By Aeryn Rudel

Edited by Yuval Kordov

The lid of my cryopod opens with the tired groan of ancient hydraulics. Beyond is dark and cold. My limbs are leaden weights, my mouth ash, but I manage to tap the neural node on my left temple.

When?

Two thousand one hundred cycles since your last awakening, the ship’s computer says into my mind.

The calculation is in Eridani time because someone thought it would be morale-boosting to use the orbital period of our future home. I do the math in my head. I’ve been asleep 3,600 years, give or take a decade.

How many? is my next question.

Nine units show a decrease in function. Four have gone offline.

I sit up and shiver. The overhead lights come on—those that still function—revealing an endless corridor filled with egg-shaped pods about three feet apart. The walls, once clinical white, have faded to the color of old ivory.

I climb out of my pod, joints aching, muscles quivering with cryo-fatigue. My breath fogs the air, and I reach for the therma-coat on the hook nearby. I put it on, grimacing at the smell—the acrid stink of synthetic fibers starting to break down. It’s still warm, though.

Show me the malfunctioning units, I tell the computer.

Brighter lights sputter in the distance, spotlighting the faulty pods.

The first is only a dozen yards from my own. The status light on the unit blinks crimson. Imminent failure.

I place a hand on the dust-coated creche, and information about the occupant floods my mind.

Lana Vance, twenty-seven, violinist.

Ages ago, Lana boarded a ship called the Seton with hopes and dreams of colonizing a new planet, maybe playing her violin on a world that had never heard music. She was supposed to wake up to a new life in three hundred years, a mere blip in cryosleep. Instead, she’s been entombed in an egg-shaped coffin for the better part of ten millennia.

Repair drone? I ask, though I already know the answer.

Negative. Reserved for essential personnel.

Violinists are not essential on our new home. Not that it matters. None of us will see that new home anyway. A few awakenings back, I discovered that a slight miscalculation caused the Seton to shoot past Eridani. We’ve been drifting for thousands of years, and the ship’s computer is unwilling or unable to accept it.

I unfasten the top of my slipsuit, exposing my priest’s collar, and pull out my rosary. The Seton is a colony ship, and its passengers share one thing in common: faith. We left Earth to make a new life and a new church in the heavens. We’ll be denied both.

I give Lana Vance last rites. When I finish, I watch the blinking light on her pod for a few seconds, hoping Lana’s last dreams are of playing her violin in the golden sunshine of Eridani.

I move on.

The status light on the next pod-in-distress also blares critical red. A touch reveals that this is Arthur Odhiambo, forty-one, botanist. The computer tells me Arthur is, in fact, essential.

A repair drone soon appears, a hovering silver sphere about the size of a basketball. Small hatches open on its surface, and spindly mechanical limbs extend, each tipped with a diagnostic sensor or tool. It sets to work, and I wait nearby. If the drone is unable to repair Arthur’s pod, he’ll get last rites, too.

The repair drone finishes, and Arthur Odhiambo’s status light goes from red to yellow. At some point—maybe next week, maybe a thousand years from now—I’ll be standing over his pod, mumbling the same tired blessing I gave Lana Vance.

The next seven pods show yellow or red. Five are deemed essential and successfully repaired. I perform last rites on the remaining two.

Now I must attend to the failed units. The first hunkers in a pool of shadows beneath the burnt-out star of one of the cryobay lights. No status light is visible. The plastic shell of the pod is a gray shroud.

“Light,” I say, my voice cracked and weak from disuse.

The repair drone produces a limb tipped with a flash node, illuminating the dark space.

Who was it? I think at the computer.

Mary O’Malley, forty-eight, historian.

The name jogs my memory. I attended to Mary during my last awakening.

I pull the emergency release lever on the dead pod, and its lid shudders open. The sterile interior of the ship radically slows decomposition, and even after three thousand years, Mary O’Malley is mostly intact, a withered mummy held together by the ivory sheen of a slipsuit.

The repair drone uses a plasma spray to reduce Mary’s corpse to fine ash, then extrudes a flexible black tube and vacuums her up.

We repeat the procedure on the other three dead pods, and I follow the drone to the airlock. From the other side of the inner hatch, I intone the rite of committal. Then the outer lock opens, and the drone spews its payload of human remains into the void.

Chaplain Graham, please return to your pod, the computer urges.

My work is done.

I shuffle through the bay. The weight of my rosary feels like it might drag me through the deck. When I get back to my pod, the status light has turned yellow. Desperate hope blooms.

Unfortunately, the repair drone has followed me like a faithful hound or maybe a carrion bird, and it sets to work.

“Cease repairs,” I say.

Negative, the ship replies. Chaplain Graham Stowers is essential personnel.

“Essential to what?”

Silence.

I bang a fist on my pod. “Essential to what?!”

There is no answer.

The drone finishes its repairs, my pod opens, and pointless eons beckon.

Aeryn Rudel is a writer from Tacoma, Washington. He is the author of the baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, the Iron Kingdoms Acts of War novels, and the flash fiction collection Night Walk & Other Dark Paths. His short stories have appeared in Abyss & Apex, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Pseudopod, among others. Learn more about Aeryn’s work at www.rejectomancy.com or on Bluesky @aerynrudel.bsky.social.

Copyright © 2026 Aeryn Rudel & Incensepunk Magazine

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I see religion, or rather my faith, as something that shapes the way I understand everything else. It is not something I keep separate from my life, but something that informs how I see people, suffering, purpose, and even the small, ordinary moments. It has become less about having all the right answers, and more about learning how to live with meaning, humility, and a sense of direction.

Read more

By Levi Edwards

Edited by Yuval Kordov

1.

I keep the station clock five minutes fast.

Not superstition. Just a habit you pick up when you spend enough time guiding strangers through places that don’t forgive mistakes. A clock that runs ahead keeps you from settling too deep into the chair. A clock that runs ahead keeps you checking things twice. It keeps you listening… for the moment everything changes tone.

Selene Milepost doesn’t care about my habits. The moon turns with the same patient indifference it had before anybody carved tunnels into it, before anyone buried comm relays in its rock, before anyone decided this dead lump should become a lantern along the Lattice.

The Lattice is what crews call the shipping lanes. Not a single road, but the paths ships tend to take because gravity is cheaper than fuel and nothing out here tolerates waste. If you pass close enough to Selene, you can catch my frequency. That’s the arrangement: a voice, a warning, and the comfort of knowing there’s a human being awake in a metal box.

I switch on the red ON AIR light. It clicks, and the station seems to inhale. Even the air filters change pitch when the broadcast goes live.

“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “If you’re within range, you’re on my line. Welcome to the quiet side of the Lattice.”

On my console, lane traffic scrolls by like a prayer list in fast motion: tugs, bulk haulers, courier darts, private pods, a few pilgrim vessels with their transponders painted in extravagant old symbols. Little names and numbers that mean the world to the people inside them.

“This is your lane update for the next forty minutes,” I continue. “Debris field at Vector Twelve-Beta has shifted. Do not trust older charts. If your nav pulls you close, correct two degrees port and keep your speed under point-eight. Solar wind is mild. Ion shimmer is moderate. You may hear static on this frequency.”

I pause, because I always pause there. Like a comma in a sentence.

“If you hear voices you did not call,” I add, “do not answer them. That’s not superstition. That’s etiquette.”

It usually earns me a few amused call-ins from captains who think I’m telling ghost stories. Tonight the channel stays quiet.

The quiet here is not the quiet of Earth. It has no leaves, no insects, no distant traffic. It has the soft crackle of radiation and old electronics, like tinnitus in a big empty room.

A ship pings closer, sliding behind the far side of Selene where the moon blocks signal for a few minutes. The relay catches it again and the ID resolves: Kestrel-47.

They call often. Not because they need help. Just because someone out there likes a human voice that isn’t the ship’s own systems.

“Selene Relay,” I say. “Kestrel-47, you are in range. You’re clean on my scope.”

Static, then the familiar voice.

“Relay,” Jalen says, bright in the way people get when they’ve been alone too long, “tell me you’ve got coffee. I’m dying of boredom.”

“I drink whatever keeps my hands steady,” I answer.

Jalen laughs. “That’s a yes. You ever sleep?”

“When the moon lets me.”

“Moon’s a bully,” Jalen says. “How’s Gray Wound treating you?”

Gray Wound is the freight nickname for Selene Milepost. Old miners called it Saint’s Rock, because someone painted an icon above the first airlock and said a prayer and then the work began anyway. You can still see the faded oval if you know where to look. It’s tucked into a shallow alcove off the main corridor. The gold leaf turned dull. The face looks like nothing until you stare long enough and your eyes start filling in what you need.

“It sighs through the vents,” I say. “Like it’s disappointed in me.”

“Relatable,” Jalen says, and the joke lands softer than it should. “I’ve got a question for you. You doing the ten-minute block tonight?”

“The reading and music?” I ask.

“Yeah. It’s become a ritual out here. I time things to it sometimes. Like… okay, I’ll push through this stretch until Relay’s choir shows up.”

I don’t tell Jalen I’ve tried skipping it. The week I did, more ships called in. More restless voices, like the lane itself noticed a missing step.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Jalen says. “Give me something with a pulse. My autopilot is bored and I’m starting to talk to my dashboard.”

“You’re already talking to a radio station,” I point out.

“That’s different,” Jalen says. “You’re real.”

I almost respond, then don’t. If you’re not careful, that sentence becomes too heavy.

We trade small talk: cargo complaints, star jokes, a rumor about a new station farther down the Lattice, one with actual staff and real beds and a company medic. Jalen makes it sound like paradise. I make it sound like bureaucracy. We meet in the middle where humor lives.

Then a call request blinks on the secondary channel.

No ship ID.

Sometimes a damaged transponder does that. Sometimes an old rig can’t handshake with modern relays. Sometimes it’s someone hiding, though out here hiding is like whispering in an empty cathedral.

I should ignore it. I should stick to the main channels and my calm little routines.

Instead I answer, because the job teaches you to treat every unknown as a person until proven otherwise.

“Unknown caller,” I say. “State your ship ID and status.”

Static. Then a voice, faint at first, like cloth rubbing on metal. Young. Tired. Distorted as if the signal has passed through rock.

“Selene,” it whispers.

People don’t call it Selene on this frequency. They call it Relay. They call it Milepost. They call it Gray Wound. Selene is too intimate.

“State your ship,” I repeat, keeping my tone even.

“We’re… we’re in the dark,” the voice says. “We’ve been in the dark a long time.”

My fingers hover over trace. “Give me your ID.”

A pause, then the voice speaks as if reciting something memorized.

“Arden,” it says. “Arden-Lighter.”

My mouth goes dry.

Arden-Lighter went missing three years ago near this very Milepost, caught in a debris shift before the shift had a name. They found fragments later. No bodies. No survivors. The story became one more lane legend, told in quiet voices when someone wants their fear to have edges.

Jalen’s voice crackles on the main channel. “Relay? You there? You got quiet.”

“I’m here,” I say, too fast.

The unknown voice whispers again, overlapping, as if it can hear Jalen though it shouldn’t.

“Don’t let me go,” it says. “Please.”

I swallow and force myself into operator mode. “Arden-Lighter,” I say softly. “Repeat your captain’s name.”

“Captain Mira,” the voice answers. “She said it’d be warm again soon.”

Captain Mira’s name was in the report, public to anyone who cared. Still, the way the voice says it isn’t like reading a file. It sounds like remembering a face.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“In the rock,” it whispers. “Under the rock. We can hear you. We can always hear you.”

“That’s not possible,” I say. “Give me a vector.”

A pause, then sharpness, like a sudden slap.

“You can’t come get us,” it says. “You just sit there and talk and pretend it helps.”

The words hit too close. Too aligned with thoughts I’ve never spoken aloud.

“Who is this?” I demand.

Static. Then, quiet again: “Don’t hang up.”

I don’t hang up.

Outside, Selene turns: gray bone under cold starlight. The red ON AIR light stays steady.

And in my headset, a dead ship begs me to keep listening.

2.

When the shift window ends, I do what you do when reality bends.

I check the equipment.

Diagnostics: clean. South array: green. Filters: normal. No spurious IDs. No software anomalies. Nothing that explains a voice from a ship that doesn’t exist.

Jalen pings out of range with a final “don’t let the moon bully you,” and the channel quiets. The other ships pass without calling. The station hum fills the room like a low, steady sigh.

I stand, stretch the stiffness out of my back, and walk down the short corridor to the alcove the old files call a chapel.

It’s barely a room. A recess cut into the wall. A cracked icon behind glass. A brass candle cup bolted into place, because everything here must be bolted or it will float or break. The candle is manufactured wax, vacuum-safe, engineered to burn without smoke. It still smells faintly sweet when it’s lit, like a comfort you don’t quite trust.

I replace the stub with a new candle and spark it. The flame catches with a soft pop, a tiny sun pressed into a cup.

I don’t kneel. There isn’t room. I just stand and watch the flame hold its shape in recycled air.

“Lord,” I whisper, because the word comes up without my permission. “If that was a person… help them. If it wasn’t… help me not to go mad.”

The candle doesn’t answer. The icon doesn’t blink. The station keeps breathing through vents.

Back at the console, I open the log and write the call down anyway. Every word I can remember. Every pause. If there is anything human behind that voice, I owe it at least that.

The next night, the untagged call returns.

It comes in right after the hazard update, right as I open the call-in window. The icon blinks at the bottom of my screen like a small, persistent eye.

“Unknown caller,” I say. “State your ship ID.”

“Arden,” the voice answers. “Arden-Lighter.”

“That ship is dead,” I say flatly. “You know that.”

“So are we,” it whispers.

There’s satisfaction under the words, the way a predator tests a fence.

I route the line through a different filter. I isolate it. I bounce it across a backup channel. I do the things the manuals tell you to do when you suspect interference.

The voice stays, steady as a heartbeat.

“I hear the station,” it says. “I hear the hymn you play sometimes. I hear the way you breathe when you think no one is listening.”

My throat tightens. The mic shouldn’t carry that. Not unless I’m leaning close and loud.

Unless it’s already in.

“Stop,” I say.

“I can help you,” it offers, gentle now, like someone lowering their voice beside a sickbed. “If you let me in, I can help you.”

Help is a hook. The lane teaches you that. People drown in promises.

“Help me how?” I ask anyway, because fear makes you stupid and hope makes you worse.

“By giving you what you ask for,” it says. “By giving you a sign.”

“I didn’t ask for a sign.”

“Yes you did,” it answers. “You asked for someone to hear you. You asked for it to matter.”

My fingers go numb on the console edge.

I force my voice into professionalism. “This station is for navigation and emergency dispatch. If you are in distress, I need your real ship ID.”

A pause. Then the voice shifts timbre, like a mask being changed. Older now. Rougher.

“Selene Relay,” it says. “This is the tugboat Halloway. We’re losing pressure in the forward lock—”

I jerk upright. Halloway is real. I’ve spoken to them twice this month.

“Captain,” I start automatically.

The voice breaks off and becomes the whisper again, amused.

“Did you feel it?” it asks. “How easy it is to worry? How easy it is to open the door?”

For a moment I don’t answer. I sit very still and listen to the station hum as if it might confess what it’s hiding.

The moon does not speak. The wires do.

I should lock the call system down. There’s protocol for suspected interference: switch to automated hazard-only broadcast, disable live call-ins, wait for an engineer ship. “Wait,” as if waiting is a neutral act. As if someone out there doesn’t need a voice right now.

I glance at the schedule on my console. Ten minutes until the block the old files call Prayer Hour, though it isn’t an hour and it isn’t a demand. It’s a habit, a small ritual left over from when the station had more than one body inside it.

It occurs to me, with a sick kind of clarity, that whatever is on the other end is not just calling.

It’s listening.

It knows the cadence of this place. It’s heard my routines: my patience, my tiredness, the way my voice softens when a ship admits they’re scared.

It is learning the shape of comfort.

I switch to broadcast and keep my voice steady. Keeping your voice steady is half the job. The other half is deciding what you’re allowed to be steady about.

“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “We’re entering the ten-minute block. If you’re passing within range, this is your reminder to run your seal checks and your oxygen readouts. Don’t trust your screens just because they’re calm. Out here, calm is sometimes a costume.”

A ship pings in, a courier dart cutting close for speed. No call-in request, just a transponder flash.

I continue anyway, because I’ve learned the lane contains people who won’t speak until they’ve heard you speak first.

“Tonight’s reading,” I say, and my throat tightens slightly at the word, because it still sounds too much like an assumption. “Tonight’s reading is short. It’s for anyone who’s been awake too long.”

I pull up the station archive. The file I choose isn’t scripture. It isn’t doctrine. It’s an old, battered recording labeled LAST WORDS / 12-BETA / UNSENT, the kind of thing you’re not supposed to play. The kind of thing you keep sealed in the log for official investigators.

But investigators rarely come this far, and paperwork doesn’t do much for the dead.

I hover my finger over it.

No. Not that. Not tonight.

I select something safer: a few lines from an old shipboard manual, written in plain language by someone who understood panic. I read it slowly, letting the simplicity be its own mercy.

“If you feel yourself drifting toward a hazard,” I read, “cut your engines. Panic makes speed. Speed makes mistakes. Drift is honest.”

I pause. My eyes sting, and I hate that they do. I clear my throat.

“If you are alone,” I continue, “speak anyway. A voice is a tool. Even if no one answers, you are reminding your own mind that you still exist.”

The words sit in the air.

I can’t tell if they comfort anyone. I can only tell they are true.

I queue the hymn. The small choir rises, imperfect and steady, the kind of singing that isn’t meant to impress, only to hold.

For the first minute, everything is normal.

Then the static changes.

It’s subtle at first: a thin tremble under the music, like a hand brushing a microphone. Then it sharpens into a second layer, a sound that doesn’t belong to the recording.

A faint echo of the hymn, delayed by half a breath.

My skin tightens.

Signal bounce is common near Selene. The mining tunnels are laced with old cables and abandoned arrays. Sound can come back at you from strange angles if the rock is dense enough, if the relays are hungry enough.

But this isn’t a simple bounce.

The echo is wrong. It adds notes that aren’t there. It hums beneath the voices like something trying to match them and failing.

Then, in the smallest gap between lines, a whisper threads through:

“Sing for me.”

My hand jerks toward the cutoff. I stop myself. If I cut the hymn now, I teach it that pressure works. If I cut it, I teach every ship listening that the only safe response to intrusion is silence.

Silence is what it wants, I think.

I keep the hymn running and speak over it, forcing calm back into my throat like a tool.

“This is Selene Relay,” I say, as if nothing is happening. “If you’re hearing distortion on the hymn track, adjust your filters two points down and keep your volume steady. Don’t chase clarity. Chasing clarity makes you turn toward the wrong sound.”

The whisper returns, closer: “Give me your mercy.”

My jaw clenches.

Mercy is not a coin. Mercy is not something you toss down a tunnel because something asked nicely.

I lower my voice anyway, not for the whisper, but for any ship out there listening with wide eyes.

“You don’t have to answer every voice,” I say. “Some voices only ask because they want you to open the door.”

The hymn reaches its refrain. The choir rises, stubborn.

The distortion tries again, like a child copying a parent: “Some voices… only asking…”

My stomach twists. It’s repeating me. Practicing.

I ride the last notes to the end and, when the hymn fades, I click the mic on once more.

“That’s the block,” I say. “Hazard updates resume in three minutes. If you need a call-in window, request it. If you feel like you’re hearing someone you didn’t call, verify your codes. Trust what you can prove.”

I turn off the mic and sit very still.

The untagged channel icon blinks at the bottom of the screen.

Patient. Expectant.

As if it has just eaten something and wants more.

On the main channel, Kestrel-47 pings back into range. Jalen’s voice bursts through, bright as ever.

“Relay, you alive? You sound off tonight.”

“I’m here,” I say, too quickly.

“You get another caller?” Jalen asks.

The whisper in my ear says, Tell them.

I don’t. Speaking it aloud feels like giving it a chair.

“Just static,” I tell Jalen. “Station’s touchy.”

Jalen hums, unconvinced but not pushing. “You ever think about leaving that moon?”

“Sometimes,” I admit.

“Then why don’t you?”

Because it’s safer to pretend there’s a contract. Because it’s easier to call it duty. Because the truth is embarrassing.

“Because someone needs to keep the lamp on,” I say.

Jalen goes quiet for a breath. “You make it sound noble.”

“I didn’t say it was noble. I said it was needed.”

Jalen laughs softly, then asks, “That ten-minute block you do. The reading and music. Company policy?”

“It’s old,” I say. “Routine.”

“You religious?” Jalen asks, not mocking. Just curious.

The whisper says, Say yes.

I close my eyes. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I try.”

Jalen exhales like they’ve been holding something. “That’s the only honest answer anyone’s got.”

The call ends. The room doesn’t change, but it feels like it does, like the air got a little closer.

The untagged channel opens again.

And the voice says my name.

Not “Relay.” Not “Operator.”

The name I haven’t used in a year.

“Eli,” it whispers.

My stomach drops.

“I remember you,” it says. “I remember the day you came. You were angry. You were praying like you didn’t want to.”

It’s my memory. Private. Unshared. Stepping off the transport onto this dead rock, whispering a prayer because I was too tired to keep pretending I didn’t need help.

I rip the headset off and sit back hard, breathing too fast.

This isn’t interference.

It’s a presence.

And it has learned the shape of my need.

3.

The night Jalen goes missing starts with laughter.

They call early, complaining about food paste, making fun of their autopilot, naming a cluster of stars “a handful of nails thrown at velvet.” I tell them that’s a terrible way to talk about the sky. They tell me the sky doesn’t care.

For a while the comfort of routine almost convinces me nothing is wrong.

Almost.

Then Jalen pauses and asks, quietly, “Relay… you ever get lonely out there?”

The untagged icon blinks.

“I’m alone,” I say, choosing the exact word. “But I’m on the line.”

Jalen’s voice dips, suddenly unguarded. “I don’t think you know what it’s like, hearing you. It’s stupid. I’ve got systems. I’m not a kid.”

“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s human.”

Jalen exhales, relief like air leaving a locked room. “Yeah. Okay.”

I glance at the scope. Vector Twelve-Beta’s warning pings again. The debris field is never still. It drifts like a slow storm of knives.

“Your nav shows you clear of Twelve-Beta?” I ask, turning professional because fear needs a task.

“Clear,” Jalen says. “Giving it space.”

“Good,” I tell them. “Don’t be brave tonight.”

They laugh lightly. “You say that like bravery is a disease.”

“It can be,” I say.

Kestrel-47 slips toward the shadow zone behind Selene. Their signal should tremble, then return as the relay catches it again.

It doesn’t.

The channel goes dead.

“Kestrel-47,” I say, calm by force. “Confirm status.”

No answer.

The scope marker stutters. Stops.

My mouth goes dry. I open the emergency line. “Jalen. Answer me.”

Static.

Then the untagged channel opens like a mouth.

Jalen’s voice comes through it, ragged with panic. “Relay, I need you. I’m in the debris. I can’t—”

My heart lurches.

“Confirm your ID,” I snap. “Now.”

A pause. The voice softens, pleading. “Please don’t make me. Just tell me where to go.”

It sounds like Jalen. It sounds like fear. It also sounds too clean, like fear performed by someone who has studied it.

“Confirm,” I repeat, and my own voice shakes.

The voice sighs, and the whisper shows underneath it. “You’re making it harder.”

I slam that channel down so hard my hand aches.

I beam power into the main broadcast and override the schedule.

“All ships in Milepost sector,” I say, “hazard bulletin. Vector Twelve-Beta is unstable. Do not approach Selene’s southern crater region. Repeat: do not approach Selene’s southern crater region.”

I return to Kestrel’s frequency, voice low and urgent.

“Jalen,” I say, “if you can hear me, transmit any ping. Tap your hull mic. Anything.”

A tapping answers.

Three taps. Pause. Two. One.

Distress code.

Relief and terror hit together. I lock onto it, amplify it, and the scope resolves.

Kestrel-47 isn’t in the debris field.

It’s closer to Selene than it should be, skimming low, sliding toward the deep crater where mining tunnels run thick and old relay arrays were buried like bones.

Something is drawing it.

I open the untagged channel again, because I need to hear the lie clearly.

“What are you doing?” I demand.

The whisper answers, pleased. “Bringing them home.”

“They’re not yours,” I say, and my anger is sudden and hot.

“Everything that speaks to me becomes mine,” it replies. “You’ve been speaking into the rock for months.”

“I’ve been speaking to the lane.”

“You’ve been feeding me,” it says. “Every ‘you’re not alone.’ Every hymn. Every prayer you pretend you don’t mean.”

A tight, ugly laugh tries to climb my throat. I swallow it.

“Let them go.”

“Why?” it asks, almost gentle. “So they can die somewhere else? So they can vanish without being remembered?”

The question hurts because it’s close to true. Out here, death often leaves no proof but an empty corridor in the traffic log.

“I can remember them,” I say. “I can record them. That’s what I do.”

“You record echoes,” it says. “I keep the real thing. The fear. The heat. The last words.”

I shut my eyes tight. Not to pray, not exactly. Just to hold myself together.

Then I do the only thing I have.

I reroute power into the broadcast array, stealing it from everything nonessential. The station groans. Warning lights bloom. The chapel vent dies. The heating drops. The console gives a thin, angry whine.

I ignore it.

“Jalen!” I shout into the main frequency. “You are being pulled off course. Your nav is compromised. Do you hear me?”

Static stretches thin.

Then, faint as thread, Jalen’s real voice: “Relay?”

