by Guy Haley
‘Leave Macullus and Dibus here,’ said Guilliman, nodding at two of the Ultramarines. ‘I wish to speak with them about their plans for redevelopment of the Veridian system.’ The Victrix Guard were as much statesmen as warriors, another practice Guilliman had reintroduced to his Chapter. ‘Take the rest of the Victrix Guard with you to the command deck. I will join you shortly.’
‘As you command,’ said Sicarius.
‘And where is Felix?’ said Guilliman.
‘He is delayed, my lord. He sends his apologies.’
‘Very well,’ said Guilliman. ‘See he is with us at the opening of the battle. I will have representatives of all arms of the crusade present. This is an important day, Sicarius.’
The backplate of Guilliman’s armour was lowered into position by a crane and held steady by the velvet-gloved hands of four mortal servants. Two massively augmented servitors manoeuvred the Armour of Fate’s breastplate from the table. Moving it into perfect alignment with tiny whinings of their servomotors, they slammed the breastplate home. Small clicks sounded as it locked to the backplate, and two men worked quickly to tighten the hex screws, making the seal fast.
‘My lord,’ said Sicarius. With one last bow, he departed, leaving two Victrix Guard behind.
‘Praise the Omnissiah for the Armour of Fate!’ proclaimed the tech-priest. ‘Praise the Emperor for His wisdom! Praise the motive force for the activation of the primarch’s shield.’
Guilliman hid a wince at the tech-priest’s fervour. He had little time for religion.
At least they are not singing, thought Guilliman. He had put a stop to that.
‘Dibus, Macullus – come here,’ Guilliman said to the two remaining members of the Victrix Guard. He settled back into the arming frame as the rest of his armour was assembled around him. ‘Tell me more about this water-conservation regime you wish to impose on Calth’s feed worlds. I understand you have been suffering disagreement. We will resolve this now, or I will decry you as worse than the archmagi.’
The two warriors glanced at each other and approached. They set out their plans, and where they did not accord. The primarch listened.
So matters of peace were discussed as Guilliman’s armada sped on towards the Pit of Raukos, and the enemy awaiting them there.
Chapter Five
Guilliman’s Mercy
The primarch’s war had taken him away from the star-realm of Ultramar, but still he found time to govern his home from afar.
War raged in Ultramar as it did everywhere else. The followers of the Plague God Nurgle assailed the worlds of the Ultramarines, and the infernal diseases of the enemy claimed far more lives than their bullets.
At Roboute Guilliman’s direct command, sick and injured soldiers were being brought to the planet Iax from across Ultramar. Iax was tithed as an agri world, but such was its beauty, it was informally referred to as the Garden Planet. That was before the war. The empire of the Ultramarines was bleeding manpower at a terrifying rate, and so Guilliman had redesignated Iax as a hospital world for the duration of the conflict – that is to say, most likely forever.
Landing the sick and wounded at Iax’s Hortusia spaceport took an amount of time congruous to the complexity of the task. The diseases spread by the enemy were supernaturally vigorous, so quarantine procedures had to be stringent. Like everything in Ultramar, if a job were deemed of importance enough to be done, then it would be done correctly.
A fresh shipment of patients was coming in by shuttle. The decontamination crew returned to the landing field and its surrounding mushroom patch of white dome tents for the seventeenth time that day. Between each trip, the shuttles were cleaned on the ward-ships in orbit, for that was the responsibility of their medicae-captains, but ensuring the purity of the landing fields fell to the Chirurgeon-General’s office on Iax.
Though Caradomus, the Chirurgeon-General, would have preferred to decontaminate the shuttles after their journey from anchor to the surface as well, speed had to be given some consideration – cleaning the landing aprons was faster than cleaning the exterior of the landers. His concerns were allayed a little by the Adeptus Mechanicus biologians attached to the Officio Medicae upon Iax, whose atmospheric re-entry patterns were calculated to burn the worst of any contamination away. Magos Kromek had suggested the cleaning procedure could be omitted from the landing protocols altogether, but Chirurgeon-General Caradomus was diligent, and if he could avoid risks he would.
