Orders of Magnitude
The resilience of the human—and holy—spirit in the darkness of space.
This month, we’re happy to present the first chapter of Yuval Kordov’s brand new novella, Orders of Magnitude, releasing Jan 7. Pre-order it now!
By Yuval Kordov
No one belonged on the Moon. Not before the disaster and not after, and yet here they were.
“How are we looking, Roy?”
Paladin-Captain Samuel Cohen craned over his pilot’s seat, squinting through the armor-plated window at the barren landscape below. It was a wasteland. Gray, silent, scarred by the ceaseless debris of space. As God intended. Earth’s only satellite was a shield, a bulwark against the void. Settling it had been a mistake.
“One minute out,” Lieutenant Roy replied, his voice tinny in Samuel’s helmet comms.
Their dropship, Seraph-1, skimmed over the lunar surface, kicking up a long trail of regolith dust. Up ahead, Serenitatis Colony loomed like a fortress of glass and steel, its geodesic domes glinting in the sun. It seemed peaceful from here, like a gravestone, but Samuel knew better. Peace was a lie.
“Do they see us yet?” he asked.
Streams of data scrolled down the pilot’s terminals, alongside wireframe renderings of the landing pad and an auto-turret at each corner. The weapons were outlined in gray, as dead as the surface.
“Defensive systems are online but passive,” Roy said, gloved hands vise-gripped to his controls.
“For now…”
Though the colonists had pretended normalcy beneath their geodesic domes, it was the ever-watchful eyes of these machines that permitted life to exist here. AI-controlled, programmed to discern friend from meteoroid—as much as any thinking machine could be trusted. Seraph-1 was flying at low altitude in any case, making sharp maneuvers to appear as unmeteorlike as possible.
Samuel’s heads up display flickered with telemetry, dumping useless colony stats onto his visor. He ignored it, focusing instead on cohort vitals. Every man’s suit reported stable, calm—as was expected of them, even as they delved into the unknown.
The cabin jolted as Roy pushed the nose up, cutting dangerously close to the jagged lip of a crater, the last one on approach. Samuel’s stomach clenched, retreating from its own little space walk to push against his throat. As they crested the other side, the auto-turret avatars blinked to life: two green, two orange.
“Being tracked,” Roy said.
“Have they acknowledged our transponder?” Samuel asked, already knowing the answer.
“Two out of four.” Another one color-shifted to green. “Three.”
The gray gave way to the titanic body of the colony, unraveling like a black ocean beneath them, but Samuel only had eyes for the spaceport. He gripped the seat tighter as Roy pitched them up and away from the domes, then banked around hard, firing their braking thrusters until they were hovering over the landing pad. Samuel could see the turrets now, each as large as their ship. The indecisive one was micro-adjusting in sync with their drift, reciprocating cannons moving with machine precision.
“C’mon, you soulless bastard,” Samuel muttered. “I promise we’re not an asteroid.”
“It might be stuck,” Roy said.
“Stuck?”
“Logic error. They’re autonomous but still need maintenance. No one’s been here for a month…”
The dropship dipped as one of its attitude jets sputtered, setting them into a slow rotation. The turret followed. Samuel grabbed the seatback tighter and stared uselessly through the window.
A month, alone in the dead of space.
Seeing the colony now, in real life, felt surreal. Samuel had watched events unfold, glued to the newsfeeds between active duty. It was something different from endless war, something different from anything. A miracle the likes of which hadn’t been reported in decades. An apparition of the Virgin Mary, to one of the colony’s cloistered nuns.
An urgent warning, to leave the Moon.
Samuel had been entranced, along with every other Catholic on Earth. But the Vatican waffled, ultimately declaring the vision curator: legitimate-ish. Anything more would scuttle long-term colonization plans—the future. In the end, they deferred to the scientific establishment.
Unfortunately, the news there was just as bad. Astrophysicists claimed the apparition was caused by an anomalous solar flare, some new particle that could alter consciousness in the absence of Earth’s protective electromagnetic field. They ultimately agreed with the devout sister’s warning. Another eruption was coming, and it would be far worse: “visions” en masse, a tidal wave of insanity and chaos.
Most evacuated. Some stayed—and were presumed dead.
Until the signal came.
Samuel leaned farther over the seat, scanning the hexagonal structures below. Beneath the reinforced lattice of the domes, the colony was a dark labyrinth of concrete and superstructure. Somewhere in that maze, someone was still alive. That someone had transmitted their message directly to the Vatican, where it remained, secured behind physical and virtual walls. Few knew the actual contents of the message—certainly not Samuel or even their mothership, the Regina Caeli—but the Order of the Sword of Saint Michael had been dispatched to intercept. There were evac boats standing by, but no one was expecting another miracle. The occupants of Seraph-1 were kitted out for combat. And exorcism.
