Nigel Thompson - Pheia

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?”