Propaganda had its role to play. The ships were not serious vectors of infection – the soldiers they carried to Iax from the war’s multiple fronts were. But they couldn’t be turned away. The outgassings of high pressure cleansing hoses at the aprons could be seen for miles. They were reassuring. So the landing aprons were cleaned, and often.
Upon Iax, the lesser sick recuperated alongside the injured. Some of the diseases unleashed into Ultramar could be treated under median-range quarantine conditions with standard medicines. Others required specialist care, up to and including Adeptus Ministorum-approved exorcism. Those suffering from the more aggressive, spiritually corrupting illnesses were held in specially commissioned stations in orbit. As few as possible were euthanised – if they could be helped, they were.
This, it was said in Ultramar, was the difference between Roboute Guilliman’s and the Emperor’s mercies, and the beleaguered people of that realm took heart in their lord’s concern for their wellbeing.
In typical Ultramarian style, multiple Imperial ordos and officios were brought together to tend to the war’s casualties, and they were made to cooperate with uncharacteristic amity. Regarding the screening of the injured and sick, the Officio Medicae was given free reign. Much of the processing went on in orbit. As the hospital ward-ships arrived from Ultramar’s warzones, the wounded soldiers on board were screened for infectious agents. Those passing the first round were transferred to smaller voidships, most commandeered for this purpose from the chartist merchant fleets or taken from among those Naval vessels too badly damaged to be made combat ready quickly. The smaller the better, in the Chirurgeon-General’s view, for smaller ships could be more thoroughly isolated.
During transit from the front back to Iax, the soldiers were kept in solitary confinement to prevent the spread of disease among their fellow patients, their physical needs attended to by servitors of only the highest classes of biological sanctity. There were not enough ships left to separate the sick from the injured before transit, not that it would have prevented cross-infection; so many of those wounded in battle harboured disease unawares.
Around Iax, troops exhibiting symptoms were divided by type. Those who had died en route were easiest to separate. After the dead, the first appraised were those suffering purely from injury, be it physical or mental. They were also rigorously tested for disease. Those who proved free of secondary infectious conditions were separated from the rest and taken to the surface via decontamination protocols at the star fort Korsteel, which had taken up anchor over Iax for the purpose. The remainder of the casualties adjudged sick – injured or not – were returned to the main group.
The sick were split into known and unknown pathogen groups, then further into physical, mental and spiritual afflictions, then by grade of severity, and finally all these groups were divided between the wounded sick and the merely sick.
After all this, groups were subdivided into numbered cohorts and relocated to holding vessels in permanent orbit. There, further anti-biological procedures were undertaken. Second and third rounds of testing virtually eliminated any possibility of transmission. Those that passed the third test were deemed safe and transferred to the surface of Iax, bound for facilities that treated all ailments.
Those who failed the second or third tests were kept aboard the isolation ships, where they were treated and repeatedly tested for pestilence. Those that improved were transferred in time; those that did not were given thei
r final blessings and their corpses incinerated in psi-warded plasma pyres.
Thus it was that – with breath-taking efficiency – huge numbers of Ultramarian casualties were broken down by stages into the smallest manageable groups. Hundreds of thousands of men became thousands, then hundreds, then tens. And all were thoroughly, relentlessly catalogued by the Officio Medicae’s Divisio Descriptor. Elsewhere in the Imperium, such work would have been unimaginable. On most worlds it would never have been undertaken – the sick would have been exterminated; the wounded would have been left to their fate.
Not in Ultramar. The white-and-blue-clad human auxiliaries each represented a significant investment in training, and most had accrued substantial combat experience. By treating and returning its casualties to the war, the realm of Ultramar kept its armies fighting without loss of expertise or effectiveness at the height of the Imperium’s darkest period.
