Inside the storage room she started scanning the shelves. She remembered seeing medical supplies in one place, but wherever that was, it wasn’t obvious now.
Many of the boxes had been displaced when they had ransacked the place earlier collecting food. Quite a few of them were scattered around on the floor now.
All the plastic tubs looked the same from above. Pale blue lids hiding whatever they contained.
Kate dropped down onto her knees and started pulling the boxes aside. “Ah, Ha.” She had found the box with the packs of pre-loaded syringes. She pulled off the lid and grabbed two packs. Way more than she should need for the trip back to the top. Wait. How long was that? At least 15 days. She grabbed one more pack and started back to the connecting tunnel.
The syringe packs kept slipping out from under her arm as she used the other one to pull herself along. In the end, she loosened the harness of her BC and crammed two of the packs inside, keeping the third in her hand.
The trip back up the ladder took some effort as she had one hand and one elbow to climb with but she was almost neutrally buoyant so it was mostly keeping pointing the right way rather than climbing.
Back in the ops room Kate took off the gear again and stacked the packs of meds on the small counter below the system monitors. She pulled the dive suit off completely and threw it in the corner on top of the scuba gear. She hoped she wasn’t going to need it again.
It took a while to work up to giving herself an injection in her buttock. She held the needle of the syringe just in contact with her skin for several seconds willing herself to push it in. She didn’t like needles very much and in addition she was worried about doing it wrong.
When Dr. Ford had administered the injections it had taken only seconds and Kate had simply looked away. “OK, then. Let’s play doctor.”
She pulled back the syringe a few inches and plunged it into herself, then pushed down on the plunger. When it was empty she paused a second before realizing it had to come out again. Yanking it out she dropped it on the counter, then put her hand over the entry point and applied some pressure. She looked around the room and saw the small first aid box on the wall. Keeping her hand on her butt she walked over and opened it, looking for bandaids.
Kate pulled her hand away and tried to look at where she had injected herself but couldn’t see. She wiped her hand over the area and looked at it. No blood. She shut the first aid box door and latched it closed.
For the next hour, Kate tried to make a plan to get back to the surface. The essence of the plan was simple: program the hab at a fixed rate of ascent and wait. Easy. She already knew how to set up the ascent rate. But what rate to set. The hab was currently in about 4,500 feet of water and Kate knew she needed to ascend slowly enough to allow her body to outgas the hydrogen and helium that had been forced into her tissues by the huge pressure she was under.
Failure to go up slowly enough could cause bubbles to form and cause the bends. She knew too that hydrogen and helium were absorbed way less than nitrogen and this is why they were breathing the hydreliox mix. What she had no idea about was exactly how much she might have absorbed or at what rate it was safe to get rid of it by going up.
The original mission plan called for three weeks to get back to the surface, but that was after being on the bottom for several days and Kate thought it likely included a big safety margin.
There was no way she could deal with being in here by herself for three weeks. Half of that, maybe. But half the time seemed like it might be pushing things too hard. She settled on 15 days. From where she was now that meant an ascent rate of 300 feet per day. That sounded like a nice round number.
At the control console, Kate entered the ascent rate and her finger hovered over the Execute button. “What am I not thinking of?”
Kate scanned the displays again. Most of it seemed reasonable. She laughed. “Oh, right, like you know.”
She tapped the Execute button and heard the drive motors spin up. The hab shifted slightly and the image of the wall outside the portal started to move. She was going up.
Ascent
Kate stood at the portal in the ops room looking out at the wall. The control systems on the hab were keeping it about 30 feet from the wall. Easily close enough to see details on the wall when the flood lights were on. The hab was rising at 300 feet per day which sounded like a lot but that was only twelve and a half feet every hour and Kate could see 30 or 40 feet of wall from the portal. It was agonizing to watch the incredibly slow movement of the wall, but it was somehow compelling. It was the only indication that the hab was rising at all.
Inside the ops room, the only evidence that the hab was in motion was the sound of the drive motors which mostly emitted a constant faint whine but which occasionally changed speed briefly to adjust the attitude or lateral position of the hab. It was boring.
But what bothered Kate more than having nothing to do was being alone. She didn’t generally mind being alone. She had regularly been backpacking on her own in the wilderness. She found it very peaceful and used it as a stress reduction exercise. When she hiked alone, there was no need to be responsible for anyone else. No need to keep up with a group or slow down so the group could keep up with her. Being alone just cut all that out. If she wanted to go faster, she went faster. If she had had enough, she could turn around and come back with no need to discuss it with everyone else. And if she wanted to sit down in the grass and count the flowers, she could do that too.
But sitting on the floor of the ops room wasn’t quite the same. Apart from very small changes on the control display panels, everything looked exactly the same, all the time. She had even tuned out the occasional beeps from the control system as it made a change to the attitude of the hab.
Kate was lonely. She could almost feel the pressure of the enormous column of water above her holding her down. Keeping her away from the people on the surface.
To keep herself busy she had rearranged all the food and other items they had brought in to the ops room once more. She had laid out a few towels on the floor as a mat and tried sleeping on it. It might work if she was really tired but it was impossible to sleep. Her head had too many things swimming around in it. She had spent over an hour just looking through all the menu options on all the control panel displays. This had turned out to be a lot less helpful than she had first thought it might. There were a lot of systems that kept the hab operating but the designers of the Pheia had sensibly automated almost everything, and there was very little Kate felt the need to look at in detail. As long as it kept running and the hab kept ascending, at some point she would reach the surface, and the people on the surface barge could pick her up. Then it would be over.
At the present rate of ascent that was 14 or 15 days away. She just had to keep it together for that long. There were a few practical issues she had to resolve. Food wasn’t a problem. She had a good collection of freeze-dried foods and a kettle to heat water with. It was really just like backpacking, and she had decided early on to avoid the teriyaki chicken. The last time she had eaten that on a trip had not been fun. And that reminded her of the big issue, where to poop?
The one head in the facility was in the crew quarters at the top of the other cylinder. If she wanted to use the bathroom, it involved a dive to the other side and back again. It hadn’t become a problem yet. She was eating so little, there hadn’t been any need but she knew that at some point it would be, and knowing her luck it would be one of those emergency events where you get the feeling that you need to go about fifteen seconds before you really, really need to go.