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No Hero – Extract

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No Hero

Peter McLean

I don’t know if anyone will ever read this journal, but I’m going to start writing it anyway. There’s nothing else to do, other than sit in my tent and sweat and wait for it to be over. It’s that or listen to Corporal Cully and Sergeant Rachain make fun of people, but after six months in D Company I’m tired of the pair of them. They’re fine soldiers but their sense of humour revolves around making up cruel names for everyone, and I don’t like it. At least they’re not in my platoon – that’s something, I suppose.

It’s so hot in the tent that I’m feeling faint even as I write, this despite the rain drumming down. The air itself is like liquid, the humidity making my combat fatigues stick to me in the most disgusting way. There hasn’t been a single day in the last six months when it hasn’t been like this, and the nights are no better. Our advance firebase is deep in the jungle, hundreds of miles away from the landing fields where even now the massive transports are evacuating whole regiments up to the orbiting troop ships.

Praise the Emperor, we’re getting out of this hell.

The first wave of Valkyries came an hour ago and took C Company away with them, heading for those blessed landing fields. It’ll be our turn soon, thank the Golden Throne. The rampaging horde of orks is less than twenty miles away from our camp now, so the scouts have reported, and there are vast numbers of them.

Vast. Too many to fight any more. The firebase will be overrun.

The order to evacuate Vardan IV came at the very last moment, but I’m just thankful that it came at all. I’m praying that our Valkyrie gets here before the greenskins do. I cannot wait to get in that carrier, and if I never see another ork again in my life it will be too soon.

I’m still alive. Somehow, dear journal, I survived it. This is what happened:

Our turn finally came to board the Valkyries. I was with Corporal Rikkards and the rest of One Section. The sergeant was with Two Section in the craft after ours. The lieutenant had already gone, no surprises there.

I clambered on board with Jannek ahead of me and Straub behind lugging his vox-caster, all of us jostling for position even though we knew there would be room for everyone. There were only ten of us in the section including the corporal, and the Valkyrie swallowed us and our gear with ease. Not in comfort, admittedly, but I wasn’t complaining. No one was.

Karrel and Varus pulled the hinged benches down on their scissor mounts and we all promptly took our helmets off and put them on the benches to sit on. We had to fly over the rapidly approaching orks to get to the landing fields, and one thing we had learned very quickly on Vardan IV is that greenskins like to shoot at anything that moves, including Valkyries. Once you’ve seen your first man hit from below by a spray of bullets coming up through the floor between his legs, you learn to sit on your helmet when you’re flying over the jungle.

‘Shove up,’ Cialella said as she lumped down next to me.

I grunted and moved a bit, but not much. I couldn’t really, with Lopata looming on my other side. He was a ridiculously big man – Cully had called him ‘ogryn’, but not where Lopata was likely to hear and make something of it. Even Cully was wary of Lopata.

‘Shove up,’ Cialella complained.

‘I’ll shove it up yours in a minute,’ I snapped at her, and Corporal Rikkards glared at us both.

‘Be quiet, the pair of you,’ he said.

I muttered an apology. It was like an oven in the idling Valkyrie, and everyone was short-tempered, and scared that the greenskins were going to charge into the camp shooting at any minute, and utterly overwhelmed with relief to be leaving alive, all at once. Brendahl was the last one in, and then the Navy gunner slammed the side door of the Valkyrie closed behind him and took up position behind his door-mounted heavy bolter. Varus mopped her face with a greasy rag, making it even dirtier than it had been. Blashak, by far the oldest of us at nearly thirty Terran-standard, coughed into his fist.

That was it, we really were getting out at last.

The Valkyrie’s twin engines began to scream, and the heavy carrier shuddered as it lifted vertically off the ground in a swirling cloud of dust and wind-blown debris. I could just see out of the door-gunner’s firing slit from where I was sitting, and I watched the thick foliage of the jungle canopy drop away beneath us as we lifted. We hovered for a moment while the pilot vectored the engines for horizontal flight, then sudden acceleration shoved me hard against Lopata’s meaty shoulder. I don’t think he even noticed.

We were still flying at a relatively low altitude, but the wind rushing in through the gun ports in the doors was blissfully cool now that the aircraft had picked up speed, and everyone started to relax as the temperature in the crew bay dropped. I could hear distant gunfire over the noise of the engines as the greenskins wasted ammo trying to shoot us down, but we were high enough to be out of range of their small-arms fire.

