Nigel Thompson - Pheia

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.

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.