She rummaged through the food pile and found a candy bar. “These are very bad for you.”
She bit into the bar savoring the chocolate and crunching through the peanuts.
When she finished it, she balled up the wrapper and threw it back onto the pile. The place was starting to look like the floor of her bedroom when she was a teenager.
She looked at the two dive tanks she had. The one she’d been using was at least half full and the other was full. There were two more full ones in the rack below. Was it worth filling more while the gas mix was still good? Given the past few hours it seemed like a good idea but from a practical point of view it wasn’t worth the effort. If the Pheia’s gas mix went out of whack again and she couldn’t correct it, a few hours on the scuba tanks would just delay the inevitable.
Kate lay down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. She was exhausted. She held her hands up in front of her face at looked at them. They were steady. No signs of HPNS. But that made her think about the meds. How long had it been since she had a shot? Why hadn’t she been putting that into the log record?
“I am not a lab rat.” she thought. “Oh yes you are. You are one rat in a very complicated maze surrounded by hungry cats.”
Kate rolled over and looked at the pack of syringes. What were the limits of this stuff? Would an overdose be bad? Fatal? She could ask the surface people but they would want to know when she last had a shot and she had no idea. Her memory of events consisted mostly of diving.
She reached out and grabbed the pack and looked at it. “Will you kill me?”
Kate injected herself and put the empty syringe back in the pack. She rubbed her thigh until the sting was gone and stared at the ceiling again. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Cabin Fever
(1,800 Feet)
Kate woke to the sound of an alarm from the control console. Yesterday she had decided she’d had enough of free cycling and her body needed to get back to a normal day/night rhythm. She had found a clock app on the control console and set the alarm for 7:00 AM. The time didn’t seem to be all that important, but she was going to try to go to sleep at a reasonable time at night and get up when the alarm sounded.
It had been easy to set the alarm but not so easy to make the ops room dark. For the last few days she had been sleeping sporadically on the mattress and she thought that part of the problem might be that it was always light in the ops room. The lights were LED units that were sort of white in color but nothing like real daylight. The designers of the Pheia had not seen fit to put a light switch in the ops room. Kate supposed that they imagined it would be occupied all day, every day of the dive, and so there was no need to provide a way to turn off the lights.
She had spent some time at the console looking to see if the lights were programmable, but they were not. All she needed was a way to effectively cover them up but this had turned out to be a lot more difficult than she imagined. Each light unit was protected by a wire mesh screen that looked like the kind of thing you might find on a Navy vessel, and she thought that perhaps that was where they came from: at least the same sort of supplier. “Probably cost a fortune.”
The light bulbs inside the cages were LED replacements for standard bulbs. She unclipped one of the cages and unscrewed the bulb using a towel. That made it a bit darker and with all of them unscrewed it was much darker. The only sources of light now were what came in through the portal from the Pheia’s external floods bouncing back off the wall, and a glow that came up from the moon pool room below. The net effect was sort of cool.
With the external floods off it was better, but there was still light from the moon pool room. She could live with that. At least it was darker. And the moon pool light acted a bit like a night light. If she needed to get up in the night at least she could see well enough to screw the wall lights back in.
When Kate woke up she was momentarily worried by the dark. It had been many days since she had woken in the dark. She padded over to the console in bare feet, cancelled the alarm, and turned on the outside floods. She didn’t like it when she couldn’t see the wall. As the lights came on outside she could see the wall was at the right distance from the Pheia and moving at its usual snail’s pace.
She walked around the room and screwed back in the wall lights then went back to the portal chewing on a protein bar. She had nothing to do. The gas system was behaving itself. The gas mix was OK. She felt OK. “The laundry is done and the dishes are all clean,” she thought.
Kate looked at the depth indicator. “There should be some light down here. Why didn’t I notice it when the lights were out?” She decided to try an experiment and went around the room unscrewing the lights again. Then she carefully maneuvered the mattress over the hole that led to the moon pool room. Satisfied that it wouldn’t get wet again she went back to the console and shut off the exterior lights.
At the portal she cupped her hands and pressed her face up to the glass between them. She waited four or five minutes for her eyes to get used to the dark but still couldn’t see anything.
Her interest was aroused now. There should be a deep blue light from above at this depth. It was doubtful there was much life, if any, on the wall but going for a look was more interesting than sitting around listening to the iPod.
Kate debated sending a message to the surface. If she sent one telling them of her plans they might argue that the dive was an unnecessary risk. “So what? What are they going to do about it?” In the end she thought it was better if she just went.
In the months that led up to the expedition, the scientists had accumulated a long list of equipment to take with them to record the life around the deep sea vents. Apart from cameras, they also had sound equipment, a variety of sensors for salinity, pressure, temperature, radiation and light level. In addition they had planned to use the comms equipment in the dive masks to record audio from all the divers. This was the modern equivalent of taking notes and was a lot more efficient than trying to write detailed information down on a dive slate.
But Kate had none of this equipment in the ops room and she doubted that the cameras had survived the flooding since they were all stored in plastic Pelican cases until the dive when they went into waterproof enclosures. She had seen the enclosures in the storage room along with the cameras in their cases. It occurred to her that there might have been someone using a camera on the check-out dives they had done, but she couldn’t remember. Even if someone had a camera, where would it be now? Probably lying on a shelf somewhere full of sea water. Was it worth searching for one that worked?
“Nope. Let’s do this the old fashioned way.”
She walked over to the console and set the ascent rate to zero then waited at the portal to make sure the Pheia stopped moving. She didn’t like the idea of being left behind if she found something interesting to look at. Then she changed her mind. There was no sense in prolonging the trip to the surface, and the ascent rate was so slow, small mollusks could keep up. With the ascent rate set back to normal, the Pheia started the its way up again. Then she shut off the outside lights. She wanted it dark when she went out there.
Kate swapped the partly empty tank for a full one in the scuba gear and suited up.
Just before she got in the water it occurred to her that the light from the ops room would shine through the portal onto the wall. Did that matter? It was 30 feet away. She was reluctant to unscrew all the lights. She didn’t want to come back to a dark room after the dive.