Varens awoke screaming into the silence of the medicae ward. Feeble hands shook him. Varens screamed again, and lashed out.

‘Ouch!’ The hands were removed. ‘Shut up, Varens, we’re trying to get some sleep,’ groused Mukai, the man who had the cot next to his. He stood over Varens looking grumpy.

Consciousness came, displacing sleep just as rushing water sweeps away sand. The horror remained. Varens clamped his mouth shut to stifle the last of his screams.

‘I’m sorry. Nightmares,’ Varens managed to say. Mutters from the beds nearby spoke of a lack of sympathy.

Varens reached for his water, hands shaking. The battle had been just like he had dreamed it, and he dreamed it every night. The aftershocks of his nightmare receded, leaving him shaking.

He fumbled for the water by his cot. His shaking hands knocked the plastek cup onto the floor.

‘For the sake of the Emperor! Keep it down!’ Hammadsen, the man on the other side, shouted into his pillow.

‘Sorry,’ Varens said. He was awake now. He needed a drink, so he slipped out from under the thin blanket and picked up his cup. His back twinged, but it was a good, healing pain.

Rubbing at his wound, he padded between the long rows of beds. The ward was a wide hall, with eight rows of low cots. The men here were all injured in ways serious enough to warrant their evacuation, but not likely to be invalided. Nearly all of them would be sent back to the war, unlike the men on some of the other wards. There were halls in the hospital for whose occupants a hard life of poverty awaited, doing whatever work their disfigurements allowed. The richest could afford augmetics. The very brave might be patched up and sent back to the front as morale-boosting examples. The rest would do what they could.

‘For Ultramar, for the Imperium, for the grace of the Emperor,’ he whispered under his breath. He made the sign of the aquila obsessively over his chest.

The lights in the small rest area calmed him down. Varens poured himself a cup of water that tasted of disinfectants. He drained it, pulling a face at the aftertaste as he took the cup from his lips. It was better than the water on Espandor, though, and in plentiful supply.

He had another cup, then started towards bed, but a superstitious unease halted his steps, and before he knew it he was turning around and heading towards the ward where Bolus was.

A medicae in low-ranking grey was in the chair outside Bolus’ ward, head bowed over a devotional pamphlet. He wore a small lamp over one eye that lit the cheap paper a livid yellow, each splinter of wood pulp a strong detail against the blue blur of night. The hands holding it were just as blotted, and blunted by hard work.

‘What do you want?’ The medicae looked up, the lamp shining into Varens’ face.