| abstract | - The story begins with monks working in an antiquated glass works. One of the monks, Brother John, tends to the wounds of another, who has burned his arm in an accident. Bells signal that it is time for lunch, but while the other monks head to the mess hall, Brother John instead ascends through the wooden monastery to the library, where he reads with his dog, Mattias. The leader of the commune, known as the Abbot, permits John to take one of the books from the library — an act that would normally be strictly forbidden — and read outside. Brother John ascends further to the surface, and the monastery is revealed to be a man-made space station called Arceon, constructed mostly from wood around a metal frame. On the surface, Brother John sits beside a lake, and as he reads to Mattias, he notices a shooting star in the sky. Over the following days, more and more monks assemble to watch the comet as it approaches the space station. Eventually, the star crashes down into the lake and is revealed to be an escape pod. Brother John rushes out to the pod in a small boat and climbs inside. It transpires that all technology has been cast aside by the monks, and as a result John has never seen anything like this before. Within, he finds the shredded, bloodstained clothing of a child and the head of a doll, before stumbling upon a distress message recorded by Ripley, in which she states the Sulaco has been infested by Xenomorphs and Corporal Hicks and Bishop have been killed. She plans to escape with Newt in a lifeboat. After viewing the message, Brother John discovers Ripley still asleep inside a hypersleep capsule, and he rescues her from the craft, despite the protests of the other monks. After having a nightmare about a Xenomorph, Ripley awakes inside the monastery. Outside her window, she sees fields of wheat, all housed beneath the surface of Arceon, with the ceiling high above painted to resemble sky and fitted with large windows that allow sunlight to filter down. As she watches, the Sulaco escape pod is lowered down, having been recovered from the lake. The Abbot enters and tells Ripley a little about their community, explaining that they have no radio for her to call for help and that she was found alone inside the pod. Ripley in turn attempts to warn the Abbot about the Alien, which she suspects was responsible for Newt's death, but is rebuked; the highly skeptical Abbot holds that her recounting of the events on LV-426 are all an elaborate deception, as he believes Earth was destroyed decades previously in an event that led to the monks rejecting all technology. The Abbot has Ripley locked in her room and forbids Brother John from making contact with her. Later that night, Brother John and another monk, Brother Graham, witness a Chestburster emerge from one of Brother Graham's sheep. Before it can escape, they kill the infant creature by burning it alive. Following the incident, Ripley is brought to a kangaroo court where she is then subjected to a one-sided show trial by the Abbot and the other senior monks on Arceon, who charge her with bringing the "evil" to their commune. Her protestations regarding the Xenomorph are again ignored or otherwise rejected as deception and she is declared responsible for the appearance of this "devil" that came from the sheep. She is imprisoned in the lowest levels of Arceon, and resigns herself to her fate. Fortunately, Brother John does not share the Abbot's belief that Ripley is to blame for the events at the monastery, and eventually decides to head into the lower levels to seek her advice. After he leaves, several monks are killed by a Xenomorph in the communal lavatory. In her cell, Ripley has discovered that another man, an android named Anthony, is imprisoned in the chamber adjacent to her own, having been banished when it was discovered he represented the technology the monks had vowed to cast out. Ripley passes the time recounting to Anthony her experiences with the Xenomorphs and her knowledge of the creatures. When Brother John arrives he begs for Ripley's help, and while she initially refuses to go on fighting the Xenomorphs, an act she considers futile, he ultimately convinces her to help him and frees both her and Anthony. They elect to head to the "technology room", the chamber where the station's air and gravity are produced, in the hopes of finding something that may be used as a weapon. As they move there, Brother John reveals that the order on Arceon started out as an anti-technology movement on Earth, which grew exponentially after a computer virus wiped out a huge proportion of all the data stored on the planet. People flocked to their cause, and their rejection of modern technology threatened the Weyland-Yutani Corporation's profits. As a result, the movement's members were banished aboard Arceon for the crime of "political heresy". Back on the upper levels, the Xenomorph runs amok through the helpless monks, who have only primitive farm tools with which to defend themselves. It attacks several monks in a field of corn, and soon the crop is set ablaze. However, the Abbot escapes, and eventually reunites with Ripley, Anthony and Brother John in the lower levels. Upon reaching the door to the technology room, they are attacked by the Xenomorph. While Ripley struggles to open the door, Anthony and Brother John fight the creature off using the bear traps that have been set in the area to stop monks venturing into the technology room. They succeed, but Anthony is critically damaged in the process. The survivors make it into the technology room and seal the Xenomorph outside. They discover the "technology room" in fact contains nothing but wood and cloth windmills that circulate the station's air and water, and the truth becomes apparent — Arceon was never meant to be sustainable, and was always intended as a death sentence for the heretics as its air would eventually run out. To make matters worse, the fires started by the Xenomorph's rampage have now used up a large amount of the remaining oxygen and also destroyed the crops that helped to refresh the atmosphere. As the survivors argue about escaping, a new type of Chestburster erupts from the Abbot's head, killing him. Ripley and Brother John elect to make for the Sulaco escape pod and use it to flee the station; however, Anthony is forced to stay behind due to the damage he received during the earlier fight with the Xenomorph. After the others leave, Anthony is destroyed by the Xenomorph. Eventually, Ripley and Brother John reach the library, just below the escape pod, but are again confronted by the Xenomorph. As the two survivors fight the creature, its acid blood starts a fire that destroys the library's floor, and all three fall through into the glass works below. The Xenomorph falls into a vat of molten glass, apparently killing it, but it emerges again and prepares to attack, whereupon Ripley opens a large dump tank and douses the creature in a torrent of water, causing its glass-coated exoskeleton to explode through thermal shock. Ripley and Brother John make it to the escape pod, but as they prepare to leave, Ripley realizes she has a Chestburster inside her. She prepares to send Brother John away on the escape vehicle while she stays behind to die. However, Brother John refuses, and by beating Ripley's chest, he manages to make the Chestburster crawl out of her through her gullet and into his own throat, saving her and impregnating himself. Condemned to death, Brother John leaves the escape pod and walks into the fires raging across the surface of Arceon, killing himself and the infant Xenomorph inside him. After watching his sacrifice, Ripley flees the dying space station in the escape pod, with Brother John's dog Mattias by her side.
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