Nigel Thompson - Pheia

She finished searching the crew area, then decided to make all the bunks up as best she could. It seemed a little OCD while she was doing it, but when it was done she felt better. As she tidied up each bunk she thought of who had used it. It was very difficult to remember who had slept where, and more difficult to know they were now dead.

As she was tidying up Boris’ bunk she found a book under the pillow. It was a translation of some of Pushkin’s poetry. Each poem was printed in the original Russian and also in English with an accompanying analysis. Kate flipped through the pages. She stopped on a poem called The Bronze Horseman. It started with an illustration. Kate read a few words of the English translation. She read a line: “tossing and turning like a sick man in his troubled bed,” and wondered if that was how Boris had felt. She doubted it. He seemed too full of himself. She wondered if perhaps Boris had been using the poems to improve his English, or perhaps even his Russian? “OK. Enough. He was just reading some poetry. Can’t fault the man for that.”

She put the book in a bag, sucked the air out and sealed it. She tossed it in the bin with the other discoveries.

When she had finished cleaning the place up, she went to her own bunk and checked she had left nothing she cared about. The bed was a mess as a result of her pulling out the mattress earlier. She rummaged through the bed sheets. Satisfied there was nothing there, she pulled off the top sheet and re-covered the bed with its blanket. She folded the sheet carefully over and over until it was about the size of the gallon bags she had, but it was too fat to fit in. She needed it dry but she didn’t need all of it so she unfolded it again and estimating where the center line was, bit hard into the edge seam, and tore it down the middle. She folded up one half and dropped it on the bunk. The other piece she folded carefully over and over until it was the size of the bag. It was still hard to get in, but it fit now. She couldn’t seal the bag. Bits of material kept getting caught in the zipper so she stuffed the bag into another one and then stood on it to squeeze the air out. Keeping her foot in place she bent over and carefully sealed the other bag. The package went into the bin with the other items.

Knowing this was likely the last time she’d see the crew room, she looked carefully around one last time. She sighed. Damn, it was just too depressing.

Kate put her dive suit on and then her scuba gear. She pushed the storage bin to the edge of the ladder hole with her foot then gave it a shove so it fell down into the water where it floated.

She followed it into the water, cracked the lid open and tipping it up so that it filled with water, then sealed the lid. It was almost exactly neutrally buoyant which made it easy to push in front of her as she swam back through the tunnel to the moon pool room.

Back up in the ops room she hung her dive suit over the pipes and then opened the bin and tipped out all the water into the ladder hole. She pulled out the bag containing the bed sheet and re-sealed the box.

She put the box in the corner with the food, then pulled out the sheet a laid it out on a dry area of the deck and went to work.

(900 ft)

As dawn broke over the island, the divers and many of the boat crew were already out on deck under the boat’s work lights preparing for the day’s dive. The surface barge sat silently on a sea as flat as glass. The wind had stopped completely during the night and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen anywhere.

Morrison looked over the side into the water. Somewhere below them was the Pheia. It wouldn’t be hard to find. They just had to drop down the side of the wall a thousand feet and there it would be. That was just over a quarter of a mile. A trip of that distance on the surface would take just a few minutes. In the sea, things were different. To deal with the increasing pressure as they descended, the dive team would change gas mixtures twice. They would rely on a collection of small mechanical parts to keep them alive. If anything failed, things could go bad very fast. But none of that worried Morrison. He’d dived past the depth they would be working today many times. The other two members of his team were equally experienced, and he trusted them implicitly. Years of working together allowed them to work cooperatively with little communication and a lot of trust.

Morrison looked out at the horizon just as someone shut off the work lights. The morning light was always spectacular, but today, the combination of the sunrise and the calm sea was perfect. Apart from a few sparse clouds on the distant horizon, It looked like it was going to be another fine Caribbean day.

He pushed back from the rail and walked over to the cage. It was time to get into the water.

On the Pheia, Kate was looking at a message on the ELF radio from Williams. “Expect divers in about two hours.” She checked the time he’d sent it and then looked at the clock. Her heart rate rose in anticipation. At the portal she checked the wall. Still there. Still creeping past. The Pheia was at about 950 feet now. Kate pushed her face to the portal and tried to look up but the angle wouldn’t let her see the surface. She imagined the faint blue glow. “Wait. Is it day or night?” she thought. She checked the clock again. It was morning. Of course. They’d want to do the dive in daylight. She did a quick calculation and figured they would take about an hour to do the descent. Maybe a little less. Given the time of Williams’ message, she had about an hour and a half to get ready. Easily enough time.

Kate pulled on her dive suit. She was very excited and her hands were shaking slightly. “Crap. Not HPNS now?” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and slowly through her nose with her tongue in the roof of her mouth. She could feel her heart beating hard. As she breathed slowly and deliberately, her heart rate started to fall. She felt calmer. When she opened her eyes, her hands were steady again. “Let’s not screw this up.”

When her dive suit was on, Kate swapped the tank in her scuba rig for a full one and checked the pressure. It was full. She put the regulator in her mouth and breathed slowly. Then she did the same with the spare. A quick check of her BC pockets verified she had everything she needed. “Well, this should be our final dive Buddy,” she said to her checklist on the wall.

Holding her fins in her arm, Kate descended the ladder until she was half way to the floor of the moon pool room. She dumped the gas from her BC and breathed out. As she descended slowly through the moon pool room she reached down and put her fins on. She felt good. It all seemed so familiar now. She gave a kick to rotate head down and dropped through the moon pool exit.

Williams was out on deck talking to Morrison and Babin. “So, you all think we are ready for this then?” he asked.

Babin nodded. Morrison said, “Yes. We are. If this goes like the practice run yesterday, we should be in good shape to start the up haul in just a couple of hours or so.”

“Good luck then.” Williams said.

Williams and Babin stood together watching the divers get into the cage. They had a speaker on the deck so the crew could hear what was happening on the comms circuit. They heard Morrison conduct the comms check, then nothing.

“They don’t talk much do they?” Williams said to Babin.

“Nope.”

“I take it, that’s your way of doing the same?”

“Yep.”

Babin grinned at him. “I like their style. They work together a lot, and all know what they are doing. It’s nice to watch a cohesive group like that in action. Very professional.”

Williams nodded. He too was impressed with the divers. He hoped it wasn’t misplaced. He wanted to get Kate back to the surface. And it would be a bonus if they could get the Pheia at the same time, although he had been wondering if it could be repaired and if anyone else would want to go down in it. He had thought about that a lot lately. Conducting operations deep underwater was always going to involve some risk in the same way that spaceflight did. There was no shortage of people applying to be astronauts. But space was more exciting in many ways than the deep sea.