Marking his Black Library debut, Alan Bao’s Warhammer Horror short story Runner takes a close look inside the head of a lone Guardsman faced with a long, dangerous journey. Taking his role in the regiment entirely literally, the unnamed runner races across the endless tundra of a frozen world, carrying a desperate message of warning to regimental command. Behind him lies a broken hive, the bodies of his comrades and things in the fog. As the journey takes its toll on his body, familiar voices pursue him and long-forgotten memories surface in his mind, but he knows he must endure.
It’s a neat idea, taking a soldier away from the battlefield in order to dig into what’s going on in his head under intense pressure, gradually breaking down the runner’s mental image of himself from nameless Imperial drone back to his origins before he joined the Guard. It’s written in an evocative, engaging style and Bao does a great job of adding texture to the character through his actions, responses and memories. The narrative is perhaps a little predictable – there’s definitely an inevitability to the runner’s arc – and could maybe have gone even deeper, psychologically, but it wraps up with a darkly satisfying ending and overall does a good job of showing a slightly different side to 40k.
