No Hero by Peter McLean

Author:Peter McLean
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2019-05-20T08:13:27+00:00

About the Author

Peter McLean has written the short stories ‘Baphomet by Night’ and ‘No Hero’ for Warhammer 40,000. He grew up in Norwich, where he began story-writing, practising martial arts and practical magic, and lives there still with his wife.

An extract from Honourbound.

Jona Veer is a dead man, covered in blood.

He runs as fast as his legs will carry him. They are burning nearly as bad as his lungs are from the smoke. The forge complex is thick with it, like fog blown in off the water. It wreathes massive machines that line the aisles, and curls up towards a vaulted ceiling. His boots ring off rust-stained decking as he lurches over thick loops of cabling and splashes through the filthy water sluicing from vast industrial laser cutters and plasma burners that make up the tank assembly line. Panel beaters stutter on repeat, and lifters whine and gasp as they raise and lower sheets of steel. All of that machinery sends ash into the air. It blizzards around Veer, getting in his eyes and making them itch and sting. Everything smells like burning and death. Tastes like it too.

Or maybe that’s just from when Chiya’s blood got in his mouth.

He retches so hard it makes him stagger, but nothing will come up except thick ropes of bile. Her face had opened up like a wyld­blossom, red and blooming as she shouted at him.

Shoot, you damned fool! Shoot!

Veer hears them behind him. The Sighted. They are laughing and clattering their weapons off the hulls of tanks. Those wicked knives that he saw gut Soli and Fren. They had opened them up slow, laughing all the while, then they’d used the blood to paint things on their skin. Things that made him sick while he hid, still not able to shoot.

Clatter. Clatter.

Clatter.

It comes from everywhere, and it sounds so close. Throne, how he doesn’t want that death. That slow spill of his guts or a bullet to the head. But then, Veer doesn’t want any death at all. Not an honourable one either, like the others. He wants to live. Veer starts running again and he tastes something else now too, mixing with the ashes and with Chiya’s blood.

It’s salt, from the tears tracking through the dirt on his face.

‘Come back, soldier,’ the Sighted shout from behind him. ‘We are not finished with you yet.’

Their voices come in the gaps between the thrumming machine noise as the manufactorum keeps working, oblivious to the war at its heart. Servitors trundle back and forth on heavy tracks, paying no heed to Veer as he runs. Half-finished chassis of tanks judder along the line to have their armour machined in place. God-killers, built to fell Titans. Veer isn’t a god-killer. He’s not a killer of any kind. He couldn’t even shoot. Not to save Chiya, or even Soli and his damned awful singing.

He’s nearly at the end of the line. The chassis of the last Stormlord to roll off the ash-clogged assembly-way waits like a

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