Let's Read the Horus Heresy 3: Galaxy in Flames

"I was there," said Titus Cassar, his wavering voice barely reaching the back of the chamber.

 - The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames, Ben Counter

That's right, it's time for the third instalment of Let's Read the Horus Heresy. You may notice it starts with exactly the same words as the first one, which is a choice you can make. Again, the story picks up right where we left off, as Horus's fleet arrives in the Isstvan system and the Heresy gets properly started.

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In this one, we meet Morty, who is amusingly described as being Darth Vader. We also get Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children back as a point-of-view character. While Tarvitz and the Death Guard assault a monitoring station, Horus and Erbs talk to the Chaos Gods. The nascent Imperial Cult on Horus's flagship hides Euphrati Keeler, who does another miracle, and eventually Isstvan III is assaulted by a force including the Sons of Horus captains Loken and Torgeddon, as well as Lucius. Tarvitz stays in orbit to co-ordinate.

Counter's writing is good, and the leering and misogyny of the previous volume are gone again. There's more sloppy editing; chapters 9 and 15 start with almost exactly identical words, for example. But overall this is a pretty good book and carries the story forward effectively.

The thing I talked about with the previous book, the emerging black-and-white divide into the good guys and bad guys, is only getting stronger, and still doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They're still presenting the secular Imperial Truth as a good thing, but then Euphrati Keeler's cult is also a good thing.

To take an example of the good guy-bad guy dynamic, Tarvitz is shown Fabulous Bill's evil lab and offered enhancements of his own. Tarvitz reacts with horror: it's blasphemous to use xenos technology to tamper with the Emperor's holy gene-seed. Now, you can read this with a sense of irony that the "good guy" is a fanatical xenophobe. But the trouble is that the scene is played entirely straight, with Eidolon and Bill as the cackling villains offering evil temptation and Tarvitz heroically resisting.

This time, there's some pretty good moments with the Sons of Horus, but Abaddon and Horus himself are just pantomine villains, with Horus especially a raging, scenery-chewing, ridiculously cruel bad guy. It's still a real disappointment after Abnett's excellent portrayal of Horus in the first book.

Again, I was left wishing that the second and third book would have gone at least a little into why some Marines stayed loyal to the Emperor and some split for Horus. The only reasoning we hear is some stuff about the Emperor abandoning them and Horus, but it's presented so half-heartedly that it's difficult to tell if the people expressing these sentiments are meant to be serious about them. We've now got traitors fighting and killing loyalists, without really properly understanding why they're doing it. It feels like such a missed opportunity.

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In military matters, I have to say I don't understand why Horus's forces storm the monitoring station on Isstvan Extremis. If the objective was to silence the station and take out its sensors, why not just bombard it from orbit? But also, destroying sensor systems on another planet isn't going to stop anyone on Isstvan III seeing giant Imperial space cathedrals lumber into orbit and start spewing drop pods.

I'm also very confused by the Titan again. In Chapter 3, we meet the Moderati of the Dies Irae again, as they're preparing the Imperator Titan for battle. And they're doing it on board Horus's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Do Astartes command ships really have the capacity to handle Imperator-class Titans and their landing craft? I mean I can't say it's impossible, but until now the biggest thing we've seen launched is a Stormbird. I really would have thought that moving even parts of a Titan Legion around would be a considerable enough operation to require dedicated Mechanicum starships.

But there are combat support troops! As the Sons of Horus are prepping for the Istvan III drop, a communications squad is mentioned. I'm especially pleased since I already painted one. Ground surveys prior to the drop pod assault are mentioned! Even more shockingly, Lucius seems to actually exercise command, and the Emperor's Children have an officer co-ordinating their battle from orbit. On the surface, there's even artillery and armor.

Severe spoilers follow. Having said that there's now at least some attention being paid to warfare, I do need to ask this. After the bombardment, the survivors fight back for what we're told is months. Given that the plan all along was for the first wave to be wiped out in the bombing, why were they allowed to drop with months of ammo? Or how are they resupplying themselves? I'm sure they can scrounge some ammo off the dead, but for months? They still seem to have plenty of emergency medical supplies until the very end. If Space Marines routinely drop with gigantically oversized supply dumps, you'd really think someone would mention it.

In general, though, when Counter writes warfare, it actually sounds like war and not a tabletop skirmish game, so from a mil-sf point of view, this is by far the best book yet.

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So the Heresy is now fully underway, with Keeler and the gang making their getaway on the Death Guard ship Eisenstein and the remaining loyalists purged from Horus's legions. I'm still enjoying reading these books; they really are good entertainment.