Our Lady of the Asteroid Belt
She came to disprove a miracle orbiting Jupiter. Instead, she learned some truths aren’t measured, only witnessed.
By Bella Chacha
Edited by Yuval Kordov
They burned incense in zero gravity.
The tendrils of myrrh and rosewood twisted through the air like memory, slow and solemn. It leaked from silver vents above the docking corridor, curling around my face as I stepped off the shuttle and into the most improbable place in the solar system: Asteroid 432-Lourdes, Shrine of the Incorrupt Saint.
The air was warm. Not the sterile chill of orbital science stations, but womb-warm, quiet as a cloister. I adjusted my bag, checked my badge—Dr. Celia Ruiz, Post-Organic Biophysics, Institute of Sacred Anomalies—and followed the sound of chanting toward the heart of the sanctuary.
The icons came next.
Projected onto the curved glass walls of the central corridor were a dozen luminous saints, each rendered in gold-lit fractals. St. Hildegard encased in a crystalline exosuit. Moses parting a Martian sandstorm with a solar staff. And there, towering above all, the one they called the New Saint: Sister Amara of Calcutta, eyes closed in eternal peace, haloed by orbiting beads of digital light.
I exhaled through my teeth.
The shrine’s public aesthetic was breathtaking, yes. But I wasn’t here for theater.
I was here to disprove a miracle.
I found Father Ignacio kneeling at the edge of the inner sanctuary, head bowed, fingers woven around a rosary that shimmered with embedded circuitry. The man looked ancient, bony, sun-wrinkled, but his eyes burned when he stood.
“You’re early,” he said.
“I’m efficient,” I replied. “And skeptical. Just so we’re clear.”
He didn’t blink. “Good. She speaks more clearly to skeptics.”
“She?”
“Sister Amara.” He gestured past me, and I turned.
The reliquary floated at the center of the chamber, a transparent capsule held in suspension by magnetic rings, its interior glistening with tiny particles of gold dust. And within it, the body.
Amara lay as if asleep.
Skin luminous, smooth. Fingers curled loosely in prayer. Her black habit unstained, her eyes closed, her lips faintly parted, as if on the verge of whispering a benediction. According to every scan, recording, and physical analysis to date, her body had not decayed in forty-seven years. No chemical embalming. No stasis field. No rational explanation.
“She’s not the first incorrupt body,” I said flatly. “There are entire cemeteries filled with saints who didn’t rot.”
“True,” said Father Ignacio. “But none of them orbit Jupiter.”
As we walked, I passed a man crawling toward the reliquary. His back was cybernetic, spinal cord replaced by gleaming rods and interlinked processors. His palms left blood-smears on the floor as he inched forward, muttering something in a language I didn’t recognize. Quechua, maybe. His mouth moved like someone confessing.
“Does he think she’ll heal him?” I asked.
“He knows she won’t,” Ignacio said. “But he believes she’ll see him.”
Outside the sanctuary window, a lone comet drifted in the distance, shedding faint light across the black. In that moment, the asteroid felt less like a space station and more like a cathedral drifting in the hands of God.
In the lab, I began my work.
Preliminary scans. Internal imaging. Cross-referencing DNA samples on file. The initial data made no sense. No chemical preservatives, no modified proteins, no signs of cryostasis.
Just clean, unblemished human tissue, suspended in what could only be described as... stillness.
I leaned close to her face. Her skin shimmered under the scanner. A molecular hum like bees in a sealed jar.
“You’re not a miracle,” I whispered. “You’re an anomaly.”
And yet... I hesitated.
For just a second, I thought I saw her lips twitch.
I pulled back. Nothing. No change. Still. Beautiful. Terrible.
That night, I reviewed my notes in the cabin.
“Subject remains biologically impossible. Internal organs intact. Core temperature neutral. No indicators of synthetic interference. Preliminary results suggest tissue-level defiance of entropy. Probability of divine causation: unquantifiable.”
I stopped typing. I stared at the blank wall. It smelled faintly of roses. There were no flowers in the station.
I dreamed of my grandmother for the first time in years. She was standing in her old kitchen, slicing mangos, her rosary swinging from her wrist. She looked up and smiled.
“She forgives you,” she said.
I woke up gasping.
In the morning, I found the man with the cybernetic spine sitting near the reliquary.
He looked up at me. “She told me something,” he said.
I paused. “Oh?”
“She told me that suffering doesn’t need to be explained. It just needs to be seen.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
Later, I logged a private note to myself:
Faith is memory pretending to be evidence. But even I know: some memories smell like roses. Even in space.
