‘Where you going, Liv?’ asked Jeph.
‘Going to head up to the bridge,’ she said, lacing up her heavy boots. ‘Captain Sulaiman and I need to figure out how we’re going to stretch our supplies long enough to reach Terra.’
But Jeph was already slipping back to sleep.
She envied him that ability.
Alivia leaned over and kissed his cheek. Jeph was a good man. He wasn’t exceptional, nor was he handsome or rich, but he loved her and his girls deeply.
What more could someone like her ask for?
She kissed the girls. Miska, the cherub-faced mistress of mischief and backchat managed to look entirely innocent while asleep, and Vivyen the storyteller, so like her father.
Alivia saw the chapbook she’d long ago taken from the Odense Domkirke library clutched tight to the girl’s chest. Ever since Alivia and Severian of the Luna Wolves (he’d been careful to make the distinction) had rescued Vivyen, she’d never let the book go.
Alivia left them sleeping and quietly slipped out of the maintenance compartment that served as their cabin. Smaller than an Arbites gaol cell, but it was more than most people on Molech’s Enlightenment had.
The deck corridor beyond was only fitfully illuminated, and Alivia saw the area around the door was again strewn with trinkets and small offerings of food. Picts of lost loved ones were pinned to the door frame and inked strips of votive paper fluttered in the sour air drifting from the recyc-vent above.
Every morning it was the same.
Alivia knelt to gather up every gift and every scrawled request. The gifts she’d redistribute, the requests she’d read later and try to help where she could.
Molech’s Enlightenment was a destroyer, a small ship by Naval standards, but still over a kilometre in length. Fast and manoeuvrable, she was a pack hunter without a pack, a lonely traveller limping back to the system of her birth.
Under normal circumstances, the vessel would boast a complement of around fifteen thousand, but now carried almost double that.
These times were anything but normal.
The ship’s holds and empty torpedo bays were now home to thousands of refugees from Molech, a world taken by Horus in his galaxy-wide betrayal.
Almost two years had passed since their escape, years in which many of those who had begun the journey from Molech had died in the darkness. Many more had succumbed to warp sickness or the pressures of their desperate existence. It seemed as though they might escape the ravages of Horus, only to succumb to the slow attrition of the voyage back to Terra.
Alivia had stepped up and worked closely with Captain Sulaiman to make conditions aboard the vessel bearable. She’d overseen the regular distribution of food and water supplies, worked with Noama Calver and Kjell to establish a functioning medicae facility, and put in place a system to ensure the fair allocation of habitable living spaces.
She’d found myriad ways to keep thousands of people crammed for months in an Imperial starship from turning on one another out of fear and desperation.
They recognised she had kept them all alive, and they loved her for that.
Someone had given her a nickname, Saint Liv, and though Alivia disliked it, she’d found it impossible to shake. It reminded her a little too much of what she’d read on a faded palimpsest a grateful patient had left on their medicae bunk.
The Lectitio Divinitatus, a quasi-religious text that deified the Emperor and set Him in the holy role of mankind’s golden protector.
She’d ripped it up with a sigh.
People always looked to higher powers when night closed in.
Alivia had since seen at least seven shrines around the ship, and knew there would be more. But as much as she loathed the idea of the Emperor being revered as a god, the nascent belief offered a sliver of hope to the desperate.
For now, that was all that sustained some people, so she swallowed her bitterness and let them believe the impossible.
Alivia set off towards the bridge, feeling the vibrations of the starship’s engines through the metal deck plates. She could hear the groaning of the ship’s superstructure as a distant rumble, and she paused to place her palm on a nearby stanchion.
The bare metal was warm, a side effect of feedback from the Geller field as it resisted the insane tides of the immaterium.
‘Only a little farther, steel-heart,’ she said.
Two thousand people called Lateral Companionway Epsilon-77 home. It had been designed as a way to swiftly move rapid-response troops to any hull breaches; now every inch of the deck was carefully divided into sleeping areas, ration dispensaries, medicae bays and refectory spaces. The environment-scrubbers were on their way out, and stale sweat, unwashed bodies and the ammoniac reek of recycled air added a tangible texture to every breath. Magos Cervari only gave them a fifty-six per cent chance of remaining functional long enough for the ship to reach Terran space.
Alivia emerged onto a wide, transverse gantry that spanned the companionway, trying to cross as swiftly and quietly as possible.
It didn’t do any good.
People looked up as she passed overhead, and more and more lifted their faces towards her as word of her presence spread.
Alivia looked down, meeting the gaze of a woman she’d helped find food for her three children. Her name was Orabella, and she kissed her fingertips before placing them over her heart.
The gesture was swiftly copied by other refugees: a man whose life she’d saved when she’d found a last bottle of counterseptic to treat a gash in his thigh; a teenage girl she and Noama had helped through a difficult birth; a child who’d suffered warp nightmares, and who she’d rocked to sleep every night for a month until they faded.
Alivia had listened to their anguished stories of fleeing Molech with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their legacies of heartache and fear. She held them close as they spoke of lost husbands, wives, children and siblings.
She’d cried more tears aboard Molech’s Enlightenment than she could ever remember shedding. To be an empath on a ship of refugees was to feel every hurt, every loss and every stab of grief that much deeper.
But she’d turned that despair into hope.
It was fragile this hope, forever in danger of being extinguished like the first sparks of a fire in a windy hearth.
She breathed soft life to it by listening with compassion to everyone who needed catharsis or closure, then speaking healing words in return. She helped shoulder every burden, and, in doing so, lessened theirs.
Alivia left the companionway and its swirling emotions, moving farther up the ship and crossing rally points now serving as dormitories, and ordnance stowage bays pressed into service as ablutions chambers.
She passed a team of servitors running a series of replacement pipes where a buckled stanchion had sheared a power conduit. Captain Sulaiman had told her the unpredictable tides of the empyrean were surging as he’d never seen them before, like a hurricane breaking upon the shore. Both of them knew upon what world’s shores the warp tides would be breaking.
Alivia…
She winced in pain, feeling an icy chill pass through her.
She looked for a speaker but she was alone, a singular enough experience on Molech’s Enlightenment that it immediately struck her as strange.
Alivia…
She put a hand to her chest as the temperature dropped.
Her skin was cold to the touch, and her breath feathered the air. She felt the hard ridges of scars, three vertical ones where the Warmaster’s claws had pierced her, and one where Severian had split her heart with Proximo Tarchon’s gladius.