

Williams was on his way back to the comms shack enjoying a few seconds in the bright Caribbean sun when he heard the shout. He threw the Styrofoam cup of coffee over the side into the calm, blue water, then felt a pang of guilt about the non-decomposable plastic going in the ocean. He reached the door of the comms shack just as the tech was coming out. The two collided. “Dr. Williams. Come and read this sir.”

Williams read the message twice. “Oh no. This can’t be. Only Dr. Moss? How can they all be dead?” He was panicking. He could feel his heart beating hard in his chest.

“Do you want to respond sir?”

“What? Oh, yes. Tell Dr Moss that we have received her message. I need to call a meeting. I’ll be in the galley. Find me if you get anything else from her.”

Williams left the comms shack in search of the barge captain.

Organizing

Kate saw the response on the ELF screen. She could imagine what was going on now. Williams would call the institute and have a meeting. That was how he worked. He almost never acted alone. He was Mr. Consensus. That would take a while. She knew that whatever the outcome of Williams’ meeting, there was nothing they could do until she got to a depth at which they could send divers down and capture the hab. Even then, she’d still need to complete the ascent before she could get out. It was going to be a while. “Time for a nap perhaps? Oh crap, I forgot to get a mattress.”

Kate was torn between crashing out on the pile of towels and getting back into her dive suit. It seemed like she was living in the damn thing. But she needed something else to do. A distraction of some kind. There had been enough tasks recently to keep her busy but now that most of them were taken care of she had endless days of boredom to look forward to.

She decided to go back to the crew quarters and get a mattress. That should be challenging for a start. And while she was there she’d look around for books, a Kindle or perhaps an iPod to bring back. “In what? The galley must have zip-lock bags. The world revolves around zip-locks. Or a plastic box?”

Kate looked at the dive checklist on the wall and remembered she had meant to add ‘knife’ to it. She checked that she had a knife and then added it to the list with the sharpie that now lived on the floor by the ladder.

On the surface barge, Williams sat in the galley with a satellite phone in one hand and an ancient fountain pen in the other. In front of him on the badly discolored and scarred table was a legal pad with several pages of notes. He was checking some of them off as he spoke into his phone and adding more to the end of the list. “We will need Dr. Morris, or if you can’t get hold of him, someone else from the psychology department…… What? Oh no, not him. I find him hard to understand…… Well, alright, I suppose he’ll have to do. How soon can he be here?…… And the others? When can they be here?…… OK, yes, that will have to do…… Yes, of course. Thank you…… Call me if anything changes.”

Williams turned off the sat phone and placed it next to the legal pad. He checked off two more items from his list, crossed out Dr. Morris and added Dr. Subramanian.

Williams really wanted Dr. Morris. He and Morris had worked on a number of projects and he trusted Morris. Morris was calm and sensitive and always enjoyed a good relationship with the subjects who volunteered for his tests. They didn’t always talk to him again after some of the tests but that was the nature of the work. He put people in stressful situations and evaluated their performance. He then tried to correlate the results with his assessment of the person before the tests. The general idea being to develop better selection methods for personnel who would be subjected to high stress situations. This kind of work had been going on for many years and Morris had reproduced many of the more bizarre tests conducted in the past including a fake airline disaster incident. Not only were some of the participants in that test not talking to him, but they were still engaged in legal action against him and the institute — despite Morris’ collection of iron-clad experiment release forms. The institute had a great legal team.

Dr. Subramanian on the other hand was a very different kind of person from Morris. Williams had initially been happy to have him on loan from the Indian Navy. Dr. Subramanian was attached to MARCOS, the Indian Navy’s Marine Commando Force where he conducted similar work to Dr. Morris, but with less regard for his test subjects. The Indian Navy had decided that its special operations forces should be selected to be on a par with the British SAS or American Delta teams. Dr. Subramanian had been recruited from academia to help devise tests that would quickly weed out candidates who were unlikely to complete the selection course. The theory being that it was cheaper to reject them earlier than later. Dr. Subramanian’s methods had proven to be effective in reducing otherwise competent, courageous, fit men, to rabid anger and in some cases, tears. When a commodore in the Indian Navy had read of Morris’ work at the institute, he had devised a plan to send Subramanian to the US and get him out of the way. They needed to develop a better commando force but Subramanian was causing them to reject almost every applicant, and in the commodore’s view that included all the men best suited to the needs of the department.

Williams had read the letter from the Indian Navy with interest. It seemed that Dr. Subramanian was doing similar work to Dr. Morris, and Williams thought Morris might benefit from an exchange of ideas and methods. In addition, the Indian government was offering to pay for Subramanian’s travel, board and including a donation to the institute.

The first meeting had not gone well. The two men disliked each other immediately. Morris thought Subramanian was a lunatic and Subramanian thought Morris’ methods were far too weak to achieve real results. Williams was stuck with Dr. Subramanian for two years — the agreed loan period (with an option to extend indefinitely). So Williams had made up a new program to keep Dr. Subramanian out of Morris’ hair. He had put him to work with Dr. Ford evaluating the correlation between psychological profiles and susceptibility to HPNS. Dr. Ford had found Subramanian to be a very diligent worker and had left him largely alone to conduct his evaluations of past data collected from years of deep dive research.

Williams underlined Subramanian’s name twice. He really needed someone to help keep Kate Moss calm over the next few days until they could get to the Pheia, but Subramanian? Williams had done a little research into Subramanian’s work in India through a friend at a university there. He had been quite horrified at some of the experiments Dr. Subramanian had conducted, and was wondering what this man would bring to the situation. He was quite certain that Kate was currently under a lot of stress and that would interest Subramanian, but would the man be able to help her or would he treat this as another of his experiments and make things worse? He was due to arrive in Georgetown in six hours with the rest of the institute staff who were coming to help with the rescue. “If you can call it a rescue,” he said to himself. He knew full well that until the Pheia reached a depth where divers could connect a winch line, Kate was on her own.

Kate was back in the crew compartment rifling through the belongings of the crew. She felt very uncomfortable doing this and more than once she stopped and looked behind her. It felt just like being a burglar. She tried not to disturb things too much. She didn’t want it to look like she’d been rummaging through everything. “Not that they will care,” she thought.

She found that Dr. Ford had an iPod and ear buds. Kate turned it on and found a great collection of classic rock. “Oh yes. That’s what I need.” Kate’s parents had been rock fans and she had picked up on the music when she was young. She fitted the ear buds, put the playlist on shuffle and set the volume to near the max. Five minutes later she was singing along to Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”

Having found the iPod , she was less inclined to dig around much more and gave up searching.

She wrestled the mattress from her own bed down into the galley. Once down there, she rummaged around and found a box of one gallon zip-lock bags. She put the iPod and headphones into one, partially zipped it, then sucked out the rest of the air and closed it fully.

That bag went into another and she repeated the air extraction process. She looked at the bag. It was a nice iPod. She used a third bag to be sure, and then looked at the mattress. There was no way to protect it from the water so she didn’t even try. She put the iPod in a pocket in her BC and then pushed the mattress down through the opening in the floor into the water below. It went down easily until she let go, when it floated back up again. She pushed it down trying to gauge the amount of weight it would take to keep it down. It felt like five or six pounds. Certainly not much more than that. She had no idea how to attach weights to it so she decided to just wrestle it.

Kate suited back up and put on the scuba gear. She ran through a buddy check playing both parts. “This is like playing chess with yourself and trying not to cheat,” she said out load.

She stepped down the ladder a few rungs until she was almost wedged by the mattress. Then she pushed down on it and pushed it sideways under the ceiling below. It stayed there, so she dropped down into the water and descended to the deck of the storage room.

The mattress was almost flat on the ceiling of the room and took some effort to pull down and get started in the tunnel. This was a lot more work than Kate had expected and she found herself breathing quite hard by the time she had pushed it into the moon pool room. The stupid thing caught on every pipe, overhead light and gas valve it could find.

Once on the other side of the tunnel hatch in the moon pool room the mattress floated up under the ceiling and Kate had to reach up, pull it down and wrestle it some more to orient it and get it to go up into the ops room. She climbed up the ladder behind it, pushing it ahead of her. It got a lot harder as it started to emerge from the water. It was well waterlogged by now and the water weight made it fold over as it was about half way through which jammed it in the opening. Kate put her head against the mattress, went up one more step and pushed hard. The mattress popped free and flopped onto the ops room floor leaking water. Kate climbed out behind it and pulled off her mask. A pool of water surrounded the mattress and she thought it looked very unappealing as a place to sleep. And then she realized she had forgotten to look for garbage bags while she was in the galley.

Sighing, she put the mask back on and climbed back down the ladder.

Vijay Subramanian sat in a window seat at the back of the A320. Beside him was a small child with an iPad apparently intent of smearing the screen with grease from a block of cheese she was eating while playing Minecraft. Subramanian watched in wonder. The child was about 7 or 8 years old and was busy building a fascinating castle. How could such a young child master a thing like this? The blocks seemed to appear under the child’s fingers as if by magic. The motions were swift and sure. It was like watching a master painter at work. The painting was already there, it just had to be revealed by the paint. He thought this child would be an interesting subject. She was obviously very confident and he wondered what it would take to shake that. The death of a pet? A parent? It was very interesting. He wanted to pull out a pad and make some notes but that was impossible. He was in the back row and the seats did not recline. The passenger in front of him had pushed the seat all the way back so that Subramanian’s knees were well trapped under his little plastic table on which stood the plastic cup containing the remains of two small bottles of scotch.

He starred out of the window. It was a clear, sunny day. The sea below was calm. A small boat was out fishing. He thought about sharks. His years of work concocting stressful situations often made him see the opportunity to introduce danger or some other stressor into almost any situation.

The plane banked to the left and he had a spectacular view of the West end of Grand Cayman as the plane lined up for the short runway that pointed into the shallow bay to the North of Georgetown. He knew from the irritating inflight advertising on the television screens that the bay held a large population of supposedly friendly stingrays. He didn’t much care for the sea, or the creatures that lived in it, unless he was eating them. The thought of being subjected to an environment where these large poisonous creatures surrounded him made him feel quite uneasy. He really needed his writing pad. This was good stuff. He would try to remember the feeling and the imagery in his head.

The Airbus touched down very gently and almost immediately applied full reverse thrust. The rather rustic looking airport buildings went by and the plane pulled up just short of the end of the runway. He wondered how many had ended up in the sea. Was it deep? How quickly would the plane fill with water? How would the passengers react? Badly, he suspected. Most people behaved terribly when they perceived danger to themselves or their obnoxious children.

The Minecraft child had not even noticed the landing. She had also ignored all announcements to shut off electronic devices, simply turning it over on her lap when the flight attendant had walked by. The kid was good. With some training she could become a great manipulator.

As the plane pulled into its parking position, Subramanian was surprised to see two sets of boarding stairs pushed up to the plane, one at the front and one at the rear. Perhaps he would not be last off the plane?

As soon as the door opened, the usual mad rush to stand up crammed a third of the passengers into the aisle. Little miss Minecraft added more blocks. Her parent reached down and took the iPad, shut it off and slid it into a shoulder bag. “Mom! I’m not done yet.”

As Subramanian exited the plane on to the top of the stairway he was hit with the Caribbean air. It was warm and moist and smelled of the sea. Not quite like India but much better than Massachusetts. He might like it here.

It took 20 minutes to get through customs and immigration. The Caymanians were polite but a little difficult to understand and wanted to know why he was on the island. “Business or pleasure?”

Subramanian was surprised by the question because he had clearly written it on the immigration form. He was wondering if this man required a bribe. “Business. I am here to help with the submarine rescue.”

The immigration official looked up at him. “Ah, yes, the American submarine. But you are Indian no?”

“I work in the United States at the institute the submarine belongs to. I am a psychologist.”

“And where will you be staying while you are on the island Mr. Sub… ram… anian?”

“Actually, I am not sure. I was expecting to be taken out to the surface support vessel and I expect to be staying on it until the incident is resolved.”

His passport was stamped and handed back to him.

“Good luck sir, and enjoy your stay.”

Subramanian took the passport and customs form. “Thank you. I hope to have some time to explore your country.”

But secretly he doubted that would happen. He imagined a week or more on the ship followed by a ride back to the airport and a flight home. That was just the nature of these kinds of trips. Fly into some interesting place and totally miss seeing any of it.

On the other side of immigration, he found his one bag by the side of the conveyor and walked through customs without being stopped any longer than it took to take his form from him.

He followed a family outside and looked for anyone he might recognize. The plan was for him and the rest of the staff to be met here. He had been fortunate to get a slightly earlier flight and had travelled ahead of the rest of the team, and he wondered now if that meant nobody would be here to collect him. He reached into his pocket for his cell phone when he heard a voice calling to him.

Across the narrow road was a parking lot and in it he saw a man waving at him. “Dr. Subramanian?”

He nodded and crossed the road.

“I’m here to take you to the quay sir. Is that your only bag?”

“Oh yes.” Subramanian shook his head side to side in the Indian motion for ‘yes’. The driver was confused by the response but saw no other bags and the man didn’t seem to be anxious that he was missing anything so he opened the passenger door and the trunk.

Subramanian put his bag in the trunk and closed it, then climbed into the car. He noted that the car was American with the steering wheel on the left. He thought they drove on the left here and was horrified to find that they did as they pulled away with him on what he though should have been the driver’s side.

There was a lot of traffic, especially in Georgetown as they made their way though thousands of tourists intent on buying t-shirts and other valueless junk. He could have walked faster than they were driving, but he had no idea where they were going and the A/C in the car was very pleasant.

They pulled into the Burger King parking lot and Subramanian asked: “What are we doing here?”

“This is where we get the boat out to the surface vessel.”

It seemed very unlikely, and he wondered for a moment if he was about to be mugged. When he got out of the car he saw over the railings at the end of the parking lot, the top of a small boat with one woman at the helm on an upper bridge.

She waved at them. “All set?” she shouted. “Or do you want to grab some food to take?”

Subramanian still had not taken to American food, and in any case found it odd to find the same awful stuff here in what he thought had been a British colony. Somehow he expected that would mean Indian food. India had also been such a colony. He decided to simply say “No.” and shake his head up and down in the usual way.

“You do?” came the shouted response.

“No. I do not need food thank you.”

They had to climb over the railings and step onto the upper bridge of the boat, then climb down a ladder to the main deck at the rear. It looked like a small dive boat. There were racks of tanks around the outside. He guessed that the institute must have chartered it to use as a ferry.

He felt increasingly uncomfortable in his suit and dress shoes. He should have thought about his wardrobe more carefully. He was used to dressing like all the other academic staff. Well, at least all the staff with some kind of sense of dress. There seemed to be quite a few who dressed like tramps. It was a very odd culture.

The ride out to the support vessel took only 10 minutes. The edge of the Cayman wall is very close to shore. The sea was fairly calm but the boat occasionally hit a larger wave and caused a big spray to fly past the end of the cabin area where he was standing. He had started off inside the cabin area but the motion of the boat had made him feel sick. It was better where he was in the fresh air and could see outside.

By the time they reached the support barge, part of his jacket and pants were damp with sea water. He felt very uncomfortable and mentally filed the details away. It was otherwise a nice sunny day with little wind. The scenery was pleasant and he had not expected to feel this way. This kind of data was what he lived for.

Kate was back in the galley looking for garbage bags. She hadn’t bothered to take off the dive gear. There were two boxes under the sink but both were for small bins and not a lot of use for covering the waterlogged mattress. “Well, what did you expect?” We have small garbage cans. So we have small bags.” She was about to give up on the idea of using the mattress at all when she found a bag of plastic table covers. “Those might work.”

She stuffed the bag into the front of her BC and made her way back to the ops room. She arrived just in time to hear a beep from the ELF radio announcing a new message had been received.

She shrugged of the scuba gear and walked over, leaving a trail of puddles on the deck.

The message read: “How do you feel?”

She typed: “Damp,” and sent it back.

“Idiots.”

Kate got out of her dive suit and hung it up on the overhead pipes to dry. She stepped on the mattress with her foot and more water seeped out on the floor. There was no way the mattress would dry out in the humidity. Everything was always slightly damp in the hab. She wondered about sleeping in her dive suit. After all, she was wearing it almost all the time anyway. “OK, so not such a good idea with the mattress.” she thought. Not willing to give up yet, she rolled the mattress up as tight as she could then stood on it and walked her feet about while holding onto the pipes in the ceiling. When no more water came out she let it unroll and pulled out one of the plastic table cloths. It covered the mattress completely so she thought she’d try to lie down on it and see what it felt like. “Got my own water bed right here.”

The sweat pants and t-shirt she was wearing were already damp. Everything was damp. The biologist in her imagined what a wonderful breeding ground it was for bacteria. Nothing better than warm and damp.

She sat down carefully on the mattress and more water ran out onto the deck. The white plastic table cloth crinkled up under her but stayed put. Carefully, she lay down to the sounds of more water trickling out. “Not too terrible. Better than the towels.”

She put her hands behind her head and starred at the pipes on the ceiling. “Why does Williams care how I feel?”

No sooner had she thought that, than she heard another beep from the ELF radio. She got up carefully and inspected the table cloth. It was still covering the mattress so it might work out as a bed after all. “It was certainly a lot of effort to get the stupid thing up here.”

The ELF radio showed a new message: “How are you feeling Kate? Are you wet?”

“What kind of a stupid question is that?” she said aloud. “OK. I’ll play along.”

She typed a response: “Yes, I’m wet. Everything is wet. This is a sub. Things get wet in a sub that has holes in it. Who is this?”

A few seconds later she got a reply.

“This is Dr Subramanian. Please call me Vijay. I am here to help you.”

Kate had no idea who Subramanian was and had no intention of getting friendly.

She typed back: “Great. Please send down a latte and a some coffee cake.”

Nothing came back for a while. She thought that perhaps they were either figuring out a way to get her snack down to her or looking for the right drugs to send. “Whatever. Either will work.” She giggled.

Williams had watched the exchange of messages. He knew Kate quite well and understood her manners of speech and general attitude towards people she thought were idiots. He smiled to himself. Kate was probably doing just fine. So long as Subramanian didn’t upset her too much he thought she’d be OK. In fact, some interaction with the psychologist might be good for her.

Subramanian turned to Williams. “What is coffee cake?”

“Well, it’s cake you eat with coffee. Nothing very special in my opinion.”

“And does Kate like this cake?”

“I have no idea, but I think…” He paused. Should he tell Subramanian that Kate was messing with him? He continued: “Well, I think Kate just misses normal food.”

Subramanian could not decide how to begin Kate’s evaluation. He normally interviewed subjects face to face. That allowed him to judge mood, level of agitation and general disposition. Facial expressions often indicated a response before the subject verbalized them, if they verbalized them at all. He knew nothing about Kate other than she had a PhD in biology, was single, and was apparently in good health and enjoyed athletic sports. He’d gotten all of this from Williams, but it didn’t help much. In his normal line of work he tried to find out what induced stress in the subject. Knowing potential stressors helped him evaluate their potential to cope with other stressful situations. It wasn’t that complicated.

This was all very different. He knew very little about the subject and less about the environment she was in. He knew that Kate was the sole survivor of some kind of accident and that she was stuck in her present environment for at least another week. Did she have issues with being alone? Was she claustrophobic? Even if he could get her to answer these questions, what was he going to do? He normally put people into stressful situations and watched them. Now he was being asked to remove the stress from an environment he had no control over.

Based on what little he knew about her, Kate was probably self motivated and resourceful. Williams indicated she was a mild type-A personality. He would have to try to get some kind of basic evaluation using just the radio. Even if he could do that, it was far from clear how to proceed. He couldn’t prescribe medication. But maybe he could get her engaged in conversation and guide her along the self-help path.

Subramanian had the radio tech explain how to enter his messages and then asked to be left alone. The tech was happy to go back to reading his book and left the shrink to the machine.

Kate was heating water to rehydrate one of the freeze-dried dinners when the next message arrived. She walked over to the control console glancing out the portal to make sure the wall was still moving in the right direction. The message on the ELF radio was simple: “I have sent out for coffee cake. In the mean time, I’d like to get to know you. Could you tell me a little about yourself: what you like, what you don’t like. Where you grew up. What your family life was like. That sort of thing. Please take as much time as you like. You can send me short messages. I don’t want you to write your life story. And please send things in the order you think of them. This is not a test. I just want to know you better. I will also try to answer any questions you want to ask. Vijay.”

Kate read it through twice. “Looks like a psychological interview in sheep’s clothing.” She was going to blow it off with a short reply but decided that doing something was better than doing nothing. It would help to pass the time.

Kate’s initial thought was to just send a few notes and forget about it. But as she was wondering what to say she started to think about what she enjoyed doing. If it hadn’t been for the accident, she’d be enjoying herself right now down on the bottom with the tube worms. She decided to write a list of things she enjoyed doing and an example of each one.

When she looked at the time, she was surprised to see that she had been writing for an hour. She decided not to re-read what she had written and tapped the screen to send the message.

Dr. Subramanian read Kate’s message through slowly. The literal words told a story, but the choice of words, the ordering, the nuance of the phrases told a different one. Kate might be avoiding actually saying it, but it was clear she was very stressed.

He left the comms shack to find Williams who was lying on his bunk reading a journal. When Subramanian appeared in the doorway he sat up and put the journal on the bed beside him.

“Any news Dr. Subramanian?”

“Yes, indeed. And please call me Vijay. My initial evaluation is that Kate is experiencing a very high level of stress. I must say that she is dealing with it very well and in other circumstances I’d be very interested in seeing what it took to make her admit it.”

Williams raised an eyebrow but said nothing. This man was incredible.

“However, since our goal is to get miss Moss to the surface alive, we must find a way to reduce her stress level significantly.”

“And what to you suggest?” Williams asked.

“Since it is not possible to interact face to face and since the writings of the ELF radio may be misinterpreted by Kate, I believe we have only two real courses of action. The first is simply to keep talking to her, which keeps her busy and possibly distracted from the situation. However, miss Moss is a very realistic and pragmatic person. She is fully aware of her situation and I suspect that she rather resents my questions and further communications from me might make her more hostile, which is not constructive.”

Williams thought the word hostile fit rather well with Subramanian. He could well imagine how Subramanian’s subjects could develop hostile feelings towards the man.

Subramanian continued. “And the second choice is to get her to sleep. This, however, is a much more difficult task. Simply telling her she needs sleep is not likely to work. In her current state of awareness of her predicament, and given her evident level of intelligence, her mind will be full of potential problems that may be waiting to emerge before she gets to the surface. What we need is to get her medicated for a while. A period of good sleep should allow her to see things in a fresh light, and if we can communicate with her when she awakes, I think we can have a more productive conversation.”

Williams looked at him. “And how exactly do you think you can get medications down to Kate?”

“That is not necessary. I checked the Pheia’s medical supply list and there is enough zolpidem on board to put a horse to sleep.”

“I see two issues with that.” Williams replied. “First, Kate is in the ops room and the medications are in the storage area which may not be accessible. The second issue is exactly how you are going to get her to take them.”

“I will work on those problems.”

Subramanian, left Williams to his journal and walked back to the comms shack. When he arrived, the technician was writing on a sticky note.

“We have another message. I was just writing you a note.”

Subramanian looked at the radio’s screen. Kate had sent another message and he read through it slowly.

“The Pheia was damaged when we were trying to anchor to the wall. I do not know the sequence of events as I was in the galley when it happened. The two hab cylinders have been pulled partially apart. Both are intact but the tunnels between them are flooded. The store room and moon pool room are flooded to the ceilings. The upper tunnel is damaged but holding the cylinders together. The lower tunnel is pulled away from the ops cylinder but is usable as a passage between the cylinders. I have tied rope around the cylinders to hold them together. Moved some stores into ops room and set up bed in here too. I have food, water and kettle to heat it. Also have dive gear and gas. Crew all sent to the bottom. Only me here now. Gas system seems OK. Hab is ascending at 300 feet per day. Distance from wall seems constant. Drive motors seem to be OK. Temperature is OK. It is damp (duh).”

Subramanian was most concerned about the storage room. If it was flooded, most likely the medications would be useless. Although that depended on the packaging. If they were in foil packets or well sealed plastic containers, they might be OK.

The Ledge

(2,700 Feet)

Kate had decided to send the message about the Pheia partly because she was in need of something to occupy the time, and party because she thought she should try to help them understand her situation. Not that it was likely to help her very much. There was simply no way for them to get to her. The Pheia was still at 2,700 feet down and that meant at least nine days to the surface. But she was a scientist, and she felt a responsibility to provide data they might be able to use to do something. “Who are you kidding?” She thought. “Whatever.”

Kate spent an hour working her way through all the status indicators on the control consoles and building up a comprehensive message about the state of the Pheia’s systems. She found this quite therapeutic. It felt more like her normal work collecting data from some biological experiment. She also suspected that her situation, while possibly not unique, was certainly going to be of interest to the academic community if she made it to the surface. So she decided to treat what was happening to her as another experiment. She would collect data and send it to the surface. What they did with it was their business.

As she had worked her way through the gas system status indicators, she had found individual gas gauges for the helium, hydrogen and oxygen storage tanks. They all had gas in them but she had no real idea if there was enough gas. The gas generator system manufactured oxygen from the seawater and stored it in the tanks. The hydrogen and helium tanks were there to maintain the correct mix but neither was consumed by her breathing. The CO2 scrubbers removed the CO2 she exhaled and the loss of oxygen was replaced by the gas system.

She wished she’d looked at this more closely before. It was kind of essential to her survival. But the pragmatic side of her brain shrugged it off. The system was working. If it had failed, she’d likely be dead by now. Since it was apparently running just fine, there wasn’t much point in watching it. And if the indications were out of whack what was she going to do? She knew the basic chemistry involved but had no real idea how the system actually worked. “OK. Too much thinking.”

She completed the system status report and transmitted it to the surface.

After she had sent it, she wondered for a minute if her analysis of the readings was correct. What if something was really wrong and she had missed it? The surface folks would get their undies in a twist for sure. “I guess we’ll see.”

Kate went over to the portal and watched the wall going by. The features varied now and then but the overall appearance was always the same. The section illuminated by the Pheia’s lights showed the light brown rocky surface with its bumps and indentations. Occasionally a piece of trash went by. Kate was looking at a very narrow strip of the wall. She was only looking at it now and then, yet she saw trash go by quite often. If this amount of trash was representative of the rest of Cayman’s entire surrounding wall, then there was an awful lot of garbage on the wall. And if you extrapolated that to the other Caribbean islands that had similar populations and levels of tourists, you had quite a volume of garbage going into the sea.

