2014-01-17 - SDR: Attack from the Deep

The temperature drop was insidious. A 'night' (well, sleeping period. Who could tell what time of day it was anymore?) spent curled up with each other to maintain precious body heat under the pair of thin thermal blankets led to a 'morning' where their breath hung heavily in the thinning air.

Natasha did not want to move. The bench was not very wide, but that was almost a bonus, because it limited the space they had to heat. Clint didn't make a particularly comfortable pillow-- muscle and hard angles-- but he was warm, and sleeping beside him (half on top of him) made her comfortably drowsy.

Or that could have been the cold. And the dropping O2 in the air. Her brain is too fuzzy to really tell. So she snuggles a bit closer, her head resting on his chest, and her eyes flutter as she attempts to wake up.

Clint is lost in dream land. Day, night whatever it is he's tired, and so he sleeps. Or at least he had been, the drop in the temperature though, slow as it was beginning to tell and even with Nat draped half-way across him the other half was cold. His long slow breaths become fitful snores and snorts as he blinks back to wakefulness and tries to figure out where he is "Rica?" he murmurs sleepily before his brain reboots and he remembers where and with who he's there with. "Nat, you dead yet?" he asks her giving her a nudge with a hand. His fingers are sore and stiff, he bites the end of one of them and it still hurts, so at least he hadn't given himself frost bite.

"Mmph." Natasha opens one eye, peering up at the archer. "You are not so lucky," she replies groggily. Her brain slowly begins working.

"I need coffee," she murmurs. She doesn't move. Everything is too cold to move, and there is a childish part of her that is refusing steadfastly on the grounds that it is even colder outside of the blankets.

But she's a good soldier. And after a stern lecture from a man in the back of her head whose face and voice keeps shifting from Nick Fury to Logan to Ivan and back, she shakily lifts herself from beside Clint, rolling off the bench and onto the floor with a heavy thud that echoes tinnily in the enclosed minisub.

Shivering hands reach for the second to last of the cylindrical containers that hold heated liquid. It takes her a couple of tries to depress the button to start the chemical reaction, but a satisfying click, and she simply holds onto the cylinder as it heats the cocoa inside, absorbing heat into her hands.

A glance towards Clint, and when the chemical cycle is halfway through, she hands the heating cylinder to him to allow him to warm his hands as well.

Clint sits up and pulls the blankets around him as he does so. He has no angry father figures in his head telling him to do otherwise. Just his angry, real father telling him he's useless. The lengths he's gone to prove otherwise will bear later analysis but for now he reaches out to take the coffee in both hands as it heats. "God, I don't even have to drink it, this feels amazing," he says as he begins to feel warm again. He doesn't Bogart it though he passes it back to Nat before he sucks up all the heat. She was the one who braved the cold for it after all. "Also, when we get out of here," perversely he has become more optimistic the closer they got to the brink "No cold weather ops for at least a year. No joke."

Natasha grabs the first ration pack she can and rejoins Clint on the bench, slipping close to him under the blankets. She drops the e-rat on Clint's lap while she fumbles the lid of the cocoa open.

The sickly-sweet smell of chocolate permeates the air. Natasha flinches. "Not coffee," she murmurs, knowing how little Clint cares for chocolate. But the liquid is warm, and she sips it, forcing herself not to gulp it down. The warm feeling slowly spreads through her body, as she offers the canister to Clint. When he takes it, she begins to open the ration packet.

Clint makes a face when he sees the hot chocolate. It had to do with his hometown smelling like chocolate all the damn time and how much he hated that shit hole. Still it's hot so he literally holds his nose and has a drink. The face continues as he hands it back with a nod. "Thanks," he says and then pulls the strip on his e-ration.

Natasha's hands are shaking. She has opened her ration, but doesn't pull anything out.

"I don't think I can eat," she says quietly, putting the packet down. "Maybe in an hour or so." She leans against Clint, sipping the cocoa again.

She is silent for a few moments. "Clint?" her voice is small and quiet. "I did not wish to mention this earlier, but did you notice the pressure gauge on the control panel earlier?"

