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 themetal. 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 wascompletely dead. Zorn's scanner provided the only illumination—green glow painting shadows across smoke and debris.