Some years ago, she had been looking at the East end of Grand Cayman on Google Earth and had come across a picture of trash on the beach. It showed a large collection of flip flops, water bottles and other plastics. She remembered thinking at the time that it was sad that so much plastic was dumped into the sea. Even given the fact that the winds had probably collected this particular pile over some time, it was a lot of plastic to have found on this one small section of beach on Cayman’s East End.

The plastic generally floated, and found its way onto shorelines, or else it ended up in one of the giant plastic whirlpools in the Pacific where sunlight and wave action helped to break it down into very small particles. Those particles stayed in suspension in the sea near the surface. They had been found in fish and other sea creatures, which meant they were in the food chain and that meant they were going to end up in people.

Did it matter? Was plastic harmful in any way? It was mostly chemically rather inert so perhaps it didn’t matter. Just another source of roughage perhaps? Kate smiled at that. It was good to be thinking again. Even if it was a little off topic and perhaps a bit random.

On the surface barge, the rest of the crew from the institute had arrived and were gathered in the galley for a briefing by Williams. He’d gone over the situation below and read them Kate’s last status report about the Pheia’s systems. The consensus seemed to be that even though the Pheia was damaged, it was operating normally and they could expect Kate to survive and arrive at the surface in eight or nine days.

Among the new crew were three more divers. The divers all knew Duncan, White and Perez, but understood their loss as being one of the possible outcomes of very deep diving. In a sense they were like drivers at a race track. They all liked the excitement of working to the limit, and accepted the consequences when things went wrong. Once the Pheia reached 1,000 feet, their mission would be to go down with the barge’s winch cable and secure it to the Pheia. They would then ride back up to the surface with Kate.

Williams was very pleased with the consensus about the Pheia. There was going to have to be an inquiry into the construction of course. The hab should not have separated as it had done, but the inquiry was going to have to wait until the hab could be returned to the U.S. But overall, the hab was in good shape and Kate was not at risk.

Dr. Subramanian had quite a different view. He had little interest in the condition of the hab. In his view, Kate was more of a danger to herself from stress and exhaustion. Even if the Pheia was performing perfectly, once Kate got tired enough she’d make a mistake and cause something bad to happen. It was a common problem. Truck drivers fell asleep after too many hours at the wheel. The sleep wasn’t the issue. It was what happened while they were asleep that mattered. He left the meeting and went back to the comms shack.

Subramanian typed up a short message and sent it. He felt rather helpless. He really wanted to talk face to face with Kate in a couple of comfy chairs. “Absurd really,” he thought. Subramanian decided not to wait for a reply from Kate. He doubted she would follow his advice, and even if she did, he doubted she’d bother to let him know.

Kate was still staring at the wall going by when the ELF radio emitted it’s new message sound.

She walked the few steps to the console and read it.

“Dear Kate. Please forgive my directness. You MUST sleep. There is a supply of zolpidem in the storage area with the other medical supplies. Take two and get some sleep. Please acknowledge.”

Kate thought about it. “Well, that’s more blunt.” She knew she needed sleep but even with the still soggy mattress covered in the table cloth and the towels she had slept only a little and very sporadically. She had recognized for herself that she probably needed more sleep and her rational side knew that sleep deprivation was not good. But the thought of another dive back into the storage area wasn’t very appealing. She decided to think about it.

In the mean time, Kate took another look through the heap of food and other items stacked in piles on the ops room floor. She had plenty of food. It was going to get a bit monotonous eating the same freeze-dried meals all the time, but that was no different than a long back packing trip. Of course on those trips, the food was there just to sustain her in an otherwise interesting environment, often with spectacular views. And of course there was the sense of progress. Packing up camp, setting off on the next leg, finding a new campsite. The days went by very quickly. There was never enough time to just sleep. She certainly had that here. There was almost nothing she really needed to do. The messages from the surface were kind of irrelevant really. They provided proof that the planet was still up there but apart from that; they didn’t contribute anything to getting her out of here.

She had tried doing yoga. That was something she’d flirted with on and off but could never really get to grips with. For exercise, and a bit of zen, she preferred a few days in the mountains. It didn’t matter all that much what she was doing there. If she was backpacking, she got a good balance of zen and exercise. If she was snow boarding, hiking or biking, there was less zen but it was still there in the views, the sunshine, the occasional animals. You just had to let it find you.

But yoga down here was difficult. For one thing, the floor was cold, hard and slippery when her hands were damp, which was most of the time. She had settled for a few pushups and some crunches. These kept her blood flowing and helped slightly with the boredom.

She thought about Subramanian’s suggestion of the sleeping pills again. Maybe that really was a good idea. She could get six hours of sleep and that would be six less hours to think about her surroundings and the huge column of water above her.

Mostly, she avoided thinking about the depth. It was too vast to really comprehend. She had regularly dived to 100 feet in several places around the Caribbean. She had the measure of that. How long it took to get down, how long she could stay, and how long the ascent took. She was currently about 27 times as far down. In some sense that didn’t seem so bad. At two deep dives a day, that was a two week vacation. And half of that would be lying on the beach in the hot sun with a good book. Of course this was all fictional. For one thing, she generally only did one deep dive a day and didn’t dive every day. “Oh this is crap. Get off this. Too much fantasy land.”

Kate pulled the towels off the mattress and hung them over the overhead pipes. Then she pulled off the plastic table cloth and walked around on the mattress in her bare feet trying to squeeze out some more water. Nothing came out. She bent down and felt it with her hand. It was still damp. But then, so was everything else in the hab. Perhaps most of the water was out now.

She put the plastic table cloth back in place carefully centering it. She left the towels over the pipes as if to dry. She doubted they would change moisture content at all, but it just looked more sensible. Kind of like airing out a sleeping bag in the morning before she packed it up camp for the next day’s hike.

Outside the hab it was dark except for the area of the wall illuminated by the Pheia’s lights. The hab crept up slowly. It was not following the course it had taken down. The descent location had been chosen based on the features of the wall. Nobody wanted a big protrusion of rock to bump the hab on its way down.

The wall was far from smooth. It had many protrusions, caves and tunnels. Kate had no idea that the hab was currently right underneath one of those protrusions.

When the hab caught the edge of the rocky overhang it stopped its ascent and tilted the floor several degrees fast enough to catch Kate off balance and knock her to the floor. “What the hell?”

Several different alarms sounded on the console.

Kate got up off the floor and looked at the console screens. Most of it looked OK but the gas control system had lots of red items on the display. She tapped the red ‘Alarm’ indicator and the sound stopped. That helped. She scanned the display looking for some clue as to what was going on but it wasn’t obvious. She listened. There was a new noise. She knew the noises of the Pheia well by now. Mostly it made creaks and groans as the structure adjusted to temperature variations or other stresses as it moved through the water. But these were infrequent, and mostly it was very quiet.

At the portal, she looked outside. The hab was right up against the wall and it wasn’t moving. It didn’t take long to figure out it was stuck under something. But what was the noise? Could it be the drive system? She realized the drive motors were making a more or less constant noise. She went back to the console and found the drive screen. Sure enough the hab was stopped and the drive system was still trying to drive it up at a fixed rate.

Kate set the ascent rate to zero, and felt the hab readjust its attitude slightly. She went quickly back to the portal. The distance was about the same but the hab was upright again now. She heard the sound of rock on metal and the hab shifted again slightly. The noise stopped and she heard the drive system make the short bursts of noise it made when it was just station keeping.

She pushed her face hard up against the portal and looked up. There was a rock shelf just visible above and she guessed that was what the hab had hit. Under the rock were a few silver bubbles of gas. They looked just like the bubbles she saw on a dive if she was in a cave or floating inverted through a swim-through. She listened again. Yes, that was the sound of gas escaping, and a faint sound of bubbles. She had a gas leak.

She brought up the gas system display on the console and looked at the indicators. The oxygen and helium supplies were green but all the data for the hydrogen system was red. She didn’t have any idea what the tank pressure should be, but the rate indicator showed a constant flow of hydrogen from the system. Normally, this was almost zero. Hydrogen was added to the gas mix to help prevent HPNS, but since the crew didn’t consume the hydrogen there was no need to replenish it, except to handle a leak or the occasional scuba tank fill. She stared at the screen a bit longer. “I need help.”

Kate found the ELF radio screen and composed a message: “Hab has hit wall. Stable now. Hydrogen leaking.” She looked at it for a moment and then added: “Help.”

She tapped the button on the screen to send the message and went back to the portal. She pressed her ear against it and listened. She could definitely hear bubbles, and not just a few, but what sounded like a constant stream. Should she go out and look? What would be the point? She could get a better idea of the damage from outside. “Right. But what’s the point? I doubt I can fix it.”

She went back to the console and cycled through the gas system screens until she found the hydrogen page with all the red values. The hydrogen tank pressure was way down from where it had been a few minutes ago. She re-checked the oxygen and helium pages and found both were OK. Then she looked at the carbon dioxide scrubbers and made sure they were also OK. So, it’s just the hydrogen then.”

At the depth she was at, Kate needed the hydrogen in the mix to help offset HPNS. She went back to the main gas system page and checked the mixture. It looked OK. She wasn’t using any hydrogen by breathing, so as long as she didn’t have a leak from the hab itself, she might be ok. The idea of a leak was terrifying. Not only did she breathe the gas but the slight over-pressure in the hab kept the water out. She went to the ladder and looked down towards the moon pool room. The water level was right where it had been for the past few days. “Duh. The gas system would know if there was a leak.”

Back at the console she went through all the gas system pages looking for problems. She didn’t find any, but to be sure she would need to track all the gas pressures and the gas mix in the hab.

On one of the other screens she opened the Pheia’s log and started a new entry. She entered all the gas supply pressures, the hab’s gas mix values and the state of the CO2 scrubber. Then she added a few readings from the reactor power system. It made her nervous to even think about the reactor. Sure, it was designed to survive a satellite re-entry from orbit but stuff broke all the time. She entered the power system readings and closed out the log entry. She planned to do the whole exercise again in an hour. If there was a major leak it would show up then. If nothing showed up, she’d repeat the test in six hours to see if she had a minor leak.

Kate went back to the portal and tried to look up but she could not see past the rock ledge. She looked over at the dive gear. It wasn’t appealing to go outside again but she really wanted to know how bad the damage was.

She walked over and pulled down the dive suit and began putting it on. The inside was damp. Everything was damp.

Once she got started, it wasn’t so bad, and after a quick self-buddy check using her list by the ladder, she put on fins and dropped into the water.

The water was cold and the chill helped her focus on the task. “Let’s not be down here all day,” she thought as she floated down through the moon pool exit and out under the hab’s weight stack.

Kate shone her light towards the wall but thought better of going that way. The hab was awfully close to the rock. If it shifted, she didn’t want to get trapped. She swam out from under the stack parallel to the wall and ascended beside the twin cylinders slowly, looking for signs of damage.

She remembered to look up just before she reached the rocky protrusion the Pheia had hit. It stuck out maybe forty feet. Enough to cover part of the hab, which was now hovering about five feet below it.

At the top of the hab, Kate saw that the ELF antenna went out around the rock. At least it was intact. Well, it looked intact from here but she could only see part of it so she swam out to the edge of the rocky overhang and shone the light up into the dark. The silvery rods seemed to go up forever.

Kate swam up a way until she could see the BC at the top. The antenna was intact. Looking down, the part of the hab she could see seemed much smaller below her. The water was perfectly clear and her light illuminated it like a small model. She dropped back down to the roof of the ops cylinder. Shining the light down, she could see the plumbing on the tops of the gas tanks closest to the wall was all bent. A few small bubbles were coming out, but there was no sign of the big leak she’d expected to see. The tank must be empty. She dropped down until her face was only a foot from the tops of the tanks and inspected all the pipework. It was bent where it had hit the rock. The Pheia must have been just close enough to catch the edge with the tanks. Kate wondered why it was so far under the ledge now. Surely it should be at the same distance from the wall it had been all along. Perhaps the sonar array that the Pheia used to measure lateral distance was damaged as well? Was that how it worked? She couldn’t remember. She mentally added that to the list of things to check before she went back in.

Kate ran her hands over the bent pipes feeling the undersides for damage. A few of the pipes had been flattened on top and bent out of shape but there were no apparent holes. She looked closer at the fittings where the pipes were attached to the tanks. A small bubble formed right where the pipe entered one of the fittings. The top of the fitting was scratched and a small piece of rock was lodged between the handle of the shutoff valve and the pipe. “Mystery solved.” she thought.

Kate closed the valve leading to the damaged fitting. If there was any gas left anywhere in the system, that might help. She knew she was kidding herself. Whatever hydrogen was in the tanks had leaked away by now and thanks to them all being connected to a common manifold, that meant they were all empty.

She thought about closing the other valves but decided against it. She didn’t really have a plan and knew very little about the way the Pheia was built.

Kate rolled over and looked up at the rock above her. It was still four or five feet away and hadn’t moved. So the Pheia was keeping position. That was good. She kicked forward and let out her breath. She glided down the side of the hab facing the wall. She was inverted and looking at the side of the hab as she went down. There were no signs of damage. But this was what she expected. The hab had clearly hit the wall from below, and it had stopped very suddenly so it had not had any chance to scrape along on its side.

Kate was looking for the sonar sensor that measured the distance to the wall, but she didn’t know what it looked like. Most of the Pheia’s outer surface was covered in gas tanks except where the portals in the cylinders were, or where the two tunnels joined the cylinders together.

Above the portal, on the ops cylinder, she found what looked like a white plastic dome about six inches in diameter. It was attached to a pipe flange that stuck out a couple of inches from the hab. She waved her hand in front of it but nothing happened. This was the only thing that looked like it might be a sensor. The only other attachments were the flood lights and the cameras.

She had forgotten about the cameras. The Pheia had several pointing out in all directions. Not that there was generally much to see on them. They mostly showed the black ocean or the wall.

Kate floated down until she found the camera on the ops cylinder below the portal. It was pointing at the wall. She shone her light over at the one on the crew cylinder. It was pointing down. A couple of light fin kicks brought her to it. She grasped it in one hand and the edge of the portal with the other and pulled. The camera came back up so it was pointing at the wall again.

Kate kicked away from the hab and as she did so she heard the drive motors spin up. The hab was moving away from her. Panicking, she kicked hard and grabbed the camera bracket. As soon as she grabbed it, the hab stopped moving. “What the hell.”

She moved off to one side and waited. Sure enough the hab started to move back slowly from the wall. It was moving slowly enough that she could follow with just an occasional light fin movement. After about fifteen seconds it stopped again. Kate looked back at the wall. “Ah. We are back in position.”

She realized that the cameras were used in some way to detect the wall’s position. “Stereo images to supplement the sonar?” she thought. She looked up and saw that the hab was now clear of the rocky ledge. “Time to go home.”

On the surface barge, Williams had gathered everyone into the galley for a meeting. There was a lot of loud conversation as small groups of two or three argued about what to do. Williams stood up. “OK, can we stop for a minute please?” He had to repeat himself twice before everyone became silent.

“So far as I can tell, the only things we agree on are that the Pheia has mechanical problems of some undetermined type and we are completely powerless to help. Is that about it?”

The group looked at him. One or two nodded but nobody spoke.

“I sent a message to Dr. Moss for more information but there has been no reply. I sent the request about half an hour ago. I do not want to read anything into the delay. We can probably assume the ELF radio is working because of Kate’s earlier message.”

He turned to the flip chart that stood by the galley table. “Let’s go through the ideas we have so far please.” He pointed to the item at the top. “Total failure.” He paused. “While I agree that this needs to be on the list, I want to ignore it for now since a total failure means we have no hope, and I’m not willing to go there just yet.” He drew a thin line through the item with a marker.

“Next we have loss of gas pressure.” This seems most likely to me if there was some mechanical event, which is likely given Dr. Moss’s message that the Pheia had hit the wall.”

He saw some nods and continued. “And we know that the most exposed parts of the Pheia are the gas cylinders and associated pipe work. Damage to the gas pipes on top of the cylinders seems likely if the impact was hard enough.”

Williams continued with the rest of the items. There was little conversation as most of the discussion had taken place earlier when they made the list.

They finished the list of potential problems. Williams really didn’t know what to do now. “Now we wait.” He said. It seemed a bit obvious, but with the Pheia over 2,500 feet down there really was nothing else to do.

Kate pulled off her dive suit and hung it over the pipes in the ops room. At the control console she saw the message from the surface. She ignored it. She wanted to know if the state of the gas system had changed. As Kate cycled through the gas system screens, she saw that there had been no change in the oxygen or helium systems. The hydrogen system was also, sadly, in the same state it was before her dive. The hydrogen tanks were empty. The carbon dioxide scrubber seemed to be OK. She went to the main gas system screen. Her hands fell to her side and she stared at the screen. The gas mix reading was red now. It had been green when she went outside. She tapped on the red indicator and a popup appeared listing the gas mixture percentages. They were all green except for the hydrogen which was about 80% of the value it should be at.

“Where did it go?”

The other gases were in the correct proportions. There must be a leak somewhere but she hadn’t seen it outside. Perhaps it was leaking earlier and had stopped now? Why would it do that? Whatever the reason, she now had less hydrogen in the mix than she needed to keep HPNS from affecting her. Maybe at 1,500 feet she could breathe just a heliox mix but down here she needed the hydrogen. And the meds. She had forgotten about the HPNS meds again. Could they compensate for the lack of hydrogen? She really needed help.

Kate remembered the ELF message she had seen when she was getting out of her dive suit and tapped the menu on the console to bring the message back up. She read Williams’ message and wondered why he was asking for details. “Didn’t he get my report?” she thought and then realized that she had not sent the log entry to the surface. “Might as well do it right.”

Kate spent ten minutes taking a new set of readings and entering them in a new log entry. It gave her a chance to review the overall gas situation once more. It was apparent that there had been a leak going on because the helium level had dropped in the tank. The oxygen level was more or less the same so the oxygen generator must be compensating.

Kate closed out the log entry and went back to the ELF radio screen. She typed out a short message to say she was sending two reports taken about an hour apart. Then she went into the log system and found how to send the logs. Once they were on the way she decided to add another message: “Hydrogen low in mix. Can I use HPNS meds to compensate?” She tapped the button to send it and wondered how long it would take them to reply.

She knew it would be a while. They had a lot to digest. She decided to eat, and started to heat some water while she picked through the freeze dried meals. She lifted one up and smiled. “Chili Mac. Excellent.”

Hydrogen

(2,400 Feet)

On the surface barge, Williams was engaged in conversation with a medical doctor who had been flown out on short notice.

“So Dr. Andrews, can Dr. Moss use the HPNS meds or not?”

“She can certainly use them, and based on my reading of Dr. Ford’s work, she should certainly do so at the depth she is at now, but this is not going to fully compensate for the lack of hydrogen in the gas mix. You understand this is not my area of expertise, but from what I have read, the hydrogen is really the essential component to the gas mix. The HPNS medication Dr. Ford was developing acts as an adjunct to the hydrogen at much greater depths.”

Williams was uncharacteristically blunt. “So she’s screwed then?”

“I don’t really know. She may have enough residual hydrogen in the gas mix for her to get to a depth where it no longer matters. But really, based on the data I’ve seen, she is in a bad position, yes.”

Williams thanked Andrews and walked back to the room he was bunking in. He lay down on the rather short and uncomfortable bed and stared at the ceiling. He had no idea what to tell Kate. She had no hydrogen left and yet that was what she needed for at least the next four or five days. He had considered trying to lower a tank down to the Pheia but they didn’t have a tank readily available, and in any case, Kate might not have the ability to connect it.

Williams lay on his bunk for half an hour thinking before getting up and returning to the comms shack.

When he got there he asked the technician if there had been any more messages.

“No sir. Nothing.”

“Very well. I’d like to send a message myself if I may.”

The technician moved out of the way and Williams sat at the console. He really didn’t want to send this message, but after a lot of thought he had rationalized that Kate had probably already figured out what he was about to tell her, and even if she hadn’t, she’d get there soon.

He typed out the message: “Kate: Sorry but we have no solution to the hydrogen problem. The meds will not compensate for the lack of hydrogen. We will keep working on the problem from up here. Williams. P.S. Keep taking the meds anyway.”

He tapped the button on the console to send it. He stood up looking at the machine hoping for a reply. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for exactly. He knew it would take Kate a while to digest it.

To his surprise a message appeared while he was watching the screen.

“OK. As expected.”

“Well she knows now,” he said to himself.

“Yes sir. She does,” the technician added from beside Williams. He had watched the exchange.

In the Pheia, Kate watched the ELF screen in case Williams sent anything else, but after a couple of minutes she gave up. She looked out the portal to make sure the Pheia was still ascending and considered her options. She could increase the ascent rate and try to make it to a depth that a straight heliox mix would work for or she could… “What? There are no other options,” she said aloud.

Even if she doubled the ascent rate, it would still take at least two days before she was safe without the hydrogen. But she had no idea if that rate was safe in itself. The last thing she needed now was to get bent or suffer some other form of incapacitation. She was still functioning OK. She had no shakes and her vision was clear. So far as she could tell, her mental processes were working fine too. “So think.”

Kate stared out the portal at the rock creeping past in the Pheia’s lights. “All the hydrogen I could ever need is right there bound up with some oxygen molecules.”

She thought about that for a while. How could she separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in the water? Then she thought about the gas system in the Pheia. It somehow extracted oxygen from the water. That was where the oxygen in the gas mix came from. How did it do that? What happened to the hydrogen that was left after the oxygen was extracted? Perhaps there was a way to tap into that and feed it into the hab’s atmosphere.

Kate tried to remember the briefings about the Pheia she had attended while it was being built. Somewhere in her memory was something about the gas system. She had to admit, the briefings were really uninteresting to her. She only really cared about the biology and that part of the mission had been months away at the time. “Typical. I zone out in the one lecture that I really need right now. And where is Google when I need it?”

She tried to remember how the system worked. She knew it wasn’t an osmotic process. Several people had tried to build artificial gills, but down here there wasn’t that much dissolved oxygen and they had to support a big crew. The gills would be massive. “Just me now though,” she thought.

“Electrolysis.” She remembered. That was partly the reason for using the Russian reactor. It supplied a lot of electricity and a good piece of that was used in the gas extraction system. The principle was simple: apply a direct current voltage to a pair of non-reactive electrodes immersed in water and hydrogen appeared on one and oxygen on the other. All you had to do was collect the gas as it bubbled up off the electrodes.

So somewhere above her head the gas system was separating oxygen and hydrogen from the water and then dumping the hydrogen somewhere. Where was it going? Why hadn’t she seen bubbles outside? Perhaps the rate was too low. The oxygen consumption rate of the full crew wasn’t that great. Perhaps the hydrogen dissolved back into the water?

“I guess we’ll go and look then.”

Kate went over to her dive gear, unclipped the flashlight from her BC and turned it on. She shone it up at the ceiling where the ladder stopped at a hatch. The hatch was secured with bolts and she had no tools. She paused for a minute thinking. “Radiation?” she wondered.

“Well death by radiation is about the same as death from advanced HPNS, so I chose death.”

She went up the ladder until she was wedged against the ceiling and inspected the bolts. They were not very big but there were quite a few. The hatch looked like it was designed to keep the crew out not to keep anything exciting in.

“Let’s go diving.” She said aloud.

Ten minutes later she was in the moon pool room looking for tools. She was fairly sure there weren’t any in the storage area. She’d have seen them earlier. And it seemed crazy that there would be no tools. “There must be at least a few wrenches to work on the dive gear, to replace hoses or whatever.” She wasn’t sure that was really true. The expedition was relatively short and they had spare scuba sets. But it gave her a reason to search.

She found a small adjustable wrench in a Pelican case with Duncan’s name marked on it. It was his ‘save a dive kit’ and contained a few spare O-rings and other items.

Kate took the wrench and headed back up to the ops room.

Back on top of the ladder she set the wrench on one of the bolts and adjusted so it was tight. She didn’t need it to slip and round off the bolt head. She held the ladder with one hand and pushed on the wrench with the other. To her delight, the bolt moved easily. She rotated it a full turn with the wrench until it was loose and then put the wrench in her teeth while she removed the bolt with her hand. She dropped the bolt in her pocket and started on the next one.

It took a few minutes, but she removed all the bolts except two on opposite sides of the hatch. These two she loosened but left in place. She banged on the hatch cover and it dropped down slightly until it was resting on the two bolts. The next bit was tricky because she needed to hold the ladder with one hand and work the bolts with the other. She stepped up one more rung and wedged her shoulder against the steel plate. It moved up enough to take the pressure off the bolts and she removed one of them with her free hand. Then she let the plate down slightly and rotated it on the other bolt until it was out of the way.

The room above was dark but full of noises. Kate pulled her dive light out of her pocket and shone it up into the space. On the wall was a light switch. She flipped it up and the room filled with light.

There were two ladder rungs welded to the wall above the hatch and Kate used these to get herself up into the machinery space. It was a bit cramped but she could stand up if she stooped a bit and was careful how she moved.

It was easy to find the oxygen generator because it had a sign on it saying “Oxygen Generator.” Next to it was another, much larger unit with a “Desalination” label on it. But Kate found the rest of it to be less obvious. There were several pipes coming into the unit.

Everything was painted white but two of the pipes had colored bands on them. One was red and one was green. Kate traced one of the white pipes to the desalination machine and from there to a water filter. The filter was connected to a flange on the wall where there was a shutoff valve. “Must be the water inlet,” she said to herself.

The pipe with the green bands on it led to a unit with fins on one end and an electric motor on the other. Kate guessed this was a compressor. And the green probably meant oxygen. “Aren’t oxygen cylinders green?” If that was the oxygen then the pipe with the red bands might be the hydrogen. That pipe went into another unit and from there through a valve to another fitting on the wall. There were several attachments to the pipes with wires coming out of them. “I guess those are the pressure or flow sensors.”

Kate looked at the whole assembly and shone her dive light over it to make sure she’d gotten a good look at everything. “OK, so now what?”

She thought about that for a minute and decided to ask for help from above. They hadn’t been much help so far, but it would be stupid not to ask.

She climbed back down to the ops room and composed a message to Williams: “I have found the hydrogen/oxygen separator. Is it possible to direct the hydrogen into the hab?”

While she waited for a response, Kate thought she had better see what other tools she could find. If Williams’ people had any ideas, she was sure she’d need some tools, although what exactly she was going to look for she had no idea. She was sure that it would take a while for them to respond to her message and she might as well keep busy.

Kate checked her scuba gear. She still had plenty of gas in the tank she’d been using. She was very relaxed in the water and breathed a lot less gas than other people. Her buoyancy control was excellent and her movements always very efficient. She really just liked being in the water. The situation in the Pheia was a little different from a recreational dive but she had found that once she was submerged it felt much the same — from a diving point of view.

Kate suited up and put on the scuba gear. She ran through the checklist on the wall and realized she had left her dive light in her pants pocket. “Crap.”