Clint opens his ration easily enough, but frowns when Nat refuses to eat hers. She's always been practical and food in situations like this often made the difference between life and death, functioning or not. "Eat," he insists and takes a bite of his ration to mark the point. Though when she mentions the pressure gauge he shakes his head, even though he had looked at it the other day when he was trying to make repairs. "What's it say?" he asks around a mouthful of food.

"It says we're at over two thousand feet deep." Natasha murmurs quietly, pulling out a dried fruit pack--pineapple and banana chips. She chews absently on one.

"But this is impossible. The Long Island Sound is only 3, perhaps 400 feet deep at its deepest." In all honesty, she was simply pleased that they were in a piece of SHIELD technology-- at this depth, they should have been crushed like a soda can.

"Hm," Clint says taking another bite from the ration pack. He'd have time to think on this, to rationalize. "Right. So, could be the thing got fried with the rest of the stuff. I wouldn't worry about it too much."

"No."

Natasha shivers slightly. "This is how I dismissed it yesterday. But I have been thinking, and it has bothered me. The pressure sensor does not rely on the power systems--if it had just fried, it would be showing at sea level. We may be deeper than this, because the top range of the gauge is 2000. The minisub was not rated for extended deep dives."

She looks over at him. "There is a way, perhaps, we might get a location of where we are. But it is dangerous. If we are so deep, we might risk crushing."

Clint frowns, there was no fault with that logic that he could find. The room felt smaller now that the words had been spoken, like the walls were being pushed in around them. He frowns "Sure, what's the game plan. Better than just sitting around I suppose." He sets down his fork and sets aside the ration. "But eat first. No dying on an empty stomach."

Natasha pulled the chemstrip off her meal, and eats it woodenly after it heats through, not even noticing the taste, or what she's eating. She is lost in thought, calculating what they must do.

After she finishes her ration, she sets it aside, curling up closer to Hawkeye. "We need to get the sonar functioning," she says calmly. "It will show us the area, mm? Give us an idea of where we are at. I do not like being blind." She muses slightly. "Do you think there is another set of the chemical batteries? We only looked in one of the bulkheads... perhaps there is another system with redundancy."

"I checked, there are, but it's not a lot of power. Some of them got banged up in the crash," this was why Clint hadn't plugged them into the transmitter yet. He wasn't sure the signal would be strong enough to be heard and the batteries could be used to back up the air scrubbers when those batteries started to go. "But we can give it a try."

Between the chill and the thin air it took the two SHIELD agents several hours to pull out the other backup batteries, get them hooked into the sonar at the front panel, and get the damaged sonar system at least willing to work for a single sweep of the area.

The moment of truth. Natasha's lips were slightly blueish, her fingers flexing in an attempt to keep the blood flowing through them. "It is all you," she says with a forced smile. "Any time you wish to flip switch."

Clint rubs his hands together not in anticipation but in order to warm them up. He cups them and blows into them as well before rubbing them on his thighs. "Alright," he says as he looks down at the switch. "Should we do a drum roll or something?" he asks with a tired smile before he just leans forward to flick it on with an "Aw, fuck it."

The sonar drinks the power from the backup battery, letting out a high-pitched waaa-ping! from the minisub. Natasha looks at the cracked, but running small screen as the telemetry beings being fed back.

WAAAAAA-PING! A second pulse, giving another set of data, giving the screen more information.

She glances to the power remaining. "Twenty more seconds," she says, her tone icy. "We will lose this battery, I think."

WAAA-PING! A third screech of sonar. The small display shows a more complete pseudo map of the area. "This is not Long Island sound," Natasha shakes her head, her brows furrowing, waiting for the next ping and more information.

"Glad we established that," Clint quips from where he's monitoring the remaining battery power. "That was a couple of hours of air right there."

"Something is moving," Natasha notes, pointing out the shift in a large field of darkness on the small screen from the first to the third ping.

WAAAAAA-PING! a fourth screech into the darkness. "...turn it off," Natasha says suddenly, her tone strained. "Turn it off, turn it off--!"

