Know No Fear

Know No Fear by Dan Abnett is the nineteenth installment in the Horus Heresy series. Told from the perspective of the Ultramarines Legion, it chronicles the apocalyptic Battle of Calth.

I'm just going to say this outright: Know No Fear is the best Horus Heresy book to date. The action is relentless, the writing superb. But the most successful aspect of this book is its scope: Abnett opens with a tour of Calth in the hours before the Word Bearers' surprise betrayal, introducing characters as varied as rough and ready Imperial Army troopers and half-machine Mechanicum adepts, ranging through the ranks from simple legionaries to Roboute Guilliman himself. This approach allows Abnett to introduce the setting and multiple plotlines at the same time, a tactic that pays dividends once the action starts. This is not the first time Abnett has deployed this technique in his writitng: the opening of Know No Fear is reminiscent of the opening of Necropolis, the third book in Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Necropolis is now a classic of Warhammer fiction, and Know No Fear has the potential to be the same. Frequent changes of perspective keep the action fresh and immediate, and a multitude of cliffhangers have readers on the edge of their seat from beginning to end. From the second the Word Bearers fleet opens fire on the unsuspecting Ultramarines you are swept up in the action. The account is presented as a story collated from Roboute Guilliman's notes, and to maintain this pace Abnett has kept the chapters short. There must be something about Guilliman and breaking big things up into smaller chapters. Nevertheless, it works.

The story of Know No Fear is essentially the story of one big battle. The action is split into two theatres, in space amongst the fleet and orbital stations, and down on the surface amongst the burning cities and wreckage plunging from orbit. While the battles are told from a multitude of different perspectives a few central stories come to form the heart of the narrative: the actions of 4th Captain Remus Ventanus as he and sergeant Selaton run a gauntlet of dangers on their way back to their company, the struggle aboard the Ultramarines flagship Macragge's Honour after daemons materialise on the bridge and Guilliman is carried off into space, and the trials of a simple farmer named Oll Persson who is revealed to be far more than he seems as he leads a rag-tag group of survivors through the warzone towards an unknown goal. The true genius of this story lies in the way the various story strands come together for the apocalyptic climax.

After surviving several desperate skirmishes in the ruins of Numinus City Ventanus and Selaton gather a sizeable force of Mechanicum, Imperial Army and Ultramarines troops and set themselves up in a palace outside the city, which they must defend from a Word Bearers siege whilst their adept uses the building's ancient data engine to collate information and help coordinate the global loyalist defence. Aeonid Thiel, a sergeant censored for theorising combat between Space Marines, becomes an unlikely hero as he leads the defense of the Macragge's Honour and gathers a force that retakes the ship using weapons from Guilliman's personal collection. Oll Persson is revealed to be none other than Ollanius Pious, patron saint of the Imperial Guard in a later age, and the man whose sacrifice motivates the Emperor to strike Horus down during their legendary confrontation at the Siege of Terra. The story of Oll and the survivors goes off in its own direction, but the other main story strands come together after Thiel leads a strike force out onto the hull of the ship and in one of the best action sequences ever is saved from an ambush by Guilliman himself, who has survived in the void without a helmet. Coordinating with the flagship, Ventanus and his force on the ground make their way back to the ruins of Numinus to install Magos Tawren into a data engine from which she can retake control of Calth's weapons grid, but only if the forces in space eliminate the Word Bearers under Kor Phaeron who have seized the grid's command station. The double climax in which each force relies on the success of the other is utterly gripping, and ultimately turns the tide of the battle.

Know No Fear is sheer pulse-pounding awesomeness. It combines all the best elements of the Heresy series into one flawless masterpiece. But perhaps more amazing than any of this is that it does this using the Ultramarines, turning the most generic and over-played faction in 40K into some of the best heroes of the Horus Heresy. Kudos, Dan Abnett. Kudos.

Limited-edition novella review: The Honoured

The Horus Heresy series has enjoyed enormous success since its inception, and that success has translated into its launching a new subset of the Warhammer tabletop game. To be clear, a series based on the lore of the tabletop game has inspired a tabletop game based on the lore of the series. The mainstream launch of the Horus Heresy tabletop game was marked with the release of the 'Battle at Calth' starter set, which featured a pair of novellas as well as miniatures and rulebooks. The Honoured by Rob Sanders and The Unburdened by David Annandale are both set during the Underworld War that followed the Battle of Calth, each showing the perspective of one of two mortal enemies, Ultramarine Captain Steloc Aethon and Word Bearers Chaplain Kurtha Sedd. 

