Runner

by Alan Bao

  ‘My little aqtipi dove, do you know how the sun got its place in the sky?’

  His sadness deepened. No matter how far he reached into the misty depths of memory, he could not remember the answer to that question, nor the reason why it resonated with such significance to him.

  A third shadow rose from the mist. Wanlek stirred, and half-remembered words burbled from his mouth.

  ‘Mami?’

  She slouched from the earth, her flesh soft and green and yielding. Not his mother – but close enough to the real thing to provide a deep, satisfying comfort. Her voice sounded like tar as she dripped her words into the swamp beneath their feet.

  ‘You have been anointed by the gods, my little dove. No more pain.’

  ‘No more pain,’ echoed the shadows in the mist.

  She enfolded him in a wet embrace. Lukewarm kisses left splotches of pus on his cheeks. When they finally broke contact, she held him out at arm’s length, and looked over his face lovingly.

  ‘We’ve taken your pain, but it is not the end of duty. You still have a job to do. Do you understand?’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘I think I do.’

  She smiled and gave him a final, gurgling kiss.

  The runner opened his eyes.

  Dawn was breaking over the tundra. A cold wind whipped across his face, but he felt no chill. He sat up, testing his muscles against his weight. They responded without complaint. He rested his flayed soles against the jagged salt of the tundra. They did not feel pain.

  The runner pulled himself to his feet and looked out over the emptiness. The gauze on his feet fell away, along with a layer of skin. Other things, too. Flakes of memory. Fragments of a yellow sun. A puzzle in a story whose ending he could not remember.

  He unstrapped the canteen from his belt and let it drop to the frozen earth. Next, his satchel. His belts and medals. Reaching into his breast pocket, he felt the solid metal lump of the antique rebreather – and, after a brief hesitation, he tossed that too.

  The runner breathed deep, surveying the bloated rodent carcasses at his feet. Joints clicked and skin sloughed, but he found himself otherwise very functional.

  ‘We have taken your pain,’ rumbled a voice deep within his gut, ‘but you still have a job to do.’

  The runner blinked. He suddenly remembered that he’d been running for days, and that his duty was not yet done. Yanking himself out of his repose, he made his way down the ridgeline, and further on into the vast, sweeping tundra.

  It was best not to linger. He still had a message to deliver, after all.

  It was late afternoon by the time the grey, hulking outline of regimental command loomed into view. The runner approached at an unhurried pace, humming his chorus happily as the air broke into rhythmic cracks around him. It took several more shots for him to recognise the sound of lasguns. Stray shots arced over his head – they did not deter his progress. The runner watched them with an idle interest, wondering if they were meant to be warning shots, or just indicative of terribly bad aim.

  There was a crack and a hiss. He tumbled backwards with a distant concern, and looked down to see where a las-shot had blown a smouldering chunk from his shoulder. Why were they shooting him now? He had a message to deliver, and he had come such a long way to do so.

  He struggled up from the ground and held up his good arm in a gesture of surrender.

  The gunfire stopped.

  After a while, several scrambling figures emerged from the fog, closing around him with practised speed. They hauled him to his feet, sweating and breathing fast. The runner regarded them with pity. They dragged him through the gate of the main compound, through a vast courtyard of stone and plascrete, and into a grey, squat bunker that huddled near the foot of the mountain hold.

  The world passed in steel and meat and sulphur. Corridors upon corridors. More meat followed, barking, sweating, running, saluting with all the messy exertion one would expect. Finally a steel door along a far wall slid open, and the runner was deposited unceremoniously into a windowless room and shoved into a corner. More meat filed into the room after him, the gelatine of their eyes straining as they studied him.

  ‘Name and rank!’ the meat barked.

  The runner blinked.

  ‘I am…’ he started, then frowned. He chided himself for his lapse in memory.

  ‘I am flesh and I am rot.

  ‘I am flesh and I am god.’

  The meat buzzed around him – wheedling, prodding, hitting, shouting. The runner accepted it all with a soft indifference. He could not understand why they insisted on waylaying him now. His message was important, even if he was a little fuzzy on the details. A keep – that was it. A keep had fallen, and something was coming. Bullard and Old Sarge and Tinker-man were dead, and–

  The runner frowned. No, that couldn’t be right. Bullard and Old Sarge and Tinker-man were fine. In fact, there was Bullard right now, in a shadowy corner of the room, his lips pulled back in a soot-black smile, deep, tongueless, toothless.

