I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy in preparation to start the sub-series Siege of Terra, and this is my review of Heralds of the Siege , book 52 in the series. Heralds of the Siege is an anthology, consisting of several short stories, and I'm going to review each one. The Ember Wolves is the fourth short story in the book, written by Rob Sanders, and it's basically BattleTech in the best of ways. This review contains MAJOR spoilers.
The story of The Ember Wolves is basically Adeptus Titanicus.
There almost may as well not be characters in it. You're reading about Titans, mostly, and you have to keep track of them, and it actually gets a little confusing if you're not used to the different kinds of Titans. Luckily the author uses "loyalist" a lot when talking about the target Titan (this story is from the point of view of a traitor Titan), so that helps.
I've got a whole fleet of BattleTech miniatures for Mechaforce and CORE Mech Warfare, and I've played the BattleTech video game, and I've read some BattleTech fiction. I was a fan of Evangelion, and I've liked the idea of big battle robots ever since Voltron.
Predictably, I really like Titans in Warhammer.
This story really delves into the physical mechanics of waging war in a walking shooting skyscraper. It goes into the atmospheric conditions, the terrain, man-made structures, weapons, and strategy, and it all sounds well-researched and true to life. I mean, true to life if big battle robots were a real thing. I would believe they were, though, after reading this story.
I think this story is almost better than seeing big robots on screen, or at least as good. Battles on screen can go pretty quickly, and they necessarily direct your attention to specific actions and parts of each robot. This story does that some, too, but reading about it rather than seeing it means you can fill in other details even when you're being told about exactly one aspect of a Titan.
This is a great story about a Titan battle.
Of course, it's not just about the Titans of the Dark Mechanicum ambushing a loyalist Titan. It's also about the people.
This one's told from the perspective of the Dark Mechanicum. These are traitors to the Imperium. And they're really engaging and you really want them to succeed.
The main character is Balthus Voltemand, who actually pretty relatable, as slaves to Darkness go. These are humans, not space marines, so their dedication to Chaos isn't as over the top as traitor Astartes in some Horus Heresy books. Voltemand is just the pilot of Canis Ulteriax, a big battle mech, hunting the enemy. We don't know why he has turned to Chaos, but odds are that the Imperium wasn't really working all that well for him and so he's hedging his bets with a new boss in hopes that it'll be better than the old boss. That's the feeling I get, anyway, and it's entirely my own interpretation of the character, but my point is that he doesn't come across as a fanatic or a lunatic. He's a guy with a job, and so when he sees Tantorus Magnificat, a famous Imperial Knight, he knows that he has found his prey.
Kordella is Voltemand's first mate, dedicated fully to the Dark Mechanicum, to Voltemand, and to the Canis Ulteriax. This is a short story, and a 40k one at that, so there's not much in the way of chemistry or character development, but seeing Krodella and Voltemand work together is a little endearing. They know each other, they trust each other, and when Voltemand checks in on her after a particularly harrowing battle, he asks if she's still with him, and she responds "Always." I'm not shipping them, or anything, but everybody likes a high-functioning team.
In the end, they manage to fell Tantorus Magnificat, which angers me as an Adeptus Mechanicus player, but it's a good battle to read about. There's a lot of interesting detail about how the battle is fought, what the battlefield looks like, how the sensors function but fail to provide useful data due to battlefield conditions. It provides plenty to draw from when you're playing a game with an Imperial Knight and want to boost the cinematics of it in your head.
If you play Imperial Knights on the tabletop, you know that when one is destroyed you have to make a Deadly Demise roll to find out whether its nuclear core has been breached. If so, it explodes in a mushroom cloud and deals massive wounds to everything around it.
Tantorus Magnificat fails its Deadly Demise roll, so nobody wins the battle in this story.
Deep down, I think there's a hidden message in The Ember Wolves. Chaos can't succeed, at least not in the way it wants, because chaos is chaotic, not orderly. And sure enough, just when things are looking good, chaos gets in the way and ensures that the heroes of the story don't get exactly what they want.
Good story. Big robots, big weapons, lots of crumbling buildings and explosions. I imagine this'll be my go-to story when I need to get motivated to play a mech wargame.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.