She decided to use some rope to make a safety line and to search the moon pool room for some fins. At least then she’d be more mobile outside.
Down in the moon pool room again, Kate paused and looked around. She wanted to make sure there were no bodies. She knew they were a long way below her on the ocean floor but she still needed to look. The room was empty and well lit by the overhead lights that were now about a foot above the water surface.
Fins turned out to be easy to find in one of the storage bins, and she wondered why she hadn’t looked for them before. The rope she had tied herself to the hab with when she went out to help Boris was still attached to the ladder. The rest of it had been pulled down the moon pool exit by the weight of the snap-link on its end. She pulled it back up and left it floating in the moon pool room.
With the fins on it was an easy swim back through the tunnel into the storage room and five minutes later she had found the stakes and rope supplies intended to make the grid on the bottom. She pulled out an extra coil of rope and swam back into the moon pool.
Once the rope from the storage room was uncoiled and attached to the piece she’d used before, it all hung like a limpid snake in the water. Kate checked the end that was attached around a rung in the ladder. She gave it a tug and it felt solid. She looked at the loose end and decided to add a few more hitches with that to prevent the main knot from coming undone. A lot of time spent rock climbing had taught her how to be safe with ropes and anchors. It was a skill that showed its usefulness more often than she had imagined it would when she first learned some knots.
Satisfied the anchor end would hold, she found the other end of the rope and secured it to a ring on her BC the same way. She gave it a good tug and tugged again at the anchor end. Then she coiled up the rope the best she could so she could hold it all in one hand.
As she floated down through the exit she let the rope pay out from the coil in her hand. It was an easy swim out to the edge of the weight stack and from there up the side of the hab to the top. She stopped and looked around. On one side was the wall illuminated by the hab’s floodlights. It went up forever and down forever into the black. The direction away from the wall was just black. It was creepy. It was totally clear water and totally black. Not a hint of anything that might be out there. The rational part of her brain kept telling her that at this depth there wasn’t a whole lot of life out there anyway and she’d be lucky to see anything. “I don’t need to be that lucky.”
Kate turned on the dive light clipped to her BC. The top of the hab cylinder had two large lifting eyes welded to it and not much else other than a few pipes. Right near the center was a short metal tube about a foot high with an insulator on top and a wire trailing from it over the side of the hab. Kate swam over the wire and saw where it dropped down the far side of the cylinder. She followed it down and found that it trailed between the two cylinders and ended a few feet below the hab. If she’d have turned around when she had swum out of the moon pool she’d have seen it right there. It had a metal connector at the end and Kate thought there must have been some kind of float that had become detached.
She left the wire where it was and swam the few feet back into the moon pool entrance. She needed a float.
At the surface of the water there were several BCs which had floated up off their pegs on the wall. “Excellent”.
Kate grabbed one and pulled it down. It had enough air in it to make it awkward to swim with so she dumped out the rest and clipped it to her own BC.
The safety line she had attached to the ladder was still there and she realized she had forgotten about it and let it trail behind her. She checked the ring on her BC and it was still attached. “Stupid. It could be all tangled out there now”
She followed the line back out the way she had come in, gathering it up as she swam. On top of the ops cylinder she let the line float and pulled up the antenna wire. She tied a figure-eight loop in the end of the wire and clipped the BC to it. Then she took a breath and let her regulator drop from her mouth. She put the inflator from the line’s BC in her mouth and blew a lung full of gas into it. The BC inflated slightly and became positively buoyant but not enough to pull up all the wire. Kate got her regulator back and took another breath which she then used to fill the line’s BC. She had one foot hooked under one of the pipes on top of the cylinder to stop the BC from pulling her up. After a couple more cycles it was getting hard to keep hold of the BC and she released it.
The BC floated up easily pulling the antenna wire with it. As the wire came taut, Kate looked up. The BC was clearly visible when she pointed her dive light at it. “Good,” she thought.
She collected the mass of safety line floating in the water into a loose coil and followed it back into the moon pool. A few minutes later she was back in the ops room. She shrugged the scuba gear off but kept the dive suit on.
At the control panel she wiped her damp hands on her legs then tapped the POST menu item again. After a few seconds the result came back: FAILED. The ELF was still not working.
Kate’s shoulders dropped. She was sure that was it. She read the log and found that the ELF was still reporting that the antenna was too short. The piece she had tied the BC to must have been just part of it. How long did it need to be? ELF stood for Extra Low Frequency and she knew that lower frequencies needed larger antennas, and with antennas in general it seemed to her that bigger might be better. Or did it have to be an exact length? “How the hell should I know? I do biology not physics.”
Her mind went back to what she’d seen in the storage room. There were a lot of ground stakes made of some kind of metal but she had not seen any wire. If she used the stakes, she’d need some way to connect them together in a long string. She decided to go back and look some more. The diving was getting easier. She was adjusting to the fact that she was alone and needed to look out for herself.
The scuba tank was getting low on gas mix. She’d need to pick up another one from the moon pool room on the way back. One more thing to remember.
In the storage room, Kate floated along the shelves. Some of the plastic containers were full of dense stuff and sat on their shelves, others had enough buoyancy to float up either to the bottom of the shelf above or out of the shelf and up to the ceiling of the compartment. In a way this helped the search. Any container with a lot of wire in it wasn’t likely to be floating.
Kate found the ground stakes where she’d seen them before. “Did you think someone would have moved them?”
She picked up a bundle and was surprised at how easily it came up. “Must be aluminum,” she thought.
She put a little more air in her BC to compensate for the weight of the stakes and with a couple of kicks, swam back into the tunnel where she put the stakes down. As she was turning back to get another bundle she noticed that the ends of the stakes had holes in them. That made sense. There had to be some way to attach the ropes that were going to be used to mark the grid out on the bottom. It seemed unlikely that the rope had to be threaded through the holes. The lengths of rope were too long for that and it would be a bitch to do that underwater without the line getting horribly tangled. Cable ties? Maybe. “You could put a loop of line through the hole, pass it over the top of the stake and pull it tight. That would hold. It doesn’t help me much though.”
Kate hated speculation. It wasted so much time and energy. If there was a way to find the actual answer, either by just waiting or by doing work, that was always preferable to just guessing.