Dark Omega - A Warhammer 40,000 novel

[Green Knight]

I'm happy to announce Dark Omega, my first full Warhammer 40,000 fan-fiction novel. It's around 140k words/500 pages.

 

It will be the first book in a trilogy of Warhammer 40,000 fan-fiction, set in the gothic dark future galaxy created by Rick Priestly et al and later expanded upon by countless other writers. More specifically the trilogy is influenced by way the Imperium and the Inquisition are portrayed in Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn/Ravenor series and the Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay game lines (the bulk of the action actually takes place in and around the official Calixis sector setting).

 

Although the trilogy focuses on Inquisition-affiliated characters, there are plenty of other elements from the 40k setting in there, ranging from Space Marines, via Rogue Trader and Guardsmen, to foul Chaos heretics.

 

Hope you enjoy it!

 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD

 

Development blog

 

Now also available on wattpad.com (much easier to read on mobile devices than the usual .pdf format).

Read it!

 

B.

[Grotsmasha]

Sounds good, I'll give it a read after Vengeful Spirit :tu:

 

Cheers,

Jono

[Green Knight]

Good reading!

 

Feedback appreciated :-)

[Green Knight]

Teaser from the book (this is from one of the most 'Marine-esque' parts of the novel):

------

The Achilus Crusade had been shrouded in such secrecy that not even the mighty Space Marines were told the particulars. The Green Knights Chapter of Adeptus Astartes had been handed their orders, like they were nothing more than a regiment of Imperial Guards, as had every other chapter currently involved in the crusade.

The orders themselves had contained an additional layer of deception: They had bidden the Green Knights prepare for deployment into the Margin Worlds, a region of unhallowed space, pressed perilously close to the roaring warp storms that marked the edge of the civilized galaxy. There they were to make an effort to reach and relieve the ill-fated Margins Crusade, long thought to be lost.

Only they had never gotten to the Margin Worlds. Instead the Chapter’s navigators, acting upon secret orders given to them by their Navis Nobilite Novators, had travelled along hidden paths and shrouded routes, until they arrived in a place none of his battle-brothers had ever heard of, let alone visited.

If Chapter Master Belkovets had any foreknowledge of these events, he chose not to share them with anyone, not even his closest advisers or ranking officers.

Now, years later, Kaminsky knew perfectly well where they were. As one of the librarians – the psychic communication officers of his chapter – it was inevitable that he would discover the truth. It was his duty to act as a living conduit for interstellar transmissions, and unlike the more common human astropaths he was entrusted with the highest encryption protocols, and could therefore perceive the contents of the transmissions he received.

Piece by piece he had assembled the truth: They were on the other side of the galaxy, out on the fringes of Segmentum Ultima. The Jericho Reach it was called, a region of struggling human communities, surrounded by great evil. But once, millennia ago, it had been an Imperial sector, a shining beacon of justice and unflinching allegiance to the God-Emperor. The Jericho Sector would rise once more, the Achilus Crusade would see to that.

It was the warp gate the Adeptus Terra had labelled the Jericho Maw Warp Gate that made it possible. It enabled the High Lords of Terra to order the formation of a great crusade on the fringes of Segmentum Obscurus, and then have it move through the warp gate, to arrive on the other side of the galaxy. The gate effectively bypassed the turbulent regions around the Jericho Reach, and gave the Imperium the drop on the many enemies of Man that had gathered during the long night.

Things had gone very well initially, far better than hoped for in fact. But after the initial period of quick gains, each of the crusade’s three salients had run into trouble. Big trouble. In Kaminsky’s mind it was a classic example of human hubris – and of political interference with the war effort. Simply put the politicos at Crusade High Command had ensured that the crusade had grossly overextended itself, so that when things started to turn sour, its commanders had no real way of getting things back on track.

