Nigel Thompson - Pheia

“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.

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.”