'Do with it as you see fit,' Gaunt said, turning his back on Rawne.
'I will… one of these days,' replied Major Elim Rawne.
The Infirmary lay well back from the main embankment defence here on Monthax. Like Gaunt's modular hut, it was raised out of the soupy ground on stacks. Long, swoop-roofed, the Infirmary's wall planking was washed an arsenic green, while the roof was black with bitumen. Grey blast-curtains protected the doors and window hatches, and bunches of pipes and cables carried in air from the scrubbers and power from the chattering turbine behind the place. Symbols of the Imperium, and of the medical corps, were stencilled on the walls, for all that Chaos would notice them if they stormed over the bulwark. Gaunt climbed up a metal ladder next to the rush-ramp for stretcher parties, and pushed inside through the screens and heavy curtaining.
Inside he found a paradise and a surprise. It was by far the coolest and most fragrant place in the camp, probably the coolest, most fragrant place on Monthax itself. Sweet odours of sap rose from the fresh timber of the floor and the clean rush matting. There was a scent of antiseptic fluids, rubbing alcohol and some purifying incense that burned in a bowl next to the small shrine set near the western end. The forty beds were made up and empty. Pale, artificial light shone from gauze-hooded lamps.
Gaunt wandered the length of the ward and let himself through a screen door at the end. There, access led off into storerooms, latrines, a small operating theatre, and the Chief Medical Officer's quarters. Dorden wasn't in his little, tidy office, but Gaunt saw his distinctive handiwork in the careful arrangement of medical texts, chart folders, and the labels-front regimentation of the flasks and bottles in the locked dispensary cabinet.
The medic was in the operating theatre, polishing the stain less-steel surface and blood drains of the theatre table. Gleaming surgical tools, an autoclave and a ressussitrex unit sat in corners.
'Commissar Gaunt!' Dorden looked up in surprise. 'Can I help you?'
'As you were, just a routine walkabout. Anything to report, any problems?'
Dorden stood up straight, balling the polishing cloth in his hands and dropping it into a ceramic bowl of disinfectant. 'Not one, sir. Come to inspect the place?'
'Certainly an improvement on the last few facilities you've had to work with.'
Dorden smiled. He was a small, elderly man with a trimmed grey beard and genial eyes that had seen more pain than they deserved. 'It's empty yet.'
'I admit that surprised me when I came in. So used to seeing your places overflowing with wounded, Emperor spare us.'
'Give it time,' Dorden said, ominously. 'It unnerves me, I have to say. Seeing all those empty beds. I praise the Golden Throne I'm idle, but idleness doesn't suit me. Must've polished and swept the place a dozen times already.'
'If that's the worst work you have here on Monthax, we may all give thanks.'
'May we all indeed. Can I offer a cup of caffeine? I was about to light the stove.'
'Perhaps later, when I come back this way. I have to inspect the magazines. There are stirrings beyond us.'
'So I heard last night. Later then, sir.'
Gaunt nodded and left. He doubted he'd have time to stop by later, and he doubted too that this little paradise would remain unsullied much longer.
Dorden watched the commissar leave, and stood for a while longer surveying the clean ward with its empty cots. Like Gaunt, he had no illusions as to the horror-hole this place would become. It was inevitable.
He closed his eyes, and for a moment he could see the floor matting drenched in black blood; the soiled sheets; the moaning, screaming faces. And the silent ones.
His nostrils seemed to detect blood and burned flesh for a second, but it was just the incense.
Just the incense.
EIGHT
The fallen men, scattered on the roadway and across the low, muddy fields of Nacedon, looked like they were wearing black mail armour. But they weren't. The meat-flies were busy. They covered the flesh like seething black links of armour. They glittered furiously, moving like a single thing. 'Medic!'
Tolin Dorden looked away from the flies. The afternoon sky lay wide and misty over the low, flat fens. Trackways and field boundaries were marked with dykes and hedge ways, all of them ruined and overrun with razor-posts, concertina wire and churned tank paths. The mist smelled of thermite powder.
'Medic!' The call again. Sharp and insistent, from down the roadway. Slowly, Dorden turned and trudged from the gutter of the road where, for a hundred metres, more corpses lay twisted and crumpled and coated in flies.
He advanced towards the buildings, feth, but he'd seen enough of this war now, no matter what the world. He was tired and he was spent. Sixty years old, older by twenty years than any of the other Ghosts. He was weary: weary of the death, the fighting, weary of the young bodies he had to patch back together. Weary, too, of being regarded as a father by so many men who had lost their own at the fall of Tanith.
Smoke clogged the late afternoon sky across the low fields. He approached the old red-brick buildings with their blown-out windows and crumpled walls. It had been a farm complex once, before the invasion. A feudal estate with a main house, outbuildings and barns. Agricultural machinery lay rusting and broken in waterlogged swine pens. A wide trench gully and a double fence of seared flak-boards topped with more spools of wire enclosed the complex in a horseshoe, with the northern side, the one that faced away from the frontline, open. Ghosts stood point all around, weapons ready. Trooper Brostin nodded him inside.
Dorden passed a sandbagged gunnery post from which the weapon had been hastily removed and entered the first of the buildings, the main house, through a doorway that had been shot out of the brick by sustained las-fire. More flies, billowing in clouds in the afternoon sunlight. The smell of death he was so, so used to. And other smells: antiseptic, blood, waste.
