HELIX: A SciFi Short Story

HELIX

A SciFi Short Story

By Drew Avera

All Rights Reserved by Drew Avera 2015

www.drewavera.wordpress.com

The catwalk hung over a dark void in the spaceship as Grant looked down. He could not resist the urge to spit and watch the bulbous fluid disappear from view for what must have been the eleventh time in as many minutes. Once again, his hands gripped the railing as he craned his neck to reach as far out as possible, his eyes looking down into the seemingly bottomless void below his dangling feet. Saliva moistened his lips for a moment just before he squeezed them together to separate the spit from his body. With only a moment of hesitation the spit trickled before falling away. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” he counted until he could not see it any more.

“Ha! Only six seconds,” Ben mocked. “I spit one yesterday and watched it fall for nine seconds. You’ll never beat my record,” he said with more than a hint gloating.

“That’s because there was more light in here yesterday,” Grant said. “The window is pointed away from the star right now.”

The Helix was a spindle-shaped vessel with a population of over five-thousand human refugees. It had been more than a few generations since anyone could remember leaving Earth behind, but no one on the Helix ever imagined returning to a home planet erupted in chaos. The threat of nuclear war and religious oppression had put the world at the brink of extinction. History being as it was, there was no wonder why life was better in the darkness of space rather than risk the future of humanity on bloodstained dirt.

The void the two boys looked into eventually led to engineering spaces, but people needed clearances to go there. Instead, the catwalk where they sat merely bridged two sides of the round spacecraft together to make life easier for the inhabitants.

“Whatever, you still didn’t spit one big enough to see for more than seven seconds so I still win,” Ben shot back. His need to excel at pretty much everything was a double-edged sword. On one hand he was a great teammate at handball, but sometimes his competitive nature was too much to handle for most people; really anyone but Grant.

“I know. Anyways, I’m getting bored with this. What do you say we go to the galley and see if Ms. Waller will give us some cookies?” Grant asked, knowing Ben could never say no to sweets.

“Uh, yeah!” Ben said jumping up from a sitting position and holding onto the cold steel railing with both hands. The catwalk was forty yards from one side to the other and both boys stood almost perfectly in the center when there was a sudden loss of power. With a whoosh everything went silent and dark.  You could have heard a pin drop if not for the instant pounding of the boys’ hearts as fear flooded into their veins.

A chill went down Grant’s spine before he finally spoke. “What happened?” he asked. His voice sounded hollow to him as the sound fought to be heard over the thrumming of his heart in his ears.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, his normal enthusiasm waning. “It’s like the ship just died.”

“Don’t say that!” Grant replied. “You know what happened to the Verne.”

It was common knowledge the ship named after Jules Verne had lost power while coasting too close to an asteroid with a strong gravitational pull. The resulting catastrophe had claimed several thousand lives and the memory of it casted a shadow over the last remnants of humanity, even more than a century later.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ben said, his knuckles white as he gripped the handrail while making his way to the hatch. “Follow me; we need to get somewhere safer in case the ship begins to list.”

A ship without power to create its own gravity would often begin to tumble as outside gravitational forces from moons and planets began to take hold. Given their proximity to KG894, a moon base settled on the moon of a dying gas giant planet, they were within range to begin plummeting towards certain death, especially without power for steering and reverse thrust.

Both boys made their way to the main passageway and found it just as dark and quiet as the void had been. A few emergency lights were illuminated to provide enough light for people to navigate back to their dorms, but the eerily casted light made the boys more afraid than anything else. “It’s never been this dark before,” Grant said under his breath. His heart beat like a drum in his chest as he remembered accidentally being locked in a storeroom when he was six years old. Even then there had been enough light to not feel too claustrophobic. This scenario felt much different to him and he could not help feeling alone and afraid despite the fact Ben was right next to him.

“Come on,” Ben said, pulling at his friend’s shirtsleeve as they moved deeper into the passageway, further from the relative safety of the emergency lit area.

It didn’t take long before the artificial gravity began to dissipate and their steps no longer fell solidly to the deck below them. The sensation of gradually rising from the surface and swimming through the air was foreign to them, but excitement soon turned to dread after Ben dared a glance from a small window looking out from the craft.

“Is it just me or does KG894 look bigger?” Ben asked.

Grant moved across the bulkhead as his fingertips found purchase on the ribbing of the craft, coming to a stop at the window where his friend looked out curiously. “It’s hard to tell, really.”

“Look there,” Ben pointed. “See the moon base’s landing pads? You can see more details of the structure from here,” he replied.

“I hadn’t noticed that before. Are you sure? Maybe we are just seeing a different perspective of it than we usually see from the void’s big window.” Grant’s words seemed rational, but Ben was not exactly ready to accept his statement as the truth. There was no denying that the base at least looked bigger, alternate perspective or not.

“Maybe, but we need to find my mom. She’ll have a better idea of what’s going on,” he said, nervously pulling back from the window. “Follow me; she’s usually on the bridge.”

“We’re not allowed there, Ben,” Grant shot back. He remembered being caught playing near the navigation charts earlier in the year and being told never to set foot on the bridge again. They were harsh words coming from Captain Lancier, Grant’s uncle.

Ben scoffed as he pulled his way down the passageway and towards the top of the spindle-shaped craft where the bridge was located. “You can stay behind if you want to, but I’m going to find answers.”

*****

Darkness met them every floating inch of the way. Each corridor and passageway was bathed in shadows, the emergency lighting barely visible against the dull light reflecting from the moon into the windows of the Helix. The temperature was beginning to plummet and steam escaped their mouths which each panting breath as they found their way to the bridge.