‘Sorry I shoved you,’ Cialella said.

‘Forget it,’ I said, and smiled at her. ‘Sorry I snapped at you.’

Cialella was all right, and a crack shot too. She was the nearest thing One Section had to a proper sniper, even if she didn’t warrant a specialist marksman’s long-las. I sighed with sheer relief. This was the closest I had come to being comfortable and happy in over six months.

The feeling was wonderful, and it lasted right up until the missile hit us.

We must have been right over the orks, and they were already taking potshots at us, but we knew they couldn’t hurt us now. Only I guess whichever warband was directly below us just then had heavy weapons.

Bad luck, that was all it was. The pilots wouldn’t have known what hit them. I don’t know much about it myself, truth be told.

All I remember is that the front of the Valkyrie exploded in a shrieking fireball and then we were falling out of the sky, screaming as the wind tore through the crew bay.

I don’t know what happened after that.

I woke up with my head in Cialella’s lap, or what would have been her lap if she’d still had any legs.

She was very, very dead.

So was Straub, who was on top of me with a huge chunk of shattered metal sticking out of his forehead like a single, twisted horn. The floor of the crew bay was slanted at a crazy angle and the whole interior of the carrier was sticky with blood. I couldn’t move.

I could hear someone moving about, then the clang of an equipment locker swinging shut.

‘Help me,’ I croaked. ‘Who’s there? Please, help me.’

‘Sorry, boy, I thought you were dead too,’ Lopata’s voice said.

I saw his huge hairy hands reach down and hook Straub’s body under the armpits, then the big man hauled the corpse off me and tossed it unceremoniously aside.

‘I don’t know how I’m not,’ I said. ‘Is anyone else alive?’

‘Yeah, the corporal is, but he’s hurt, and Jannek is hurt far worse,’ Lopata said. ‘Varus and Blashak seem to be all right, and one of the Navy gunners made it too. Everyone else is paste.’

Seven of us had survived the crash, then. It didn’t seem possible.

‘It’s a miracle,’ I whispered. ‘The Emperor protects.’

Lopata shrugged and helped me to sit up.

‘Varus reckons we came down on top of the jungle canopy and sort of slid across the top of the trees for half a mile or so, and that slowed us down enough that we weren’t all pulped when the craft hit the ground. Pure luck, she says.’

‘Oh, how would she know?’ I muttered as I pulled myself the rest of the way up and tried to wipe as much of Cialella’s blood off my face as I could.

‘She looked at the trees – reckons she knows woodcraft and all that stuff,’ Lopata said. ‘She’s a scout, after all.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

Varus had only been made up to scout two weeks ago after Darrup had been killed in an ork ambush, and in my opinion it had gone to her head. I took an unsteady step and the world spun around me, making me clutch at a broken piece of the Valkyrie’s twisted fuselage to hold myself up.

‘Steady there,’ Lopata said, grabbing my arm in a hand that went all the way around it with ease. ‘You must have taken a hell of a blow to the head – you’ve been unconscious for hours. It’s why I thought you didn’t make it.’

I grunted, just glad the other survivors hadn’t already been rescued before I woke up. I would have been left behind for dead, if that had happened. That made me frown as I thought about it.

‘Why haven’t we been picked up yet?’

Lopata just shrugged.

‘We’ve been written off as lost in action, the corporal says, and we’ve no way to tell anyone otherwise. The cockpit… well, isn’t there any more, so we’ve got no vox and no distress beacon. We were going to move out on foot once I’d finished scavenging kit.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What about Straub’s field set?’

‘Some of it’s sticking out of his head, and the rest is smashed to bits,’ Lopata said.

‘Oh,’ I said again.

‘Reckon you can walk yet?’

I tried a tentative step towards the hole in the side of the aircraft where the crew bay door had been torn off. My vision was a bit blurry and my head was throbbing, but nothing seemed to be broken. I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to the Emperor for my deliverance.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll be all right. Thanks for pulling me out of there.’

I climbed carefully down out of the wreckage and into a steaming jungle clearing that was strewn with bits of the shattered Valkyrie. The jungle stank of rot and the promethium that was slowly dripping from the carrier’s ruptured fuel tanks. I could only thank the Emperor that we hadn’t all gone up in a fireball.

