Nigel Thompson - Pheia

She felt the same now. She was alone in the sea and a group of unknown people were approaching. Maybe it would be fun to hide? They would find the Pheia empty. Just like the Mary Celeste: an old British ship found abandoned in the Atlantic in the 1800’s.

Kate breathed out and listened to the bubbles. She looked up to see the stream of gas above her. There would be no hiding here. In any case, it was a stupid idea.

She watched the lights above her. They were almost here. She kicked away from the wall and floated down to the top of the hab. She hooked her fins under a gas line and adjusted her buoyancy so she could stand still without moving. The cage and divers were quite clear now. She pointed her dive light at the cage and made a circle with it. She saw lights in the cage go off and on again. They saw her. She had to work hard to calm down. She was almost in tears now from the excitement. She adjusted her position again and tried to breath slowly.

Morrison and his team floated out of the cage and swam down towards the Pheia. Morrison laughed out load when he saw the message Kate had tied to the top of the hab. “WELCOME EARTHLINGS” it said. He assumed the diver floating behind the sign was Kate. He gave her an enthusiastic OK with his right hand, pumping it a couple of times.

Kate saw the OK and guessed whoever it was had read her sign. It seemed slightly childish now, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to explain it. But that could wait. She pulled out a dive slate and wrote a quick note. As the three divers arrived in front of her she showed it to the one who had given her the OK.

Morrison took the slate and read it.

“WELCOME. GOING BACK IN NOW.”

Morrison gave her an OK and tried to signal with his hands that the three of them were going to hook the Pheia to the cable.

Kate got the idea, gave an OK back. Then she kicked forward and before Morrison could react, she hugged him.

Morrison got the message. When he looked into Kate’s mask, he could see tears in her eyes. He nodded to her.

Kate let go of Morrison, looked briefly at the other two divers who were doing something outside the cage they had come down in, and then kicked over the side of the hab and let herself descend.

She was very excited and had to work hard to keep her breathing under control. Before she swam under the weight stack, she looked up just to make sure that were actually there. She saw part of the cage and a pair of fins. Real enough.

Morrison had not been expecting the hug. In his experience, hugging underwater was rare. Especially in the commercial dive business where a hug from a fellow diver would likely mean someone was going to get a beating in the locker room later. And in any case, the equipment tended to get in the way.

It hadn’t really dawned on him until then that he and his crew might just be saving Kate’s life. She had obviously survived this far on her own wits but his quick look at the damage to the Pheia told him she had been very lucky.

The Pheia was still rising slowly under its own power. Morrison had asked the surface to stop lowering the cage and start pulling it back up at the programmed ascent rate. He didn’t want it dropping down below them or banging into the Pheia while they worked.

The other two members of his team had already rigged a polypropylene line from the Pheia to the big hook that was holding the cage to the barge’s cable. That allowed them to keep it close in case the Pheia moved laterally or a current pushed on the cable.

The next step was to unhook the cables they would sling around the hab to keep the two cylinders together. The team uncoiled the cables from the cage letting them sink down the few feet that separated the bottom of the cage from the top of the two cylinders of the hab. They left the upper ends secured to the cage and then dropped down to secure the lower ends to the Pheia.

As Morrison reached the mid way point he saw the nylon line Kate had put in place. He gave it a tug. It was tighter than he expected and the knots looked good which was unusual. Most people tied pathetic knots that came undone in a slight breeze. These were good solid knots that a sailor might use. He scored another point for Kate, and set about securing the cables they had brought with them.

The team worked mostly in silence, only using the comms when one person was out of sight and needed something to happen like taking up slack. It took them less than 15 minutes to get all the cables in place and snugged up to Morrison’s satisfaction. He was very pleased with the arrangement. He keyed his comm system. “Morrison to surface. Please give Miss Babin my regards. All the support cables went in place perfectly. Moving to the hook up phase next. Out.”

He had no way to know if the surface would hear his transmission. He was too far down, but it did no harm to try. He keyed the comm system again. “Phase 2 people.”

The other two divers gave him an OK, preferring that to using the comm system.

They swam together to the top of the cage. They unhooked the lifting cables and made sure they were secure to the barge cable before letting them drop down. Once the cables were off the cage one of them triggered a gas cylinder that inflated a small lifting bag attached to the cage. When the cage was neutral in the water he shut the gas off. They uncoupled the cage from the hook on the end of the barge’s cable and swam it sideways until it was clear of the Pheia.

Morrison took a ten foot line with large clips on both ends and attached one end to the top of the cage. He signaled the other two to get the lifting cables attached to the Pheia then let out some gas from the lifting bag until the cage started to sink slowly. He swam down with it, passing it just before it reached the weight stack. As the cage started to drop past him he hooked the other end of the line to a bracket on the Pheia. He gave it a tug and hoped it would stay put. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they lost the cage and the tools in it but it would be nice not to.

He let the cage sink down until the line was taut then swam down and dumped the rest of the gas from the lifting bag. He didn’t need the lift bag expanding as they ascended as that might cause the cage to hit the Pheia.

Satisfied the cage was secure, he swam around the hab slowly rising as he went. There was no other apparent damage. When he reached the top, the lifting cables were all in place. There was a good ten feet of slack that needed to be taken up and he needed to shut off the Pheia’s drive motors so that it hung on the cable. He had to be inside to do that.

There was just one more job to do, and one of the others was doing it now. The lift cable also had a comms line attached to it and that was plugged into the port on the top of the ops cylinder.

Morrison looked one last time at the lifting cables to make sure they had them connected to the cylinders correctly. The tensioning of the cables couldn’t be done until the hab’s drives were shut off.

Morrison had planned to do that himself but now wondered if he could get Kate to do it so he could stay outside and supervise the tensioning.

He keyed the comm system. “I’m going to get the drive shut down. Hold fast until I return.”

When he saw the OKs from the others he swam down over the side of the Pheia. As he passed the portal in the ops room he looked in and saw Kate looking out at him. She waved. Waving was another thing he wasn’t used to underwater. The closest he got to waving was using the ‘iffy’ signal. He gave her an OK and dropped down below the portal.

When he got up into the moon pool room he was momentarily surprised. He had expected it to be dry then saw the gap where the connecting tunnel had parted from the cylinder and understood why it was flooded. He kicked up and grasped the ladder to the ops room.