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and couldn’t stand up in was much too small for comfort. Semi-claustrophobic, Sturman had first taken a scuba class right after high school to help him conquer his avoidance of confined spaces. It had worked. Well, that and his general fearlessness. He didn’t worry much about dying, never had. Seventeen years later, he could remain relaxed while breathing compressed air through a hose, a hundred feet underwater, at intense water pressure, while swimming through narrow openings in a sunken vessel. But he still didn’t enjoy being confined.
    The rapid ascent from the HMCS Redemption this morning had ended with them breaching halfway out of the water with the momentum of their ascent. Sturman had looked over at the female diver to see bloody froth coming out of her mouth and bubbling out of her nose into her mask. That had frightened the hell out of him, but the woman had stayed conscious and wide-eyed as he towed her back to his boat. Sturman had realized she must have held her breath on the way up and damaged her lungs.
    Besides her lung injury, they had both almost immediately started to feel the first effects of the bends. Sturman had gotten a headache moments after surfacing, and by the time they reached the boat two hundred feet away his face had begun to itch and his shoulders and elbows were tingling.
    On his marine radio he had called for an ambulance to meet them at the dock. To prevent serious injury and lessen the pain of the decompression, they had been rushed to the hyperbaric chamber at the hospital in La Mesa. When they had reached the hospital an hour later, Sturman, although primarily concerned with the injured woman, had felt intense pain in his upper joints as the nitrogen gas bubbling up in his tissues wreaked havoc on his nerves. The woman, in greater pain and still bleeding some from her mouth, hadn’t even been able to talk at that point. She had been confused and delirious, and when she had been able to speak through the pain and bloody froth, all she had kept asking was where they were and what was happening.
    Now she was unconscious on the floor of the chamber, underneath a light blue hospital blanket. A nurse sat beside her, monitoring her vitals.
    “You are suffering from decompression sickness.”
    Sturman turned to see the doctor, a middle-aged Indian man, looking at him through one of the five small, circular windows in the chamber. His voice had emanated from a small speaker inside the chamber. On his white coat was a metallic nametag: DR. PESHWAR.
    Sturman walked over to the porthole and saw a button labeled TALK next to a small speaker. He pushed it.
    “Thanks for the diagnosis, doc. I thought I was in here for the view,” Will replied. As a divemaster, he already knew all about the bends.
    The doctor scowled at him and shook his head. “Do you think this is funny, sir? That woman nearly died.”
    “I’ve got a helluva headache,” Sturman said. “Say what you’ve gotta say.”
    “Your bodies absorbed a lot of nitrogen when you were underwater, and when you surfaced too quickly, the nitrogen didn’t have time to leave your body,” the doctor explained over the small speaker. The chamber walls were too thick to speak to each other directly. “What you are experiencing is the bubbling up of nitrogen in a gaseous form in your blood and tissues, particularly in your joints. Mrs. Buckner also has suffered trauma from an air embolism. Apparently she held her breath on your ascent and ruptured her lung.”
    He paused, fixing Sturman with an accusing stare. “She’s lucky to be alive, Mr. Sturman.”
    Sturman’s face flushed. “And you think it’s my fault, right?” The doctor didn’t reply. Sturman looked down for a moment, then back at the doctor. “Will there be any permanent damage?”
    “It’s hard to say right now. You should be all right, since you made it here so quickly. It’s likely you’ll make a full recovery. As for Mrs. Buckner, we’ll need to keep a closer