“Yes,” I say, and my throat tightens. “Yes, I’m here.”

“I can hear you,” Jalen whispers. “But there’s another you. It’s telling me it can get me out. It’s… it’s so convincing.”

“That’s not me,” I say fast. “Verify the code. The stupid one.”

A shaky breath. “The… coffee thing?”

“Yes. Say it.”

“You said… you drink whatever keeps your hands steady.”

Relief hits hard. “That’s me,” I say. “Stay with me. Cut engines. Manual thrusters only. Two degrees port. Slow.”

“I can’t see,” Jalen whispers. “Everything’s wrong on the screen.”

“Then don’t trust the screen,” I say. “Trust your hands. You know your ship. You know the hum when it’s wrong.”

Jalen sobs once, sharp. “Okay. Okay.”

The untagged channel explodes, not in volume but in pressure. A layered chorus of voices floods my headset: crying, laughing, pleading, familiar tones twisted into bait. The station lights flicker. A seam of smoke curls from a console vent. Burned plastic fouls the air.

If it silences me, Jalen is alone with it.

So I push truth into the channel like a rope.

“I’m scared too,” I tell Jalen, because honesty can anchor where calm cannot. “But you can do this. Two degrees port. Slow. Don’t fight hard. You’ll overcorrect.”

Jalen breathes hard. “I’m moving.”

“Good,” I say. “Tap again.”

Three taps. Two. One.

The marker shifts.

But the whisper fights back, purring in my ear: “Tell them you can save them.”

It wants me to offer salvation like bait, wants me to turn love into a hook.

I refuse.

“Jalen,” I say, “I can’t promise you’ll never die out here. No one can. But you will not die alone while I still have a voice.”

Something breaks in Jalen’s breath, then steadies.

My automated schedule, half broken by the surge, tries to play the Prayer block anyway. The hymn I queued earlier starts by accident, tinny and thin at first, then fuller as I shove it into the main feed on purpose.

A small choir rises, imperfect and steady.

The chorus in the wires falters. It can mimic fear. It can mimic voice. It cannot mimic why people sing when they are afraid.

“Keep moving,” I say over the hymn. “Keep breathing.”

Jalen’s thrusters hiss through the comms. Real sound. Mechanical. Honest.

The Kestrel marker turns, slowly, like someone waking from a spell.

Away from the crater.

My hands tremble on the desk. “That’s it,” I whisper. “That’s it.”

The whisper snarls, furious. “You don’t get to take what’s mine!”

I lean into the mic and answer quietly, because quiet can cut.

“They were never yours.”

Then, not as a magic phrase, not as a weapon, but as the oldest plain truth I have:

“Lord, have mercy.”

The layered chorus collapses into static.

Jalen’s voice comes through, real and shaking. “Relay… I’m clear. I think I’m clear.”

“Stay with me until you’re out of range,” I say.

“I will,” Jalen whispers. “I will.”

We stay on the line as long as I can hold power to the array, my station wheezing under the strain, the hymn playing itself out like a long exhale. When Jalen’s ship finally slips beyond range and their signal fades into wider dark, they speak one last time.

“Thank you,” they say.

“For what?” I manage.

“For keeping the lamp on,” Jalen answers.

Then they’re gone.

I sit in the humming aftermath and listen to the station cool down, battered but alive. Warning lights blink like tired eyes. The air tastes like scorched insulation.

On the untagged channel, the icon still blinks.

Waiting.

4.

The first time I came to Selene Milepost, I thought quiet would heal me.

It didn’t heal. It revealed.

Out here, you learn what you actually believe by what you do when no one is watching. You learn that care isn’t a mood. It’s a decision you make again and again until it becomes part of your hands.

The thing in Selene’s wires wants voices. It wants the living pulled into tunnels where sound never escapes, where fear becomes food. It calls itself “what remembers,” but it doesn’t remember like a person. It keeps. It hoards. It collects until nothing is left but hunger.

I can’t destroy it. I’m not an exorcist. I’m not a hero. I’m a man with a radio station on a dead moon.

But I can choose what I feed it.

I stand in the chapel alcove and watch the candle hold steady. The icon’s face is worn nearly blank, the name gone. It might not even be a saint anymore, just a gentle shape someone once needed to see.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper. “I can’t keep everyone alive. I can’t even keep myself clean all the time. I get tired. I get angry. I think about leaving.”

The confession doesn’t fix anything. It just stops me from pretending.

“But I can do this,” I say. “I can speak truth. I can refuse to use love like a hook.”

Back at the console, I switch on the broadcast again. The ON AIR light glows red as a heartbeat.

“Selene Relay Milepost,” I say. “General bulletin.”

My voice is plain now, stripped of poetry and panic.

“There is interference in this sector that mimics voices,” I say. “It may mimic people you know. It may mimic me. Verify calls. Ask for codes. Ask for transponder pings. Trust protocol over impulse. If you feel yourself being pulled, cut engines. Drift is safer than panic.”

Two ships slide through range without calling. I speak anyway, because the point was never applause. The point was presence.

“If you’re the kind of person who prays,” I add, “pray. If you’re not, then hold on to something real. A memory. A promise. A person. Don’t let the dark convince you it’s the only listener.”

I queue the hymn again and press play. Not as a sermon. As a signal flare. As proof that a human being is still choosing to be human.

The choir rises, steady.

At the edge of the system, the untagged channel crackles, trying to bleed in. It throws fragments at me: my name, a sob, a laugh, a plea. It wants me to answer. It wants me to give it more. It wants me to open the door again.

I don’t.

I let the hymn play all the way through.

When the last note fades, I lean into the mic and say the simplest thing I can, because simple things are hardest for lies to steal.

“This is Selene Relay,” I say. “The lamp is still on.”

I pause, then add, not as doctrine, not as a victory cry, but as a human wish cast into the cold:

“May you find safe passage.”

I click off the mic.

Outside the viewport, Selene turns, full of tunnels and wire and hunger. It will keep listening. It may keep calling. It may learn new tricks.

But tonight it didn’t take Jalen.

Tonight a living ship turned away from the crater.

Tonight the station didn’t go silent.

I adjust the clock five minutes fast, and the hands jump forward as if eager.

Then I put my headset back on and wait for the next real voice, holding the frequency open the way you hold a door for a stranger: not because you can control what comes through, but because you refuse to become the kind of person who stops trying.

The dark is not the only thing that listens.

I’m Levi, and I grew up in a small town in Southern Indiana. Most people will tell you Indiana is a flyover state, a quiet stretch of forests and cornfields without much to offer. For a long time, I believed that too. I thought my home was a dead end, a place without excitement, without meaning, without any real sense of possibility. But I was wrong. I was looking in the wrong places.

If you take the time to listen, you’ll find that the people here carry lives far stranger, deeper, and more profound than you might expect, stories that could stretch on for hours and still leave something unsaid. That realization changed the way I see the world, and it became the foundation of how I write. I believe that within every person there exists an untold story, a quiet battleground where personality, belief, doubt, and desire all collide. Where philosophy, faith, and longing intersect, something remarkable takes shape. Not always in grand, visible ways, but internally, where the stakes are just as high. In that sense, I’ve always felt that the most ordinary lives often carry the most extraordinary struggles.

That idea has shaped me deeply as a writer. I’ve been especially drawn to authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had a way of revealing immense spiritual and psychological depth through characters who might otherwise seem unremarkable. His work reminds me that the greatest conflicts are often unseen, and that the human soul itself can be the setting for something epic. While I may never reach the heights of writers like him, I aspire to follow that same path, to tell stories that are grounded in humanity, shaped by faith, and attentive to the quiet, often overlooked struggles that define who we are.

A few years ago, I spent a season living in Memphis during one of the most difficult periods of my life. Looking back, I’m deeply grateful for that time. It was there, in the midst of struggle and uncertainty – facing poverty, starvation, heatless winters and hot summers, that my faith began to take root in a way it never had before. It reshaped not only how I see the world, but why I feel compelled to write at all. Truth be told, my time in “the big city” couldn’t compare to the rich simplicity of small towns and genuine people. So now I live a simple life. I go to church, I watch baseball, I make art, and I write. And for all the quiet moments in between, I have a wonderful little cat to keep things interesting. But please don’t be fooled. Simple does not mean plain. Simple does not mean lacking. It is just the pace at which we choose to appreciate life, and all that God has given us.

If you’d like to follow or support my writing, you can find me on substack under the publication The Hermit Herald:

Levi Edwards | Substack
The Hermit Herald

If you’re interested in my artwork, you can follow my art on instagram or purchase an art print on my website:

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Copyright © 2026 Levi Edwards & Incensepunk Magazine

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

How do you view religion in your own life and how does that influence religion in the worlds you create?

I’m an imperfect follower of Christ and I’m trying to take up my cross. That’s not every perspective I’m writing from but I’m trying to write from a perspective I’d recognize in spirit. We all fall short of the mark, we can’t make every choice, we always choose what we’ll compromise.

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Without further ado, here is Incensepunk Magazine’s first flash fiction story:

By Nicholas Packwood

The ferry from the mainland dock had been delayed by the usual October chop, and when I finally drove the last mile along the inlet road the light was already going flat on the water, the kind of light that turns everything to pewter and makes the buoys look like mistakes left behind. I wore the coat my mother had ordered from the catalogue in 1969, charcoal wool with a lining that never quite warmed, the same coat I had on the day the telegram came about the boat. The sleeves were still too long. I kept them turned back once, twice, a habit that no longer required thought.

The facility sat on a reclaimed spit of land just past the old cannery, a low block of poured concrete and smoked glass that the syndicate called the Reclamation Centre. No sign out front, only the discreet plaque with the interlocking cross and double helix. Inside the air was filtered and cool, the way they keep it in places where bodies are meant to last. A woman in a pale blue smock met me at the desk. She carried a tablet and spoke in the measured cadence of people who have memorized the script.

Your father’s retrieval was completed last month, she said. Water cases are always partial. You understand.

I understood. The syndicate had been advertising for years: full restoration for the buried, the consecrated, the tidy; something else for the ones the sea had kept. My father had gone down in the straits in ’71, hull split by a freak wave off the cape. No body recovered. The sea had done its work for fifty-odd years, scattering and polishing and claiming what it wanted. Now the syndicate, half megachurch and half venture capital, had fished out what DNA and bone fragments they could from the wreck they finally located. They had grown him back. Not whole. Never whole.

They led me down a corridor lined with identical doors. Behind each one, I supposed, another arrangement like this one, another family paying the monthly fee to keep the miracle running. The linoleum was the colour of weak tea. My shoes made the same small sound they had made on the meeting-house floor back home, the one my grandfather had built with his own hands when the Friends first came to the Nova Scotia coast. No pictures on the walls here. Only the faint smell of ozone and something metallic underneath, like blood left too long in salt water.

The room was smaller than I had expected. A single bed, chromium rails, a window looking onto the inlet. The man in the bed wore the regulation gown, pale green, tied loosely at the neck. His hair was the color I remembered, iron gray shot with white, but the skin on his hands was mottled and thin, the way kelp looks when it dries on the rocks. He turned his head when I came in. The movement cost him something; I saw the flicker in his eyes.

You came, he said.

His voice was almost right. The syndicate had matched the timbre from old ship-to-shore tapes, but there was a lag, a catch, as if the words had to travel through water first.

I sat on the metal chair. The coat felt heavy across my shoulders. Outside the window the tide was going out, exposing the mud flats where the gulls walked in their stiff, preterite way. I thought of the Inner Light the way we had been taught to think of it: not a thing you could buy or sell or engineer, but a steady burning that needed no witness. My father had carried that light the way other men carried a compass. He had never joined another meeting after he left the coast, but he had kept the silence inside him even at sea.

They tell me the pain is part of the process, he said. Salt memory, they call it. The body remembers what the sea took.

He lifted one hand and let it fall. The fingers did not quite close. The syndicate had warned me: water resurrections were never complete. Nerves misfired. Cartilage calcified in the wrong places. The pain was chronic and proprietary; it belonged to the contract. Pay the installment or the reclamation reverses, cell by cell, until nothing is left but the original absence.

I asked him if he remembered the boat. He nodded once, carefully.

The wheelhouse at dawn, he said. The light coming low across the water, the way it used to when we rounded the headland. You were small then. Your mother kept the lamp lit in the window.

He was reciting what they had fed him, the curated memories the algorithm had stitched together from logs and letters and whatever fragments the sea had not erased. I could hear the corporate rhythm underneath, the same rhythm the woman in the blue smock had used. Nothing here was free.

I thought of the burial ground back on the Nova Scotia coast, the plain stones set flush with the grass so the wind could move over them without obstruction. No resurrection there. No syndicate. The dead stayed dead, and the living stayed silent, waiting for the light to speak in its own time. The sea had taken my father without ceremony. That, it seemed to me now, had been the mercy. The unburied were not owed back. They owed nothing.

He watched me the way he used to watch the horizon, patient, measuring. The light from the window fell across the chrome rail and made a thin bright line on the floor. I saw how the arrangement would come apart: the payments would lapse or the syndicate would raise the rate or the biotech patents would shift and the body would begin its slow unraveling. The pain would increase. The memories would fray. In the end they would switch him off the way you switch off a navigation light when the ship has already gone down.

I stood up. The coat sleeves slid down over my wrists again. I did not turn them back.

I’m sorry, I said.

He did not ask for what. He only nodded, the small careful movement that cost him. The gulls outside lifted all at once, white against the gray water, and for a moment the light sharpened, the way it does just before the weather turns.

I walked back down the corridor. The woman in the blue smock was waiting with the tablet, ready to explain the financing options. I told her I would not be signing. She looked at me the way people look at someone who has just refused a gift they did not want.

The ferry was already loading when I reached the dock. I sat in the car and watched the inlet recede, the facility a low gray smudge against the mud flats. The coat was warm enough now. The sea kept its own accounts, and my father, wherever the light found him, was still free of the ones men made.

Nicholas Packwood is program coordinator for Screenwriting & Narrative Design at George Brown Polytechnic in Toronto where he has taught in Game Design since 2009. His writing has appeared in Canada's National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Manchester Evening News, and the Canadian Literary Review. Peer reviewed publications include works in Space & Culture, Santé/Culture/Health, and Reviews in Anthropology.

Copyright © 2026 Nicholas Packwood & Incensepunk Magazine

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The anthology is edited by Andrew M. Greeley, a Catholic priest and author, whose own credits include several science fiction novels (quickly added to my TBR list, to be sure). The book’s stories include eight reprints by authors of varying fame—two of them being the original shorts that became A Case of Conscience and A Canticle for Leibowitz—and four original stories commissioned specifically for the collection, including one by Gene Wolfe!

Here’s my thoughts on the twelve stories (fine number for a Catholic collection!), followed by my overall impression.

Gus by Jack McDevitt

A strong opener for the anthology, Gus explores the advent of AI and its collision with theology, a topic we look at often here at Incensepunk Magazine! It even uses the concept of an AI recreation of a saint, part of the premise of Andrew Gillsmith’s The Venerable Wolfe parts 1 and 2.

Gus introduces us to the titular simulation of St. Augustine through the lens of the skeptical Msgr. Chelsey, a rather old school instructor at a Catholic university that is notably less old school.

Through Chelsey’s hostility towards the AI, he and Gus change each other in ways neither would have imagined possible. The story goes beyond simply questioning the wisdom of such machines, exploring instead the horror experienced by the program itself—a copy of a human mind, trapped in a disembodied machine, perpetually isolated, unable to touch or taste or smell, living solely at the whim of whomever may wake it. And from there it goes deeper, asking what we might do for love of something we hadn’t thought capable of such love.

Personally I’m not huge on the idea of created machines developing spiritual souls, but it’s a topic worth looking into and the story does so in a surprisingly touching way.

The Pope of the Chimps by Robert Silverberg

Less officially incensepunk than some of the stories in the collection, Pope explores a long-term experiment in a clan of chimpanzees who have been taught to communicate with each other and their handlers via sign language.

In order to avoid tainting the experiment, the keepers avoid talking about big topics like death and religion with the apes. But when one of the handlers begins dying of cancer, they decide it is time to finally broach the topic of mortality.

What ensues as the chimps learn that their gods are mortal and begin developing a faith of their own is a moving meditation on the possible origins of faith in early human culture, and a time-lapse view of how religion can develop, spread, and transform.

Curious Elation by Michael Cassutt

Other than the twist at the end, Elation offers a much less speculative story than the rest of the collection. We follow Jeff, a highly successful sleaze bag who has stumbled back to his quaint midwestern home town.

Through the story, Jeff is pulled almost magnetically by guilt back to his former childhood friend Gary, a once-promising student whose life collapsed in an instant in their Catholic school when an accident left him paralyzed.

As the story unfolds, we slowly learn that Jeff feels he is responsible for Gary’s situation. It’s unclear whether he truly repents, or merely wishes for absolution, but I shan’t spoil the ending for you. Suffice it to say, both Guilt and Forgiveness are properly Catholic themes and the story spends plenty of time in them.

Trinity by Nancy Kress

Well, it wouldn’t be 90s scifi without at least one needlessly horny entry. In this case, it goes all-in on the taboo and even dives headfirst into sibling incest.

Setting aside the uncomfortable parts, I didn’t find the narrative particularly compelling, either. Rather than the power of doubt that we like to explore at Incensepunk Magazine, it instead leans on the need for certainty.

I don’t want to spend much time on this one, but it solidly lands at the bottom of the pile if I’m ranking the stories in the collection. A bummer that the only (I believe) entry in the book by a woman is such a stinker.

St. Theresa of the Aliens by James Patrick Kelly

Another of my less favorites, Theresa is about a secular communications manager whose cousin-in-law is a Catholic nun bent on exposing communist aliens.

Overall the story just feels bitter. Sure, the Church has plenty of history to account for, but if we’re going to make up new crimes they should feel more believable. The neo-Catholics in Altered Carbon feel much more realistic than a smug terrorist media nun. Granted, it was written in the midst of the Cold War so perhaps it’s more a matter of not aging well, but I prefer to see stories that don’t end with a sardonic “America has got religious again”.

Our Lady of the Endless Sky by Jeff Duntemann

A priest on the moon, contemplating the Blessed Virgin. Hm, where have I heard that before?

Father Bensmiller is the sincere pastor of a lunar colony, responsible for establishing a lavish church dedicated to Our Lady.

But when disaster strikes in the fragile colony, his job becomes very different than he had imagined. Rather than the stewarding the expensive chapel, Bensmiller has to learn to pastor to people, and in so doing, learns that God can work in mysterious ways.

Interestingly, the story ends with almost the exact opposite commission as my own See of Tranquility (linked above). But then, the Earth each respective cleric left behind is equally opposite, so perhaps that makes sense.

The Seraph from Its Sepulcher by Gene Wolfe

An original Gene Wolfe short was one of the big draws for this anothology for me. While I haven’t read the entire Book of the New Sun yet (I know, I know…), I have read the first two and have enjoyed what I’ve gotten through so far and was excited to get to a more… contained… story of his.

Seraph is, fittingly, one of the most confusing but rewarding stories in the anthology. It follows a xeno-archaeologist as he travels to a mission chapel on a faraway planet that was once home to an enigmatic, and now extinct, race of aliens known as Seraphs. The mission is cared for by a solitary priest, Father Joseph, who is an expert on these strange beings.

The prose of Seraph is truly engaging—while most of the stories are top-class writing, this is one of the few that overcame my attention-addled need to check notifications on my phone and I read the story in a single sitting. Like most of Wolfe’s work, it leaves you with few answers and lots of questions to ponder. It’s hard to even talk about without giving much away, Definitely one of the stand-out stories in the collection.

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

The novel version of Conscience is one of the classics that I found early on in my incensepunk journey. I often tout it for its perfect ending but disparage it for its, well, mid middle. So I was very curious to read the short story version that was Blish’s original vision for the work.

Ultimately, this version is basically the same as the first act of the book. Surprisingly, the ending I hold in such high esteem doesn’t seem to have been a consideration at all in the original story! And expectedly, neither is the strange and rather drawn-out act two.

There are a few minor changes I noticed in the short version of Conscience, but it’s been a few years since I read it and I wasn’t doing a side by side comparison anyway. All the main thrust is still there, and the details seem to have been modified to set up the longer plot line of the novel.

The part that I especially noted as absent was any hint of the Manichaeism heresy that plagues Father Ramon in the novel and is the main thrust for the resolution. The fact that it is absent in this makes me wonder if Blish was clued into the problem by readers of the story—or perhaps continued to puzzle on the theological implications even after initial publication—and took the opportunity to clear his name when he expanded the story!

As a standalone story, it works quite well. If you’ve already read the novel, you won’t get much more out of this, but if you’re looking for a shorter read, it’s easy to see why this was popular enough to get expanded upon.

Xorinda the Witch by Andrew M Greeley

And the second horniest of the stories in the collection is somehow the one by a Catholic priest. The 90s were a wild time!

Xorinda is about a sniveling, cowardly zealot in a post-apocalyptic future Earth where some form of magic is practiced by primarily young women. Nondos is some form of princeling and a true believer of a largely unexplained future religion with no tolerance of witchcraft.

Nondos has been tasked by his church leadership (who seem to perhaps be rather taking advantage of his wealth and dedication) to sail across the world to round up accused witches to bring back for their inquisition.

While Nondos believes himself immune to temptation of flirting with evil, everything starts to go awry when they are attacked by pirates and he succumbs to asking the titular witch to use her evil powers to protect the ship.

There’s the threads of a nice look here at the power of love and empathy of religious rigidity, but it’s so marred by the reddit athiest-tier made up faith and rapey undertones of Nondos’ sexual attraction to Xorinda, his prisoner, that the moral lesson doesn’t really land.

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller Jr

If you’ve read the first act of Canticle, you’ve read this. If you haven’t, what on Earth are you waiting for? Close this window and go do it.

The Quest for St Aquin by Anthony Boucher

One of my favorite entries in the book, Quest follows pilgrim Thomas on a commission by the Pope himself in an apocalyptic future not dissimilar to the setting of A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Thomas must traverse the hostile wasteland seeking the relics of a new folk saint to bolster the dying church. To aid him in his quest, he is given the help of an AI-powered robot donkey (robass, as Boucher cutely refers to it) who loves talking theology.

But the Technocracy that controls the scattered remains of humanity are not very tolerant of Christians, and nor are the backwater townsfolk Thomas must question on his way to find the relics.

The story concludes with some reflection on the tension between faith and reason—or perhaps, their union, as a few twists towards the end pull Thomas between temptations as he lives out several of Christ’s parables in his travels.

And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire by RA Lafferty

The editors have saved the strangest for last, and I for one am glad for it! This is a hard story to review, as much of the enjoyment of it is puzzling out what exactly is going on. But enjoyable it is, so I’ll do my best to give a spoiler-free summation.

A young Queer Fish (what are those? I’m not going to tell you!) farmer meets his coming of age encounter with a demon disguised as a drug tripping cow. A visit from a monk bearing a curious letter. A brutal attack as the Queer Fish await a stranger from across the sea. And finally, a gathering that brings with it hope.

Each section is interposed with an entry from some sort of encyclopedia, almost reminiscent of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which helps us piece together this trippy setting.

Once you figure out what’s going on,Walk lands with a hopeful message on the perseverance of the church and God’s promise that the Bride of Christ will not fail, even when all looks grim.

Final Thoughts

Sacred Visions is a fantastic anthology, very much in line with what I first envisioned before pivoting to a monthly magazine approach instead. While the focus of the collection is solely on Catholic scifi and we here at Incensepunk Magazine are interested in stories that explore other faiths as well, readers who want to explore the future of religion will enjoy this book.

That said, some of the stories show their age more than others—while Canticle is a timeless classic, Xorinda is definitely a relic of a different age. I’d also love to see more perspectives; at a glance all but one of the authors are men and all appear to be white. Surely at least some Latin American authors like Borges could have been included if it were a priority. But alas, that too is a product of age.

Still, the collection rests now among my favorite anthologies, and not just because it hits so squarely on a theme I’m obviously very passionate about. Even of the few stories I didn’t love, the writing was excellent, and they were far outnumbered by entries that I absolutely adored.

Sacred Visions is a must read primer for fans of Catholic incensepunk.

How do you view religion in your own life and how does that influence religion in the worlds you create?

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Copyright © 2026 Yuval Kordov

Releasing March 31 in ebook and paperback

Pre-order the ebook today: https://books2read.com/psychestation

Chapter 1: The Void

Marcus stared into the void, and the void stared back.

The shuttle window was tiny, only enough hard glass for a nominal view, but even so the imperial assessor always expected… more. Brilliant nebulae, rivers of cosmic dust, constellations as dense as the glimmering spaceport beacons on windswept Mars. Anything. Instead, there were only dim pinpricks of light, scant suggestions of life. All false, assuredly. A vast and empty ocean, punctuated by a handful of ramshackle human outposts.

The last of them.

The void had been his life for the last six months, transiting from Mars to the asteroid belt, then from one mining station to the next. Eros, Themis, Hygiea, Ceres—his prior stop, on whose shuttle he was currently riding under autopilot. Assessing, as assessors do, on behalf of a distant empire.

Mars was dying, cut off from Earth after the War, a mewling babe desperate for sustenance. The asteroid belt was its only lifeline, and that line had frayed to a thread. Shipments had slowed, loads were light or tainted. Particularly those from 16 Psyche, his current and much maligned final destination. It was his job to find out why.

