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 their final blessings and their corpses incinerated in psi-warded plasma pyres.