The Siege of Terra: Solar War

[Fire Golem]

Hope mine comes soon, I’m itching to read this one.

[Kelborn]

Oh me oh my
What glorious art... Maybe I'll try to get a copy in May, as well...

After viewing them a couple of minutes, my favorites are Dorn / Perturabo, especially Dorns has so much to say, imho.

The Emperor's architect, if you want. The idealist, the soldier, the creator, THE Praetorian in all of his glory.

 

Somehow, he reminds me of someone in that pic but I can't grap it.

[Sandlemad]

Oh my god I love the idea of illustrating select members of the dramatis personae with marble busts. That's brilliant. Same for the rest of the art, the paired colour portraits of Dorn and Perturabo in casual gear are exquisite, right down to the opposite gauntlets. Kinda regretting not going for the limited edition now.

 

Also it just sunk home that this is going to be French writing Ahriman again!

[Preliminary Bombardment]

Where is my copy, hurry up and post it GW grr.

[Ranwulf]

Jubal looks exactly what I imagine in my head.

 

Him smiling makes me smile, because that was always my favorite part of the Legion.

 

Ran

[Demigod]

I would like for BL to describe the void battles more as they are in Battlestar Galactica and less as ships of the line. It is often described how some fleets sacrifice main battery and lances for more fighter and bomber hangars but the fighter and bombers are never given any major role. I would envisions the battles in such a way:

 

Nova Cannon and Lance "heavy" ships would be glass cannons that would fight at great distances but would sacrifice close range batteries and fighter protection for it. They would be mainly involved in the opening stages of the battle where they would either try to overwhelm the shields for the bombers/torpedoes or target the ships that already have their shields down.

 

Then come the torpedo "heavy" ships,  "carrier" ships and "close range battery" ships . They would act all in tandem, waves of fighters trying to clear the enemy fighters so to protect their waves of  bombers and torpedoes ,the bombers going for the enemy guns and smaller ships ( destroyers/frigates)  to disable as many as they can so more bombers and torpedoes can move in and the torpedoes ( both standard and boarding )  acting as the primary damage dealer.  The destroyers and frigates would all the while be dancing around the battlefield trying to protect the main ships from the bombers/torpedoes , targeting the enemy main ships with torpedoes and engaging the enemy destroyers/frigates.

 

But in the end because the superstructure of the biggest ships is so durable , the easiest way to deal with them is to get boarders to attack crucial systems so that is why with time when the massive ships are involved  the battles would end into a "close" range battery action.

 

This way it would be more of a massive choreographed dance instead of the go strong,get close,fire main battery/ torpedoes and go for boarding actions. Also it would give the writer a lot more options of describing the battles and outcomes instead of the simple "we fired all guns and the ship reactor blew up like a star "  or "our boarding troops managed to lower the shields /take over the bridge and it was done"

[Marshal Rohr]

Ships in 30k/40k are too big for fighters to play a meaningful role. Their main purpose is to clear out boarding craft, intercept torpedoes, and clear away pdc's for boarding craft and torpedoes to hit their targets. Some ships in 30k/40k are bigger than sub-moons in our own real world solar system. The only thing that is threatening to them is high speed kinetic impacts, energy weapons, and boarders. Which is part of their design. 

[mc warhammer]

Besides the fact I don't know why Pert would have tubes coming out of his head outside of terminator armour, I really dig that pic. Power armour is fine, but the "big space marine" look for primarchs never really captured their grandeur for me. He looks like a true war leader and conqueror in that shot.

glad i’m not the only one who thought some of the primarchs depictions looked like aggressive teletubbies

[Demigod]

Ships in 30k/40k are too big for fighters to play a meaningful role. Their main purpose is to clear out boarding craft, intercept torpedoes, and clear away pdc's for boarding craft and torpedoes to hit their targets. Some ships in 30k/40k are bigger than sub-moons in our own real world solar system. The only thing that is threatening to them is high speed kinetic impacts, energy weapons, and boarders. Which is part of their design. 

 

I think I wrote just that.

 

The Fighters would be fighting for superiority with the enemy fighters and intercepting the enemy bombers and torpedoes. 

The Bombers would be targeting capital ship turrets/battery so that more torpedoes/bombers could reach their targets and engaging targets of opportunity from the enemy screens ( destroyers ).