She had to pull the scuba gear off and unzip the suit. Even then it was awkward to fish the light out of her pocket.

When she was ready again, she looked at her hands. They were still steady. Forgetting about the light was a simple oversight but she was getting a bit paranoid about the gas mix in the hab and how that might affect her. “At least the mix in the tank is good,” she thought.

As she dropped down into the moon pool room, Kate decided to go through the tunnel and search the storage room again. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t find anything but not looking was a sure way to not find something that might be lurking there. And in any case, the last time she was in there she wasn’t looking for tools, so she might have just not noticed them. She tried to think through what she was looking for. “Tools, pipe, valves, gizmos, emergency tank of hydrogen, cheese sandwich.”

In the storage room, Kate scanned the piles of stuff she had rummaged through before. It was everywhere. Some of the ones she hadn’t opened floated up at the ceiling. A few floating items were trapped in the shelves and the rest was either still on a shelf or on the floor.

She started with the items floating on the ceiling. “Pretty unlikely to be tools but who knows?”

She moved them all to one side of the room and nominated that side as the place she’d stack everything she had searched. Then she moved everything on the floor to the other side of the room, then started opening storage bins on the shelves and rearranging them as she went.

After half an hour she had been through all the items on the shelves and re-stacked everything. She had found a small toolkit of screwdrivers, cutters, wire ties and some electrical tape. She put the box by the tunnel hatch and started on the piles of boxes on the floor. This was a bit more difficult than the shelves. With the shelves she had been more or less upright and could hold the shelf supports for stability. Moving the boxes around on the floor meant trying to use her buoyancy to lift them or to put her feet down. The fins kept getting in the way, and in the end she took them off and put them by the tunnel hatch. She let all the gas out of her BC and just stood on the floor.

Gradually she worked through the storage bins and bags of stuff. Most of it was of no use at all. She found a box of Ramen noodles and put that by the door. She finally got most of the stuff she had put on the floor either back on shelves or stacked on the far side of the room. That let her get at the bottom row of shelves and there she found another tool kit. This one opened to show wrenches, sockets, and a hacksaw. Kate smiled and her mask flooded.

She cleared the mask and dragged the toolbox over to the tunnel hatch. She finished searching the bottom shelf and found a small bag of pipe clips and some rubber hose. It looked like the hose from a scuba regulator. The markings on it showed it was rated at 200 PSI. She put that by the door with the bag of clips.

Pleased with her haul, Kate moved everything into the moon pool room and then up the ladder to the floor of the ops room. She checked her scuba gas level and found it was almost in the red. “Well, I still need to dig through the moon pool room lockers so I might as well get another tank at the same time.”

In the moon pool room, Kate pulled the full tank she’d left in the rack and pushed it up ahead of her onto the ops room floor. She stood on the ladder with just her shoulders out of the water. After adding some gas to her BC so it would float, she shrugged it off and pushed the rig up onto the floor. She climbed up a couple of steps so she could reach, and swapped the tank over. Once she had the gear back on she pulled the empty tank towards her and dropped back down into the moon pool room.

At the fill station, she put the empty tank into the rack, and then found another tank to add to it. She set both to fill and went to look for a regulator to keep in the ops room as a spare.

The tanks filled as Kate searched for more tools. She found another save-a-dive kit and added a couple of regulators to that in a small pile at the base of the ladder.

By the time she had finished searching all the lockers, the tanks were full and she shut off the fill valves and removed the whips. The two full tanks and the tools she’d found all made their way up to the ops room. Kate looked down a last time to make sure there was nowhere she hadn’t looked, then climbed up the ladder out of the water.

On the surface, Williams had convened a meeting to discuss Kate’s idea about using the oxygen generator to provide hydrogen into the hab’s atmosphere. Williams had flown down Babin and Leclerc, the two engineers from the Pheia’s construction company. Both Leclerc and Babin had laptops open and were going over the design of the gas generator. Between them they were explaining the difficulty of Kate’s idea. Mostly, Leclerc spoke french to Babin who attempted to translate. Williams wondered how they had managed to build the Pheia if they couldn’t talk to each other. Babin had seen frustration on Williams’ face every time they started to answer a question. At one point she had said simply: “Dr. Williams, we are engineers. We communicate with schematics, whiteboards and occasional mathematics. The language is irrelevant. Our only real problem occurs when we discuss dimensions as I occasionally use inches in discussion whereas Monsieur Leclerc only uses millimeters and meters. He gets very annoyed when I make that mistake and gives me a lecture about how stupid the United States is to be using such ancient units. Nonetheless, we work well together. Monsieur Leclerc is an excellent engineer.”

Evidently Leclerc’s understanding of english was enough to follow what Babin was saying. He nodded at her. “Merci Madame.”

Babin continued with her explanation: “There are two main problems with the idea of using the oxygen separation apparatus to provide hydrogen to the gas mix in the Pheia. The first is rather simple: The pipe that vents the hydrogen from the separator through the hull would need to be cut. There is no valve to open to release the gas. We’ll get to the issue of actually cutting the pipe in a minute. The second issue is that with the pipe cut, there is no way to control how much hydrogen is released into the atmosphere. The generator runs when the oxygen system sensors detect that the oxygen storage tank pressure is below a threshold value. This is controlled by the rate at which the crew consumes the oxygen, and any leaks from the overall system.”

Williams nodded. He knew all this but had the sense not to say so.

Babin continued. “We have done some computations. We are assuming no leaks, which may be invalid but we needed somewhere to start. We also assume one crew member, Miss Moss, who is breathing normally. Based on her rate of oxygen consumption, and the volume of the hab, and the current gas measurements Miss Moss supplied, the gas system is running so infrequently that it will never produce enough hydrogen to affect the gas mix even if its entire output was vented into the interior.”

Williams spoke up now. “So can we dump some of the oxygen to make the generator run more?”

Leclerc responded. “Oui, ce est possible, mais difficile.”

Williams looked over at Babin who translated.

“Yes. Possible but difficult.” She went on. “We would need to vent the oxygen from the separator somehow. Or possibly vent some of the gas mix from the atmosphere. This would cause the oxygen pressure in the storage tank to drop and make the generator run. This also requires helium to be added to the mix. We think there is enough helium, but again the problem lies with the volume of gas we are trying to affect. As Monsieur Leclerc said, it is difficult. The best approach is to find a way to vent the oxygen from the storage tank to the outside and to let the hydrogen vent into the interior.”

Williams stood up and stretched. He’d been sitting too long and it was hard to concentrate when he was inactive for long periods. “I follow your thinking, but how can Dr. Moss do any of this?”

Babin spoke. “We have no idea. But this is the only solution we can think of. According to the inventory of the Pheia, there are enough tools on board if Miss Moss can locate them. Do you think Miss Moss is capable?”

It was a simple question but Williams did not answer.

Dr. Subramanian had sat silently through the entire discussion. He found the engineering discussion tedious but the interaction between Williams and the engineers was fascinating. Babin had made the most interesting point of the whole meeting: the two engineers could communicate with a few words and a schematic. That was their shared language. He had been thinking about Kate while they discussed the problems and had come to a conclusion. Before Williams could answer Babin’s question, he spoke up.

“In my opinion, Dr. Moss is a most capable woman indeed. She clearly has the intellectual capacity to deal with the problem. She has demonstrated her ability to deal with her situation numerous times in the last few days and I think that she can accomplish whatever task you set her, so long as you can explain it to her. It is this last point which worries me most. I see that the engineers can communicate through a few words and pointing at a diagram. But Dr. Moss is a biologist, not an engineer. And she does not have your diagrams. So if you are to succeed, you must create a set of instructions that someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the system can understand. Furthermore, we must not frustrate Dr. Moss by sending instructions she cannot follow, for whatever reason. So I propose that you write down exactly what you want her to do, and we test the instructions on me. I am clearly the person here with the least understanding of the vessel’s systems. My only reservation with this idea is how you will show me the nature of the task.”

“What do you mean by that?” Babin asked.

“I mean that you will need to show me pictures or a model of the system so that I can try out your instructions.”

“We don’t have a model and we only have the schematics. No pictures. And sadly, we do not have the 3D models either. Although we might be able to get some photographs from when the Pheia was being built but I suspect these will not be of sufficient resolution for your needs.”

Subramanian looked worried. “So there is no way for you to test your instructions on me?”

“No, I don’t really see how we can do that quickly. If we had more time, we could get the 3D model data and use that to create some images for you.”

“Then Dr. Moss is about to be severely tested.”

Subramanian wasn’t worried about Kate following instructions. He was worried about giving an unfamiliar task to someone under stress, who already knew the situation was dire and failure to perform meant death.

Gasses

(2,100 Feet)

Kate was asleep dreaming of diving on the Cayman wall when the ELF radio announced a new message. It was the first time she’d slept more than an hour without waking, and she almost went back to sleep telling herself she’d read it later. Five minutes later the radio beeped a second time. Two messages? “OK, I’m coming.”

She rolled off the towels covering the mattress and stood up. She felt much better. Amazing how a little sleep could help so much.

The ELF radio showed it had two messages for her. The first was from Williams and was short: “Kate, we are sending instructions for a mod to the gas system. Please read, review and send me your comments ASAP. Williams.”

The second message was very long. Kate scrolled to the end to see who had sent it. She didn’t immediately recognize Babin’s name but after some thought she remembered Babin as one of the people who had given talks on the Pheia when it was being readied for the mission. Kate had enjoyed her talk about the mechanical design, although she had found Babin’s southern accent a little difficult at times.

She scrolled back to the top and started to read. When she got to the end she went back to the top and read it through a second time. Babin had explained the concept first, then the general method Kate was to follow, and then there were very detailed instructions. Essentially they wanted Kate to go outside and create a leak in the oxygen storage system then come back in and cut the hydrogen pipe so it would vent into the hab. Babin had included enough detail on the theory of what they wanted her to do for Kate to accept that this wasn’t some hare-brained scheme.

The details were quite specific but there was obviously some doubt about exactly how to make the oxygen system leak at just the right rate. What they wanted her to do was go outside and loosen one of the gas fittings until oxygen started to escape. Then come back in and track the leak rate from the console. Too much or too little and she’d have to go outside and adjust the leak. By comparison, the section on cutting the hydrogen pipe was child’s play.

They had given her the option as to which operation she performed first. Kate opted for the hydrogen pipe. It was a simple operation. She had a hacksaw. They had said there was no risk of explosion as the hydrogen was not mixed with any oxygen. So even if she did make a spark, there would be no big bang. “So what else would they tell me?” she thought.

Kate was much more worried about venting the oxygen system. What if it the coupling they wanted her to loosen came apart and wouldn’t go back together? Babin’s message had said that the hydrogen pipe was at almost zero pressure since it was basically just a vent but the oxygen system was pressurized by a compressor in the hab, and it would leak easily given half a chance.

Kate went back and read the section about loosening the oxygen coupling. Babin said it would be tight, and that Kate would need a large wrench. She had gone on to describe where there was a large adjustable pipe wrench in the storage room. Kate had recognized the description of the location and looked over at the pile of tools she had rescued. The large pipe wrench was on the floor by the collection of scuba regulators she had brought up. The hacksaw was with a few other tools she had also found. So she had all the tools. Why not get on with it?

Something was bothering her. She didn’t want to go outside again. It had nothing to do with making yet another dive. The diving was easy and she’d had a lot of practice recently. She decided to put it out of her mind and reply to the messages.

She typed up a short response: “Got instructions. Understand. Have tools already. Is this going to work?”

Kate hesitated before sending the message. What was the point of asking them if it would work? They would just tell her to get on with it. She tapped the button to send the message. They never responded immediately, so she thought she’d boil some water and make some instant coffee. It wasn’t really that great, but it was all she had.

Williams handed the printed copy of the message to Subramanian. “What do you make of her question?” Williams asked him.

“It is as I feared. She does not say so but she is thinking about failure. If she doesn’t act, she still has some time before the gas mixture becomes a problem. If she acts now and things go badly, then she may not survive another day.”

“So what am I supposed to do about that?” Williams asked him.

“Perhaps I can send her a message.”

Williams couldn’t tell if Subramanian was asking a question or making a statement.

“With what in mind?” he asked.

“I will explain my understanding of her psychological state. It is not as good as a face to face conversation but it may be enough to help her understand her own fears.”

“And if that doesn’t help?”

“Then we must wait for Miss Moss to make up her own mind. I do not think she will give up. She just needs a push in the right direction.”

By the time Subramanian had sent his message, Kate was up in the reactor area armed with her hacksaw and looking at the pipework for the gas separator. Babin had confirmed that the red markings indicated the hydrogen line. She had also explained that the pipe was stainless steel and would be quite hard to cut. It needed slow actions with the saw, but with good pressure. Babin had also thought to warn Kate that the blade adjustment in the hacksaw needed to be tightened as much as possible so the blade made a good twang noise when plucked. She had explained to Kate that people commonly used hacksaw blades with too little tension and this resulted in many broken blades as the saw moved from side to side.

Kate was impressed with the level of detail in the message and was not at all insulted by Babin’s details. She would not have thought to check the blade tension.

Kate gave the blade a pluck with her finger. It seemed pretty tight to her. She placed it on the pipe in the only place she could easily reach. She gave it a slight push and it took the white paint off the pipe and revealed the shiny stainless steel underneath. “Remember to shut of the valve.” She said to herself. Babin had repeated this instruction three times. Kate thought that shutting the valve was pretty obvious. She was about to cut a pipe that led out to sea. “Duh.”

Kate pushed down on the hacksaw and the blade bent over slightly. She gave it a push and it skidded down the pipe and inch or so removing more of the paint. The next time she put her left hand on the pipe and set the blade next to her thumb. She pulled it back and it made a slight mark on the pipe. She pushed it forward and it started to cut. There was only room to move the blade back and forth a few inches but she gradually deepened the cut.

She tried sawing rapidly but nothing much happened. “I guess Babin was right. Slow and hard does it.”

After a couple of minutes the saw cut through the pipe’s skin and the cutting went faster. Kate was excited and pushed harder. The blade snapped and she hit her knuckles hard on the fins of the oxygen compressor. “Fuck.”

She looked at her hand. It was bleeding slightly but not bad enough to do anything about. Kate examined the pipe. It was cut about half way through and she was sure the gas could escape from the small slot she had made. She had an idea, and went back down to the ops room to find a flat bladed screwdriver. When she got back up into the mechanical space she put the blade into the gap in the pipe and pushed the screwdriver’s handle sideways. At first nothing happened so she pushed harder a little wary of skinning her knuckles again. The blade on the end of the screw driver bent slightly but then the pipe buckled inwards making a much larger hole.

Kate looked at the hole. “That’s got to be big enough.” She sucked on her knuckles and licked the blood off. She left the hacksaw where she had dropped it but took the screwdriver back down to the ops room with her.

She dropped the screwdriver on the floor by the other small tools and walked over to the control console. On the ELF radio screen, she typed a message: “Hydrogen line cut. Going outside now.”

She noticed another message had arrived while she had been busy and read it. “More psychobabble from Dr. Sub.” she said aloud and then deleted it. “Really? I’m just going to sit on my ass and wait to pass out? I don’t think so. Moron.”

Kate walked the few steps to the pile of tools and picked up the large pipe wrench and hefted it in her hand. “If I drop this it‘ll be gone really fast.”

She looked around for some rope or string to tie through the hole in the end of the wrench’s handle. Something she could use to clip the wrench to her BC. The only thing she could find was a collection of cable ties in a rubber band. She pulled them out and joined several together to make a chain. It looked a bit feeble so she made a second chain as a backup, and then used two more ties to attach one end to the wrench. The other ends she joined with a tie and clipped to her BC. Satisfied with the attachment she suited up and ran through her checklist. She really liked the checklist on the wall now. It was the closest thing to a dive buddy she had.

Kate swam head down through the moon pool exit and out from under the Pheia’s weight stack towards the wall. It was odd in some ways to always go towards the wall. She could get out from under the hab in any direction and then go up to reach the top. But the wall, despite it being the source of many of her current problems, always seemed the way to go. It was certainly more attractive, thanks to the hab’s lights, than the black ocean that otherwise surrounded the Pheia.

She paused half way up the ops cylinder, grabbed hold of a tank clamp and looked at the wall. It was still moving in the right direction. She looked up but it was just black. There was something creepy about that. The fact that it was dark down here no matter which way you looked. Only the bubbles knew which way was up.

On top of the cylinder, Kate reviewed Babin’s instructions in her head. She needed to be sure she found the oxygen manifold not the helium one. She knew which one was attached to the hydrogen tanks because that was the one that had been mangled. The oxygen tanks had green marks on top but she had to look closely with her dive light to be sure. Babin’s instructions said to loosen any of the oxygen manifold couplings. It didn’t matter which one. They would all leak gas just the same.

Kate placed the open end of the wrench on a fitting and adjusted it down until it was snug. Then she tried to loosen it but she just moved in the water. “Stupid.”

She grabbed onto a cylinder top with one hand and pulled against the wrench with the other but it wouldn’t budge. She tried two other fittings before realizing that they were just tight. “Am I doing this the right way?” She wondered.

She tried one of them in the other direction with the same result.

“When in doubt, use more violence. But how?”

She turned around and placed her feet against the manifold pipes, and put both hands on the wrench. Kate used her legs to apply force while holding on as tight as she could with her arms up against her chest. She strained very hard for several seconds before the fitting gave way.

When it did, the wrench came off and she flew back several feet with the wrench over her head.

She recovered her position, flipped over and swam back to the fitting. She tried to loosen it with her hand but it was still too tight for that. There were no bubbles.

Kate put the wrench back on the fitting and gave it a tug. It moved easily and bubbles started to flow from it.

She compared the size and rate of the flow with her own dive bubbles to get an idea of how fast the gas was escaping. The small stream was quite feeble compared to the large bubbles her exhalations were making. She shone the light on the two columns of bubbles and looked up. The oxygen stream was obviously a lot smaller so she put the wrench back on the fitting and opened it some more.

After a couple more careful attempts, Kate thought the oxygen stream was about the same rate as her exhalations. She had no idea if that was enough but it was somewhere to start.

She clipped the wrench to the BC using the two ties right on end of the wrench so it wouldn’t get in her way and swam back down to the moon pool entrance under the Pheia.

Back in the ops room Kate got out of the scuba gear but left the suit on. She found the gas system screen on the console and looked at the oxygen tank pressure, which she then copied into a log entry next to the current time. Having done that she composed a short message to the surface to let them know the oxygen was venting and she had taken a tank pressure reading. She added that she would wait an hour before testing the tank pressure again and then letting them know what, if anything, had changed.

Kate pulled off the dive suit and hung it up. When she had signed up for this expedition it hadn’t occurred to her that she be doing this many dives. The plan she remembered was to float down here for several days, then do a couple of long dives to look at the hydrothermal vents. Then she would veg out on the way back up, and finally enjoy some time in Cayman before going home to write a couple of papers.

She realized that although she had logged the oxygen tank pressure, she hadn’t recorded the gas mix values. She needed to do that so she could see if there was any change in the hydrogen level.

Kate went back to the console, found the data and added it to the log entry she had made a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that she had recorded all the data she would need for a comparison later, she thought it might be useful to see if the gas generator was running.

After climbing back up into the mechanical area, Kate could hear the small compressor running on the gas separator. She tried to hear if there was gas coming from the hole she had made in the hydrogen pipe but the compressor was too noisy, so she spit on her finger and then placed it over the hole. Sure enough bubbles formed in the spit. “Yee haa!” She pushed down on the hole a bit harder and the gas still escaped. There was at least a reasonable pressure there but was this enough flow?

While she was thinking about it, the compressor stopped and it got a lot quieter in the cramped space. The gas system must have put back enough oxygen in the storage tanks to raise the pressure again. Kate thought about that. “If it’s refilled the tanks, the leak rate must be pathetic.” She was hoping the hydrogen would flow continuously into the hab until the level was back up, and then she could go outside and shut off the oxygen leak. There was a really large volume to fill and she was sure it would take ages even with the compressor running full time.

Kate sat down and leaned back against the hull wall intending to wait for the compressor to come back on and get an idea of the duty cycle. If she could estimate what percentage of the time it was running, that would give her an idea of how much more oxygen she needed to let out. She felt really tired and closed her eyes for a minute. It was uncomfortable on the hard floor with the cold wall behind her, which was just as well. She needed to wait for the compressor to come back on, not sleep. She tried counting. “One one thousand, two one thousand,…” but got bored quickly. Then the compressor started back up. “OK, so how long was that? And how long had it been running before it shut off?”

She guessed it had been running since she was outside and perhaps it had been off for about half that time. Maybe a little more? It was very hard to judge. She sat and thought about it for a while. She tried to calculate the percentage increase in the oxygen venting rate she needed, but was having a lot of trouble with the math. “Never my strong suit,” she thought. She tried again but felt weird, spacey, like she was about to pass out. “Get out of here!”

Kate rolled over forward onto her hands and knees and crawled the few feet to the hatch. When she got there she lay flat on her belly and let her head hang down through the hole. She breathed deeply a few times and instantly felt better. She got up and descended the ladder into the ops room. “That was stupid.”

She had realized she was anoxic because the low density hydrogen was filling the mechanical space and all the oxygen was being forced down out of the hatch. Well, at least she had enough hydrogen in the mix! But that made her think about how the system kept the gas mix at the right levels. Surely the hydrogen and helium would float to the top and all the oxygen would settle at the bottom.

Fans, there must be fans to circulate the gas mix.

“What the hell is the matter with you? Of course there are fans. They make the noise that fills the hab all the time. How could you not know that?” She realized that the mechanical space was normally sealed off and had no fans. She sat down on the mattress and listened. She was so used to the noises of the hab by now that she had to pay attention to hear them. The fans were running but she still didn’t feel right.

Kate rolled off the mattress and turned on the scuba cylinder she had been using, put the regulator in her mouth, and breathed deeply for a few breaths. That felt better. She put the scuba rig on and walked over to the console. The gas mixture screen showed that the hydrogen level was way above where it should be. “Oh crap.” She looked at the clock. Two hours had gone by since she took the readings. “Did I pass out? Oh shit!”

She took the scuba gear off keeping the regulator in her mouth. Thank God for dive training. She could breathe through the regulator while keeping her nose blocked off without the need to pinch it with her fingers. A skill that was taught for survival in the case your mask was kicked off by another diver. She laid down the scuba rig and took a deep breath. Holding her breath she dropped the regulator from her mouth and grabbed the dive suit. She got it half way on in one breath then used the regulator to get a few more before holding it again to zip up the suit.

Once she was suited up she checked she had the big wrench secured to the BC and ran through the checklist on the wall. “Dive light. Where is the light?” It was clipped on the wrong side but at least it was there. “Let’s go.”

Kate tried hard not to swim fast. “Be cool girl.”

At the top of the hab she put the wrench back on the loose fitting and rotated it closed until there was just a small leak. It wouldn’t close any more than that. She had no way to get enough purchase in this direction. The leak was tiny. It would have to do.

On the surface Williams was hovering over the technician in the comms shack. There was still nothing on the ELF radio screen. His mind was full of desperate thoughts. He just wanted to know what was happening. He’d settle for just knowing that Kate was still alive.

The tech. looked at him. “Why don’t you get yourself some coffee sir? I’ll let you know the instant we get any messages.”

“What? Yes. OK. Good idea.” and Williams left. The technician thought that more coffee might be the last thing Williams needed but her was fed up with the pacing.

Williams found Dr. Subramanian in the galley nursing a cup of tea and chatting with the engineers.

“Any news Dr. Williams?” Subramanian asked.

“No. Nothing. I am very worried about Dr. Moss.”

“Of course. But I suspect she is working on the problem and has not had the time or the inclination to send us a message.”

“How can you be so dispassionate about this?”

“I have plenty of passion Dr. Williams, but I am also a pragmatist. Whatever is happening down there is what is happening. We have no control. Speculation is pointless, unless you wish to make a wager. Are you a betting man Dr. Williams?”

“No, not really. Do you think she is coping?”

“Oh yes. Unless some further problem has developed, I believe Kate will let us know when she has completed the task and has something positive to report.”

In the Pheia, Kate stood at the console still in her dive gear and breathing from the regulator. She typed out a message to send to the surface: “Survived passing out from anoxia. OK now. Shut oxygen leak off. Taking measurements. Will report shortly.”

The technician jogged down to the galley and stuck his head through the door. “A message from the Pheia.”

Williams got up. “What does it say?”

“I guess she’s OK, but you should read it for yourself.”

Williams and Subramanian walked into the comms shack. Williams read the message.

“Oh my God. She passed out. How the hell did that happen?”

He left Subramanian to read the message for himself and went back to the galley to talk to the engineers.

When he got there, they were having an argument in French. Williams sat down and they stopped talking and looked at him.

“Kate says that she passed out. How could that happen?”

Babin considered the question. “I can think of at least five or six reasons. Do we have any other data?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Then I do not wish to simply guess,” Babin said.

Williams told them he was expecting more data soon and left for the comms shack again.

Kate reviewed all the gas system screens and built up a log entry with all the data. When she was sure she had it all, she sent the message. “That should keep them busy for a while.”

She looked at the gas mix levels again and took out the regulator. The mix was OK now as far as she could guess. The fans must have mixed it better now and the levels had stabilized.

The air seemed OK to her. She breathed it for a while and tried to assess her own mental state. “Fried, I think.” she thought and managed a smile.

She rummaged through the food pile and found a candy bar. “These are very bad for you.”

She bit into the bar savoring the chocolate and crunching through the peanuts.

When she finished it, she balled up the wrapper and threw it back onto the pile. The place was starting to look like the floor of her bedroom when she was a teenager.

She looked at the two dive tanks she had. The one she’d been using was at least half full and the other was full. There were two more full ones in the rack below. Was it worth filling more while the gas mix was still good? Given the past few hours it seemed like a good idea but from a practical point of view it wasn’t worth the effort. If the Pheia’s gas mix went out of whack again and she couldn’t correct it, a few hours on the scuba tanks would just delay the inevitable.

Kate lay down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. She was exhausted. She held her hands up in front of her face at looked at them. They were steady. No signs of HPNS. But that made her think about the meds. How long had it been since she had a shot? Why hadn’t she been putting that into the log record?

“I am not a lab rat.” she thought. “Oh yes you are. You are one rat in a very complicated maze surrounded by hungry cats.”

Kate rolled over and looked at the pack of syringes. What were the limits of this stuff? Would an overdose be bad? Fatal? She could ask the surface people but they would want to know when she last had a shot and she had no idea. Her memory of events consisted mostly of diving.

She reached out and grabbed the pack and looked at it. “Will you kill me?”

