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“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:
The door opens and everyone is dead; perhaps they all killed each other. Story focuses on destroying/capturing the entity.
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.
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