The torpedoes ( both standard and boarding) would be the main anti ship weapons but would depend on the fighters for protection and for the bombers to disable the turrets so they have a better chance to reach their target.

The Destroyers and Frigates would both screen the capital ships against the enemy bombers and torpedoes + launch their own torpedo volleys against the enemy capital ships.

 

I personally have never read a book where this kind of combat is described. Instead the authors either always jump into the boarding/macro cannon duel at close range or describe how a ship got destroyed by being targeted by everything. If they would describe the entire process I think the battles would become much more interesting. Instead of "named character" ordering his troops to the boarding craft to board the enemy vessel, where they race against time to reach the enemy ships most important locations. 

[Marshal Rohr]

I was agreeing with you :D

[1ncarnadine]

Here's a little on the opening 3 chapters of the Solar War, mostly elaborating on John's twitch interview. Spoilers, of course:

The Khthonic Gate defended by Sigismund is hit with an unexpectedly large mass of ships right off the bat. It's a mess, and it seems like Horus's strategy against this gate is to choke it with bodies. We move to Terra's main strategium, where Su-Kassen, the Primarchs, Malcador and the Mechanicum magos-emissary discuss the situation. The Primarchs obviously disagree on how things should be conducted, but Malcador wrangles them back to cooperating.

Meanwhile, Uranus and its many moons are a super-fortress concentrated around the Elysian Gate. Through the gate, three huge mass conveyors show up first, stripped and loaded with as much armor and as many generators and void shields as the Iron Warriors could fit on them. Two weather the fire of the platforms and explode with catastrophic effect. Eight IW battleships arrive next, swiftly followed by... a massive, refitted carrier space hulk the size of a small moon that can't move under its own power. It's named the Daughter of Woe, cost 12 ships pushing and pulling it through the warp, and its purpose is solely to break the defenses of Uranus and then provide a defensive anchor to prevent the gate from being retaken from the Traitors.

Finally, Abaddon, Zardu and Ahriman (and their respective Legion fleets) have warped in away from a gate, directly above the solar system but still outside the sun's gravity well, by way of mass sacrifice and arcane ritual. There's a fun bit where Ahriman has to be that guy and quotes obscure poetry, and Abaddon surprises him by not only recognizing the source but quoting the next passage back at the Thousand Son. Ahriman gives him a look and Abaddon simply replies, "We are warriors, not barbarians." This isn't the Abaddon we see in Talon of Horus by any stretch (he straight up bares his teeth at Zardu's slaves), but he's in there somewhere.

I'm not going to keep updating as I read further, and I actually may not finish this for a while as I scramble to get things together for Adepticon. This is more of a teaser and a sign of John's writing priorities, if anyone had any doubt 

and besides, it looks like more people are getting their LEs in so it won't take too long for reviews and summaries to start sprouting up

[Mechanicus Tech-Support]

arrrghh, the book can't get here fast enough

[Manchu warlord]

Mr. LetsYouDown, you certainly don't let us down.

[Marshal Rohr]

Abaddon knowing poetry and not talking about it is awesome. 

[Sandlemad]

This isn't the first time Ahriman's dropped some self-indulgent quote and had someone else step in to remind him that he's not the only one with the ability to read. Happened in Prospero Burns and possibly elsewhere? You'd think he'd learn.

[bluntblade]

You're thinking ATS, but it was a Wolf who knew it

[1ncarnadine]

I messed up. I rapidly came down sick yesterday, so even though I already had the day off, I laid down in bed to recover and blew through the rest of The Solar War. I said I wouldn't do this, but I wrote up a plot summary anyway. I couldn't stop thinking about this book and this helped me to review it all again...

 

edit: I've decided to pull my summary down, though if anyone is incredibly desperate to know what happens in the book you can always send along a PM. It didn't feel right to spoil this one publicly. I think summarizing it failed to capture something essential.

It's fair to say I really enjoyed this book, though  

[mc warhammer]

that...hmmm...uhmm...hmmm

[Sete]

Awesome artwork.

Send me a PM please with spoilers!