‘By the preservation of life do we maintain our capability to mete out death.’ So the primarch had said. Or, at least, the records indicated he had said so. Now Guilliman was among the living once more, it was possible to ask him if all the words attributed to him were truly his. For the first thirty years, Guilliman had been in the habit of correcting his subordinates, insisting many of his supposed sayings were apocryphal, until he had given up in exasperation. He was simply not believed by most, for whom the primarch remained an ideal. They valued their preconceptions of him over the living evidence.
Despite this mass cognitive dissonance, no one could argue that the efforts to save the troops’ lives were undertaken in a manner at odds with the primarch’s own beliefs. Though diminished in efficacy, something of Guilliman’s meticulous methodology had survived the ages.
Iax had become the hub for all counter-plague efforts, a laboratorium and sanatorium both, where treatments for the war’s ever-evolving sicknesses were concocted and disseminated to the fronts of Ultramar’s war as fast as the enemy could unleash them.
The processing of casualties was labour intensive, no matter how efficient. Ensuring the purity of bulk landers was hard, so they were forbidden from the surface, but smaller lighters or shuttles meant more trips. As a result, landing all the troops from a single medicae ward-ship took a long time, and there were always plenty more waiting.
To the untrained eye, the cleansing of the landing aprons was an impressive sign of the diligence with which the screening procedures were undertaken. In reality, it was the least important and easiest, entrusted to low-ranking ground crew and mono-task servitors whose biologic components were sealed deep within inorganic frames.
Iax had a pronounced axial tilt, and the southern hemisphere’s autumn was coming to an end. It was evening and growing cold as the cleansing team climbed down from their transports. They unspooled their lines and passed through a spray gate, the only gap in the complex of bubble tents around the field. Drenched in strong antibiologics, they paced to and fro, the huge hoses leading from the tankers looped over their backs and pointed at the ground. Their human forms were lost in the bulk of their protective suits, so that servitor and true man were hard to tell apart. Blasts of boiling water were followed by sheeting sprays of anti-virals. Bio-killers swept across the rockcrete. The water sent up huge columns of condensing vapour into the chill air. Appearances were maintained.
When the cleansing had been done, priests in biohazard surplices marched out from the interconnected domed tents crowding the apron. They trailed back and forth over the antiseptic ground, flicking aspergillums full of sanctified oils to kill those psychic corruptions that chemicals could not purge.
Finally, the quarantine masters – the mid-ranking medicae officials, the Frater Hospitaller Majoris Inferior of the local Adeptus Ministorum and purity officers from the commissariat – came out from the tents, inspected the work, gave their approval and affixed their seals to the relevant order parchments. Only then was a lighter given clearance to land.
The whole process took half an hour, every single time.
The ground crew were kept on hand in case the cleansing had not been performed satisfactorily. With relief, they watched their superiors march back into the clutter of bubble tents around the field. As the last closure zipped shut, the ground crew wearily rolled up their disinfectant hoses, retreated back through the spray gate to their service vehicles and sped beetle-fast across the landing fields to grab forty minutes of rest, one cleansing closer to the end of their eighteen-hour shift.
The field was now yielded to several medicae equipped with bulky auspexes attached to their suits with sealed, flexible pipes. Angry red lights flickered condemnatory patterns on the instruments’ upper surfaces.
Bright points shimmered against the evening thousands of feet into the sky. The lighter came in fast. When it had grown to a growling, angular shape, black against the low sun, the medicae set off cleansing bombs around the landing apron that shot out plumes of astringent white smoke in noisy whooshes. The lighter touched down in a mist of anti-biological agents, dropped its ramps without powering down its engines, and was away as soon as the last injured soldier was out of its hold.
In this way, Tullius Varens of the Prandium 30th Ultramar Auxiliary Regiment came to Iax. He shuffled onto the apron with a hundred others like him, blinking against daylight after a week inside a dimly lit voidship cell. He carried nothing but his lasrifle, his flak armour and the uniform on his back. Everything else he owned had been incinerated.
‘Stay close, Bolus,’ he said to the man beside him. ‘Don’t wander off.’
Bolus, an older man with rough salt-and-pepper stubble, stared ahead with the eyes of the profoundly disturbed.