  Outside in the corridor, a commotion broke out. Shouts rang out in a din, and heavy footfalls weaved this way and that in staccato confusion. Garbled messages flitted from vox-comm to vox-comm before the room fell deathly silent.

  The meat shouted and hit him with another blow. He could feel the shock of flesh against flesh, knuckle against jaw.

  Right. The message.

  The runner opened his mouth.

  ‘I am the flesh that time forgot.’

  A sudden understanding came over him. He stood up ponderously, working out the semantics in his mind. He was not a runner after all. He was more of a… what was the word?

  A herald.

  The meat recoiled from the green mist that leaked from the herald’s nose, mouth and pores.

  ‘I am the flesh that time forgot.’

  Bullard stepped out from the shadows. And Old Sarge, and Tinker-man, and Machinist. The herald held the convulsing meat to his breast, as if to soothe a crying child. Its limbs kicked with a desperate vigour, but each blow came weaker than the last. The herald embraced the meat as a father would; cradled it, smothered it.

  ‘No more pain, little man,’ he said, as the mist grew thick and the shadows grew solid. ‘We are coming.’

  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. We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for.’

  ‘Yes, corporal,’ Moonface said, and that really was the only right answer he could have given.

  Cully headed up One Section, Alpha Platoon, and that made him Rachain’s top canid. No recruit boot from a lower section was going to answer him back, not if they knew what was good for them.

  ‘Corporal,’ a voice rasped behind him, sounding like it was coming straight out of an open grave.

  That was Steeleye, Cully knew. He turned and looked at the veteran sniper. Steeleye had been in One Section since even before Cully’s time, and ever since she got her naming wound she had refused to answer to her real name anymore. Cully respected her capability enormously, but that didn’t make her any easier to look at.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, feigning nonchalance as his eyes took in the ruin of the woman’s face.

  Steeleye had met an ork up close, once. Very close indeed.

  It had bitten her face off.

  Her left eye socket had been crushed too badly for the medicae to be able to do anything except seal over the collapsed mess of broken skull with hideously shiny synthetic skin, giving her whole head a disturbingly lopsided appearance. Her right eye had been replaced with the bulbous metallic augmetic from which she took her name. She had no nose, just a ragged open snout from which thick green snot ran almost constantly, and the bone was exposed along the length of the left side of her jaw where the synth-skin had refused to take.

  She carried a specially customised long-las over her shoulder, topped with a scope that interfaced so perfectly with her augmetic eye that the entire weapon became part of her body. She had recorded eight hundred and thirty seven confirmed kills on Vardan IV.

  ‘Stop winding the poor brat up,’ Steeleye said, nodding sideways at Moonface. ‘You ain’t been listening to the list.’

  Cully shrugged. He hadn’t been listening to the morning list for the last eighteen months.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Drachan made it.’

  Cully blinked. Sergeant Drachan had been the platoon’s top scout.

  Making the list, that was what they called it when you went out into the green and didn’t come back. Sometimes a trooper might be confirmed Killed in Action, if they were shot down right in front of their comrades and someone managed to bring their ident-tags back for the Munitorum to log the death and send The Letter to their next of kin, but it was rare. In the impenetrable, greenskin-infested jungles of Vardan IV, ninety per cent of casualties were officially listed as MIA for the simple reason that no one could find what was left of them after an engagement.

  ‘You sure?’

  Steeleye nodded, and paused to wipe her oozing snout with the back of her already crusty uniform sleeve.

  ‘Emperor’s word,’ she said. ‘He went out with Two Section yesterday, didn’t come back. Gesht’s in pieces.’

  Cully nodded slowly. He knew Drachan and his corporal had been close. Maybe too close, if you cared what the regulations said.

  Cully didn’t care one little bit.

  ‘I’ve got some sacra in my tent,’ he said. ‘I’ll go see her. Thanks, Steeleye.’

  The old veteran nodded her ruined head at the corporal, and no more words needed to be said between them. Moonface just looked on in simple, naive bewilderment as the day to day business of the Astra Militarum went on around him.

  Death, loss, grief.

  It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.

  Vardan IV

  Now

  Cully squeezed down on the trigger of his lasgun and blew the ork apart with a sustained burst of full auto.