Kate injected herself and put the empty syringe back in the pack. She rubbed her thigh until the sting was gone and stared at the ceiling again. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Cabin Fever

(1,800 Feet)

Kate woke to the sound of an alarm from the control console. Yesterday she had decided she’d had enough of free cycling and her body needed to get back to a normal day/night rhythm. She had found a clock app on the control console and set the alarm for 7:00 AM. The time didn’t seem to be all that important, but she was going to try to go to sleep at a reasonable time at night and get up when the alarm sounded.

It had been easy to set the alarm but not so easy to make the ops room dark. For the last few days she had been sleeping sporadically on the mattress and she thought that part of the problem might be that it was always light in the ops room. The lights were LED units that were sort of white in color but nothing like real daylight. The designers of the Pheia had not seen fit to put a light switch in the ops room. Kate supposed that they imagined it would be occupied all day, every day of the dive, and so there was no need to provide a way to turn off the lights.

She had spent some time at the console looking to see if the lights were programmable, but they were not. All she needed was a way to effectively cover them up but this had turned out to be a lot more difficult than she imagined. Each light unit was protected by a wire mesh screen that looked like the kind of thing you might find on a Navy vessel, and she thought that perhaps that was where they came from: at least the same sort of supplier. “Probably cost a fortune.”

The light bulbs inside the cages were LED replacements for standard bulbs. She unclipped one of the cages and unscrewed the bulb using a towel. That made it a bit darker and with all of them unscrewed it was much darker. The only sources of light now were what came in through the portal from the Pheia’s external floods bouncing back off the wall, and a glow that came up from the moon pool room below. The net effect was sort of cool.

With the external floods off it was better, but there was still light from the moon pool room. She could live with that. At least it was darker. And the moon pool light acted a bit like a night light. If she needed to get up in the night at least she could see well enough to screw the wall lights back in.

When Kate woke up she was momentarily worried by the dark. It had been many days since she had woken in the dark. She padded over to the console in bare feet, cancelled the alarm, and turned on the outside floods. She didn’t like it when she couldn’t see the wall. As the lights came on outside she could see the wall was at the right distance from the Pheia and moving at its usual snail’s pace.

She walked around the room and screwed back in the wall lights then went back to the portal chewing on a protein bar. She had nothing to do. The gas system was behaving itself. The gas mix was OK. She felt OK. “The laundry is done and the dishes are all clean,” she thought.

Kate looked at the depth indicator. “There should be some light down here. Why didn’t I notice it when the lights were out?” She decided to try an experiment and went around the room unscrewing the lights again. Then she carefully maneuvered the mattress over the hole that led to the moon pool room. Satisfied that it wouldn’t get wet again she went back to the console and shut off the exterior lights.

At the portal she cupped her hands and pressed her face up to the glass between them. She waited four or five minutes for her eyes to get used to the dark but still couldn’t see anything.

Her interest was aroused now. There should be a deep blue light from above at this depth. It was doubtful there was much life, if any, on the wall but going for a look was more interesting than sitting around listening to the iPod.

Kate debated sending a message to the surface. If she sent one telling them of her plans they might argue that the dive was an unnecessary risk. “So what? What are they going to do about it?” In the end she thought it was better if she just went.

In the months that led up to the expedition, the scientists had accumulated a long list of equipment to take with them to record the life around the deep sea vents. Apart from cameras, they also had sound equipment, a variety of sensors for salinity, pressure, temperature, radiation and light level. In addition they had planned to use the comms equipment in the dive masks to record audio from all the divers. This was the modern equivalent of taking notes and was a lot more efficient than trying to write detailed information down on a dive slate.

But Kate had none of this equipment in the ops room and she doubted that the cameras had survived the flooding since they were all stored in plastic Pelican cases until the dive when they went into waterproof enclosures. She had seen the enclosures in the storage room along with the cameras in their cases. It occurred to her that there might have been someone using a camera on the check-out dives they had done, but she couldn’t remember. Even if someone had a camera, where would it be now? Probably lying on a shelf somewhere full of sea water. Was it worth searching for one that worked?

“Nope. Let’s do this the old fashioned way.”

She walked over to the console and set the ascent rate to zero then waited at the portal to make sure the Pheia stopped moving. She didn’t like the idea of being left behind if she found something interesting to look at. Then she changed her mind. There was no sense in prolonging the trip to the surface, and the ascent rate was so slow, small mollusks could keep up. With the ascent rate set back to normal, the Pheia started the its way up again. Then she shut off the outside lights. She wanted it dark when she went out there.

Kate swapped the partly empty tank for a full one in the scuba gear and suited up.

Just before she got in the water it occurred to her that the light from the ops room would shine through the portal onto the wall. Did that matter? It was 30 feet away. She was reluctant to unscrew all the lights. She didn’t want to come back to a dark room after the dive.

Kate dragged the mattress over to the portal and stood it on end against the wall, covering the window. “That will have to do.”

Down in the moon pool room she spent a few minutes collecting all the dive slates from the BCs. It made for quite a collection. She clipped them to her own BC. She also added a couple of spare flashlights. The LED lights were bright and used almost no power compared to the older type that had incandescent bulbs. The dive light she’d been using was fine but the idea of being outside with no light gave her the creeps.

The last thing she did was to tie one end of a length of line to the ladder in the moon pool room and the other end to her BC. If something went wrong, she didn’t want to end up separated from the hab.

Beneath the hab, the only light was from the moon pool room above. In the clear water it had almost nothing to reflect off, and so, as Kate moved out from the entrance under the weight stack, the light disappeared quickly. She had kept her dive light off deliberately to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. It was very creepy.

She put her hand over the flashlight lens and turned it on. The light shone through her fingers making the skin glow red. Avoiding looking at the light, she pointed it in the direction where she thought the wall was, and uncovered it. There was something very different about diving in the dark. Despite numerous night dives, Kate always found the experience eerie. It wasn’t so bad when she was close up to a coral head or something else she could observe, but to be free floating in such a black sea with nothing to reflect the light back made her wonder what else was out there. “Don’t be a ditz. There is almost nothing out here at all. You’ll be damn lucky to see anything.”

Kate looked at where the wall should be, and as her eyes got used to the dark she could see it faintly. She made a few kicks and adjusted her buoyancy so that at mid breath she was exactly neutral. She was always relaxed in the water and breathed quite shallowly which meant that once her buoyancy was right she could just hang there motionless.

She kicked again and floated closer to the wall until it was about 10 feet away. Rotating, she looked at the Pheia. The light reflected off the metal surfaces making it very bright in the darkness. She clicked the flashlight off. There was just a little light leaking around the mattress and lighting up the edges of the portal. That gave her a good visual reference and she was glad she’d left the lights on in the ops room.

Kate looked up and inhaled enough to float up to be level with the top of the hab. She looked down at the portal. It was just possible to see it faintly. Rotating she looked at the wall and turned the light on again briefly. The dive light illuminated an area 10 or 15 feet across. It was mostly just the grey rock she’d seen passing by for days.

Satisfied she wasn’t moving, she turned the dive light off and hung still for a minute as her eyes adjusted to the total dark. Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head up. When she opened her eyes again she could see a faint dark blue glow. It was the most exciting thing she’d seen in days and it made her heart race. She felt water moving over the fine hairs on the back of her hand. She was floating up. Consciously she breathed out and stopped the ascent. It was so wonderful to see the light above. She imagined the surface of the sea. Warm. Bathed in brilliant sunlight. A slight swell on the surface. The surface barge waiting up there somewhere.

She tried to see if she could see the barge but there just wasn’t enough light to show any detail — just a faint glow of very deep blue.

Kate felt a tug on her BC. She had been floating up again and the safety line had pulled tight. She inverted and finned down clicking on the flashlight as she descended. The Pheia shone brightly in the light. She rotated slightly and looked at the wall. There was a small cave just level with her and she swam slowly over to it. She had about 20 feet of slack line, which was enough to get into the back of the cave and look around. It was 10 or 15 feet tall at the opening and maybe eight feet high at the back.

Kate pulled up the collection of slates and wrote on the top one: “Cave.” Then added some details about the size and orientation. Normally she would have taken a set of photographs. Without a camera she tried to record her impressions. At times like this she wished she could draw. Sure, she could draw a map or do rough shapes of objects just like most people could, but she couldn’t draw faces, flowers or anything approaching an impression of an outdoor scene. Her talents lay elsewhere.

She began a methodical examination of the cave. There was almost nothing to see. It was the same rock as the rest of the wall with the same layer of sandy dust on the floor that covered the wall. The dust was a mixture of crushed rock — perhaps the work of ancient parrot fish above, and biological matter that had come down with the rock.

Kate leveled herself out horizontally and breathed out so that she descended to the floor of the cave slowly enough to not disturb the sand. As her chest touched down she exhaled fully and dumped the rest of the gas from her BC. This was one of her favorite things to do on a dive. Just lie on the bottom and look in detail at everything in front of her. On a shallow dive in the Caribbean she would see numerous types of life. It was everywhere in the warm, sunlit waters.

Down here there was very little to see at all. There wasn’t enough light or heat to support plant life on a scale she would be able to see.

After a few minutes of looking at everything in her field of view she inhaled a full lung-full of gas and floated up slowly. When she was a few feet above the bottom she added gas to the BC and breathed normally again. She kicked gently towards the side of the cave. On the wall of the cave she saw a small movement. Her heart raced. Something was alive down here! Kate knew that various animals and fish lived in the sea well down below 10,000 feet. They survived by filter feeding, or eating each other, depending on their size and needs. But it just seemed unlikely that any of them would happen to be in this cave.

As she got closer she could see that it was an isopod about three inches long and it was not alone. She saw what seemed to be a small colony of them. She wrote down everything she could think of to describe them, their number, sizes and how they were arranged on the wall. She was happy. A discovery. Maybe not of any real value to anyone but her, but for now this was exciting science. This was what she lived for on expeditions: to find something that might be new, or just unusual in the location that she found it. She was sure these isopods were not uncommon but the combination of the very sparse environment of the cave and the lack of light made it an interesting find.

Kate attempted to draw one of the isopods on a clean slate. Inwardly she sighed. “Oh for a camera.”

She spent half an hour watching the isopods and trying to see what their food source might be. She also tried to see why they were only in this one place in the cave. The wall on the other side was bare, as was the back wall.

She was getting a little chilly now and thought she’d scan the roof of the cave again a bit more closely then go back to the hab to warm up. She turned to shine her light on the Pheia to see how much it had risen and was shocked to find a four foot long frilled shark right behind her. She breathed in heavily and banged her head on the cave roof as she floated up. The shark swam around her to the back of the cave.

Kate forced herself to calm down and breathed out enough to float down a little. Then she dumped some air from her BC and finned quietly for the cave mouth. She shone her light on the shark, which completed its tour of the cave and swam out past her into the dark sea.

Kate hung in the water at the entrance of the cave for a minute shining the light out into the dark, but the shark was gone. She pulled up a slate and wrote a note: “Frilled shark. 4+ feet.”

The Pheia had risen so that the weight stack was now almost level with the cave mouth. Kate kicked out from the cave and angled her body down slightly towards the bottom of the weights. She glided easily under the structure and up into the moon pool room. She shone the light around inside the room to light up the few dark spots in case the shark had decided that this too might be an interesting cave to go hunting in. Kate knew the shark wasn’t dangerous to her. At least not in any way other than to be a bit scary when encountered in the dark. In fact, she thought that the combination of the isopod find and the shark sighting made the whole dive a great idea.

Back in the ops room she took off her suit and hung it up. She unclipped the stack of dive slates from her BC and went over to the control console intending to write up a detailed description of the dive and her finds. She had just entered the current depth and started writing a description of the cave when the ELF radio sounded the arrival of a new message.

For the past two hours Williams had been watching the weather forecast. It was not unusual to have a storm come through at this time of year, and it was probable that the one currently between Haiti and Jamaica would miss them completely. Its current track predicted that it would pass 50 to 60 miles south of their position. What worried Williams was that the reports from Haiti ,where it had passed over a few hours before, were very severe. If the storm’s track shifted to the north, even slightly, it might hit Grand Cayman. The barge’s position in West Bay should protect it from the heavy seas which would hit Cayman’s East end first, but once the storm was on top of the island, if it lingered there, things could get bad very quickly. The vessel was large enough that it could ride a moderate sea, but strong sustained winds would make it hard to keep on station. Not to mention the potential for sea sickness amongst the crew from the mainland. If the conditions looked like they might be bad then they would probably have to motor around to the lee side of the island and given the barge’s only moderate speed, they were going to have to depart at least a couple of hours before the storm arrived.

For the moment, the weather was calm and sunny, but Williams knew that if they had to move they might lose ELF contact with the Pheia and he didn’t want to have to tell Kate they were leaving in a hurry. He sent a message with his assessment of the situation to the Pheia and wondered what Kate would make of it.

Kate read the message. “Great. No support if the storm hits.” she thought. But she wasn’t really worried by the message. These tropical storms rarely lasted more than a day, and she was still several days from the surface. “They’ll be back when it’s over.”

She typed up as detailed an account of her dive as she could manage. With nothing else to do it helped pass the time. She even went though the text when she had finished the first draft and edited it. Satisfied it was a solid report of the isopods and shark, she sent it to the surface. “Pity there were no pictures.”

Williams expected some sort of question from Kate about the storm and was quite surprised an hour later to be reading a report of a dive she had done. He was partly horrified that she was outside for no good reason, but very interested in what she had found. He didn’t know how to respond, and decided to talk to Subramanian about it.

Williams found Subramanian in the galley where he seemed to spend most of his time talking to the engineers. They were a new breed for him. Most of his research had been conducted on military personnel. These engineers thought quite differently from the soldiers and sailors he had experimented on. He had made up a joke for himself but was not yet ready to share it with them: “How do you stress an engineer? Give him a week’s worth of work and ask for it in two days.” This seemed to be a recurring theme in their conversations. According to them, they were often asked to do work in time periods much shorter than they thought it should take. And it wasn’t because they were lazy. Evidently both Leclerc and Babin worked very long hours for a fixed salary. What drove them crazy was having to compromise on quality. They would put all kinds of effort into completing a project so long as they could complete it the way they thought it should be done. And what they seemed to detest the most was a non-engineer as a manager. They had great distain for managers in general who they considered to be parasites attached to their project, rather than a form of help. Subramanian was in the middle of a discussion about the merits of management when Williams arrived. Williams had a somewhat distressed look.

“What is the problem Dr. Williams?” Subramanian asked.

Williams took a moment to respond. He was debating asking to talk to Subramanian in private but changed his mind.

“It seems that Dr. Moss went on what I might call a science dive. She made some quite interesting discoveries. I am, on the one hand quite excited by the news of what she found, but I am very worried about her making unnecessary dives. I was going to ask her not to do any more dives but I thought I’d ask your opinion first.”

“What was the tone of Kate’s message?”

“It was in the form of a scientific report.”

“Yes, I’m sure it was, but what was the tone? Did she sound excited or bored or frightened?”

“Oh, I see. Yes, she sounded very positive. I suppose that was what made me excited when I read it.”

“Then I think you should make a comment on the content of the report but not on the dive itself. That way you are providing positive reinforcement for her work, but not condoning or censuring the fact that she conducted the dive. I suspect that Kate went out because she is simply tired of sitting in the habitat doing nothing. She is evidently a competent diver and the risk of this dive seems to me to be way below the risks associated with getting the vessel to the surface.”

Williams thought about what Subramanian had said. He had not been thinking about how Kate was spending her time.

“OK, that’s a good idea, but do you think I should discourage her from doing more dives?”

“Oh, certainly not. I am quite sure that Kate’s response to that would be to go out on another dive right away.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Kate does not care for authority figures, and you would be setting yourself up in exactly that position.”

Williams raised his eyebrows.

“Dr. Moss works for me,” he said.

“Yes, she does, but in her day to day work she generally sets her own goals etc., yes?”

“Yes, she does. I approve the general direction of the research she does and help with funding, but you are right, she then decides for herself how she will conduct the research.”

“Then I think you should consider the next few days as a research project, and let Dr. Moss find her own path through them. The reality is that we need her mentally alert in case there is another problem she needs to deal with, and having her mind engaged in some research which she finds interesting will help pass the time, and keep her in top mental gear.”

“I’m just worried about her.” Williams replied.

Babin and Leclerc had been following the conversation in silence. Babin waited until Williams had left then added her own disdainful comment. “Managers!”

Back in the comm shack, Williams asked if he could get an electronic copy of Kate’s transmission. The tech had him enter his email address and tapped a few entries on the screen to send the text.

“There you go.”

“Thank you,” Williams replied and left to get his laptop.

Back in the bunk room, Williams reviewed Kate’s paper. It was well written and she had obviously taken great care to edit it. It was a shame it had no pictures, but both the isopod and the frilled shark had been photographed before and he was sure he could find some images online somewhere. The number of scientific deep dives was very limited. He knew only too well how much it cost to equip an expedition like this. It was no surprise that when one was conducted it found something new or at least interesting. Mankind knew more about the surface of the moon that it did about the deep sea. He’d repeated that line at more fundraising events than he could remember. Kate’s paper was evidence that there were still things to discover and all the more reason to repair the Pheia and strive to conduct more deep sea exploration expeditions.

Williams was quite excited about the idea of doing some fund raising for a follow-on expedition, but then he came to his senses. Most of the Pheia’s crew was dead. Kate was the only survivor. The press would write this up as a disaster, and the public, who Williams generally referred to as the great unwashed, would see the entire thing as a waste of lives, money and time — in that order. The only upside to the situation was that the bulk of the people who donated money for deep sea research were well educated, intelligent people with a sense for adventure. He’d had many donors ask if they could go as part of the crew. To them it was as exciting as getting a seat on a rocket ride into space. They would mourn the loss of life and hand over more money. So far as the loss of life was concerned, expedition members were in the same camp as test pilots, astronauts, and race car drivers. Death was a consequence of what they did when the odds ran out. And for most of them, they’d also tell you what they did was safer than driving a car on the public roads.

He was thinking about memorial services for the crew when the boat captain put his head around the door.

“The storm track has shifted. I’d say we’re 50/50 in terms of being able to stay on site.”

Williams thanked him and went back to making notes about the services they would need to conduct.

Storm

(1,500 Feet)

Babin woke up when a coffee cup fell on the floor and broke. She had been dreaming of swimming with a huge shoal of small fish above a brilliantly lit coral reef; her body moving to and fro with the action of the waves in the shallow water.

When she opened her eyes she could see nothing in the dark room, but her senses told her that the barge was wallowing in a heavy sea.

She sat up slowly and swung her feet out onto the cold floor, then reached out and flipped on the light

The wind was howling outside and she could hear voices shouting. Her watch said 5:00 AM. She was inclined to go back to sleep. Her normal hour for getting up was still a long time away, but the raised voices outside made it sound like there was a problem. She heard mattress springs moving above her and a voice. “Bon matin.” Leclerc was awake.

Babin had spent a lot of time on her uncle’s shrimp boat when she was young. She liked the motion of the sea and she was constantly impressed by the power of the waves. A boat caught between a wave and a rock was usually about to get damaged. Boats were sometimes even crushed just by the waves alone, although seas big enough to do that were more common in the North Atlantic than in the Caribbean. She had worked on a job on the Grand Banks one summer and although the weather never got really bad, the seas had been huge at times. To look at them as they approached the boat was both exciting and terrifying at the same time. The really big rollers had a deep blue at the base as they rose, the wind ripping water from the tops and spraying her in the face where the salt accumulated in the corners of her eyes.

Learning about the physics of waves at school had been one of the things that pushed Babin towards engineering. At first it seemed inconceivable to her that waves could be described with mathematics, and in truth, the waves in the sea needed a lot of math, but the overall concept of wave motion and the interaction of waves with stationary objects and other waves could be described quite well with quite simple equations.

The boat rocked again as Leclerc climbed down from the upper bunk. He wobbled and fell on the deck groaning. He hadn’t realized he was sea sick until he tried to stand up.

Babin recognized the symptoms immediately. The look on Leclerc’s face was enough to tell her he was in a bad way. She grabbed him by one arm. “Get your coat on. We’re going outside.”

“Non. Merci. Je vais rester ici.”

Babin laughed.

“No, you really don’t want to stay in here. You need to get outside where you can see the horizon.”

She helped him into his coat and put her own rain gear on. Out on the deck the combination of rain, wind and waves in the early morning light took her right back to her childhood fishing trips.

Babin looked at the sea. It was a lot bigger than she had expected. It must have picked up during the night. She turned to Leclerc. “Right now Kate is having the best ride.” She smiled at him.

“Yes, I will trade with her now.” Leclerc replied and promptly doubled over and threw up on the deck.

Babin grabbed him around the waist and moved him to the railings. “Stay here.” she told him. “Try to watch the horizon. It will help your brain reconcile the images from your eyes with the signals from your ears.”

Leclerc retched again but nothing came up. “Quoi?”

“Just look at the horizon. You’ll feel better. I am going to get you something to help.”

“OK. Je vais rester ici.”

Babin made her way to the galley, which was empty. The better sailors were no doubt still in their racks, she thought. She rummaged around and found what she was looking for. On the way out she grabbed a bottle of water.

Back at the railing she saw Leclerc was staring at the horizon.

“I’m back,” she said to him. “Here. Drink some water and eat this.” She offered him the bottle of water and the sandwich she had made.

He drank a mouthful of water and handed the bottle back to Babin.

“I don’t want to eat anything.” he told her.

“I know you don’t, but you need to have something in your stomach or you will damage the lining if you keep retching. Trust me, you’ll like this.” She offered him the sandwich again.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Strawberry jelly.”

He just looked at her.

“I learned about this from an English sailor. They call it a strawberry jam sandwich, but it’s the same thing. It is easy to eat because it’s sweet. The bread gives it some bulk you can throw back up if you need to. But the best part is that it tastes the same going down as coming back up!”

Leclerc retched again and all the water came back up.

“Please,” Babin said. “You must drink and eat.”

Leclerc drank some more water and took a bit of the sandwich. The sweet jelly tasted good.

He watched the horizon. “It is getting darker again.”

Babin turned to see where he was looking. Straight into the wind. The clouds were very black in that direction. If this kept up, she was sure they would have to move off station. There was really no risk to the steel-hulled barge but the thrusters would find it difficult to maintain the boat’s position if the wind got much stronger. And most of the crew would soon be useless. She thought about Kate again. It would be calm and peaceful down there for now. But if the sea was still rough in a few days when the Pheia surfaced, things would be very different. She was thinking about the damage Kate had described. If the tunnels had separated, the Pheia could break up in even a light sea, let alone what they had now. Kate would need to leave the hab well before it got to the surface. She decided to go and wake up Williams and talk to him.

When Babin got to Williams’ quarters, the bed was empty. She made her way to the galley where she found some of the crew. They told her he was with the captain on the bridge.

“Yes, of course.” She thanked them and headed for the bridge.

Williams and the barge captain were looking at the weather display when Babin arrived.

“Good morning miss Babin.”

“I’m not sure I’d say it was all that good Dr. Williams. If this keeps up, the Pheia is going to break up when it gets to the surface.”

Williams nodded. “The captain and I were just talking about the weather. It looks like this will pass sometime tomorrow. That should allow us to send down divers and attach a line to the Pheia.

The captain added: “I am confident we can maintain station in this wind. So long as it doesn’t pick up any more, we’ll be fine here.”

Babin addressed Williams. “Leclerc was retching his guts up but I’ve got him outside and fed him. I think he’ll live.”

Williams smiled. “I suspect he will not be the only one today. Some of our academics do not like boats very much.” He grinned. Williams was enjoying himself in the same way that Babin was. Some wind and a bit of a swell was all it took.

Babin grinned too. “Brings back my childhood.” she said. Then added: “I need to work with Leclerc on a sling design for the Pheia. I want to put something together that distributes the lifting forces properly but which does not do any more damage than is already present.”

“What is wrong with the system we used to put it in the water?” Williams asked.

“Nothing at all, except that when we designed that, the two cylinders were separated by the two tunnels. Now that the tunnels have become detached the cylinders will pull together as we lift the rig. I want to stop that from happening. It’s not complicated. I will make something from the wire and fittings we brought with us. I can make it from the design plans but the divers will need to be instructed as to how it needs to be attached, and I probably need to include some way to alter lengths and so on. Since I have no real data on how the two cylinders are separated, I will have to allow for the worst case I can think of which means quite a bit more cable. If the separation is not that bad, that means a lot of slack.”

“Yes, I understand.” Williams replied. “By the way, I have sent a message to the Pheia explaining that the divers expect to connect the line when it reaches one thousand feet. The divers are happy with that depth. They will return to the surface in the Pheia. That gives us a day and a half or two days. Something like that.”

“OK. We’ll be ready well before then,” Babin replied, and left to discuss the details of the lifting rig with Leclerc.

Leclerc was still holding the railing and staring out at the horizon when Babin found him. He had the hood of his rain jacket up. His skinny white legs and bare feet made him look like a garden gnome.

“How are you feeling?”

Leclerc turned and looked at her. “Not so bad now. The food has helped. But I have just fed it to the fish.”

Babin laughed. “OK, that’s as expected. If you feel up to it I’d like to talk about the sling design. We need to make it adjustable so the divers can fit it properly.”

“Oui. I had been thinking the same thing. But I do not think I can be inside.”

“That’s OK. You stay out here. I’m going to rough out a design or two. When I have them I’ll show them to you.”

Leclerc looked at her and laughed. “But it is raining. Your computer will not like that.”

“I thought of that. I think we can sit in the small supply container. It is fairly close to the center of the ship and the doors face the railings. It will provide enough shelter from the rain that is coming in from the other side of the ship. It also has the materials we will need. We can work in there.”

“OK. Yes. Let’s go.”

Leclerc let go of the railing, steadied himself, and the two of them walked across the ship to the small container. As they were crossing the deck, Leclerc retched again.

“May I have another sandwich?” He asked.

Babin laughed. “Of course. I’m glad you like them. I will bring it with the computer.”

Leclerc was happy to have something to do. It took his mind off the awful feeling in his stomach. When they had first come out to the barge, he had been offered a Dramamine patch but had declined it, not wishing to seem weak. He was regretting that now, and wondering where they were kept. They would be inside somewhere, of course and he had no intention whatsoever of going back inside the structure until the sea was flat calm. He would stay out here for days if that was what it took.

He opened the doors to the small container and locked them back to the sides, then stood in the opening facing the sea. He was out of the rain now and pulled his hood down. It was actually quite warm now that he was out of the wind. He grabbed one of the folding chairs from the workbench inside and set it in the doorway. Sitting there, watching the clouds on the horizon, he felt much better. The boat was moving up and down less here than his position at the railing. He kept his eyes on the horizon and started to think about the sling design. His stomach growled. He hoped Babin would be back with his sandwich soon.

