The Beast Arises reached the series' halfway point this month with the release of my own offering, Echoes of the Long War. I've been following the reviews and the blog articles of the previous entries in the series, and reading Gav Thorpe's excellent blog about the equally excellent TBA3: The Emperor Expects actually told me a lot that even I hadn't known about the planning and gestation of the Beast Arises series. With the hope of adding a layer of interest to the words already down their on the page, I thought I'd add my own notes on the thinking that went into Echoes of the Long War.

The Beast Arises was first planned out about 4 years ago, back when I was still writing short stories and working my way into Black Library, so I had very little input into the actual plot. Books 1-4 were written sequentially, but as I sat down to plan Echoes, TBA5 was still to be written and 6-9 were also being plotted so there were some hefty constraints with which to operate. That said, there was still enough scope to throw a few ideas of my own in there, including one major piece of plot which I'm still pleased to see incorporated into the greater storyline.

I decided early on after reading the short brief I'd been given that this was going to be a story about the Fists Exemplar. They are a 2nd founding Chapter of the Imperial Fists that, for reasons as yet unknown, are lost and apparently unremembered by the 41st Millennium. They were last seen in detail in Rob Sanders' TBA2: Predator, Prey, fighting to defend their fortress monastery from a massive ork invasion of the planet, Eidolica. We got to see them in action, as well as several tantalising hints as to their origins and philosophies. Here are some of those teasing nuggets I picked up:

1) The Fists Exemplar founder, Oriax Dantalion, was the one who persuaded Dorn to accept the Codex Astartes

2) Their armour is unpainted, a demonstration of their turning their back on their old heraldry and traditions

3) They were originally a fleet-based Chapter, patrolling a Chaos-wracked region of wilderness space

They are zealots in their own way, cleaving quite fiercely to the Codex that their founder had championed, and thus more resistant to the concept of the Last Wall than the other Chapters. I saw them as revering Guilliman almost as much as Dorn. I even named a ship after him and, in an earlier draft, had a squad of First Company called 'Thirteenth Son'. The legacy of their founder's vision on his sons is a tremendous belief in their ability to think for themselves. As First Captain Zerberyn puts it: They were notoriously free and independent thinkers in their founders’ mould; not the barbaric affectation of the wolves of Fenris, nor the solitary hunters of Mundus Planus, but a mentality borne of absolute conviction in their personal infallibility. Their lack of pride, in their appearance and in their hierarchy is actually a POINT of pride. I also saw a prominent role for their Librarius and a lot of cool anti-psyker ship modifications to account for their experience of operating in damaged regions of space.

The character of Honorarius Zerberyn, from TBA2, a rival of the Chapter Master, Maximus Thane, seemed a perfect fit to be my main viewpoint character. Exploring a side character like this, or highlighting an offhand remark about history or culture and going a little deeper, is one of the particular delights of working in a shared universe. Echoes was no exception to that.

This was also the first piece I wrote with a little outside editing help. My good friend and editor of Alternative Realities, Matt Sylvester, was looking to set up a proofreading service, specialising in action scenes. He was kind enough to do me a few chapters as a free trial. Here's a sample of some work that passed through his rough, fighters' hands:

The matt grey Thunderhawk gunship, Penitence, descended hard on the planet’s night side, ventral thrusters blasting up a tsunami of dust as the assault craft levelled out and dropped its troop doors. Dust billowed through the open hatch, whipping through handgrips and cargo netting and smothering the armoured forms of Veteran Squad Anatoq. With the enhanced senses of smell and taste granted by his neuroglottis, Zerberyn sifted the storm of particulates. Small stones. Dead soil. Bone chips. Blood. It chopped up the thirteen helmet beams and the weak pastel glow of wall-mounted panels, banging and rattling inside the troop compartment.

‘Quickly in and quickly out’ voxed Veteran-Sergeant Columba over the squad channel, one hand wrapped through a ceiling handgrip.

The sergeant was an iron-faced ascetic with ice water in his veins and hearts of leaden grey. A narrow view of the Exemplar creed of humility had led him to turn down the captaincy of the First more than once, and had publically rebuked Koorland over the offer of a position in the reformed shield corps of Terra. Zerberyn liked him.

The narrow beam of his own helm light cut half a metre into the swirl, catching the whipped up grit as if by surprise, stripping it from uniform night black to white and grey and bloody brown. A crowd of gold runes representative of his squad slid around the periphery of his internal faceplate display, the gunship shaking under the force of its own engines unsettling the runes’ positions. The boarding ramp railroaded out into the dark. He could see neither the ground nor the end of the ramp.

‘We are Exemplars,’ he said into his helm vox. ‘No wall stands against us. No wall can stand beside us.’

‘You all know your objectives,’ Columba concluded.

Zeberyn led them into the vertical jetwash, running, a servo-powered leap plunging him into a rippling funnel of dust. For a moment a combination of his battleplate’s powered systems and the updraft of disturbed earth made him fly. Then he fell, five metres, a tonne of ceramite slamming two-footed into dry earth. Suspensor grids dispersed the impact force throughout his armour, plates shifting, crunching to a crouch, then with a counter-whine of servos he came up, disengaged his pistol’s mag-holster and whipped the weapon up.