***
I began the first scan at 0700 hours.
The lab, tucked beneath the chapel level, was dim and silent, except for the hum of the magnetic field suspending the reliquary. Sister Amara floated inside, her habit rippling as if caught in some invisible tide. Every few minutes, the dust motes around her spun into tiny halos, then settled.
She looked like she had been carved from light.
I activated the diagnostic frame. Laser tomography swept over her skin in calibrated passes. Data scrolled across my palm screen in violet text.
Skin: lntact. Elastic.
Microscopic fissures: None.
Tissue decomposition: 0.003%
Bone density: Normal
Signs of embalming fluid: Negative
Cryogenic signature: Absent
Artificial stasis field: Absent
Cellular decay markers: Undetected
Genetic tampering: None
I blinked. Ran it again. Same results. I leaned back against the bulkhead, exhaling through my nose.
“No cryogenic systems. No genetic alteration,” I murmured into my recorder. “This should not be possible.”
Back on Earth, we catalog corpses like books. We know what rot looks like in every climate, every burial ritual, every chemical bath. Time always wins.
But here she was. A woman who should have been dust, glowing like phosphorescent coral in deep sea water. Her hands still folded. Her lips uncracked. Her eyes…
I stepped closer. Her eyes were closed, of course. But behind the lids, beneath the translucent membrane, I saw a flicker.
A glint of moisture. A shimmer. Alive.
Or something close to it.
I initiated phase two: cellular extraction. A standard dermal probe, sterilized, threaded with an atmospheric lock. Just one sample, enough to test cell integrity under duress.
The probe reached the reliquary barrier.
And stopped.
The air pressure around the capsule shifted barely perceptible, like the moment before a thunderstorm. My tablet flickered, connection interrupted. A sound bled into the silence.
Music.
Soft. Wordless. Chant-like. Male voices rising and falling in Latin, reverent and slow. I turned. The lab’s speaker system was off. My headset unplugged.
I was alone. But the music moved through me. Not around me…through. I dropped the probe.
The reliquary blinked blue once and sealed tighter, the magnetic rings pulsing in quiet synchrony. The chant dissipated like steam.
I filed the incident under “Equipment Rejection, Unknown Cause.”
Then I filed a second log—encrypted, private.
“Relic appears to respond to invasive tech with subtle but controlled electromagnetic defense. No visible mechanism. External stimuli not detected. Possible AI override? Or... something else?”
I didn’t say miracle. I didn’t need to.
By the end of the week, I began hearing reports from the pilgrims.
They were murmuring at meals, praying louder, gesturing to nothing midair. One woman claimed she saw Amara outside her cabin window, “standing among the stars, with gold dust in her hair.”
Another pilgrim, a mute ex-monk, wrote on a tablet that he dreamed of walking barefoot through a desert until Amara met him at a glass gate. “She kissed my forehead and said I was no longer alone.”
At first, I dismissed it. Shared isolation. Ritual suggestion. Grief transference.
But then the stories began to align.
The same gate. The same words. The stars. All from people who hadn’t spoken to each other.
I recorded the testimonies and marked them: Collective Dream Phenomenon. Possibly Induced by Low-O2, Emotional Distress, Group Hallucination. I submitted it to the medical AI for analysis.
The AI returned one word: Unlikely.
That night, I dreamed of my mother. She was young again, wearing the green scarf she used to wrap around her hair when we cooked beans together. Her hands were smooth. She was stirring something at a stove that didn’t exist.
“Come, Celia,” she said, not looking up. “You always hated waiting.”
I was twelve again. Still wearing the hospital visitor tag. I didn’t want to move.
“I prayed for you,” I whispered. “And you still died.”
She turned, smiled. “Maybe I prayed for you, too.”
The next morning, I didn’t log the dream. But I remembered it with a clarity I hated.
Later that day, Father Ignacio found me in the hydroponics ring, where they grew basil and thyme for ritual oils. He watched me transplant a bulb without speaking.
Finally, I asked, “How do you explain the music?”
He didn’t ask what music.
He just said, “She is merciful to everyone but herself.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked at the soil on my hands. “You believe there’s a truth underneath everything. A root system of proof. But sometimes, what grows isn’t logical. Sometimes it’s love.”
I laughed, sharp and bitter. “Love didn’t save my mother.”
“No,” he said softly. “But maybe it stayed with her while she died.”
Flashback: The hospital room.
I’m twelve. My mother is dying. Her breaths come in whistles. Her rosary is coiled tight in her.
“Prove God. Right now. Prove it!”