The medicae came out of the chemical fog, shoving the exhausted troopers into a line. Varens was too weak to resist as rubber-gloved hands grabbed him. He growled out a challenge as his wounded back was roughly pawed.
‘Careful,’ he said. The medicae manhandling him went on to the next man without comment. Varens shuffled along with the queue of men. He turned when he realised Bolus wasn’t following him, but was still standing confused where the ramp of the departed ship had deposited him. Sighing, Varens went back to Bolus’ side.
‘Come on, Bolus,’ he whispered. He took his friend by the elbow.
Bolus had never been the same since the last assault at Konor’s Reach. Once voluble and confident, he now went meekly where Varens led.
‘Weapons in a pile in the red circle. Armour and webbing in the green,’ a medicae barked through voxmitters set into his thick armourglass visor. He pointed at painted circles offset from the entrance to the bubble-tent complex. ‘Uniforms in the blue.’
‘Everything?’ said one of the other soldiers. He was stupid with exhaustion. One of the medicae waved his burbling medical auspex up and down his body.
‘Everything,’ the medicae said.
Wearily, the auxiliaries stripped. Emaciated bodies shivered in the cool evening.
Varens reached for Bolus’ gun. His own lasrifle slipped on a shoulder gone scrawny from months of poor rations, rubbing his injury. The gun felt like it weighed as much as a heavy bolter, but he gritted his teeth against the pain, unslung it and took hold of Bolus’ weapon as well, gently unhooking the strap from his friend’s limp fingers.
‘Best get undressed,’ he said to Bolus.
Bolus looked at him wildly. ‘Fifteen! Fifteen!’ he said. He jabbed a finger on his good hand at one of the other troopers, a man by the name of Gideon.
Gideon was one of the few others Varens knew in the group. He was a braggart. Varens did not think much of him.
‘Fifteen!’ Bolus said, urgently gesturing at Gideon.
‘Hey! Hey!’ Varens snapped his fingers before Bolus’ face. The older man quieted and stared at the weapons in Varens’ hands with red-rimmed eyes, as if they affronted him.
‘What, the guns?’ said Varens. ‘I’ll deal with those. Get
undressed, old man, I’ll pile everything up for you. Don’t draw attention to yourself. You got that?’
Bolus nodded. Varens squeezed his shoulder. Reluctantly he left him alone and trudged to the coloured circles. Guns and equipment made fragile-sounding clatters as they were tossed into piles on the rockcrete by the troopers.
It didn’t seem right to Varens, disrespecting their weapons like that, and he scowled at his fellows. Most of them were from worlds far away from his. They were too tired and too sick to notice his disapproval. He elbowed his way forward and carefully laid his and Bolus’ gun down at the circle’s edge.
‘You’ve served me well,’ he said quietly, resting his hand on the stock of his rifle. ‘I pray your spirit finds rest, if you are not to return to the war.’
Leaving his gun was like leaving his heart on the floor, but when he stood and let out a shaky breath, he realised it was a release to be free of it.
His hands went to the buckles fastening his webbing and armour. He was still clothed, but he was cold and shivering already, and his numb fingers struggled with the catches. It wasn’t just the chill: his hurts troubled him. There was a core of flesh missing from his back, just below his shoulder blade. It was still raw around the edges, unnaturally hot. He had not even noticed receiving the wound. In one moment what had once been simple had become permanently fraught with pain. Try as he might, he could not refuse to acknowledge the frailty of his own flesh. The evidence of his weak fingers slipping on the catches was right before his eyes.
After half a minute of fumbling, the catch cooperated and undid. His shoulder plates slid weightily from his body, taking a good portion of his bodily warmth with him. He wasn’t looking forward to taking his uniform off.
Bolus’ shouts had him looking up.
‘Fifteen!’ Bolus was struggling in the restraining arms of a medicae. He was trying to get at Gideon, his arms outstretched. Shouted orders from the medicae team ripped across the throng, augmitter harsh. In a minute, there would be armed men emerging from the tents.