Of the four beings present at your birth, none were fully cognizant of it. For your mother’s part, the drug-induced stupefaction was administered against her will. The fraying attention of the medicae was torn between three other births, one fatal, hence her predilection for overpowered analgesics. The third being you were not even aware of, and so perhaps their lack of attention to you can also be forgiven. Of course, as a newborn, you have no memory of this.

The first time you recall being aware of Their presence was as a child, scurrying around in the rusted ducts and service shafts of the gun deck. You cut yourself off a rusted nail, heat searing through your bloodied thigh.

A sickly terror spreads from your chest and flushes your pallid skin with heat and a growing nausea, gathering in your perpetually empty stomach. A cold sweat washes stinging clumps of greasy oil into your eyes.

Then, quite as suddenly, the feelings subside. Heat gives way to calming warmth. Your breathing moves from ragged to shallow to gentle. And you feel the caress of a hand against your cheek. Cool and comforting. A gesture of tender care you have never known.

It allows you to stem the bleeding. Limp back home and clean the wound.

Later, you recall this while listening to a sermon by the deck preacher. She explains how the light of the God-Emperor flows from Holy Terra and defends the faithful against evil.

You imagine it is the Emperor who reached out to you, steeling you against the pain. You relay this thought to your mother. She tells you to be quiet.

Eventually, you learn from the preacher of witches, but you do not think of yourself in these terms. These are hated things; to be cast out and destroyed. You are never told of astropaths.

You grow older. You enter the service of the gun deck as a water carrier.

You wonder if one of the sweat-soaked men toiling here is your father. The thought brings bitterness and sorrow. It is quickly smothered by a sense of belonging and purpose, but you know it is not yours. 

It comes from beyond you.

Again, you feel the soothing hand on your cheek. You raise yours in mimicry, instinctual and uncertain. But the moment passes as quickly as it came. 

The Emperor’s light, you resolve.

There are many more such moments as you grow into adulthood. Pain and sorrow at first, but occasionally joy. You prefer these moments, buoying your heart with their effervescent and ephemeral fancies. Sometimes it is you who instigates these moments, the good and the bad.

Eventually, there are images too; hazy and shadowed, like smeared oil paintings. They are still-lifes of an existence beyond your ken. Fields of wheat; agricultural equipment at rest; and the vast openness of the evening sky. You find it ironic that you have lived your entire life in the void and never seen stars.

Your companion shares in your jovial observation. This brings you joy.

You no longer think of them as Him.

You are an adult now.

After shift-end you and a young woman find a rare time and space of seclusion. You are attracted to her, and she to you. You both enjoy the privacy. The heat between you grows beyond the background claustrophobia of the voidship. Your bodies touch.

But, at the moment of escalation, tightness pounds against your heart like the empyrean upon a Gellar field. Straining it tight across your chest to the point of snapping. You see the confused eyes of your companion as you pull away.

You share her surprise. 

Then, you share Her agony.

Your throat closes tighter than a quarantined air duct. Jealously, preposterously, claws at your chest. Jealousy of her; jealousy of yourself.

The young woman flees.

You force calm and acceptance into your mind, bringing your hand to your cheek by way of comfort and contrition.

The agony abates.

You are sorry. As is She

When you awake from your troubled sleep, the next shift you feel Her aching heart far across the void. You tell her that it is all right.

She sends the image of a bouquet of wheat. They are beautiful and foreign to you.

As is She.

The shifts turn to rotations, rotations blend into terms. You are left alone by your crewmates, but you rarely feel lonely. When you do, you raise your hand to your cheek and touch Hers. Your Minds entwine, you see the memories she has prepared for you; stored within Her heart, decanted into yours.

A fleeting vision of wild-flower weeds tangled up in willow-vine. The gentle susurrations of grainfly on a summer’s eve. A subtle mix of melancholic intimacy. 

Always She answers you.

You try to reciprocate these moments. To convey the rhythmic symphony of the loading mechanisms. The rainbow colouring of the terawatt power feeds of a macro-lance. The simple solidarity of a gun team at work.

You feel the intention of these efforts is more pleasing than their composition.

You think of Her as Yours. And you as Hers.

You never know Her world.

Perhaps, you think wistfully, your vessel has seen it in her immeasurably long life. Perhaps you have eaten grain raised by her hand. Or been another starry light in her evening sky. But probably not. The Imperium is so vast; your meeting so improbably unlikely.

You thank Him, for binding your souls and hearts together– For bringing you Her, across the vast and lonely gulf of space.

But the life of a gun decker is brutal and short.

You know your passing will be the end of Her. As does She. To be in this universe without each other, to never know each other again, would be a kind of death itself.

In the end, at that last shift of that last rotation, you raise your hand to your cheek one final time.

You know you will go to His throne together.

As He must always have intended.