The priest says nothing.
Only this, as he lays a hand on my shoulder: “God isn’t proof. God is presence.”
I tore the rosary off her wrist and threw it across the floor.
Back in the lab, I resumed my scan.
The reliquary glowed. Silent. Still. But I no longer trusted my measurements. They were only data—signposts toward something I could not name.
***
The smell woke me before the sound did.
Burning roses. Sharp and honeyed, like old prayers lit on fire. It floated in the air above my bed, thick and unmistakable, and pulled me out of sleep like a hand on my shoulder.
I sat up too quickly. The room swayed. I checked the air quality readout. Normal. No combustion. No floral chemicals logged.
But the scent lingered.
I opened the door and stepped barefoot into the corridor. The light was dimmed for third shift. My breath echoed in the silence. I walked past the prayer alcoves and water recycling panels in a kind of slow daze.
My body moved ahead of my thoughts. I didn’t choose where I went. The station chose me.
I reached the sanctuary. The reliquary was lit from below, the gold dust swirling faintly like fireflies in slow orbit. The chapel was empty, as far as I could tell.
Until I saw her.
My mother.
Not as I last remembered her—skeletal and coughing blood—but as she was at her strongest. Hair in a tight braid. Skin warm and brown and full of sun. She was kneeling in front of Sister Amara’s capsule, her hands clasped, her head bowed in reverence.
She turned as I entered.
“Celia,” she said, smiling. “You took your time.”
I stood there, frozen. My lips parted but no sound came.
“She forgives your unbelief,” my mother said softly, her eyes kind and impossibly real. “But will you forgive yourself?”
I opened my mouth to answer… but something broke. A ringing in my ears. A jolt through my spine. The walls collapsed inward.
And then: nothing.
I woke in the medbay. White lights above. A hiss of air vents. Something cool on my forehead. My tongue thick with saline.
“You collapsed,” he said. “By the reliquary.”
I blinked. “What time is it?”
“0430. The AI flagged your vitals: emergency extraction. You were unconscious for twelve minutes.”
“Seizure?”
He shrugged. “That’s one word for it.”
I pulled myself upright. “Run the neural logs.”
He handed me a tablet. “Already did.”
I scrolled through the data.
Heart rate: Elevated.
Neural activity: Normal.
EEG: No abnormal spikes.
Locomotion tracking: No entry to the chapel logged.
Medbay override: Unprompted.
“No chapel entry?” I whispered.
He nodded.
“There’s no record of me being there.”
“No,” he said. “And yet you were.”
Later, in the lab, I ran my own bio-scan. No anomalies. No toxins. No synthetic dream inducers. But I did find something:
Dopamine: +178%
Oxytocin: +240%
Cortisol: -72%
A pattern I recognized. A chemical state associated with intense euphoria, like the kind produced during religious rapture.
I had seen these numbers once before, during, a Vatican-sponsored study of a Carmelite nun in a neural prayer loop. She had described the sensation as “feeling touched by light.”
That evening, I sat alone in the observatory. Through the dome window, I watched a comet drift across the black like a lit fuse. I told myself it was a glitch. A brain event. Sleep paralysis, maybe.
And yet… my mother had touched my hand. I had felt it. And the smell of roses? Still faint on my clothes.
More pilgrims arrived on the next inbound shuttle.
An Orthodox bishop in exile, beard white and eyes glassy, who refused to walk past the reliquary without kneeling.
A Jain ascetic who hadn’t spoken in thirty years, but began chanting in Sanskrit after touching the chapel floor.
A woman with frost scars on her cheeks who said Sister Amara appeared to her inside a comet storm, whispering the phrase, “Let even silence be sanctified.”
I logged their accounts. I ran their scans. No pathogens. No mass psychosis. Just this unrelenting pattern: a quiet, private blooming of belief.
I used to think belief was a form of surrender. A way of refusing to face the randomness of the universe. A chemical coping mechanism for a species too fragile to face death cleanly.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe belief was less about surrender than presence. Maybe it was about standing still in the face of something vast, and not needing to understand it.
At 2300 hours, I returned to the lab. I sat before the reliquary. I didn’t speak. I didn’t scan. I simply watched.
And for one full minute, I swore…
Her lips parted. Just slightly. As if remembering breath.
***
The alarms sang a single high note, then silence.
For exactly 4.7 seconds, the inner chamber depressurized. The reliquary dimmed, the seals blinked red, and the sanctuary lights guttered like dying candles.
By the time the override systems kicked in, the damage had been done.
And yet…
Sister Amara remained. Untouched.
