Kate dragged the mattress over to the portal and stood it on end against the wall, covering the window. “That will have to do.”
Down in the moon pool room she spent a few minutes collecting all the dive slates from the BCs. It made for quite a collection. She clipped them to her own BC. She also added a couple of spare flashlights. The LED lights were bright and used almost no power compared to the older type that had incandescent bulbs. The dive light she’d been using was fine but the idea of being outside with no light gave her the creeps.
The last thing she did was to tie one end of a length of line to the ladder in the moon pool room and the other end to her BC. If something went wrong, she didn’t want to end up separated from the hab.
Beneath the hab, the only light was from the moon pool room above. In the clear water it had almost nothing to reflect off, and so, as Kate moved out from the entrance under the weight stack, the light disappeared quickly. She had kept her dive light off deliberately to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. It was very creepy.
She put her hand over the flashlight lens and turned it on. The light shone through her fingers making the skin glow red. Avoiding looking at the light, she pointed it in the direction where she thought the wall was, and uncovered it. There was something very different about diving in the dark. Despite numerous night dives, Kate always found the experience eerie. It wasn’t so bad when she was close up to a coral head or something else she could observe, but to be free floating in such a black sea with nothing to reflect the light back made her wonder what else was out there. “Don’t be a ditz. There is almost nothing out here at all. You’ll be damn lucky to see anything.”
Kate looked at where the wall should be, and as her eyes got used to the dark she could see it faintly. She made a few kicks and adjusted her buoyancy so that at mid breath she was exactly neutral. She was always relaxed in the water and breathed quite shallowly which meant that once her buoyancy was right she could just hang there motionless.
She kicked again and floated closer to the wall until it was about 10 feet away. Rotating, she looked at the Pheia. The light reflected off the metal surfaces making it very bright in the darkness. She clicked the flashlight off. There was just a little light leaking around the mattress and lighting up the edges of the portal. That gave her a good visual reference and she was glad she’d left the lights on in the ops room.
Kate looked up and inhaled enough to float up to be level with the top of the hab. She looked down at the portal. It was just possible to see it faintly. Rotating she looked at the wall and turned the light on again briefly. The dive light illuminated an area 10 or 15 feet across. It was mostly just the grey rock she’d seen passing by for days.
Satisfied she wasn’t moving, she turned the dive light off and hung still for a minute as her eyes adjusted to the total dark. Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head up. When she opened her eyes again she could see a faint dark blue glow. It was the most exciting thing she’d seen in days and it made her heart race. She felt water moving over the fine hairs on the back of her hand. She was floating up. Consciously she breathed out and stopped the ascent. It was so wonderful to see the light above. She imagined the surface of the sea. Warm. Bathed in brilliant sunlight. A slight swell on the surface. The surface barge waiting up there somewhere.
She tried to see if she could see the barge but there just wasn’t enough light to show any detail — just a faint glow of very deep blue.
Kate felt a tug on her BC. She had been floating up again and the safety line had pulled tight. She inverted and finned down clicking on the flashlight as she descended. The Pheia shone brightly in the light. She rotated slightly and looked at the wall. There was a small cave just level with her and she swam slowly over to it. She had about 20 feet of slack line, which was enough to get into the back of the cave and look around. It was 10 or 15 feet tall at the opening and maybe eight feet high at the back.
Kate pulled up the collection of slates and wrote on the top one: “Cave.” Then added some details about the size and orientation. Normally she would have taken a set of photographs. Without a camera she tried to record her impressions. At times like this she wished she could draw. Sure, she could draw a map or do rough shapes of objects just like most people could, but she couldn’t draw faces, flowers or anything approaching an impression of an outdoor scene. Her talents lay elsewhere.
She began a methodical examination of the cave. There was almost nothing to see. It was the same rock as the rest of the wall with the same layer of sandy dust on the floor that covered the wall. The dust was a mixture of crushed rock — perhaps the work of ancient parrot fish above, and biological matter that had come down with the rock.
Kate leveled herself out horizontally and breathed out so that she descended to the floor of the cave slowly enough to not disturb the sand. As her chest touched down she exhaled fully and dumped the rest of the gas from her BC. This was one of her favorite things to do on a dive. Just lie on the bottom and look in detail at everything in front of her. On a shallow dive in the Caribbean she would see numerous types of life. It was everywhere in the warm, sunlit waters.
Down here there was very little to see at all. There wasn’t enough light or heat to support plant life on a scale she would be able to see.
After a few minutes of looking at everything in her field of view she inhaled a full lung-full of gas and floated up slowly. When she was a few feet above the bottom she added gas to the BC and breathed normally again. She kicked gently towards the side of the cave. On the wall of the cave she saw a small movement. Her heart raced. Something was alive down here! Kate knew that various animals and fish lived in the sea well down below 10,000 feet. They survived by filter feeding, or eating each other, depending on their size and needs. But it just seemed unlikely that any of them would happen to be in this cave.
As she got closer she could see that it was an isopod about three inches long and it was not alone. She saw what seemed to be a small colony of them. She wrote down everything she could think of to describe them, their number, sizes and how they were arranged on the wall. She was happy. A discovery. Maybe not of any real value to anyone but her, but for now this was exciting science. This was what she lived for on expeditions: to find something that might be new, or just unusual in the location that she found it. She was sure these isopods were not uncommon but the combination of the very sparse environment of the cave and the lack of light made it an interesting find.
Kate attempted to draw one of the isopods on a clean slate. Inwardly she sighed. “Oh for a camera.”
She spent half an hour watching the isopods and trying to see what their food source might be. She also tried to see why they were only in this one place in the cave. The wall on the other side was bare, as was the back wall.
She was getting a little chilly now and thought she’d scan the roof of the cave again a bit more closely then go back to the hab to warm up. She turned to shine her light on the Pheia to see how much it had risen and was shocked to find a four foot long frilled shark right behind her. She breathed in heavily and banged her head on the cave roof as she floated up. The shark swam around her to the back of the cave.
Kate forced herself to calm down and breathed out enough to float down a little. Then she dumped some air from her BC and finned quietly for the cave mouth. She shone her light on the shark, which completed its tour of the cave and swam out past her into the dark sea.
Kate hung in the water at the entrance of the cave for a minute shining the light out into the dark, but the shark was gone. She pulled up a slate and wrote a note: “Frilled shark. 4+ feet.”