The Honoured picks up just before Know No Fear left off, with Captain Aethon receiving Ventanus's warning to get underground whilst in the midst of the fighting at Lanshear. During a lull in the battle he spots a Word Bearers chaplain across the street. Their eyes meet, and Aethon becomes convinced that the chaplain is his old friend Kurtha Sedd because...reasons. The action then cuts to the Ultramarines and Word Bearers running for shelter as the Veridian star begins scorching Calth's surface clean of life. An Ultramarine named Arkan Dardanus seizes the shelter entrance from Word Bearers and lets the remnants of his squad in, but their sergeant is killed. The novella's other main character, Terminator Sergeant Orestrian Urcus, walks his way through the scorching fire and lifts the door Dardanus just closed in the novella's coolest passage. Aethon shows up, promotes Dardanus to acting sergeant and then leads the Ultramarines down into Calth's cave network. 

The rest of the novella is basically a series of confusing and disjointed fight scenes, gummed together by flashbacks to when Aethon and Kurtha Sedd were friends. The Ultramarines discover a teleport station and Aethon uses it to launch an attack on the main teleport hub from whence the Word Bearers came, suicidally charging blind into the middle of the enemy base because...reasons. The Ultramarines manage to win by releasing the teleport hub's hypercoolant reservoir into the tunnels. They then establish a base there, discovering from captured Word Bearers that their enemies are in fact led by Kurtha Sedd, and Aethon sends Dardanus on a mission to release the captives into the undertunnels so they can convey his offer of an honourable death to Sedd. The plan is also to link up with the forces of Tauro Nicodemus, fighting in the next cave system over. Aethon sends a now battered Urcus back up to their original territory on patrol, where he finds all the humans who took shelter with them butchered by the Word Bearers. Whoops, forgot about those helpless humans we were supposed to be defending. Oh well, we're not those sissy Salamanders with their actually caring about human beings. We are the Ultramarines, Legion of the reversed toilet-seat insignia! (Seriously, once you've sen it you can't unsee it). Cue another random fight scene for no reason. 

Down in the depths, Dardanus and his squad are ambushed by Sedd and go down like Imperial Guardsmen attacking a daemon prince with sticks. Dardanus lives long enough to drag his mortally wounded body partway back to base, and when the Word Bearers launch a full-scale attack Aethon turns the tables and drives them back, following Dardanus's blood trail into Sedd's lair. He and Sedd have the obligatory one-on-one, which ends with Aethon's death. Urcus and handful of others only survive thanks to Tauro Nicodemus's forces showing up and blitzing the daemons Sedd unleashed, though Sedd himself escapes, ready to take centre stage in his half of the novella duology. 

The Honoured is just bad. The plot is poorly articulated, the action makes little sense, and none of what happens matters. In fairness to Rob Sanders there are some cool scenes, such as Urcus determinedly walking through the firestorm on the surface and Dardanus dragging his body along leaving a blood trail for the others to follow, but the novella blatantly serves no purpose other than to inspire gamers pitting Sedd against Aethon on the tabletop. Here's hoping The Unburdened is better. 

That's all for now Heresy fans, but check back in a week or so as I continue my review of the books depicting the Battle of Calth and the Underworld War, examining the Mark of Calth anthology and The Unburdened, second half of the Underworld War duology. See you soon!               

Angel Exterminatus

Angel Exterminatus by Graham McNeill is the twenty-third installment in the Horus Heresy series. It follows the Emperor's Children and Iron Warriors legions as they undertake a joint mission into the Eye of Terror, dogged by vengeful survivors from the Shattered Legions.

