The facility was set on a rise overlooking the Hythian wetland. From the foot of the ridge, expansive marshes stretched as far as the horizon. Like everything in Ultramar, the marshes were well managed and thoroughly exploited, dotted with aquaculture facilities and helical turbines that chopped at the wind soothingly despite its tended nature, the area retained a hint of wildness. A healthy ecosystem thrived there amid the Ultramarian industries.

The hospital was well sited. The brutality of the era had eroded much of humanity’s gentler qualities, but the medicae of Ultramar had enough insight remaining to appreciate the healing potential of calm, natural spaces.

The night drew in, fragrant with the damp smells of falling leaves and the last seasonal growths before winter. Out over the marshes, birds wailed shrill laments for their summer homes as they wheeled away towards the equator. Meadows fringed the reed beds and children ran through them waving switches, driving bovids home for the night. Their shrieks were as piercing as the birds’. The hot breath of the cattle snorted out in miniature, short-lived storm fronts.

Peace reigned. It was bizarre to behold. Varens thought never to see peace again.

Varens leaned on the parapet, letting himself relax. His fear was lessening. He no longer expected death to come at any moment, though he wasn’t sleeping well. Nightmares had him screaming himself awake in the late watches.

The balcony sat atop the hospital portico before a recessed entablature, an unusual arrangement that did not, to Varens’ eye, quite work. Although the site was well chosen, the architecture of the hospital did not respect Iax’s garden beauty. The architect’s interpretation of Ultramarian aesthetic mores was somewhat clumsy, and the hard lines of the hospital stood out jarringly on the soft landscape. The marble’s cold luminosity added to the chill of the evening, further setting the building apart from the damp, wide landscape of muted browns and greens.

Varens shivered in his hospital shift, but he didn’t want to go back in, not yet. The cold of the tiles through his thin slippers reminded him he was still alive, and the itchy tightness in his wound, until recently so hot and sore, told him he would soon be whole again. Out on the balcony, he felt like a man, not like a patient as he did when he was in the healing halls, or worse, like a number. To the logisticians of the Departmento Munitorum, all men were numbers, as dispassionately expended as bullets. Varens relished those rare moments when the war and the needs of the Imperium retreated a pace from the forefront of his mind, those times when he might simply be.

Once healed, the men had a few days of peace before they were returned to the war and became numbers again. Numbers transferred from one column on the balance sheet to another, from sick to well, from resource drain to asset.