Nigel Thompson - Pheia

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.