When Babin returned some time later, the rain had stopped and the sun was out. It was still quite windy and the waves on the sea were the same height, but it looked like the storm was passing. Babin guessed that it would take many hours for the sea to calm down, but at least it was sunny. It always looked better when it was sunny. She gave Leclerc his sandwich and got herself a chair.

“I have looked at the original sling design,” she began, “and I think if we cut the inside lines and insert bottle screws we can make it adjustable enough to account for the angle of the two cylinders.” She showed Leclerc a 3D model that she had set up to show how the Pheia might look with the tunnels separated in the way Kate had described. “Of course, I have no idea if these gaps are the right size but I don’t think it will matter much.”

Leclerc looked at the laptop briefly. His stomach was feeling better and the motion now felt no worse than a bad airplane flight. He could look at the screen briefly so long as he went back to looking at the horizon when he talked or listened to Babin.

“I agree with the idea. But I think we need more range of adjustment than a bottle screw will provide. Perhaps we use two in each leg of the sling?”

They discussed the design for over an hour before they were both satisfied that it would hold the Pheia at whatever angle it was currently at and prevent it from shifting as they lifted it.

In the Pheia, Kate was attempting some yoga, more out of boredom than the need to exercise. The floor was hard, cold, and slippery from the ever-present moisture which made a down dog a rather temporary pose. She could push her butt up, straighten her legs and start to push her heels down, but then her hands started to move out away from her on the floor. So she kept the poses short, and tried to ignore the unpleasant feeling of the diamond pattern of the deck plates. It was after all a ship not a gym, she thought. It felt good to stretch out. She had been sleeping in one position for a long time now, and apart from the recent dive, she was getting almost no exercise at all. And the dive hardly counted either. She moved so easily in the water, it took almost no effort.

Thinking about it, she decided that the only exercise she had gotten, was putting on the scuba gear. “Pathetic.”

Kate was used to running or riding her bike almost daily. It not only kept her fit but also helped her mental state a lot. A good bike ride could drive out thoughts of work — provided she focused on the trail. There were plenty of times when she’d been out on a run or on her bike when she realized she didn’t know quite where she was. She’d been totally zoned out thinking about her work. At one time she was determined to learn Spanish, and had tried listening to the lessons on her iPod while running. It was a complete failure. She found she could tune out the lessons within a couple of minutes of starting the run. They provided a weird kind of white noise background that enabled her to think about work, or other problems — anything but Spanish.

As she pushed up into an up-dog, she looked through the portal on the far side of the room. She could not quite see the wall, just a bright area of light reflected back from it. Something about that got her curiosity and she gave up on the pose and stood up.

At the portal, she noticed that the wall had stopped moving. Two steps over at the console she confirmed that the ascent rate was set to zero. Had she done that? No. At least she didn’t think so. No. Certainly not. The last thing she had done at the console was what? She couldn’t remember.

Her heart started pounding. “Calm down.” she said aloud, and tapped the menu until she had the gas system page. A brief scan showed everything was green. She held her hands out in front of her and studied them. They had a slight shake. Not surprising given her heart rate.

Kate closed her eyes and breathed deeply forcing her breath out between her lips in long, slow cycles. She felt her heart slow down and her composure return. When she opened her eyes and looked at her hands again they were steady. “HPNS?” she thought. The depth indicator showed a little under 1,400 feet. That made her feel better. Not only was she getting closer to the surface but she was now at a depth where the hydrogen in the mix wasn’t such a necessity and she would not need to inject herself with the meds again. That alone, was worth being happy about. She didn’t like injections when someone else was doing them, and she had found that they were worse when she had to do them herself.

“So why have we stopped?”

She closed her eyes again and listened for the noises of the drive motors. They were still there holding the Pheia motionless. Kate could hear the occasional bursts of activity that corrected for drift or changes in attitude of the hab. So the drive system was operating OK.

Out of the portal, the wall was where it had been for days. Kate pressed her face against the plastic and looked up. The wall disappeared up into darkness as far as she could see which wasn’t far past where the top of the hab was.

Back at the console she opened the log screen and scrolled down to the last entries. There it was. “Ascent halted. Overhead obstruction.”

“Oh crap. What now?”

She tried looking up from the portal again but there was nothing to see.

Her options seemed limited. She could try to manually move the Pheia out away from the wall and see if she could restart the ascent. Or she could go out there and see what the problem was. The dive was not very enticing so she toyed with the idea of moving the Pheia laterally. Or maybe down a bit and then out a way? Her mind went into overdrive thinking of all sorts of obstacles that could tangle up the top of the Pheia. “OK, we need to go and look.”

On the support barge, Williams was on the bridge with the captain and the sonar operator.

“So it’s stopped moving? Is that what you are saying?” Williams asked.

“No, not exactly. We were tracking the Pheia based on Doppler changes in the sonar signal. It’s very close to the wall so a direct ping response isn’t very reliable. We detect it only because it’s moving. And now the Doppler computation shows zero. So it’s either not there or it’s stopped moving.”

“Very well.” Williams replied. “I will send a message and ask what is happening.”

“I already asked the comms guy to do that.”

“Hmmm. And you have had no reply I assume?”

“Right.”

“OK, then I suppose we must wait and see if it starts moving or Dr. Moss sends us a reply.”

When the ELF radio in the Pheia announced the arrival of the new message Kate was already on her way down through the moon pool exit.

As she followed the now very familiar route out from under the weight stack in the direction of the wall, it occurred to her that the Pheia had reported an overhead obstruction and stopped the ascent. Why hadn’t it done that earlier when it ran into the protrusion from the wall? That would have saved all the work on the hydrogen system.

As Kate came out from under the stack she flipped over on to her back then straightened up so she was facing the ops cylinder. She looked up and to her surprise saw a huge shadow against the faint blue of the surface. Whatever it was, it was enormous. She looked towards the wall, which angled away from her dramatically into some kind of shelf.

A few feet further up, her dive light illuminated the obstruction which took on the familiar form of a sunken vessel. She couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but she could see some kind of superstructure on the far side. She was looking at the bottom of the keel and part of the side of the hull. The part that was visible stuck out from the wall at least sixty feet. As she drew up level with the top of the hab she shone her light along the bottom of the hull and traced it back towards the wall. The light was too weak to see very far so she swam towards where the ship rested on the ledge in the wall.

It was at least 150 feet long and looked to her like some sort of cargo vessel. The Pheia had come up right under it and was now hovering about ten feet below the hull. She still couldn’t figure out why this had triggered the alarm in the Pheia but the wall protrusion had not. Perhaps the rock just hadn’t stuck out far enough?

Kate swam over the top of the edge of the wall following the line of the ship’s hull about 20 feet from it. The hull soon curved away to reveal a broken propeller and a few feet further the wall ascended vertically again. The ship was resting on a huge ledge.

She swam around the stern, then went up over the top of a second propeller and around to the top of the ship which was lying on its port side. She swam along parallel to the deck, which had three large cargo hold openings. Most of the superstructure was missing. It looked very mangled; presumably as a result of sliding down the wall.

When she reached the bow she swam down under it and stopped. The Pheia was below her and towards the wall. Her heart jumped when she realized she wasn’t tied to the Pheia. “That was stupid.” At least it was still there.

Once she was on top of the ops cylinder, she tried to gauge how far she would need to move the Pheia to clear the ship. She looked out away from the wall into the darkness. “OK dummy. We have lots of space.”

Back in the ops room, Kate debated the merits of sending a message to the surface asking for instructions versus simply moving the Pheia without their guidance. She had spent quite a bit of time looking at all the control systems in the past few days. She was familiar with the vertical ascent rate controls and where the wall lateral separation value was entered. “It can’t be that hard.” she said aloud, and decided to do what she had done when Boris was trapped and just set up a larger separation value from the wall and see what happened.

On the bridge of the support barge the sonar let out a ping and everyone looked at it.

“What was that?” Williams asked.

The sonar operator was already looking at the display.

“We got a direct return from something. It’s at the right depth for the Pheia but it’s not right.”

“Why not?” Williams asked.

“Sorry. It might be right. It’s just different. This is a clear response with no Doppler shift. The only way we could get that is if the Pheia was a long way from the wall.”

“It’s not moving up?”

“No. Doesn’t appear to be. The echoes we are getting show no change in depth. No. Wait. It’s moving up again. We have a definite Doppler shift now.”

“So it’s ascending the wall again?” Williams asked.

“It’s certainly ascending. It must still be at least a hundred feet from the wall. It’s come up two or three feet as I’ve been watching it.”

Williams found the lack of details frustrating. Why hadn’t Kate answered his message. What was going on down there?

“I’m losing the reflections again now. The Doppler shift is still the same. I’d say it’s returning to its position next to the wall.”

“Very well.” Williams responded. “I’m going to try to send another message. Please let me know if anything changes.”

He left the bridge for the comms shack. When he got there the technician looked at him and told him there was a message for him. Williams went to the ELF radio console and looked at the message: “Got stuck under a boat. Moved out to clear it. On my way up again.”

Williams sighed. “What boat?” he said aloud.

“Lots of wrecks around this wall sir.”

“Yes, well I’m just glad the Pheia isn’t one of them.”

Waiting

(1,200 Feet)

There was a lot of activity on the surface barge. Babin and Leclerc had modified the Pheia’s lifting harness so that it could be adjusted for the angle they thought the two cylinders were now at. They had also manufactured several straps from steel cable which would be used to stabilize the cylinders so that they would not shift when the whole rig was lifted from the sea.

The lifting cables and straps were laid out on the deck and Babin was explaining to the dive team how they were to be attached.

Leclerc was a different man. The sea had only a slight swell to it and the sky was almost clear. The hot sunshine felt wonderful to him after the misery of the rain and sea-sickness. He was back to enjoying his work again. He had also developed an addiction to strawberry jam sandwiches, which now formed the bulk of his diet.

The dive team leader, Morrison had not looked very happy all the time Babin was talking. When she asked for questions, he had said nothing but just looked down at the cables on the deck shaking his head.

“Mr. Morrison. It is clear you are not happy. Can you tell us why please?”

Morrison looked up.

“It’s not a matter of being happy or not. It’s whether we can fit these to the structure. None of us have ever seen the sub in person and we don’t have a way to practice the attachment so we’ll be doing this for the first time in a thousand feet of water. What’s not to be happy about?”

“I completely understand your concern and if I were in your position, I’d probably say the same things. All I can say again is that Leclerc and I know the Pheia very well and we have designed the lifting cables to compensate for a much wider range of tilt angles than we believe is possible. We have made the stabilization straps to also be very adjustable and a lot longer than we think they need to be.”

“It’s the think part that bothers me.” Morrison replied.

Babin grinned at that.

Williams had joined the group while Morrison was talking. He moved forward and spoke up.

“As you all know, the Pheia is damaged, and Dr. Moss is alone down there. We would like to secure the hab as soon as possible and thus we plan to be there when it reaches a thousand feet, which Mr. Morrison assures me is a workable depth for the dive team. If things go well, the dive team attaches the cables and joins Dr. Moss for the rest of the trip back to the surface. If there is a problem, the dive team surfaces and we re-assess the situation. We still have three or four days before the Pheia is at the surface, and if necessary we could have it hover safely below the surface while we re-work the lifting rig. And in that event, we’d bring Kate out and do a swim ascent for the final hundred feet or so. I’m sure she’d be out well before that if we’d let her. I think we all understand the complexity of the situation, the risks and the consequences of any problems that arise. However, these are cards we’ve been dealt and we must play them as best we can.”

Babin nodded at him. She wanted to say, “rah rah.” but thought better of it. She wasn’t sure everyone would see the humor.

Most of the divers nodded at Williams too.

Morrison addressed him.

“Yes, we all know the facts. I was just letting my mouth run a bit. We’ll follow the plan and see where that goes. This is what we do.”

Williams liked Morrison. He’d met him in the U.S. a year or so before on a different project. Morrison was a commercial diver with a lot of hours in the water. That was rare these days when ROVs were used whenever possible. Divers were expensive to operate and had very limited working times at depth, unless complex and expensive gas and decompression systems were available. He didn’t know any of Morrison’s team but he doubted Morrison would be working with them if they we’re worth their salt.

On the Pheia, Kate was watching the wall through the portal again. Moving the hab out around the shipwreck had been very easy. She had simply dialed in a large separation from the wall and waited while the Pheia adjusted its position. She had watched from the portal as the wall faded into darkness. With the exterior lights off, she had tried again to see the surface but it just looked black when she tried to see up. She had turned the lights back on just as the Pheia came level with the shipwreck. It was fascinating to see it as she moved slowly past. In the very clear water it looked like a toy, not the massive vessel it actually was. As it moved down below the Pheia in her view she walked back to the console and reset the wall separation to its usual 30 feet. She felt the slight shift in attitude as the Pheia moved laterally.

As she watched now, the wall crept past at its usual slow rate. It had also returned to the usual appearance: dusty grey rock with occasional hollows and protrusions.

Kate checked her depth. She had been doing that more and more often over the last day. She was nearing the depth that divers could operate and was very nervous about what would happen next.

She had not paid much attention to the recovery briefings months ago back at the institute. At the time, it had seemed to her that recovery of the hab would be anti-climactic. They would have new science data to process, and she imagined she’d have a couple of days on the beach before flying home. “So what do you want to do when we get out of here?” she asked herself.

She had been avoiding thinking about the surface as much as possible. Until recently it had been too far away, and she had no desire to jinx the ascent. But now she was just hours from seeing divers outside. It seemed surreal. After so much time alone, the idea of having company was disturbing her and she couldn’t quite figure out why.

On the surface barge Dr. Subramanian was discussing the same topic with Williams.

“Kate is probably a little anxious about what happens next. She has been alone for several days now and is about to have visitors.”

“I can’t see that being a problem.” Williams replied. “She’s told me all about her week long solo mountaineering trips. Why would this be any different? I’m sure she’s just looking forward to being back in the sunshine and getting a change of clothes.”

“I’m sure that is true, but she has been in more of a survival mode than she probably has experienced before. She has successfully managed several serious problems recently and given her nature, she is most likely worried that anyone else joining her at this point might mess things up for her. It might be helpful to send down some information about the dive team. I am thinking that we might also talk to the leader, Mr. Morrison isn’t it? About what to expect from Kate, I mean.”

Williams agreed and went to compose a message to Kate. He was sure Morrison was more than capable of dealing with any other issues that might arise.

When Kate got Williams’ long message she wasn’t sure why Williams had sent it. “So you’re sending divers? I knew that.” She read through the section about Morrison again. Evidently he was some sort of hot shot in the water. The description reminded her of Duncan. Kate had liked Duncan. He had a direct way of speaking that many people didn’t like, but Kate liked the directness and lack of fluff when he spoke. She always knew where she stood with Duncan. During dive training he had been very thorough and quick to point out errors or bad practices. He didn’t usually overstate the situation either, but, “And now you’re dead.” was one of his favorite phrases. When he used it, someone had usually screwed up badly. It had often made her smile if that someone wasn’t her. On the few occasions she had messed up and been the object of Duncan’s ribbing, she was usually too embarrassed to say more than “Sorry.” And that too was a mistake. Duncan didn’t want an apology. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to get it right. Got it? OK, let’s do it again.” That was the usual exchange.

At the end of their practice dives, Kate really did feel she was a better diver. She was more aware of herself, her equipment and those diving with her. Duncan had often pointed out that the greatest threat when diving was usually other divers, especially those with less experience. Either they got in trouble with their equipment or they did something to you, like kicking your mask off as they swam too close over the top of you trying to get to the front of the group.

The other point that Duncan had driven home relentlessly was that at the depths they would be diving, there was no option for a free ascent. He made fun of the PADI procedure: “Whistle all you like. Whistling and little bubbles will get you a hundred feet or so. And then you’re dead.”

Kate had to bring herself back to the present. When she was alone, her mind often went off on random trips. Thinking about Duncan wasn’t doing her any good. Right now she needed to focus on getting up the next few hundred feet and dealing with the arrival of the divers.

But she wasn’t sure what exactly to do. The Pheia was moving up at its usual sluggish rate. She had food and water and a delightful, almost dry mattress to sleep on. Perhaps she should vacuum and make cookies? That gave her an idea, but it would mean another dive. Looking out the portal at the wall she thought: “Nothing else to do.”

In the brilliant sunshine on the surface, the dive team were preparing for a test dive. Morrison and his team were suited up. A large steel cage was attached to the hook on the barge’s recovery crane. Everyone who wasn’t at some sort of duty station was out watching. It made Babin think of the scene in Jaws when Quint is eyeing up the shark cage. “Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water. Our shark.”

Babin looked through the railings at the sea. No sharks.

She had worked with Morrison to arrange the lifting and support cables into manageable groups. Each assembly had a small float attached to one end. The float wouldn’t be enough to lift the cable, but if the cable was dropped it would mean that it would descend very slowly. Babin hoped it would also make the cables easier to handle in the water. As the diver uncoiled the cable, it’s upper end would float up slightly helping make it obvious which was the ‘up’ end and preventing it from being tangled. Morrison had liked the idea, and Babin got the idea that he was actually impressed. It seemed to her that he mostly had to figure things out for himself and wasn’t used to getting much real help. Or maybe she just fancied him? Hard to tell. She watched him work with the other two divers to move the cables to the cage and load them onto hooks they had welded onto the outside. Each cable was then secured with a cable tie.

Babin walked over to Morrison. “You do have cutters don’t you?”

Morrison smiled at her and without breaking eye contact reached down with one hand and produced a set of large cutters attached by a short line to his gear.

“Just checking.” Babin smiled too. “I’d hate for you to get down there and not be able to get them off the hooks.

Morrison put the cutters back in their pocket. “And if those get lost I have this. He produced a huge dive knife. Not one of the dinky modern dive knives with a square tip that could be used to cut cheese providing it was pretty mild. This was a knife right out of the Sea Hunt era. He took a step back and waved it around like a sword.

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“A former Marine buddy of mine has a small business that makes them.” He put the knife back in its sheath on his leg and pulled the retaining strap back over the handle, then went back to checking out the lift cage.

When the divers were satisfied that they had all the gear stowed and their communications were working, they stepped into the cage.

Morrison gave the other two an OK and they responded with their own. Then he gave the crane operator the ‘go up’ signal and the cage lifted off the deck rotating slowly as the tension in the cable produced some torque. When the cage was about six feet up, the crane operator swung it out over the water.

Morrison checked the other divers again, and gave the crane operator the go down signal.

Babin watched the cage drop slowly into the water. The big wire spool on the hoist paid out the steel line for a long time. She tried to imagine what that felt like for the divers. They had no control over the descent. They just had to stand there and wait.

The test dive was to 150 feet. Just below the sport dive limit.

When the cage stopped descending, all three divers checked the depth and all their gauges. They had switched from air to trimix for this dive. On the rescue dive they would switch again to hydrox but much deeper than they were now.

Morrison adjusted his buoyancy so he was just floating and waited for the others to do the same.

The divers spent the next hour removing the cables, uncoiling them and checking that the floats performed as expected. Morrison was impressed that they worked exactly as Babin had said they would. He smiled to himself. This was much better than some of the commercial operations he’d worked where the equipment was often old, unreliable and not suited to the job; a side effect of trying to keep costs down. It seemed to him that Miss Babin knew her business.

They practiced attaching the cables to the dive cage. It wasn’t anything like the size of the Pheia but it allowed them to verify all the pieces worked in the water. They had tried it out on the ship twice but Morrison knew from experience that what worked on the surface sometimes threw you a curve in the water.

When they had tried out all the adjusters, they unhooked the cables, coiled them back up and put them back on the hooks on the outside of the cage in the original positions. Each one received a large cable tie to hold it in place.

There had been very little chatter over the comm system on the dive, and Morrison was pleased with that. His team knew what to do and went about it with the minimum of fuss. When they were all back in the cage he said, “Good job,” over the comms circuit and gave them a big OK.

“Morrison to surface. We are ready to ascend.”

The team listened to the response from the surface then felt the cage start on its way back up.

“Perfect.” Morrison thought. “If that’s how it goes, this will be a piece of cake.”

Kate was back in the crew quarters. She had decided to collect any personal items she could find and put them in one place. She thought that the relatives and friends of the crew might like that, and she wasn’t at all sure that the items would be preserved when the Pheia was being shipped back home. She had a large box of ziplock bags and a big plastic storage bin.

She felt bad rummaging around in the lockers but this time she had a purpose and soon left the bad feeling behind.

It was a little sad just how few items she found. Some of the crew had brought a book to read or photograph to stick on the wall but most of them seemed to have brought nothing other than clothes. If it wasn’t for the clothes, it would be hard to find any evidence of the crew at all.

Kate pulled down a photograph of an old couple from one of the bunks and tried to remember who had been sleeping there. She thought it might have been Kayla Miller, the chef. Perhaps these were her parents? She carefully pulled off the pieces of tape from the corners and dropped the photo into a bag, which she sucked the air from as she sealed it. The bag joined to small collection of items in the bin.

Kate looked at the storage bin. It was such a pathetically small collection of items. She wondered briefly if she should forget the idea. If she could only find items for one or two of the crew, how would the other relatives feel? She imagined the questions: “Surely my son had a photograph of his girlfriend?” She didn’t want any questions. It was going to be hard enough facing the crew on the surface barge, let alone relatives and friends of the dead.

She finished searching the crew area, then decided to make all the bunks up as best she could. It seemed a little OCD while she was doing it, but when it was done she felt better. As she tidied up each bunk she thought of who had used it. It was very difficult to remember who had slept where, and more difficult to know they were now dead.

As she was tidying up Boris’ bunk she found a book under the pillow. It was a translation of some of Pushkin’s poetry. Each poem was printed in the original Russian and also in English with an accompanying analysis. Kate flipped through the pages. She stopped on a poem called The Bronze Horseman. It started with an illustration. Kate read a few words of the English translation. She read a line: “tossing and turning like a sick man in his troubled bed,” and wondered if that was how Boris had felt. She doubted it. He seemed too full of himself. She wondered if perhaps Boris had been using the poems to improve his English, or perhaps even his Russian? “OK. Enough. He was just reading some poetry. Can’t fault the man for that.”

She put the book in a bag, sucked the air out and sealed it. She tossed it in the bin with the other discoveries.

When she had finished cleaning the place up, she went to her own bunk and checked she had left nothing she cared about. The bed was a mess as a result of her pulling out the mattress earlier. She rummaged through the bed sheets. Satisfied there was nothing there, she pulled off the top sheet and re-covered the bed with its blanket. She folded the sheet carefully over and over until it was about the size of the gallon bags she had, but it was too fat to fit in. She needed it dry but she didn’t need all of it so she unfolded it again and estimating where the center line was, bit hard into the edge seam, and tore it down the middle. She folded up one half and dropped it on the bunk. The other piece she folded carefully over and over until it was the size of the bag. It was still hard to get in, but it fit now. She couldn’t seal the bag. Bits of material kept getting caught in the zipper so she stuffed the bag into another one and then stood on it to squeeze the air out. Keeping her foot in place she bent over and carefully sealed the other bag. The package went into the bin with the other items.

Knowing this was likely the last time she’d see the crew room, she looked carefully around one last time. She sighed. Damn, it was just too depressing.

Kate put her dive suit on and then her scuba gear. She pushed the storage bin to the edge of the ladder hole with her foot then gave it a shove so it fell down into the water where it floated.

She followed it into the water, cracked the lid open and tipping it up so that it filled with water, then sealed the lid. It was almost exactly neutrally buoyant which made it easy to push in front of her as she swam back through the tunnel to the moon pool room.

Back up in the ops room she hung her dive suit over the pipes and then opened the bin and tipped out all the water into the ladder hole. She pulled out the bag containing the bed sheet and re-sealed the box.

She put the box in the corner with the food, then pulled out the sheet a laid it out on a dry area of the deck and went to work.

Capture

(900 ft)

As dawn broke over the island, the divers and many of the boat crew were already out on deck under the boat’s work lights preparing for the day’s dive. The surface barge sat silently on a sea as flat as glass. The wind had stopped completely during the night and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen anywhere.

Morrison looked over the side into the water. Somewhere below them was the Pheia. It wouldn’t be hard to find. They just had to drop down the side of the wall a thousand feet and there it would be. That was just over a quarter of a mile. A trip of that distance on the surface would take just a few minutes. In the sea, things were different. To deal with the increasing pressure as they descended, the dive team would change gas mixtures twice. They would rely on a collection of small mechanical parts to keep them alive. If anything failed, things could go bad very fast. But none of that worried Morrison. He’d dived past the depth they would be working today many times. The other two members of his team were equally experienced, and he trusted them implicitly. Years of working together allowed them to work cooperatively with little communication and a lot of trust.

Morrison looked out at the horizon just as someone shut off the work lights. The morning light was always spectacular, but today, the combination of the sunrise and the calm sea was perfect. Apart from a few sparse clouds on the distant horizon, It looked like it was going to be another fine Caribbean day.

He pushed back from the rail and walked over to the cage. It was time to get into the water.

On the Pheia, Kate was looking at a message on the ELF radio from Williams. “Expect divers in about two hours.” She checked the time he’d sent it and then looked at the clock. Her heart rate rose in anticipation. At the portal she checked the wall. Still there. Still creeping past. The Pheia was at about 950 feet now. Kate pushed her face to the portal and tried to look up but the angle wouldn’t let her see the surface. She imagined the faint blue glow. “Wait. Is it day or night?” she thought. She checked the clock again. It was morning. Of course. They’d want to do the dive in daylight. She did a quick calculation and figured they would take about an hour to do the descent. Maybe a little less. Given the time of Williams’ message, she had about an hour and a half to get ready. Easily enough time.

Kate pulled on her dive suit. She was very excited and her hands were shaking slightly. “Crap. Not HPNS now?” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and slowly through her nose with her tongue in the roof of her mouth. She could feel her heart beating hard. As she breathed slowly and deliberately, her heart rate started to fall. She felt calmer. When she opened her eyes, her hands were steady again. “Let’s not screw this up.”

When her dive suit was on, Kate swapped the tank in her scuba rig for a full one and checked the pressure. It was full. She put the regulator in her mouth and breathed slowly. Then she did the same with the spare. A quick check of her BC pockets verified she had everything she needed. “Well, this should be our final dive Buddy,” she said to her checklist on the wall.

Holding her fins in her arm, Kate descended the ladder until she was half way to the floor of the moon pool room. She dumped the gas from her BC and breathed out. As she descended slowly through the moon pool room she reached down and put her fins on. She felt good. It all seemed so familiar now. She gave a kick to rotate head down and dropped through the moon pool exit.