Twenty-three books into the Horus Heresy, Angel Exterminatus is the first novel to feature the Iron Warriors as major characters. Graham McNeill is the author of the 40K Iron Warriors series and he hasn't strayed far from familiar territory here, using earlier versions of many of his 40K Iron Warrior characters as protagonists. The other half of his cast of course is made up of Emperor's Children, a legion McNeill has made his own within the Heresy series. Angel Exterminatus is an excellent book and thus I want to get my gripes out of the way first: it feels like half the scenes involving Iron Warriors in this novel are just sneaky winks at McNeill's 40K Iron Warriors fans. The origins of the feud between Toramino and the other captains, Kroeger's first steps down the path of Khorne and Barban Falk's transformation into 'The Warsmith' must be fascinating for those who have read the Iron Warriors series, but for those who haven't they are strange and random elements of the story. Authors jamming the origin stories of their 40K characters into the Heresy series is one of my pet hates. That said, if Dan Abnett were to include some ancestor of Ibram Gaunt in one of his Heresy novels I'd probably wet myself with excitement, so I suppose it really depends on what you like and what you have already read.

Right, onto the good stuff. The Emperor's Children in this novel are diabolically depraved, the sub-story of an Imperial Fists captain captured and turned into a monster by Fabius Bile being particularly repulsive to read, and Graham McNeill handles the Emperor's Children side of this novel with practiced excellence. The crew of the Sisypheum, loyalists who are attempting to prevent the traitors from obtaining the devastating weapons Fulgrim tells Perturabo are hidden in the Eye of Terror, are a motley crew of vengeful Iron Hands with a mortally wounded captain they keep in stasis, accompanied by a Salamanders Apothecary and a Raven Guard commando named Nykona Sharrowkyn, who is pure awesomeness concentrated into a character. Over the course of the novel Sharrowkyn puts a bullet through Fulgrim's head, rams two swords through Fabius Bile and becomes the first person ever to kill Lucius in a duel. He is my favourite Warhammer character, period.

The biggest star of the novel, though, is Perturabo himself. The Iron Warriors primarch is usually treated as badly by the fiction as he is by the in-universe Imperium, overlooked and ignored, but here McNeill makes him into a complex character with unsuspected redeeming features. Perturabo suspects that Fulgrim is playing him from the start, and he is proven right when the traitors reach Eldar Crone World Iydris and Fulgrim reveals that there are no weapons, just the location of his ascension to daemonhood, and abandons the Iron Warriors to fight undead Eldar. An attack by the crew of the Sisypheum gives the traitors a common foe, and the novel climaxes with Fulgrim's transformation into a daemon prince and the Iron Warriors plunging into the black hole at the heart of the Eye.

Angel Exterminatus has some faults, but overall it is an excellent novel with gripping fight scenes and memorable characters. If the entire premise seems weak then action is good enough that we can forgive it, and no novel that ends with a primarch becoming a daemon prince will ever be a wasted read.

Limited-edition novella review: The Seventh Serpent            

Every now and then Black Library decide to raise revenue by releasing a Horus Heresy story as a limited-edition novella, printing a small number of copies and charging exorbitantly for each. These novellas are then given a mainstream release years later, finally making them available to the vast majority of fans. The Seventh Serpent by Graham McNeill was the ninth of these novellas to be released, and follows the crew of the Sisypheum as they join a mission to assassinate Alpharius himself. 

The Seventh Serpent continues the story of the Sisypheum crew after the events of Angel Exterminatus. Launching an attack on an Alpha Legion ship they discover that it was on its way to rendezvous with Alpharius and are saved from the attack of a second ship by the sudden arrival of none other than Shadrak Meduson, legendary warleader of the Iron Hands. Meduson and the Sisypheum crew join forces to lay an ambush for the traitor primarch on an orbital fuel siphoning plant above Eirene Septimus, using Alpha Legion armour to take the traitors by surprise. But of course this is the Alpha Legion, so nothing is as it seems. 'Alpharius' is in fact a loyalist Alpha Legion commander on the run from his traitor brethren, one of the Sisypheum crew is a disguised Alpha Legion operative and 'Shadrak Meduson' is the real Alpharius, using the loyalists as pawns in his plan to neutralise the commander. It all ends predictably in fighting and death, but what makes the climax of The Seventh Serpent memorable is the loyalists' skin of their teeth escape and the unexpected revival of Ulrach Branthan who comes back from the brink of death to command the Sisypheum once more, though as a dark and monstrous version of himself. The Seventh Serpent is an excellent novella with a complex plot and gripping action, making it one of the best examples of its format.