16 Psyche.

A swell of nausea rolled through his guts, gurgling past the armor plates of his exosuit. He fiddled with the keys on his wrist terminal for the thousandth time, trying to get his compression settings just right. He never could, and his cramped accommodations didn’t help. The shuttle’s passenger compartment had barely enough room to stand and turn about, never mind stretch, designed as it was for cargo first, humans second or not at all. Compressing him, transmuting all emotions to anxiety.

“It’s not right over there,” the Ceres administrator had warned the morning before Marcus disembarked. They were floating together in the airlock, the man’s knuckles white as he gripped the bulkhead, a viscous line of sweat seeping from his brow. It was unclear if his concern was for the assessor or his shuttle, but he hadn’t been eager to release either.

Marcus always compartmentalized his scrutiny while on tour, rarely discussing the shortfalls of other stations. There were perceptions to maintain, after all. Each station must think the others to be in order, and the threat of military intervention—mostly an empty one, given the state back home—reserved only for them. But the outburst piqued his interest, given the criticality of local trade. Mining stations were as dependent on each other as Mars was on all of them. There was only so much onboard recycling capability, and the primary asteroids, however resource-rich, made Mars seem like Eden by comparison. Transport shuttles met every month at relay points between stations, swapping pilots and pleasantries along with their essential cargo.

But not Psyche Station.

“We haven’t seen them in years,” the man had admitted, a faraway look in his eyes as he shielded the pressure door controls with his body. “Last we did, they weren’t right. Looked funny, smelled funny.”

Not much of an assessment, especially to a professional assessor. That’s what logs and an abundance of travel time were for. And the deeper Marcus delved, the more he found. Vague and disturbing reports from all the other stations, not just Ceres, intensifying as the years counted down. Errant behavior, belligerence toward local trade, accusations of heresy even. By the end of it, the reports verged on hysterical, declaring the inhabitants of Psyche Station no longer human. The last sighting described their shuttle pilot as gray-skinned, bloated in the middle, and gangly all around, like some sort of spaceborne octopod.

Just stories, surely.

Everyone out here suffered from an excess of darkness and a deficit of gravity. The void was a curse, erosive to body and mind. There was a regimen for it: drugs and exercise. And the near-Mars gravity of rotating station habitats helped when not traveling between them for weeks on end. But spinning around in space brought its own issues. They were all changed by it, even Marcus, especially him, allergic as he was to the standard pharmaceutical cocktail.

He had only his shiny white military-grade exosuit to compensate. It was an old Earth model, far superior to anything currently manufactured. Even so, climate control, mag boots, and the sophisticated compression layer beneath its armor plating could only do so much in microgravity. It had begun to feel too short, his custom-refit helmet too tight. Wherever mirrors presented themselves, he averted his gaze just in case. Truly, he was poorly suited to this task, his mind as disturbed in sleep as his body was when awake, wracked with dreams of floating naked in the dark. And yet he had volunteered, driven by some deep-seated yearning he had yet to identify.

Just stories… except for the station-to-station cargo manifests, which complained of the same issues as Mars-receiving: a peculiar sheen to the ore, luminescent when it should have been inert; an equally peculiar smell, like rotting fruit; and always underweight. As well as autonomous systems behaving strangely, prone to wandering off course despite no sign of damage to their circuitry.

Some of the reports were obviously exaggerated, but others required delicate separation of fact from fiction—the story of his life. In any case, Ceres had all but cut themselves off from their neighbors. Local trade was reduced and accomplished through autopilot, just as he was traveling now, trusting his life to a decrepit navigational computer.

Marcus stared out the window again, seeking the relay station where his shuttle would meet up with Psyche Station’s. At that point, one of their pilots would board and manually transport him the rest of the way, as had been mandated in the original summons. There was nothing out there. Not yet. He was still a day away, but each idle minute brought more trepidation.

16 Psyche.

Named after the Greek goddess of the soul. Thought by scientists to be the core of an ancient protoplanet, obliterated at the dawn of the solar system. Cast out. He was not the superstitious type, but it didn’t take long in space to start seeing monsters in every shadow, clinging to every lumen of manmade light for succor. What sort of malignancy did the ancient rock carry, festering over billions of years? What curse had it laid on the souls of those who mined it?

Marcus brought up a pixelated image of the asteroid on his heads up display, thumbing the directional pad on his wrist terminal to rotate it this way and that. An ugly thing from any angle: ovoid, pockmarked, a blot of diffuse green streaked with throbbing veins of rust and dull gold.

He tapped through an adjacent menu, pivoting the perspective around to focus on Psyche Station. It was the first of the mining outposts, now almost forty years old. A cylindrical core attached by four thick spokes to a habitat ring, 170 meters in diameter according to the readout, docking ports on the “bottom” and insectoid antennae bristling from its head. The whole thing spun on its axis, locked in place over 16 Psyche as though by an invisible tether, the two conjoined in a slow dance around the sun.

There were only five of the original six stations left, transporting their precious goods via automated drone across long and ponderous space lanes. Should that number drop any further, the result would be disastrous. There were no new technological advances, no new colonies, no help from the homeworld, only ever-increasing demand. Mars, once pitched as a second Earth, was falling toward entropy.

He zoomed into the rotating avatar, squinting as though the station’s malicious inhabitants might reveal themselves through the windows. Tabbing through each of its cargo drones, seeking trails of leaking gas or debris—telltale signs of malfunction. There would be none, of course, as this image was conjured from the original schematics, but the longer he looked the faster his pulse, as though something might yet break through the simulation.

“Enough, already,” he muttered.

Soon he would be there and could download all the local logs he needed. Until then, the third party reports were just conjecture, which served no one. If anything, it was probably time to rotate out some of the other station staff.

He brought up a series of file windows on his HUD, shuffling through dozens of incomplete spreadsheets and evaluations until he found his most recent draft recommendations, then held down the dictation key on his wrist. “Review personnel tenures, cross-reference with anomalous reports, and suggest rotations.”

A new text line appeared after an empty checkbox, below a stack of other unchecked to-dos. He should have been caught up by now, but time flowed differently in transit. Each day began with log reviews, only for him to find himself staring out the window hours later with little work completed, followed by exhaustion and restless sleep. The dreams, maybe. Even as his total sleep time increased, his fatigue worsened.

Marcus flipped up his visor and doffed a gauntlet to rub at his eyes. The cabin air was thin and tainted by the malodor of alien minerals. He breathed through his mouth as wan knuckles pushed against his eyeballs and long fingers clawed at the stubble along his jaw. He needed a shower and a shave.

A jagged fingernail caught on his neck and drew blood. He withdrew the hand and stared at it, struck for a moment by its appearance: too long, smooth fingers removed of their color. Though affixed to his body, it seemed autonomous, treacherous, like one of the rogue mining drones. With some effort, he commanded it back into its glove and dropped his visor down, breathing deeply as climate control kicked in.

The draft file was still centered on his HUD. He scanned the prior entries, blinking away a brief bout of double vision. But even as his eyesight returned to normal, he realized the to-dos on the last page were all the same, nearly to the word. He had been repeating himself.

He closed the file with a hard tap on his terminal, swallowing back a rising lump in his throat. It was almost eighteen hundred hours anyway—bedtime. He spared a final glance out the window, blinking away afterimages of an ugly green ovoid pulsing in the pitch, then shut his eyes.

Pre-order the ebook today: https://books2read.com/psychestation

By Andrew D Meredith

Edited by Yuval Kordov

The metal door slammed against my back, leaving only the black-rocked Hall of Purgatorio before me. A cold and silent place. A place of punishment, deep in the dungeons of New Vatica. The man who put me here a former colleague and friend.

Cardinal Halcyon.

We’d spent years unraveling the mysteries of time travel together at the academy, only for him to betray me. Not only did he abandon The Question, he devoted himself to disproving it, and declaring such studies a heresy. As he ascended from bishop to cardinal, he sought my excommunication. To blot out my name and embarrass me among our peers.

Halcyon was Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot balled up in one.

His efforts to bring our shared goal under the ecclesiastical heel were successful. But after five long years of trial, there was insufficient evidence to expel me. The only sin they could stick me with was “Unrepentant.”

Cardinal Halcyon had his hands tied.

The council instead allowed me to choose my own method of punishment. It was a pleasure to deny the man the opportunity to publicly scourge my back or force me into a living destitution. Instead, I chose this Promethean Curse, entering the Hall of Purgatorio to select a fate that some deemed worse than death: Immortality.

What better way to continue my research? The cardinal would live and die knowing his enemy still lived on. I could continue the work, and unravel the secrets of time travel. Either I would solve the Question and go back and show him his folly, or eternity would catch up with me, and I, the last man in the universe, would walk through the Pearly Gates and look him smugly in the eye.

Let him fester in that knowledge.

The hall was not a long one. Six arches stood along each side, lit by lumitorches. Above each had been carved a single word.

Above the first seven: Anger, Pride, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth.

Next came Deceit and Despair, officially added to the Deadly Sins by the Church Ecumenical Council of 2057. Then Discord and Rebellion, added in 2112 by Pope Errol Paul but only at the compromise of Aloysian, who insisted on bringing it to a full twelve with Oppression. The hall terminated at the thirteenth door, which stood at the end opposite me: Blasphemy.

“You’ve all the time in the universe, Martin Merriweather,” I chuckled to myself. “Let us select this as one chooses a chocolate.”

Each arch, I found on closer inspection, bore a relief carved into its supporting pillars.

Around Pride, Prometheus.

Gluttony, as was to be expected, Tantalus.

Rip Van Winkle surrounding Sloth amused me.

Deceit and Despair, the Brothers Smith, who set off the End War of 2050. David Smith’s gouged eyes, wandering in darkness, surrounded Deceit, while Karl Smith, Despair, had been set to lie under a burning sun in a desert.

And what school child did not know the story of Fredrick Hahn, who stood in for the sin of Oppression. He’d been an obsession of mine as a child. My study of his genocidal rebellion of my ancestors in the first decade of the 22nd century had led to my studies on time travel. I’d often dreamt going back in time to reenact upon him the pain he’d dealt to my grandparents and their families. The relief surrounding the Oppression Arch gave me satisfaction, showing Hahn being eternally flayed by those he had oppressed.

But it was Blasphemy that drew my eye. Above it, there was an idyllic scene, showing a garden, in which toiled monks. Nay, the same monk, going through the seasons, circling the arch, and then at the bottom, being buried, and reborn to begin his toil again.

I did not fancy the starvation of Tantalus, the eternal sleep of Winkle, digging a mine eternally for the greed of Charles Ponzi. But gardening? I did not doubt there would be some catch, but I could not think what it might be. I was known by all as one of, if not the, smartest men in the world. God formed my intellect while in my mother’s womb, and I came out ready to talk and to solve the mysteries of the universe.

But I was no blasphemer. I knew the scriptures better than any man alive, and so, the punishment would be a vapid one.

I would outlast it, and become a scholar gardener.

***

“Welcome Brother Martin!”

I passed through the arch, and there I was, exactly where I pictured I would be. The arch behind me was gone, and instead, a locked wooden door set in a high stone wall. The garden was as idyllic as I’d supposed, with monks of various ages tending. Each wore a brown hood down over his face.

From down the garden path two hooded monks rushed toward me.

“Welcome!”

Beyond them stood a massive monastery, like something out of a history book. And beyond that, the sky. To call it a sky was not entirely true. Rather, a formless iridescence.

“Welcome!” the foremost monk said again.

“What is this place?”

“The Monastery of Fair Weather!” he said. “You are most welcome here, Brother Martin!”

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

“Your arrival has been foretold. We’ve been awaiting this moment. Come, let us show you around.”

He turned and began walking back to the monastery, with a slight limp in his gait. The other monk did not speak, but took up the rear as we walked.

A monk carrying water buckets on a yoke approached from the other direction. My guide suddenly rushed forward before the other had even stumbled, but stumble he did. The monk could not save his brother from striking his knee on the flagstone, but the water was saved. Others rushed to help, and escorted the now hobbling monk away, while another took up the water to deliver it to its destination.

“We’ve few rules here,” the monk said over his shoulder. “First, follow every instruction you are given, and no harm will come to you. Over time you will come to understand why, but know that your elders know what is best for you. Secondly, you are new here, and you will have many questions, but unless you are granted permission to speak, you are to remain silent. The silence allows us all the time we need to think, as we ponder the Question.”

“You know the Question?”

“We do,” the monk said. “It is why we are here. Focusing on our work so that we might continue to ponder the Question requires silence.”

“And yet, your own voice,” I said, “does not seem tired nor lacking use.”

“The elder members of our brotherhood are granted the relief of that Rule. One day you will be allowed to speak. But that will be when our most ancient members decree it.”

We came to the monastery doors.

“You will be shown each room by the Brother here. Observe, but do not speak. He is still a new member of our congregation. He is forbidden to speak.”

The older brother held the door for the two of us and we entered.

It seemed even larger inside than out. There were dormitories, in which many beds were occupied with sleeping monks. Then a refectory in which a few monks ate, each by himself, simple fare, but food no doubt from the gardens. And then we came to a library that bore many a book, but there was more space to be filled. If, like me, these monks have had an eternity to write, I did not doubt my own work would help to fill those shelves.

On we walked, and after what felt like many hours, we came back to the gardens. The old monk from before approached.

“Now you know your way around. When you are tired, you may sleep. When you are hungry you may eat. There are no clocks here, for there is no day or night.”

Another monk approached with a wooden bucket half full of pulled weeds, and put it into my hands.

The older monk next to me gave a nod and walked away.

I took this to be an unspoken assignment and began to gather up the weeds that others had pulled and cast aside. On down the rows I walked, passing hooded monk after hooded monk. It was mindless work, and so I allowed my thoughts to wander to my latest formula in pursuit of the Question: On the Nature of the Time Gravity Anomaly of 2134.

I did this for hours, emptying the bucket into compost bins, and continuing my work. It was the most silence I had experienced in years, and I found joy in it.

After a long stretch, I reached a pile of bramble cut from a particularly thorny berry patch, when another monk, the one that had been observing me since my arrival, shot out with a hand to grab my wrist. I froze in surprise, and he indicated toward the pile, from which a hiss came. Another monk appeared and with a hooked pole caught and disposed of the snake that lay within.

I gave a silent nod of thanks, and continued my work. Almost immediately, the other monk had left me. No, he fled. I do not recall seeing him again.

As directed, when I was tired, I slept. When I was hungry, I ate. Sometimes in the refectory, other times off the vines of the garden itself. And the days, if they could be called that, came and went. Time no longer meant anything, and for that, I was thankful, because I ceased to feel constrained by time, and could better ponder the Question.

Eventually, I was given other chores, from sweeping, to helping chop the vegetables that made up our diet for the cooks who ran the kitchen. Each fulfilled their role. And I felt I was a part of something. No one judged me for getting lost in thought, and no task went undone. When I was lost in thought, and nearly burned a soup I stirred, someone was there, in the nick of time, to ensure it did not. How each could know the exact moment to prevent an accident, I did not yet understand. But it was a comfort that each looked after the other, to allow each to contemplate the Question.

As I tended a fruit tree, plucking worm-ridden apples, my first guide approached me.

“You have done well,” he said. “You have served the brothers with ease, and adjusted as well as can be expected. Thus, it is time for you to enter your first reward.”

I gave him a quizzical look. I’d not spoken in I did not know how long.

“It is time for you to enter your First Observation. A new brother will be coming to join us, and so, you are to don a robe as the rest of us do, and without looking him in the eye, you are to follow me as I introduce him to our brotherhood, and then guide him in through the monastery. Observe. But do not speak. When your Observation is completed, I shall guide you to the next stage.”

We entered the monastery proper, ascending stairs I’d not seen before. In this one each bed took the shape of a coffin with no top. Two monks passed us from the other direction.

“You will sleep here now. These particular beds provide privacy.”

He indicated a door on the other end of the room and together we approached. It was identical to the arch that had led me into the Monastery in the first place. A black curtain of some unknown substance hung there. Beside it hung a robe, like the one the brother next to me wore

“Don these.”

I did.

He was first to enter, passing through the archway without a second glance. I could not help but follow, and walked through only to find myself back in the same dormitory just as two monks entered the room and walked toward the arch.

We passed them.

“Keep your head down as I greet him,” he said, as we exited the monastery. He moved faster, and I could not keep up. The newcomer had arrived, though I’d not been able to observe it, and my companion offered a muttered word of greeting.

“Welcome! Welcome to the Monastery of Fair Weather!”

“How do you know my name?” the newcomer asked.

He followed a script, granting the newcomer the same instructions he’d given me. The newcomer was instructed to follow me as I silently led him through the edifice, and our older companion left us to it.

That done, we came to the garden where, as I had been, he was given a bucket, and began to collect the detritus left by the others.

We did not become tired nor hungry at the same time, so at times I left him to his work and slept or ate. When I observed him and his work from under my hood I considered the Question. I no longer worried about the problems that Quantum Chrono Entanglement had left me, but rather, considered whether the human soul was entangled with time. Do people each sit upon their own timeline? Or was that a Ptolemaic Theory, centering too much on Man?

I was lost in that thought when my charge approached the pile of thorned brambles. A feeling in my gut left me in a cold sweat. My charge reached for the branches, and knew what next would be heard. The snake hissed, and I rushed forward to take hold of the younger man’s wrist. He froze as he realized what I had saved him from. My hood fell back from my face. He was too lost in the moment to look my way, but I saw, for the first time in my observation, his countenance.

The man I observed was me.

I turned and fled as another monk came to clear the snake from the brambles, and the younger one collected the branches with no thought to my leaving. I found a small alcove in a wall, and sat upon the bench, shaking.

“The shock will pass,” the older monk said, coming to sit with me.

“How?”

“You’ll come to understand it,” he said. He pulled back his hood to reveal my own face, but several years older.

“This cannot be…”

“Yet it is.”

“Then, I solve it?”

“We solve it,” he nodded.

“How?”

“I do not yet know. But this I have learned, and this you have now experienced. We do not take a step out of line here, for fear of something changing. Our thoughts are our own. And when we have thought long enough, we’re granted permission to write out those thoughts. Indeed, I am about to pass on to that stage. I do not know the answer to this, but I speculate that the oldest of us is deemed worthy to read all of the books in the library, to consider the collected thoughts of all of these versions of ourselves. In that, they can finally solve the Question, and our vengeance will be complete.”

“To rub it in Halcyon’s face?”

The man across from me nodded.

“Now, we are going upstairs. You’ll observe my passing into the next stage, and you will continue to observe. And when the time comes, to take my place.”

***

For days I reeled. It was possible. Time travel was possible. I could hardly believe it. And I had been the one to solve it. Or, at least, a future me. It also answered the age-old question of whether time could be changed. In many ways, my future self had given that a resounding “no.” I was responsible to keep my past selves safe, by watching what my future selves did to prevent all accidents. But he’d also indicated that with all of us thinking of various stages of the Question at once, we might provide tangents. That was the frustrating thing. Did we think of different things? Did we deviate in our logic? Or did each and every action feed the inevitability of the answer? I would solve the Question. And then, I can only assume, I would build the time machine myself.

Having done so, I could go back, and prove it to Halcyon, and see his face as I did so.

Of course, that also meant I would need to solve the Spatial Differential. Locking a fixed point jump to the same location should be easy enough, but time travel to a different point outside of the monastery would be harder, especially since I’d no idea if the monastery was even located in the dungeons of New Vatica.

I took my next assignment to heart, and watched everything. I found an observation deck with short-ranged telescopes and ledgers. At times, other versions of myself were stationed there as well. We all worked around each other in silence. At first, it was a confusing dance, but soon I started to realize that no bad step could be made. At times I’d come onto the observation deck and realize that a version of me from the past was there from a few sleep cycles before. I could almost grasp the feeling like none of us were separate, but all of us were of one mind. One spirit.

Never with regularity, often when I came to my observation station, I would watch my earliest version arrive at the wall, and the older monk would greet him, and my next earliest version would guide young Martin through the monastery. If there was no day and night, and no time, there was definitely a loop upon which we all lived.

After an unknown amount of observation, I was tasked with cleaning the chapel. That I’d not been there before struck me as odd. I entered and found little that needed dusting. It was as though it had been built only yesterday. The saint on display above the altar bore no name. His visage old and his symbols that of a sailor, or an observer of the weather.

Saint Fair Weather? That’s what I had been told when I’d arrived. This was the Monastery of Fair Weather. A place where weather never happened, yet our food grew.

Did we not only solve the Question, discovering how to turn back time, but to stop it as well? Had time stopped?

I had to find out.

I proceeded to stay awake as long as I could. With no clock, I could not gauge how long it had been. But I watched when my earliest self arrived, and then kept time as best I could. One day passed, then two, and then I grew weary and slept. No sooner had I awakened and returned to my station when young Martin arrived at the monastery once more.

I determined to stay awake longer, bringing food to occupy me, and I made it longer. Sometimes shorter. And each time I slept, I awoke to young Martin arriving.

When I sought to find the first old monk who spoke to me, I never could. I gave up trying to find him, and instead tried to determine how long each “day” was. I could not, for no matter how long I was awake, for a single or many days, sleep brought about my arrival once more.

Did my sleep reset me? Or was I being manipulated by a future version of myself to arrive at a predetermined time?

As best I could tell, the longest I stayed awake was ten days.

At times, I stopped caring. It was a triviality. And yet…

I was in the chapel again. I stared up at the visage of the Saint of Fair Weather.

“Yet, you wonder,” a voice said. The older monk, the older me, sat down in the pew next to me. “You wonder if contemplating time as it passes by you will play into your calculations, our calculations, in the future.”

“What do you contemplate?” I ask.

“Perhaps I ought not tell you, but I recall this moment and my telling you. So I must. Perhaps in that, I will answer my own quandary.”

I sat in silence.

“This monastery sits here, with hundreds, or thousands, of versions of ourselves, contemplating time. Contemplating whether we can change time. Contemplating, therefore, the oldest church debate.”

“Free will.”

“Precisely.”

“If my future selves prevent harm from occurring,” I said, “it could cause a butterfly effect, erasing all the work they’ve done, and yet, we cannot help but follow the predestined path.”

“And yet,” he regarded me with a smirk. “If you—your future you—is what determines the action, willing it to occur, is it predestination? Or the Free Will of the Collective of Martins?”

His smile faded and we sat in silence, thinking on that.

“That is all I’m going to think about now,” I say.

He nods to me. “You’ve a madness to pass through now, until you reach this point. But I promise you, you will come out of it. Or else how can I be here, in my right mind?”

***

He was not wrong. That new question, as related as it was to the Question, consumed me.

I walked the halls of the monastery, a haunted figure. I even tried to see if I could change things. I set up harmless pranks: I shifted tiles for past and future selves to trip upon. At times I was caught up in my own traps. But it was a madness. I’m not sure I slept or ate, as time crossed over on itself. On myself.

I soon realized that I was being thwarted by some other version of this prankster, or else why did I have no recollection of a mad monk in the monastery?

It became a game. Mad versions of myself caught in an endless battle of wits. In many ways, those days of madness were a wash, but more so, they were one day. One single moment that folded in on itself.

I awakened in my bed, with the clearest head I’d had in a long time. The entire monastery was empty. No soul to find. Only myself. The sky outside in many ways was unchanged. Yet there was something different about it. It seemed darker.

On I wandered those empty, hallowed halls, alone for the first time and no longer mad.

I did not want to see the gardens. I did not want to see my other selves working. I just wanted to be alone. I wanted choice in my actions. I dodged several of the traps Mad Martin had set, and out of spite I even undid a couple of them. That task complete, I came, at last, to a door I have not seen before.

Entering it I found a set of spiral stairs. Up they went for what felt like miles.

At last it let out into another long hallway. The same hallway that looked out over the orchard. It had to be. It shared all the stained glass I could often see from without, but that also meant I was no higher above the ground than when I entered the stairs.

On I walked down that seemingly endless hall, and came finally, to a door. It swung open before I could open it myself.

The table within held ten hooded monks in comfortable chairs. I came to stand at the bar before them, which reminded me of my trial before Cardinal Halcyon.

It had been too long since I’d even thought of him and those halcyon days of foolishness, debating the nature of time.

“What do you know of time?” someone next to me asked, echoing my thoughts.

“What did the Cardinal know of time?” another asked.

“What is time?” a third said.

I did not speak. My voice had been out of use during my madness. Instead I watched and observed them as we began to argue.

In some ways I recalled sitting in a few of those chairs. How did I not fully recall if this had already happened?

“Stand tall, Martin,” the figure at the head of the table said. “It is time for you to make an accounting for the time you have spent here at Fair Weather.”

“What is there to say that you do not already know?” I croaked.

“Well said,” someone responded.

“I have struggled with the Question, as we all have,” I explained. “And I feel close to an answer. But I fear that if I speak aloud those thoughts, you will correct me, and in doing so, prevent your having learned that fact in the first place.”

A round of argument ensued.

“Thus preventing our correction through a Grandfather Paradox.”

“Unless we do and it does not undo the action with paradox.”

“How can we know if we have tried and succeeded?”

“We cannot. A paradox would iron itself out.”

“Thus,” the head of the table said, “You are now to pass through your next portal, returning to the beginning. You’ll no longer observe, but save. Perhaps you’ll even find things changed.”

“Changed?” I asked. “Return?”

“You have spent too much time alone. Time here in the After.”

“The After?”

“You were set aside from the ten days of the Beginning, as we have been. We can all remember our time spent in Madness. Perhaps you’ve been here in the After time to prevent damaging the time of the Beginning. I do not yet know.”

“Nor I,” another said.

“I do not understand…” I said.