The Acheros Salient had ground to a halt first, faced with the ravenous hordes of ferocious and corrupt warriors that poured out of the Hadex Anomaly. Kaminsky had killed his first renegade Astartes there. The coreward Canis Salient, which had made such great gains initially, had been outmanoeuvred and beaten back by a tech-savvy species the Ordo Xenos had labelled the Tau. Kaminsky found he had nothing but loathing for the filthy creatures; they were cowardly and weak, irreverent in their employment of technology, fit only for extermination. The greatest setback, however, had come in the form of the slowly encroaching Tyranid hive fleet designated ‘Dagon’. It had almost completely overrun every gain made by the Orpheus Salient, and now threatened to overtake the entire crusade. It was up to the Green Knights to stem the tide, to buy Crusade Command time to react and redeploy. Noble Astartes sent to the slaughter fields, to save the hides of sycophants, corrupt bureaucrats, and self-serving politicians.

---

Brother-Codicier Kaminsky sensed the foul beasts several seconds before they sprang their ambush on Squad Ivanov. Sufficient time for the librarian to send a psychic warning into the mind of each and every member of the squad he was accompanying.

For the seventh time, in half as many hours, the space marines of Squad Ivanov reacted with all the speed and skill you would expect from battle-hardened Astartes. Six times before their defences had held, and they had walked away bloodied, but victorious. This time, however, their best wasn’t going to be quite good enough.

They had already lost one Battle-Brother and had another man severely injured. Losing any more of his charges was unacceptable to Kaminsky. The squad was under his protection. His failure to keep them safe did not reflect well upon the Librarium of the Green Knights. Honour demanded that if any more space marines were to die, he would be the first to go.

The xenos abominations attacked as one, bursting out of hiding and storming towards the marines with unbelievable speed and ferocity. The men, forewarned by Kaminsky’s signal, opened up with their bolters. Short, controlled bursts, mercilessly thinning the ranks of the charging xenos.

Not a single enemy would have made it into melee range, save for a tiny gap in the fire arcs between brothers Olegov and Abranovich. A trio of the xenos instinctively sensed this weakness and headed straight for the gap. Within moments they would breach the perimeter and all hell would break loose; in melee the genestealers could kill even battle vested marines.

Kaminsky didn’t have time to think, let alone draw upon his reserves of psychic power. He only had time to react by instinct alone. He sprang forward, bolt pistol and force sword at the ready. He managed to squeeze off two shots at the rightmost genestealer. One of the bolts skipped off its carapace and didn’t detonate. The other hit squarely, punched its way inside the alien and detonated with lethal force. The beast didn’t die – it just collapsed, its innards turned to jelly. It trashed about a bit, but was no longer a threat, and could be dealt with later.

The leftmost stealer tried to flank him, but he had predicted this move and was ready for it. The force sword hit it in the upper body and sheared the xeno clean in half. He avoided its death throes by throwing himself shoulder first into the third drone warrior of Hive Fleet Dagon.

Voluntarily getting into grappling distance with a genestealer was definitely not Codex approved. But when all other options are exhausted you must either act, or die. Luck – or the God-Emperor guidance – was with him that day, making the stealer fumble its decapitating strike and instead entangle its claws in his backpack unit.

He recovered his balance, head-butted the stealer for good measure, removed both offending claws with a swipe of his sword, and then shot it once in the brain at point blank range. It dropped like a rock.

Around him the members of Squad Ivanov finished off the remaining aliens with methodical efficiency. Enemy dead, thirty-eight. Marine casualties, zero.

---

The second and third generation of genestealers hadn’t been much different from the original ones, except incrementally larger. The third generation in particular had been easy to distinguish, half again as tall as, and much more massively built, than the preceding first and second generations. If anything it made them easier to spot and therefore easier to kill. There are very few things so large a bolter or a chainsword can’t butcher it.

Later iterations reversed the trend. It was as if their abominable enemy, the Tyranid Hive Mind, finally realized that the weapons the marines wielded would kill its warriors, no matter how big or through they were grown. So it decided to try something new. The stealers became smaller again, and by the sixth or seventh iteration they were markedly smaller than the original, but still powerful enough to be a threat to the marines in their powered armour. They had also made away with what had been assumed to be their natural bluish-purple colouration, evolving a new camouflage pattern, perfectly suited for the scarred surface of Jerober XI.