Williams was out on deck talking to Morrison and Babin. “So, you all think we are ready for this then?” he asked.

Babin nodded. Morrison said, “Yes. We are. If this goes like the practice run yesterday, we should be in good shape to start the up haul in just a couple of hours or so.”

“Good luck then.” Williams said.

Williams and Babin stood together watching the divers get into the cage. They had a speaker on the deck so the crew could hear what was happening on the comms circuit. They heard Morrison conduct the comms check, then nothing.

“They don’t talk much do they?” Williams said to Babin.

“Nope.”

“I take it, that’s your way of doing the same?”

“Yep.”

Babin grinned at him. “I like their style. They work together a lot, and all know what they are doing. It’s nice to watch a cohesive group like that in action. Very professional.”

Williams nodded. He too was impressed with the divers. He hoped it wasn’t misplaced. He wanted to get Kate back to the surface. And it would be a bonus if they could get the Pheia at the same time, although he had been wondering if it could be repaired and if anyone else would want to go down in it. He had thought about that a lot lately. Conducting operations deep underwater was always going to involve some risk in the same way that spaceflight did. There was no shortage of people applying to be astronauts. But space was more exciting in many ways than the deep sea.

As he was thinking about the future of the program, the cage lifted from the deck. He gave the divers a wave but none of them waved back. It made him feel foolish. Like a kid waving at a passing train. Diving excited him. Much more than space ever could. He had wanted to be on the Pheia’s crew for this expedition but he had no useful role to play, and there really wasn’t any justification for him to go as a tourist. It had also occurred to him that he might be dead now if he had gone. He was trying not to feel guilty about that. He felt a hand on his shoulder and it made him jump.

Dr. Subramanian was behind him. “Worried, Dr. Williams?” Subramanian asked.

“Yes. And no. Mostly yes.”

“I watched the divers yesterday. They seem to have everything in hand.”

The cage was now being lowered into the water. Williams resisted the urge to wave again. He wanted to go down with them. Not specifically to help, but to enjoy the silence of the deep. To escape his responsibilities and just float and observe.

“What is it that concerns you?” Subramanian asked.

Babin answered for him. “He’s just pissed that he can’t go with them.”

“Is that so Dr. Williams?”

Williams nodded, and watched as the cage disappeared below the calm surface of the sea.

The group of three moved to the railings and watched as the shiny metal cage descended into the deep blue water. The surface was still almost flat, and visibility was over 200 feet, so the cage was easy to see as it descended.

The deck speaker came to life. “Morrison here. All checks complete. Continue descent. Out.”

The voice of the crane operator followed him. “Roger.”

Williams watched the winch cable slowly feeding down into the water. The cage was hard to see now. Someone was talking to him but he’d missed what they had said. “Excuse me. I was thinking about the divers,” he said.

Subramanian touched his shoulder. “Perhaps some breakfast?”

“I’m in,” Babin said. “And here comes Leclerc. He’s always late, and always in need of coffee.”

Williams let go of the railing with one hand and turned to face Subramanian. “I can’t. I need to stay here.”

“And do what exactly Dr. Williams? The divers have control now. We can monitor their progress over the communications circuit. There is little you can do by watching the surface of the sea.”

Williams let his other hand drop off the railing. “Very well then. Breakfast it is.” He followed them to the galley glancing over his shoulder twice at the winch cable. He really didn’t like the feeling of being powerless to help.

In the water outside the Pheia, Kate was humming a song from Florence and the Machine about coffins. In one hand she had a collection of cable ties and in the other was the half bed sheet. She was finalizing its attachment to the top of the Pheia. She latched up the final cable tie and inhaled deeply so that she rose up several feet. “That’ll do.” she thought as she looked at her handwork, and went back to humming the tune.

Kate hung stationary in the water about ten feet above the top of the hab. She rotated slowly around taking in the dark of the sea as she looked out past the Pheia into the distance. Then the wall came into view. It was still only really lit by the Pheia’s lights and mostly just loomed there very dark except for the one bright spot. The appearance hadn’t changed much at all during the entire ascent. She thought about the shear size of it. It was much taller than El Capitan in Yosemite. She had visited the park several times and climbed part way up the wall on a guided trip with friends. She had found it exhilarating to be hundreds of feet above the ground on the side of a vertical cliff. Some other members of the small group had been less excited. They were all decent climbers but most of them had only done single pitch climbs on bolted routes. The incredible exposure on El Cap had freaked a few of them out. One of their guides had taken two of them down leaving Kate with the other guide alone on the wall. They had reached the anchors at a small ledge that was the upper end of the guided route. Kate had asked to go further but the guide told her that the route change to 5.11 quickly and although 5.11 might be OK in the gym, out on the wall, the holds were small and sharp, often causing cuts to the finger tips. Kate wasn’t disappointed. She had not expected the guide to agree. But she did convince him to stay for a while on the ledge. They had talked about climbing for a while. Other routes they had done. Then Kate had told him about her work, and about the expedition they were planning for the Cayman trench. The guide had been horrified when Kate told him the depth and explained the water pressure and the need for a complex gas mix. She thought his response was very funny as they sat on the small rock ledge with their feet dangling over the edge. “Really.” She said. “It’s no more dangerous that this.”

“This isn’t dangerous at all. I’ve free-soloed this route a couple of times.” The guide replied. “But man. Being that far down in the sea. That just feels wrong. I don’t even really like being in the deep end of the pool.”

Kate had laughed again. It was funny how different things freaked people out.

Her thoughts came back to the present. She had rotated back around so she was looking at the black sea out away from the wall. She tucked a leg back and flicked her fin so she rotated onto her back and looked up. The surface was visible now. It still wasn’t very bright but it was there. And up there were a hot shower, clean clothes and a lot of sunshine.

Kate studied the surface and thought she could just make out the shadow of the surface barge. It was an incredibly small dot. Then the dot swam away and she realized it must have been a fish. Maybe a shark. “Dummy.”

She checked her dive watch. The dive team should be about half way down by now. She looked up again but there was no sign of them yet. Her gas gauges showed that she had plenty of gas left. This was her last dive on this trip and being in the water right now felt better than sitting inside the hab waiting for their arrival. She decided to wait for them in the water.

Kate rolled over so that she was facing down again, then kicked towards the wall. “Might as well explore a bit.” she thought.

Morrison was floating exactly in the center of the cage with his eyes closed. He was going over the capture procedure in his mind.

“Hey boss. Wake up.” A voice said in his ear.

He opened his eyes. Both the other divers were hanging out of the cage door looking down.

“What’s up?”

“Bubbles.” Came the reply.

“What? A leak?”

“No. Don’t think so. Looks like a stream from an open circuit dive set. Someone is in the water.”

Morrison thought about what Williams had told him about Kate. Although the background was a little sketchy, Morrison had gotten the picture. Kate was the adventurous type with a healthy lack of respect for those in authority. He was sure that Kate was out in the water now. Perhaps waiting for their arrival. Not necessarily the brightest move perhaps, but probably what he’d do himself. “I think that Dr. Moss is looking for us,” he said over the comm system.

Morrison floated over the top of the other two divers and held the side of the cage door with one hand. “There are the lights from the Pheia. You can see them on the wall.”

“Roger that boss.”

Morrison checked the depth. They were at about 600 feet now. The Pheia was about a hundred yards below them. He looked directly at where the Pheia was and turned his helmet lights off and on slowly several times.

Kate was hanging in front of the wall looking for signs of life. She didn’t see Morrison’s signal. She had been looking up every few minutes in anticipation of seeing the divers. This time, when she looked, she saw the lights. She could just make out the bulk of the cage against the faint blue light from the surface. Her next thought was to hide. Her heart rate went up. It was like when she was out hiking alone and heard voices. She would step off the trail and stand very still allowing the other hikers to pass by. They seldom saw her, being too wrapped up in their conversation to notice the animal lurking in the trees. If someone did see her, she’d give a short wave and walked back to the trail as though she’d just had to stop to pee.

She felt the same now. She was alone in the sea and a group of unknown people were approaching. Maybe it would be fun to hide? They would find the Pheia empty. Just like the Mary Celeste: an old British ship found abandoned in the Atlantic in the 1800’s.

Kate breathed out and listened to the bubbles. She looked up to see the stream of gas above her. There would be no hiding here. In any case, it was a stupid idea.

She watched the lights above her. They were almost here. She kicked away from the wall and floated down to the top of the hab. She hooked her fins under a gas line and adjusted her buoyancy so she could stand still without moving. The cage and divers were quite clear now. She pointed her dive light at the cage and made a circle with it. She saw lights in the cage go off and on again. They saw her. She had to work hard to calm down. She was almost in tears now from the excitement. She adjusted her position again and tried to breath slowly.

Morrison and his team floated out of the cage and swam down towards the Pheia. Morrison laughed out load when he saw the message Kate had tied to the top of the hab. “WELCOME EARTHLINGS” it said. He assumed the diver floating behind the sign was Kate. He gave her an enthusiastic OK with his right hand, pumping it a couple of times.

Kate saw the OK and guessed whoever it was had read her sign. It seemed slightly childish now, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to explain it. But that could wait. She pulled out a dive slate and wrote a quick note. As the three divers arrived in front of her she showed it to the one who had given her the OK.

Morrison took the slate and read it.

“WELCOME. GOING BACK IN NOW.”

Morrison gave her an OK and tried to signal with his hands that the three of them were going to hook the Pheia to the cable.

Kate got the idea, gave an OK back. Then she kicked forward and before Morrison could react, she hugged him.

Morrison got the message. When he looked into Kate’s mask, he could see tears in her eyes. He nodded to her.

Kate let go of Morrison, looked briefly at the other two divers who were doing something outside the cage they had come down in, and then kicked over the side of the hab and let herself descend.

She was very excited and had to work hard to keep her breathing under control. Before she swam under the weight stack, she looked up just to make sure that were actually there. She saw part of the cage and a pair of fins. Real enough.

Morrison had not been expecting the hug. In his experience, hugging underwater was rare. Especially in the commercial dive business where a hug from a fellow diver would likely mean someone was going to get a beating in the locker room later. And in any case, the equipment tended to get in the way.

It hadn’t really dawned on him until then that he and his crew might just be saving Kate’s life. She had obviously survived this far on her own wits but his quick look at the damage to the Pheia told him she had been very lucky.

The Pheia was still rising slowly under its own power. Morrison had asked the surface to stop lowering the cage and start pulling it back up at the programmed ascent rate. He didn’t want it dropping down below them or banging into the Pheia while they worked.

The other two members of his team had already rigged a polypropylene line from the Pheia to the big hook that was holding the cage to the barge’s cable. That allowed them to keep it close in case the Pheia moved laterally or a current pushed on the cable.

The next step was to unhook the cables they would sling around the hab to keep the two cylinders together. The team uncoiled the cables from the cage letting them sink down the few feet that separated the bottom of the cage from the top of the two cylinders of the hab. They left the upper ends secured to the cage and then dropped down to secure the lower ends to the Pheia.

As Morrison reached the mid way point he saw the nylon line Kate had put in place. He gave it a tug. It was tighter than he expected and the knots looked good which was unusual. Most people tied pathetic knots that came undone in a slight breeze. These were good solid knots that a sailor might use. He scored another point for Kate, and set about securing the cables they had brought with them.

The team worked mostly in silence, only using the comms when one person was out of sight and needed something to happen like taking up slack. It took them less than 15 minutes to get all the cables in place and snugged up to Morrison’s satisfaction. He was very pleased with the arrangement. He keyed his comm system. “Morrison to surface. Please give Miss Babin my regards. All the support cables went in place perfectly. Moving to the hook up phase next. Out.”

He had no way to know if the surface would hear his transmission. He was too far down, but it did no harm to try. He keyed the comm system again. “Phase 2 people.”

The other two divers gave him an OK, preferring that to using the comm system.

They swam together to the top of the cage. They unhooked the lifting cables and made sure they were secure to the barge cable before letting them drop down. Once the cables were off the cage one of them triggered a gas cylinder that inflated a small lifting bag attached to the cage. When the cage was neutral in the water he shut the gas off. They uncoupled the cage from the hook on the end of the barge’s cable and swam it sideways until it was clear of the Pheia.

Morrison took a ten foot line with large clips on both ends and attached one end to the top of the cage. He signaled the other two to get the lifting cables attached to the Pheia then let out some gas from the lifting bag until the cage started to sink slowly. He swam down with it, passing it just before it reached the weight stack. As the cage started to drop past him he hooked the other end of the line to a bracket on the Pheia. He gave it a tug and hoped it would stay put. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they lost the cage and the tools in it but it would be nice not to.

He let the cage sink down until the line was taut then swam down and dumped the rest of the gas from the lifting bag. He didn’t need the lift bag expanding as they ascended as that might cause the cage to hit the Pheia.

Satisfied the cage was secure, he swam around the hab slowly rising as he went. There was no other apparent damage. When he reached the top, the lifting cables were all in place. There was a good ten feet of slack that needed to be taken up and he needed to shut off the Pheia’s drive motors so that it hung on the cable. He had to be inside to do that.

There was just one more job to do, and one of the others was doing it now. The lift cable also had a comms line attached to it and that was plugged into the port on the top of the ops cylinder.

Morrison looked one last time at the lifting cables to make sure they had them connected to the cylinders correctly. The tensioning of the cables couldn’t be done until the hab’s drives were shut off.

Morrison had planned to do that himself but now wondered if he could get Kate to do it so he could stay outside and supervise the tensioning.

He keyed the comm system. “I’m going to get the drive shut down. Hold fast until I return.”

When he saw the OKs from the others he swam down over the side of the Pheia. As he passed the portal in the ops room he looked in and saw Kate looking out at him. She waved. Waving was another thing he wasn’t used to underwater. The closest he got to waving was using the ‘iffy’ signal. He gave her an OK and dropped down below the portal.

When he got up into the moon pool room he was momentarily surprised. He had expected it to be dry then saw the gap where the connecting tunnel had parted from the cylinder and understood why it was flooded. He kicked up and grasped the ladder to the ops room.

He surfaced slowly until his head was clear of the water. He saw Kate standing above him with her hand out towards him.

Morrison held up his index finger in the now familiar, “Wait a second” sign used universally by cell phone users. Kate dropped her hand. He reached down and pulled off his fins, which he threw up onto the deck. Kate put out her hand again and he accepted it this time and climbed out onto the deck of the ops room.

It took him a minute to remove his helmet.

Kate waited until he had it off. “Sorry about the hug.” she said.

Morrison grinned. “No problem. A first time for everything. You OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” She resisted the urge to hug Morrison again.

“We need to shut off the drive system so we can adjust the lifting cables. Can you handle that?”

“Sure. I’m quite the expert now.” she grinned.

“OK, then I’m going back out to secure the lifting cables. Once that’s done we have some gear and food to bring in, and then I guess we’ll do the introductions.”

Kate smiled at him. It was hard to stop smiling. “Sure.” she said.

Morrison nodded and put his helmet back on. A few seconds later he was gone.

Kate watched his bubbles until they stopped then went to the control console and sent a message on the ELF radio. “Divers arrived. Securing lift cables. Stopping drive now.”

Once the message was on its way, she shut down the drive system. The noise of the motors stopped, and the Pheia was silent again. It hadn’t been this quiet ever. On the way down, the barge had been lowering them so they didn’t need the drives but the entire crew was on board and often talking. Now it was eerily quiet.

A few minutes later Kate felt the Pheia jump up slightly as the lifting cables took up the tension.

She checked the depth. They were at about 750 feet. Another two days or so and she would be on the surface. But she had to spend that time with the three divers that were outside. “I hope they aren’t jerks.”

Hauling Up

(600 Feet)

Williams was ecstatic when he got Kate’s message from the Pheia. It felt good to know that the cable was attached. That should mean that they would have voice comms any time now. The barge was now in control of the Pheia’s ascent. So long as the gas mix held out, it would all be over in two days.

Morrison and his crew finished adjusting the lifting harness cables in short order. They had been set to almost exactly the right length and took very little adjustment to get the tensions even. He keyed the comm system. “We’re done here. Time to get the rest of the gear and go inside.”

The other divers followed his lead down the side of the hab, past the ops room portal and the weight stack to where the cage was hanging. On the floor of the cage were a couple of large plastic bins and what looked like a large kit bag. The three divers each grabbed one item and followed Morrison’s lead to the moon pool entrance. Morrison didn’t bother to tell them the moon pool room was flooded. They saw it for themselves as they swam up into it.

Morrison dropped the bag he was carrying and pulled off his fins at the bottom of the ladder and spun around to make sure the other two were with him. They had gotten the message. No need to explain. He floated up the ladder and climbed into the ops room.

Kate had seen the bubbles and was waiting for him. As Morrison stepped onto the deck he pulled off his helmet. “Wipe your feet.” Kate said.

Morrison looked at her as water ran off his suit over the deck plates. He wasn’t sure what to say. He was fairly sure she was joking but the look on her face was dead serious. He shuffled his feet a bit and that made Kate laugh. A head appeared behind him.

Kate looked around him as the diver climbed up the ladder.

“That’s Washington” Morrison said looking at the dark face inside the mask. “Stephens is behind him.” He nodded to Washington who disappeared back below the surface. A moment later a plastic storage bin appeared in his place. Morrison grabbed it and pulled it out of the water. He did the same for the other bin and the dry-bag. Then Washington came out of the water. Morrison grabbed Washington’s gear and steadied him as he climbed out. Washington pulled off his helmet. “Thanks boss.” He looked at Kate. “Miss,” was all he said and gave a nod.

Stephens appeared in the hole and also climbed out.

When all three were in the ops room, Morrison turned to Kate. “So. How do you want to work this?”

“What do you mean?” Kate asked him.

“We brought some food.” He pointed at the bins. “And we also brought a few medical supplies, and some clothing for you. It’s all bagged up. I hope it’s still dry.”

“I have no idea.” Kate said. She was feeling a bit overwhelmed.

“OK, well, we’ll get out of these suits and you can dig through what we brought down if you like.”

Kate looked at the divers. “I’m Kate,” she said and held out her hand to Washington.

“John.” he said and shook her hand.

Stephens took a step forward with his own hand out. “Stephens,” he said and then added “Just Stephens”.

Kate shook his hand.

It all felt very weird. She had been alone in the Pheia for quite a while now and had got used to her own company and her limited set of supplies. She looked at the mattress. “I’m not sure how we’re going to share the mattress.”

Stephens laughed. “We brought our own couch,” he said as he pulled off his suit and pointed to the kit bag.

“We’ve got some inflatable pads and blankets,” Morrison added.

When all the divers were out of their suits, they hung them up next to Kate’s. Nobody gave orders. They just worked quietly and got organized. The inflatable mats went over on one side of the room and the food was unpacked and stacked next to Kate’s small supply.

“Just like camping.” Washington said.

“You backpack?” Kate asked him.

“Hell no. Too primitive for me, but I’ve done some car camping with my folks in the past. Didn’t like that much either.”

“John likes his creature comforts,” Stephens added.

Kate noticed a bottle of wine in the food pile.

“Who brought the wine?” she asked.

“That is a gift from the Indian guy.” Morrison added. “I can’t pronounce his name. Submarine or something like that. I think he’s some kind of shrink. He said he thought you deserved it. And I have to say based on what I’ve seen so far, I agree with him.”

“So what do we all do now?” Kate asked.

“Not much,” Morrison replied. “The surface has us hooked up and will control the ascent. I need to do a systems check but unless we have a gas problem, we eat, talk, play cards and wait.”

He nodded to the other two. “We’ve had our fair share of long decompression dives. The deco is usually boring and in a tight space so we have learned to adapt.”

He pulled a plastic box from one of the storage bins and unsnapped its catches. He pulled out a cardboard box. Kate saw it was a set of trivial pursuit cards. “We don’t use the board.” Morrison explained. “Just do the questions. This is a new set. Stephens memorized the last, set and kept winning, and we can’t have that.”

Stephens stepped closer and took the box. “Bastard. These are all rock music questions. That’s pretty underhanded.”

Morrison laughed. “Stephens only likes the two kinds of music. I’m not going to give them any credence by naming them.”

Kate decided that the divers were probably OK. She’d reserve judgment until they had been together for a day, but she knew she could at least kick some butt at trivial pursuit. She found a plastic bag of sandwiches in the food pile. “Cheese sandwiches! May I?”

“Help yourself,” Morrison said.

Kate pulled open the bag and took one out. “You guys want any?”

“Nope. We had breakfast before the dive.”

She took a large bite. It tasted wonderful after the dried food. “Mmmm. Yes.” She was about to say something when the speaker in the console surprised her.

It was Williams talking from the surface.

Kate looked at Morrison.

“We hooked up a comms line,” he explained. “I guess your boss wants to chat.”

“I’ve got it,” Kate said through a mouthful of sandwich, and pushed the talk button. “This is Kate.”

“Are you OK?” came Williams voice. It was like he was in the room.

“I’m fine. We just unpacked the food. Thanks for the sandwiches. I think I’ll open the wine next.”

There was a pause.

“Wine?” Williams asked

“I think Dr. Subramanian sent it. At least that’s what Morrison told me.”

“I see. I will ask him. Perhaps it’s not a good idea to drink it until you get to the surface.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “Really? You send down wine but I’m not expected to drink it? I don’t think so. Tell Dr. S thank you from me.”

Williams didn’t respond. Evidently he’d decided not to argue.

It seemed an odd way to end the conversation but Kate was more interested in finishing her sandwich.

Stephens had found some plastic cups and had poured wine into four of them. He gave one each to Kate, Morrison and Washington. “Up the rebels!” he said.

They touched cups and drank the wine.

The divers inflated their mats and sat on them. Kate sat cross-legged on her mattress recounting the events of the past few days.

“So how did you know how to build the antenna? I saw it on the way down and wondered what the hell it was,” Stephens asked.

“I just took a guess really. I knew that lower frequencies needed longer antennas so I made it as long as I could.”

Morrison watched Kate. This woman was really something. She didn’t seem affected by the experience at all. In fact, he got the impression when they arrived that she was a bit resentful of having to share her space with his crew. She seemed OK now though. In fact, she seemed to fit well with the group’s humor, which was a little unusual. They had worked together a long time and had many inside jokes. Those didn’t faze Kate at all. If she didn’t get it, she came right out and asked; and the explanations didn’t embarrass her. At one point Kate had said: “I’m a biologist. I know all about sex.” That had caused a loud burst of laughter from everyone.

The wine had definitely helped. Morrison thought that he should send the Indian shrink a thank you note. Or maybe he’d just do that in person when they got back to the top.

As the day passed, they moved from Kate’s tale of the past days to playing trivial pursuit. She turned out to be good at that too. Morrison could not figure out how someone her age could possibly know so much about rock music from decades ago.

“My parents subjected me to it as a kid. It was almost the only music I ever heard in our house. We had a server with a lot of music on it. This was before Pandora and apps like that. So I listened to what was there and got to like it. I’ve moved on a bit since then, but rock still has a special place for me.” She picked up Dr. Ford’s iPod. “It turns out that Dr. Ford had the same passions.” She laughed. “I was really grateful for this a few days ago.” And then she went quiet.

Nobody spoke. Morrison’s team knew only too well what it was like to lose someone you worked with. They all knew she was thinking about the accident.

Washington stood up. “I need to take a leak.” He walked over to the ladder and facing away from the group, peed in the water.

Stephens had opened a bag of trail mix and was about to hand it to Kate when the Pheia lurched upwards. The trial mix flew out of his hand and spilled over the mats. Williams fell over as he was trying to zip his pants up. “What the hell was that?” he shouted.

Morrison got up and went to the control console, but before he could hit the talk button, the surface beat him to it.

“Pheia, be aware we have some swell up here.”

Morrison hit the talk button. “Thanks for the notice.” he said just as the Pheia lurched up again.

“This is Williams. The captain says that there is some rough weather heading our way again. We had thought it was all passed but it seems there is a second system on track for us.” There was a pause, then “Over.”

“So how bad is it going to get?” Morrison asked.

“We don’t know. This swell caught us by surprise too. The weather is still good up here except for the sea condition. If it gets worse we may pay out some slack and ask you to re-engage the drive system until it calms down. Over”

“You want us to do that now? Over.”

“No, not yet” Williams responded. “The captain says the swells don’t look like they are going to get any worse for a while and he says the servos on the winch is coping with the smaller waves. Over.”

The deck pulled up under Morrison again.

“It’s a little rough down here. Are you folks sure the habitat can handle the stress? Over.”

“The engineers are discussing that now. I’ll let you know what we are going to do in five to ten minutes. Over”

“Roger. Out”

Morrison looked at the others. “Well, this is nice.”

Williams had got up off the floor. “You think this tub can handle this?” he asked Morrison.

“I’ve no idea, but this can’t be good.”

The hab heaved up again and this time it was accompanied by a loud groaning sound.

“This is stupid.” Kate said. “Let’s turn the drive on and make some slack. Williams will be doing his committee thing. There is no way he can make a decision in under an hour.”

Morrison took one step back from the console and waved at it with his hand. “You want to drive?” he asked Kate.

She got up off the floor just as the deck heaved again and fell down on the mattress. “Yes, I do.”

She rolled over, got up and joined Morrison at the console. She quickly got to the drive system page and set the drive ascent rate to twice what it was before. They heard the drive motors spin up.

The Pheia gradually rose in the water. It was rising faster than the cable from the barge and so it created some slack.

They all stood in the ops room waiting. The hab seemed to be stable again. “You think that’s enough?” Kate asked. She was looking at Morrison.

“Yes, probably. We only need a few feet of slack.”

Kate altered the ascent rate to the normal setting and let out a breath. Her heart was pounding in her chest. The sound the hab had made brought back memories of the accident. She was sure it had been one of the tunnel sections getting wrenched further from the cylinder.

On the surface, Babin had already decided the Pheia could not take the strain of the wrenching it was getting and had told the winch operator to hold the ascent and pay out some cable. She wasn’t specific about the amount of cable so the operator let it run out for a while then shut off the winch and locked it.

Babin was about to get on the comm system and let the Pheia know they would need to re-engage the drive system when the next wave rolled by.

The combination of the Pheia moving up and the winch line being let out had caused a loop of cable that extended down below the bottom of the Pheia. As the next wave hit, the surface barge rose up over the wave pulling the cable up rapidly. The bottom loop of the cable came up under the crew cylinder and caught on the gas cylinders on the outside of it. The energy in the wave was enormous. As the barge rose up over the wave, the cable pulled taut. The crew cylinder was pulled violently up snapping the support cables that held it to the other half of the Pheia. As the crew cylinder rotated up and away it snapped off the upper tunnel completely so that the crew cylinder was connected to the ops cylinder by only the gas and electrical connections at the top.