[Kelborn]

that...hmmm...uhmm...hmmm

Tempted to pm him? I am. ;)

[mc warhammer]

letsyoudown, hope that wasn’t my reaction that inspired the edit

 

i’m still excited to read it, there were just a few bits i thought were a tad...done before. and honestly, i couldn’t remember who half the characters mentioned were

[Preliminary Bombardment]

Just got mine! Weekend basically sorted haha

[1ncarnadine]

letsyoudown, hope that wasn’t my reaction that inspired the edit

 

i’m still excited to read it, there were just a few bits i thought were a tad...done before. and honestly, i couldn’t remember who half the characters mentioned were

 

It was somewhat, but I was already very on the fence. Sorry about that.

 

The cast does seem pretty large, but for a ~400 page book it's actually kept relatively tight throughout. A condensed summary doesn't show that well, though.

 

Anyway, enough of you cretins have PM'd me that I'm tentatively putting it back, here, and now with a few annotations. I had also double spoiler-tagged but it was causing wonky formatting problems, so be very sure you want to spoil this before reading:

 

 

Disclaimer: I'm obviously leaving a huge amount of context, conflicts, motivations and dialogue out, so if you find any overt plot beats distasteful, I encourage you to wait and read the novel to form your own opinion. Or ask myself or someone else who's finished the book for the context and hopefully we can provide details that make an event palatable for you. If not, that's fine, you don't have to like everything that happens in the book.

 

And let me say it again: I'm leaving out a lot. There is a ton of a kind of "there went a moon" levels of destruction that it's a little like the Campanile scene in Know no Fear but through the whole book. It gets numbing, intentionally so. Without reading the novel you're missing the tone of urgency and shock running throughout. Now, carry on...

 

   A major plot thread running through the entire novel is actually the flight of Mersadie Oliton. She, and the remaining prisoners of Titan, have been sent to Uranus on a jail barque in the wake of Titan's little adventure. As Horus's forces arrive, a kill order goes out to eliminate the prisoners. In her cell, Mersadie receives a vision from Keeler urging her to bring a message to Dorn. Keeler impresses into Mersadie's mind a kind of warp alignment map. Horus's forces arrive and a kill order goes out to eliminate the prisoners, but Mersadie escape on a little shuttle with the help of another prisoner, the navigator Nilus Yeshar. They're eventually rescued by a refugee mining ship (the Antius) captained by Cadmus Vek. Vek & crew quickly realize they're dealing with a prisoner escape and decide the only answer is confinement.

 

   The Scars have arranged "Falcon fleets" above and below the solar plane and swiftly move to harry the much larger Traitor force coming from above. Jubal commands these actions from the Lance of Heaven. The Traitor force endures the harrying cuts being dealt to it for the sake of its timetable. Zardu & Abaddon have a confrontation off the bridge, but Abaddon handily puts down both the blade slaves and subdues Zardu with a blade to him. Zardu thanks Abaddon for sparing his life and tells the Cthonian that they now share a bond (but he's mostly just drawn to Abaddon because he can hear faint songs of prophecy about him). Their future as BFFs is sealed.

 

   At the Khthonic Gate, Sigismund has begun a general retreat and it looks like the gate is lost. Aximand, in Traitor command of this offensive, breaks off a spearhead to run them down and leaves Vull Bronn to finish up at Pluto and secure the gate. The Loyalists enact a ploy to detonate Kerberos, Charon and Hydra, annihilating a staggering chunk of the Traitors around Pluto. Sigismund turns his fleet to engage Aximand's. This too is a ploy and most of the Loyalist ships go on to wreak absolute havoc among the Traitors still reeling at Pluto, while the Three Sisters and other faster ships engage Aximand. Aximand catches the Lacrymae and teleports onboard with his elite veterans, slaughtering most of Sigismund's bridge crew. Sigismund himself exacts a heavy toll, behaving somewhat suicidally due to Dorn's edict from The Crimson Fist, but is injured badly by weight of numbers before facing Aximand himself. Aximand is about to cut the Lord Castellan down, but Rann and Boreas arrive with a load of Breachers and the fight continues more evenly. Aximand grinds Boreas into paste and the Fists activate transponders to bail, but Sigismund, powered by righteous indignity, lops Aximand's hand off and stabs him right before being taken by the teleporter. It's unclear if Aximand and/or Vull Bronn die through all of this. What's left of Boreas is recovered and still kind of alive, and he asks Sigismund why he wanted to die. Sigismund has a moment with Boreas before his XO passes, and is convinced to stand with Dorn on Terra.