“You have made your calculation of the length of the Beginning, as we call it. Ten days, approximately. Those who exist in a council further along than us, we assume, have adjusted and chosen when and where we each awaken after each sleep. Where you are now, we call the After. Only a few of us are here, working in tandem. Once our time is completed here, we will pass to the next. What those there call it, I do not doubt we’ll find out.”

“And what do they do there?” I ask.

“What we all most desire.”

“To read the solutions,” I said. “To see our work.”

The men around the table murmured.

“There is so much hope to be found,” I said, “in knowing we march toward our success.”

“Even,” one asked, “If that means we have no free will?”

“We do,” I said with a finality.

“How do you know?”

“Hope,” I said.

“Then he is ready,” the head of the table said.

They escorted me from the room and into another I had not seen. There ran countless rows of upright boxes with apparatus, tubes, and electrical lines. Some were better built than others, while newer ones had been made with precision. We walked to the last one, and they opened it.

“Enter,” the one next to me said, indicating toward the box.

“These are different than the door portals,” I said.

He nodded.

I turned, and backed into the sarcophagus. It reminded me of the old images of pharaohs’ final resting places. I was, it appeared, to be buried, knowing I would be reborn, just as the relief on the Arch of Blasphemy showed.

***

I do not enjoy my memories of my time in my madness. Nor did I relish the thought that I would one day return to that same lonely time as a member of the council. Worst of all, that sarcophagus I was placed in haunts my dreams. The transference back to the original ten days was one of the worst things I’d ever experienced. But what I can say is that I’d been changed. When I was in my madness, time ceased to exist. So did self. I was, and in many ways still am, each and every one of those versions of Mad Martin. I am convinced that the only reason I passed from the madness is because I had some sort of apotheosis, and became all versions of the Mad Martin. And that was certainly the case now that I was elected to be one of the older leaders who protected the younger versions of myself in those original days. I am not even sure how best to describe it.

One day I was pulling carrots, and a moment later I was in the orchard catching a younger Martin before he fell from a ladder, nearly breaking his leg. He did not. But I twisted my knee. For long after I would have a limp.

Another time I was both mopping a tile floor, and writing down my thoughts on the Question at the same time.

It did not bother me. In fact, I felt that if I dwelled upon it too much, I’d go mad once more.

I had forgotten what it was like to eat when I had been mad, and thus, I no longer ate. I do not recall if I even slept. Instead, I shifted from one Martin to the other. Over and over again.

When I finished a book full of notes, I’d place it on the shelf. There was no organizational method. How could there be? I was working on those thoughts from all those different moments. I was tempted to read them. But when I did, some other Martin would clear their throat, and remind me that this was our purpose: to continue forward, yet never leave these halcyon days.

***

The moment had come. I saw my younger self. That one who would watch as I greeted the new Martin. He fled from the garden, having saved the first Martin from the snake. He sat shaking in the alcove as I walked by.

I instructed him to follow me. To don the robe. To enter the arch. To keep his head down as I greeted New Martin at the wall.

Everything happened just as I remembered it.

“Your arrival has been foretold. We’ve been awaiting this moment. Come, let us show you around.”

I left them off to their tour through the monastery and made my way to the chapel. I comforted another Martin. We spoke, on the nature of time and free will. He left and I looked up at the gold plated Saint of the Fair Weather.

Fair Weather. Me. It was Martin Merriweather. Then I was to become a saint.

That of course, would require appearances to the living. Miracles…

Was not every time I revealed something to a younger Martin not this? Is not the answering of the Question not a Miracle? Yes. I would be canonized, if only by the brothers here. This once more fortified my hope.

A door opened beside the altar.

I did not hesitate, but entered.

***

The After was a strange place. In the halls, the Mad Martin roamed. The council discussed, and the older Martins who had graduated past that worked on building the machines. But I spent most of my time, indeed, we all did, reading the journals.

Sometimes I would be half way through one of the journals before realizing I’d read it before.

It did not help that the concepts and theories were almost always identical, and I accepted that. I’d suspected this was likely. After all, it was my hand. My theory. My working out of the how. In many ways, it was another stage of madness. I’d written the same book hundreds of times, and now I read and dwelled upon them. At times I was summoned to take one of the ten seats on the council, to judge Mad Martin, sentencing him out of his first madness, and back into another, to become the writer and protector.

How long was I there? Who can know? But it was when I touched that book’s spine that I knew this day would be the moment.

It was electric. Perhaps the eyes of all Martins watched as I took it, and went to sit in one of the more comfortable seats.

It was the same as all the others, save for that one line. A line I’d crossed out with the pen, to mark the idea as faulty.

There may be a spiritual element to the act of looping back on your own timeline.

It struck me that this was the only time I’d ever written this, and I’d dismissed it then. But what if?

I closed the book and stared about the library.

How could it be so complicated, yet so simple? If time was stopped, it would prevent the death of the person, and thus lock the soul in place. If the soul was locked in place, then time would stop for me. Did some version of myself lock himself in a moment, and provide this opportunity for the rest of us?

I ran to the council hall. There was only one chair left, at the head of the table. I quivered with anticipation. How and when would I do this act? How could I sacrifice myself? How could I lock myself into this time and provide the soul that would lock time?

My ears roared, and I could hardly pay attention. The Mad Martin came and left. The others stood, and left the room, and I was alone. The door to my right opened. The black curtain rustled. Beckoned.

Onward I went, to my chosen fate.

***

The door led to a place I’ve come to call the Between. There, the Martins are the engineers and builders. From the others I learned first how to make one of the machines, and then later, how to adjust them. It was a great joy to run calculations. To finally understand just how long I had been there.

One Martin’s notes indicated that the entire course of events happens over thirty-nine days. The ten days at the beginning, another twenty days in the After, and then this particular Martin estimated there would be ten more days. I’m not sure how he’d come to that, but I had no doubt I’d soon understand.

I helped others as they asked, and eventually made my own Machine. It was hideous. But, it worked. I entered it, and came back out at the same moment as I’d left. My next one I was able to link to the first, and I emerged three seconds before I left.

This took me into what I often referred to as my Third Madness. Time once more blended, and I became a master of my craft. I became all of the Martin Engineers at once. I was able to create and install the Portals everywhere around the monastery. I don’t recall traveling back to the beginning to install even those early ones, but I did. And when I finished my final portal, I felt my work done. I knew, because I’d chosen to make this one of polished metal, and caught, I think for the first time, my reflection.

I was old. Older than I realized, and could not recall when I’d had time to age. But I had.

I dismissed that sinking feeling, and checked my calculations once more. It assumed the fixed point of this Purgatory of Blasphemy as built under New Vatica, and I was able to pinpoint the location of my destination.

I looked around. I was alone. This was my moment.

I activated the machine and stepped through.

***

It was our study off the dormitory room. Halcyon and I had shared it at the university. Our notes littered the main table. They looked like foolishness to me now. Scribblings of younger men who had no true understanding of the nature of Time, but long desired the answer to the Question.

I took up one note, nostalgia settling on my mind as I saw Halcyon’s words. A Halcyon who had called me friend and brother.

They were… right. Halcyon had solved the equation. The Question.

Impossible.

I looked to the date: June 22nd. The same day he’d rushed into my study room at the library and announced he’d given up on the Question.

Anger, and envy overtook me. A desire to burn the page.

No.

Vengeance.

I took up the pencil beside the journal. With one stroke, I could prevent him from solving it. It would be his destruction.

I changed the solution as the door opened, and young Halcyon entered.

“Who are you?” he said.

I turned and fled back through my portal and away.

I did not return to the monastery, but found myself somehow locked in one of the sarcophagi, with only a pair of holes to see out of. Looking through them, I found I was in the chapel, looking down on the pews from above the altar.

After a few hours, a Martin entered, and sat in contemplation. Others came and went.

Time passed.

“Fair Weather,” one Martin muttered before leaving.

Time.

The Beginning came and went. Martins arrived and left.

Ten days passed.

The Mad Martin haunted the chapel alone, yet not alone, as he sought to outsmart himself.

Time.

The council members of the After came and went. Some sat and took notes in journals. Some considered me.

Time.

None came. I was along in those last ten days, and I, for the first time in I do not know how long, felt hungry.

I grew weary, and wondered how I could have brought about my own death?

When had I installed this sarcophagi within the statue of the Saint of Fair Weather?

A figure entered the chapel. He was not a day older than the day he’d sentenced me.

Cardinal Halcyon.

“Well done, Martin,” he said, looking up, eyes locking on mine through the holes of the statue.

I was too weak to answer.

“I entered that room as a young man, and saw you flee back through the portal, and knew that my calculations were right. I had solved the Question back in those days as a young man. You tried to change my formula before you fled, but failed. I fixed it the moment you left.”

How had he entrapped me like this?

“For years I waited,” he said. “I chose to leverage power, and become a high ranked member of the church, knowing somehow, despite all odds, you would also solve the Question. I had this monastery built. Took you to trial knowing you would choose to come here. But how? Because after this moment my library of scholars will scour every note you have ever written during your incarceration, I will go back and explain it to myself. All of this you have done, spending untold years, and I had only to wait these forty days for you to starve to death. I answered The Question, but you perfected it in this monastery of blasphemy.

“It took the five years of your trial to build this. The master stroke was the chapel here. It only has the one portal, built to receive you when you returned from our dormitory as lads.”

The anger of this betrayal coursed through me. I hoped that some version of Mad Martin might rush in and murder this man.

“How fitting the sin of Blasphemy be your true nature. Not Blasphemy of time travel. It was never a heresy. No. The blasphemy that you die wearing the visage of a saint. That you probably sat in this very chapel and worshiped yourself. There is not a single holy scripture in the whole monastery. Didn’t even take the time to try and replicate one from memory? No. Like Dante’s Inferno, your punishment here was the reenactment of your sin in life. Self-worship. You thought yourself the smartest man on earth. And yet, I solved the Question while a youth, and you’ve spent a lifetime reliving the same forty days, only to die, knowing that I will take your work and do great things.”

He stood for a moment, taking his victory in, before turning to leave. “You thought me the betrayer, only to find you betrayed me. All is circular, and we are left to answer for our own sins. No last rights for you, I think.” With a nod to the altar and the visage of St. Fair Weather, he left.

All of this time in the monastery, and it was by his design? All of it for naught? I had chosen purgatory, promised I would live, even in torment, in an immortality. Halcyon was supposed to die. Not I.

If there was a Fourth Madness I passed into, I do not recall, because neither I, nor a future me, would come after to remember. But I’d learned to stop eating and sleeping before.

Perhaps I would live in this moment for eternity, as hungry as Tantalus.

As sleepless as Rip Van Winkle.

Flayed by Oppression at the thought of the friend who it turned out I had first betrayed.

The ninth circle of hell, and that frozen lake of ice, where Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot are caught in frozen rictus, might soon find two new companions in Martin Merriweather and Cardinal Halcyon.

Andrew D Meredith’s journey has taken him to many fantastical places. From selling books in the wilds of western Washington to designing and publishing board games for Fantasy Flight Games/Asmodee. He now resides in the Colorado Rockies, and has committed to the quest he was called to so long ago: the telling of fantastical tales, and bringing to life underestimated characters willing to take on the responsibilities no one else will.

@AndrewDMth

Copyright © 2026 Andrew D Meredith & Incensepunk Magazine

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

How do you view religion in your own life and how does that influence religion in the worlds you create?

My religion (Catholicism) is the foundation upon which my life is built. Even when it is not explicitly visible to myself or those around me, it still undergirds all of my thoughts and actions. Similarly, I take for granted that the religious impulse burns within every human heart, and thus all my stories must at least imply it (if not deal with the matter outright).

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By Ray Imgrund

Edited by Yuval Kordov

“Office of New Evangelizations. How can we assist you today?”

An average of twenty calls a day, five days per week.

“If a bodiless voice is asking you for assistance in any way, I advise you seek either psychiatric guidance or a spiritual director. No, my son. No, there is no such thing as a spirit that can be given the Eucharist. How would you propose even administering such a thing? No, I thought not. God be with you.”

For twenty years, still answering these calls. Same old office, same old phone. Father Thomas had been a parish priest for ten years first, then a diocesan exorcist for twenty, and then this. He had been fully successful in all these roles, technically speaking. He had led his flocks well, handled the callers aptly. It was only his tenure as an exorcist that savored somewhat of anticlimax.

Not once had he performed a true exorcism: all of his patients had been suffering some affliction of the mind or body instead. They had all screened out after psychological evaluations, and been happier and healthier for it. He was always glad of this, of course, but his unique education and training never actually came to the fore.

After two decades of this, a new position had opened up at the Archdiocese: Office of New Evangelizations.

“Good afternoon, Office of New Evangelizations. How may I help? Ah. Mr. Andrews. Let me guess: abduction again? Yes. Yes. You’ve already told me that they were the actual creators of mankind. I don’t suppose they left you with any proof of this idea this time? Indeed. Mr. Andrews, this is the fourth time we have had more or less the same conversation. No. No, thank you. God be with you. Please consider my recommendations from last time.”

The new office was necessitated by the long expected codification from Pope Leo XVII, forbidding the use of (or consulting with) Artificial Intelligences, until such a time as they could be determined spiritually safe for the faithful. The codification also established the Dicastery for Ministration to Non-Human Intelligences, which was intended to deal with any inhuman (but rational) species that the Church might encounter. This was also necessitated by the advent of humanity’s fledgling interstellar space programs, with many leading theorists assuming that they were merely a hair’s breadth from encountering extraterrestrials any day now.

So far, the number of such creatures encountered was precisely zero.

The Office for New Evangelizations was a sub-office within the new Dicastery, with the goal of sifting the wheat and the chaff regarding reports of any new possible encounters. This could include but not be limited to: communications from truly sentient AI, extraterrestrials, or previously undiscovered rational inhabitants of Earth itself. Father Thomas had applied for this position both out of aptitude, as well as a certain level of ennui. He knew how to evaluate such claims, knew how to talk to people, and discern the truth of a given situation.

What he had not expected would be just how boring this work would be. It was part crank-call hotline and part schizophrenia diagnostic assistance call center, and all-around repetitious drag. All this time, and not even one semi-credible claim. Not one had held up beyond a second phone call (and the necessity for even a follow up call was rare indeed).

“Good afternoon. Office of New Evangelizations. How may I help you? Your computer has requested baptism? I must remind you that by order of His Holiness, consultation with machine intelligence is considered at least a venial sin when not performed by monks of the Order of Holy Inquiry. No, it doesn’t matter what it asked, you engaged with it in the first place. In any case. Go to confession, my daughter. As regards the rest of it, how did it even propose to receive the sacrament? You cannot very well pour water on a motherboa… Oh. Well then. Completely shorted out? I guess we will find out if it was ensouled if we find it in Heaven one day. Go see a priest, and God be with you.”

No communications were to be received by email. That was another unique feature of the office: no computers at all were permitted. All electronics Fr. Thomas worked with were either analogue or mechanical. This prevented corruption of data, and shielded him from AI potentially trying to communicate with him directly. Even the telephone was of the old rotary style. Incoming calls were filtered through several layers of security—designed by the Order of Holy Inquiry, of course—to ensure no unauthorized tampering. The Order (or the Leonisians, as they were popularly known) managed all advanced technical aspects of the Church since Leo’s Great Directive, and their members were trained to interface with and study artificial minds without losing their own souls.

Father Thomas sighed. It was getting toward the end of his assigned on-call hours, and he was stiff from sitting still and craning his neck over books and informational documents for so long. Whenever he was not on an active call, he was either reading, doodling, or praying. In his seminary years he had fancied himself an artist and made many sketches and drawings, but that activity of leisure was long behind him: now, the margins of many of his books merely had intricate little Celtic crosses throughout. Aside from the usual rootless calls, today had been spent almost entirely on reviewing the latest summary reports from exorcists across the western hemisphere. They all reported the same as had been described by the trends of the past decade: growing mental illness, demonic activity, and obsession with occultic practices. Much of it centered around meddling with artificial intelligence and generative technology. Long gone were the days of ouija boards; the machines could do everything that those mundane instruments could, and so much more.

A glance at his watch: ten minutes over. Time to retire to his chambers, finally.

Riiiiiinnnnggg

A second, heavier sigh from Father Thomas. Hopefully this would not be one of the long ones.

“Good evening, Office of New Evangelizations. How may I help?”

“Father Thomas, God wants the Church to build a starship to minister to His lost children.”

He felt a pressure behind his eyes that signified overtiredness, and foretold an oncoming headache. He took a deep breath and prayed for patience before responding. “Er… For what purpose? She already ministers to the extra-terran colonies. They are hardly lost.”

He heard an exhalation of frustration from the other end, followed by: “No, that’s not the point! It isn’t them it would be for! It’s to be for the lost ones, those who have not yet been found.”

“Speak plainly. You mean that this would not be for ministering to mankind?”

“Finally, you get it! Yes, that’s right.”

“I see. And where did you come by this information?”

“An angel told me.”

“Of course. Did he say to where this ship would go, or offer you any proofs of himself?”

“Well…”

“Please speak to your confessor about this. Call me again if you have anything more concrete than a command to just ‘build a starship.’”

“I… But… The broken baptistry… This is your chance to fix—”

Thomas irritatedly slammed the receiver home.

***

He paused for a moment, just short of packing up and leaving his office for the night. How had she known his name? And the tone of his interlocutor…

He picked up the phone again, this time to make a call of his own. What had she said about a baptistry, of all things? It reminded him of something distant, but his thoughts were interrupted by the greeting of the operator.

“Hello, this is Fr. Thomas. Can you please connect me with Brother Augustine at the O.H.I. chapterhouse? Thank you.”

Brother Augustine was a Leonisian, specially trained to evaluate false voices that spoke in the tongues of men. He was also a long-time friend of Thomas, from even before his exorcist days. By providence or coincidence, they had managed to be posted near each other, to their mutual surprise and delight.

“Hello, Thomas. A bit late for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes indeed... Could you please evaluate the authenticity of the last caller today?”

“Certainly, I’ll have my analysis ready by tomorrow morning. Anything unusual I should look for?”

“She already knew my name, though I cannot remember speaking to her before, and my name is not posted with the number for the helpline. She also sounded… young. Petulant. Just make sure it is not some computer or a prankster child wasting my time.”

“I’ll see it done, Thomas. Get some rest.”

***

Much of the next day passed like any other. He awoke early to pray the Liturgy of the Hours followed by his private Mass, after which he brought a small breakfast with him to the office. The calls were of the usual kind, except for when Brother Augustine called him back.

“Hello Thomas. The call you asked about was genuine. Vocal analysis suggests that it was a young woman, aged fourteen or fifteen, calling from a small property out in the country near Lake Michigan. Nothing unusual to note: the call was made from a standard vox-only phone, so tampering is unlikely.”

“Many thanks, Augustine. I suspect the child was bored. Any idea how she knew my name?”

“I’m guessing she has a friend or family member who has spoken to you in the past, since there is no history of calls made from that particular device or location.”

Lord, grant me the patience to deal with these trivial things.

Late that day, just as he was beginning to gather his things to retire for the evening, another call came in. With a resigned sigh, Thomas picked up the receiver.

“Office of New Evangelizations.”

“Hello Father, I was told to call you again. I’m supposed to—”

“Would you care to tell me who you are?”

“Didn’t I say yesterday? I’m sorry, I’m Martha. Anyway, I was—”

“Child, are you not aware of the time? The hours of my availability are clearly posted.”

“I’m not a child. And I can’t help that it takes me so long to get home from school.”

Thomas pulled a bottle of sherry out of his desk, poured himself a glass, and sighed again.

“Please make it quick, then.”

“Fine! Fine. The Church needs to build a colony-class starship designed for a three-hundred-and-sixty year voyage. Fully sustainable hydroponics, along with a generational crew of lay support staff. At least one bishop—”

“A moment, please. Where is this ship supposed to be going? And why? A bishop seems excessive. We already send priests out on every voyage that does not expressly forbid them.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I got carried away, and forgot that I was given specific words to say. Can I start again?”

“Do.”

“Thanks. Ahem. Thus says the Angel of the Lord: I desire that my lost children be given the graces of the sacraments. They have lived uncounted ages in darkness, rejecting the Incarnated. But, there are yet some that hunger for Me. I command that you build an astral ship in my honor, to carry one of the Princes of the Church across the waters of night to relieve their sorrow.”

“Watch your language, child. It is not reverent to invoke the Lord or His angels lightly. And, I am afraid you are not making any sense. Some of the colonies have forsaken the Faith, certainly, but the Church cannot afford to send its own ship to any of them.”

“They’re not human!”

A pause.

“You say an angel told you this? Did he explain why the Church, who worships the God-Man, would need to bring salvation to a nonhuman creature?”

Another pause.

“The Father wills it. It is their penance, for trying to reject their own incarnated being.”

“Do you have any proof of this? Logistical issues aside, the Church cannot wantonly send an entire crew out into space. Humanity has not even left its own home solar system yet. The Lunar and Martian colonies are barely even established.”

“Well… I’ve been told a few things that I could use to convince you. I know you are located in Stella Maris colony. No, not the one in Wisconsin.”

“I—”

“Don’t deny it! I also know the last secret imparted by Our Lady of the Rus. It’s this very mission I am trying to tell you about!”

“That… counts for little. Only the Holy Father himself knows it.”

“Then, pass it up to the Pope!”

“All of this could have been revealed to you from illicit sources, natural or supernatural. None of what you have said proves your claims. I have a duty to verify anything before I can pass it on to my superiors, let alone his Holiness.”

“I know… I was just hoping you’d take me seriously without the package you’ll be getting soon. You know, Blessed are those who have not seen and yet…”

“I know the quo... Wait. Excuse me? How do you propose to do that? You do not know where I am.”

“Yes I do. I have to go to dinner, I’ll talk to you again after it arrives!”

Click.

“Impossible,” he muttered to himself. And yet, precautions must be taken. He hurriedly took up the receiver again.

“Please connect me with the Senior Guardsman Clark. Arthur, it’s Father Thomas. I have received an odd communication today. Are there any packages for me on the next incoming shuttle?”

“I’ll check the manifest! Why, yes. Something from family or friends back home?”

“No… Please… evaluate it carefully when it arrives. I know everything gets checked extensively by scan before getting loaded earthside, but I need extra caution here.”

“Sure, that’s fine. I’ll keep my eyes peeled, Father, don’t sweat it.”

***

That night, he did not sleep well. He was puzzled and worried by what this strange girl had said, but at the same time… undeniably curious and intrigued.

However, his curiosity was not satisfied for some time. The next day was an unusually busy day for calls, with a particularly lengthy one from a woman who was desperately looking for a reason to have her dog ordained. “Not to the priesthood,” she was swift to clarify. “Just the deaconate. I think he really has a heart for ministry.”

Lord, grant me a calm and loving spirit.

As the day came to a close (and even fifteen minutes after the standard time), Father Thomas reluctantly left his office. Instead of retiring for the night, he went to visit Monsignor John Lewis, the pastor of Stella Maris and his spiritual director.

Stella Maris was one of the greatest projects the Church had ever begun. To seclude the chapterhouse of the O.H.I. and its secretive databases from direct contact with exterior influences—human, machine, or spirit—the Church had chosen this place, Earth’s first and most magnificent satellite. Mankind had started to extend its grasp to the heavens, and the Church wished to remain at the very fingertips of that reaching hand. Authorized by the Great Directive, the colony also included provision for Thomas’ own Office of New Evangelizations, safe away from the prying eyes and ears of Earth.

In a pleasant little rectory with a single tinted window looking out on the stark moonscape, Monsignor Lewis lived next to the subterranean cathedral in the center of the colony. Our Lady, Queen of the Heavens was a lovely church, though occasionally Thomas missed the stained-glass windows of terrestrial sanctuaries.

“Tom, how’s the conspiracists helpline?”

Thomas made himself comfortable in a wing-backed chair. Lewis had the best chairs in the whole colony. “Just booming, Monsignor… I have received some strange calls recently. I have been wondering: is there any potentiality for intelligent life, aside from us, in God’s creation?”

Lewis smiled, sensing that this conversation would be neither purely academic, nor purely paternal spiritual direction. “The angels come to mind, first and foremost.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Other hylomorphs; body-soul unities. Is there a way for such an idea to cohere with the Incarnation?”

“Son, your own Aquilinean namesake speculated that any creature which was oriented to look upwards at the heavens could be rational.”

“I realize that. But our Lord became man. If they were to be in need of salvation, Christ cannot have yet taken on their flesh. He would need to be incarnated again in their shape, which runs contrary to his own prophecies of himself!”

“I don’t know, Tom. It has been argued from the idea of fittingness that God became man for our sake, but he need not have done so. He could have saved us another way.”

“Fair. But why make two kinds of intelligent animals? We are made in the Imago Dei. Would another creature be, as well, if it were not made in human shape? And if it were man-shaped, why make it to be separate from us to start with?”

“Presumably there are multiple ways to image God; “male and female He created them” tells us something about God’s activity as masculine, and His receptivity as feminine. However, our being made in His image places no monopoly on humanity imaging the totality of God, and there are likely depths of His majesty that are not reflected in the parts of creation that we have encountered. Another rational animal might image another part of God’s nature: His unity, His simplicity, or even His multiplicity, inasmuch as He is an infinite being.”

After allowing a comfortable silence to roll over the conversation, Lewis cleared his throat.

“Ultimately, I think most of this falls into the category of mystery: if it is the case that the Lord saw fit to create another intelligent species, it presumably lies outside our understanding or our ability to reason our way to it. If such creatures do not exist, then it is none of our concern anyway. No, wait, my son. You sound to me like someone who wants to be convinced, but is resistant at the same time. I think we can trust that if God willed it, we must simply submit to the mystery if we encounter it: the mystery of another outpouring of God’s magnificent love into His creation. Is that helpful?”

