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.