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Boris had made his way back up into the operations center. Chas was on the ladder behind him trying very hard not to stare at the floating bodies. He was dealing with them better than he had expected. They looked like pale mannequins from some kind of freaky clothing store.

Chas handed more dive weights up to Boris as he reached for them and Boris dropped them on the ops room floor. They had a small pile there now and Chas hoped that attaching them to the corpses wasn’t going to be a problem for Kate because he was pretty sure that no matter how he felt about these dead people now, he was never going to be able to touch them.

He saw bubbles in front of his face and looked down to see Kate below him. She was waving at him to move up the ladder.

Boris decided to leave the weights to Chas and Kate and moved over to the ops room tunnel hatch. It looked OK. It must have been open when the accident had happened. He pushed it closed slowly against the resistance of the water and looked very closely at the edge of the door as it came almost closed. He was wondering if it was warped. It closed snugly and he spun the wheel. Good. One less problem to deal with.

Chas had found the gas control panel and had been waiting for Boris to signal the door was closed. Boris waved at him and Chas opened one of the gas flood valves slightly. These valves connected to a set of tanks outside the hab that were filled with heliox all the time to help mitigate a small leak. This certainly wasn’t a small leak, but they had only to push out the water from the ops room not the entire hab. The moon pool could stay flooded. He figured they had enough gas in the scuba sets to make dozens of trips back and forth if they had to. That wasn’t going to be the main issue. The big deal was going to be just how much gas was in the Pheia’s tanks. He couldn’t do the math in his head but he knew that the water pressure down where they were meant that whatever massive amount of gas was in the tanks at sea level pressure was a lot less volume down here.

As he cracked the valve open, bubbles emerged from an opening in the ceiling of the compartment. He opened the valve fully and watched as the gas started to form a bubble at the top of the room. It was expanding quite fast but it was obvious that at the rate the gas was entering the room it would be a while before they could get out of the scuba gear.

Kate and Boris attached one or two dive weights to each of the dead crew and pushed them over to the ladder. Each body slowly drifted down out of sight but Kate knew this was only the first step. Once they had them all in the moon pool room, they would need to push them out of the hab exit to float the few hundred feet down to the sea bed; the place they had come down here to explore. She couldn’t help crying as she worked. The tears stung her eyes and she had to stop more than once to flood her mask and clear it. The seawater washed her tears away just as it took the bodies of her friends.

By the time all of the bodies had been sent down to the lower level, the room had a pocket of gas about two feet deep at the top. Boris gave Kate a thumbs-up sign and the two of them pulled up the ladder into the gas pocket.

“I need to look at gas generator system.” Boris said. “Can you go down and take care of the bodies?” he asked her.

Before she could answer, Chas’ head appeared on the opposite side of the room. He pulled his mask down around his neck. “Hey, Boris, I don’t think there is going to be enough gas to fill the room.”

“Yes, I expected that.” Boris replied. “I will see if the gas generator system is still working. There should be plenty of helium and hydrogen in the tanks. We just need it to make more oxygen.”

Boris put his mask back on and dropped back into the water. Kate followed, dreading the thought of dealing with the bodies again.

Kate stopped at the bottom of the ladder and saw that Boris was looking at the gas control panel. It seemed very unlikely that the systems would have survived the flooding but as Boris had pointed out, the actual control systems were above them in the reactor room and the control panels down here were all gel filled. They had been on the dive for about 20 minutes now and she was starting to feel a little chilly. The feel of the cold made her want to get the dive over with and she lowered herself down the ladder into the moon pool room. A few rungs from the bottom she stopped. The floor below her was covered in bodies. She pushed off the ladder with a good shove and floated down to the floor beside them.

Part of her wanted to say something for each one, and part of her just wanted them gone.

She bent over and grabbed the pant leg of the nearest body. It lifted easily from the pile and she directed it over the moon pool exit. Goodbye, she thought as it slowed dropped out of sight.

Kate looked at the pile of corpses and selected the next closest one. She grabbed it by the arm and pulled it over the exit. She was trying not to look at the faces but as she grabbed the next one, the face of Kayla Miller floated before her and Kate let out a sob that made here face crease and let water into her mask. Tears filled her eyes as she pulled the body over the exit and released it. She didn’t bother to clear her mask. She didn’t need to see any better than the blurry view she had now as she slowly pulled the rest of the dead crew over the exit and released them into the darkness below.

When they were all gone she lifted her head and cleared her mask. The moon pool room was empty. She stood there alone listening to the sounds of her bubbles as she breathed. It was peaceful. The same peace she had discovered on her first sea dives in the Caribbean with her family so many years before. Despite the chill she was feeling, she tried to focus her mind on remembering happy dives in sunny warm waters; her father looking for things to show her in this new world.

Chas’ feet appeared on the ladder and brought her back to reality. She looked at him and he made swimming motions with his fingers and pointed to the tunnel hatch. Kate nodded and moved towards the tunnel.

Back in the galley again, Kate dropped her scuba gear on the deck and started to unzip her suit.

“Help me out of this will you Chas? Where is Boris? Is he OK?”

“He indicated to me to come back. I think he’s working on the gas system controls. When I left, the room was about six feet deep in water still.”

“Do you think it’s going to work? Can we get the ops room working again?”

“From what I saw when I was in there, all the controls are working. Boris must have been right about the electronics. It looks as though it really is waterproof.”

Kate helped Chas out of his gear and found a can of soup. “Are you hungry?” She asked Chas. “I’ll heat this up. I’m starving. It’s been ages since we last ate.”

“Sure. But not mushroom. Mushroom soup is evil.” He smiled at her. This was the first time Kate had seen him look close to normal. “I’m glad the bodies are gone,” he added.

“Yes. Me too. I couldn’t stop crying but now that we are back here it seems oddly surreal. Like it was a dream.”

They sat together and ate the soup in silence. As Kate was getting to the bottom of the bowl she heard bubbles, and then saw Boris emerge from the storage room. He pulled off his mask and tossed it on the deck.

“Need help?” Chas asked and offered a hand.

Boris pulled up on Chas’ hand and stepped onto the deck. “Gas system is working,” he said and pulled of his scuba set. “I estimate about five hours to clear water from ops room but we can operate equipment before it is empty.”

Chas helped him out of his suit. “Can we get back to the surface?”

“Yes, this is possible. We must blow the pyros that hold the legs to the hab, then use the drive system to ascend.”

“Do we know the drives are OK,” Kate asked. “Did you test them?”