Corporal Rikkards was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, with the surviving Navy door-gunner not far away from him. Blashak was away by the edge of the treeline, and I could see Varus staring up at the canopy, as though still trying to work out how we were alive at all. Lopata followed me out of the wreckage with four lasguns in his arms.

‘Look who I found,’ he said, grinning.

Corporal Rikkards looked at me in surprise.

‘Thought you were dead, boy,’ he said.

He was nursing his left arm. Blashak, our squad medic, had bandaged it up for him, wrapping his left hand in a great ball of dressings that told me the wound must be pretty bad.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

‘I can see that now, boy,’ Rikkards said, and winced as he moved. ‘What did you get, Lopata?’

‘Four more lasguns,’ he said. ‘At least we can have one each now, and I’ve salvaged a fair bit of ammo too. And a Navy flare pistol, in case we can think of a use for it.’

‘Good,’ Rikkards said. ‘Stack them with the rations. We need to move out soon.’

‘You really don’t think anyone’s going to come looking for us, corporal?’ I asked.

‘No, I really don’t,’ Rikkards said. ‘You can see the state of the craft as well as I can – no one’s going to be expecting any survivors from that.’

I sighed. He was right. The front half of the Valkyrie had been obliterated. If it hadn’t been for the Emperor’s Grace and the thickness of the jungle canopy we would all be dead. As it was, it seemed our plummet from the sky and subsequent slide across the treetops had carried us well away from the orks. I couldn’t hear any shooting in the distance, or anything at all except the hooting and screaming of the hideous simians and fierce avians that infested the jungle.

‘Corporal,’ Blashak called over to where Rikkards was sitting.

Blashak was hunkered down on his haunches in the shade of the trees, bent over the prone figure of Jannek, with a medi-kit open on the ground beside him.

‘What?’

‘Jannek isn’t in a fit state to be moved,’ Blashak said. ‘This is way beyond anything I can do with field dressings. I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

Rikkards wiped his good hand over his face and looked away.

‘No, I don’t think he is either,’ he said.

‘Well, what are we going to do with him?’

‘You know what we’re going to do with him, Blashak,’ the corporal said. ‘We… Oh Throne, I’ve got the seniority, haven’t I? Where’s the lieutenant when you actually want him for once? I suppose I’ll have to do it.’

He climbed off the tree trunk and walked over to where Jannek lay. Jannek was alive but only just, impaled through the gut by a long piece of the Valkyrie’s broken airframe. His breathing was shallow and weak, and he was the colour of rancid milk.

Blashak looked up at the corporal and shook his head.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry. I tried, but…’

He gestured helplessly at the critically wounded man.

‘I know.’

Corporal Rikkards bowed his head in prayer for a moment, and drew his laspistol.

‘The Emperor’s Mercy,’ he said, and shot Jannek through the head.

‘You can’t do that!’ the Navy door-gunner protested, leaping to his feet from where he had been sitting with his back to the fallen tree.

He looked down at Jannek for a moment, then took a step away from the corporal.

Rikkards shrugged.

‘Just did,’ he said. ‘And anyway, yes I can. You know the regulations as well as I do – if a man is wounded and can’t continue, if it would be a mercy to end his suffering or if his condition presents a clear and present danger to his comrades, the senior officer present is empowered to administer the Emperor’s Mercy.’

‘All the same…’ the gunner started.

Lopata put a huge hand on the Navy man’s shoulder. The gunner swallowed.

‘You don’t want to make a fuss about this, Navy boy,’ Lopata said quietly. ‘You survived the crash with us, so you’re one of us now. And we don’t make a fuss. Otherwise maybe you didn’t survive the crash, you understand me?’

The gunner nodded. He still looked a bit sick, but he had obviously taken the big man’s meaning. Regimental legend had it that Lopata had been some sort of big-time ganger back home, or at least an enforcer for someone who was. A man who broke people’s kneecaps for money, or worse. Right then I could well believe it.

‘The name’s Civatte,’ the Navy man said. ‘Gunner, second class.’

‘Welcome to the glorious Reslian Forty-Fifth,’ Rikkards said. ‘You’re in the army now, and I’m in charge. Right you lot, share out the gear and get ready to move. We’re getting to those landing fields and onto a transport even if we have to walk.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 1 in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Phil Moss.

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