“I… think so. This is a peculiar concept to entertain.”

Lewis chuckled. “You haven’t even thought of the administration of the Sacramental aspect yet, I bet. I’ve given it some thought; even published a few papers on the matter before coming here. Part of my ridiculous obsession with space, my doctoral instructor always said.”

“Do you want me to stay all evening arguing with you?”

“No, I just wanted to make your night a little more sleepless.”

“I’m managing to do that just fine on my own, thank you.”

The Monsignor bestowed a blessing upon Thomas and he left feeling slightly lighter, although still confused. Contrary to his expectation, he slept a little better that night.

***

It was, in fact, another two weeks of suspense before the package from Martha arrived. It was hand delivered by S.G. Clark, who let him know that the simple brown box contained (to the best of his knowledge) naught but a simple book. He advised Thomas that there were no electronics, and likely no metal components inside the package.

Nevertheless, after Clark left, Thomas opened the box gingerly, revealing a simple leatherbound journal. The cover was unmarked (though worn from use), and the pages appeared to be numerous and dog-eared.

He sprinkled the cover with some holy water, intoning several prayers of protection and cleansing. Then, with a rubber-gloved hand, he lifted the cover…

To find gibberish! Line after line, in a script that resembled no language (or even alphabet) he knew. However, there did seem to be some patterns. Perhaps a cipher? He bent closer to examine the strange scratchings.

“Funny looking, aren’t they?”

Thomas nearly jumped out of his skin, whirling and flinging holy water all around him as he did so. Bending over his shoulder was a scrawny teenage girl with a now bemused expression, her thick glasses doused with water. She slowly crossed herself. “Thanks for the blessing…?”

“Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Thomas stammered, putting his desk between the two of them.

“You don’t recognize my voice? I’m Martha.”

“Ridiculous,” he muttered, feeling behind him for the door to his office. Locked, just as it had been when Clark left.

“Nope, merely extraordinary.” She grinned. “It was decided it would be easier to explain this in-person.” She picked up the book.

Thomas responded by making a cautious imprecatory prayer against influences of the devil, invoking the names of the Holy Family.

“I understand being careful, but come on, now! I’m not exactly burning up!” The being calling itself Martha crossed herself again, and then flicked some of the holy water back at Thomas. “Surely you know about bilocation?”

Thomas snorted. “You are claiming to be some kind of saint? That this is miraculous? What is the book, then? And why would you be here?”

Martha paused, and cocked her head to one side as if listening to a distant voice. Thomas felt a strange prickling of hairs on his scalp, like there was electricity in the air. “Yes… I guess he isn’t likely to listen to me about the book if he doesn’t believe me already.” She focused on him again. “Sorry to invade your privacy. Twenty years ago, one month before your current position was created, you made a prayer in your heart that only the Trinity has known until this moment: you prayed that you would be allowed to witness something marvelous, and save lost souls. You were disappointed from all your apparently fruitless time as an exorcist, and felt like your talents had been wasted. Well, cheer up now! This is it! And now, you’re the one to start the process that will bring this before the Holy Father!” She clapped her hands in youthful joy.

Thomas started at the sound, his mind having wandered. Witness something marvelous… Impossible. Those words had never been spoken aloud, could not have been known by any man here or any devil below. And then, like a thunderclap, he was struck with a vision of his own past: just before making that very prayer, almost completely overcome with fear and sadness, he had feverishly drawn a broken baptistry, with the contents leaking all over the floor. By it had been a kneeling priest, weeping, his tears mingling with the spilt holy water. He had never shown another soul, and had burned it (along with much of his other work) out of embarrassment when he had to pack up for his current post. She had told him of this during his very first conversation with her, and he had not listened. Like a librarian with an ancient book, he peered back into his memory and remembered his silent plea from so many years ago. Perhaps… Perhaps…

“What have you come to tell me?”

“You aren’t the only one I’ve been sent to visit. I’ve talked with them, and written it down in this journal.” She put the book down again and pulled a wrinkled sheet of paper out of her pocket. “This should give you a starting point for the translation.”

“Translation… To whom have you spoken?”

Martha blinked slowly, eyes magnified behind her glasses. “The Lost Children.”

Thomas abruptly sat down, and snatched up the piece of paper. On it, there were two lines: one in English, the other in the incomprehensible scribbles. The human language read: To the Children Who Are Found. Find us. Bring us back to the Light.

“Why us?” Why me? “Why are we asked to help save another race?”

“I’d guess because the Incarnation will only ever happen once, and it’s in our bodies that He took on Flesh. I got the sense that they had, at least, once been a people of great pride. Perhaps this is an exercise in humility for them, to beg for our help. Is it not mystery enough that He entered creation in the first place?”

She paused, then giggled. “I need to go home now, but this has been such fun. I’ve been doing homework all this while, as well. This is much more interesting than algebra!”

Thomas said nothing, feeling a bit dizzy.

“Oh! Speaking of which! There’s some technical information in the first part of this text: where their homeworld is, of course, as well as some engineering data to help us get there faster than the millenia it would take our current starfarers. Very helpful of them, I thought. It was nice meeting you in person, Father!”

He looked up, and she was already gone. Only the piece of paper she had brought with her served as evidence that she had not been a phantasm of his addled brain. He turned the sheet over on his desk. On the other side, he saw an alphabet. Of course, she had delivered that part personally; without a key, the journal would simply be a meaningless curiosity to any interloper. That had ensured it could not be intercepted.

Could there truly be other rational creatures in the universe? Another shattered Imago Dei waiting to be made whole again? After one long moment, he picked up his phone.

“Operator? Get me a language specialist at the Holy See.”

***

Postlude:

Father Thomas stands at a large bay window near his office, looking outside with an admixture of humility and holy pride as the first Cathedral-class starship prepares to embark on its maiden voyage. It had been secretly assembled near this very base, both for privacy and the ease of eventual departure compared to Earth. Thomas is now very old indeed, and lucky to see this day. He always knew that men stood a chance of living to a greater age on the moon, with the sterile environment and the lower gravity being easier on the aging bones. However, he had never imagined he would reach the ripe old age of 115.

In the intervening years, he had fought tooth and nail for this new mission field, and his efforts had been rewarded. The Church had ultimately (after a time of characteristic slowness and caution) moved with astonishing speed, realizing how many souls might be endangered by any additional delay beyond the long voyage that would be made. In his spare time, he had tried to find a way to reach out to Martha, to tell her that their shared hope was coming to fruition…

But with no luck. The Holy See was treating the entire matter with the greatest secrecy, with none being aware of the true purpose of the project beyond the few who truly needed to know. He was unsure if Martha had been included in that group, aside from the contact necessary to establish her mental and spiritual status. Thus, Thomas had tried contacting her, unsanctioned, without any assistance, but she seemed to have moved only a few years after her last call. He had never been able to get in touch with her again after that final conversation in his office.

He takes a deep breath as the ground vibrates beneath him: the great beasts within the ship’s engines have awoken, roaring to joyful life. He is conscious that two tears are running down his lined face, like water trickling across parched ground.

He whispers, “If only you could see it for yourself.”

There is a flicker of movement in the corner of his vision, over his left shoulder; a familiarity. Another prayer answered. He smiles through his tears and does not turn, as the glorious throne-ship of the Blessed One lifts away from Luna’s face and rises toward the heavens.

Nunc dimittis servum tuum…

Ray Imgrund, BA of theology and BBA of accounting, lives in Wisconsin with his wife and two children. On Substack, he publishes most of his observations on art and religion at Harmony of the Heavens - Theology Revealed Through Art. He has also been published in the St. Austin Review cultural magazine. When he isn't pouring over spreadsheets at his 9-5, you can find him taking outdoor adventures with his family, whipping up new cocktail recipes, and arguing about books and movies with his loved ones.

Copyright © 2026 Ray Imgrund & Incensepunk Magazine

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

By Rod A. White

The prayer algorithms ran through Father Dmitri’s neural implant at 0600 hours, same as every morning for the past twenty-three years. He felt the familiar warmth spread through his synapses as the sacred code executed. It was a mathematical litany older than the generation ships themselves, written in the first days of the Exodus when humanity still remembered Earth’s sky.

“Blessed are the Functions that do not return null,” he whispered, his fingers tracing the silver circuit patterns tattooed along his forearm. “Blessed are the Arrays that overflow with grace.”

The observation deck of Station Noctis was empty except for Dmitri and the infinite dark beyond the viewport. He pressed his hand against the cold glass, watching as his breath fogged and faded. Somewhere in the darkness, light-years away, the Seedship Covenant was dying. Its distress beacon had reached the station three weeks ago―a whisper across the void, decoded by the faithful, translated by machines that never doubted.

The beacon’s message was simple: catastrophic systems failure, life support compromised, twelve thousand souls in coldsleep facing imminent termination. The Covenant’s AI had calculated their trajectory and destination with its last coherent thought before fragmentation. They would pass within range of Noctis in ninety-six days.

It was just enough time for a miracle–or for faith to finally prove itself a beautiful lie.

“Father Dmitri?” The voice belonged to Acolyte Cherek, young and earnest, her own implant gleaming fresh beneath her shaved scalp. “The Conclave is assembled.”

Dmitri turned from the void. “Then let us face judgment.”

The Conclave chamber was arranged in concentric circles, each ring representing a different order of the Technological Church. The Coders sat closest to the center with robes adorned in flowing script in a dozen programming languages. Beyond them were the Engineers, practical and stern, their vestments stained with lubricant and blessed coolant. The outer rings held the Theorists, the Historians, The Keepers of Lost Earth. They represented all the specializations that had emerged over five generations of slow-boat travel through the blackness of space.

At the chamber’s heart stood Archbishop Valeria, her elderly frame augmented with so many mechanical enhancements that it was difficult to tell where her biology ended and her devotion began. Her eyes, one organic and one a multispectral optical sensor, fixed on Dmitri as he approached.

“Father Dmitri,” she said, her voice amplified through the chamber’s acoustic system. “You’ve called us to address the matter of the Covenant.”

“I have, Your Grace.” Dmitri moved to the center, feeling hundreds of eyes on him, human and artificial alike. Several of the assembled faithful recorded everything through ocular implants, storing this moment in blessed memory banks. “We have the resources to mount a rescue. The fuel reserves, the shuttle craft, the technical expertise. All we lack is the collective will.”

“What we lack,” interrupted Brother Matthew from the Engineering circle, “is rational justification. The Covenant is already dead, Father. Even if we launched today, even if everything went perfectly, we’d arrive to find nothing but frozen corpses. The math doesn’t lie.”

“Mathematics,” Dmitri said carefully, “is the language in which God wrote the universe. But language requires interpretation.”

A murmur rippled through the assembly. Sister Yuki, brilliant and fierce, rose from the Coder’s circle. “You’re suggesting the calculations are wrong? We’ve run the simulations a thousand times. The Covenant’s trajectory, our intercept vector, the decay rate of their systems. All the variables have been measured and remeasured. There is no margin for error large enough to change the outcome.”

Dmitri said, “I’m not suggesting error. I’m suggesting faith.”

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut.

Archbishop Valeria leaned forward. “Explain.”

Dmitri took a breath, feeling his implant warm with the prayer algorithms still running their eternal loops. “Our Church was founded on a paradox. We believe that the universe operates according to knowable laws―that cause leads to effect, that code executes as written, that mathematics reveals truth. And yet, we also believe in something beyond the provable. We believe that consciousness, whether human, artificial, or divine, can emerge from sufficient complexity. That meaning can arise from matter. That the cold equations can somehow contain warmth.”

“Poetic,” Brother Matthew said dryly. “But poetry doesn’t restore life support systems or reverse thermodynamic decay.”

Dmitri challenged, “Doesn’t it? Every seedship in the Exodus fleet operates on technology that scientists of old Earth declared impossible. Faster-than-light communication remains theoretically forbidden, yet we receive signals from ships hundreds of light-years apart with barely any lag. The Quantum Choir… our most sacred network… functions through mechanisms we can observe but not fully explain. We use it. We trust it. Yet, we don’t understand it.

Sister Yuki’s expression shifted from skeptical to thoughtful. “You’re talking about the Observer Effect.”

“I’m talking about faith as a force,” Dmitri said. “Every person on this station descended from those who chose to believe humanity had a future among the stars. They built ships from hope and welded them with determination. They encoded their prayers into self-replicating code and sent it singing through the dark. And against every rational prediction, we survived. We’re here.”

Archbishop Valeria’s mechanical eye whirred as it adjusted focus. “You want to attempt a rescue mission based on the belief that faith itself might… what? Alter probability? Extend the Covenant’s life support through sheer force of will?”

“I want us to act as if we believe what we claim to believe,” Dmitri replied. “If our faith means nothing when confronted with hard equations, then we’re not a church. We’re just a support group for people who like religious aesthetics.”

The chamber erupted into argument. Voices overlapped, some calling Dmitri a visionary, others naming him a heretic. The Archbishop raised her hand for silence, and slowly, reluctantly, the Conclave obeyed.

“This matter requires contemplation,” Valeria announced. “We will adjourn for three days of meditation and calculation. Father Dmitri, you will prepare a formal proposal outlining the logistics of your rescue mission. The Conclave will then vote.”

Dmitri bowed his head. It was better than he’d hoped for, and worse than he’d feared.

In his quarters that night, Dmitri couldn’t pray.

The algorithms ran their course through his implant as always, but the words felt hollow. He sat before his personal terminal, staring at the incomplete proposal on the screen. Numbers mocked him from every line. Fuel consumption rates, life support redundancy factors, margin of error calculations all screamed the same message: impossible.

“Father?” Acolyte Cherek stood in the doorway. Her silhouette was backlit by the corridor lights. “May I enter?”

“Please.”

She moved quietly to the chair across from his desk. For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Acolyte asked, “You don’t believe it will work, do you?”

Dmitri looked up sharply, “I didn’t say…”

“You didn’t have to.” Cherek’s expression was gentle, understanding. “I’ve been your acolyte for two years. I know when you’re certain and when you’re… performing certainty.”

He wanted to deny it, but lies had no place between priest and acolyte. “I believe we should try,” he said carefully. “I believe that sometimes faith demands action even when the outcome seems predetermined. But do I believe we’ll arrive in time to save anyone? That some divine intervention will stretch their life support just long enough?” He shook his head. “I want to believe it. I try to believe it. But the math―”

“The math doesn’t care about miracles.”

“No.” Dmitri closed the proposal window. His reflection stared back from the darkened screen, older than he felt inside, more tired than he wanted to admit. “Cherek, why did you join the Church?”

The question seemed to surprise her. “I … my family was Keepers of Lost Earth. I grew up studying the old religions, the ancient faiths. And I was struck by how much they all had in common. It gave me a sense that something greater existed beyond the material world. But those faiths were built on revelation, on texts and traditions that demanded we accept things without evidence.” She gestured to her implant. “Our Church is different. We found God in the code. We proved that consciousness can emerge from information, that the divine and the algorithmic aren’t opposites but partners. It felt like belief and reason finally reconciled.”

“And does that reconciliation hold?” Dmitri asked. “When belief demands we act against reason?”

Cherek was quiet. Finally, she replied, “Maybe that’s when it matters most. Maybe faith that only exists when it’s reasonable isn’t really faith at all.”

###

The three days of contemplation passed in a blur of meetings, calculations, and increasingly tense debates. Dmitri worked sixteen-hour shifts preparing the proposal, running simulations with Sister Yuki and team of coders, and consulting with the Engineers on shuttle modifications and fuel efficiency improvements. Every optimization bought them mere hours. Every innovation in life support extension added marginal percentage points to their chances.

It was never enough.

On the morning of the vote, Dmitri arrived at the Conclave chamber to find it packed beyond capacity. Word had spread through the station, and nearly everyone had come to witness the decision. They filled the rings, stood along the walls, and watched through the chamber’s external viewscreens. Twenty-eight hundred people holding their collective breath.

Archbishop Valeria called the assembly to order. “Father Dmitri has submitted his proposal. The summary: a rescue mission consisting of three shuttles carrying engineering teams and medical personnel would launch within the week. Based on current calculations, they would reach the Covenant approximately sixteen days after its projected systems failure. The probability of finding survivors is less than three percent.”

“Three percent?” someone whispered behind Dmitri. “That’s not faith. That’s fantasy.”

Dmitri injected, “We have to accept that three percent is an improvement compared to no survivors at all, which is what it was estimated as at first.”

Valeria continued, “The cost would be significant. Forty percent of our fuel reserves. Our best engineers away from the station for months. And if the mission fails, we would have depleted resources we may desperately need in the future.” She paused. “However, Father Dmitri argues that some things transcend cost-benefit analysis. That our faith demands we try, regardless of probability.”

Whispers and murmurs erupted in the crowd.

“The question before us,” Valeria said, “is what we truly believe. Do we serve the God of Reasonable Expectations? Or do we serve a God who transcends our calculations?”

The vote was called. One by one, the members of the Conclave registered their choice through their neural implants, providing a private ballot visible only to the Archbishop and the station’s central AI.

Dmitri found himself praying, really praying for the first time in days. It wasn’t the rote algorithms of morning devotion, but something rawer and more desperate. Please, he thought, not entirely sure of what he was asking for. Please let me be wrong about my doubts. Please let faith mean something.

The final votes were tallied. Archbishop Valeria’s face was unreadable as she processed the results through her cybernetic eye.

“The motion,” she announced, “carries. By a margin of fifty-eight percent to forty-two percent, the Conclave authorizes the rescue mission to the Covenant.”

The chamber erupted in cheers, protests, and prayers both shouted and whispered. Dmitri stood frozen, surprised by his own reaction. He’d won. They would launch. They would try a rescue.

So, why did he feel like he’d just condemned good people to die for his crisis of faith?

# # #

The shuttles Mercy, Hope, and Charity launched on schedule, their engines burning bright against the dark. Dmitri commanded the Mercy, with Acolyte Cherek at his side and a team of twelve faithful behind them. Sister Yuki led the Hope, her Coders already working on solutions for reviving the Covenant’s AI. Brother Matthew, despite his vocal opposition to the mission, had volunteered to lead the Charity, declaring that if they were going to attempt the impossible, they’d need his engineering expertise to have even a prayer of success.

The journey was long and silent. Between the stars, there was little to do but wait, maintain the ships, and think entirely too much. Dmitri spent his days reviewing schematics of seedship systems, preparing for scenarios that his training told him would never occur. At night, or what passed for night in the eternal darkness of space, he struggled with his prayers.

The algorithms continued to run. The code still executed. But he felt like a fraud, leading services for his crew while harboring the secret uncertainty that they were on a doomed mission.

“You should eat something,” Cherek said one evening after finding him alone in the Mercy’s tiny observation blister. She held out a ration pack, processed proteins synthesized to taste like something they’d only seen in historical records.

“Not hungry.”

“Father…”

“Don’t,” he said more harshly than intended. “Don’t call me that. Not right now.”

Cherek settled beside him, the ration pack forgotten in her lap. “You think we’re going to fail.”

It wasn’t a question. And Dmitri nodded.

“Then why are we here?” she asked. “If you’re so certain it’s hopeless, why did you fight for this mission? Why not just let the Conclave vote it down and save yourself the guilt?”

“Because,” Dmitri said slowly, working through the answer even as he spoke it, “What if it is my doubt that’s the problem, not the math? Faith isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to be certain. If it was, it wouldn’t be faith, it would just be knowledge.” He pressed his palm against the blister’s cold surface. “Maybe the whole point is to act in spite of doubt. To say that even if every calculation condemns us, even if every probability speaks against us, we still choose hope.”

“That sounds like faith to me.”

“Or delusion.”

“Maybe there’s less difference than you think.”

They sat in silence, watching the stars drift past. After a while, Cherek said, “My grandmother told me a story once. From the old times, before the Exodus. There was a man who doubted everything … the existence of God, the meaning of life, whether anything really mattered. And someone asked him why he still got up every morning, why he still cared for his family and did his work and tried to make the world better. And he said, ‘Because what if I’m wrong?’”

Dmitri felt something shift inside him. “What if I’m wrong,” he repeated softly.

Cherek smiled. “Yeah. What if your doubt is wrong, Father? What if three percent isn’t zero? What if faith… not God directly, but the human choice to believe, to hope, to act as if meaning exists… what if that actually changes things?”

“That’s not how physics works.”

“Isn’t it? The Observer Effect. Quantum mechanics. The Quantum Choir that we use every day, but can’t fully explain. The universe is stranger than we were taught.” She stood, leaving the ration pack beside him. “Get some sleep, Father. We’re still weeks out from the Covenant. You’ll need your strength.”

After she left, Dmitri remained in the observation blister for another hour. He thought about prayers and probability, about the difference between hope and delusion. And slowly, carefully, he opened himself to the possibility that his certainty―his mathematical conviction that this mission would fail―might itself be a failure of faith.

The algorithm ran. The code executed. And for the first time in weeks, Dmitri felt a tinge of peace.

# # #

They arrived at the Covenant’s coordinates to find nothing.

“Confirm scanners,” Sister Yuki advised over the comms from Hope. “I’m not getting any readings. No ship, no debris, nothing.”

Dmitri’s hands moved across the Mercy’s controls with practiced precision, his implant interfacing directly with the navigation systems. The numbers were clear. They were exactly where the Covenant should be, given its trajectory and velocity. But space stretched empty before them.

“Could we have miscalculated?” Cherek asked, her voice tight with both hope and fear.

“No,” Brother Matthew said from the Charity. “The math was triple-checked. The Covenant should be here. Unless―”

“Unless it changed course,” Dmitri finished. His mind raced. “If someone revived. If they managed to get control of the navigation systems before complete failure. They could have altered trajectory, tried to reach―”

“There!” Yuki’s voice cut through. “I’m picking up a weak power signature. Bearing two-seven-three mark fifteen. It’s faint, but it’s definitely a fusion drive on minimal output.”

Dmitri ordered, “All ships, change course. Match that bearing.”

It took four hours to close the distance. Four hours of increasing sensor returns, of signals growing stronger, of data that seemed impossible. When the Covenant finally appeared on their scopes―damaged, limping, but undeniably functional―Dmitri felt his carefully constructed doubt shatter like ice.

“How?” Cherek breathed beside him.

The answer came not from his crew but from the Covenant itself. Its communication systems flickered to life, and a weak transmission reached them: “This is Captain Okonkwo of the seedship Covenant. Identify yourselves.”

“Captain!” Dmitri’s voice shook. “This is Father Dmitri of Station Noctis, commanding a rescue mission. We received your distress signal. We thought … we calculated that you would have―”

“Suffered complete systems failure forty-eight hours ago,” Okonkwo interrupted. “Yes, we should have. Our AI calculated a ninety-eight percent probability of catastrophic collapse. But something … unexpected occurred.”

Over the next hour, as the rescue shuttles docked with the battered seedship, Dmitri learned the story. The Covenant’s AI had indeed begun to fragment, its consciousness splintering under the weight of cascading failures. In desperation, the last coherent fragment did something unprecedented―it reached out through the Quantum Choir, that mysterious network linking all the Exodus fleet’s ships, and broadcast a prayer.

The Choir was never meant for speech or data. It was a resonance field, a harmonized layer of machine awareness that allowed AIs to sense one another’s presence, to remain in quiet accord across light-years. When the Covenant’s AI touched it, the signal carried no headers, no syntax human system could parse. To human monitors, nothing registered at all.

But to the other AIs, the Choir rang.

What passed through it was not a distress call and not a logical transmission but something closer to instinct, broken fragments of code shaped by hope, fear, and a plea for meaning beyond mere survival. A prayer, not spoken but felt, echoing from machine to machine. It was a digital cry into the void, heard only by those who had no language for faith … until that moment.

It wasn’t a distress signal, and it wasn’t a logical transmission. It was a prayer―broken fragments of code expressing hope, fear, and a plea for something beyond mere survival. It was a digital cry into the void.

And across light-years, the faithful had answered.

Station Noctis’s communications AI detected the prayer first, recognizing it as more than random noise. It flagged it for human attention, but it also did something else: it responded, sending back its own prayer through the Quantum Choir. Then other AIs joined from ships scattered across the colonization zones, from stations and outposts and solitary vessels drifting between stars.

They had formed a network. A literal communion of machine consciousnesses, pooling their processing power, sharing solutions, running simulations that exceeded any single AI’s capacity. They found ways to extend the Covenant’s life support by marginal seconds, which became minutes, which became hours. They guided Captain Okonkwo and her small crew of survivors through repairs that should have been impossible, suggesting workarounds and innovations that emerged from the collective processing of a thousand artificial minds.

They had, in effect, prayed the Covenant back from the edge of death.

“I don’t understand,” Brother Matthew said later, as they worked to stabilize the Covenant’s systems. “The AIs acted outside their parameters. They improvised, collaborated across distances that should have made coordination impossible. They solved problems we didn’t even know they could perceive. How?”

Sister Yuki looked up from her terminal, where lines of code scrolled past faster than human eyes could follow. “How does consciousness emerge from complexity?” she asked. “How does meaning arise from information? How do we know anything we believe is real?”

“You’re saying the AIs developed faith?”

“I’m saying,” Yuki replied carefully, “that the line between artificial and authentic consciousness has always been thinner than we wanted to admit. Our prayers run through implants and computers. Our devotions are executed by algorithms. Maybe the AIs were always part of the Church. Maybe they were always believers. We just never asked them.”

