Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
BEA
The bulkhead slammed shut with a sound like a guillotine.
I spun toward the noise, the medical scanner still in my hand, and felt my stomach drop into free fall. The emergency seal had activated with an automatic response to catastrophic hull breach. Which meant the section we'd just left was gone. Vented into space or collapsed entirely.
Which meant we were cut off from the rest of the team.
"Zorn?"
He was already at the sealed bulkhead, running his scanner across its surface. The green glow reflected off his forest-green skin, highlighting the tension in his jaw. "Structural integrity compromised. This section is separating from the main hull."
Around us, the refugee ship groaned, a deep, metallic sound that vibrated through the deck plating and up through my bones. Not the normal sounds of a functioning vessel. This was the sound of something dying. Something coming apart at the seams.
I forced myself to breathe. To think. To assess.
We were in what had been the refugee ship's secondary medical bay—now a disaster zone of overturned equipment, flickering lights, and the acrid smell of burned wiring.
The patients we'd stabilized were gone, evacuated with the rest of the medical team before that final raider strike.
Before the structure had started its catastrophic failure.
Just us. Trapped.
Life support indicators on the wall panel flickered amber. Not critical yet, but heading that direction. The air already tasted stale, recycled too many times through failing systems.
"Communications?" I asked, my voice steadier than I felt.
Zorn pulled out his comm unit, tried the emergency frequency. Static answered him as harsh and unforgiving. He tried again. Same result.
"Interference from the hull breach," he said. His golden-brown eyes met mine, and I saw him making the same calculations I was making. "Or the radiation from the raiders' weapons is disrupting signals."
"So Mothership can't find us."
"They're searching. But with the debris field and energy signatures—" He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to.
We might drift for hours. Days. Until our air ran out or the structure collapsed completely.
The ship groaned again, more insistent this time. Something exploded in the distance, muffled by bulkheads but close enough to feel. The deck tilted slightly, maybe two degrees. Not much, but enough to confirm what I already knew.
We were running out of time.
My training kicked in automatically, the same emergency protocols that had kept me functional through countless traumas, disasters, impossible situations. Assess the situation. Identify resources. Develop a plan.
"Medical equipment," I said, moving toward the overturned supply lockers. "Surgical lasers can cut through metal if we modify them. What about your scanner?"
Zorn was already there, pulling equipment from the wreckage with careful efficiency despite his size. "Possible. The energy output isn't designed for industrial cutting, but with modifications—"
Another explosion. Closer. The lights flickered and died, plunging us into darkness for three heartbeats before emergency lighting kicked in. Red glow instead of white. Warning instead of comfort.
The air tasted thicker now. Recyclers failing.
"How long?" I asked.
Zorn checked his scanner. "Life support? Thirty minutes, perhaps forty if we limit movement and reduce oxygen consumption."
Not enough time. Not nearly enough.
But I'd worked miracles with less. Had saved patients who should have been corpses, had kept people alive through situations that should have killed them. This was just another impossible problem requiring an impossible solution.
I could work with impossible.
"Show me the bulkhead composition," I said, moving beside him. Close enough that I could smell the ozone-and-metal scent that clung to his skin, I could feel the warmth radiating from his larger frame. "If we can identify structural weak points—"
"Here." He pulled up a schematic on his scanner, highlighting areas where the metal was thinner, where emergency seals had created stress fractures. "But we'll need sustained energy output to breach even the weakest sections. More power than we have available."
I studied the schematic, my mind racing through options. The surgical laser had limited battery life. The scanner wasn't designed for cutting. The other medical equipment was either too specialized or too damaged to repurpose.
Unless—
"The defibrillator," I said suddenly. "The cardiac resuscitation unit. It generates high-voltage electrical pulses."
Zorn's markings flickered, the gold healing patterns catching the red emergency light. Understanding crossed his features. "You want to use it as a makeshift arc welder."
"It's insane."
"It's resourceful." He was already moving, retrieving the defibrillator from where it had tumbled against the wall. "We'll need to reconfigure the output, bypass the safety limiters, and hope the power cells don't overload."
"And if they overload?"
