Nigel Thompson - Pheia

She had tried doing yoga. That was something she’d flirted with on and off but could never really get to grips with. For exercise, and a bit of zen, she preferred a few days in the mountains. It didn’t matter all that much what she was doing there. If she was backpacking, she got a good balance of zen and exercise. If she was snow boarding, hiking or biking, there was less zen but it was still there in the views, the sunshine, the occasional animals. You just had to let it find you.

But yoga down here was difficult. For one thing, the floor was cold, hard and slippery when her hands were damp, which was most of the time. She had settled for a few pushups and some crunches. These kept her blood flowing and helped slightly with the boredom.

She thought about Subramanian’s suggestion of the sleeping pills again. Maybe that really was a good idea. She could get six hours of sleep and that would be six less hours to think about her surroundings and the huge column of water above her.

Mostly, she avoided thinking about the depth. It was too vast to really comprehend. She had regularly dived to 100 feet in several places around the Caribbean. She had the measure of that. How long it took to get down, how long she could stay, and how long the ascent took. She was currently about 27 times as far down. In some sense that didn’t seem so bad. At two deep dives a day, that was a two week vacation. And half of that would be lying on the beach in the hot sun with a good book. Of course this was all fictional. For one thing, she generally only did one deep dive a day and didn’t dive every day. “Oh this is crap. Get off this. Too much fantasy land.”

Kate pulled the towels off the mattress and hung them over the overhead pipes. Then she pulled off the plastic table cloth and walked around on the mattress in her bare feet trying to squeeze out some more water. Nothing came out. She bent down and felt it with her hand. It was still damp. But then, so was everything else in the hab. Perhaps most of the water was out now.

She put the plastic table cloth back in place carefully centering it. She left the towels over the pipes as if to dry. She doubted they would change moisture content at all, but it just looked more sensible. Kind of like airing out a sleeping bag in the morning before she packed it up camp for the next day’s hike.

Outside the hab it was dark except for the area of the wall illuminated by the Pheia’s lights. The hab crept up slowly. It was not following the course it had taken down. The descent location had been chosen based on the features of the wall. Nobody wanted a big protrusion of rock to bump the hab on its way down.

The wall was far from smooth. It had many protrusions, caves and tunnels. Kate had no idea that the hab was currently right underneath one of those protrusions.

When the hab caught the edge of the rocky overhang it stopped its ascent and tilted the floor several degrees fast enough to catch Kate off balance and knock her to the floor. “What the hell?”

Several different alarms sounded on the console.

Kate got up off the floor and looked at the console screens. Most of it looked OK but the gas control system had lots of red items on the display. She tapped the red ‘Alarm’ indicator and the sound stopped. That helped. She scanned the display looking for some clue as to what was going on but it wasn’t obvious. She listened. There was a new noise. She knew the noises of the Pheia well by now. Mostly it made creaks and groans as the structure adjusted to temperature variations or other stresses as it moved through the water. But these were infrequent, and mostly it was very quiet.

At the portal, she looked outside. The hab was right up against the wall and it wasn’t moving. It didn’t take long to figure out it was stuck under something. But what was the noise? Could it be the drive system? She realized the drive motors were making a more or less constant noise. She went back to the console and found the drive screen. Sure enough the hab was stopped and the drive system was still trying to drive it up at a fixed rate.

Kate set the ascent rate to zero, and felt the hab readjust its attitude slightly. She went quickly back to the portal. The distance was about the same but the hab was upright again now. She heard the sound of rock on metal and the hab shifted again slightly. The noise stopped and she heard the drive system make the short bursts of noise it made when it was just station keeping.

She pushed her face hard up against the portal and looked up. There was a rock shelf just visible above and she guessed that was what the hab had hit. Under the rock were a few silver bubbles of gas. They looked just like the bubbles she saw on a dive if she was in a cave or floating inverted through a swim-through. She listened again. Yes, that was the sound of gas escaping, and a faint sound of bubbles. She had a gas leak.

She brought up the gas system display on the console and looked at the indicators. The oxygen and helium supplies were green but all the data for the hydrogen system was red. She didn’t have any idea what the tank pressure should be, but the rate indicator showed a constant flow of hydrogen from the system. Normally, this was almost zero. Hydrogen was added to the gas mix to help prevent HPNS, but since the crew didn’t consume the hydrogen there was no need to replenish it, except to handle a leak or the occasional scuba tank fill. She stared at the screen a bit longer. “I need help.”

Kate found the ELF radio screen and composed a message: “Hab has hit wall. Stable now. Hydrogen leaking.” She looked at it for a moment and then added: “Help.”

She tapped the button on the screen to send the message and went back to the portal. She pressed her ear against it and listened. She could definitely hear bubbles, and not just a few, but what sounded like a constant stream. Should she go out and look? What would be the point? She could get a better idea of the damage from outside. “Right. But what’s the point? I doubt I can fix it.”

She went back to the console and cycled through the gas system screens until she found the hydrogen page with all the red values. The hydrogen tank pressure was way down from where it had been a few minutes ago. She re-checked the oxygen and helium pages and found both were OK. Then she looked at the carbon dioxide scrubbers and made sure they were also OK. So, it’s just the hydrogen then.”

At the depth she was at, Kate needed the hydrogen in the mix to help offset HPNS. She went back to the main gas system page and checked the mixture. It looked OK. She wasn’t using any hydrogen by breathing, so as long as she didn’t have a leak from the hab itself, she might be ok. The idea of a leak was terrifying. Not only did she breathe the gas but the slight over-pressure in the hab kept the water out. She went to the ladder and looked down towards the moon pool room. The water level was right where it had been for the past few days. “Duh. The gas system would know if there was a leak.”

Back at the console she went through all the gas system pages looking for problems. She didn’t find any, but to be sure she would need to track all the gas pressures and the gas mix in the hab.

On one of the other screens she opened the Pheia’s log and started a new entry. She entered all the gas supply pressures, the hab’s gas mix values and the state of the CO2 scrubber. Then she added a few readings from the reactor power system. It made her nervous to even think about the reactor. Sure, it was designed to survive a satellite re-entry from orbit but stuff broke all the time. She entered the power system readings and closed out the log entry. She planned to do the whole exercise again in an hour. If there was a major leak it would show up then. If nothing showed up, she’d repeat the test in six hours to see if she had a minor leak.