I reached the chamber moments after lockdown lifted. Father Ignacio stood in the archway, pale, clutching his chest.
“We lost magnetic containment,” he said. “Just for a breath.”
Inside the reliquary, Sister Amara’s body floated, serene. A single drop of blood marked her left cheek. It gleamed like a ruby, then shimmered, and evaporated.
Not into mist. Not into vapor. But into incense.
The smell filled the room instantly: cedarwood and rainwater and something faintly like ash. I inhaled involuntarily. It burned in the best possible way.
We later confirmed sabotage. An anonymous anti-theist activist embedded in a tech maintenance crew had uploaded a disruption loop into the environmental controls, targeting the chamber seal. He left behind a message: “No more relics. No more lies.”
They detained him quietly. But no explanation followed for why a full vacuum failed to blacken Amara’s skin. Why no blood pooled. Why the drop became scent.
I requested full access to the system logs, desperate now, less for answers than for a foothold. I needed the story behind the woman.
In the cathedral archive, behind a triple-encrypted firewall labeled PRIVATE/VOCATIONS, I found it, a recorded file. Timestamped three days before her death. Metadata indicated it had never been played. Not even by the custodians.
I braced myself. Then pressed play.
The video was grainy. Sister Amara sat cross-legged in a small cabin—bare, except for a wooden cross, a digital book of psalms, and a steaming mug of something herbal. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her hair peeked slightly from her veil.
Her voice was softer than I expected.
“They keep asking me for miracles. But I don’t feel holy. I never have. I only ever wanted peace.”
She laughed, almost shyly.
“The war took everything from my family. My sister died screaming. I prayed, not because I believed God would stop it, but because I had nothing else to offer.”
She looked down, then back into the lens.
“If God wants to use me, may it be not to prove Him. May it be to comfort those who feel forgotten. That’s enough for me.”
She ended with a whisper.
“Love doesn’t need proof. It needs presence.”
The screen went black.
I sat in the dark of the archive for a long time. Not crying at first… just still. Then, slowly, the tears came. Not out of belief. Not out of conversion. But out of recognition.
She hadn’t asked to be canonized. She hadn’t petitioned the stars. She had just been witness to the pain of others. And in that stillness, they had seen something holy. Maybe not proof. But comfort.
And I… I, who had catalogued the biology of death, charted entropy in bones… I could no longer pretend that comfort had no value.
I returned to the sanctuary that evening. The room was already full. Pilgrims lined the floor, heads bowed. Some silent. Some singing. One woman held a child who had never walked. A man lit a single candle and placed it by the wall. A Jain monk lay prostrate on the floor. There were no chants playing—but somehow, the air carried reverence.
I stood near the back, unseen, unannounced. And I watched Sister Amara. Still. Silent.
Radiant, not because of any light, but because people believed they could still bring something to her. Their grief. Their awe. Their silence.
Father Ignacio found me there. He didn’t speak. Just nodded. I didn’t kneel. But I stood.
For the first time, in reverence. Not for sainthood. Not for science.
But for what it meant to be remembered as someone who loved the world deeply, fiercely, honestly.
Later, I recorded a note for my final report.
“What I encountered here was not verifiable in a lab. I cannot quantify what happened to the blood, or explain the preservation. The reliquary resists certainty. But in this place, I have witnessed the soft defiance of decay—not just in the body, but in the spirit of those who come here. I have not found a miracle. But I have found mercy.”
***
I wrote my final report in the station library. The room was quiet, circular, filled with sunlight-mimicking panels that shifted through the hues of late afternoon. The walls were lined with both digital archives and actual books, paper-bound, some with cracked spines and marginalia in multiple languages. Psalms. Autobiographies. A worn copy of Summa Theologica. A surprisingly dog-eared Introduction to Neurotheology.
I liked the stillness. Not silence. Stillness.
My fingers hovered over the touchpad for a long time before I began.
I had always believed that writing was for clarity. That science existed to contain the uncontainable, to name the pattern in the fog, to pin the truth like a butterfly under glass.
But Sister Amara had refused containment.
She refused to decay.
Refused explanation.
Refused to be anything less than exactly what she was: a woman, once living, now suspended in time, surrounded by memory, story, and scent.
I had tested her. Scanned her. Pushed against her mystery with every method I knew.
And still… She had not moved. But I had.