“What say you, Captain?” Roy asked.
Samuel stared hard at the final holdout, willing it to change color. Nothing happened. “Can we take it out without damaging the surrounding structure?”
Roy shook his head. “No. And we might trigger the greens.”
“Can we hack it?”
“Need a neural interface to hack AI. And even if we had a heretic aboard, same issue as shooting at it.”
“Damn.”
Samuel pressed himself into the bulkhead, anxious for an anchor in the absence of proper gravity. There were seventeen men with him on the dropship, seventeen souls under his care. And a fixed mission time. He had memorized the colony layout, etched into his brain every relevant site and fallback, but he hadn’t considered not being able to get in the front door. Or getting blown up while trying to break it down.
“Novak,” he called, turning to the comms officer seated next to his pilot. The man craned his head in response. “Open a channel to Mothership.”
“Yes, sir.” The man tapped at his terminal to establish a link.
Samuel gritted his teeth as the channel burbled and hissed, waves of static crashing in the ocean of the void. High above, the Regina Caeli was watching, waiting. A tiny blotch of gray against the infinite.
The scars on his back began to itch, like always when he was nervous. As a child, he had naively dreamed of exploring outer space, of bounding across low gravity colonies and unearthing ancient life. His father had admonished him for it, particularly when he was caught doodling spaceships or watching the latest launch instead of studying Torah. He had argued back: where was Creation if not in the stars? Where was God if not in the heavens? His mother minded less, sneaking him astronomy books from the shul library. On his thirteenth birthday, she bought him a civilian pass to Palmachim Spaceport, south of Tel Aviv. His best and worst memories were of that day, gripping the golden ticket in his hand, wondering about the flash in the sky, before all was heat.
A distorted voice surged into his ears. “This is Command, go Seraph-1.”
Samuel blinked away the memory, the burning of the thermal pulse across his flesh. “Sir. We have a situation with the colony defenses. One of the turrets is stuck at alert status.”
The signal pinged then degraded to a low warble. Samuel stared out the window and waited. Roy had stabilized the dropship, turning its nose down so their forward guns were pointed at the stubborn machine. Its avatar still glowed orange, maybe even red—it looked darker than last time.
The voice of Admiral Vandenberg sizzled back into being, scalding his eardrums. “Nothing we can do from here. You’re authorized to neutralize any defenses necessary to make entry.”
Roy’s fingers twitched, sending an electric jolt through Samuel’s body.
“Acknowledged,” he said. “Seraph-1 out.”
“God be with you, son.”
The signal died, and with it any out.
Naive…
Samuel had joined the Order at an early age—the minimum—to do his part in restoring civilization after the War. To convey the Word of God across land and sea, and space if he had to. But the farther he traveled from Earth, the greater his anxiety, the more painful his scars—physical and mental.
He glanced through the bulkhead window to the passenger compartment. His men sat quietly, shoulder to armored shoulder, hulking in their white exo-tac suits, the Order’s winged sword motif beaming from their breastplates. Some had heads bowed in prayer, others gazed through the thick walls of their ship to loved ones too-far removed. Everyone’s visors were up.
Their chaplain, Father James, was the only man standing, swaying stubbornly on a safety tether affixed to the ceiling. Unlike the rest of them, he was clad in the black of the clergy, a purple stole draped over his shoulders. An ember of low-smoke frankincense smoldered in his thurible, burning tracers in Samuel’s vision as it glided back and forth in the priest’s hand. It didn’t smell right; the extra processing diminished its earthiness, just as the onboard oxygen processors thinned the air.
The two men locked eyes and he faltered, the same way he had upon taking his first Eucharist. Judgment was inescapable. Samuel, born Shmuel, would never be Catholic enough—his heritage was burned into his flesh. Dropping down onto the command seat, he drew his rosary from a cargo pouch and tapped his wrist terminal for general broadcast. “We’re going in.”
“Making approach,” Roy called.
A shudder wracked the dropship as its landing gear extended. Samuel grasped the beads tighter, squeezed his eyes against the visage of his dying mother’s face, and mouthed a prayer as his pilot counted down.
We fly to Thy protection, O Holy Mother of God.
“Contact in ten, nine…”
Do not despise our petitions in our necessities.
“Eight, seven, six…”
But deliver us always from all dangers.
“Five, four, three…”
O Glorious and Blessed Virgin.
“Two, one.”
They landed with a thump, engines wailing in victory. The turret hadn’t attacked. They were in.
Almost.
Yuval Kordov is a chronically creative nerd, tech professional, husband, and father to two amazing girls. Over the course of his random life, he has been a radio show DJ, produced experimental electronic music, created the world of Dark Legacies®, and built custom mechs with LEGO® bricks.
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