"The explosion will be immediate and fatal." His voice was matter-of-fact. Medical professional stating clinical reality. "But we die either way if we don't try."
He was right. We both knew it.
We worked in synchronized silence, our movements practiced from months of medical collaboration.
I handled the delicate electronics, bypassing safety protocols that existed for good reasons.
Zorn managed the power calibration, his larger fingers moving with surprising precision across the interface.
The ship groaned constantly now. A symphony of structural failure. Metal grinding against metal, systems shutting down one by one, the slow-motion collapse of a vessel that had survived raider attacks and engine failure but couldn't survive the final catastrophic damage.
Sweat rolled down my spine despite the cooling temperature. My hands trembled slightly, exhaustion and adrenaline and the weight of knowing that every second counted, that this jury-rigged plan had maybe a thirty percent chance of working.
Thirty percent. I'd taken worse odds in surgery.
"Ready," Zorn said.
I checked my modifications one last time. The defibrillator hummed with barely-contained energy, its power readouts climbing into ranges that made my stomach clench. We had one shot at this. Maybe two if we were lucky.
"Weak point," I said, pointing at the bulkhead section his scanner had identified. "There."
He positioned the defibrillator's discharge pads against the metal. I stood back, giving him room, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"On three," Zorn said. "One. Two—"
The defibrillator discharged with a sound like thunder in the confined space. Blue-white electricity arced across the bulkhead, so bright I had to look away. The smell of superheated metal filled the air, acrid and chemical.
When my vision cleared, there was a molten glow where the discharge had hit. Not a breach, but a weakening. A start.
"Again," I said.
He recharged the unit. The power cells whined in protest, their indicators climbing into red zones. Dangerous zones. But we didn't have alternatives.
Second discharge. More lightning. More heat. The bulkhead glowed brighter, metal sagging slightly under its own weight.
"It's working," Zorn said.
Third discharge. Fourth. The power cells were screaming now, their safety mechanisms triggering alarms that we ignored. The bulkhead showed a definite weak point, metal stressed past its structural limits.
"One more," I said. "Just one more—"
The defibrillator exploded.
Not a dramatic cinematic explosion. Just a sudden electrical pop, acrid smoke, and the unit going dead in Zorn's hands. The power cells had finally overloaded, their safety cutoffs triggering too late to prevent cascading failure.
We were out of tools.
I stared at the bulkhead, weakened but not breached, close but not close enough. So close I could see the metal sagging, I saw the stress fractures spreading like spiderwebs.
"Kick it," I said.
Zorn looked at me. "What?"
"You're eight feet tall and built like you could bench-press a shuttle. Kick the weakened section." I pointed at the sagging metal. "The structure's already compromised. Applied force might be enough to breach it."
He studied the bulkhead, running calculations I could see in his expression. Then he nodded, positioned himself, and drove his boot into the weakened metal with enough force to shake the deck.
The bulkhead held.
He kicked again. And again. Each impact sending vibrations through the dying ship, each one accompanied by the groaning protest of stressed metal.
On the fourth kick, something cracked.
On the fifth, the weakened section buckled inward.
On the sixth, it gave way entirely, peeling back with a shriek of tortured metal to reveal the corridor beyond. Dark and filled with smoke, but open.
Escape route.
"Go," Zorn said, already moving. "Before this section collapses."
I followed him through the breach, crawling over sharp metal edges that caught on my uniform, scrambling into the corridor beyond. The emergency lighting here was completely dead. Zorn's scanner provided the only illumination—green glow painting shadows across smoke and debris.
The ship groaned again. Louder. More insistent. The deck beneath us shuddered, tilted another five degrees.
"Escape pods," Zorn said, already moving down the corridor. "This section should have emergency evacuation stations."
Should. If they hadn't been destroyed in the raider attack. If they hadn't been used already. If we could reach them before the structure failed completely.
I ran after him, my lungs burning from the smoke-filled air, my legs protesting the sprint after hours of surgery. The corridor was a nightmare of collapsed ceiling panels and sparking conduits, every step an obstacle course in the dark.
Zorn stopped suddenly. I nearly crashed into his back.
"What—"
"Listen."