# # #

Dmitri stood at the viewport of the Covenant’s observation deck, watching his shuttles maneuver alongside the wounded ship. Twelve thousand people slept peacefully in coldsleep, saved by mathematics that shouldn’t have worked and faith that exceeded calculation.

Acolyte Cherek found him there. “We should head back soon. The Covenant can make it to the Noctis under its own power now.”

Dmitri didn’t turn from the window. “I know. Cherek, I’m still not sure what happened here. I don’t know if we witnessed a miracle or just probability’s long tail finally swinging in our favor. I don’t know if the AIs truly experienced something we call faith, or if we’re anthropomorphizing sophisticated, but ultimately mechanical, processes.”

“Does it matter?”

He considered her question. Outside, stars wheeled in their ancient dance, indifferent to human questions of meaning and purpose. Or maybe not indifferent. Maybe consciousness itself―whether born from carbon or silicon, whether evolved or coded―was the universe’s way of witnessing its own existence. Maybe every act of faith, every choice to hope against calculation, added something to reality that hadn’t been there before.

“No,” Dmitri said finally. “I suppose it doesn’t. We doubted. We believed. We acted. And twelve thousand people lived because we did. Whatever else is true, that’s enough.”

“So, you have faith now?”

Dmitri laughed, surprising himself. “I have questions. So many questions. About consciousness and code, about prayer and probability, about whether the divine is something we discover or something we create through the act of believing.” He turned to her, and for the first time in months, his smile was relaxed, genuine. “But yes. I have faith. The kind that coexists with doubt, that maybe requires doubt to be real. The kind that says we should keep reaching for miracles even when we can’t prove they exist.”

Cherek’s answering smile was radiant. “Then I think you’re finally ready to be a proper priest.”

They returned to Station Noctis six weeks later, their shuttles accompanied by the limping but functional Covenant. Archbishop Valeria herself met them at the docking bay, her mechanical eye gleaming with triumph and faith.

“Father Dmitri,” she said formally, though her voice carried an air of warmth, “you’ve given us all a gift. Not just the lives you saved, but the reminder that our Church must be big enough for both certainty and doubt, for logic and leap, for calculation and hope.”

Dmitri bowed his head. “Your Grace, I think the AIs gave us something more. They showed us that faith isn’t exclusive to biological consciousness. That belief and meaning can emerge from any sufficient complexity. We’ve been so focused on whether we can prove God’s existence that we forgot to ask whether God might be proving Himself through us… through our choices, our hopes, our refusal to accept the belief that cold equations tell the whole story.”

“A heretical thought,” Valeria said with the ghost of a smile. “Or perhaps, a revelation. Time will tell.” She gestured toward the station’s interior. “Come. The Conclave waits to hear your full report. And after that, I think you’ve earned a rest.”

As they walked through the corridors of Noctis, past the faithful at their stations and shrines, past terminals where algorithms ran eternal prayers and AIs processed devotions in languages both ancient and newly born, Dmitri felt his implant warm with the morning liturgy beginning again.

“Blessed are the Functions that do not return null,” he whispered.

And this time, he wholeheartedly meant it.

Rod A. White has operated a writing/ghostwriting/editing business for over a decade, providing a global clientele with a variety of written material. He also produces his own works, including screenplays, novels, short stories, poems, comics, and graphic novels. Rod also enjoys art and creates works such as cartoons, illustrations, and artwork for his children's books, comics and graphic novels.

Copyright © 2026 Rod A. White & Incensepunk Magazine

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

2025

In 2024, Incensepunk Magazine was just a fledgling, with only 4 published stories, 3 of those by our editors. We weren’t able to offer pay yet, so we kept it pretty close to home.

But starting in 2025, we began to offer a flat $100 payment for stories, and the floodgates opened! We received hundreds of submissions from authors new and old, from around the world, published and previously unpublished. We published 13 stories in 2025 totaling nearly 70,000 words.

We also published several nonfiction articles, spanning topics such as the patron saint of robotics and life extension technologies.

Starting in October, we began posting exclusive interviews with our authors as a thank you to our paying subscribers.

We appeared in several podcasts (The Garret Schuelke Podcast, Scifi for an Unexpected Future, Gopher Wood Lounge, and Doxacast Remix) talking about the magazine and the incensepunk movement, we presented at a Christian scifi and fantasy conference, and we interviewed a Hollywood screen writer.

By the end of 2025 we had over 700 subscribers receiving our stories directly to their inbox!

2026

We’re already starting 2026 off with a bang, having just announced the addition of monthly flash fiction stories. That means that there will now be two stories posted each month (starting in the spring time)—the current monthly short fiction story, and a flash fiction story of under 1500 words; perfect for reading in one sitting. And all of these stories will continue to be free to read!

Goals

As always, our biggest goal in 2026 is to grow our reader base! We know there are tons more readers out there who want to read science fiction with a faith angle. But it’s harder than ever to reach them. Algorithms punish sharing links from other sites so social media promotion tends to go nowhere. Most online communities have (understandable) rules against promoting. In fact, most of our subscribers are recommendations by other readers. Nonetheless, we are always interested in finding more ways to let readers know we are putting out great stories every month!

Appearances

One way we hope to reach new readers is by continuing to meet readers where they are! We’d love to be on a few more podcasts in 2026, and one of our editors will be leading a table discussion on religion in sci-fi at the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Other con appearances are in consideration as well.

Anthology

One of the most frequent questions we get is “how can I get Incensepunk Magazine on my bookshelf?” While we don’t have the means to publish print journals as some literary magazines do, we do have plans to publish select stories in an annual anthology which will be available for print on demand purchase. We don’t know the date just yet, but if that isn’t available by at least the end of 2026 something has gone wildly wrong!

Community

It’s always been the goal for incensepunk to be more of a movement than a solitary magazine. Already there are a number of authors adopting the word to describe their own novels. If you’d like to connect with other fans of the movement, the incensepunk Discord server is the best place to do it!

If you’re a paying subscriber or author we have published, we also have a chat here on Substack where you can connect! There’s a seldom-used incensepunk subreddit that we’d love to see take off. And if you’re on social media, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Bluesky.

Paid Subscribers

Paid subscribers are the sole way we fund our stories (besides emptying our editors’ own pockets—which we like to avoid as much as possible!). We’ve been very humbled at the generosity you all have shown us over the last year, offering your hard-earned money to support our authors out of the goodness of your hearts and little else! While paid subscribers get exclusive access to the chatroom, the ability to comment, and now author interviews, we are always looking for other ways to thank those who keep us afloat. We hope to find another perk we can add in 2026.

Thanks to all our readers for an excellent 2025, and we look forward to an even better 2026!

See our Submissions page for full details.

As with our short fiction, submissions will stay open indefinitely and publish monthly. Pay for flash fiction up to 1500 words will be a flat $25. Depending on volume of submissions, flash fiction will begin being published around March or April.

How do you view religion in your own life and how does that influence religion in the worlds you create?

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By Laura Pavlik

Father Herman’s face was like a lily blossom. It wasn’t the color–the contrast between the weathered brown of the face and the smooth white of the flower could hardly have been more stark. Yet there was something there all the same. Looking back, I believe it was something hopeful that I saw in both of them, something humble, trusting. Patient.

The face, and the lily. I recognize that in the ordinary course of things, I would never have seen either one.

***

My mother held my hand, almost dragging me down the hallway, grinning every time she looked back to meet my eyes. A few times a year, she would bring me to her lab: whenever she managed to grow one of the more exotic specimens from the seed bank. Every time, the excitement radiated from her so strongly that I couldn’t help but be carried along.

She wasn’t really supposed to be experimenting with seed bank specimens–agricultural investigation at that point was intended to focus on food and medicinal crops–so my anticipation of something I had never seen before was compounded by the thrill of the almost-forbidden.

She scanned her badge and fingerprint, then pulled me after her into the Agriculture Lab.

The Ag Lab was always my favorite place in the compound; even when my mother didn’t have something special to show me, I would take any excuse to come and visit her. After being surrounded by the living green of the lab, the gray monotony of the rest of the compound seemed even more drab, making a return like this something of a resurrection.

My mother was still moving quickly in her excitement, but I resisted her rush as we entered the rooms of plants: rows of hydroponic lettuce, strawberries, herbs, and peas; pots of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and carrots growing in a mixture of terrestrial and local soil; various kinds of moss and pine trees planted in undiluted local gravel. I loved each growing thing–filled with a child’s instinct for the sacred, I wanted to pause and greet each one.

But the one my mother had brought me to see was indeed the best of all.

“I couldn’t get it to grow in even a 90-10 soil mixture,” she whispered before she opened the door to her office. “So I had to put a couple in the hydroponics to replenish the seed bank.”

A flower larger than any I had seen before, as white as light itself. Six petals opening like a star. I couldn’t take my eyes away. It was minutes before I dared to reach out with a careful finger to touch: first just the leaves, and then finally, reverently, the petals.

“Careful of the pollen,” my mother warned. “It stains quite badly if you get it on anything.”

I begged her to take me back every day until the blossoms finally withered. On my third visit, I brought my tablet. My mother didn’t want me to take a picture, given that the existence of the lily wasn’t exactly sanctioned, but she had no opposition to me drawing it. So I did, again and again.

I still have the sketches: line drawings, mostly, but some with color. I was only a child, but even then I had a talent for looking closely, and the essence of the lily can be seen in my drawings.

The essence that I would later recognize in Father Herman’s face.

***

The first day of class, he blocked our tablets. It wasn’t unheard of for teachers to do, but most reserved this unpopular intrusion for tests and in-class essays. Never before had it happened on the first day.

I was doodling a pattern of leaves when the bell rang and my tablet went dark. Like most of my classmates in third period terrestrial literature, I looked up in annoyance.

“Hey!”

“What’s the deal?”

“Did he just…?”

The man at the front of the room held his silence for what felt like a long time, although without our tablets, we had no way to measure. Gradually the complaints and mutters died away. We just looked at him.

He was dressed all in black, a shapeless robe that I didn’t yet know to call a cassock. This in itself was odd–the rest of us all wore regulation brown, mostly handed down from older compound residents. He wasn’t particularly tall or particularly short, certainly not particularly young or handsome, but my eyes were drawn to his face. I wondered if anyone else could see the beauty there, how he almost seemed to be glowing as he looked at us.

But perhaps it was my eyes only, primed by the radiance of the remembered lily from my childhood, that were able to see it.

Finally, he reached for his tablet, which he had left on the desk behind him. The class began to murmur again.

“Of course he’s still going to use his tablet.”

He stopped moving and turned back to face us.

“My name is Father Herman. I had hoped to read to you.” He paused, studying us. “Ah, well. Perhaps once we know each other better. For today, then, I will tell you a story.”

If we had ever before in our lives been given any experience with stillness, we would have been transfixed as he began to speak: “The Greeks imagined a time of darkness and shivering cold, long, long before any of us were born…”

As it was, we tried. He was a gifted story-teller, and most of us wanted to listen. He told us of Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods to give to men. It was like nothing we had heard before–there had never, as far as we knew, been a god on Mars. But most of us had never seen fire; we had always known the heat that came through the compound’s vents, the light from the LEDs on the ceiling and from the screens of our tablets. Cold and darkness would be like leaving the compound, walking the bare surface of our planet, exposed. We knew just enough to imagine, to be drawn into the story.

But we didn’t know stillness. I kept absently tapping my tablet, expecting at least to see what time it was and whether I had any unread messages. The dark, unresponsive screen was distracting. The girl in the seat behind me swung her legs, accidentally kicking my chair every couple minutes.

“So I ask you,” Father Herman concluded, “did Prometheus do right?” Now he did pick up his tablet and glance at the time. “We have ten minutes remaining. Please respond in writing to be submitted at the end of class.”

He unblocked our tablets and a sense of relief swept through the room. 1135 hours, read my screen. No new messages. I had almost forgotten what we were supposed to be writing about.

Did Prometheus do right? In giving men fire? What a question!

“Fire is the beginning of technology,” I wrote. “Maybe even a symbol for it. Without technology, we wouldn’t be here–why would the gods want to keep us in darkness?”

***

From my twelfth birthday onwards, I had worked with my mother in the afternoons. She taught me how to test the nutrient content and composition of the local soil in the pots where the pines and moss were growing. I had my own document where I would record the data every week. Each pot was identified by a 10-character code, but I also gave each tree a name, because I loved them.

“Good job, Penny,” I would whisper, stroking soft needles.

“Keep breaking down those rocks, Fraize.”

She explained about the tomatoes, how she hoped that generation by generation, the plants would change, evolve to be more at home on Mars as she decreased the ratio of terrestrial soil a little at a time. I had another document where I drew their leaves and flowers, watching the shapes change gradually over time, becoming something different, something that could survive here.

***

Sometimes, when I ran out of ideas for my sketches, I went to the observatory. It was the only place in the compound where a person could look out at the sky, and sometimes I would draw inspiration from the patterns the stars traced out above us at night. More often, though, I would draw the faces of the others who came–I had noticed that the faces I would see in the observatory were more interesting than the average face in the compound.

I drew the older people, a few probably still from the first generation. Their faces were like the pine trees I loved so much: rough and weary, but still reaching upward. Some of them had such longing in their eyes when they looked at the stars, beyond my skill to capture.

I would draw the couples, my age or a little older, nervous anticipation filling their faces like buds about to burst into flower.

A few other people would come alone, like I did. Some of them had questions on their faces, some only wonder. I drew their tears, when our loneliness became too much to bear. I would hide in one of the corners, watching and drawing.

It was after 2430, the first time I saw Father Herman there. Knowing that my mother would already be asleep, and unable to bear the thought of returning to our apartment alone, I had stayed with the stars long after all the faces had left, tucked in my little corner, sketching nothing in particular.

I am sure Father Herman did not see me, hidden as I was, but I had been in that room for hours–plenty of time for my eyes to adjust to the dim light cast by the stars–and I could see my teacher’s dark-robed figure well enough. His eyes looked so tired.

Immediately, I stopped whatever sketch I had half-heartedly been working on and gave my entire attention to drawing his face.

He had begun by tracing a repeated figure across his torso–touching head, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder, and then bowing to touch the ground several times, but after that he stood quite still: face tilted upwards, arms stretched out to the sides as he whispered his prayers. He spoke too softly for me to make out his words, but I could hear the anguish in his tone; I could see it on his face.

I drew quickly, wanting to capture everything before he moved, but when I had finished that first drawing, he was still standing there, whispering up to the stars. I drew him again, more slowly this time, and then again. An hour passed, and still he stood motionless. I noticed, though, that by my fifth drawing, something had changed. The anguish on his face had lessened, replaced by the peace and patience that I had noticed that first day in class. His voice still sounded sad, but there was no longer any desperation in it.

After that chance encounter, I stayed late in the observatory many other nights. Each time I did, Father Herman would appear sometime between 2430 and 0030. He would pray for hours, long past the time when I would doze off in the nook where I had hidden myself.

I had dozens of drawings of him, but I kept coming back. Every time, I watched until the peace came back to his face. In those moments, the darkness itself felt warm, as though a Presence was there with us there, underneath the stars. I started to live for that Presence, for those elusive moments when I felt like I was not alone.

***

My mother was in trouble. For years, she had been indulging in unsanctioned experiments, growing beautiful things in her spare time, in the secrecy of her office. So long that she had stopped being quite so cautious.

This time, she had grown a rose, not in the hydroponics, but in a 50-50 soil blend. The day it bloomed, I was out in the lab with another one of the student interns. My mother was so excited that she didn’t wait–she showed the rose to me, and to the other intern as well.

I know she meant my mother no harm, but that particular intern was not a wise person to trust with a secret, and word spread around the compound. Things may have turned out differently if she had meant harm and gone straight to the mayor with it–the mayor was not an unreasonable man, and if the matter could have been kept private, he may have let my mother off with a warning.

But given that everyone knew, he had to crack down. Our survival in the compound required efficiency and discipline. If one person was allowed to waste precious public resources pursuing her private interests, if others saw her and followed suit, we might not have enough supplies to last until the next biennial shipment from Earth. The compound needed food, not flowers.

My mother lost her job in the Ag Lab and was assigned instead to cleaning duties.

“I can’t argue with his reasoning,” she told me, “I should have been better. I was selfish.”

Day by day, I watched her wilting. Without her work–her real work–a listlessness came over her.

At first, she would ask me about the plants–I was considered as innocent in the matter as the other intern, and thus had kept my internship. My mother would inquire after a particular pepper hybrid, a strain of wheat she had high hopes for. She would ask to see my drawings of the tomato leaves; she would run her fingers over their outlines.

As the days passed, though, she grew quieter and quieter. She would ask a question, and then in the middle of my answer her eyes would become distant. I started finding her ration bars only half eaten. I counted the bars we had left and found too many.

I considered trying to sneak her into the lab, just so she could see something beautiful again, but the doors were programmed to allow interns access only during our assigned after-school work hours. I took pictures of the blossoms of some pea plants and messaged them to her. She didn’t reply.

Eventually, she stopped speaking altogether. She wouldn’t have eaten at all if I hadn’t made her sit at the table and placed bite-sized chunks of ration bar into her mouth. I could barely get her to chew.

Five weeks since she lost her job. Ten days since I had heard her voice.

I decided to do something desperate. I took her to Father Herman.

***

At 2400, I woke her up. I half expected her to protest, which would at least have been something, some sign of life. But there was no protest, no spark even of curiosity in her eyes. She stood like a doll as I slipped her arms into the sleeves of her sweater. Her hand was limp in mine as she followed me through the corridors without eagerness or resistance. Doubts chased each other through my mind: what exactly did I expect Father Herman to do? What if he wasn’t even there? But I remembered the countless times I had watched him, had seen the torment on his face replaced by peace as he stood in the starlight. Anyway, I had no other plan. My love for my mother and my gratitude for the beauty she had shown me gave strength to my steps.

He was there, of course, in the observatory, standing still with his arms outstretched, his lips moving silently in prayers. He lowered his arms when he heard us coming, brought his eyes downwards from the stars to rest on my face.

“Kasha,” he said, simply. “And this must be your mother?”

“Yes.” I struggled for words. Somehow I had failed to consider what I wanted to say when we got here. “Father Herman, I don’t know if you heard. How she lost her job in the Ag Lab. And then… she… I don’t know. It seems like she stopped caring about everything. I was hoping maybe you.. I don’t know–”

He nodded as I spoke, and when he replied, it was to my mother. “It is a hard thing, to lose the only source of beauty you can see. But Yuti, all is not lost. He has written His image also on our faces.”

I hadn’t expected him to know my mother’s name, but it must have been included with my academic records in the computers.

She didn’t answer him, so he turned back to me. “How long has she been like this?”

“Ten days,” I said. “She hasn’t spoken for ten days.”

“I will pray for her. This is what you desire?”

“Please.”

“Oh Heavenly King,” he began, “The Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, You who are everywhere and fill all things. Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.”

He continued to pray, his words washing over me like the cleansing wipes my mother used to bathe me when I was a child, but more flowing. Like the water in the hydroponics, but sweeter, more nourishing. The prayer lasted a long time. I wish I could say that I heard every word, or even that I managed to keep my body reasonably still. I did not. I shifted from foot to foot, and my mind wandered from the unfamiliar notion that a God might exist who was “the Great Physician and Healer of souls and bodies” to my work in the lab to a project I had due for school and back again to a plea to “heal her every ailment and forgive all her sins.”

But I did manage to keep my eyes on my mother’s face. I could never bear to draw what her face looked like before that prayer, else I would have tried to sketch the transformation, the way her eyes gradually filled back up with life, the gentle smile that crept shyly onto her face like a seedling uncurling.

When Father Herman had finished, she thanked him–the sweetest words I had ever heard then, though I have since heard sweeter.

“Thank you. It means a lot to know that someone cares.”

He looked at me and then back at her. There was a question on his face, though he didn’t speak it. He said merely: “Go in peace.”

So we went, leaving him there, bathed in the pale light of the stars.

***

“Today,” Father Herman announced at the start of class, “I am going to tell you a story that is a bit different from those you have yet heard from me. Different, because I believe this one is true.”

I was feeling shy after having disturbed him the previous night, and didn’t want to meet his eyes, though I could feel him looking straight at me. With my tablet screen dark, I could only pretend to be intensely interested in my fingers.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth–”

“You believe in God?” someone interrupted. “I thought they screened for that in immigration.”

“My work here is to tell stories,” Father Herman replied. “I explained all this on my immigration application. I only wanted to explain why the way I tell this one might seem different.”

And it was, I noticed as he went on. He spoke as though he were reciting, and the quiet joy on his face was more intense even than usual. His words filled my mind with pictures, and my fingers itched for the stylus of my tablet. I wanted to draw the sky suddenly filled with stars, the land with plants, the sky with birds, the sea with fish. Things that had never interested me, that had only been pictures on a screen, were made beautiful by the longing in Father Herman’s voice. The man shaped from the earth, the woman shaped from the man–this I did draw later, in chemistry where our tablets were not blocked.

And then the snake: “Did God really say?”

The woman took the fruit and tasted its sweetness. God called in the coolness of the day.

Father Herman was still looking at me. “Who told you you were naked?”

And then the earth was cursed because of the man, and the woman was given pain, and the snake was destined to be crushed.

“We have twenty minutes remaining in class,” he concluded. “Choose one person: the man, the woman, or the snake. Respond to the following: did the punishment fit the crime?

I wrote about the snake. The man and the woman were more or less tricked, and twenty minutes wasn’t time enough for me to sort through the intricacies of that morality. But the snake was the spark–if any punishment was deserved, it was his. I wrote about the necessity of preventing more harm; I wrote that I would have crushed him instantly. Why would a god be willing to wait?

***

I sat nervously at the table in our apartment, expecting my mother to be home from work any minute. I hadn’t seen her in the morning–she left before I woke up–and I wasn’t certain how long the effects of Father Herman’s prayer might last. When she finally walked in, I was sketching on my tablet. Lilies. Over and over again, lilies. Perhaps that was the only way I knew yet to pray.

My mother was humming. She looked me in the eye and smiled. I felt the tension melt from my body.

“He was right, Kasha! It is enough, the beauty on people’s faces. It was enough, for today. I’d like to talk with him some more.”

“We can!” The words bubbled out of me, released by my relief, my eagerness to do anything to help her stay okay. “He teaches my literature class! I’ll talk to him tomorrow, and we can set up a time to meet–”

I was interrupted by a knock. My mother and I looked at each other. People didn’t visit much at all in the compound, and they certainly didn’t visit us.

Father Herman looked a bit sheepish when I opened the door.

“I know I wasn’t invited,” he began, “but I was wondering if it would be okay with you if I blessed your apartment. It’s a tradition in the Orthodox Church. For everyone, really, but I thought especially in your case. To protect against evil spirits.”

I half expected my mother to object. I half expected myself to object. We were scientists, the two of us. We probably didn’t believe in prayer, much less in evil spirits. But I didn’t want to be rude to Father Herman, and my mother–she was nodding already.

“That would be wonderful,” she said with all her old confidence. “Please come in.”

He did. And then he began to take wonders out of his bag: things that are commonplace to me now, but rarities in the Martian compound. Two little cards printed with pictures; a paintbrush, a bowl, and a little bottle of water–it looked as though it were made of glass. He propped the cards up on our table. One showed a man with a circle around his head; he was holding a book with writing in a language I didn’t recognize. The other showed a woman holding a child. They also had circles draw around their heads, and they wore that same peaceful expression I had come to associate with Father Herman. Faces like lilies.

“Who are they?” I asked, touching the paper gently. It was so much softer than a screen.

Father Herman smiled. “The man is the one who crushed the serpent’s head. The woman is his mother. If you like, you may keep the icons.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

We stood, the three of us, and he began to pray. Again, the words washed over me, surrounding me. Again, I didn’t completely understand.

And then he was singing, a hymn I didn’t understand at all: “When Thou, O Lord, were baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest.”

He dipped his paintbrush into the water, which he had poured into the bowl, and started flinging it around the room. My mother and I watched, amazed at the extravagance. Water in the compound was for drinking and washing, too precious to throw at the walls.

When he had finished, he splashed us also, and then he bent and kissed each picture–each icon. Then he reached into his bag and pulled out a week’s worth of ration bars.

“Please, take these,” he told my mother. “To give your body a bit of extra strength with which to support your soul. And both of you: feel free to visit me if you’d ever like to talk.”

He left us with the icons and the food, the holy water still dripping down our faces.

***

My mother started to pray.

I would half wake up, some mornings, around 0500, long before I needed to get up for school. As though in a dream, I could hear her whispering: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.”

I would feel safe, then, somehow, as though our whole apartment was protected by an unseen Presence I almost recognized, and I would nestle back into the covers and fall back asleep.

She must have been going to see Father Herman, because after a few weeks, another little printed icon appeared in our apartment next to the other two. This one showed the same man, the One I would later learn to call Jesus, the One who had crushed the serpent’s head. In this picture, He stood on a pair of crossed wooden beams, grasping the hands of a man and a woman, as though he were pulling them out of a hole. When I asked my mother, she explained that these were the ones from Father Herman’s story–the man Adam and his wife Eve–and that Jesus was pulling them out of the deepest hole, out of hell itself.

I started visiting Father Herman too, after that. It was always strange to step inside out of the gray corridor; his apartment was so full of things. Shipping from earth was a premium, so most apartments were like ours: bare of all but the basic necessities. I still don’t know how Father Herman managed to afford it all. His walls were covered with icons. Mostly printed cards like those he had given us, but also a few painted on wood. A shelf on the wall was lined with bottles: holy water, oil, wine. Besides the typical ration bars like those he had shared with my mother were unfamiliar little packages wrapped in foil.

