To Konrad the monastery had been a place of devotion to the faith, but also of great joy. The scene that greeted him was the ultimate negation of his memories. Death and destruction blanketed the sanctuary. Konrad didn’t need to count to confirm that all the brothers had been killed. In his gut he knew.

“Captain?” Eric said, gesturing toward the apse.

Konrad tore his eyes away from the carnage toward the far end of the room. There, draped in his familiar silk stole, was Father Paisios, suspended from the ceiling, his arms extended in a manner that even the most devout atheist could not mistake for anything but crucifixion. Konrad averted his eyes quickly.

“Red. Chase. Let’s get the Father down. Then we can try to . . . figure out what the devil happened here.”

While the other two men worked at lowering the prior’s body, Konrad pulled Eric along with him as they weaved among the benches. There was something odd about the long, wooden rows; they didn’t look quite the way that Konrad remembered them. The once-familiar grain of the wood—one of the few luxury items on the entire station—had taken on a crystalline quality. Perhaps, Konrad thought, the brothers had replaced them after all those years. He reached out to run his hand along the rail, but jerked it back quickly at the feeling of—he wasn’t quite sure what—a shock, almost a biting? He started to lean forward to get a closer look.

“Captain,” Red called, snapping his attention back to the other end of the room. “We have a problem.”

“What is it?” Konrad replied, gingerly stepping over one of the monks and making his way toward the front. “Eric, keep your eyes peeled and move slowly.”

The captain reached the point where Father Paisios’ lifeless body hung. He could see clearly then what his eyes had refused to see before. The white-haired old man was not suspended from the ceiling, but rather fused to it, pulled taut with what seemed to be filaments of light, not the ropes or other bindings Konrad had expected.

“He’s … in there,” Chase half-whispered. “You ever seen anything like that?”

Konrad could only shake his head. There was something off about the cleric’s body. He had seen the dead before, the eyes glazed over and glassy. But this was different: the whites of the eyes seemed impossibly bright and the irises gave off a metallic sheen.

“Well can we at least . . .” Konrad began. “Never mind, just—”

“Captain?”

This time it was Eric.

“What now?!” Konrad snapped. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

He hated to see what had become of Father Paisios, but neither could he bear to look away just at that moment. Konrad felt that he owed the man’s memory at least that much.

“It’s just . . .” Eric continued. “You should look at this.”

Konrad let out an exasperated sigh. Nothing was going like it should have. Life on Bethlehem Station had been orderly and deliberate; now a sense of chaos seemed to drip from everything.

“What is it?”

“There,” Eric gestured toward the floor. “I rolled him over and . . .”

The Captain glanced down to where Eric had moved one of the brothers’ corpses to the far side of the aisle. There was a footprint—at least Konrad assumed it was a footprint, judging by what appeared to be the spread of several toes. He knelt down and gently touched the mark, finding that it was not blood, as he had assumed, but more like a scorched spot. Not merely a spot, he realized, but a depression.

“How . . .?” he said, glancing up at Eric momentarily. Eric merely shrugged.

Laying his weapon on the floor beside him, Konrad leaned down so that his face was inches from the strange print. The floor of the chapel had been carved directly into the asteroid’s surface; nothing should have been able to put a dent in it. The toes, Konrad realized, were not quite toes; the structure was wrong in a way he couldn’t pin down. As he continued to look, craning his neck to the right and back to the left, he saw that where the foot had landed, the stone beneath had taken on the same geometric patterns he had observed in the pew just moments before. Faint crystal fingers branched out from the mark in every direction.

“What is it, Captain?” Red was standing there now. “We laid the priest up there at the front. He . . . well, you saw.”

“Thanks, Red.”

Konrad got back to his feet and checked the shoulder strap on his rifle as he slung it back over his shoulder.

“I don’t know what this is, but where there’s one of . . . those, there are sure to be more, right? Let’s find them and see whether they lead somewhere. Spread out.”

The crew got to work, carefully moving bodies when required, pews scraping along the rock the only sound to be heard.

“Over here,” Chased called out, beckoning toward apse. “It looks like they lead back there.”

There was, Konrad knew, a rear exit to the chapel; it was never used by anyone except Father Paisios. The Captain paused briefly to say a prayer as he approached the body that Red and Chase had done their best to leave in a state of repose.

“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” Konrad whispered.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than another sound assaulted the crew’s ears. At first it was low and deep before resolving into something more like someone pounding his fist against a metal door.

Instinctively, the four men crouched, scanned their surroundings, and brought their weapons to a ready position.

“What is that, Captain?” Red asked.

“I don’t know, but I have an idea. And I have an idea where to look. Follow me and stay alert.”

He switched on his rifle’s flashlight attachment, pointed it down the rear passageway, and stalked away into the darkness.

“I thought monks were supposed to be poor.”

