A door clanged and he saw flickering strip lights stutter shadows on the white vestry walls. A wiring fault in the light outside, he’d have it seen to in the morning. It was Rachel, that much was obvious from the hesitant steps through the gloom towards him. Five months on The Arc and the stupid girl still couldn’t get the hang of ReeGravs.

Sweet Jesus... Brother Michael clicked his fingers and all the lights came up but the olive-skinned girl didn’t increase her speed. She was too afraid of tripping. Long black hair framed Rachel’s face, reaching almost to her thin waist. Only the lumbering hips spoilt the promise of her waist and full breasts: something she’d always known, mainly because her father had never let her forget. In her hands she held a shimmering flask of silver fabric filled with pulped orange. At the bottom was a strip of velcro and from its top protruded a simple straw.

“I’ve brought fresh juice...” She watched Brother Michael bite back some unkind remark and instantly felt sick. If he’d shouted at her, that would have been good. If he’d raised his hand to her, that would have been better. She was used to that. It was his strained patience that Rachel couldn’t stand.

“Come here,” Brother Michael patted the space beside him.

“I have tasks...” Rachel tried to make her voice sound firm, but she never managed it like the other girls did; her words just came out sounding sullen and petulant.

“Here.” Brother Michael patted the seat again, waiting for her to obey. His brown eyes stared at her, peering deep into Rachel’s soul until the woman reddened and glanced hurriedly away.

“How are you?” Brother Michael asked.

“Fine.

“Really?” The man nodded towards the arm of the woollen sofa, watching while Rachel pushed the flask into the cloth, velcro locking the flask safely into place. “Are you sure? You seem uneasy.”

Uneasy! Rachel’s mouth set into a thin line.

“We need to pray,” announced Brother Michael firmly, reaching out for her hand.

“Your juice...”

“God comes first,” said Brother Michael, looking serious. “You know that.” And then, deciding his reply wasn’t sufficient, he smiled his most winning smile, the one that had brought Rachel Cargassi to him in the first place. “Besides,” he said, “what’s my thirst, compared to your happiness, compared to the health of your soul?”

There was no answer. There wasn’t meant to be.

Rachel looked at her tormentor, at the silver dusting of age that touched his temples, at the deep egg-speckled eyes. The man was handsome, as silver-tongued as the devil and as overpowering as incense. Power oozed out of him the way that sour ghosts of fear oozed from everybody else on The Arc.

Even the skin of his instantly recognizable face was an elegant contradiction, soft but weather-beaten at the same time. Most people still had some cosmetic treatment, usually in the early teens when such things started to matter. Rachel knew all about that. Her hips were beyond rebuilding, a deep genetic flaw put there by her father’s refusal to let her mother get the embryo tested.

As for her face, she’d tried five different clinics before she was happy. Four Bupex and finally one black clinic in Budapest that stripped off her old face and then reformatted it using fresh tissue. Rachel didn’t know where her new face had come from: she didn’t want to know. She just knew she liked it and had no intention of giving it back.

Brother Michael clicked his fingers again and the lights in the vestry dipped back into gloom. One elegantly manicured finger brushed over a datapad set into the arm of his sofa and the nearby window exploded into an array of pale blue as Sister Rachel looked out at the curve of the distant Earth. Space would be clear as ice and black beyond imagining once they had left the planets behind. That Brother Michael had promised her.

“Kneel,” Brother Michael demanded and Rachel knelt: not on both knees as she had been taught as a child but with one knee raised the way people prayed in zero gravity, so that a boot could remain flush with the floor, its sole locked to the deck.

Almost casually, Brother Michael gripped Rachel’s narrow shoulders and repositioned her so that she knelt directly in front of him. His knees shut around her raised leg and his hands reached for her head.

Brother Michael’s study was a zero-gravity habitat, but that wasn’t why Rachel adopted that posture. It was the Brotherhood’s trade mark, literally. Lawyers had tied it down on all seven continents, not to mention on Planetside, but then, everything was franchised or trademarked up there. Rachel should have known: through proxies she’d owned three of Luna’s more valuable ad agencies before she’d bequeathed them to Brother Michael.

Prayer with Brother Michael was silent. Or rather, the congregation stayed silent while Brother Michael spoke: sometimes to them and sometimes to God, but mostly to himself.

Hands now rested on the sides of Rachel’s head, fingers lightly caressing her long hair. When she’d arrived at The Arc, Rachel had wanted to crop her hair short but it hadn’t been allowed. As Brother Michael had pointed out, her raven-black hair was the one really beautiful thing about her.

Rachel tried not to stiffen her shoulders as his fingers began to knead out their knots of muscle, all the while bending Rachel further, moving her head towards his robed lap. She could smell him through the rough cloth. An earth-like odour mixed with urine. All men were the same, she decided. At least, all the ones she’d met in her twenty-three years. But then, that wasn’t many, as even Rachel was prepared to admit.

“Pray,” said Brother Michael, pressing on the back of her head.

She could feel him, swollen beneath the cloak, his hands pushing her face further into his lap. He’d keep pushing, too, until she did what he wanted, Rachel knew that. It was her choice, the other handmaidens had made that clear right at the start. She could almost suffocate against the cloth of his lap as Brother Michael prayed fiercely over her head. Or she could soothe him, the way David soothed the wild tumult of Saul.

Rachel did what Brother Michael wanted, accepting the inevitable. She was getting good at that, Rachel told herself bitterly. She wouldn’t cry, though. Not now, not ever...

Sliding Brother Michael’s robe over his knees and up around his waist, Rachel bent her head and prayed. Above her, Brother Michael groaned and began to pray even more fervently, his words spilling out into the silence of his starlit vestry.

The other handmaidens had tried to tell Rachel how to grip so he couldn’t fill her mouth entirely. And how to use her tongue and sucking to speed up his release. Rachel tried: every time she was called to pray she tried to remember. And always she gave up, letting Brother Michael push her up and down into his lap.

His words were a litany now, a high complex song that spun up to the cold waiting stars. But Rachel couldn’t hear any of it: she was trying to breathe. And then he was shouting, his hands tight around her head as he pumped wet salt into the back of her throat. Rachel swallowed. She had to, she wanted to breathe.

And then it was over, Brother Michael’s hands lifting her head away from his lap to push his gown back into position. They stood after that, his hands on her shoulders as unsmiling eyes stared deep into her. Whatever he saw there he was satisfied.

Fear, probably, Rachel thought bitterly.

“Go with God.” He said it dismissively, fingers already flicking over the sofa’s data panel, closing down the ice-cold array of heaven. Brother Michael waited until Rachel had reached the door before calling her back, pointing to his juice flask. “Take that away. Oh...” He paused, watching her shoulders stiffen and seeing the tendons stand out at the back of her bowed head. There was, he had to admit, something about this one that brought out the worst in him.