 

-Every few chapters throughout this book there's what I like to call a "Night Lord Moment," where we check in on some cheerful thing that some Night Lords are up to to remind us the VIIIth Legion is involved. That sounds flippant, but they're actually all pretty awesome. One of my favorites is here:

 

Quote

"Its reactor signature masked by the death-echo of the moon, the Barb of Nostramo had slid into the shroud of asteroids and waited. It met the five Imperial Fists strike vessels with a cloud of assault craft. Warriors in midnight armour poured into the Imperial Fists ships. Two escaped. The remainder died by inches, their decks flooded with the screams of those who had already fallen, their chambers and passages darkening one by one as power was cut. The few Imperial Fists on each fought to the last as the screams became silence, and the night surrounding them lit with red eyes and laughing voices."

 

   Jubal and the Falcon fleets make a jab at Abaddon's command ship and run off. Abaddon catches the Lance of Heaven and teleports aboard, eventually making it to the bridge with Zardu and the Justaerin. But the bridge is empt- WHAM Jubal and the Scars pilot a load of Caestus rams into their own bridge. Jubal and Abaddon duel amidst the ensuing chaos, with Abaddon being whittled down by swift strikes, struggling to land a blow. But it doesn't take him long to read Jubal, and in a moment of upsetting savagery that would make Game of Thrones proud, snatches Jubal's guandao with his power fist and runs him through with his sword before drawing it upwards.* Zardu saves Abaddon from one last melta explosion using warpcraft. This fleet then splits in two against Mars and Luna, with a sneaky sliver fleet containing the Thousand Sons and Word Bearers masking their presence and making way for the Shrine of Unity comet.

 

   The Antius is halted by a ship looking for escaped prisoners, but Mersadie has them broadcast her name and Loken's and they're let off. They flee into the void, which soon proves to be a problem. The ship is loaded with refugees and doesn't have enough food. Tensions rise. Mersadie admits to Nilus in privacy that she's having bad dreams of her time aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Mersadie and Vek bond somewhat over his limited faith in the Lectitio Divinitatus. Koln stews in resentment over an earlier order by Vek to leave more refugees behind and save what they can. They get boarded by Malcador's kill squads, who massacre Vek's crew. Koln is overtaken by daemonic forces (Samus is here) and slaughters the boarders before Mersadie shoots her in the head. She encounters Nilus again, but they split. Mersadie finds some of the refugees have ship crew experience and frees them. The ship after them lingers outside, but is engaged and destroyed by a riotous ship of the Emperor's Children. It capriciously speeds away, leaving the Antius to head to the Jovian yards. Mersadie finally meets up with Loken there and he agrees to take her directly to Dorn.

 

Abaddon assaults Luna, and the Dark Mechanicum engage Camba Diaz's fleet above Mars. Abaddon drives his special ship into Luna's ring and annihilates it, teleporting into Luna before the impact. Zardu gives Abaddon the opening he needs to get to the Selenar Matriarch before she can destroy the gene vaults. Abaddon forces her to surrender and work for them, saving Zardu's life in the action. True BFFs <3

 

Dorn still wonders where Horus is amid all of this, but believes he's bought enough time now that he's essentially won. He boards the Phalanx (held in reserve until now) with Su-Kassen and they head out towards the action. Mersadie and Loken board.

 

Ahriman & co enact The Big Ritual, and reality breaks. Each stage of the traitor operation was for this moment. A massive ring tear opens around Terra, and out rides Angron RIDING THE FRIGGIN CONQUEROR THROUGH SPACE, followed by the Pride of the Emperor and of course, the Vengeful Spirit. Their attendant Legions, the rest of the Sons of Horus, and hordes of daemon heralds burst out too.