The next couple of generations were less successful, becoming little more than glorified termagants, only without any useful ranged weapons. They only posed a threat to the dwindling number of remaining Guardsmen, who were having problems spotting them early enough to deal with massed attacks. Even auspex scanners were having trouble providing useful early warning. It didn’t really matter; in a few weeks all the Guardsmen would be dead of other causes anyway, such was the insidious nature of the bio-weapons deployed by the Hive Fleet. Better the Guardsmen died quick, honourable deaths, rather than suffer the horrors of gene-regression.

The Hive Mind had quickly rectified the size problem, however, and the genestealer genome had stabilized as the highly effective Iteration X. It was smaller than a regular stealer, but still lethal to marines it engaged in hand-to-hand combat. It was harder to spot, although the marines with their superhuman senses and advanced detection gear were largely able to sniff them out before they could spring their ambushes.

But most of all the Iteration X stealer was quicker. Kaminsky hadn’t thought that was possible, not until he was nearly killed by a horde of them, attacking suddenly across open ground. He had miscalculated; believing the marines to have more than enough time to gun the xenos down, well short of melee range.

His hubris had nearly cost the Chapter a good librarian – and the three squads under his protection. Fortunately the members of squads Ivanov, Romanov, and Aleksandar had remained coolly professional in the face of this new threat. There were no lapses, no errors, only methodical slaughter, even as wave after wave of hostile flesh rolled towards their lines.

It would not, however, be enough to carry the day. Too many stealers would reach the lines of the Green Knights. Many marines would die, perhaps all of them, Kaminsky included. The Chapter had lost too many marines already. Three more squads lost would put another company out of commission. It could not be allowed to happen.

It was time for Kaminsky to take steps to rectify his error. What time remained to him was – barely – sufficient to summon the forces of the warp, to smite the enemies of mankind. It was not a calm, collected, and controlled summoning. Instead it was rushed, frantic, and haphazard. Everything a summoning of warp energies should not be.

The psychic warding circuitry bonded to his armoured suit was turned to useless slag by the raging energies he called forth. An instant later strands of impossibly bright light erupted from Brother-Codicier Kaminsky’s eyes, lancing out to connect with the dashing forms of the genestealer horde. For a few drawn out moments the battlefield lay bathed in the eerie radiance of the Immaterium, as the primeval forces of Chaos were let slip upon of the enemies of Mankind.

The unnatural glare caused marine auto-senses to terminate their sensory feeds, effectively blinding the power armoured Astartes warriors. When next the Knights looked, the genestealers were gone. Not dead, but gone, unravelled from existence, as if they never had existed at all.

Not a single member of the squads under Kaminsky’s protection was physically harmed during the assault – though the same cannot be said about their minds and spirits. Several of them required corrective brain surgery to remove troublesome memories of what they had witnessed. Others required the spiritual and moral support of their chaplains to deal with the experience. One brother shot himself in the head with his bolt pistol, rather than suffer the seductive whispers troubling his mind.

Perhaps the Inquisition should have been informed of the uncontrolled release of warp energies, but no such notification was ever sent. The Adeptus Astartes keep to their own code; but rarely do they seek the counsel of others, and never if they feel it might besmirch the honour of their Chapter. So it also was with the Green Knights.

Kaminsky was not as fortunate as the others. The uncontrollable release of psychic energy has completely ruined his eyes and optic nerves, to such an extent that his sight could never be restored by bio-grafts or cybernetic replacements. His faceplate had been reduces to molten slag by the energy blast, causing horrendous secondary burn damage to his face. Repairable, after a fashion, but hugely painful, even for a space marine.

The injured Librarian was heavily sedated, placed in stasis, and rotated out of the crusade. For all intents and purposes the Brother-Codicier was a lost cause, his career as a fighting marine over. It was hoped he could still serve the Librarium in an astropathic role, but he would never again lift a weapon against the God-Emperor’s enemies. A cruel fate for an angel who’s craft is death.

[Green Knight]

Another teaser. Not Astartes, but power-armoured nonetheless.