The irreverent mercenary could try all he liked to hide it with humor, but he—along with the rest of the S.S. Starsong’s crew—couldn’t help but be impressed as their starship approached Bethlehem Station: a kilometers-long, olive-shaped asteroid, reshaped and retrofitted to form a monastery. Great, aluminum-plated domes bubbled across its dark surface, glinting white against the stark black of space. Without any atmosphere to filter it, the sun’s glare was so bright on those domes that some wondering child on Earth might see the monastery twinkling in the night sky. Even through the Starsong’s filtered plexiglass it was painful to look at directly. Without that glass, Eric and the rest of the mercenaries would be blind right now.

There was a surreal beauty to it: the useless hunk of space rock, having been mined to depletion, now transformed into a majestic hall of prayer orbiting a thousand kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

“How much do you think it costs?” Eric continued, squinting into the glare. The lean, sandy-haired man was the youngest (and most talkative) of the crew and stood beside Konrad’s captain seat, nose almost touching the curved glass. The rest of the crew—Lily, Red, Chase, and Helix—also crowded around Konrad, their body heat starting to stifle. The bridge really wasn’t meant for everyone to stand in.

“Too much. Waste of money!” Chase grumbled, his grey-haired arms crossed as he glared at the extravagance.

“It’s beautiful,” Lily said simply.

“It’s all hand-me-downs,” said Helix. “The asteroid, the aluminum—it probably didn’t cost as much as you think.”

“This is Captain Konrad of the S.S. Starsong requesting permission to dock, over,” Konrad said into the comm system.

“Lot more money than I have,” Eric said.

“This is Captain Konrad of the S.S. Starsong requesting permission to dock, over.”

Silence. Again.

“Well it was worth a try,” Lily said.

“Or ten,” Eric grumbled.

Konrad frowned and leaned back, his chair creaking under his muscled weight. He had been warned that the station had gone silent, but he didn’t want to believe it. The implications were not something he wanted to think about.

The Earth looked so peaceful below, all blues and greens and whites, with no hint of the war and hunger that tore it apart since the days of Cain. If this mission was successful, Konrad might just be able to set foot on its surface again. Wars and all, it was home. Or used to be, and perhaps could be again.

But that was a big if. Bigger than his crew knew.

A week ago, he had been hailed directly by the United Space Federation on a secure channel, which was on its own highly unusual. Even more unusual was the fact that a high ranking admiral had done the hailing. At first, Konrad had been worried that the U.S.F. finally decided to hunt him down, that even space was no longer safe for him and his crew.

The reality was far more disturbing.

“Captain Konrad,” Admiral Thornton had said over comms, his face and voice crackling with the distance. At the time, the Starsong had been escorting a transport to Mars. “The U.S.F. would like to hire your services.”

Konrad’s initial shock morphed into horror as the scarred and stiff-jawed old admiral told the whole story. Bethlehem Station, humanity’s most ancient off-world monastery, had gone silent. No technical failures, no distress call, just one last message: “The manger is empty. The star is moving.”

“The station is on complete lockdown,” the admiral said. “Our men can’t get inside without risking the integrity of the structure. And the lives within,” he added almost as an afterthought. “It’s keyed to unlock for one ship and one ship only. Yours.”

Konrad’s grey eyes blinked at that, but little else betrayed his surprise. Why would the monks send for a lapsed novice such as himself?

“Captain Konrad, am I right in assuming that you know what we’re dealing with here?”

Konrad gritted his teeth. He wasn’t supposed to know, didn’t want to know, and most definitely wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.

“Yes.”

“Good. Then you know how important it is that this situation is dealt with. Quickly.”

#

It had taken a full week to make it back to Earth’s orbit, but the U.S.F. agreed to cover all expenses and ensure that their escort task was completed by military professionals. That left a week for Konrad to ruminate on all the ramifications of his mission. Admiral Thornton promised a full pardon for Konrad and the entire Starsong crew if they succeeded, not to mention enough money that they could all retire on Earth and never risk their lives to feed themselves again. Yet even with all that Konrad considered time and again turning right around and getting as far from Bethlehem Station as possible.

But the monks had sent for him for a reason, and he still owed them for taking him in. Besides, try as he might, he couldn’t shake the gnawing guilt that crept in every time he considered leaving. Too much time with monks has made me soft, he thought.

So now he sat in his starship, gliding towards the silent station, squinting against the white glint, trying to muster the courage to move.

He sighed and stood. “Chase, Red, Eric, suit up. We take the shuttle in ten.”

#

Three hours later the four men approached the pole of the asteroid, their shuttle’s AI rapidly calculating the asteroid’s spin and adjusting the shuttle’s to match. As Admiral Thornton had promised, the port unlocked and allowed their small craft to dock with a click and a hiss, though they didn’t hear from a single human the entire approach.

As space-bound mercenaries, he and his crew were well-accustomed to this kind of silence, with nothing but the hum of engines and the rhythm of their own breath behind their masks. This time, however, the silence had them all on edge as the four men unstrapped themselves from their seats and pulled their weightless bodies into the airlock.