An answering screech can be heard, felt from the oceanic darkness surrounding the sub. A sucking noise, and a clang. "Oh... Clint," she whispers. The sub shifts, creaks.

And the world moves.

Clint looks at the screen and his eyes go wide "What the futz is that?" then he wraps the power cords around his hand yanks them out of the equipment. The sonar goes dead, but not before the sub starts to move. "Oh shit," he curses trying to get to a view port. Not that it would help, it's black as night outside. Though if he's going to tumble to the darkest depths of the ocean, he's damn well going to have a front row seat.

In the pale light from the single LED, what has wrapped around the sub can be seen through the glass of the viewing ports.

Large suckers grip the glass and metal minisub. A single large eyes blinks, looking into the sub through the observation port in the back over the bench.

Natasha staggers towards the back as the sub shifts and moves, lurching to the side as the giant squid toys with it in its grip.

Her voice is surprisingly calm as she says "Well, Clint... I did not expect being eaten by a kraken was how I was going to die."

Clint steps back from the widow looking horrified. "Yeah me neither," he says. "So when you said there is a chance we might be crushed, this wasn't what you were talking about?" He looks over at where he had gathered his arrows back into their quiver but abandons that idea. He can't go out to fight the squid, and shooting it from the glass would just mean they drowned instead of being crushed. "So, did you bring squid repellent?" he asks glancing over at Natasha.

Natasha shakes her head, reaching for Clint's arm. "There are worse ways to die." she gives him a stoic look, and prepares herself for the sub to be twisted open.

That does not happen, though. The sub moves, tumbles and twists in the squid's grip as the giant creature plays with it the way a cat might toy with a small ball. Though not as chaotic as their previous ride, it is still unpleasant.

Perhaps it was only minutes. Perhaps an hour. But the squid grows tired and bored of its toy, which no longer screeches so prettily at it, and lets it go, the sub sinking slowly back into the depths.

Though... not quite as deep. The sub comes to a gentle rest, and the view through the back viewport... light. Not from above, however, but from the ground itself not too far distant. The temperature in the sub rises to something less frozen and a touch more... tolerable. If not a bit warm.

"Bozhe moi," Natasha breathes, pulling herself up from where she had been knocked to the floor. "...they will not believe this field report. We might as well not even bother."

Clint feels like vomiting again when the squid plays with the sub, but when it stops and they're dropped somewhere less doomy. He can't help but laugh out loud steadying himself on the bulkhead. "Nah, nah, let me file it, Fury will just think I'm futzing with him," he moves over to the viewport jumping up on the bench to crane his neck to look down at the light. "What in the hell is that? Though at this point it could be an AIM sea-base and I'd mouth kiss MODOK if he came and captured us."

He waits a beat. "No tongue though."

Natasha scrambles up onto the bench beside him, peering out. "I do not know, but I am not freezing anymore." She laughs at Clint's joke. "Ughhh, how would you even find a way to that creepy little kretin's mouth, anyway?" She elbows him lightly.

"Mm. It does not look like a base." A few fish swim up, ugly bastards with sharp teeth-- not the pretty bright colored ones you might see around a reef. They examine the sub and swim on, bored. "It looks like... a river, maybe?" She strains her eyes, looking. "It is not so close I can tell."

"Oof," Clint says jokingly and wraps an arm around Nat's waist. "And I don't know but if he got us out of this damn sub I'd do it," he laughs before he asks. "So, other than not freeze, can we do something about this? I mean we're still pretty deep, all those ugly fish are always really deep, or so says the Discovery Channel."

Natasha leans against Clint heavily, smiling for the first time in days. It's surprising what a little bit of light can do for the mood. "Maybe. Let's check the air, our supplies, and take a moment to recalculate." She kisses his cheek lightly. "Wherever we are now, this is much better than where we were, so... this is good?"

Clint smiles when Nat kisses his cheek and he rubs her back with thick calloused hand. "Good plan," he says. "We'll save the rest of the batteries for the air, we can hold out longer that way. It's not perfect, it's not freedom, but it will do," he jumps back off the bench then and goes to check on the batteries voltage to see how long he can stretch things out.