Short story outline
Monks are traveling on a ship to a large floating station on a gas giant.
Ship – Massive transport vessel that is filled with mostly supplies and one pod of tightly cramped quarters for passengers, mostly rotating crew to the mining station.
Monks are there to pick up several severed and preserved heads of recently deceased members of their order. The heads are each in a super oxygenated, sterile bubble. The three were killed in a recent accident on one of the large platforms due to lack of proper safety precautions.
The goal is that after the heads are picked up to take them home to the central hub on their world where they will be destroyed while the collective thoughts and consciousness will be digitized.
The pickup is going along normally except another large explosion shortly before departure. One of the mining vessels is hanging by a small tether attached to the main station. It has been breached and all aboard dead or presumed so. The plan is to cut the tether soon but the monk (Lo) volunteers to go down and retrieve the heads of 3 of their fellows.
The monk has the ability to survive for about 20 min in the hostile atmosphere. He zips along the cable to the vessel using a powered zipline and wearing a very basic space suit.
Once on board he sees that all the crew have been sucked out but 2. Neither is a member of his religion, but one is still alive.
The monk patches his suit with parts of his and takes him back to the zipline where he realizes that it can’t take them both due to weigh constraints. The monk then uses asks the survivor to kill him and take his head back up.
The survivor is a catholic and refuses to do it and the monk can’t either for a similar reason.
As the time runs out they make a last ditch attempt by shedding all the weight the can. The monk drops his suit and uses his cutter to cut off both legs. The two make it back just in time.
The monk is questioning his commitment to the region on the trip back as he learns through some idle talk with the miners on the ship that the men in question rarely if ever followed the tenants of the religion but were donors or had other useful skills that the collective wanted. (this might need work, as I also think that the whole story could be told as a flashback the monk is having while explaining the incident back on him planet). In this vein it could be that the three engineers were good at pattern matching and extraction algorithms that are both useful for mineral locating and memory extraction. This useful to monks as their founder/prophet most revered had a damaged partial backup and cannot be properly digitized.
Story Draft
Lo sat on the aluminum grate that comprised the hold of the Sun Skipper. The gravity and heat had been dialed up to full for the last hour but would be cut to 1/3 terra soon as the ship had to pitch over to dump heat and the solar panels would be facing away from the sun. He had the paper bundle in his gloved hands, carefully turning over the text. He was on the 14th tenant when the alarm began to blare.
“Thrust cutout imminent. Temperature gradient at unsafe levels.”
Lo sighed and replaced the papers in his backpack before strapping it to his back. He checked the tether cord around his waist and made sure the other end was bound to the grate. The lurch came a moment later. Thrusters cut and the ship stopped acerating causing the gravity to dissipate. The feeling of weightlessness always excited Lo, the aches of the last 3 weeks on this cramped vessel seemed to fade into the background and the suddenly silent space seemed to vibrate all around him. Lo closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind before the clawing memories of his time in the armed service began to stream past his eyes as they always did when it was too quiet and still. He focused on the tenants.
The 4th tenant
If there is no up then there must be no down. Directions are meaningless but velocity is eternal.
The tenants of his faith were less than a century old and heavily influenced by the gradual spread of humanity across the three central systems that were connecting wormholes.
The door to the sleeping berth slid open with a faint whirring and a pink pudgy face poked in. The too small eyes crinkled up above a wide tight smile hiding several rows or serrated teeth.
“Dolo brother Lo” said Chirim, third monk or the Canara Cult, “I have your meal and stim pack for this cycle. Are you ready to receive them?”
“That would be most welcome. You have my thanks brother” Lo replied in his most serene tone.
These last weeks in his brother’s company had made Lo yearn for the simple comfort that came from not speaking to brother Chirim who’s only talent that Lo could discern was his ability to turn any conversation to one of the tenants.
A monk of Lo’s station was expected to spurn stimulations like vids, games or women. Drugs and food made from animal products were also off the table. That lack of any mortal vices made conversations among the monks mostly focused on random observations of their surroundings and of course the Tenants.