  ‘Emperor’s teeth, but there’s a lot of them,’ Gesht’s voice growled in his vox-bead.

  The other corporal was five, maybe six hundred yards to ­Cully’s left, away through the curtain of suffocating rain with her own section spread out around her.

  Alpha Platoon were deep into greenskin country, on an advance recon mission.

  ‘I hear you,’ Cully replied. ‘Concentrate on the big ones, they’re the bosses.’

  ‘You think I’m some new boot?’ Gesht snapped. ‘I know that, Cully.’

  Cully shrugged, for all that he knew the woman couldn’t see him.

  ‘Sure, Gesht,’ he said. ‘Just watch your arse, and watch your section’s arses even harder.’

  ‘Teach me to suck a bleedin’ egg,’ Gesht started, then her inevitable obscenities were cut short by a crackling barrage of automatic lasgun fire through Cully’s vox-bead.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I was just doing my job. What are you doing?’

  Cully bit back a reply and pulled himself forward on his elbows and knees through the stinking mud and rotting vegetation. The light was greenish yellow in the rain, filtered through the high jungle canopy above them. Everything in Cully’s world was made of sweat and mud and filth.

  His webbing chafed at his shoulders through his flak armour, rubbing his sodden undershirt against the constant friction sores that were a simple part of life on Vardan IV. Enormous insects swarmed around him, biting at his exposed skin, and more than once he’d had to stop and brush hideous, translucent arachnids off his sleeve.

  ‘Status report,’ he said, after a moment.

  ‘About five hundred on your nine,’ Gesht said. ‘No more contacts. Closing on the boss.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Cully said. His section were finally out of orks to kill, too.

  They were both closing on Rachain, bringing their sections forward to the sergeant’s position. He was in the command squad, of course, with Lieutenant Makkron who was at least nominally in charge of Alpha Platoon’s deep recon patrol.

  If Makkron had even half a brain, Cully thought, he would be doing what Rachain told him. The officer was fresh out of the cadet scholam back on Reslia itself. They still did things the old-fashioned way on Reslia; sent anyone with good breeding straight to officer school. That meant anyone with money, obviously. He was maybe twenty Terran-standard years old at the most. Rachain was almost twice his age, and had spent all those extra years in the Guard. He knew what he was doing.

  A newly commissioned lieutenant outranked a platoon sergeant, of course, but he would have to be a special kind
of stupid to try to enforce it. Cully really didn’t want to have anyone that stupid in command of him and his men.

  ‘Hey, Gesht,’ Cully said, flicking his vox-bead over to their private channel. ‘What do you make of the lieutenant?’

  Gesht snorted in his ear. ‘Wetter behind the ears than the last one was,’ she said. ‘The next one will still be in nappies, at this rate.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Cully said. ‘You reckon he’s listening to Rachain?’

  ‘He’d better be, or he might get shot in the back by an ork,’ Gesht said.

  ‘Like the last one did, you mean?’

  Their last lieutenant had been the special kind of stupid that had almost got thirty of them killed when she marched them straight into an ork ambush despite Sergeant Drachan’s insistence that it was a trap. It had only been the honed reactions of the veterans, and Steeleye’s stone cold sniping, that had got them out of it alive. The lieutenant had been gunned down from behind by a lone ork on their way back to the base. No one ever found that ork, and platoon lore had it that perhaps its name had been Gesht, but of course no one could prove anything and in honesty no one much cared. As far as Cully was concerned that was all well and good.

  The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, and he had long since come to accept that.

  ‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Gesht said, and her voice was flat and emotionless.

  Cully could have kicked himself for a fool for bringing it up. That had been before.

  Before Drachan made the list.

  Before Gesht lost her mind to grief.

  ‘Don’t mean anything,’ he assured her. ‘We’re good.’

  ‘We’re good,’ Gesht agreed, and the moment passed.

  Cully remembered the day Steeleye had come and told him Drachan had made the list. He remembered going to Gesht’s tent with his illicit flask of sacra, to see how she was.

  Deranged, that was how she had been. He had found her field-stripping her lasgun and anointing its few moving parts with her own blood as she recited the Emperor’s Litany of Vengeance over and over again. She’d had plenty of blood to work with, what with the mess she had made of her left arm.