Kate rolled over so that she was facing down again, then kicked towards the wall. “Might as well explore a bit.” she thought.
Morrison was floating exactly in the center of the cage with his eyes closed. He was going over the capture procedure in his mind.
“Hey boss. Wake up.” A voice said in his ear.
He opened his eyes. Both the other divers were hanging out of the cage door looking down.
“What’s up?”
“Bubbles.” Came the reply.
“What? A leak?”
“No. Don’t think so. Looks like a stream from an open circuit dive set. Someone is in the water.”
Morrison thought about what Williams had told him about Kate. Although the background was a little sketchy, Morrison had gotten the picture. Kate was the adventurous type with a healthy lack of respect for those in authority. He was sure that Kate was out in the water now. Perhaps waiting for their arrival. Not necessarily the brightest move perhaps, but probably what he’d do himself. “I think that Dr. Moss is looking for us,” he said over the comm system.
Morrison floated over the top of the other two divers and held the side of the cage door with one hand. “There are the lights from the Pheia. You can see them on the wall.”
“Roger that boss.”
Morrison checked the depth. They were at about 600 feet now. The Pheia was about a hundred yards below them. He looked directly at where the Pheia was and turned his helmet lights off and on slowly several times.
Kate was hanging in front of the wall looking for signs of life. She didn’t see Morrison’s signal. She had been looking up every few minutes in anticipation of seeing the divers. This time, when she looked, she saw the lights. She could just make out the bulk of the cage against the faint blue light from the surface. Her next thought was to hide. Her heart rate went up. It was like when she was out hiking alone and heard voices. She would step off the trail and stand very still allowing the other hikers to pass by. They seldom saw her, being too wrapped up in their conversation to notice the animal lurking in the trees. If someone did see her, she’d give a short wave and walked back to the trail as though she’d just had to stop to pee.
She felt the same now. She was alone in the sea and a group of unknown people were approaching. Maybe it would be fun to hide? They would find the Pheia empty. Just like the Mary Celeste: an old British ship found abandoned in the Atlantic in the 1800’s.
Kate breathed out and listened to the bubbles. She looked up to see the stream of gas above her. There would be no hiding here. In any case, it was a stupid idea.
She watched the lights above her. They were almost here. She kicked away from the wall and floated down to the top of the hab. She hooked her fins under a gas line and adjusted her buoyancy so she could stand still without moving. The cage and divers were quite clear now. She pointed her dive light at the cage and made a circle with it. She saw lights in the cage go off and on again. They saw her. She had to work hard to calm down. She was almost in tears now from the excitement. She adjusted her position again and tried to breath slowly.
Morrison and his team floated out of the cage and swam down towards the Pheia. Morrison laughed out load when he saw the message Kate had tied to the top of the hab. “WELCOME EARTHLINGS” it said. He assumed the diver floating behind the sign was Kate. He gave her an enthusiastic OK with his right hand, pumping it a couple of times.
Kate saw the OK and guessed whoever it was had read her sign. It seemed slightly childish now, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to explain it. But that could wait. She pulled out a dive slate and wrote a quick note. As the three divers arrived in front of her she showed it to the one who had given her the OK.
Morrison took the slate and read it.
“WELCOME. GOING BACK IN NOW.”
Morrison gave her an OK and tried to signal with his hands that the three of them were going to hook the Pheia to the cable.
Kate got the idea, gave an OK back. Then she kicked forward and before Morrison could react, she hugged him.
Morrison got the message. When he looked into Kate’s mask, he could see tears in her eyes. He nodded to her.
Kate let go of Morrison, looked briefly at the other two divers who were doing something outside the cage they had come down in, and then kicked over the side of the hab and let herself descend.
She was very excited and had to work hard to keep her breathing under control. Before she swam under the weight stack, she looked up just to make sure that were actually there. She saw part of the cage and a pair of fins. Real enough.
Morrison had not been expecting the hug. In his experience, hugging underwater was rare. Especially in the commercial dive business where a hug from a fellow diver would likely mean someone was going to get a beating in the locker room later. And in any case, the equipment tended to get in the way.
It hadn’t really dawned on him until then that he and his crew might just be saving Kate’s life. She had obviously survived this far on her own wits but his quick look at the damage to the Pheia told him she had been very lucky.
The Pheia was still rising slowly under its own power. Morrison had asked the surface to stop lowering the cage and start pulling it back up at the programmed ascent rate. He didn’t want it dropping down below them or banging into the Pheia while they worked.
The other two members of his team had already rigged a polypropylene line from the Pheia to the big hook that was holding the cage to the barge’s cable. That allowed them to keep it close in case the Pheia moved laterally or a current pushed on the cable.
The next step was to unhook the cables they would sling around the hab to keep the two cylinders together. The team uncoiled the cables from the cage letting them sink down the few feet that separated the bottom of the cage from the top of the two cylinders of the hab. They left the upper ends secured to the cage and then dropped down to secure the lower ends to the Pheia.
As Morrison reached the mid way point he saw the nylon line Kate had put in place. He gave it a tug. It was tighter than he expected and the knots looked good which was unusual. Most people tied pathetic knots that came undone in a slight breeze. These were good solid knots that a sailor might use. He scored another point for Kate, and set about securing the cables they had brought with them.
The team worked mostly in silence, only using the comms when one person was out of sight and needed something to happen like taking up slack. It took them less than 15 minutes to get all the cables in place and snugged up to Morrison’s satisfaction. He was very pleased with the arrangement. He keyed his comm system. “Morrison to surface. Please give Miss Babin my regards. All the support cables went in place perfectly. Moving to the hook up phase next. Out.”
He had no way to know if the surface would hear his transmission. He was too far down, but it did no harm to try. He keyed the comm system again. “Phase 2 people.”
The other two divers gave him an OK, preferring that to using the comm system.
They swam together to the top of the cage. They unhooked the lifting cables and made sure they were secure to the barge cable before letting them drop down. Once the cables were off the cage one of them triggered a gas cylinder that inflated a small lifting bag attached to the cage. When the cage was neutral in the water he shut the gas off. They uncoupled the cage from the hook on the end of the barge’s cable and swam it sideways until it was clear of the Pheia.
Morrison took a ten foot line with large clips on both ends and attached one end to the top of the cage. He signaled the other two to get the lifting cables attached to the Pheia then let out some gas from the lifting bag until the cage started to sink slowly. He swam down with it, passing it just before it reached the weight stack. As the cage started to drop past him he hooked the other end of the line to a bracket on the Pheia. He gave it a tug and hoped it would stay put. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they lost the cage and the tools in it but it would be nice not to.