He could not see a thing. Dust devils gyrated between the ground and the gunship’s thundering exhausts, sieving the landing lights from above. Blinking runes in his helm display and the vibrations picked up by his boot sensors told of veteran-brothers thumping into the ground around him.
They fanned out from the drop zone, murky giants with boltguns raised and aimed.

Veteran-brother Donbuss was triple-checking the belt feed to his heavy bolter and covering the advance from relative high ground. Antille dropped to one knee, hand to where his ear was underneath his helmet, the long antennae of a shoulder-mounted vox-booster whipping about. Each Space Marine’s battleplate was independently vox-capable, but the volume of near-orbit communications noise and the signal diffraction of their own fleet’s place in hiding necessitated the booster should they need to raise their brothers around the eighth planet. Apothecary Reoch stood beside him holding his narthecium at arms length, sampling the wind for toxin traces or pathogens. It was almost impossible to kill a Space Marine, but a reasonable excess of caution won more wars than abandon ever had. Veteran-brother Karva was the twelfth and last down, pivoting on the spot as a promethium tank dropped through the darkness and catching it in the crook of his arms.

Zerberyn voxed up to the Thunderhawk that his squad was deployed, received two brittle clicks through his microbead in response, and then felt a slam of downwash.

With a tremendous roar of thrust, the gunship rose, re-angling its engines for horizontal flight and pulled away. The dust storm began to settle, stones and larger debris falling out to leave dried organic matter zipping about. It cleared the air enough for Zerberyn to see Penitence turning for a fly past of the planet’s principle city, Princus Praxa, and its Crusade fortress approximately two hundred kilometres east across the daylight meridian.

A second gunship circled in low. Its metallic bodywork was embellished with unorthodox modifications; battle honours, ablative hull plating, variant weapon loadouts, and not all of it of obvious human make. The star-backed iron skull of the Iron Warriors stared grimly from its tailfin and nose section. Keeping low, it banked left and began to steadily climb, mapping the terrain with a pair of sweeping spotlights and searching for an appropriate drop zone of its own.

Zerberyn processed his surroundings without thinking about it.

Left, a diagonal line of wind power converters, bi-blades, chomping sombrely through the dark. A greasy metal water tank, empty, riddled with holes, fenced off with chicken wire that had been cut and trampled. Brother Tarsus advanced towards the shed, boltgun sweeping the row of quietly whump-ing turbines. Right, looming rockcrete-walled slurry pits, surrounded by dirty metal outbuildings. A petrochem generator. A silage tank, round-walled and massive. One of the sheds was a machine store. It was open, an upswinging outer door half-covering a weather-beaten wheeled truck. The vehicle was a rusted contraption of belts, pulleys, and funnels, with an articulated pallet lifter at the front end painted to look like an orkish mouth. It had a canvass top and a blood-splattered rear fender. Its tyres were flat. Brothers Galen and Borhune took firing positions, Karva moving up to cover the units with his heavy flamer. Behind, nothing, according to the Thunderhawks’ deep augur scans just over-exploited pastureland and dust.

Ahead, the objective.

His genetically perfect low light vision described the structure in sharp detail. It was a massive, industrialised agricultural unit, with dust-tanned steel walls and barred windows. A large, rectangular glyph of a twisting serpent had been graffitied over the upper storey windows. It was an ork structure. It was only as Zerberyn closed and metrics gathered in his helm display that he realised that every feature was about twenty-five percent too large for human standard. The dirt drive leading up to the main door was churned with tyre tracks and strewn with bone meal, dung, and what looked like scraps of clothing.
He loped forwards at an easy run. Brothers Hardran and Nalis followed up behind and flanking, covering the upper storeys and secondary entrances with their bolters. Tosque and Columba kept pace, the former maintaining his aim on the door with a bulky combi-plasma.

The unit frequency crackled in Zerberyn’s ear.

‘Galen. No contacts.’

‘Tarsus. Same here, Brother-Captain.’

‘Reoch,’ voxed the apothecary, voice double distorted and animal. ‘I am reading high soil concentrations of antibiotics and human growth hormones. I cannot say why, but I see no danger.’

‘Vigilance, brothers,’ Zerberyn replied, unslinging his thunderhammer.

If you're interested in writing accurate combat, then you could do a lot worse than checking out Matt's website and seeing what he can do for you.

https://matthewsylvester.com/weapons-...

Things move fast in the Beast Arises however, and next this month sees the release of the wonderfully-titled The Hunt for Vulkan, by David Annandale. Then it's Gav again, David *again*, allowing me that OTHER great pleasure of writing tie-in of seeing what other people do with your characters and storylines, before Zerberyn et al come back to me for TBA10: The Last Son of Dorn.

And word is just in. Guy Haley has finished work on the final instalment, TBA12: The Beheading. It's going to get a whole lot worse for the Imperium before it gets better...