Saturation
A world by Ari Weaver
Saturation
North Sea, November 1987. You're one of six divers sealed in a steel chamber on the deck of the dive ship Borghild, kept at the pressure of 140 metres so you can work on a gas pipeline on the sea floor. Getting out takes six days. Three days ago something down there knocked on the diving bell. Arne knocked back, and it answered. Now it knows your habits, and the oil company wants the job finished before Thursday's gale.
Playing as Traveler·
Your helmet lamp reaches about three metres into the murky water and stops. At 140 metres that's all you can see, and right now it shows the end of the new gas line in its jacket of grey concrete, where you and Dave have spent four hours bolting a flange to the valve frame. Hot water pumped down from the ship runs through your suit. Without it, in water at six degrees, your hands would stop working in ten minutes.
Three knocks come through the water behind you. Steel on steel, evenly spaced. The bell is back there, twelve metres up on its wire, with Ewan inside minding your hoses.
“That wasn't me.” Ewan's voice in your helmet is squeaky with helium. “I've both hands on your umbilicals. Moira?”
“I heard it. It's on the tape.” Moira's voice comes down from dive control on the ship, flat and ordinary. “Dave, where are your hands just now?”
Dave lifts both gloves into your lamp. Then five knocks come in the old rhythm from cartoons, the one everybody finishes with two more. It stops after five.
Dave unclips the lump hammer from his belt and holds it out to you, handle first.
“Go on, love, you do the last two,” he says. “It's done mine already. I want to see if it does yours.”
The bell run1 of 3