The wave passed by and the barge descended into the trough behind it. The cable went slack again and released the crew cylinder which floated at 90 degrees from the ops cylinder. As the cable went slack, the Pheia adjusted its attitude so both cylinders were out at an angle joining at the top to form a pyramid shape.

Everyone in the ops cylinder was lying on the floor which was at a crazy angle. The console was emitting several different alarm sounds. The force had pulled the ops cylinder sideways enough to unbalance them all at once. Stephens had hit his head on the way down and was sat on the floor with his hand covering a gash that was bleeding through his fingers.

Morrison was first up and quickly pulled up the system status screen on the console. There was so much red it was hard to find anything that was OK. “Jesus,” he said.

Kate stood next to him. “Any leaks?” she asked.

“I have no idea. Look at it. It’s all red.”

Kate pushed him out of the way and quickly went through the system screens. “No. We’re OK. The gas rates look good.”

“Are you sure?” Morrison asked over the sound of the alarms.

“Yes. I spent a lot of time learning my way through this stuff. We’re OK for now.”

Kate tapped a couple of buttons on the screens and shut the alarms off.

She was truly frightened for the first time since they had left the surface. The other problems had been like puzzles to solve, and for those there had been enough time to think.

This felt very different. This could be the end if there was anything seriously wrong with the ops cylinder.

Kate looked at Morrison hoping like hell he had some ideas. “So?” she asked.

Before Morrison could answer the console alarm sounded again.

Kate scanned the screens. “The drive system is out.”

Before Morrison could respond the comm link came alive from the surface.

“Are you folks OK? Over.”

Morrison was closest to the mike and pressed the talk button. “We’re fine. We got yanked around pretty hard and we had a lot of alarms. Don’t know the extent of the damage yet. We had the drives running when it hit and the cylinder is at quite an angle. Over.”

“This is Williams, by the way. We have some big waves up here. We are not sure if we can stay on station or not but we will stay as long as possible. Babin says we cannot afford to risk the winch getting damaged by another big wave so we need to let out some slack and have you float. Can you do that?” There was a pause. “Sorry. Over.”

Kate looked at the screens. “The drive system looks like it’s dead,” she said to Morrison.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said to her, then pressed the talk button. “Negative on the drive system. It’s out. We’ll assess what we have operational and get back to you. Over.”

There was a long delay before Williams came back. “Understood. We will do what we can from up here. Let me know if anything changes. Over.”

“Roger. Out.”

Kate had moved to the portal. The Pheia’s lights lit up the wall. “Oh crap” she said. “We’re sinking.”

Morrison hit the talk button. “Surface. We are sinking slowly. Pay out cable. I Repeat. Pay out cable. Acknowledge.”

A different voice came over the speaker. “Understood. Paying out cable now.”

From the accent, Morrison thought it was Leclerc. That was good. He would understand without a lot of conversation.

Stephens and Washington were at the portal with Kate. Stephens turned to face Morrison. “We need a lifting bag.”

“Or an anchor.” Washington added.

Morrison looked at Kate. She shook her head. “There is nothing like that on board.”

“OK, we’ll go with what we brought down.”

Stephens and Washington were already suiting up. Washington paused before he put his helmet on. “I hope you have a plan boss,” he said to Morrison. He didn’t wait for a reply. He stepped down the ladder, secured his helmet, and submerged out of sight. Stephens followed him a few seconds later.

“Good luck,” Kate said to Morrison as he pulled on his suit. He looked back at her. She seemed calm.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Yes. This is fun.” She tried to smile but couldn’t. “What do you want me to do?”

“Shit. I nearly forgot.” Morrison dug into the big kit bag and pulled out a small waterproof plastic case and a headset. “Here,” he said, handing it to Kate. “Put the headset on and turn the radio on. You should be able to hear us if you stand near the window.”

Kate took the radio and put on the headset. She turned the unit on and pushed the talk button. “Can you hear me?” Morrison nodded and Kate heard Stephens and Washington both say “Roger.”

Morrison got into the water.

Kate watched him disappear and then walked to the portal. There was nothing to see except the wall which was moving slowly past in the wrong direction. At least it wasn’t moving very fast but the Pheia had gotten much closer to the wall.

Under the Pheia, the divers swam down to the cage. Williams dumped the gas from the lift bag clipped to its top and unclipped it. “Got the bag boss.” he said over the comms.

“Roger,” Morrison replied as he pulled a spare lifting bag from the bottom of the cage.

Stephens had grabbed the small bag of tools they had left in the cage which was empty now.

Morrison gave the thumbs up sign and they all swam out from under the Pheia towards the wall ascending as fast as they could swim.

At the top of the Pheia, Morrison and Stephens attached the lift bags to the top of the ops cylinder and inflated them. The bags were small but when both were inflated the Pheia slowed down noticeably. It was still sinking, but the rate was very slow.

Morrison looked out over the side of the Pheia. The surface had paid out a lot of line and the line was quite heavy. He thought it was probably pulling the Pheia down but he couldn’t ask them to pull it up; not while the sea was still heavy. One more yank on the ops cylinder and the Pheia would be split in two completely. That made him think. “Washington. See if you can shut off the gas connections to the crew cylinder.”

“On it,” came the reply.

Stephens was next to Morrison. “What next boss?”

“I want to pull up the winch cable and see if we can secure it to the wall.”

“How the hell are we going to do that? It’s probably too heavy to swim with.”

“Right but let’s give it a shot.”

They swam down to the bottom of the Pheia leaving Washington to work on the gas lines.

When they reached the cage, the cable was still a long way down below them.

Morrison swam down with powerful kicks, Stephens right at his side.

When they reached the loop in the cable they were nearly a hundred feet below the Pheia. Morrison grabbed the bottom of the loop and started swimming towards the wall. Stephens grabbed on just behind him and followed.

They reached the wall easily. They only had to pull the cable sideways. The weight wasn’t a problem yet.

“Look for a pinnacle” Morrison said. “Let me have the cable. Go left. I’ll go right.”

They split up and swam in opposite directions. Morrison dragged the cable along. It was awkward but not as hard as he thought it might be. The wall was blank. There were a few hollows and some small protrusions but nothing to hang the cable on.

Stephens was about forty feet from Morrison. “Got something below me boss. Move fast.”

Morrison reversed direction and swam towards Stephens descending rapidly as he did so.

When he reached Stephens he could see a big pinnacle a few feet below them. It was coming up towards them as the Pheia sank and they sank with it. The surface barge was still paying out cable and the loop Morrison had grabbed was now quite a way up from the actual loop in the bottom of the cable. He and Stephens swam in towards the wall with the cable and prepared to loop it over the pinnacle, which was just below them now.

The Pheia had been drifting closer to the wall as it sank. Kate watched the wall getting very close to the portal. She keyed the talk button. “Hey guys. The hab is now almost in contact with the wall.”

The divers all looked up just in time to see the weight stack under the ops cylinder strike the wall and give off a big cloud of dust. The Pheia stopped descending and started to rotate out from the wall as the weight stack stuck on a small ledge.

Washington swam down to the others, and between them they made a loop of cable above the pinnacle. Morrison took two cable clamps from his tool pouch and quickly attached them to the cable making a fixed loop. “I hope this holds,” he said.

Kate held on to the console as the Pheia tilted over as it rotated out from the wall. It was at almost 45 degrees when the weight stack slipped off the ledge that was holding it up. Kate fell over as the cylinder righted itself and started to sink again.

The divers held the loop of cable out between them and sank down over the rock pinnacle. The cable drifted down over the top and stopped when the pinnacle widened out.

The Pheia sank slowly down. Washington swam up to it and put his hands on the edge of the weight stack. He pushed his feet out onto the wall behind him and pushed hard. The hab moved out slightly. “Help me,” he said over the comms.

Morrison and Stephens swam up and helped push. The mass of the hab was hard to shift but they moved it out enough to clear the pinnacle as it passed by.

They let go and watched the Pheia sink slowly down now clear of the wall. The ops cylinder was almost upright but the crew cylinder stuck out at a crazy angle. The two parts were held together by a collection of gas lines and electrical conduits.

The loop of cable below the Pheia rose up past the bottom and came taut as the hab sank below the pinnacle.

A great cloud of dust filled the water as the cable pulled tight around the rock. Morrison held his breath and watched the cable. It stayed put.

Kate felt the Pheia stop moving. She expected more of a jolt but it wasn’t moving very fast when the cable stopped it. “Way to go guys,” she said over the comm system.

The Pheia hung against the wall by the cable, the dust suspended in the water above it like a cloud.

“Morrison to surface. Hold that cable. Pheia is stable.”

“Roger. Winch stopping,” came Leclerc’s voice.

Morrison watched as the cable stopped moving. “Well done guys, ” he said, then spoke to Washington. “Did you get the gas lines shut down?”

“I closed all the valves on the cylinders around the crew cylinder but when I got done I realized that doesn’t do any good if the lines rupture,” Washington said.

Morrison nodded and Washington continued: “I don’t see any leaks but some of the pipework is pretty mangled. It’s not going to last long if anything moves much.”

Morrison swam out to the far end of the crew cylinder. It was angled at about 45 degrees now. He was wondering why the weight stack at the bottom of the cylinder hadn’t pulled it back into the upright position.

As he swam past the end of the cylinder he saw why. Only one plate was left. The others had been torn off when the winch cable had pulled the cylinder sideways. The one remaining weight ring wasn’t enough to completely counter the buoyancy of the cylinder.

The winch cable was still moving. He pushed his talk button. “Morrison to surface. Secure the winch. Confirm. Over.”

After a short delay he felt the cable stop moving and he heard Williams’ voice. “The winch is already stopped. What is the problem?”

“Let me talk to the engineers. Over.”

Babin’s voice came back immediately. “Babin here. Over.”

“The crew cylinder has lost most of its weight stack. It has one ring left. It’s at about 45 degrees and held to the ops cylinder only by the gas and electrical connections. The sling cables to the ops cylinder are OK, but the ones to the crew cylinder are mostly slack. I don’t think it’s safe to haul like this. We have no way to shut off the gas lines and if they break we’re screwed. We need some way to stabilize the structure. Over”

“Understood. Are you OK for a while? I need to discuss this with Leclerc.”

“Roger. We’ll go back inside for now.”

Morrison made swimming signs with his fingers to the other two divers and they headed back inside the hab.

Rigging

(750 Feet)

Williams stood at the rail of the surface barge. The sea had flattened out again over the past few hours. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly. The engineers were still discussing what to do with the Pheia and he had nothing left to contribute.

He had sent a report to the Pheia about the engineering discussions, but there was little to say. Kate had told him she was playing trivial pursuit with the divers and was winning. It was hard for Williams to image the scene in the Pheia, or what remained of it. Morrison’s account of the cable event and the loss of the weights made it sound as though there wasn’t much left. Babin had told him she thought it very unwise to try to bring it up any further with anyone inside and Williams had rather uncharacteristically said: “Duh.”

The tentative plan was to wait for the sea to become flat calm, then winch the Pheia up to a depth of about 150 feet, then have the divers swim out. That would take two days. Now the Pheia was nearer to the surface, the pressure changes were more significant as the hab rose out of the depths. The last thing anyone wanted now was for the team on the Pheia to get bent, but it was hard to be patient. If the gas lines between the cylinders ruptured there would be no option but to try to get the divers out and have them swim up, but Williams knew that wasn’t really an option. They could send down more tanks of gas but they would suffer from the cold way before they had gas issues.

Williams heard something and turned to see Subramanian, Babin and Leclerc coming towards him. Subramanian handed him a cup of coffee and asked how he was doing.

“I’m fine. I’m worried about them.” He pointed down over the railing at the sea.

“You do not look fine.” Subramanian said. “Have you slept?”

“Yes, of course.” Williams lied. He’d had little sleep for the past few days and none the night before. He could tell it was affecting him and it was no surprise that others could see it too. He just needed to tough it out for two more days and he could sleep for a week.

Babin moved in a little closer. “I don’t want to alarm anyone but we do still have another problem that we need to work.”

“What’s that?” Williams asked, sounding dejected.

“As Leclerc and I understand it, the Pheia is hanging from a loop of winch cable which is over some sort of pinnacle on the wall.”

“Yes, I know that.” Williams said. “What’s the problem? Will that stop us winching them up?”

“Not exactly. As the winch cable comes up, it will probably pull the loop off the pinnacle. We might need the divers out there to watch. The issue that we are concerned about might occur after tension is applied, because of the weight of the Pheia. Morrison has clamped the cable into a loop and those clamps will cause a couple of crimp points on the cable. We can probably haul it up like that but if there has been any abrasion of the cable by the clamps it might not handle the strain.”

Williams stared out at the horizon. It was a beautiful day. “So what do you suggest?” he asked.

“We need to get the Pheia neutrally buoyant. Then Morrison can pull off the clamps and inspect the cable.”

“And if it’s damaged?”

“We think he can re-clamp the loop so that the damaged parts are in the loop itself. We sent extra clamps with him for exactly that situation.”

“I don’t understand. What’s the difference from the loop they have in the cable now?”

“I need to draw you a picture really but the problem is that Morrison has clamped the cable so that the cable makes a sharp turn as it comes out of the clamp. We want to create a loop so that the cable goes smoothly into the loop and then out of it with the two clamps on two sections of cable parallel to each other.”

“And to do that, you need the Pheia floating?” Williams asked.

Babin nodded to Leclerc.

“We have another option.” Leclerc said. “We cut the cable from the winch above the damaged area and clamp it back together with the cable that is attached to the top of the Pheia.”

“Can they do that?” Williams asked.

Babin answered. “Yes, they have a cutter but not enough clamps. So we want Morrison to remove one clamp from the loop they have now and use that to join the cables after they have cut it. Then we take up the slack until the loop is free. Then they take off the other clamp and use it to back up the first one.”

Williams looked hard at Babin and Leclerc. They were engineers. They had probably argued this out over a whiteboard and a calculator. “And this is safe?” he asked.

“Not really,” Babin responded. “But we see no other choice. We want to ask Morrison about it since he has seen the situation down there and may have other insight. We also need to discuss the method we think they can use to stabilize the position of the crew cylinder.”

Williams agreed. “Let’s go and ask him then.”

When Williams’ voice came over the speaker in the console, Kate was laughing at Washington for his awful knowledge of rock music. She had found his answers to some of the questions hilarious. Washington was definitely more of a country fan.

Morrison got up off the floor and pushed the talk button. “Morison here. Over.”

Williams explained that Babin wanted to talk to him about the winch cable.

“OK. Put her on. Over.”

Babin explained the plan to Morrison. The others stopped their game and listened.

When Babin had finished, there was silence.

Morrison pushed the mike button. “You have got to be out of your mind. Over.”

The sound of Babin laughing came over the speaker. “Sorry.” She said. “Leclerc just won a bet we had. We do have another idea but I doubt you’ll like it any better. Over.”

“Let’s hear it. Over.”

The others had stood up and were with Morrison at the console.

“They are crazy if they think one of those clamps will hold this thing up.” Stephens said.

Babin came back over the speaker. “We think we might be able to slide another set of clamps and some cable down the wire to you. You could use that to clamp the uphaul to the Pheia before you cut the damaged part out. Over.”

“That’s more like it” Stephens said.

“We like that better. Over.” Morrison said.

“Is that going to work?” Kate asked. “Will it actually slide all the way down here?”

“I don’t know,” Morrison answered. “But it’s real easy to find out.”

He pressed the talk button again. “Can you send down another lift bag too? Over.”

There was a delay. Morrison could almost hear them discussing it.

“Yes. But we think we’d like to try to send down the wire and clamps first. Then follow that with the lift bag with some weights inside it.”

“Why would they expect any of that to work?” Kate asked. “Surely it will just get hung up on the wire.”

“I guess we’ll wait and see.” Morrison suggested. “I like that better than relying on one clamp.”

Babin’s voice came back again. “We also want to send down another wire rig to stabilize the crew cylinder. We are concerned that it not move as we try to pull the Pheia back up. Over.”

Morrison pushed the talk button. “OK. How will that work? Over.”

“We want to tie the tops of the two cylinders together to prevent any further separation there, then attach lines from the weight stack on the crew cylinder to the weight stack on the ops cylinder, one on each side. That will stop it swaying and prevent it from rotating further up. Lastly, we want to rearrange the lift cables on the top of both cylinders to even out the lift forces. Over.”

Morrison raised his eyebrows and looked at the others. “And you are going to send all this down to us?” he asked.

“Yes. We are assembling the cables and clamps now,” Babin replied.

On the surface, Babin and Leclerc organized the equipment. They took several lengths of cable and made up the sets of cables and clamps needed for each attachment. When they were all assembled they made a short loop of cable around the main lift wire and attached all the others to it.

Once Leclerc had done up the last clamp he took a large cable tie and attached the wrench to the main loop of wire then dropped the whole assembly it into the water. The wire made a splash as it hit the surface and disappeared immediately.

“I wish we could be sure it’s going to go all the way,” Babin said looking down into the water. “Let’s get the bag ready.”

They took a large lifting bag and put about 20 pounds of dive weights in it. Leclerc attached a large snap link to the bag and lifted it up. “I think it will jam on the wire.” He said.

Babin looked at it. “I agree. Take most of the weight out. We just need to make it negative. If it flutters in the water it will take longer to go down but I think that will stop it from snagging up.”

Leclerc tipped the bag up and the weights fell on the deck. He picked up a four pound weight and dropped it in the bag then rolled the bag up to get the air out.

He reached out and snapped the link around the barge’s winch cable then let go.

The bag hit the water and stayed there unrolling on the surface and sinking very slowly. Once water had covered one end it sank faster and started to descend. Leclerc watched it go down through the clear water. The yellow bag was quite visible as it went down the wire.

Babin leaned over the side and watched. “Is it still moving?” she said.

“Barely.” Leclerc answered.

She picked up a dive belt and threaded a few weights onto it then reached out and passed it around the lift cable. She put the end of the belt through the buckle and pulled it tight until it was almost snug on the cable, then dropped it into the water.

The weights hit the surface and went down the cable. Babin and Leclerc watched until the weights hit the lift bag’s snap link. They saw the bag change shape in the water and get smaller.

“Alright,” Babin said. “I wonder if the sonar can track that.”

The loop of cable floated slowly down through the water column like a large leaf falling from a tree in still air. It floated to one side, tipped down and floated to the other side.

Above it, the dive bag and weight belt passed a manta ray cruising off the top of the wall. The ray changed course slightly to avoid the suspicious fish and went on its way, its massive wings beating slowly.

When Babin asked the sonar operator if he could see the weights, he laughed. “That’s what? About the size of a parrot fish?” He shook his head. “Sorry.” he added. “There’s way to much other noise from the wall to pick that out.”

In the Pheia there was a lot of discussion about how long the wire falling from the surface would take to arrive.

“Let’s just wait until we are sure it should be here before we go out.” Morrison said. “We don’t need to be out there wasting gas waiting for it.”

“So, how long is that?” Stephens asked.

“I have no idea.” Morrison answered.

“You guys ever do math at school?” Kate asked.

“Sure.” Stephens answered here. “Adding and stuff like that. And I can count all they way to twenty in Spanish.”

Unperturbed, Kate continued. “We’re somewhere around 750 feet from the surface. Maybe a bit more since we sank down some. Let’s say it falls at a leisurely one foot per second. That’s…… Bueller…… anyone? That’s 750 seconds. Divide by 60 gives us about 12 minutes and change. We’ve been talking about it for longer than that. It’s either up there on the roof or it’s not coming.”

Nobody spoke. The divers just got up and started putting their suits on.

“I suppose you think you’re pretty smart?” Washington asked with a big smile on his face.

“Damn right I am,” Kate said grinning at him.

Kate watched them disappear down into the water then moved to the portal and waited for them to come past. She saw bubbles and a fin off to the side. With nothing to do she wandered over to the console and tapped the screen a few times to go through the system status pages.

It all looked horrible. There were so many things wrong but the gas system was OK. And so long as it stayed that way they should be on the surface in a couple of days.

It was unfortunate, she thought, that the Pheia had sunk at least 150 feet below where it had been at its high point. That was half a day right there if they were going by the book.

And that made her wonder about exactly how much gas was in her body. They had this guideline of 300 feet per day that she had been following but did they really need to go that slow?

Kate tapped on the console some more until she found the bio-medical pages that Dr. Ford had added to the system. There were the names of all the crew members who might go into the water as part of the expedition. It was yet another reminder that they were dead and she almost moved off the page but something kept her looking.

“Oh, what an idiot.”

Next to each name was a link labeled “Bio.”

Kate found her own name and tapped on the link.

A box popped up: “No signal”

She had totally forgotten about the bio pills. If she had some of those she might be able to measure her gas saturation level directly. That would tell her if she could go up faster.

Where were the pills? Almost certainly in the storage room somewhere. But what if they had gotten wet?

“They are designed to be swallowed,” she thought. “Some seawater isn’t going to affect them. I hope.”

She decided that the pills might give her a way to get to the surface faster and that was worth another dive.

Kate walked over to her gear, checked she had enough gas, and started to suit up.

As Morrison swam up above the top of the Pheia he moved over to the wall and started following the pinnacle up. Fifty feet below the top he saw the loop of wire and the clamps.

“Target in sight,” he said over the comm system.

As he swam closer, he saw the wrench Leclerc had attached. “Thoughtful,” he said to himself.

Morrison decided to deal with the rigging of all the support lines first. There was no point in detaching the Pheia from the pinnacle until the crew cylinder was secured.

The collection of coils of wire and clamps that Babin had sent down looked confusing until Morrison noticed the dive slates. Each cable set had a slate tied to it and on the slate was a diagram of where that wire went. That made Morrison smile. He thought he would be buying Babin and Leclerc some beers when this was over.

Rigging the support wires between the cylinders went quickly. They were simple to attach and adjust. The lengths were about right but they couldn’t tension them until the lift cables were re-set and the Pheia was hanging from the winch line.

When all three support cables were in place they moved back to the pinnacle to set up the cable that would suspend the Pheia when they cut it free from the wall.

Between them they carefully removed the first clamp. They used that to attach one end of the coil of wire to the main lift cable above the pinnacle. Then they removed the rest of the clamps one at a time putting them into a gear bag. Washington held the cable as Morrison and Stephens removed the last clamp. The cable dropped loose over the pinnacle.

“Let’s do the top first.” Morrison said.

Washington replied “Rog,” and pulled the lose end of the cable up a few feet. They attached it to the uphaul with three clamps.

When the clamps were tight, Morrison removed their safety clamp and bagged it. Stephens pulled the cable loop and swam away from the wall unrolling the cable as he went.

Williams cut the cable ties that held the comms line to the winch cable and maneuvered the comm line so that it wouldn’t get pulled apart when they cut the hab free. When Stephens got to the end, he let go and the cable drifted down slowly in the clear water towards the Pheia.

The three divers followed it down towards the Pheia making sure it had no kinks in it.

The cable had fallen straight down the side of the pinnacle. Morrison judged it’s end was right about the same level as the top of the Pheia.

When they got to the end of the cable it was obvious they had a problem.

“Morrison to surface.”

“Go ahead Morrison. Over” came a voice over the comm link.

“The cable is too short by about five feet. Over”

“Roger. I’ll tell the engineers. Over.”

“Like that’ll help.” Morrison thought to himself.

Stephens gave Morrison the WTF signal. Morrison shook his head. “How much slack do we have at the top?” he asked.

“Maybe two feet. Not enough.” Stephens answered.

“Fuck. Anyone got three feet of cable?”

Morrison let go of the end of the cable.

“Let’s get back in and discuss this. We’re just wasting gas.”

Washington was first above the water level in the ops room. He climbed out and started to pull off his gear. Stephens appeared right behind him. He pulled off his helmet. “Hey, where’s Kate?” he asked.

Washington turned around. “Not here. That’s for sure.”

Stephens felt Morrison tap him on the leg and climbed up out of the way.

When Morrison pulled his own helmet off he said, “Where’s Kate?”

“Question of the day.” Washington replied.

Morrison looked around. There was nowhere to hide. Then he noticed her suit was not on its usual pipe. “She’s in the water. Did either of you see her when you came back in?”

They both said no.

“Wait or search?” Morrison asked.

Stephens said: ‘Wait,” and Washington nodded in agreement.

“OK. We wait five then search. Damn tourists.”

As they were hanging their suits up, Kate’s face appeared above the water. She pulled her mask off. “Miss me?”

Stephens was fastest. “Nope.” he said.

Morrison and Washington both laughed but Morrison wasn’t amused.

“Mind telling us where you were?” he asked.

“I had an idea. Turns out I was right.”

“Perhaps we’ll judge that later.” Morrison said. “Care to share?”

Kate got out of the water. Washington held her tank as she slipped out of her gear.

“Thanks,” she said and walked over to the console still in her suit.

The page with the “No signal” message was till on the screen.

“Come over here and watch this,” she said.

Kate had a plastic box in her hand. She opened it, took out one of the pills looked at the number printed on the side and swallowed it.

“What was that?” Morrison asked.

“Look here and you’ll see.” Kate said. Then added, “Hopefully.” as she typed in the ID number for the pill.

As the acid in her stomach contacted the pill, it activated itself and the message on the screen disappeared and was replaced by a page of data.

“What’s all that?” Stephens asked.

“My bio info.” Kate answered him.

“OK, I’m lost.” Morrison said. “Interesting, I suppose, but what’s the point?”

“The bio pill is showing my general biological condition plus some very specific data. Look here.”

Kate pointed to a number on the screen.

“That’s my overall gas absorption number. In a few minutes it’ll work out numbers for the gasses in the mix we’re breathing. If I let it run for an hour or two it’ll figure out my rate of absorption. If the hab were ascending, you’d see a negative number. Essentially how fast I’m outgassing.”

Morrison still didn’t get it. “Fascinating. You just felt the need to know eh?” he asked.

“Yes. Absolutely. Because if we all take the pills we can track our outgassing rate exactly and…”

She didn’t get to finish. Washington cut her off.

“Figure out how fast we can get to the surface.” he said.

“Right!” Kate said.

Morrison looked at the figures. “Really? And it’s reliable?”

“Yes it is. This is what Dr. Ford used to measure all her test subjects with. It’s got tons of people-hours on it. Way better than guessing, or sticking to the maximum safe ascent rate.”

Morrison thought for a minute.

“OK, so if it’s accurate we might be able to go up faster and live to tell the tale then. I guess we can give it a try but we have another problem to fix first.”

Kate visibly slumped. “And what’s that?” she asked.

“The cable they sent down is a few feet too short. We need to lift the Pheia until it reaches.”

“I spoke to Babin while you were out.” Kate said. “She said they sent down another lifting bag. Did you not find it?”