 

------

 

THE GIRL NAMED SALT

Once upon a time there was a girl named Salt. She lived in the small village of Divine Grace, upon the world of Zephyr, somewhere in the great Sixth Circle of Finial. Her parents were very devout, as were most Zephyreans. Her mother was a candlemaker and a good one at that; her honey-scented candles fetched a good price at the market, and the local templum readily accepted them as the family’s tithe payment. Her father had no craft, but worked as a stonemason’s assistant. It didn’t pay very well, but it was honourable work – most of the stone he prepared for the master masons went towards the beautification of the shrines and temples of Zephyr.

Salt’s father was also part of the Frateris Militia, the militia force overseen by the Adeptus Ministorum. Most of the able-bodied menfolk of Zephyr were – and her devout father was no exception. Indeed, as a sergeant-at-arms with the militia her father gained greatly in status – and received a modest stipend from the Ministorum officials. When Salt was little, three or four years old, she couldn’t quite remember, her father had joined the glorious Margins Crusade – and never returned. After a while their stipend was annulled; the priest of their local congregation curtly informed them that Salt’s father had deserted in the face of the enemy, and therefore been stricken from the rolls. Her mother had wanted to protest, Salt’s father was no coward, but dared not – she could ill afford to antagonize the Ministorum further, now that she was a sole provider.
 
Thus it was that Salt grew up, fatherless and desperately poor, in the shadow of the great mountain that housed the fortress-monastery of Saint Ibelina. Her mother was hard pressed to provide for seven children by herself. Fewer people bought the candles of a woman whose husband had turned out to be a man of little faith and courage. Still she carried on, secure in the faith that her husband had been true until the end, and that the God-Emperor would provide and protect.

---

Just two days short of Salt’s sixth birthday – she remembered that part very well – her mother had contacted the wasting illness the old women called the Scourge of Drusus. At that time she had not known anything about this Drusus, or the disease that carried his name. But by the amount of lamentation uttered by the old village hags she knew that it was deadly serious business.

Two days later, on the day of her birthday, her mother was deep in deliria, her body wracked by painful spasms, and her orifices weeping blood and puss.

Four days after the birthday that never was, her mother was dead – and each of her six siblings had contacted the disease. When she looked about it seemed the entire village was similarly afflicted. The lamentation had abated somewhat, to be replaced by the wailing of the sick and the desperate prayers of those about to die.

On the ninth day following her birthday, the village had grown eerily silent. If anyone was still alive they were doing as Salt; sitting at the side of their loved ones, praying for them and easing their passing into the embrace of the Father of Mankind.

More days passed. How many she could not tell. She no longer counted the days, only her dead brothers and sisters. When the last of her siblings had finally passed into the beyond, she opened the door and went out into the streets, barefoot and alone.

That was when she saw them for the first time – stern-faced girls from the monastery, none of them older than fourteen, decked neck to toe by tightfitting armour that glinted red in the glare of the promethium flamers they carried.

”Sister-Superior!” one of them shouted, a tall one with close-cropped black hair showing above her breath mask. “We have a live one!” The muzzle of the flamer swung towards her.

Salt stepped forward to welcome the cleansing fire.

---
Life in the monastery-fortress of the Adeptus Sororitas was very different from the simple village life she was used to. Even her name was different: She had used to be simply Salt, but such a low-born name wasn’t good enough for the Adeptus Terra, so now she had a proper High Gothic name: Novicia Salinaria, Novice Salt.
 
Everything was different, except for one thing: The unflinching devotion to the God-Emperor displayed by every member of the community. That was the same here inside the mighty mountain, as it had been in the village. As long as she kept faith in the Master of Mankind, she felt whole, even knowing that all those she had ever known before, her own family included, were dead. Faith was her anchor, that which kept her safe in the storm. As long as she had that faith, she was not alone.

---

It had come as a surprise to everyone, especially Salinaria herself, when she was assigned to one of the Orders Militant; the Order of the Bloody Rose, one of the most famous warrior sororities in the Imperium. It was quite shocking really. She had always imagined she would be assigned to one of the Orders Hospitaler. Did she not excel in the gentle arts? Did she not have the healing touch? Why then, did the God-Emperor wish for her to fight? Truly His ways were inscrutable.