Scientific Report: Post-Organic Subject, Sister Amara of Calcutta
Submitted by: Dr. Celia Ruiz
Affiliation: Institute of Sacred Anomalies
Summary Findings:
Subject’s body demonstrates total absence of standard post-mortem decay markers. No chemical preservatives, cryogenic treatments, synthetic stasis fields, or mechanical enhancements were found. DNA integrity remains near-living baseline. Magnetic resonance imaging confirms full organ retention and structural preservation. Cellular degradation remains statistically insignificant after 47.6 years.
Conclusion:
I cannot prove a miracle. I can only say: she has not decayed. Her tissue defies biological time. I found no signs of artifice. What remains is not proof, but possibility.
Addendum:
The reliquary demonstrates inexplicable response to intrusion attempts. Recorded phenomena include auditory hallucinations, synchronized dream phenomena among unrelated subjects, atmospheric anomalies, and electromagnetic flux resistant to replication.
This report does not recommend declassification of the shrine as a religious site, nor its reclassification as a standard biological anomaly.
Recommend continued observation. And respect.
I encrypted the log and uploaded it to the central archive. For once, I didn’t over-explain. I didn’t caveat every line.
Let them interpret the data. Let them search the numbers for cracks. That was never the point.
Sister Amara had never asked to be understood. Only seen.
I left the chapel one last time that night. It was nearly empty. Most of the pilgrims were asleep. A few lingered in the shadows—meditating, whispering, weeping.
Father Ignacio was kneeling again, head bowed. I passed him quietly. I didn’t need to speak. And he didn’t need to stop me.
That was something I hadn’t known I wanted, that kind of silent permission.
I stopped in front of the reliquary. Sister Amara lay exactly as she always had. Still. Unmoved. Suspended in that haze of golden dust.
But something in the air felt different. Or maybe I did. I didn’t kneel. But I bowed my head. Just slightly.
A nod not of surrender, but of recognition. A gesture that said: I don’t know.
I may never know.
But I am here.
I packed lightly the next morning. My original case files, now annotated in my own voice. The data cube holding the encrypted confession Amara left behind. And a vial of dried basil leaves the hydroponics monk had insisted I take. “For remembering,” he said.
I didn’t argue.
The shuttle docked with a mechanical shudder. Boarding was quick, just six of us: a woman returning to a mining colony on Ganymede, a couple holding hands and speaking softly in Arabic, a nervous researcher from Europa who kept adjusting his oxygen patch.
I was the last to board.
As we lifted off, the shrine shrank beneath us—first a cathedral, then a spire, then just a glimmer in the black.
Behind it, like a divine punctuation mark, a comet flared. It drifted past the station with impossible precision, its trail arcing directly behind the reliquary dome. For one suspended breath of a moment, the chamber reflected the light, and the reliquary glowed gold.
Not metaphorically. Literally. A perfect flare. A molten corona. A final benediction.
The other passengers gasped. The nervous researcher whispered, “Was that planned?”
I said nothing. I simply watched. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t try to name what I was seeing. I didn’t dissect it. I let it be.
In my private log, I left this:
Final Entry: 432-Lourdes Pilgrimage Mission
Maybe belief isn’t the absence of doubt.
Maybe it’s standing in awe even when you still question.
Maybe it’s letting the unexplainable remain intact.
Maybe that’s enough.
Weeks later, back on Earth, I attended a conference in Geneva. The hall was packed. My name badge was tagged “skeptical iconoclast.” My talk was titled “Phenomena and Probability: When Anomalies Refuse to Fit.”
I stood on stage, preparing to speak.
But as the lights dimmed and the slides began to load, I reached into my pocket and closed my hand around something I hadn’t even realized I brought with me.
A single dried rose petal. It smelled faintly of cedar.
Sometimes now, I dream of her. Not of miracles. Not of visions. Just sister Amara, sitting in her small cabin, drinking her tea. Laughing quietly. Telling no one what she would become.
And in the dream, she always says the same thing:
“Comfort is not proof. But sometimes, it is enough to go on.”
I’ve stopped looking for evidence. But I haven’t stopped looking.
I still read the reports that come in. The ones about visions during comet crossings. The ones about synchronized dreams across solar colonies. The ones that mention scent, always scent, roses, basil, smoke, ash.
The shrine continues to orbit. People continue to arrive. To doubt. To believe. To kneel. And sometimes… like me… to stand still.
***
“Blessed are those who don’t believe, and yet stand still.”
Bella Chacha is a speculative fiction writer and Poet whose work has appeared in Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Heartlines Spec, IHRAM Publishes and runner-up at Defenestrationism.net 2025 Short Story Contest. She writes stories that explore faith, memory, and the quiet collisions between science and wonder.
Copyright © 2025 Bella Chacha & 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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