Alright, So GBO2 Was Kind Enough To Drop A Kmpfer High-Mobility Type For Me The Other Day, So I Figured

Alright, so GBO2 was kind enough to drop a Kämpfer High-Mobility type for me the other day, so I figured I’d use this as a springboard to talk about the design, and by extension my feelings towards UC Engage’s designs as a whole.

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You know when you mention something, and it just kind of sticks with you for a bit? Anyway, the YMS-18 Kämpfer Prototype was one of many ne

I already went over the Kämpfer and its variants previously, but being able to compare the models in GBO2 changes things a bit.

There’s actually a lot of subtle differences that I hadn’t caught the first time around that distinguishes the High-Mobility type. When compared to the original Kämpfer; the chest’s larger and rounder, the head is wider, the armour on the arms is different and the legs have a feminine design closer to the Gerbera Tetra. It’s very good, the increased mass implies a more powerful reactor and the masses of extra thrusters do make it feel like a High-Mobility unit. The head incorporates Vulcan guns, and the suit itself also incorporates a beam machinegun, again implying an improved reactor. The thruster pack is similar to the Gerbera-Tetra’s but it feels much more like prototype, with its larger fuel tanks and holes for multiple large thrusters, as opposed to the Gerbera Tetra’s more understated look. The design has a much more rounded feel for it, typical of space-use units. It’s just rather annoying, because I’d written it off as “Kämpfer with Gerbera Tetra Thrusters”, so coming back to it and finding all these deign flourishes is…… just sort of odd. Like, yeah maybe I should’ve looked a little closer, or maybe it should’ve been a little more attention-grabbing in the first place?

See, I generally don’t like officialised “kitbash” designs - I typically find that there’s too many familiar elements, so the design doesn’t really have much of an identity of itself. Yeah, battle damage or repair’s fine, but when a designs’ just bits from one suit slapped on another it just feels rather unimaginative to me.

But then again, shared equipment between mobile suits typically speaks of an elegance of design to me - these are machines that are outfitted for war, so standardisation is helpful in that respect. I’m typically a big fan of seeing the MMP-80 machine gun or 90mm bullpup machine gun on one year war units, because they’re so ubiquitous that I don’t think of them as being part of any single design.

I think what I’m getting at is; I don’t think I like the concept of the Kämpfer High-Mobility type (i.e. fuse the Kämpfer and Gerbera Tetra together due to their shared design philosophies), even if the execution’s much better than I gave it credit for previously.

I’ve been meaning to do a post on UC Engage’s designs for a while now, so I figured I’d package it with my thoughts on the Kämpfer High mobility type. I’m not going to go through every design in the game, I just figured I’d cherry-pick 8 designs I’ve got strong opinions on - what I think works, and what I think doesn’t.

Disclaimer: I’m going to be looking at the UC Engage in-game models for all of these, simply because either higher quality models don’t exist, or I’m not inclined to wait around for GBO2 to supply them to me so I can properly look at them (honestly I tend to use GBO2 as a design gallery more than anything else, but because it’s gatcha I really don’t have much influence over what I get). If I ever receive the higher-quality GBO2 Models, then I’ll note any changes of opinion then. I also don’t really care about the plot or story of UC Engage, but I’m given to understand that it’s explicitly non-canon to the rest of UC (since they put Peche and the Engage Zero in Kamille and Rosamia’s final confrontation during Gryps, and introduce a new Doga unit during Chars Counterattack as a counterpart to the Jagd Doga and Psycho Doga), so I’ll only really be considering the mobile suit designs.

Engage Zero

Okay, nine designs, because I should probably talk about the Protagonist’s suit. The RX-78MS00Z Engage Zero. So -assuming I’m reading this right- the Engage Zero was a prototype/competing design to the Gundam Development Project - the GP series seen during 0083: Stardust Memory, that were developed by Anaheim Electronics. The Engage Zero incorporated magnetic coating technology and a prototype movable frame, which would make it cutting-edge at the time of its release. It and its pilot, Peche Montague, would be passed between various groups and upgraded throughout, eventually concluding in the Neo Zeon designed Engage Zero Yonghwavin, a fully psycommu-equipped mobile suit. The general design of the Engage Zero is that it was developed as a Newtype-speciality machine amongst the rest of the Gundam Development Project.

