You awoke to turmoil. Your eyes snapped open, heart racing as the sound of an emergency alarm pulled you screaming from sleep. The alarm was so loud that it hurt your ears, but it did its job of hauling you to alert wakefulness. Clad only in some cheap underwear and a mustard-stained undershirt, you roll out of bed and try to shake the bleary sleep from your eyes. This is a severe emergency alarm, a life-threatening event, which in your situation means one of two things. Either the base is being actively attacked by enemy forces, or one or more sections of the hull have been compromised. In either case, you know that you are more than likely fucked.
You grab the data pad that you always leave beside your bed as you head down the re-enforced steel halls of the seabase. It looks like the personnel section of the base isn't flooding quite yet, but that doesn't mean much. The base was built almost a thousand meters beneath the waves of the North Pacific, so even small problems had a way of cascading into catastrophic failures. You tap the data pad to life as you subconsciously make your way toward the life pods on the southern side of the compound. You can immediately see that your fears are very much justified. The map display on the data pad shows you that the western portion of the deep sea base has been utterly compromised. Three compartments, then a fourth as you watch have completely collapsed. The system shows flooding, structural damage, and more. You know you might only have minutes before the entire place implodes. Sleep now completely shaken from your head, you sprint on bare feet towards the escape pods, knowing full well that the other scientists and soldiers aboard the base will be heading there as well.
You can hear the structure groaning, hear re-enforced walls giving way in distant parts of the base as you half-run down the cramped halls. The dark red emergency lights make navigating the cramped bulkheads and steel corridors somewhat difficult. Your bare feet plod along the cool metal, thankful that you're not splashing through icy salt water. As you make your way towards safety, you can't help but wonder why you're not seeing more people along the corridors. The base has a staff of almost two dozen scientists and as many soldiers at any given time, and you know you should be seeing other people by now. It is worrying. Every room you pass is empty, or bears the evidence of a hasty evacuation. Food sits uneaten on dining tables, and showers remain on at full blast as if everyone simply vanished on the spot. You pick up your pace as you hear the ominous groaning of yet another section of the base collapsing.
You come to the southern pod bay, and feel your heart sink as you see that not one, not two, but all three of the evacuation pods have been jettisoned. Each one could hold over a dozen passengers, so even with a full evacuation, there should be a remaining lifepod for any stragglers. You fall to your knees as you realize that you're stranded. The base is collapsing, and you've been left without an escape route. Due to the selfishness or panic of your fellows, you've been left a thousand meters below the surface of the sea, trapped in a metal coffin that is slowly collapsing around you.
You are not left long to stew in hopelessness. You feel it, feel the bulkheads collapsing, feel the metallic floors shake with a rhythmic "Thump! Thump! Thump!" as over a hundred atmospheres of pressure bears down on your squishy human body. You close your eyes tight, and await with trembling hands for the instant implosion death that awaits you.
"Hey! Hey, Doc, what are you doing!? We gotta run!" a voice calls, shaking you from your submission to the inevitable grasp of death. You turn your head and see her, see all two hundred pounds of her barreling down the cramped corridor towards you. You know the marine in passing, have spoken to her a few times. She goes by Mary, and she's an absolute mountain of a woman. Her big, Olympian frame hurdles towards you as a flood of icy salt water rushes into the corridor behind her. She grabs you by the back of the shirt and hauls you to your feet, not missing a step as she flees from the oncoming wall of salty death.
You scramble behind her, simultaneously thankful that you're not alone and sorry that another soul has to share your grave. "W-where are we going!? The life boats are gone!" you call after the beefy woman. She is clad in a pair of black spandex shorts and a tight tank top as she rushes along in the dim red light of the undersea compound. Two hundred pounds of big, corn-fed white girl leads you along the corridors, heavy footfalls shaking the steel panels beneath your feet with every step.
"Loading dock! It has the heaviest door! We might be able to hold out there for rescue!" she answers, voice confident and somehow without a hint of fear.
You follow her, mind working overtime in a life-or-death situation. Salty flood waters begin to lap about your ankles as the corridors behind you spring leak after leak after leak. Occasional emergency doors close behind the two of you, but it seems like the majority of the systems are offline. "Offline... offline... Hey! we're going the wrong way!" you shout as you put on a burst of speed to catch up to the statuesque marine. You cut down the right-hand tunnel just as the marine cuts down the left. It leaves her spinning on her heels before she finds herself following you down the cramped corridors.
"Loading dock is that way, Doc!" she says urgently as the compartment behind us begins to buckle violently.