“No.” Morrison said. “Either it’s still on its way down or it got stuck.”

Kate contacted the surface and confirmed with Babin that they had sent down a lift bag. “Well, it’s supposed to be here: she said.”

As the lift bag had slid down the cable, pushed by the collection of dive weights it had fluttered slightly from side to side. It was most of the way down to the Pheia before one of the dive weights jammed between the clip on the bag and the cable. It hung there limply in the water like a sad flag on a windless day.

They had all heard what Babin had said about the bag. She had also said that they would put some more weights around the cable and send those down. Perhaps that would get it moving again as it was obviously stuck somewhere. She had apologized twice before leaving to send down the extra weights.

“Is there anything else here we can use as a lift bag?” Morrison asked Kate.

“We have lots of trash bags but nothing to put them in.” she said.

“What about kit bags? Anything like that? Doesn’t need to be big if we have enough of them.”

Kate tried to go through her mental list of everything she had seen in the storage area. “There might be kit bags in the crew room. We all brought down a few spare clothes but there isn’t much space so we were told to limit it. I know there were some small backpacks but I don’t remember seeing anything large.”

“We’re being stupid.” Washington said. “We just need the surface to let out some cable. It doesn’t reach because there isn’t enough slack. Right?”

Morrison felt dumb. “I’m going to write this off to the pressure.” He pushed the talk button on the console. “Morrison to surface. We need you to pay out about 20 to 30 feet of cable. Over.”

Babin’s voice came over the speaker. “I should have thought of that. That’s the trouble with not being able to see. I had some other mental model of the situation. We are paying out the slack now.”

The divers suited up and went back in the water. Kate wanted to be with them. It was getting a bit old now, standing around in the ops room doing nothing.

When the divers reached the top of the pinnacle, the winch cable had a loop of about ten feet deep in it. Morrison and Stephens pulled up their short section a few feet and removed one of the clamps from its end to secure it temporarily as they took off the rest of the clamps.

Washington took one clamp from Stephens and swam the end of the short line to the bottom of the lift cable loop. He clamped it there. “Secure boss.” he said over the comm system.

Morrison and Stephens transferred the rest of the clamps and let the cable hang down. Washington swam it over to the top of the Pheia. The other two joined him and they clamped the cable in place.

“Morrison to surface. Are you receiving? Over.”

“Five by five Morrison. Go ahead.”

“We have the short section clamped in place. We will cut the loop out of the main cable now so you will lose the comm link. Over.”

“Understood. Wait one. Over.”

There was a pause and Babin came on the comm in Morrison’s helmet.

“Tell me how you plan to do this.” she said and then added “Over.”

“We’ll cut the cable just above the clamp at the pinnacle first. Then we’ll go down to the top of the Pheia and cut it lose from there. We have the short link as tight as we could make it so the drop should only be a foot or so. Over.”

Babin agreed with the plan.

Morrison sent Stephens with a large cable cutter to go up and cut the lift cable free at the top of the pinnacle.

When Stephens was swimming up he saw a patch of yellow above him. “The lift bag just got here. I’ll snag it.”

“Rog.” Morrison replied.

Stephens unclipped the bag from the line and attached it to his harness. Then he put the big cutters around the lift cable and squeezed. The cutter had a ratchet action and he had to pump it a couple of times to slice through the steel wires.

The cable drifted away from the cut and drooped down. Stephens checked the clamps on the short section as he swam back down and joined the other two on top of the Pheia.

Morrison pointed to the lift bag on Stephens’ belt. Stephens nodded. He removed the bag and clipped it to the top of the collection of lift cables where they joined the main cable from the barge.

The bag was large and took a while to inflate. As it took shape it took some of the weight of the Pheia from the main cable. Stephens added more gas to the bag until the main lift cable went slack. “Good to go,” he said.

Washington took the cutter from Stephens and swam out a way with Morrison. They cut the cable that was holding the hab to the pinnacle on the wall. “We’re free,” Morrison announced.

The Pheia floated up slowly, lifted by the huge bag attached to the cables.

Stephens swam to the vent port on the bag and let gas out until the ascent stopped. It took a minute or so, and in that time the Pheia had risen past the pinnacle.

Morrison was watching from the wall. “It’s moving up too fast.”

“I’m on it,” Stephens replied as he let out more gas.

The Pheia halted its ascent and floated stationary in the clear water just a few feet from the wall.

Morrison pushed the talk button on his comms gear. “Morrison to surface. We are free. Over.”

He listened to the acknowledgement then waited. The view was spectacular. The huge structure hung silent in the water, its flood lights illuminating the wall.

A few seconds later he saw the cable start to move as the winch on the surface barge took the tension. When the cable was holding the Pheia, he pointed to the lift bags and Stephens opened the dump valves fully to empty them.

Very slowly the Pheia moved up as the winch lifted it and it started to drift away from the wall.

Morrison spoke to the team. “Let’s watch for a minute and make sure nothing breaks.”

The divers floated beside the giant structure as it crept slowly up past the wall. The assortment of cables held the two cylinders, set at their ungainly angle. Morrison thought it looked very feeble. He hoped it would hold until they got to the surface.

Kate was sitting on the floor with her back to the console. She had been listening to the comm circuit on the headphones. She looked up at the portal and saw the wall was moving again. A great wave of relief swept over her. She was going home.

Final Ascent

(400 Feet)

The surface barge had changed position overnight so that it was several hundred feet further from the edge of the wall. Nobody wanted any chance that the hab could hit the wall again in its fragile state. The sun was shining brightly and the sea was a glassy green with a slight swell on it.

400 feet below the surface, Kate had woken up and been surprised to see the portal looked black. For so long, it had provided a dull glow from the reflected floodlights.

She looked at the divers. They were all still asleep. Morrison had told her that life in the Navy had taught him to sleep whenever and wherever he could. Evidently the training worked because she had seen him fall asleep as soon as his head went down.

Kate got up and walked to the portal. The floodlights were still on and in the distance she could just make out the wall but there was no detail and no sign they were ascending. She walked over to the console and tapped on the screen. The depth read 400 feet. That meant they had about a day to kill and then they could get out. She wasn’t looking forward to that last dive. They had talked this over with Williams and the engineers and everyone agreed that the Pheia should be held somewhere between 50 and 100 feet and the divers should swim to the surface from there. They would need to take their time and for safety there would be two decompression stops. The first was to be at 50 feet and the second at 20 feet. The surface crew had already arranged for four sets of scuba equipment to be lowered to 50 feet for the first stop and a set of hookah lines connected to tanks on the surface barge to be lowered to 20 feet for the second, longer stop. Williams had also checked with the Caymanians to make sure that the decompression chamber on the island would be available if they needed it.

Kate had done a lot of sport diving, and most of those dives had included a three-minute safety stop at 15 to 20 feet. But these were not decompression dives. The stops were just a precaution. She always found them relaxing. There was usually a line or bar under the boat to hold on to and she could just float there looking down at the fish below her.

Tomorrow’s stops would be different. For one thing they were necessary, not just a precaution, and for some reason that made her more nervous. The bio pills they had all taken were reporting the expected gas saturation figures, so at least she knew they were in the right place on the curve. This was science, not just guessing, but all the same it held some mystery. You couldn’t tell if bubbles were forming in your blood until later when the damage had already started and the joints in your arms started aching. You had to follow the rules, take the decompression stops, and be sure to maintain a slow rate of ascent at all times.

Kate knew all this and had even done a lot of reading before the expedition to try to understand what she was going to experience. But still she was nervous. Whether that was because of the decompression stops or just the excitement of getting back to the surface she didn’t know.

The other aspect about the stops the next day that would certainly be different is that they would both be blue water stops. The wall was too far away to be a visual reference so they would essentially be just floating in the ocean on the end of a line from the barge. Around her would be miles and miles of open sea. And perhaps some fish, although most of the small fish tended to hang out near the wall.

She heard movement behind her and turned around to see Stephens digging through the food pile. “Morning,” she said to him.

“Hmmm. Morning,” he replied. “What I want are two eggs sunny side up with some bacon and hash browns. And coffee.”

“Try the other boxes,” Kate said with a smile.

“Right. Protein bars it is then.”

Kate walked over and filled the kettle with water. “I’ll get the coffee going.”

Stephens walked over to the portal. “I see they have moved us away from the wall. It’s amazing how clear the water is down here. Way better than many of the dives we’ve done in harbors and river estuaries.”

Kate spooned coffee crystals into mugs. “What is that like?”

Stephens turned around to face her. “Crappy. Some of the water is so murky that you literally cannot see you hand if you push it out in front of you.”

“So what’s the point of being down there if you can’t see?”

“We are usually doing inspections. Looking at welds and fittings. So long as you can find your way down there, once you are up close you can see well enough. And if it’s really bad you can take down a plastic bag full of clear water to look through.”

Kate thought he was kidding. “Right.” She said sarcastically and handed him a mug of black coffee.

Stephens prodded Washington then Morrison with his socked foot. “Chow time.”

He continued: “No, really. You push the bag up to what you need to see, and look through it. The plastic is almost completely transparent in the water and you have a few inches of clear water inside it. It really works. When they told me about it the first time and handed me a bag to fill with water, I thought this was like being sent to the nurses office the first day.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the deal with the nurse’s office?”

“There isn’t one. An office I mean. When someone new joins the team they get sent to do all sorts of stupid stuff until they wise up.”

“So it’s kind of like being in grade school then?”

Washington laughed. He was standing now, drinking his coffee. Morrison had apparently gone back to sleep.

“Mr. Stephens here is our practical joker. To be honest with you, we are all a bit childish when we are together on the surface. It helps to pass the time. Thanks for the coffee by the way.” He waved the mug in salute.

Kate looked at the depth indicator on the console again. Stephens watched her but kept quiet. He was impressed with Kate. From what she’d told them, she’d done a remarkable job of keeping herself and the hab together for the last few days. But he could tell she was nervous. It showed in the way she was talking and the way she moved.

“It’ll be OK.” He said.

She looked at him. “Yeah, I know. Only one more day. Then we get to face the relatives.”

Stephens understood why she looked stressed now. She was the sole survivor. He had enough military friends that had been in that situation to know that her next few months would be tough on her.

“We all understand where you are right now.” He said. “When this happens to one of us we tend to close ranks. Nobody needs or wants to talk. In fact, a quiet group of close friends is probably best. I came back alone from a mission one time. I didn’t know I was the only one to make it until I was back on the sub. When I got back to base a few days later, Morrison was one of the guys who hung out with me. He never spoke of the mission. In fact, he didn’t say a whole lot about anything. He was just there with one or two other guys from other teams. We drank a lot at night, and went running during the day along the beach. I ran so hard sometimes I puked.”

Kate’s eyes were misting up.

“He’s full of shit,” Morrison said from his pad.

“I thought you were still asleep.”

“Nope. Just lying here enjoying this tale you’ve made up.”

Kate laughed and wiped her eyes. “I need more coffee.”

Washington was already on his second cup. “When we get topside, I’ll buy you a proper drink.”

“And take me running?” she asked.

He patted his belly. “Sure. I could lose a few pounds.” He laughed.

On the surface, Williams stood on deck watching the winch line that led down to the Pheia. As the barge rose and fell over the mild swell, the servo system in the winch kept the tension in the wire constant. The mechanism was designed to compensate for up to a couple of feet of movement. The last time they had big waves it had been overcome by the huge change in height of the barge and yanked the Pheia apart.

Williams watched the wire where it entered the water. It didn’t move at all as the barge rose and fell. He wondered how it worked. Some sort of electric or hydraulic control system he supposed. So long as it kept working, he didn’t really care.

He glanced at his watch and sighed. They were expecting a TV crew and some reporters later in the morning. He had done his best to keep them away over the last few days so the barge crew could work uninterrupted. A few boats had come out to look. He’d seen cameras and given a few interviews over the phone but managed to avoid having any of the reporters on the vessel. Talking over the phone let him use notes to keep track of what he wanted to say. He wasn’t sure how he’d stand up to questioning in person.

He’d made the mistake of mentioning this to Subramanian who had talked to him like one of his stress test subjects. The man was incorrigible. He had eventually offered some advice which Williams now thought might actually make sense. He had reminded Williams that the reporters were coming out for information, not to see him specifically. And if the source of their information was a bit nervous, they would either not notice, or simply understand. This was what reporters did.

He watched the steel cable supporting the Pheia for a few more seconds then turned away and walked off to the galley. He wanted an update on the procedures for the decompression stops and the recovery of the Pheia’s crew.

The day passed slowly in the Pheia. Kate and the divers played trivial pursuit. They taught her some card games and she tried to be a good sport about losing. She knew they were trying to keep her occupied. No one said very much unless there was obvious cheating which usually resulted in the cheater having something thrown at him.

Kate enjoyed their company, and appreciated the help in passing the time. She tried very hard not to keep looking at the depth indicator. Without the wall passing the portal there was no indication they were moving up at all. Occasionally they could feel a slight change in the Pheia’s position as the tension in the winch line varied a bit. They all knew that meant waves on the surface but nobody said what they were all thinking: the last big waves had caused a lot of damage.

The slight variation in the cable tension caused by the surface barge moving over the waves was transmitted down to the Pheia. The compensator on the barge’s winch combined with the slight elasticity in the very long cable reduced the variation in tension to almost nothing by the time the cable reached the Pheia. But it was just enough to cause a slight harmonic resonance in the structure. As the tension in the cable increased, the Pheia’s two cylinders were pulled together slightly as they rose. When the cable tension dropped again, the cylinders floated back down again. It was almost impossible to see the motion of the large cylinders in the water but it was enough to apply some torque to the gas lines connecting the two cylinders together.

Most of the gas lines were small diameter, high pressure stainless steel connections that had been bent, but were not otherwise damaged. They flexed with the slight motion of the cylinders. Below the thinner gas lines were two large diameter steel pipes which were part of the gas recirculation system. They helped keep the gas mix constant between the two cylinders and ensure that the pressure in each one was the same. These large diameter pipes had folded in on themselves when the crew hab was wrenched up. Both pipes were crimped almost closed but had not yet developed any leaks.

Unfortunately, one of the larger pipes had been pressing against an electrical cable for a long time now and the slight motion of the cylinders had caused the crushed part of the pipe to wear through the plastic covering of the power cable. The cable was an underwater design with a steel and copper shield around the conductors. The pipe had worked through the steel shield in one small patch and was now resting against the inner copper shield.

The galvanic action of the dissimilar metals in the salt water caused the steel pipe to start corroding very fast. The corrosion worked though the zinc covering and exposed the bare steel underneath. The pipe was under considerable tension from the cylinders at its ends and once the corrosion ate through the thicker part of the steel there was nothing left to prevent the pipe from being forced open.

Inside the hab, Kate was digging through the food pile when the alarm on the console went off. There had been occasional alarms over the past few days and she didn’t react at first.

“You gonna see what that is?” Morrison asked.

Kate stood up from the pile holding a bar of chocolate. She hadn’t seen any for days and was looking forward to devouring it.

“Sure.” She said and walked over to the console just as a second alarm went off.

The console screens had lots of red pages from the previous problems so it took Kate a while to find what was causing the alarm. She was about to say something when Stephens beat her to it.

“We’ve got a leak. Look.” He was pointing to the water level by the ladder. It was at least an inch higher than it had been.

Kate scanned the gas system pages. “I don’t understand. The gas cylinders are all much the same as they have been for ages now. It must be leaking from somewhere else.”

Stephens picked up the marker Kate had used to make her buddy list by the ladder. He bent down and made a line where the water was and wrote the time next to it.

They were all standing now, looking at the water.

“Are you sure it’s come up?” Morrison asked.

“Yeah. I’m sure. There was a slight mark on the metal from the oils on the surface. It’s gone now.”

They all grouped behind Kate and watched as she scanned through the screens.

“How deep are we?” Morrison asked her.

She changed screens and looked at the depth indicator. “320 feet.” She said.

Morrison looked at his team. They both nodded at him.

“Can you tell where the leak is and how fast it’s leaking?” he asked Kate.

The screens flashed by as her fingers tapped on buttons and menus.

“The overall hab pressure is dropping. Not fast, but it’s dropping.”

Stephens went back to the ladder and looked at his mark. “It’s covered the mark I just made. I’d say it’s come up half an inch in, what, five minutes?”

Kate glanced over at him. “That’s not too bad. That ladder hole is pretty small diameter compared to the compartment. At that rate we’d have hours before it was even knee deep.”

Stephens looked at the water again. “Are you sure? It seems to have moved up pretty fast to me.”

As they were discussing how serious the leak was, a slightly larger wave made its way under the support barge. The cable tightened as before but it pulled just hard enough to cause the small hole in the pipe between the cylinders to open to a pencil-sized hole.

In the ops room, another alarm went off. Kate looked at the gas generator screen and saw that it was no longer able to keep up with the leak rate. It was running continuously now. Other screens showed that the gas mix was being supplemented from the helium tank.

Morrison tapped her on the shoulder. She looked at him with obvious fear in her eyes. “Let me talk to the surface.” He said.

Kate stepped aside and Morrison pushed the talk button. “Surface. This is Morrison. Over.” His voice sounded calm and professional.

Someone replied but the voice wasn’t recognizable.

Morrison continued. “We have developed a leak. We have a limited amount of time left before we need to evacuate. We need to have you lower the deco rigs to 200 feet and we need you to do it now. Over.”

He let go of the talk button and looked at the others. “Let’s get all the gear checked out.”

Stephens and Washington walked away without a word. Morrison turned to Kate. How much gas do you have?”

“I have about one and a half tanks up here and there are at least two full ones on the rack in the moon pool room.”

“How long does one tank last you?”

“I don’t know really. I’ve only done light work down here. Maybe an hour or so.”

Kate did the math.

“So I’ve got maybe three to four hours of gas to go up 150 feet. Right?” she asked Morrison.

“You’re the math whizz. I doubt we have that much so I’m going to ask you to do something you won’t like.”

Kate thought he meant to share the gas she had or buddy breathe or something like that. She was wrong.

“I am going to take Washington and Stephens and use our gas to get to the deco rigs. We’ll have to go up faster than I’d like but we have no choice.”

Kate was about to say something but Morrison held up his hand.

“You will not follow us at the same rate. You will ascend at one foot per minute or thereabouts. That should bring you up level with us and the deco tanks in around three hours. Can you do that?”

“Sure, but you guys can’t go up that fast.”

“We have no choice. We’ll get ready, then wait in here until we absolutely have to leave – all of us I mean. No sense in going before we need to.”

Kate couldn’t understand how he could stay so calm. The other two had still not said a word. They were going over their gear at the other side of the room. She looked at the piles of stuff all over the floor. “I have an idea.” She said.

She picked up a pack of syringes containing Ford’s HPNS meds. “You should at least each use one of these. They are designed to help suppress the symptom of HPNS and I happen to know that there is also some part of the mix that has to do with bubble formation. I don’t know the details but it can’t hurt.”

Morrison took the pack of syringes. “Where?”

“In your butt.” Kate actually laughed.

He took one out, pulled off the cap and plunged it into his buttock all in one move.

“Not much of one for arguing are you?” Kate said.

He threw the pack over to the others. “Your turn.”

They each injected themselves then brought the pack back to Kate. It had one syringe left in it. She took it out, pulled down the top of her pants, hesitated a moment then, injected herself. “Can’t hurt me either. I hope.” She added.

Things on the surface were frantic. Williams was coordinating the efforts but there was little he could actually do. They rigged a longer line to lower the scuba systems that were at 50 feet down to 200. It took some time to find enough gas line to extend the hookah rig, but they got it down to 50 feet. Williams had no idea if this was good enough and left to call the medical center on Grand Cayman to warn them again that they might need their decompression chamber.

The hole in the pipe connecting the Pheia’s cylinders enlarged more as the motion of the cylinders further weakened the pipe.

In the ops room, the water had risen to everyone’s knees. They had all put on dive suits but left the tops open. They looked like a set of misfit fishermen lost in a trout stream. Stephens had been drawing lines on the wall with times next to them. It was obvious to everyone that they had perhaps an hour before they needed to leave.

“We’re going to freeze.” Kate said.

“Yes, we are.” Morrison answered. “No avoiding that I’m afraid.”

Kate had already put on a second pair or sweat pants under her dive suit and two sweat shirts that the divers had brought with them. She was worried her suit would be too tight. No circulation wasn’t going to help with the heat problem.

Washington rummaged through the gear they had brought with them and held up an orange colored plastic bag. “Ta da!” he said. “Hand and foot warmers.”

Kate recognized them from ski trips.

Washington ripped open the bag and threw a set of hand warmers and two sets of foot warmers to Kate. She grabbed them awkwardly in her arms.

“Don’t drop those.” Washington added smiling.

She opened the packs and stuffed the heaters into her pants and her shirt sleeves. She saw that there were only a few left. “What about you guys?” she asked.

“We’ll share what’s left. We’ll be on the deco rigs up higher than you. We’ll be fine.”

They all ate as much as they could manage without feeling uncomfortable. By the time they were done, the water was almost up to Kate’s waist.

She pulled up the top of her suit and Stephens helped her zip up.

Kate looked around the room. There had been so much tragedy here yet she was reluctant to leave. The ops room had been her home and kept her alive.

“Time to get wet.” Morrison said.

They all exited the Pheia together. Kate stayed at the back of the group and followed as they ascended to the top of the ops cylinder.

Morrison signaled to Kate: stay here, slow ascent. OK.

Kate gave him an OK, then hugged him, her mask pushing against his.

“Two hugs on one dive.” He thought. “A whole new experience.”

The three divers went hand over hand in single file up the winch cable. Kate watched as they moved up and hoped they would be OK.

She looked at her watch. Three hours to go up 150 feet.

Towed behind her were three other scuba sets, each one attached to a BC that had just enough gas in it to make it neutral in the water. She checked the line that tied them together was secure and tied off to her own BC then she began to climb.

She moved up one foot each time the second hand on her watch reached the top. It started out OK but when the divers were well above her and she was alone again, she started to feel hopeless. The water was cold. She was still warm enough in the dive suit for now and could feel the heat packs in her legs and sleeves. She hoped it would be enough.

Stephens’ gas ran out about 20 feet below the tanks and he used Washington’s spare regulator until they all reached the decompression tanks waiting for them. He was glad they had left the helmets in the Pheia and were using normal masks. The helmets didn’t have any way to use an alternate air source.

They all changed regulators over and checked tank pressures. They had enough gas for a decent stop and a slow crawl up to the hookah line 150 feet above them.

Morrison held the line with one hand and rolled over to look down. There, below him he caught the wink of a light in the water. He hadn’t felt like this for a very long time. Way down below him was someone he had started to care for. He wanted badly to go down and join her, but he knew Kate would follow the instructions he’d given her, and in a little under three hours she’d be where he was now. He hoped like hell that he’d be alive when she reached him.

Epilog

Kate sat in her underwear on the bed in the hotel room she had been staying in for the last two weeks. Outside, the Caribbean sun shone brightly and she thought about getting dressed and going for a walk along the beach. She got up and walked to the window. The last two weeks had been hectic. Her arrival on the barge had been met by applause and she was still very uncomfortable with that. There had been two TV crews on the boat: one from Cayman and one from Houston. She had burst into tears at the first question about how she felt, and that had more or less ended the first TV session.

They had both interviewed her again in the hotel, and this time she was more composed. But when they asked questions about the crew, she could only keep saying she was sorry to be the only survivor.

Everyone knew she hadn’t caused the accident itself or been responsible for Boris or Chas, and all the reporters had told her so both before and after the interviews.

Morrison and his crew had taken her drinking when she got done with the TV people. She didn’t ordinarily drink much, and to their credit they didn’t push her. She still ended up legless and had to be carried out of the bar. She had slept for fifteen hours.

The next day Morrison had told her they were leaving the island for a job in Bahrain. They would be gone for several months but he promised to get in touch when he was back in Maine. Kate had put his cell phone number in her phone more out of duty than out of any expectation they would speak again. She had hugged him as hard as she could with tears streaming down her face, then kissed him on the lips. She had to reach up a bit for that. Morrison had looked genuinely sad to leave.

Kate had gone to the airport and waited in the upper gallery for them to walk out onto the tarmac as they boarded their plan. She had blown Morrison a kiss and then wondered why she’d done that. Her emotions were all over the place.

Williams had been by to see her at the hotel several times. He had arrived with Babin and Leclerc the day after she got ashore and they had gone over everything in detail. Babin had apologized several times for the structural failure of the Pheia. Kate had hugged her too and thanked her for her help with the hydrogen system. She was a hugging person these days.

Traffic along the Seven Mile Beach road was busy as usual. She looked beyond the road to the sea and wondered when she’d dive again. Not any time soon. That was for sure.

A knock on the door brought her back to reality.

She opened it to find Williams standing there in a nice lightweight suit. He was tanned from days in the sun and looked a little more cheery today.

“May I come in?”

“Sure. Of course.”

Kate stepped back in to the room.

Williams glanced around. It was quite a mess.

“Can’t get quality help,” Kate said to him and smiled weakly.

“Yes, well I’m sure the hotel staff can help if you let them in. I came to let you know that the barge is on its way back to Maine with the Pheia on board. We have recovered all of the personal items that were left on board.”

Kate interrupted him. “I had a box…”

“Yes, we found that in the ops room. It’s all been taken care of.”

Williams sat in a chair and looked at his hands. Then he lifted his head and looked at Kate. “I know you are not keen on going to services. You’ll be pleased to know that most of the families have already held them back at home but we, the institute, will be holding one the week after we get back. I want you to be there and I’d like you to say something.”

He knew Kate would say no, and was preparing to push a little harder.

“OK. I guess I can do that.” She said.

Williams was taken aback but recovered quickly. “Good, well then, there is just one more thing to talk about. I have arranged our flights home for tomorrow morning. We need to leave the hotel around nine.”

Kate nodded.

“Well, then, that’s all I have. Would you like me to have one of the hotel people help you pack?”

He knew he’d make a mistake as soon as the words were out, but it was too late.

“Pack what?” She asked.

“Sorry. Well, I mean, just sorry.”

Kate touched him on the arm. Williams had tried very hard to be supportive over that last couple of weeks.

“I’ll see you at nine then.” She said.

Williams left, and Kate went back to the window. She really should go for a run. It looked fabulous outside. “This might almost be a nice place to come back to someday.” She thought.

Content

Nigel Thompson
PHEIA

This Edition

MUIR

Boat Yard

First Dive

Descent

Half Way Down

Anchoring

Realization

Control

Alone

Ascent

Antenna

Comms

Organizing

The Ledge

Hydrogen

Gasses

Cabin Fever

Storm

Waiting

Capture

Hauling Up

Rigging

Final Ascent

Epilog