The end of the arm was about two feet from the wall and just above Boris’ head. She tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
Boris looked up at Kate. What was she doing out here?
Kate could see the pain in his eyes. She looked at where his hand was in the rock. She reached out to free it but his other hand grabbed her wrist.
She gave him an OK as a question.
Boris signed back with OK and then waved his hand. Kate smiled to herself, the crease in her face letting a small amount of water into her mask. He released his grip on her arm and she positioned herself so she could hold the hab’s arm with one hand and Boris’s wrist with the other.
She applied downward pressure slightly on his wrist again and he reacted by grabbing her arm and shaking his head.
Kate looked at the coral. It was cracked in many places. Perhaps she could split it. Her right hand patted her BC until she found the end of the small dive knife. This wasn’t the long, sturdy knife of the old underwater movies. This was the polite, short, almost useless modern tool now considered acceptable by the recreational dive community. It looked to her like it would be great for cutting cheese. She pushed the blunted tip into a crack in the coral about three inches above where Boris’s hand was trapped. The knife blade went in an inch or so and stopped. She moved it from side to side, trying to widen the crack. It moved just enough for the blade to slide in another inch. The short knife gave her very little leverage but it was better than trying to use her fingers. She pushed sideways on the blade as hard as she could hoping fervently that it wouldn’t break.
The knife gave way suddenly and a large chunk of coral broke off in a cloud of dust. A second later a much bigger section of the wall came away from above them. It dropped down in almost slow motion taking Boris with it. His hand was still stuck in the hole.
Kate grabbed for Boris with her free hand but she missed him by inches.
The chunk of coral pulled Boris rapidly down the wall. The sudden movement had sent an enormous wave of pain through his body and he blacked out. He continued breathing, unconscious as he fell, following the huge chunk of coral towards the bottom two hundred feet below.
Kate let go of the arm and tried to swim down. She dumped all the breath from her lungs to make herself negatively buoyant but without fins she only sank slowly down. By the time she passed the bottom of the hab, Boris was out of sight below her. She breathed in again and grabbed at the line tethering her to the hab. There was a lot of line and it took a while before she had any tension in it.
She held on to the line not moving, looking down into the dark, looking for a sign of Boris. Something in her head dug up a rule of diving: if you lose sight of your buddy, search for no more than a minute before surfacing. It was far easier to find each other on the surface than in the vastness of the ocean. “But I can’t surface,” she thought. She looked up at the hab. She knew she needed to get back inside. She really didn’t want to leave Boris. He might still be alive. The combination of the hydreliox mix and the meds they were on ensured he could handle the depth. After all what was 200 feet more when you were already 4,000 feet down? The tether wasn’t that long. Perhaps a 100 feet? There was no way she could get down there and back up again. The line was too short and she had no fins. A free ascent using the BC for buoyancy was very risky. Even if she could control the ascent, if she drifted away from the hab on the way back up she wouldn’t be able to get back to it. She couldn’t possibly hold Boris and swim with one arm.
All this went through her head as she hung on the line rotating slowly, looking into the dark with tears in her eyes. She was alone.
Alone
Kate sat on the floor of the ops room. Apart from the occasional whine from the drive motors it was quiet. She had dropped her dive gear where she now sat and pulled down the top of her dive suit. She was emotionally drained and very alone. Above her were four and a half thousand feet of seawater and somewhere 200 feet below her were the bodies of her friends. And there was nothing to see. No way to see up. No way to see her friends below. The only view was the small patch of wall outside the portal and a clean area of rock marking the spot where Boris had been taken to join the rest of the crew. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. They were all gone and she was here. Why was she still here?
The overwhelming sense of being alone took a grip on Kate. She sat on the floor of the ops room for a long time not really thinking of anything much at first. She felt totally drained. She had no emotional energy left even to feel sad. She was also starting to feel very tired — a combination of lack of sleep and the wild emotional ride of the last few days.
The ops room had dried out almost completely now. There were a few puddles on the floor where she had dumped her gear but otherwise the floor was dry. And it was noticeably warmer now. The electrical heating was working and so was the gas system — obviously.
She looked up at the consoles. They were all lit up and showing various bits of information about the hab. It seemed like alien technology. Kate noticed that her hands were shaking slightly. She brought them up in front of her face and tried to hold them still. Her fingertips shook as she watched them. It seemed odd. She wasn’t cold anymore. “Oh, crap, where are the meds?”
It had been a while since they had all taken a dose of Dr. Ford’s HPNS meds. The realization that she might be suffering from HPNS brought her awake. She needed to find the meds now or she was soon going to be very dysfunctional.
The food and gear they had dragged into the ops room was all piled in one corner. Kate tried to think where the meds might be. Had they even brought them over? She started to get worried as she dug into the piles of tinned food and bottles of water. She didn’t see any of the plastic cases that Dr. Ford kept the syringes in. The pile of stuff seemed massive now that she was alone. Food was not going to be an issue for sure. But where are the meds?
Kate had made a mess of the pile to no effect. She decided a more orderly search was needed, and in any case she should organize the food and water so that at least she had some idea of where everything was.
Five minutes later she had several organized piles but no box of syringes.
She looked at her hands again, holding them straight out in front of her. They were still shaking. She put her hands down and looked at the ladder to the moon pool below. The water was about a foot down from the deck and looked very uninviting. She had to have the meds. Without them she was likely to start having difficulty making decisions, and that wasn’t going to lead anywhere good.
Reluctantly she pulled the upper half of the dive suit back up, pushed her arms into the sleeves and pulled the zipper closed. She looked again at the water. It felt cold just to look at it.
“OK, we need to get motivated here girl.”
Kate picked up the scuba gear and made sure the gas was on. She took a breath from the regulator and then hauled the rig up off the floor and onto her shoulder.
Once in the gear, she felt better. She had something to do, and that felt OK.
She put on the mask, checked the gear one more time and started down the ladder.
She felt the water push the suit against her legs and felt the cold of the water. It wasn’t really cold but her mind was telling her it was cold and it wasn’t somewhere she needed to be.
She went down a few more steps and put the regulator in. She took a breath and stepped down further until her head was under the water. The cold hurt her head. “Damn. Why didn’t I put on a hood?” The shock of the cold, made her think more clearly. She dropped down to the floor of the moon pool room and moved into the tunnel to the storage room.