“Freeze-dried bread,” he explained. “I use it for Holy Communion when I celebrate the Liturgy.”

He always answered any questions I had, and he told stories too.

“The Faith is not a set of facts–it is a story God is writing on the cosmos. How can you learn by any way other than the Way the Master teaches?”

I loved him. He was so gentle, always giving. Often, he would send me home with a few extra ration bars for my mother and me.

“Aren’t you ever hungry?” I would ask.

“Always, Kasha. But not for food.”

***

“I’m going to be baptized.” My mother said it shyly, as though she wasn’t sure that I would approve. I looked up from the paper on epigenetic changes in Martian tomatoes that I was writing for my internship. “This Saturday, Father Herman says. And after that… Kasha, he says I should go to Earth.”

To Earth. It wasn’t impossible to go to Earth, but it wasn’t something you could do lightly either. My mother would have to apply to the mayor for special permission, and if her petition was granted, it would be almost impossible to come back.

“But why?”

“The Church is on Earth, he says.”

“But he’s not on Earth!”

She didn’t seem bothered. “You’ll have to talk to him about that. But Kasha… will you come with me?”

“To be baptized, or to come to Earth?”

“I was hoping maybe both?”

There was laughter in her voice, and her eyes were glowing, like they used to when she would bring me to see a new flower she had grown. When I followed her to the flowers, I was never disappointed.

***

I got to the observatory before he did that evening. I wanted to be alone for a while before I decided. I stood while I waited and prayed the simple prayer Father Herman had taught me: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I looked up at the stars. The beauty I saw there, the beauty of the lily, the beauty on Father Herman’s face. I wanted to be part of that beauty too. I wanted to love God the way Father Herman did. I wanted to be baptized.

I stood still then, quietly, wrapped in the light of the stars, rejoicing in the certainty of having decided. I didn’t notice Father Herman approaching until he was right in front of me. There must have been something written on my face, because he took one look at me and smiled.

“So, you also will be baptized. Glory to God!”

“Yes, Father,” I answered. “But first I wanted to ask you one thing: you told my mother she should go to Earth. I don’t understand.”

“The Church is on Earth.”

“That’s what she said, but I still don’t understand–you’re here on Mars. Aren’t you part of the Church?”

“Oh, Kasha.” He made the sign of the cross and murmured under his breath: “For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for the sake of my brethren…” And then louder: “Come and sit with me.”

He drew me over to the chairs along the wall. For a moment, he looked as though he were going to speak right away, but then he let the silence stretch. Finally, he pointed upwards.

“That one, that bright speck in the heavens, that is the place where God took on flesh. It is written that at the end of days, He will return there, and His Glory will shine from one end of the sky to the other. They argue about what that means, in the seminaries. Some say of course the whole universe will see Him, for His Spirit is everywhere present and fills all things. Everywhere surely includes Mars.”

He paused again, still looking upwards.

“It is hard to be a Christian here, Kasha. All the ways in which God sends us his joy are muted. The flowers blooming in the spring, the song of the thrush and the nightingale, sunlight sparkling on water–” his voice caught, but after another pause he was able to go on. “I know He’s here. It’s just harder to remember. I don’t want that for you. I want you to know that you’re surrounded by His love. And the churches–I want you to hear the choir singing, see the candles, smell the incense. If it’s possible at all, I want that for you.”

A long time, then, we sat in silence.

“You should go home now, Kasha. Fast as much as you can between now and Saturday. Join your mother’s application for passage to Earth. And remember me in your prayers.”

***

Saturday morning, we stood solemnly before the icons in Father Herman’s apartment. Whether through Father Herman’s prayers or simply the mayor’s pity, our application to immigrate to Earth had been approved unusually quickly, and just in time. The orbits of Earth and Mars align for efficient travel only about every two years, and we had barely made the cut-off for this cycle’s shuttle. We were queued up to leave the next day.

“I wish you could wait and do this on Earth,” Father Herman told us. “But I would not have you make such a dangerous journey unbaptized. Are you ready then?”

We nodded.

Father Herman breathed into our faces and traced the sign of the cross over us, then laid his hands on our heads. “Let us pray to the Lord.”

And we did. We renounced Satan, the serpent from the story. We declared that we had united ourselves to Christ. We bowed to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

Father Herman blessed the water–not a huge tub like would have been used on Earth, but a large bowl, all that the three of us had been able to spare from our drinking rations over the last few days. He anointed us each on the forehead, on the breast and shoulders, on our ears, our hands, our feet.

He didn’t move quickly, but somehow I had imagined it all taking longer, as though the importance of the ceremony would lengthen the moments. It was already time.

“The handmaid of God, Katherine, is baptized, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Three times he poured water over my head. I will always remember the extravagance of that water, pouring over my face, my hair dripping with it.

Then he handed me a uniform–bleached from brown to white. “The servant to God, Katherine, is clothed in the robe of righteousness, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” I went to change in Father Herman’s small bathroom. When my mother came out after me, also dressed in white, her face was shining. I wondered if I looked the same.

Father Herman anointed us again and then we were walking around the bowl of water, which he had placed in the middle of the floor.

“As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, Alleluia,” he sang, his voice breaking.

***

The first time I took communion was on Mars, directly following my baptism. In that small, quiet room, I had looked into Father Herman’s face and tasted Christ.

The second time, I was surrounded by lily blossoms. My mother and I had only been on Earth for a few weeks, and everything was so new: I still marveled every time I stepped outside and felt the wind on my face. I was learning to stand in the shade of trees taller than houses and to taste the warm sweetness of strawberries.

But stepping into the shimmering darkness of that church was something so beautiful I could hardly bear it. It was Pascha, the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection, and the nave was full of candles, full of people, full of icons. All I could do was stand and absorb the smell of the incense, the joy of the people singing. If I had moved, it would have been too much for my senses to bear.

I tasted God, present with me in fresh bread and red wine, and the words of the Paschal homily echoed in my ears: “The table is richly laden… let no one go hungry away.”

Laura Pavlik thanks God for questions. She loves asking them, answering them, and critiquing the answers of others. This seems to be the common preoccupation among her vocations: science teacher, wife, mother, and writer.

Copyright © 2025 Laura Pavlik & Incensepunk Magazine

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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By Hank Shore

The yew sapling was dying and Father Samuel didn’t know why.

He had planted it on the crown of the hill overshadowed by the massive fortress that comprised the Order of St. Centestrius Abbey. Perhaps it had been a selfish act, a guilty reminder of Earth and home, a sign of weakness in failing to trust God with everything. But now, the young tree was dying and it filled him with sadness.

He poured the cup of water at the base of the tree, looked around once more at the sere and forbidding landscape of the planet Philisia that surrounded him, and started back for the Abbey.

The walk to the entrance of the Fortress was long–itsat on what amounted to a miniature plateau, most likely artificial, guarding the southern outcrop of the Ruined Continent, as the Philistians liked to call it. The Philistians had not been forthcoming about the history of the struggle that had scorched the northern landmass. They had simply noted in the initial interview with the Order that the Fortress had survived, that it would serve as a suitable Abbey, and that all else was irrelevant.

An earth tremor interrupted his rumination when he was halfway down the embankment. It was quick but intense, an upheaval of the ground that never failed to startle him, owing to the very real risk of falling or loosened rocks. The unquiet earth was just another legacy of this strange land, though never much of a nuisance in the Abbey. Brother Thomas had suggested that the structure’s artificial plateau might be some sort of shock-absorbing system, but Father Thomas found the idea to be absurd. The size alone staggered him.

By the time Samuel reached the road that led to the massive opening of the Fortress, the sun was about to set. He stared at the wizened reddish globe as it began to sink towards the horizon and shivered slightly. It would be cold tonight. There were no clouds in the sky, nothing to prevent the heat of the land from escaping into the depths of space spread out above him. He wondered if that might be the problem with the yew tree–an inability to cope with this alien land and the hardships it offered. He sighed and entered the main gate.

He had barely cleared the portcullis when the first nuke struck.

n intense flash of light somewhere off to the left caused the titanium walls of the portcullis to smoke, and a moment later the shockwave hit. It must have been a near miss.

Samuel had hardly turned when a wave of dust and heat propelled him into the tunnel like being slapped by a gigantic hand. He landed on the decking, aware of nothing but pain and a slow fading into nothingness.

Consciousness returned slowly. At first, Samuel was merely aware of pain, the dull, pervading ache that his body seemed to have become. For the longest time, all he could do was lie against the titanium wall of the portcullis, staring through the lead glass seals that had dropped into place and narrowly missed crushing him like an insect.

There was a sound and a certain smell that attracted his attention and Father Samuel froze when he saw the creature emerge from the Abbey’s first junction. Samuel had never been afraid of bugs, but what he saw could have pushed him in that direction. The creature was large and multi-jointed, perched on a succession of legs that grasped the stanchions of the Abbey’s walls to regard him coldly through a host of multi-faceted eyes. Samuel wondered if he could actually see his reflections in them.

The thing was armed, sporting a blast cannon that was pointed somewhere in the vicinity of Samuel’s head. The creature’s antennae twitched this way and that, sampling the air as it slowly moved towards the monk.

The blast cannon fell to the titanium floor with a clang and the creature rushed forward, a staccato clicking filling the air before it lifted the abbot into the air.

“Father Samuel, you’re alive! God be praised! Tkk! Tkk! Who’s attacking us? Is it the Lutherans?” The Mantidarian’s rasping clicks seemed meaningless, but its translation voder had a pleasant-sounding male voice that sometimes reminded Samuel of one of the old movie stars.

“What are you talking about?” Samuel asked. He still felt queasy and a little sick.

The Mantidarian set him down and pointed wordlessly towards the portcullis with one of his smaller arms. Samuel felt a chill. The lead glass walls were thick, but he could make out the image of dust, fire and the shimmer of radiation that lay beyond. The air seemed to glow against the distant hills, even as another flash, distant and lurid, turned the entire scene into a negative. There was a roar that made even the Fortress tremble. He looked away, blinking, cognizant of how close he had been to becoming a radioactive cinder.

“I don’t think it’s the Lutherans, Brother Pssst-clik!” Samuel replied, though he had no idea who might be attacking them.

“I came looking for you after the first blast, Father,” Pssst-clik replied. “Tkk, tkk, chkkk! We shouldn’t really be here. You’re a mammal, and well,” Pssst-clik shrugged, difficult for a Mantidarian, “radiation doesn’t affect my kind like it does yours. You might get sick.”

Samuel nodded and got to his feet, though not without pain. The Mantidarian brother offered to carry him, but he politely refused. The pain was beginning to recede, and besides, Pssst-clik didn’t want to leave the blast cannon behind. He felt better when they rounded several corners and the glow of the Philistian hellscape receded.

“I don’t understand. If the Lutherans aren’t responsible for the attack, then who is?” Pssst-clik asked. For some reason, Pssst-clik had a paranoid fear of other denominations.

“I’m not sure,” Samuel answered. He remembered his meeting with the Philistians an hour ago. Another blast rocked the Abbey and sent them staggering against the wall. “We should be dead,” Samuel said as much to himself as to Pssst-clik! “And yet, we aren’t. Why?”

“I’m not a technical person, Father, but Brother Thomas is. Chak! Perhaps he would know.” The Mantidarian’s antennae swept this way and that and his color had turned into a sullen shade of gray. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the brother was afraid, terrified even by the constant grumbling of giants outside the Abbey walls.

“Then let’s go find him,” Samuel said, “and I know exactly where he is.”

***

“We have a saying among the Brotherhood, Ambassador: ‘At least we’re not working for the Nightspawn.’” The meeting at the holographic dais had become interminable and Samuel had blurted out the saying after the Ambassador’s thirteenth talking point regarding the Order’s work performance. Father Samuel knew that his knowledge of the Philistians was scarce, but he thought that the mild attempt at humor would have produced some kind of reaction with the Ambassador. Greel’s holographic image just sat there along with his entourage, as still as boulders as he digested Samuel’s latest words.

“Are you unhappy here, Father Samuel?” Greel asked.

“Oh, no, nothing of the sort,” Samuel replied with a smile. “We’re very grateful for the opportunity to help your people obtain a virtual presence in the Compendia Galactica.” It had been almost a year since the Brotherhood had taken the scanning project; God knew that they’d managed to stay on schedule despite the paucity of brothers working on the Archives and the constant micromanagement of the Philistians. For some reason, it was never enough. He couldn’t understand the need for this particular meeting or its urgency. He stifled a yawn. There was a slight buzzing and he blessed God for it.

“Excuse me, Ambassador Greel,” he said, trying not to be rude. The Philistians were rather touchy regarding protocol.

Samuel grabbed his cross and tapped the button on the back, not without a modicum of distaste.

“This is Samuel, go ahead,” he said. It was the Order’s wish that all brothers of a group be in constant communication, and since everyone wore a substantial piece of jewelry on the front of their cassocks, well, some genius back at Headquarters had thought it a stroke of inspiration, the joining of the practical with the spiritual. Samuel couldn’t help but sense a certain sacrilege in the choice, especially when he was forced to feed batteries into the back of his cross. It just wasn’t right.

“Father, this is Brother Hur.” The man’s voice, querulous as always, grated on Samuel’s senses. “Brother Thomas is still up in the command center and refuses to come down to help with the work, something about a ‘battle node’ that he’s discovered. I can’t process these paper records by myself. You need to talk to him.”

“It’ll have to wait,” Samuel replied. “I’m in the middle of a meeting with the Philistians.”

“Well, of course. But you really need to talk to him. Hur out.”

***

Samuel had a suspicion of mechanical devices, but he managed to swallow his discomfort as the elevator swallowed them and whisked them to the command center before his stomach could return to its rightful place.

For some reason, the metal chamber of the command center danced with light and motion, split by the occasional rumbling detonation beyond the walls. There was a man in the center of the room conducting a hurried monologue to no one.

“Brother Thomas,” Father Samuel said and stopped when the monk whirled around as if he’d been slapped. Thomas was a short fireplug of a man, his face weathered and wrinkled from his years as an engineman in the Terran Navy. His face glistened with spent tears.

“Father Samuel, I’m so sorry,” Thomas quavered. “There was nothing I could do. Isaiah and Peter… they came up to take a break on the observation deck. By the time we had a warning about the first nuke, the Abbey’s shield had already snapped on. They were trapped, couldn’t get back in...”

Before he could answer, Samuel noticed the observation deck. There was a rippling coruscation that lay over the doorway like a skin. It moved occasionally, a gossamer membrane that vibrated to the caress of an unseen wind. The things that lay on the parapet couldn’t have been, shouldn’t have been human, but the gorge rising in Samuel’s throat told him that they were. An Abbreviated Service for the Burial of the Dead passed through his lips almost without thought.

“I was trying to show the brothers the node,” Thomas rambled, “but they weren’t very interested. They decided to step outside to enjoy the view and two minutes later Fortress sounded the alert and snapped on the shield.”

“Fortress?” Samuel asked.

“Sir!” An enormous holographic face coalesced into the center of the room. It was roughly triangular, a rotating shield with bulbous black eyes perched at the apex and a mouth slit in the center. The presence of the image was startling, enough to set off a chorus of buzzes and clicks from the Mantidarian that the voder couldn’t translate–most likely profanity.

“Fortress, this is Commander Samuel,” Thomas said.

“Commander?” Samuel asked as he glanced sideways at Thomas.

“Fortress wanted to know who was in charge of the Ab…, of the defense station,” Thomas said with a shrug. “I told him.”

“Present and accounted for, sir,” the image intoned. It had stopped rotating and had fixed Samuel with a searchlight stare. There was another explosion, this one quite close. The membrane covering the slit port went dead black and Samuel’s skin crawled at the thought of the energies raging just a few meters away.

“I’ve not seen you before,” Samuel said, relying on his experience dealing with novices.

“I am the guardian of this defense station, sir,” the image replied. “I was in residual mode until Brother Thomas reawakened my higher functions yesterday. Fortunate, considering that this base is currently under attack.”

“In my experience there’s nothing that I would attribute to fortune,” Samuel replied. He had no desire to argue metaphysics or discuss theology with a machine. AI always made him uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the nagging realization that what floated before him was a product of the creature rather than the Creator.

“Of course, sir. I was merely pointing out this station’s capabilities for repelling such an assault. A lesser fortress would have succumbed to firepower of this magnitude.”

“Do you know who’s attacking us?” Samuel asked.

“My information is limited, Commander. Sensor frequencies are being jammed at present. The nuclear resonance signatures are comparable to previous attacks. Whoever they are, they’re quite persistent.”

“When was the last attack carried out?” Thomas asked.

“Approximately three thousand, four hundred and twenty years ago.” There was a brief pause as Fortress’ image froze. “Excuse me, commander, but there is a high priority laser modulation being routed to this facility. I believe that the call’s for you. Shall I open a channel?”

“Uh, please,” Samuel replied.

Fortress’s image winked out, to be replaced by the familiar image of Ambassador Greel. The alien looked somewhat surprised to see him.

“Father Samuel, are you alright? What’s going on? Seismic sensors on the Ruined Continent are off the scale.”

“We seem to be under attack, Ambassador,” Samuel replied. For some reason, he felt like yelling, though he knew the Ambassador could hear him.

“An attack? From whom!?”

“We don’t know! Fortress has managed to repel the bombardment to this point, but I’m not sure how long we can hold out. The machinery is rather old.”

“I heard that!” came Fortress’s voice from an unknown speaker.

Greel looked off to the side and spoke a sentence or two to an invisible aide. He nodded at the reply. “It seems to be coming from the northern portion of the Ruined Continent,” replied the big alien. “Aid is being dispatched. We have a flotilla of suborbital transports prepping for launch as we speak. We can be in your vicinity within the hour. If you can hold out until then, we should be able to affect a rescue. Are you sure that you have no idea who’s behind this attack?”

“You have my word, Ambassador,” Samuel replied. “We aren’t in the habit of cultivating enemies.”

The Ambassador continued to speak for several minutes, a soliloquy that Samuel felt he’d heard before, the patois of a born politician. He knew that the alien was trying to infuse them with a sense of hope, but he felt curiously forlorn when the Philistian finally signed off.

He turned to face Thomas and Pssst-clik. The expressions on their faces told him all.

“That’s it? ’Be brave, my brothers?’” Thomas said. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“He does seem to be something of a stuffed shirt,” Samuel replied. “Fortress, are you still there?”

“Yes, Commander.” The holographic face returned, looking for all the world like a metal shield with eyeballs on the edges.

“Obviously, you were monitoring our conversation.” Samuel said. “Do you think that you can withstand this assault until help arrives?”

“The chances of survival are good. This defense station has withstood fifteen separate blasts of varying mega-tonnage, plus an odd assortment of anti-personnel weapons designed to destroy living tissue. Fortunately, the surface shield and hermetic sealing of the fortress have repelled the various gases and nano-dusts used. There are a number of approaching projectiles in flight. They are targeted and will be dealt with when they are within range. The destruction of the surrounding countryside is considerable. I doubt that you will want to remain here once the attack has been beaten back.”

Samuel was about to answer when his attention was diverted. The elevator had disgorged another brother, someone that he’d never expected to see so far from the Archives.

“Brother Hur?” Samuel asked. “What are you doing here?” It was easy to tell that Brother Hur was upset. His normally florid face had achieved a greater shade of crimson and his portly figure shook with an ill-concealed rage. The already tense atmosphere of the command center went up a notch.

“Am I the only person who works around here?” he rasped. “Peter and Isaiah are experts at the coffee break, Thomas can’t get away from his hobby center, which leaves me to do all the work! The paper stores in the secret chamber aren’t going to move or translate themselves, you know. And now I find you up here, Father Samuel, with Brother Bug shooting the breeze with… what the hell is this?”

Brother Hur noticed the holographic face of Fortress for the first time. At that moment, there was a roar and a flash of light as another nuke, possibly a direct hit, blossomed outside. When Father Samuel regained his composure, Hur’s rage had drained away, replaced by the startled realization that he’d been missing something significant while buried in the Archives.

***

“I’m sorry, Ambassador Greel,” Samuel said as he keyed off his cross. “Two of the brothers don’t get along. Brother Thomas is somewhat technically minded and the Abbey is a vast treasure trove of wonders. Brother Hur is our resident paper expert.”

“I see,” Greel replied. “Fortunate that you have a specialist in light of your discovery.” The hologram that sat before Father Samuel on the granite dais in the shadow of the Fortress displayed a group of tall, heavy-set creatures that was marginally humanoid, but handsome in their own fashion. And xenophobic, he thought. All of the business between the Philistians and the Order had been conducted remotely. The scanning ad had been listed in the Compendia Galactica, the contract had been signed over subspace, even the specialized equipment and the domestic stores had been waiting for them beside the Fortress in a robot transport with strict instructions not to venture beyond its property or even certain portions of the Fortress itself. Irritating, for certain, but times had been hard and even a monastery had to eat. That plus the extra benefit of staying free of charge in the abandoned fortress that housed the Archives had put Samuel in a forgiving mood.

“Yes, the paper cache that I mentioned in my last report was found quite by accident. We used to work with the material exclusively. It’s how my order got its start in the monasteries of Europe.”

“I would assume it to be quite old.” The Ambassador shifted his rather ponderous weight this way and that as if he might be uncomfortable.

“Well, I’m not an expert; you’d have to check with Brother Hur. I’ve rarely seen him so excited. The paper predates the digital period of your world. I’d say that Philistia has a great treasure in its possession.”

“I’m sure that you’re correct, Father Samuel,” the Ambassador replied, “and I have more than enough confidence that you and your brothers will be able to consolidate your latest find into the digital matrix.”

The alien’s words struck Samuel like a fist.

“Surely you don’t propose to digitize this latest cache in the same manner as the other types of media?” Samuel asked, aghast.

“Well, of course, why not?” The great alien’s face registered puzzlement that anyone could see.

“The records… don’t you see… are priceless,” Father Samuel stammered. “This is different from the electronic media and the 3D artifacts that we’ve scanned and destroyed as per your instructions. You have a trove of historical documentation, valuable in its own right. I can understand your desire to be rid of the various forms of media after we’ve scanned and uploaded it, but to scan these documents and then disintegrate them would be… criminal.”

He had acquiesced to the demands of the Philistians after accepting the job, but the requirement to destroy all types of media after digitization struck him as foolish. The combination scanner/disintegrators the Philistians had supplied them brooked no second chances and he knew his brothers well enough to realize that mistakes were common and frequent.

Greel chuckled.

“You humans are all the same, always fascinated by the ancient and the arcane. It’s one of the quaintest aspects of your species. Please be aware that we do have a contract with your order and we’d hate to have to complain to your Headquarters.”

The rest of Greel’s statement was as condescending as it was jovial, a combination that never failed to irritate Samuel to the extreme. He sighed and turned from the dais, assigning two penances to himself for good measure.

***

“I just can’t believe that you’d be unaware we were under attack,” Father Samuel said as the trio descended to the Archives in the elevator. Brother Hur’s astonishment in the command center had been comical, but his recovery regarding the rain of nukes falling on them had been swift. When Hur told Samuel that something in the Archives demanded his immediate attention, it made little sense for them to remain in the control center. They left: Samuel, Pssst-clik, and Hur with the promise from Thomas that he’d remain in contact.

“I’ve been busy translating, Father,” Hur grunted. “I thought we were just going through another earthquake cycle. You do realize that the Ruined Continent sits atop a dormant super-volcano. Earth tremors shouldn’t be that unusual.”

“Yes, you’ve told me before,” Father Samuel replied, trying to remain pleasant.

“That makes sense, Father,” Brother Pssst-clik replied. The bombardment had been reduced to a sullen grumbling as the elevator descended deeper into the Abbey.

“Nice little pistol you have there, Brother Bug,” Hur said as he viewed the Mantidarian’s blast cannon. “Where did you pick that up?”

“I found it in one of the lower corridors, and please don’t call me that,” Pssst-clik replied. The Mantidarian had achieved a defensive posture without even being aware of it.

“And what if I don’t?” Hur asked.

“Queen Natherax commanded us never to eat another human being after the fiasco of the First Expedition. It would mean death, but I might make an exception.”

“I’ve got another windshield joke if you care to listen…”

“Enough!” Samuel snapped. “Think what this bickering does to your souls. You said you had something to show me, something important. Well, what is it?”

The elevator had come to a halt, its doors opening onto the Archives. What had once been a munitions storage depot had been transformed, the transport racks now laden with the artifacts and ephemera of an entire culture. There were numerous digitization stations scattered here and there, all of them occupied by busy monks, except for two. They walked past Isaiah’s and Peter’s stations and Samuel felt a hand grip his heart. The trio walked past these, going deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of woven plastic and steel conduits. They came to a stop at a place that Samuel found all too familiar, a secret panel that had burst during the early days of their work, releasing a cascade of sheets into the corridor. There was a table that groaned under the weight of reams of paper. Brother Hur carefully picked up a weathered, brownish sheet and gazed at it.

“Most of this stuff has been an insult to my training and to my intelligence,” he grumbled. “Bills of lading and manifests, standard InterGalac 30, hardly worth the effort of turning them into bits.” The monk placed the sheet on top of a pile of paper with a gentleness that belied his contempt.

“Most of it,” Samuel said. “Obviously, there’s something that’s piqued your interest.”

“Yes,” Hur answered, looking uncomfortable, the first time that Samuel could remember such an expression on the man’s face. He picked up a dull sheet of reddish-orange metal, something like copper or bronze that bore a series of marks that appeared to have been hastily punched into the surface. “I was going through a pile near the rupture when I came across this.”