Design-wise…. Eh. I can imagine it’s difficult to “fit in” another Gundam unit in UC canon at any rate (which is why there’s so many Gundam’s and gundam-a-likes running around in the One Year War, since it’s an easy fit), so tying it into the Gundam Development Project is a smart move, but there’s very little to tie it in design-wise. Yeah, there’s some similarity in the legs, but the chest resembles the G-Self more than anything to me. The arms are what I’d describe as inoffensive - there isn’t anything wrong, per se, there just isn’t anything distinct either. The waist seems to want to suggest a Gelgoog influence with the skirt, but it just looks wrong on a Gundam, and it overshoots and makes me think of the Qubeley. The head’s fine, no real opinion there. It’s overall a very feminine design, which I’m not against or anything, it just again feels odd. Like, it’s a feminine design because the pilot is female, but ….why? It just seems a bit odd tonally, especially since it retains the original gundam’s samurai influences, which are typically rather masculine. It’s a feminine design, but in doing so, it masculine-codes every other design. So it’s a feminine Gundam that causes you to question why every other female Gundam pilot has just had (for want of a better term) a non-feminine Gundam. I just find it incredibly odd from that perspective. I imagine that’s why it makes me think of the Qubeley so much, because that’s the most prominent other feminine design we see in UC.

Dijeh Assault Package

Is the fact that there’s actual art of this one cheating? Anyway, the MSK-008S/A Dijeh Assault Package was an upgraded version of the standard Dijeh, and was used in a bombardment role. It’s essentially a Dijeh with additional weapons, armour and, of course, missiles. I like this one, not necessarily because I think it’s an amazing design (the artwork’s doing a lot of heavy lifting), but because I think it fits so well with Karaba as an organisation. They’ve got a fairly limited number of mobile suit designs available, but a lot of them are very good, so it makes sense to manufacture variants to those units for different mission types. A high-spec bombardment unit that can fight well after the initial barrage is always going to be attractive to a Guerilla organisation, hence the Dijeh Assault Type. Even the reused equipment works really well, since Karaba isn’t known for being well-funded. All-in-all, it’s solid.

Roswell Jegan

I’ve used this one as a punchline a few times, so I’m sure my opinion shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I really just don’t like the Roswell Jegan. It’s basically a Jegan that was used to test fin funnel weaponry designed by Amuro, which would then be incorporated into the Nu Gundam. I’ve kinda got a lot of questions here - where did the psycho-frame come from? How’s the jegan got the reactor to mount all those fin funnels? How did they know it worked? Doesn’t the existence of the Silver Bullet (funnel test type) kinda invalidate this machine’s existence? Why Roswell?

And all that for a jegan with a little bit of additional armour and funnel rack backpack. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m no great Jegan fan, but I actually do like a lot of its other variants, so the Roswell Jegan just feels so plain and drab by comparison. A funnel-mounted or newtype-use jegan has potential, I just don’t think the Roswell is that.

Gelgoog Ls

Regrettably, this is the best image I have. The Gelgoog Ls was an upgraded form of the Gelgoog L, a Gelgoog variant designed for defending VIP’s, which was essentially a standard Gelgoog with a new backpack, large shield and heat lance. The only real difference with the two units is that the Gelgoog Ls incorporated more filigree and mounted Vulcan guns in its much larger head. It’s noted that Gelgoog L pilots were often young and barely-trained cadets, which wasn’t uncommon around the time of the Gelgoogs deployment. The Gelgoog Ls, meanwhile was apparently more geared towards the secret service.

