Runner by Alan Bao

Author:Alan Bao [Bao, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781789997569
Published: 2019-09-11T12:28:52+00:00

About the Author

Alan Bao is an illustrator and multimedia designer currently bouncing around East Asia. He is also a writer of poetry and prose, and ‘Runner’ is his first story to be published by Black Library.

An extract from ‘Predation of the Eagle’ by Peter McLean,

from the Warhammer Horror anthology, Maledictions.

Vardan IV, Astra Militarum Advance Firebase Theta 82

Three months ago

Sergeant Rachain read the names of the Missing in Action to the platoon every morning.

Every morning, the list was longer than it had been the day before.

‘Emperor’s grace,’ Corporal Cully muttered to himself as the reeking, poisonous rain beat down hot around him, pounding on the canvas covering of the muster tent overhead. ‘There won’t be any of us left before we get out of here at this rate.’

‘What say, corporal?’

That was Moonface, from Three Section. Cully looked at the boy’s fat, sweating face, and he could see the fear written there in the premature lines around his young eyes.

‘Nothing, trooper,’ he said. ‘Old Cully’s just muttering to himself, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’

Cully had no idea what Moonface’s real name was, but it didn’t really matter. On Vardan IV it didn’t really matter what anyone’s name was, at least not until they had survived their first firefight. Most of them didn’t, after all.

The steaming jungles were infested with orks, and the Reslian 45th were chewing through new recruits as fast as the troop ships could deliver them. Cully, though, he’d been deployed there for the last two years. So had Rachain, of course.

They were tight, the pair of them, and Sergeant Drachan and Corporal Gesht and the others from Two Section. They were the old guard, the backbone of Alpha Platoon, D Company. The hardened veterans.

The survivors.

Corporal Rikkards and his mob were all right too, he supposed, especially that huge lad who Cully called Ogryn, but never where he might hear him. Lopata, he thought the man’s name was. Still, they were in Beta Platoon and tended to keep themselves to themselves and didn’t mingle much with the others, so to the warp with them.

No, it was the old guard who mattered. Rachain and Cully, Drachan and Gesht. Veteran sergeants and their top corporals, that was what made a platoon. Rachain was lead sergeant of Alpha Platoon. He was top canid in D Company, and Cully was his right hand man and his best friend.

That was how you ran an army, Cully thought. Lieutenants were only there to do paperwork and take the blame if the wheels fell off an operation, and who even knew what captains did. Anyone higher up than that might as well not exist, in Cully’s opinion. It was boots in the mud that won wars, not generals polishing chairs with their arses.

‘It’s a lot of names, corporal,’ Moonface said.

Cully had forgotten the boy was there. He blinked and looked at him.

‘This is war, Moonface,’ he said. ‘People go missing, in the jungle. People die. That’s what we’re here for, in case it had escaped the memory capacity of the tiny brain that hides behind that enormous face of yours.

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