I'm happy to announce Dark Omega, my first novel in my Warhammer 40,000 trilogy (it's around 140k words/500 pages). 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!

B.

DIRECT DOWNLOAD (.pdf format)

Development blog

Read it on Wattpad.com (handy for mobile devices)

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In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. Beset on all side by multitudes of malefic enemies, Mankind tethers on the brink of destruction. Only the guiding light of the immortal God-Emperor, and the selfless sacrifices made in his name, keeps the horrors of the final night at bay. You are Marcus Aurelian, prodigal Interrogator of the Holy Orders of the Inquisition. Your master wields the absolute and inviolable authority of an Inquisitor. You are his sworn servant and trusted confidante. Recruited for your skills as an investigator and prowess as a warrior, it is your fate to stand on the front lines of a great and secret war. It is a conflict that has raged unabated for more than ten thousand years, beginning when Warmaster Horus raised his banners in rebellion against his Father and Emperor. It is your solemn duty is to root out the foul stench of heresy, hunt down the vile alien, and expunge the twisted influence of Chaos. You will tread where others fear go: You will venture to distant worlds filled with xenos abominations, you will walk through ancient space hulks best left undisturbed, and you will savour both the cruel depths of the under-hive and the wicked world of the high-born in their spire-top mansions. You will face enemies that would steal the courage from lesser men, you will see things that will scar your mind and soul forever, and you will come to face you own dark desires. You will never know fame nor reward, yet if you stand resolute, you will die knowing that you did so serving a higher purpose, and that your name and deeds will be carried to Holy Terra in darkness and silence, there to be whispered to the God-Emperor himself, who will know and remember for all eternity...

Edited May 22, 2014 by Green Knight

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

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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.

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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.

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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 coloration, 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.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Green Knight

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

Read it!

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.