Free HELIX: A SciFi Short Story by Drew Avera

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