No Hero (Warhammer 40,000) by Peter Mclean

Author:Peter Mclean [Mclean, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Peter McLean has written several short stories for Black Library, including ‘Baphomet by Night’, ‘No Hero’, ‘Sand Lords’ and ‘Lightning Run’ for Warhammer 40,000, and the Warhammer Horror tale ‘Predations of the Eagle’. 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.

Commissar Severina Raine slides a fresh magazine into her bolt pistol with a hard click. She has replaced the eight-round magazine four times. Thirty-two shots fired.

Six of them to execute her own troops.

Raine has fought many wars on many fronts across the Bale Stars, and almost all of them have been against the Sighted, or their splinter cults. She has seen the way they turn worlds with whispers and false promises. The way they set workers against their masters, and guards against those that they are meant to protect. It’s what makes them dangerous. When you battle the Sighted, you battle the people of the Bale Stars too. Scribes and soldiers. Priests and peacekeepers. The poor, the downtrodden, the ambitious and the reckless. For some of those that serve with her, that knowledge is too much. For some it is just fear that means they find the trigger impossible to pull. No matter the reason, they will find themselves looking down the barrel of her pistol, Penance, in turn. Just like Penance, Raine is made for the act of judgement. For the instant before the strike of the hammer and the burst of flame. She understands what it means to pull the trigger, and what it makes her. She is not driven by anger, or malice. That would undermine her purpose, which is the same no matter the crime.

To eliminate weakness.

Raine crouches down and takes Jona Veer’s ident-tags from around his neck. They will not be sent back to Antar as with the honoured dead. They will be disposed of at the end of the fight on Laxus Secundus. His name will go with them, to be forgotten in time by everyone but her, because Raine never forgets the dead, honoured or not.

‘Commissar.’

The voice belongs to Captain Yuri Hale. It’s rough-edged, like he is. The captain of Grey Company is tall, like most Antari. Three deep, severe scars run down the left side of his face from hairline to chin. The Antari call him lucky because he managed to keep his eye. They say he must have been graced with that luck by a white witch, or by fate itself. Raine doesn’t believe in luck. She believes that Yuri Hale survives the same way the rest of them do.

By fighting for every breath.

‘More power spikes from the inner forge,’ he says.

Raine puts Veer’s tags in her pocket, where they clatter against the others, then she gets to her feet and looks to the dust-caked screen on the auspex kit Hale is holding. When the regiment first entered the forges, more than six hours ago, it was registering soft spikes. Now the peaks are jagged, with the regularity of a great, slow heartbeat.

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