Kate pushed down on the hacksaw and the blade bent over slightly. She gave it a push and it skidded down the pipe and inch or so removing more of the paint. The next time she put her left hand on the pipe and set the blade next to her thumb. She pulled it back and it made a slight mark on the pipe. She pushed it forward and it started to cut. There was only room to move the blade back and forth a few inches but she gradually deepened the cut.
She tried sawing rapidly but nothing much happened. “I guess Babin was right. Slow and hard does it.”
After a couple of minutes the saw cut through the pipe’s skin and the cutting went faster. Kate was excited and pushed harder. The blade snapped and she hit her knuckles hard on the fins of the oxygen compressor. “Fuck.”
She looked at her hand. It was bleeding slightly but not bad enough to do anything about. Kate examined the pipe. It was cut about half way through and she was sure the gas could escape from the small slot she had made. She had an idea, and went back down to the ops room to find a flat bladed screwdriver. When she got back up into the mechanical space she put the blade into the gap in the pipe and pushed the screwdriver’s handle sideways. At first nothing happened so she pushed harder a little wary of skinning her knuckles again. The blade on the end of the screw driver bent slightly but then the pipe buckled inwards making a much larger hole.
Kate looked at the hole. “That’s got to be big enough.” She sucked on her knuckles and licked the blood off. She left the hacksaw where she had dropped it but took the screwdriver back down to the ops room with her.
She dropped the screwdriver on the floor by the other small tools and walked over to the control console. On the ELF radio screen, she typed a message: “Hydrogen line cut. Going outside now.”
She noticed another message had arrived while she had been busy and read it. “More psychobabble from Dr. Sub.” she said aloud and then deleted it. “Really? I’m just going to sit on my ass and wait to pass out? I don’t think so. Moron.”
Kate walked the few steps to the pile of tools and picked up the large pipe wrench and hefted it in her hand. “If I drop this it‘ll be gone really fast.”
She looked around for some rope or string to tie through the hole in the end of the wrench’s handle. Something she could use to clip the wrench to her BC. The only thing she could find was a collection of cable ties in a rubber band. She pulled them out and joined several together to make a chain. It looked a bit feeble so she made a second chain as a backup, and then used two more ties to attach one end to the wrench. The other ends she joined with a tie and clipped to her BC. Satisfied with the attachment she suited up and ran through her checklist. She really liked the checklist on the wall now. It was the closest thing to a dive buddy she had.
Kate swam head down through the moon pool exit and out from under the Pheia’s weight stack towards the wall. It was odd in some ways to always go towards the wall. She could get out from under the hab in any direction and then go up to reach the top. But the wall, despite it being the source of many of her current problems, always seemed the way to go. It was certainly more attractive, thanks to the hab’s lights, than the black ocean that otherwise surrounded the Pheia.
She paused half way up the ops cylinder, grabbed hold of a tank clamp and looked at the wall. It was still moving in the right direction. She looked up but it was just black. There was something creepy about that. The fact that it was dark down here no matter which way you looked. Only the bubbles knew which way was up.
On top of the cylinder, Kate reviewed Babin’s instructions in her head. She needed to be sure she found the oxygen manifold not the helium one. She knew which one was attached to the hydrogen tanks because that was the one that had been mangled. The oxygen tanks had green marks on top but she had to look closely with her dive light to be sure. Babin’s instructions said to loosen any of the oxygen manifold couplings. It didn’t matter which one. They would all leak gas just the same.
Kate placed the open end of the wrench on a fitting and adjusted it down until it was snug. Then she tried to loosen it but she just moved in the water. “Stupid.”
She grabbed onto a cylinder top with one hand and pulled against the wrench with the other but it wouldn’t budge. She tried two other fittings before realizing that they were just tight. “Am I doing this the right way?” She wondered.
She tried one of them in the other direction with the same result.
“When in doubt, use more violence. But how?”
She turned around and placed her feet against the manifold pipes, and put both hands on the wrench. Kate used her legs to apply force while holding on as tight as she could with her arms up against her chest. She strained very hard for several seconds before the fitting gave way.
When it did, the wrench came off and she flew back several feet with the wrench over her head.
She recovered her position, flipped over and swam back to the fitting. She tried to loosen it with her hand but it was still too tight for that. There were no bubbles.
Kate put the wrench back on the fitting and gave it a tug. It moved easily and bubbles started to flow from it.
She compared the size and rate of the flow with her own dive bubbles to get an idea of how fast the gas was escaping. The small stream was quite feeble compared to the large bubbles her exhalations were making. She shone the light on the two columns of bubbles and looked up. The oxygen stream was obviously a lot smaller so she put the wrench back on the fitting and opened it some more.
After a couple more careful attempts, Kate thought the oxygen stream was about the same rate as her exhalations. She had no idea if that was enough but it was somewhere to start.
She clipped the wrench to the BC using the two ties right on end of the wrench so it wouldn’t get in her way and swam back down to the moon pool entrance under the Pheia.
Back in the ops room Kate got out of the scuba gear but left the suit on. She found the gas system screen on the console and looked at the oxygen tank pressure, which she then copied into a log entry next to the current time. Having done that she composed a short message to the surface to let them know the oxygen was venting and she had taken a tank pressure reading. She added that she would wait an hour before testing the tank pressure again and then letting them know what, if anything, had changed.
Kate pulled off the dive suit and hung it up. When she had signed up for this expedition it hadn’t occurred to her that she be doing this many dives. The plan she remembered was to float down here for several days, then do a couple of long dives to look at the hydrothermal vents. Then she would veg out on the way back up, and finally enjoy some time in Cayman before going home to write a couple of papers.
She realized that although she had logged the oxygen tank pressure, she hadn’t recorded the gas mix values. She needed to do that so she could see if there was any change in the hydrogen level.
Kate went back to the console, found the data and added it to the log entry she had made a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that she had recorded all the data she would need for a comparison later, she thought it might be useful to see if the gas generator was running.
After climbing back up into the mechanical area, Kate could hear the small compressor running on the gas separator. She tried to hear if there was gas coming from the hole she had made in the hydrogen pipe but the compressor was too noisy, so she spit on her finger and then placed it over the hole. Sure enough bubbles formed in the spit. “Yee haa!” She pushed down on the hole a bit harder and the gas still escaped. There was at least a reasonable pressure there but was this enough flow?