“Uncle?” Grant whispered as they entered the ghostly room. The gravity levels were stronger in the bridge and their feet touched the ground lightly, allowing them to walk instead of having to pull themselves across the bulkheads of the ship.

Surrounded by eerily luminescent control panels and screens the boys stepped deeper into the bridge. Some of the readouts were easy to understand, temperature and oxygen levels were the first things they noticed, but the oscillating numbers identifying the distance between the Helix and KG894’s orbit revealed the boy’s worst fears; they were indeed falling, if you could call it that.

“Ben, look!” Grant gasped, pointing at the readouts as the digits scaled downward, each fluttering of numerals proving how quickly they were descending.

Ben moved over and looked over Grant‘s shoulder, his eyes wide, terrified. Not only were they falling but he was just struck with the realization that they were the only two souls either of them had seen since the emergency started. “I don’t know which is worse, the fact we are crashing uncontrollably or that there are no pilots, no anyone in the bridge.”

Grant looked around, holding his breath as Ben’s words were proven with a sight he had refused to acknowledge at first. They were in fact alone.

“Where did everyone go and why didn’t we realize we were alone until now?” Grant asked, daring to reason the answer should be obvious despite the churning of fear in his body.

“I…I don’t know,” Ben whispered. He had always been the one with answers, the fearless one amongst his friends, but there he stood, watching KG894 grow larger as the Helix fell, aided by the gravity the ship could no longer combat against. They were nothing more than an advanced version of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple falling from the tree, proving that gravity was indeed the enemy of flight.

Ben and Grant dropped their gazes from the banks of indicators and windscreen of the Helix that revealed their impending doom. No good would come from watching death rise towards them like a bird taking flight; instead they leaned against a bulkhead on the other side of the bridge and dropped their bodies down into a seated position.

“This situation doesn’t make any sense to me,” Ben said, his eyes moist with fresh tears threatening to stream down his face.  Never in his fourteen years of living on the Helix had he experienced anything of this magnitude, nor had any training evolutions taken place that resembled their current plight.

“What should we do?” Grant asked; his voice on the verge of cracking. “We can’t call for help, but maybe we can eject from the ship into an escape pod and land on KG894. Do you think you can pilot an escape pod?” He asked, allowing a tremor of hope to form his words.

Ben shook his head, he had played on many flight simulators growing up, but he had never learned to land any of those crafts on a surface bearing gravity. “We would die either way,” he said solemnly.

Ben could feel hope escape his friend’s body as he exhaled a barely audible sob next to him. The younger boy had put all his hope into Ben and now the fourteen year-old boy felt responsible for crushing his best friend’s hopes of normalcy. A flood of thoughts entered Ben’s mind as he dissected the situation a hundred different ways, his eyes looking outside the Helix and towards the pale light of KG894. A bead of sweat ran down his brow as he thought, pleading to himself to find a way, any way to save himself and his friend.

As Grant sat with tears running down his face there was a sound, reminiscent of static across a radio frequency, but that was impossible because the communications systems were down, or were they?

“Did you hear that?” Grant asked, sitting up and looking around the room.

Ben’s ears perked up as both boys stood and listened intently for what had caused the sound.

It happened again, this time more audible, more hopeful.

“Over there!” Ben pointed at an unlit console, mostly in shadows on the other side of the bridge.

Ben and Grant scrambled over to that side and looked at the station. There was only a small indicator resting flat on the horizontal surface, the readout nothing more than a dim, orange line scrawling across the four inch plane. The sound appeared again, louder this time, but accompanied by a sign-wave along the orange line.

Ben squinted as he tried to read what the indicator was for. The only clue he had was the letters “DC” labeled under the right corner of the screen. He thought for a moment before speaking. “I think this is for emergency DC power, I remember reading in one of the manuals that electrical power can be reset so long as there is a power source. Surely this might have something to do with it,” he said.

“If that’s true then how do we reset it?” Grant asked.

Ben hunched down over the console, straining to read the controls in the dim light. “Do you have a flashlight on you?”

Grant looked down at his belt and brought his hand up with a pencil-thin wand, a small LED attached to one end. “Here you go,” he answered, switching the light on for his friend.

Now, bathed in light, Ben could make out what each button and knob was on the console. Each label dismissing his attention until he found what he was looking for. “Here, generator reset switch, I wonder if this is it?”

Grant watched as Ben touched the switch and lifted it to the reset position before letting go. There was a louder than anticipated click as the spring-loaded switch returned to the normal position. The boys stood there for a moment in the darkness before the bridge lit back up, first in hues of blue and then brighter, whiter light  engulfed the space in piercing luminosity.

Brant took a large gasp and wrapped his arms around his friend. “You did it!” he shouted. “I can’t believe it!”

Ben smiled; looking around as each console sprang back to life and lit up. The temperature indicators and gravity monitor readings began to return to normal and both boys could feel themselves weighing heavier. Everything was moving in the right direction except for the altimeter, it still showed that they were moving closer to KG894’s orbit and before long the moon’s gravity would pull them to the surface.

“Oh no,” Ben said as he darted across the bridge to the engine control console. Within a few moments he realized the pulsars were not activated and needed to be restarted. His hands glided over the controls with the precision of a skilled pilot. The pulsar initiation sequence forced the engines to come online, led by Ben’s skilled control.

“We are still dropping fast,” Grant said as he read the altimeter over Ben’s shoulder.

“The engines are online, but the pulsars are facing the wrong direction,” Ben said. “I have to correct the pitch and ease off the throttles at the same time. I need you to take over flight controls,” he ordered.

Grant looked over at the lonesome console across the bridge. He was nothing more than a few dials and control sticks, but it was beyond anything he had ever used. Grant, though growing up in the shadow of his Uncle who was captain of the Helix, was not being brought up to pilot the vessel.