THE BALANCING DIAL

Trapped deep within the dim, steam-choked corridors of a commercial cargo vessel, Helen finds herself at the central environmental terminal facing a brutal moral crossroad. The ship's emergency reactor is failing, and a predatory alien organism has tracked her down. Her only hope of stopping it is to trigger a complete reactor overload, vaporizing herself along with the monster. However, the stamped steel identifiers above the console's two primary rotary dials have worn down to bare iron, and her frantic mind blanks out under the crushing weight of the pulsing sirens.

Over the overhead intercom, Jones—an engineering tech trapped in the locked control booth three decks up—screams down at her in a desperate attempt to help her trace the schematics. The stakes vanish off the charts when he reveals his terminal is completely read-only; if Helen twists the wrong dial, she won't blow up the ship. Instead, she will drop the automated quarantine floodgates to Sector B, exposing twenty-five innocent crew members currently sleeping in hypersleep. As the creature bursts from the vents and launches into a low, terrifying sprint inches from her skin, a panicked Helen throws her weight into the left-hand dial. The heavy mechanical clunk that follows does not bring an explosion, but the slow, pneumatic hiss of the habitat gates grinding upward, permanently trapping Helen in the dark as the monster lets out a vibrating hiss and turns toward its twenty-five defenseless targets.