The Gelgoog Ls is a bit of an odd one for me. I’m kind of a sucker for Lance units in general, and the Gelgoog seems to be an attempt to backdate guard units like the GAZ-L and GAZ-R into something that started with the principality. Only real issue is that there seems to be an awful lot of “Royal Guard” units running around. There’s the Gelgoog Ls, the Rick Dom, the Galbaldy Alpha, the Gyan Eos and so forth. That and that customising a mobile suit for the Secret Police seems overkill. What are they gonna be facing that requires that level of force, particularly a goddamn heat lance? (the Vulcans make sense, because they’re typically used against infantry or light vehicles, but the Lance is just overkill). The design itself is just…. Fine. Gelgoog with a shield and heat Lance probably didn’t *need* to be its own thing, but I like how the Vulcans are integrated. I am weirdly fascinated by what the backpack looks like, since I’m absolutely certain I’ve seen that design somewhere before, I’ve just no idea where. (I keep thinking it’s from the Gyan Marine from Gihren’s Greed, I know it’s not that)

Finally, I should note that the head appears to be based on contemporary police uniforms. My initial thought was of the “classic” Gendarmerie (the French police service), with the cylindrical hats, which spun out naturally to the Landespolizei (the German police service) and the Ordnungspolizei (the Nazi police service, which I was very happy to find no similarity to), but it seems to be based more on contemporary dress uniforms than anything else, which makes sense, considering the all of the filigree.

Gaza CZ

The Gaza CZ is a Gaza C that has been modified for use in an artillery role, it replaces the shoulder armour of the original Gaza C with missile pods, and the integrated Knuckle Buster with a belt-fed minigun. The Head and legs also appear to have been slightly remodelled - the head’s sleeker and more pointed, emphasising the monoeye (and likely its role in target acquisition), while the characteristic three-digit foot “claws” of the Gaza C have been reduced to a fairly standard looking foot, with the side thruster being enlarged.

The rationale of the Gaza CZ’s design is to up-arm the aging Gaza-C second-line units and use them as artillery support similar to the Zssa. I like this rationale, because it makes sense that Neo Zeon would want to make use of the massive amount of Gaza-C’s it had, and strapping some missile pods to it is a logical and practical approach to this. Even the Gatling gun is excellent, because it would enable more of the mobile suits generator to be directed to its improved thrusters and thus offset the weight of the heavier equipment, and as a second-line unit, it would typically be operating within easy reach of resupply. I just wish I could get a better look at the feet and see it transformed.

Gabthley B

As in “beta”. The original Gabthley is a design from Zeta I just love - it fits perfectly into my definition of a “mid/late-season weirdo”. So good. The Gabthley Beta was a redesigned and upgraded Gabthley used by the Titans. While the original Gabthley showed promise, the design was judged to be too complex and expensive for mass production, which led to the design of the Gabthley B. There’s only stated to be one produced but it really *feels* like a limited-production suit to me. The design’s just wonderful because it’s a just a hodgepodge of Titans mobile suits - there’s the Gabthley, obviously, but it incorporates the arm claws of Scirocco’s Messala, it looks to have a (single) wing binder from the Gaplant and the feyadeen rifle Mk-II is an upgraded form of the original used by the Gabthley and Hambrabi. The large arms and oddly-proportioned body even make this commenter think of some of the oddities of the Titans Test Team, such as the TR-6 Hyze’nthley and the TR-6 Kehaar II. I’d also like to note that the head’s been completely resdesigned - it’s this blend of the monoeye, visor, the original streamlined Gabthley head and it’s even got some Gundam-style protrusions near the collar. It’s a very commanding design, for a commander type unit, it what I’m getting at.

I do hope we see it in a better colour scheme at some point, however. I don’t typically dislike black-and-purple, it’s just that there’s quite a lot of obscure, bulky titans units with that colour scheme, and they tend to look rather similar (especially since it’s a rather busy design).

Nemo Bellator

The Nemo’s an interesting one, since it seems to have dodged the many, many variants of the GM and Jegan. It’s certainly got a fair few, but (with the noted exception of the Nemo III and the absolute superb MSA-003 Nemo Cannon from Aoz) none of them are really that exciting. A bit of armour plating here, a new backpack there, never necessarily setting the world on fire but being pretty solid “yeah, that’s a grunt mobile suit” throughout.