"We're not going to the loading dock! We're going to hydroponics!" you answer with a wild whoop of fear and excitement. You saw on your data pad that Hydroponics was undamaged. The section, newer than the rest of the base, was built on as a sort of expansion. Three rooms dedicated to hydroponics and biological studies that had their own power and air filtration systems. "We would run out of air in the loading dock in less than forty eight hours, but Hydroponics has its own systems!"
The run towards hydroponics is nothing short of maddening. A chaotic dash through ever-increasing levels of ice cold salt water. It rushes in, freezes your muscles with icy fingers and seems to drag your feet down with every step. The grip of it, like the grip of death itself threatening to pull you down, spurs you onwards towards your only hope for safety. Your heart beats like a pneumatic hammer in your chest as you spot the closed bulkhead of the Hydroponics bay up ahead. Yet, salvation is far from secure. The emergency bulkheads built along the corridor start to close one by one, triggered by the rising levels of water inside of the tunnel. The automatic failsafe designed to save your life may end up dooming you to a torturous death by drowning as the sliding doors move slowly downwards.
"Don't stop! We're almost there!" Mary calls from behind as we struggle to duck beneath the closing doors one by one. Closer, closer, closer, we work our way towards the door as the series of bulkheads close. We're too slow, hindered too much by the now knee-high waters. The final emergency bulkhead is too low to get under, maybe six inches from being closed. So close and yet so far. The door to Hydroponics is just on the other side, less than six feet away. "Step aside, Doc," Mary says seriously as she gently but firmly pushes you to the side. You watch her squat low, watch her hook her fingers under the slowly closing pneumatic door.
You watch, awestruck, as the beefy marine strains, and somehow halts the downward motion of the bulkhead. You don't know exactly how much force these doors close with, but you know it is quite a lot. They are made to withstand more than a thousand meters of water pressure. Mary halts the door, and then with an almost pained sounding grunt, she starts to lift it. The veins on her neck bulge out, and the powerful muscles of her back ripple in stark relief as she forces the door open through sheer muscle and determination. The pixie-cut wearing blonde roars as she struggles against the door. With a nearly herculean effort, she hoists the door up onto one of her hefty shoulders. You can hear the pneumatic systems whining and groaning as they struggle against her almost inhuman strength. "Go, Doc!" she grunts as she holds the way open for you.
You slip through the door and waste no time. You enter your passcode into the keypad beside the Hydroponics door and the door opens with a hiss. You hold the door open as Mary slips under her bulkhead and barrels toward you. You can see the rush of water behind her, hear the roar of oncoming death. The marine turns on a heel as soon as she enters the bay and the two of you work in tandem to close the thick bulkhead of the hydroponics lab behind you. You close your eyes, wrench them shut in fear and the anticipation of death as the bulkhead creaks. You can hear the tunnel you were just in collapsing, hear the metal screaming as a billion tons of water compress it down into mangled destruction. You know that you're next, know that the cascading implosion is going to take you next... yet nothing comes. You feel the now-sealed hydroponics lab shudder slightly as some far-off compartment of the base implodes, but the room that you and Mary find yourselves in seems to have somehow weathered whatever catastrophic event that led to the destruction of the base.
"Holy shit!" Mary says simply with a deep sigh of relief as she slumps to the floor. You echo the statement and slump with her. You stare at the huge woman next to you, knowing full well that she saved your life back there. If it wasn't for her beefy arms and powerful thighs, then the two of you would likely be finely pasted fish food by now. Her top, now soaked with seawater, has become sheer, almost translucent, and you can see the color of her hefty breasts through the fabric. The girl is big in every way it seems.
"What the hell happened? One minute I was catching some sleep between shifts, and the next the whole place was imploding and falling apart!" you say as you try to calm the runaway beating of your heart. Adrenaline courses through you, makes your fingers shake and your voice feel small.
"Hey, beats me. I was just working out. Had my headphones on, so I guess I missed the alarm. Didn't notice nuthin' was off 'til I felt the water around my ankles," Mary answers as she grins an honest grin your way. "Hey, quick thinking coming here. You probably saved us with that smart noggin. No way we coulda closed the loading bay doors in time. This is probably the only safe spot on the whole ship!" she says as she claps you on the back with one hefty hand. You realize that she is very likely right, though this may not be the safe haven that it seems.
"Well, we should take stock of what we have in the hydroponics wing. Even at best, we can't expect rescue for at least a week. If we can't last it out, we might end up just dying a slower way," you say as you stand on shaky feet and look about the room. Hydroponics was never your department, so you rarely had reason to come here. You see several grow tables aligned in the middle of this main room, all lit with white, fluorescent grow lamps. Smaller plants sit on shelves along every wall and the whole space smells of soil and eucalyptus. At the very least, it seems you've found yourself trapped in the most pleasant portion of the now destroyed sea base.