Back in 2021, the Black Library published Steel Tread by Andy Clark, a story about the crew of a Leman Russ in a Cadian armored regiment. This kicked off a new series of books focused on the Astra Militarum, with a new one being released each year. 2022 brought us two titles, Catachan Devil by Justin Woolley and Steven B. Fischer’s Witchbringer1, then Rob Young’s Longshot and Deathworlder2 by Victoria Hayward take us through to the end of last year.
With the newly-released (if blandly-named) Final Deployment, R. S. Wilt shows that unlike Crime and Horror, sadly, this terrific series continues to have legs.
Wilt is a relative newcomer to the Black Library, and is a great example of the minors-to-majors talent pipeline that the modern Black Library has been employing. Wilt’s first story was The Pharisene Paradox, a short story that was included as part of 2022’s Black Library Horror Week that October. The following month he’d landed another one with an inclusion in the anthology Inferno! Presents: The Emperor’s Finest, with Recriminant.Â
2024 is another good year for him as Eradicant is published as part of the Black Library Celebrations eShort subscription in February, and just two months later we see The Guns of Enth included in Space Marine Successors Week. Pleased with his work, the Black Library extends him a novel and we arrive at Final Deployment.
The shorts-to-novels progression isn’t just something we see with authors, as often characters get their debut in the shorter form before potentially landing the longform treatment. Take Mike Vincent, for instance. Two short stories in 2024, a third one this past April (Blades of Atrocity) that introduce us to Dalchian Rassaq, the Skin-Taker, main character for the upcoming The Remnant Blade. Or Rob Young, whose second short story (2022’s Transplants) served up an appetizer for Longshot.
To meet the heroes of Final Deployment, we can look back at Eradicant– but it’s not necessary to enjoy the story, which is fully self-contained.
This story concerns the First Eradicant squad of Tempestus Scions, the elite special forces of the Astra Militarum. If the Scions are like the Green Berets or Navy SEALs4, Eradicant squads are where they send their fuck-ups, derelicts, and ne’er-do-wells. It’s the same “atonement or death” Imperial logic used for Sisters Repentia of the Adepta Sororitas: you’ll get thrown into the most hazardous and dangerous assignments, and if you survive long enough you might earn your way back.
For Tempestor Traxel’s First Eradicant, that means getting dropped into a raging civil war on the planet Rilis, where it quickly becomes apparent that they’re up against not only the forces of the traitor armies, but also the Iron Warriors the traitors have allied with in their bid to break free of the Imperium.
We’re In the Army Now
Wilt is a former military officer, and much like combat veteran Noah Van Nguyen (Godeater’s Son, Elemental Council) that experience infuses his writing and lends it a riveting authenticity. There’s more than the usual considerations of things like eating, bodily functions, and equipment maintenance here- the basic busywork of the soldier when they’re not actually warfighting. It’s commonly said of war that it’s 99% boredom and 1% terror, and while the grimdark setting of Warhammer 40K plays with that ratio a bit, you very much get the sense that Wilt’s Scions are indeed professional soldiers due to a triumph of show over tell. It’s one of the book’s strongest elements.
The other element I really enjoyed here was the way the story moved in unexpected directions. For one thing, for being a straightforward war story there was an excellent variety in the set pieces, particularly in an absolutely page-turner of a sequence where they Scions are looking to infiltrate an installation, only to find that one of the Iron Warriors had already taken the liberty of setting up some truly intricate defenses. The chess match that follows could have been written twice as long and I’d have greedily devoured every word.
‘Unexpected directions,’ by the way, also includes character mortality, though I’ll offer no spoilers here. By that I mean the potential for any character to die at any point, a feature George R. R. Martin used to notable effect in his Game of Thrones series. When it’s dialed down we see a book’s characters over-encumbered with plot armor, villains who cheat death in increasingly incredulous and unlikely ways until the story’s inevitable climax- where they get to deliver a big speech or dramatic moment before being vanquished by the hero with an act of exceptional heroism or flourish.
It’s not realistic, nor is it meant to be, and it certainly has its place. While Final Deployment doesn’t go all in on Red Weddings5, the mortality of its characters only adds to the gritty realism Wilt’s conveyed here. People aren’t guaranteed to survive because of dramatic plot reasons when subjected to overwhelming peril, they die here because that’s what often happens when people are subjected to overwhelming peril. In a genre filled with the fortunate and unlikely, I found this surprisingly refreshing.
For all I enjoyed Traxel’s collection of misfits, like the best of villains the Iron Warriors really stole every scene they were in. I enjoyed Graham McNeil’s Storm of Iron as much as the next Chaos adherent- as depictions of sieges go it’s certainly amongst the best- but as characters Honsou and the gang always felt a little flat to me. Wilt channeled a few flashes of Aaron Dembski-Bowden here in the ability to give his Heretics life and breath- and more than a little humanity.
One example of this comes when the traitor general arrives to give bad news to the leader of the Iron Warriors detachment. That’s every evil commander’s nightmare, giving the Big Bad the awful news and watching them explode, throw things, and quite possibly kill you? “You have failed me for the last time” and all that.
Instead, how that scene plays out made it one of the best of the book6, underlining that Wilt isn’t interested in cartoon villains here but rather a more realistic portrayal of individuals at war. More Chaos Astartes like this, please!
Final Thoughts
That isn’t to say that Final Deployment isn’t without its flaws, but they’re comparatively minor. The final third of the book isn’t quite as tight as the preceding sections, losing a bit of the very tight focus it had held throughout. It doesn’t go off the rails by any means, and indeed he may have been a victim of his own success with that riveting middle-third of the defensive gauntlet. But visual depictions were a bit more vague, and I had a harder time imagining the action and locations in my mind’s eye as compared to the earlier parts of the book. Sticking the landing can be something of a pitfall for the newer writer.7
He also flirts just a bit with anachronisms, words and phrases that pulled me out of the setting just a touch. Things getting ‘knocked down like tenpins,’ ‘hip bone connected to the thigh bone,’ or having a character using the term ‘some assembly required’ sardonically. Hey, if our pop culture references can survive forty millennia, watch out xenos!
But again, minor and even nitpicky stuff8. Wilt shows a lot of promise with Final Deployment, and I’d love to see him pen a short story with his Iron Warriors for a future Heretic Astartes Week. This one’s an easy pickup for eighteen bucks, folks.
Footnotes
- Fischer’s Broken Crusade was on my shortlist for best books of 2024. We reviewed it here.
- This one was the winner. Seriously, hard to top the Guard facing down tyranid body horror.
- Inferno! was the magazine that originally helped create the Black Library as we know it today. It’s a fascinating story, and one we’re in the middle of now in our ongoing series the 40K History of the Black Library.
- A subject, unsurprisingly, of no small amount of debate.
- There’s a deeper discussion here involving the degree of affinity the reader is encouraged to develop with characters that plays into it. Star Trek’s redshirts are a great example. Sure there were lots of deaths and mishaps, but that’s what those characters were there to do. Put another way, they die so that the heroes don’t have to. That was Martin’s genius- he killed off the ones you actually cared about.
- Again being vague on purpose here so as not to overly spoil it for fresh readers.
- I’m assuming Wilt falls into this category, as I can’t find any non-Warhammer works by him listed online.
- While I’m being nitpicky, hey James Workshop, can we start releasing this series in hardback please? Not sure why these are limited to softcover only as they’re perfectly good, standalone novels.
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