When the airlock finished decompressing, Konrad led them into the adjoining elevator. According to his suit’s monitors, life support was still online and the air breathable. Whatever had happened to the station was apparently not altogether destructive. At least not physically.

“Keep your masks on,” Konrad said. “We still don’t know what to expect.”

The descent (if you could call it that) was uneventful, yet the sinking feeling in Konrad’s gut had nothing to do with the rapidly increasing “gravity” as the elevator approached the outer, habitable regions of the asteroid, where the centrifugal force of the spinning station would roughly equal Earth’s gravitational pull. Within minutes the weight returned to their bodies and their feet were once again planted on the floor.

When the elevator doors opened, Konrad almost expected to see a monk greet them. Maybe even a familiar face, someone to ask him how he’d been, to tell him this was all a great misunderstanding, that the monks just needed some space from the outside world and that’s why they’d gone silent, or that their communications went down and they just never bothered to set it back up. Konrad wouldn’t put it past them.

But the vestibule was empty when they stepped in. Empty and silent. No chanting echoed from the halls and there was no shuffle of black robes or muffled footsteps as the monks busied about their tasks. Otherwise the narthex, the transition area from the outside world to this place of contemplation and worship, was much as Konrad remembered. The floors and walls were made of the polished, grey-black rock of the asteroid itself, with a thin, translucent layer of sealant that gripped easily onto their combat boots.

The entryway’s arched ceiling lended it a tunnel-like appearance and heightened the sense of passage from the void of space to the sanctuary within, if indeed sanctuary it still was. Konrad doubted it. Colorful frescoes began halfway up the dark walls, depicting saints and angels alike, but the men’s eyes were drawn to the aperture door at the far end of the hall and the figure guarding it, a figure that was comfortingly familiar to Konrad despite the dread of the mission. Each of the door’s six leaves depicted one of the fire-like wings of a seraph, with the angel’s head in the center. Below that serene face, two hands holding the Word of God.

The dog-headed St. Christopher loomed in the archway above the seraph, one hand wielding the cross, the other raised as though cautioning the crew back.

Instead they moved forward. Their footsteps fell softly as they passed brass candlestands with cold stubs burnt right to the sand they stood in.

Nobody had been through here in some time.

“Eyes sharp,” Konrad said, his rifle raised and at the ready as he made his way to the door. Normally it would have automatically opened at his approach, but it remained shut. “Red,” he said.

“Aye aye, Captain.” Red’s voice came loud and clear into Konrad’s helmet. The machinist moved to the control panel left of the door while Konrad kept his rifle pointed straight at the seraph’s head. “Captain, there’s a password. And it looks like…a riddle? ‘Your true name.’” He pressed a few more keys. “I guess I’ll just have to hack into it. Might take a while, I’m no Lily.”

“Try ‘Christopher.’”

Red looked up and raised an eyebrow at his captain, his pale, angular face and ebon hair giving the action an exaggerated appearance. Konrad had never told his crew just how familiar he was with Bethlehem Station; that would have just opened things up to far too many unnecessary questions, questions that Konrad didn’t know how to answer even if he wanted to and wasn’t worried about the U.S.F. coming after him for divulging its secrets. Even now Konrad didn’t say anything and merely nodded to the control panel. Red leaned back over it. A moment later the machinist shook his head in disbelief. “Well it looks like you were right. We’re in.”

Konrad should have been relieved, but instead he tensed. Seemed like someone went to great lengths to make sure only Konrad would be able to get in. Someone who knew him. Who knew the patron he would have chosen had he taken his vows: the dog-headed warrior saint of the fringe. Defender. Outsider.

Monster.

Father Paisios had once told him that sometimes you needed a monster to slay a greater monster. At the time, Konrad had not been aware of what the monks kept sealed in the depths of the asteroid, that being bred of black holes and darker things, held captive by vigilant prayers a thousand kilometers from Earth. Looking back, Konrad wondered if Father Paisios had predicted this would happen. That one day soon those prayers would fail. That some monk in a moment of weakness would fall to temptation, would heed the being’s call, would set them all on the path of destruction.

But while Konrad had always agreed with Father that he was, indeed, a monster, he was never sure if he was the kind of monster that did the slaying, or the kind that needed it.

“Open it,” he said. Red keyed a button on the control pad and the seraph’s wings slid open. Konrad reflexively crossed himself, the long dormant habit suddenly awakened in need, as he walked under the figure and saw what lay beyond.

What’s next?

Here are some thoughts from the author:

In my vision, that last message sent by the monastery is code meaning something along the lines of: Some semi-demonic entity wrought in a black hole by demons (a fallen star, if you will) has emptied the manger (stolen/destroyed a device or relic that kept it at bay) and is now moving (trying to get to Earth), though I suppose any of that could change. I tried to keep the voice fairly neutral and the POV flexible to make it easier for the next person to make it his own.

The editors have selected the following continuation prompt:

Look for the next installment of this Round Robin story in March. If you want to see where the other authors will take us, subscribe below.