So the Nemo Bellator being just so boring is rather novel, in a way. A Nemo, with back binders and a mega launcher. No reworking of the body, no targeting equipment (like the Hyaku Shiki), no improvement to the generator. There’s just nothing going on here. And the name “Bellator” just sounds like the creator needed a name quickly so they could knock off for lunch.

Sliferail

The Sliferail was an upgraded Gundam Ground Type that was remodelled with the expectation of deploying in cover operations in forests and wetlands. It was apparently a custom job on behalf of the pilot, who specifically requested the addition of the beam javelin.

This is a design where I love the concept, but I’m ambivalent about the execution - we see a bunch of ace custom units in Gundam anyway, and there was a good amount of Gundam Ground Types around, making them an excellent opportunity for variant designs in different theatres. The Sliferail is essentially a counterpart to the Ez8, showing how another pilot adapted to the changing war situation. The design itself…. It’s not bad, I like the new fins on the legs, and the new head and chest are nice. The colour scheme’s nice, and it makes sense for a wetlands environment. To be honest, it’s probably that I’m quite fond of the “standard” Gundam ground type, and so the Sliferail just feels like a step away from that, and I feel if anything, it should have leant into the changes a bit more. Up-armour the shoulders, put a ghille cloak on there, maybe remodel the lower legs a little more to better distribute the weight or something.

Type 99 Assault

Last but not least, the Type 99 Assault. The Type 99 assault was an update to the Type 100 Hyaku shiki from the Gryps Conflict and was intended to be a competitor to the Formula Series. It was built around U.C. 123. Though it’s stated to be an upgraded to the hyaku shiki, the Delta Gundam Kai influences are obvious, what with the head and chest. Interestingly, the lineart appears to be drawing from Kazuhisa Kondo’s designs, with the larger wing binders and differently styled head (which reminds me of the rather obscure Hyaku Ichi Shiki), though the design seen in UC engage leans more Delta Kai.

I really like the rear arms and integrated leg thrusters on this one, it gives it a really unique feel. The Gatling gun and beam rifle are both nice touches, and it feels like a machine designed for extended operations. It’s a design I would really like to see more detailed illustrations of, since I’d like to look at it in more detail. The leg thrusters also suggest great agility and remind me of the Anksha from Unicorn, which is nice. I do rather like how Anaheim made the Delta Gundam, and just consistently failed to then take that any further. Like, yeah, it happens a lot with Gundam’s too, where they’re built and they perform well and then they’re just sorta never expanded on, but the way that the Delta line just keeps throwing all these great ideas at the wall with none of them sticking makes it fell like….. I dunno, the Sega Saturn of mobile suits?

Closing

And that’s the highlights for the U.C. Engage Design Series. This ended up being a lot more positive than I was expecting honestly, which is nice. Quick shoutouts to: the Giessen Doga for being so boring I don’t even want to talk about it, the Duffel Jegan for being another ace-use jegan to add to the pile, and the Delta Gundam Ans for not having any good images available.

Machine Messiah Auge

Fest''in, in Les Halles, paris, France, 1988.

Scan

Cross Mirage (Male Type) Lineart by Nagano Mamoru

Excellent review, I’d been looking forwards to hearing about this one, though I do have a few thoughts on it that have been kicking around in my head since I read it;

Bolter Porn is an excellent term, I will probably steal it, it really helps put a name to how I felt when reading this book - not necessarily unenjoyable, but it was more…. Straightforward than I expected.

Every character being a stereotype of their legion is something I hadn’t realised until now, but there is the savage space wolf, the levelheaded ultramarine and the know-it-all thousand son. The berserk world eater, Skraal…. Is probably my favourite part of the book, simply because I think he’s got a few good scenes, like when Cestus and another ultramarine (I think?) are discussing legion relations while watching Skraal in the fighting pits and they’re obviously struggling to find some commonality with the world eaters. Or when Skraal has infiltrated the Furious Abyss and the word bearer captain tries to convince him to change sides over the intercom, telling him that Angron’s turned traitor, which infuriates Skraal . I think it’s an interesting parallel with Angron, since both him and Skraal are very much about not being slaves, even as that’s what the nails are doing to them. He’s still a stereotype, but I think he’s used in an interesting way (though that could just be my own fondness for Traitor Legion Loyalists speaking).