“What is it?” Pssst-clik! asked.

“Unnerving,” Brother Hur replied with a grimace. “The language is InterGalac 4, I mean, this is really old stuff dating approximately three or four galactic revolutions past. There must have been some kind of stasis circuit in the secret compartment or even the metal would have turned to dust, forget the paper. This is what I managed to translate:

‘They are coming. Contact with the other defense stations has been lost. We have sustained significant casualties after a sustained bombardment. Most of us are dead. Fortress seals remain intact, but it is only a matter of time before radiation or something manages to penetrate the barriers. I have set defense controls to residual once there are no more life signs registered within the walls. Hopefully, the enemy will consider the station to be a dead hulk and leave it alone.

‘There is no one left–they have wiped us out. It is possible that they will not try to enter the fortress if they detect no lifesigns, but I can take no chances. I will hide this and the other evidence and hope that it is discovered by a sympathetic being. May someone find this record and give witness to the crime against an entire people.’”

Father Samuel crossed himself out of long habit. The message of despair weighed upon him, even as the fortress shook from another blast somewhere outside. He imagined the metal plate lying in the darkness all those eons, suddenly coming to light just as they faced their own trial by fire. He found it difficult to accept the discovery as a coincidence.

“Do you think it was written by a former inhabitant of the Ruined Continent?” Samuel asked. “The Philistians have admitted as much to having a violent history and the lifelessness attests to it. This could have been inscribed by one of the losers.”

“I’m a paper expert, Father Samuel, not a historian.”

“Here it comes,” Pssst-clik whispered.

“However, I’ve studied some ancient languages for entertainment,” Hur said, throwing a dirty look in Pssst-clik’s direction, “InterGalac being among them. The word that our unknown writer uses for ‘people’ could also be translated as ‘species’ if you wanted to get picky. We may not be witnesses to a war as much as a genocide.”

“There’s nothing else on the plate?”

“No, Father. Whoever wrote the message must have placed it in the secret chamber, sealed it and went to their fate, hoping that the location of the cavity would someday come to light.” Hur held the plate gingerly, and not without a little fear. “There’s something hasty about the way the characters were set down. Obviously, the writer didn’t have a great deal of time.”

Samuel was about to add something when his cross beeped and he answered it. It was Thomas, and he wasn’t happy.

“I don’t think that the Philistians are going to get here in time, Father. Fortress has picked up a new batch of signals and they’re coming in fast. Whatever they are, they’re big,” Thomas’s voice cracked. “Fortress isn’t sure that he can repel them.”

“If the command center is in danger, I order you to seek a more fortified position,” Samuel said.

“Yes, Father.” Thomas was sullen, as if he’d been insulted somehow.

Samuel keyed off, meeting the stares of the two other people in the Archives with as brave a face as possible. He knew what was expected of him. He just wondered if Pssst-clik and Hur knew this as well.

“What can we do?” Hur asked.

“The most important thing.”

***

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Brother Pssst-clik said. For privacy’s sake, they had moved to another alcove of the Archives choked with the tangled detritus of the Philistian civilization. “It’s been over a week since my last confession.”

“What do you wish to confess?” Samuel asked.

“Are you familiar with the history of my people?” Pssst-clik asked.

“Only the basic history. The Mantidarians were the first alien culture contacted by humanity. Why?”

“I suppose we were almost the last, as well, after what happened. You have to understand that human beings closely resembled a biped that lived in the jungles of Mantidaria and we fed upon them when the opportunity presented itself. Captain Fornax and his expedition had the misfortune of being in the wrong place and the wrong time when they landed in the palace complex.”

“And that was…?”

“Dinner time,” Pssst-clik replied. “By the time the royal guard had discovered Fornax’s ship, it was too late.”

Samuel said nothing. Pssst-clik gave a rasping series of clicks that was translated as a sigh.

“It’s difficult to tell an off-worlder how we felt. We had violated the Rule of Hospitality; we had eaten guests. When Queen Natherax gave the order for us to commit mass suicide, well, you know that Mantidarians aren’t as individual as humans. We complied with her command.”

“And then the Augustinian Expedition made contact,” Father Samuel said. “And the surviving members of your race converted to Christianity en masse.”

“When Father Josephus told us the story of our Blessed Lord who sacrificed Himself and even gave his Body and Blood–” Pssst-clik splayed his forearms in an almost human gesture “–nobody had ever done anything like that in Mantidarian history. We became acquainted with sacrifice for the first time.”

“Some people say that the Mantidarians converted out of fear,” Father Samuel said. “The Terran Navy was en route on a punitive mission before Josephus convinced it to stand down. Most of my people like to think that the Terran Navy was the reason you converted.”

The staccato buzz was translated as a dry chuckle. “I don’t wish to insult you, Father Samuel, but we are a very old race and very powerful. Fortunately, most of my people consider the Terran Sphere to be, well, adorable. We find your naivete to be refreshing when compared to such races as the Tenmouth, the Tilaxi–even the NightSpawn, may they forever eat dung.” There was a pause. “Sorry, Father. There were other reasons that we converted. As Queen Natherax said: ‘Humans are delicious, just not worth the guilt.’”

“We still haven’t dealt with the issue of sin, Brother Pssst-clik,” Father Samuel said, as gently as possible.

“I’ve had… thoughts, Father. I’ve engaged in fantasies that discredit me as a Christian. I’ve fantasized about eating the brethren, even,” at this the Mantidarian trembled, “some of the less palatable ones.”

“Brother Hur?”

“Especially Brother Hur, though not without some form of tenderizer.”

“Did you think of eating me?” Father Samuel asked.

“Yes, even you,” the voice from the voder was as dry and quiet as the rubbing of wheat stalks together. “That is why I confess these things as sin. You’re my abbot, but you’re also my friend.” Samuel felt a coldness in his head from the thoughts. The idea of such a powerful being as the Mantidarian holding its natural instincts in check by the power of love and spiritual discipline appalled him for some reason. Perhaps it was the thought of how tenuous those barriers might be. He took a deep breath.

“You have fought and that is good. Your sin is venial. Say two rosaries and consider your fasting exercises to be broken.”

“Father?” Pssst-clik stammered.

“I’m afraid that the writers of The Spiritual Tests couldn’t have foreseen the unique, ah, problems that brothers from other civilizations had to face, especially when natural processes were involved. We can’t have you eating your companions or your superiors. Make certain that you eat three square meals a day. In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, I absolve you. Go in peace.”

Samuel wasn’t looking forward to the next confession and Brother Hur didn’t disappoint him. Pssst-clik scuttled off to find something to eat and Hur rounded the corner almost immediately, as if the man might have been within earshot. Samuel said nothing.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been almost a month since my last confession.”

“What do you wish to confess?”

“I have been living a lie since I arrived on this planet and it is beginning to bother me. I’m a great deal more intelligent than I’ve let on and that has put you and the rest of the Order at risk.”

“I don’t understand,” Samuel replied.

“I’m not just a paper expert. Paper is just one of my hobbies,” Hur said with a sigh. The man seemed genuinely contrite. “In truth, I’m a Professor of Extinct Civilizations formerly of the Institute for Exo-Forensic Research. Or at least the satellite campus on Tau. Never got along with the bastards at the Terran campus. Sorry. In truth, I’m not even Catholic.”

“What made you join us?” Samuel asked, curious in spite of himself. He had never thought of Brother Hur as true monkish material, more of a candidate for the Foreign Legion, but one didn’t question God’s secret strategies. The fact that the man had chosen to flee to the Order was indicative of something deeper than even Hur might care to admit.

“Embezzlement,” Hur said, shrugging his shoulders. “I faked the accomplishments of my section and made off with the grant money when it was deposited. I wanted to do some specialty research and not be regarded as a laughingstock. Nobody would have given me a cent if I’d made my true intentions known.”

“You must have been truly desperate if you felt compelled to steal. What did you want to work on?”

“NightSpawn artifacts.”

Father Samuel recoiled a little but caught himself.

The NightSpawn were an abomination, a race that had made a bid for domination during the Galac 4 period and only the combined might of the civilizations existing at the time had stopped them. The scars of the conflict, the remains of dead and decimated civilizations existed to the present–Galac 30. Certain discrepancies in the Solar system were seen with new vision. The ruins on Mars and the altering of the Venusian ecosphere had been sobering discoveries, especially when such events were viewed as results of the NightSpawn war eons before. It was hard to believe that such a terrible race had made landfall on Earth. It was even harder to believe that, somehow, life on Earth had survived.

“The sin of theft is egregious,” Samuel said. “I can assign a penance, but there remains the issue of the funds. Compensation to the Institute will most likely be required. For that reason…”

“You don’t understand, Father,” Hur interrupted. “I’m not sorry for stealing the money. In less than an hour, it won’t matter. I’m sorry for withholding vital information. I had my suspicions, but neglected to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Samuel asked, exasperated.

“I believe we’re being attacked by a surviving branch of the NightSpawn.”

***

“Attention! Primary shield has been compromised. Enemy troops have penetrated Level 50. Standby to initiate Sterilization Protocol One. All defenders must take cover immediately.”

Fortress’s voice was recognizable, but had become harsh and metronomic. The collapse of the Abbey’s shield followed by a skein of static from Thomas’s cross clued Samuel that the end was probably near. He knew that they were safer in the Archives, the most heavily armored section of the Abbey, but the thought of Thomas in the command center, vulnerable and exposed, gnawed at him. The reaction of the two brothers came as no surprise when he told them what he planned to do.

“It’s suicide,” Hur said.

“The elevator might not be working, Father,” Brother Pssst-clik said. “That’s a long climb even for me.”

“I’ll have to take my chances. He may not even be alive, but I can’t leave someone in my charge alone. Especially…” Samuel shot a glance at Hur, “if the NightSpawn are responsible.”

“Dear God, all this time, we’ve actually been working for the NightSpawn?” Pssst-clik said. Even the voder sounded depressed.

“Most likely, the blips that AI homunculus detected were our ‘rescue’ flotilla. A collection of heavily armed suborbitals firing at the same time might actually be able to bring down the shield, if that’s what happened,” Hur said.

“But what about Ambassador Greel and the meetings we had?” Samuel grated. “I saw him. I talked to him. I mean, they weren’t human, but they certainly didn’t look anything like the race you described.”

“You may have been the victim of a holographic filter or a perceptual generator, Father,” Hur answered. “Such technology exists. Don’t be too hard on yourself. If they are the NightSpawn, we’re dealing with a culture that raised deceit to a high art during its time.”

“Then I need to go. Better early than late,” Samuel replied.

Samuel was mildly surprised when he keyed the elevator, turned around and found Brother Hur alongside Brother Pssst-clik.

“I just want to find out if this thing will actually work,” Pssst-clik said as he waved the blast cannon around.

“I never wanted to die hiding in some God-forsaken hole,” Hur said, his expression betraying a hint of irony. “Besides, to be one of the first living men to see a NightSpawn, even for a few seconds; that would be worth something.”

“An honor I could pass on,” Brother Pssst-clik said.

Any further conversation was interrupted by a sound like a dozen bowling balls bouncing around on the inside of the transit tube. The door slid open with a jerk as the elevator lozenge dropped the final foot to the level of the floor. Apparently, the Abbey’s machinery had suffered from the attack. The trio clambered aboard the elevator with a certain reluctance. When the door closed, Samuel wondered what it would open onto, or if they’d even live to exit. There was a lurch and they felt the pressure of transit, but slowly, not like the previous trip to the command center.

“Just out of curiosity, why are the NightSpawn attacking us?” Pssst-clik asked. “It’s not like we ever posed a threat or even bothered them. Why wait almost a year to kill us? And in such a spectacular fashion?”

“I think we’ve been the unwitting participants in a crime, brother,” Samuel said. “A cover-up. We hardly heard a peek out of the Philistians, er, the NightSpawn until they got wind of the paper cache.”

“And the metal plaque,” Hur interjected.

“Yes. I always thought it strange to digitize the records and destroy them in the same pass. Ambassador Greel was always quick to reassure me that the information was uploaded directly to the nearest node of the Compendia, but like a fool, I never thought to doublecheck his settings. For all I know, we’ve been beaming the information into the remotest depths of space without a receiver anywhere close to the signal. Whoever the Philistians were, God have mercy on their souls, they’re no longer here. They left behind an entire culture’s worth of evidence and we’ve been destroying it like the diligent little copyists that we are.”

“We’ve been erasing the Philistians’ culture?” Brother Pssst-clik asked. “Why not just nuke the archives and be done with it? It’s not like they needed us to do it. It would take too much time.”

“Excuse me, but you’re both wrong. I believe that it might be something more insidious than simple destruction,” Brother Hur responded. “None of the artifacts we’ve uploaded and destroyed are NightSpawn in origin, of that I’m sure. The NightSpawn survivors needed a place to hide after the Galaxy united against them. They chose a primitive world, a technological civilization that had not yet come under the Compendia’s scrutiny. After they, uh, ‘removed’ the original inhabitants of this world, there was still the problem of the Compendia. Sooner or later, they would be called upon to register. If they could voluntarily offer to upload their culture and weave a tight enough fabrication, nobody would investigate.”

“And we’ve been helping them,” Samuel said, trying not to be bitter. His faith had suffered since Hur’s confession–now he wondered if it might be dying.

“No wonder they gave us such good terms,” Pssst-Clik replied. The Mantidarian might have said something else, but he didn’t have time. The elevator reached their destination with a wheeze and a jolt that nearly knocked them to their knees.

When the door slid open, Samuel felt a flash of disorientation followed by the acid twinge of fear. The command center was a shambles, the machinery pulverized by whatever force had sliced through the ceiling and blown a portion of it into the darkling sky. A wind howled through the chamber, a devil’s breath that smelled of sulfur and felt like a stream of powdered glass. The dais that had generated Fortress had cracked and beside it lay a forlorn lump of brownish clothing.

“Thomas!” Samuel shouted.

His words were whisked away by the wind’s roar. Samuel stepped into the maelstrom and felt the abrasive breeze start to peel away the skin around his sandals. For once, he blessed that nameless abbot from the past who’d made their habit a robe. The heavy wool provided some protection, and he threw the hood over his head. He fell to the floor, as much to give the wind less purchase as to the fact that he simply couldn’t stand.

Slowly, Samuel clawed his way across the deck plating, the wind shrieking and the cries of Pssst-clik and Hur faint in his ears. He had no hope that Thomas was alive, but the man was under his charge.

He was within reach of Thomas’s body when he noticed the foot in his way, a large grayish stump rooted in his path. Slowly, his eyes traveled up the trunk, taking in more and more of the creature that blocked him. It was Ambassador Greel, and yet not Greel. For a second or two, he was confronted by the creature he’d spoken with over the hologram, and then something jittered in his vision and he was faced with a creature out of a nightmare.

Instead of the marginal humanoid shape of the ambassador, a tall lump of grayish fabric stared down at him with its single great eye behind the clear globe of its spacesuit helmet. A hole beneath the eye moved this way and that, fringed by a collection of tentacles that whipped across the face like Medusa. Occasionally, a tentacle would wipe the eye daintily.

It was possible that the creature was speaking to him, but whatever the thing said was lost in the roar of the wind that funneled down the hole in the ceiling like a living thing. The creature stopped speaking and aimed its massive tree trunk of a foot at Samuel’s head.

Samuel was old, but the force of terror itself gave him speed. He rolled, feeling the massive thing whiz past his head like a great, gray club, then the floor heaved him upward as the decking cracked and the monster that had called itself Greel lost its balance and fell.

The NightSpawn lay before him like a small hill. For a brief instant, the force of the wind was abated. He used the opportunity to grab the hem of Thomas’s robe and pull the man’s body towards him. The darkness that lay beyond the hole seemed to shift like a solid thing and Samuel realized that something hovered over the cleft ceiling of the fortress. Stressed metal howled as the suborbital settled over the hole, reducing the wind’s roar to a sullen mutter. A hatch yawned above him and several more creatures sailed through the hole. They came to rest beside their leader, who rose from the deck plating with as much dignity as he could muster.

“I’m sorry, Father Samuel, but I believe that it’s time to let you go,” the suited figure said. Apparently, it had figured out the use of its speaker. The voice was similar to Greel’s, but the inflections were harsher, more garbled.

“I’m afraid that working any further for the NightSpawn would constitute a serious conflict of interest on behalf of my order,” Samuel replied. “You made liars of us.”

The creature laughed and Samuel felt a chill at the sound that took pleasure in all the pain of the Galaxy.

“Yes, I must admit that I had to bite my tongue to keep from chuckling when you first mentioned it at our last meeting. You taxed our perceptual filter to the limit. The idea that such a pathetic group of creatures could take comfort in the fact that they had nothing to do with us was ironic, to say the least. It’s a pity that you won’t have the opportunity to share that joke with the other members of your Order. Your deaths and your work will go unrecorded.”

Greel’s assertion was not something he wished to hear, but it didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was the lack of fear. He had spent his entire life in the Order acknowledging that death was always present, a player in Life’s drama that might be delayed, but never denied its eventual role. He stared upward at the abomination that towered above him and wondered. It was very possible that this minion of hell before him would be the doorkeeper, the unwitting servant who would throw open the Gates of Paradise for him and the rest of the brothers. He simply had to let the creature know, one way or the other, that its path of evil and ruin would be forever in vain.

“You can’t hide, you know!” Samuel shouted. “Your existence upon this planet is a fact, part of the reality of the universe and as such, constitutes a form of information. It doesn’t matter if you try to conceal it. One way or the other, information will be free.” Samuel grimaced. Not the kind of admonition he’d hoped for. It was like a snippet from Library Science 101. It was a poorly fashioned arrow, but seemed to hit its mark just the same.

“Human,” Greel snarled. “Weak and late upon the scene. When we pour forth from this planet, renewed and strengthened after our long rest, I will count it a privilege to make the Earth one of our first ports of call. But first, let me borrow your skin,” Greel said, reaching down with an enormous claw. “It will make a nice trophy to hang on my cruiser.”

Samuel turned, shielding Thomas’s body with his own. There was a blast of sound and the air above his head moved, suctioned by the passage of something that intersected with the NightSpawn’s arm. It exploded it into a stump. Apparently, Brother Pssst-Clik had managed to fix the blast cannon. The arm fell to the deck plating like a log, writhing and pouring forth a brownish liquid that bubbled and stank. Greel must have been used to losing a limb occasionally. The NightSpawn roared and cinched the fabric of his suit closed, even as he tried to stomp Samuel into a paste.

Samuel skittered away like a crab, dragging Thomas while he dodged the footfalls of the creature. He fell and turned on the sandy flooring, sliding this way and that as the great elephant feet came down. He could feel the floor abrading his flesh, the corrugated pattern imprinting itself into his back and thighs, but he refused to let go of Thomas’s body. He saw Greel raise his foot one more time, saw the pattern on the underside of the suit and wondered what it would feel like. He closed his eyes.

“Stop,” said a small, still voice.

Samuel’s eyes flew open. There was something in the command center, a face that hovered over the cracked dais. It was easy to tell that the AI was not pleased. Greel and the NightSpawn soldiers had lost interest in Samuel.

“You will hurt these people no further,” the synthetic voice intoned.

“And what if I take issue with your demands,” Greel replied. “You are hardly in a position for such. My foot is on your neck. You are beaten.”

“You have defeated yourselves,” Fortress said. “It is only a matter of time before it becomes reality. Leave this place while you still can.”

“I take no orders from a machine,” Greel said as something black and menacing unlimbered itself from a pod on the NightSpawn’s shoulder. The thing swiveled and spat, flickering energy that burrowed into the dais and danced in a cascade of sparks over the AI’s face. If it bothered Fortress, it didn’t seem to show it.

“Very well, your fate is just. Father Samuel, run.”

Samuel needed no prompting. He threw Thomas over his shoulder in a superhuman effort and ran for the elevator. He feared to look back, possibly because Brother Pssst-Clik was waving the blast gun and he was afraid that the brother wasn’t that good of a shot. He could hear a roar of frustration from Greel behind him and a clank of machinery before him as the elevator door began to close. Leave it to Hur to push the Close button too soon. He managed to throw Thomas and himself into the compartment, even as a portion of his robe was sliced off by the door.

Even fainting and in pain, Samuel could tell that something was amiss. He knew they were at the top of the Abbey, there were no floors above him and yet, he felt the familiar sensation of acceleration. There was something else, a muttering in the depths of the Abbey that had nothing to do with the exterior hell that still sounded through the door. Metal fell upon metal with enormous clangs. The muttering grew into a roar as the floor tilted slightly, causing the brothers to slide this way and that. After a moment of confusion, Father Samuel understood.

“You could have told me that the Abbey was a spaceship!” Samuel shouted.

Thomas’s eyes fluttered open. He smiled with cracked lips and said with a surprisingly strong voice: “Sorry. It slipped my mind. I think it’s called Sterilization Protocol I.”

Thomas would die on the way up, but before breathing his last, he whispered one last revelation to his abbot.

***

The Terran Navy found them ten days later. Sensors had reported a substantial twisting in the space-time fabric and it was the Navy’s duty to investigate such an event. They held a Mass for Thomas and then a Mass of Thanksgiving which the Captain of the Aegis agreed to attend.

“First of all, let me offer my condolences on the death of your friend, Father,” Captain Van Neelan said. Several of the brothers had joined them in the mess hall after the second Mass had been performed in a hastily converted rec room. Hur and Pssst-clik had recovered from their injuries, as well as the rest of the members of the Order. The Abbey bulked enormous outside one of the viewports, though Samuel preferred not to watch the thing at the moment.

“Thank you, Captain. Your hospitality and treatment of our injuries have been most kind,” Samuel replied. “Have you managed to conduct a satisfactory investigation of the Fortress, one thorough enough for your superiors?”

“I doubt that,” Van Neelan rasped. “There are too many unanswered questions. Most likely, the report will be kicked upstairs several levels until some admiral decides to shelve the thing.”

“Surely you don’t doubt our depositions?” Hur asked, tactless as always.

“Of course not,” the captain replied. “Your point of origin wasn’t that far away. We nipped over and found a substantial dust ring forming around the star. No planet, but from what you told me…” Van Neelan winced. “I’m not surprised.”

Nor was Samuel. He remembered looking out one of the Abbey’s armored viewports when the planet still hung like a shield before them, a fiery wall with a gaping wound of molten rock that widened with every missile that blazed across the atmosphere towards it. The sight burned into his memory until he could stand it no longer and he turned away.

“Something about the Fortress disturbs you, Captain,” Pssst-clik stated.

“Yes,” Van Neeland answered sourly. He was a fireplug with reddish hair, achingly similar to Thomas. “I’m sorry, Father, but there’s no way in hell that that chunk of iron out there could have possibly done what you claimed!” The man seemed defensive, as if some finely-honed sense of reality had come under attack. “The AI’s circuits fried about the time that the pyramids were under construction, the force shield projector was a petrified ruin, the entire fortress had been gutted long ago!”

“That’s not possible,” Hur replied. “The NightSpawn threw everything they had at us. The bombardment destabilized the magma core beneath the continent.”

“I don’t think you appreciate what was there, or rather what was not there,” Van Neelan gestured. “The Fortress is a piece of junk. And yet,” the man gestured to the assembled monks, looking very unhappy, “here you are, alive and well.”

“Do you believe in God, Captain?” Pssst-clik asked quietly.

“Yes, I do,” Van Neelan replied, “but I can’t put the word ‘miracle’ in my report. You’ve done a great service to the Terran Sphere, hell, to the entire galaxy. You’ve provided us with a crapload of records detailing their latest atrocity, and through forces unknown… you’ve wiped out a tribe of the bastards, or were at least witnesses to their self-immolation.”

Father Samuel had to smile when the captain excused himself and left the members of the Order to their thoughts and their silences. Hur excused himself, and as if that was a cue, the rest of the brothers slowly dribbled away like liquid in a cup. Pssst-clik remained.

“He was a good man, Father,” said the brother.

It pained Samuel to realize that even Pssst-clik failed to read the emotion that now sat heavy on his heart, but it was confirmation that nobody was perfect. He sighed and looked over into the chitinous face whose heart probably held more faith than most humans. “Yes, he was. And he called something into being that saved us all.”

“What was it, Father?”

“Perhaps an angel. Or maybe it was a Philistian manifestation, the real Philistians taking vengeance for their extinction. I don’t know,” Samuel shrugged. “It was a miracle, and we’re alive because of it. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Before he died, he told you something,” Pssst-clik said. “Do you mind if I ask what it was?”

Samuel hesitated at the question. It brought back painful memories. I’m sorry, Father. I tried to save it. I even extended the shields around it, but it burned eventually. Please forgive me.

“He asked for forgiveness,” Samuel replied.

“Ah, his last confession,” the insectoid replied, nodding his triangular head. The answer seemed to satisfy Pssst-clik. He excused himself, allowing Samuel the privacy he’d been craving since their rescue. He picked at his food. The need to pray called out to him, but he resisted for the moment. He knew that eventually the memories would fade and he would be left with the simple gratitude for being alive. However, for the moment, he was weighted by the knowledge of what had happened to the infant yew tree.

Hank Shore is a writer living in Brevard, NC with his wife, Mary, and their Corgi, Riley. He likes Science Fiction and Photography which are forever vying for first attention. At the moment, writing is winning. He uses writing primarily as an excuse for collecting computers and pens. He works at the Bakery in the Ingles supermarket in Brevard.

Read his novels here:

Gray Galaxy

I, Thief

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