Nigel Thompson - Pheia

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.

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.