 

Dorn would react but unfortunately another plot unfolds - Mersadie's message is in fact a lie. Nilus (he's the man beside you) was a warp delusion, and she's revealed as a conduit for Samus.** The Phalanx is overrun. Loken snaps and reverts to Cerberus. Trapped in her own mind, Mersadie watches the horror unfold as her body makes its way to the reactors. Dorn frees his Librarius and defeats a massive Samus, but Samus returns through a dead Huscarl and it becomes clear their efforts won't be enough. Mersadie realizes Samus is like a story - it keeps coming back if the story isn't stopped.*** What's left of Sigismund's fleet is gunning in to help. Loken/Cerberus confronts Mersadie at the reactor but can't overcome her daemon mojo, but Mersadie takes control of her body one last time and flings herself into the reactor, ending Samus's incursion aboard the Phalanx. Loken recovers his mind in this scene and they have one final dialogue.

 

Dorn sends Su-Vassen and the Phalanx out to the void to fight on, while he rides back to Terra with Sigismund.

 

The Dark Mechanicum liberate Mars, and Kelbor-Hal walks the dusty sands as his Nine Disciples bow before him (Nul through Octa, 0-8).

 

The Warmaster gazes upon what he has wrought upon the system before his eyes turn firmly to Terra.

 

*Jubal gets a number of fantastic scenes before this, if that helps. I should also mention Abaddon's flashbacks, where we see glimpses of his past, from gang brat to Legionary. I can't do these justice, but I will mention that there is a bit between Jubal and Abaddon that makes this confrontation a little more tragic, and reminds us how well-liked and respected the Sons of Horus had been before their fall.

 

**Waaay back, Maloghurst replaced one of her eyes to spy on Loken to discover if he was working against Horus, and covered the memory up. Because she was a remembrancer with memory modifications, she never noticed the missing/altered memory as they already seemed perfect to her recollection. It's made clear that Mersadie's use in the Siege wasn't intended, but is the fortunate leveraging of an asset by Horus. The replacement of her eye left a doorway in her soul. It’s set up nicely throughout the book as she at first seems to be thinking back to her time on the Vengeful Spirit, moving to unsettling dreams,inescapable visions of Maloghurst, and finally being unable to tell if she’s on the VS or the Phalanx in the end.

 

***On Samus, and stories: yet another Primarch vs. Daemon Final Boss. I felt it worked here, especially with how Samus’s defeat hinged on Loken and Mersadie rather than Dorn. Samus’s favorite “broadcasts” are used in clever and unsettling ways through this book (the end and the death, the only name you will hear, etc). Another recurrence are Mersadie’s words to Loken in the early chapters of Horus Rising:

 

“I understand you have a story, a particularly entertaining one. I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

‘Which story?’

‘Horus killing the Emperor.”

and there's fantastic payoff in the last scenes between her and Loken. 

 

Some Final Thoughts: very exhausting, but very good. From the outset, this wasn't going to be a happy story nor one filled with big wins for the Loyalists. That can often be said of the Heresy in general, but is exceptionally true here. It's the story of how Horus manages to begin the Siege of Terra itself in only 6 weeks, and the goal of the Loyalists is delay and containment. We know that can't happen from the outset, so to some extent it's a matter of just what exactly went wrong.

 

There are a number of contradictions and signs that can allow you to sniff out what's going on with Mersadie very early as well, and as my suspicions grew it increasingly became like watching a train wreck in slow motion (in a horrible, gripping sense, rather than like watching a train wreck of a story). 

 

I don't think I felt familiar enough with Boreas or his relationship to Sigismund for his death to have as much weight to me as it has with Sigismund's character. I can't recall if he had been featured in previous Fists stories? He's the commander of the 3rd of the Three Sisters, the others being captained by Fafnir Rann and Sigismund himself. 

 

And while there is a lot of ship-on-ship combat, I think anyone expecting this to be the space battle book will be somewhat disappointed. This is strongly character focused, so the emphasis is significantly more on ship boarding actions and especially teleport assaults. There may actually be too many teleport assaults. I think they also deliberately left the naval combat as an open-ended squall because FW/SG has considered setting Battlefleet Heresy in these actions of the Solar War if they ever get around to it, and in that case it would be elaborated on, possibly in game-related materials? Them's the breaks with product-related IP fiction

 

Otherwise, dang. Fantastic. I'm excited for May's general release when everyone gets a chance to read this, and I hope that release includes John's afterword.

[DarKnight]

Many thanks Lets You Down. This is quite a lot to digest lol does it say what the Emperor is doing currently on Terra?

[FirstSonofHorus]

Any idea when the ebook releases for this? Just getting a bad gateway on the webpage...