Nigel Thompson - Pheia

She looked around but there was nothing in the tunnel at all other than her and the pile of stakes. “Oh crap.” She looked at the gas gauge for the scuba gear. It was in the red.

Kate dropped the stake on top of the rest of the pile and swam into the moon pool. Time to find a new tank.

In the moon pool room, Kate found a tank with a small amount of gas still in it. It didn’t have a regulator attached so she grabbed one from the wall rack and ascended the ladder into the ops room. Once above the water, she attached the regulator to the tank and holding it in her arm, dropped back down to the moon pool room. She knew she would need to fill a tank, and she might as well fill several while she was at it in case she had more diving to do.

The moon pool room had a rack for two tanks above which was a set of gauges and valves. Trailing from the valves were two fill whips. She found a couple of empty tanks and set them in the rack. The steel structure of the high pressure tanks kept them negatively buoyant even when empty.

Kate hesitated before attaching the fill whips. There would be some sea water trapped between the fitting on the end of the fill whip and the tank valve. Did that matter?

She decided to try one tank first. Kate dropped the fitting over the tank valve and tightened it in place. The tanks were rated to 5,000 PSI. A necessity for very deep diving since the water pressure was huge down here and a tank filled at the bottom would have to contain the full pressure during ascent without exploding. A safety valve ensured that the tank couldn’t be filled past its safe operating pressure. Kate knew all this from sport diving combined with the briefings they had had before she boarded the Pheia. Still, she was nervous about putting high pressure gas into the tank.

The sea water in the fitting still worried her. “How can I get that out?”

Kate thought about how she cleared her regulator when she put it in her mouth underwater. She undid the fill whip from the tank so it was just sitting loosely on the tank valve and then she cracked the fill valve open on the panel above the tanks and saw the stream of gas coming out of the gap at the tank valve. She pushed the fill fitting into place and tightened it as best she could with the gas still escaping. The pressure built up quickly and made it hard to get it to seal.

Using two hands she slowly reduced the flow by closing the valve on the fill panel as she tightened the fitting on the tank. The bubbles stopped. “Good enough.” She thought, and opened the tank’s valve and then the fill valve on the panel. The gauge showing the tank pressure starting to rise.

The tank that she was breathing from was almost empty and she didn’t want to have to change tanks again so she hooked up the second tank and started filling that one too using the same procedure

Five minutes later she was almost out of gas in the tank she was holding but both tanks in the rack were full. She unhooked the fill hoses and pulled one tank from the rack leaving the other one in place so she knew where to find it.

Not having enough hands to hold everything, she took a breath from the regulator then spit it out and dropped the tank she was breathing from on the deck. She grabbed the full tank by the valve and breathing out a small stream of bubbles from the corner of her mouth she ascended the ladder to the ops room.

The full tank was heavy as she hauled it out of the water and laid it on the floor. She scanned the room half expecting to see other people. It was so weird to be alone in this place that had been so crowded a day ago. “Two days?” It was getting hard to keep track of time and she had no interest in trying to remember the events that had started her on her lone trip to the surface.

Kate swapped tanks in her scuba gear. The full tanks would be good for over an hour as long as she wasn’t doing anything strenuous.

It took ten minutes to get the collection of stakes and the box of carabiners into the ops room. By the time she had it all on the floor and had dropped her scuba gear on the floor beside it, she was tired and hungry. It was the stress. Even if she didn’t want to admit it, on a scale of one to ten she was about at thirteen now.

“Food,” she thought.

Kate boiled water and added it to one of the dried meals. She sat cross-legged on the floor thinking back to trips in the wilderness with her father. Happier times. Sitting in the sunshine — or the rain — eating these exact same meals, biting the heads off gummy bears and watching her dad cut up the last apple of the trip. After eight minutes were up, she opened the food pack to stir it. The smell of the food reinforced the memories of the camping trips and she burst into tears.

Kate ate the food slowly and tried to stop crying. It was just so hard to be here. “So let’s think about the antenna.”

“We need to be able to join the stakes together with the biners so we need a way to make a hole in the pointy end. How do we do that? Do we need to get the point out of the stake tube first? Maybe. Then make a hole in the tube big enough for a biner to go through. Aluminum is soft so perhaps I can punch a hole with something?”

She took one stake and placed the point on the side of the tubular part of another one. “Hammer?”

She saw a dive weight on the floor and put down the stakes to get it.

A test hit showed that the point on the end of one stake was hard enough to penetrate the thin aluminum tube. She beat the stake several times until the point was all the way through one side of the tube. She wiggled it out and looked at the hole. “Not big enough.”

She rolled the tube over on the floor and used the point on the second stake to beat a hole in the opposite side. Now she had two small holes. “Just need to make it bigger.”

Kate found some more dive weights and made two short stacks so that she could rest the tube on top of them and have room for the spike to pass through the tube without hitting the floor.

It was easy to enlarge the hole working a little from each side, but it took a while before the hole was big enough to pass the carabiner through.

She tried attaching the blunt end of one stake to the pointy end of the one she had beaten the hole through. They attached with a short overlap. The biner wasn’t long enough the clear the ends of both tubes. “That’ll work. Just 900 more to do.”

The thought of having to repeat the job on all the remaining tubes had two sides to it. On one side she was now sure she could join all the tubes together and end up with a fairly long antenna. On the other, it was going to take ages. But then again, she had nothing much better to do.

Two hours later, Kate had made holes in the pointed end of all the stakes and had put biners through all the blunt end holes. Each stake was about four feet long and she had around fifty of them. “Should be long enough,” but she wasn’t really sure. She had no idea what antenna length was needed. But this was what she had, and it was enough to try with.

The next problem was how to get them assembled in line and outside the hab without losing any of them or dropping the whole thing down the side of the wall.

Kate took one of the long lengths of line and attached it to the ladder in the ops room. Then she clipped every stake to the line by its biner. At the far end of the line she made a loop and tied a figure eight knot that she pulled as tight as she could. She clipped a biner into the loop.

She put her dive suit back on and then the scuba gear. After one last check to make sure everything was lined up right on the floor, she dropped down the ladder holding the end of the line.

In the moon pool room, Kate pulled another of the floating BCs down from the ceiling and dumped almost all of the air out of it. She clipped the line to the BC. She didn’t need it to float yet, just to prevent the biners from sliding off the line. Now she felt like she wasn’t going to lose anything. It was a lot like rock climbing. When you were setting up or breaking down an anchor it was really important not to lose any gear or inadvertently untie yourself. “Be slow, be careful, check it twice.”