Nigel Thompson - Pheia

Getting into her dive suit and scuba gear was becoming automatic now and she was conscious that with that familiarity and the lack of sleep that she might be getting sloppy, so she had found a marker pen and written a check list on the wall by the ladder. She looked at it. “What crappy writing.” A sure sign she had been tired when she wrote it. Kate read through the list twice. It seemed to be complete, and she had done everything on it. A second glance at her gas gauges showed she was OK for the dive. Grabbing the ladder with her left hand she pulled on a fin, then changed hands and pulled on the other. The fins made the ladder useless but the swimming was much easier. She dropped into the water and descended into the moon pool room. From there it was just a few good kicks to float over into the storage room.

Kate grabbed two coils of the yellow line and made a figure eight loop in the end of each one and clipped the loops to her BC. Then she picked up some more biners and made them into a chain which she clipped to the other side of the BC. Having done that she swam back through the tunnel to the moon pool and down through the exit.

Outside the Pheia she scanned the lower part of the ops cylinder with her flashlight for a place to tie off the line. Most of the cylinder was covered in gas bottles. The only clear areas were near the portal and where the tunnels attached the ops cylinder to the crew cylinder.

She got closer to the gas bottles and saw how they were mounted to the cylinder with short brackets. There was room to pass the rope through the bracket. She unclipped one of the coils of line and undid the clove hitch that held the coil together. Then she passed one end through the gas bottle bracket and tied a bowline. She put two half hitches in the free end. “Paranoid are we?” she thought.

A tug on the line confirmed it was solid. Kate pushed back from the hab and paid out line as she swam around it to the far side of the crew cylinder. She took a biner from the collection on her BC and tried to clip it to the gas bottle mounting bracket but the biner was too small to go around the wide metal. She clipped it back on the chain. “This really is just like climbing.”

Finding the end of the coil of line, she felt for her dive knife, intending to cut of a length of the line but was surprised to find it not there. A sudden flashback of the image of Boris disappearing below the hab reminded her where she had lost it.

She made the line into a coil again so it wouldn’t get tangled and tied the end to the bottle bracket. It took her only a few minutes to return to the moon pool room and find another knife. “Put the goddamn knife on the checklist.”

Back at the far side of the hab, Kate cut off a length of line and tied it into a loop with a figure eight knot then passed the loop of line through the bracket and back through itself. She clipped a biner in the end. “Nice anchor.” Happy that the line would not drop down below the bottles, she clipped the line through the biner and continued to pay it out as she swam the rest of the way around the hab to where she had started. She made another loop of line and clipped in another biner and the line through that, then went back in the opposite direction to the far side.

She placed her feet against the gas bottle and pulled on the line until it was taut, then pulled a bit harder. Nothing happened. The hab didn’t move. She had somehow expected to be able to pull the two cylinders of the hab together, but if she couldn’t move them, perhaps they were still joined solidly. No, that was crap. She saw the gaps every time she went though the tunnel. There was just too much mass perhaps and she hadn’t tried for long enough.

She took a loop of line around her wrist and pushed back hard with her legs. The line moved an inch. “OK, so the rope stretches.”

Resigned that she could not move the hab, she decided to just secure it as best she could and spent the next fifteen minutes going back and forth with the line. Each time she reached one of her anchor biners, she clipped in the line, pulled it as tight as possible and went back in the opposite direction. When the first line was used up, she did the same thing with the other one but on the other side so as to balance out the first line.

When she was finished there were quite a few lengths of line on each side and she felt happy that the two hab cylinders were not going to separate. Her gas gauges showed she was getting low and she returned to the moon pool room intending to swap the tank for the full one she had left there. When she got to the tank rack it occurred to her that there wasn’t an easy way to swap the tanks underwater so she pulled the full tank from the rack and swam it up the ladder ahead of her and pushed it up onto the floor of the ops room. Satisfied with that, she dropped back down and found another empty tank to fill. She checked her gas to make sure she had time and waited until the tank was full, then shut of the valves and swam back through the tunnel to the storage room.

One thing Kate liked about being at this depth was that swimming up and down even a hundred feet made so little difference in pressure that her ears didn’t even register it. It was so much nicer than shallow dives near the surface when only a foot of depth change registered on her eardrums. Her ears had never cleared easily and would not clear at all if she was tense. She had learned to take her time on the first part of the descent of a dive to let her ears adjust. If she spent just a little extra time doing this, then the rest of the dive was a charm. Down here there was no need for any of that, and she found that she was enjoying the dives despite the circumstances.

In the storage room, Kate looked around to see if there were any sheets of plastic, or tarps or anything that could be used to cover a soggy mattress. “It’s a deep dive expedition. Why would we have tarps?” There weren’t any, and she gave up looking quickly. She had most of the store room inventory in her head now and nowhere in the list were tarps. Trash can liners maybe? Join them with duct tape? But she couldn’t find any of those either.

She swam up the few feet to the galley. As she surfaced she pulled her mask off and put it on the deck. She paused, floating with her eyes just above floor level. It was very weird to see the room again. It looked just like it did when she had last been there with Chas and Boris.

She pulled off her fins and threw them on the galley floor. Then she climbed the few last steps of the ladder and pulled off the scuba gear, which she laid down on the deck. Having done that, she climbed the ladder to the crew room.

Kate scanned the bunks half hoping to see someone asleep but it was empty — just as she had left it. It was warm in the crew room and it felt comfortable. “Almost like home.”

She pulled off the dive suit and let it fall in a pile by the ladder.

Since she was here she thought that she might as well search the place for anything useful. It felt wrong to plan to go through the other crew’s possessions. Kate had always respected their spaces and never had any interest in what was stored there. But now, what? What might be there that could possibly help? Probably nothing. And even if she did find something useful like an iPod how would she get it back to the ops room without it getting wet? “Oh, whatever. Just have a quick look.”

Kate rifled through the crew storage lockers very superficially. She almost didn’t want to find anything because then she’d have to decide if she was going to take it. In the end she decided that whatever might be in there could stay there. She collapsed back on to her bunk and stared at the bottom of the bunk above. She was asleep before she could have another thought.

On the surface barge, David Williams was getting very frustrated. “Why haven’t they responded?”