A fortnight later she was on her way to Ophelia VII, the oldest and holiest of all the Ministorum’s cardinal worlds – and the home of her Order Militant. She was no closer to getting any answers, but she had at least made peace with her fate, so to speak. If the God-Emperor demanded she take up arms, she would do so without hesitation. If she was told to kill, she would do so, and consider the act of slaying an offering to Him on Earth. If she died, she would do so, knowing that her duty had been done.

---

After her graduation to the rank of Sister Militant, Salinaria had been handed transfer papers, pointing her towards the remote Calixis sector, a place she hadn’t even heard of. It turned out the place wasn’t far, relatively speaking, from the world of her birth. The coreward and spinward reaches of the Calixis sector touched ever so tenuously upon the borders of the Sixth Circle of Finial, within whose borders lay the shrine world of Zephyr. Not far at all – in the galactic sense.

Her lofty superiors on Ophelia VII had seen fit to bolster the Calixian Ministorum by granting them a sizeable number of Battle Sisters; a full Preceptory of a thousand fighting women. Salinaria’s name was included on the roll of names listing the Sisters going into the first Commandery to ship out. There was trouble out there on the edge of civilization, and the time for diplomacy and espionage was at an end. A more violent approach would be required to deal with the heresies gnawing at the sector.

Her new posting was to a place called Malfi, a hive world, as bloated and corrupt as they came. It was the subsector capital of the rimward areas of Calixis and arguably the second most important world in the sector. Salinaria had detested the place from the onset. To her Malfi felt too much like her old village had done, gripped in its death throes. Mercifully the Sisters’ monastic base was located on a small lunar body in the outer system, some fourteen hundred million kilometres from the Malfian surface. If she tried, she could still sense the hopelessness and decay of Malfi’s hives, even across interplanetary distances. Or at least she imagined she could.

---

The God-Emperor possesses unfailing wisdom and foresight, including in the matter of one Sister Salinaria. As it turned out the young Sororita was more than a capable combatant; she turned out to be the living incarnation of the God-Emperor’s wrath, a weapon to be wielded against all those who dared threaten the majesty of the Imperium or disparage the inviolable purity of the Imperial Creed.

Salinaria still considered herself well skilled in the more gentle arts; her numerology was good, her command of languages excellent, her social skills impeccable. She also had an uncommon talent when it came to healing. This could not be denied. But there was also no denying that her true calling in life was death.
 
The Malfian Preceptory quickly became deeply involved in combatting an insidious cult that had spread its foul influence across the stars of the Drusus Marches – and into the Malfian subsector. Sister Salinaria rose quickly through the ranks, testament to her skill at arms and her boundless courage. Had she been a man, her sisters whispered behind her back, she would have become Astartes, such were her murderous instincts

[Green Knight]

Now also available on wattpad.com (much easier to read on mobile devices than the usual .pdf format).

Read it!

[Green Knight]

I've decided to make some short story collections based upon the Dark Omega interludes. Essentially I'm recycling the interludes, but adding some new pieces to make a chronological collection that fits together.

The first chapters of the first collection is already out:

Battle Angels of the Imperium, Featuring Librarian Kaminsky and Sister Salt. For now the only really new part is Sister-Palatine, but more will be added.

Next will be the Chaos version, which focuses on the Preacher and his travails.

I also have one collection featuring Rogue Trader Corben and his ship, the Maiden of Golgenna, but it will be a while until it's ready for publishing.

For now the short story collections are only available on wattpad.com

[Green Knight]

Long story made short:

I'm doing a revised edition of Dark Omega, using a more traditional storytelling technique (no 2nd person POV for example). I kind of liked how my experiemntal use of techniques turned out, but overall the feedback was negative.

 

The plot is largely the same, but there are numerous additions, alterations, etc. Overall a more gripping story, with several more interesting characters and secens added.

Currently this is WIP and only found here: http://www.wattpad.com/story/32263185-dark-omega-revised-ed

Could be I post it to https://www.fanfiction.net/ as well, time permitting.

Once I have the revised ed done it will go up on my blog as a pdf download, but that is some time into the future.

[deathspectersgt7]