My general impression of Battle For the Abyss, looking back, is essentially Daemon Incursions: the Novel. There’s three of the damn things in one book. Granted, it’s a staple of Warhammer in general, but it does get wearing.

Battle for the Abyss

This post contains spoilers for Battle for the Abyss, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) July 29th, 2008, although sources disagree -- some places I've found assert it was published on August 1st, 2008. Something I've found when trying to date specific works in this series, though, is that a lot of places will say "Published on [Month] 1st" when they actually mean "Published in [Month], we don't know which exact day," so as a general rule when I do this dating thing I assume any source that's specific about it being published on an exact date is accurate unless that date is given as the first of the month, in which case I assume that's filler information and only the month is reliable. I guess it makes sense for a book published two days before the end of the month would be attributed to the next month in some databases. Also I kind of don't care if I'm off by a couple of days about a publication date because I'm tumblr liveblogging a series of, at best, high-school-essay-quality book reports about a media tie-in novel series.

So this book is kind of infamous; I've seen it described as The Worst Horus Heresy novel with the possible exception of some of the Salamanders books that come later. Thing is, I don't hate it. To explain why, I will have to go into some of the events of the Horus Heresy that haven't been covered in these novels yet.

According to the pseudo-history of the Horus Heresy, following the Istvaan III Atrocity but before news of it had reached the larger galaxy, Horus issued orders to the Ultramarine Legion to muster at Calth, a planet in the Veridia System within the realm of Ultramar (the Ultramarines' empire-within-an-empire, conquered by their Primarch prior to his discovery by the Emperor of Mankind). An airless world with massive underground cities and an expansive orbital shipyard, Calth served as one of Ultramar's major military bases, and the order was for the Ultramarines to gather there with the Word Bearers Legion to prepare for a campaign against an ork force who were moving in the direction of Veridia. Unknown to the Ultramarines, the muster at Calth was a trap -- the Word Bearers, upon their arrival, immediately attacked the planet, using the slaughter of the gathered Ultramarines and Calth's human population to fuel a ritual that poisoned Veridia's sun, and ultimately this ritual fueled a massive warp-storm, the Ruinstorm, that both interrupted FTL travel between one half of the galaxy and the other and made it much easier for daemons to manifest in realspace in its vicinity, allowing the traitor forces to summon daemonic reinforcements to aid in their war against Imperial loyalists.

(If you've played Space Marine 2, this is what Chairon is talking about when he says he was born on Calth -- the game takes place ten thousand years after the Horus Heresy but many of the first generation of Primaris Space Marines, of which Chairon and Gadriel both are, were taken by Belisarius Cawl as children during the Heresy for experimentation and spent most of the intervening millennia being brought in and out of stasis as Cawl developed the Primaris aguments.)

Calth is important in the annals of the Heresy. Visions of Darkness, an art book (the second of four, compiling card art from the 2003 Horus Heresy collectible card game; the Visions series also served as the outline for the events of the Heresy as a whole), detailed the Word Bearer assault on Calth in 2005, a year before the publication of Horus Rising. (I would have covered the Visions series on this blog except I didn't realize three of the four were published before Horus Rising until after I'd done my entry on False Gods; the fourth was published between those two novels.) Calth is the subject of future novels and in 2015 got its own boxed game, Betrayal at Calth, which contained the first Horus Heresy plastic miniatures -- Mark IV armor, Cataphractii Terminators, two characters, and the first (truly awful; thank God we're rid of it) plastic Contemptor Dreadnought. Betrayal at Calth also had its own ruleset but hardly anybody ever played it; that boxed set was a way to justify pulling money for development of plastic Horus Heresy figures from the self-contained-boxed-games budget and everybody knows it.

What the pseudo-histories of the Horus Heresy don't say is that the attack on Calth was part of an intended two-pronged attack, meant to occur simultaneously with a sneak attack on Maccrage, the adopted homeworld of the Ultramarine Primarch Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines' primary recruiting world, while most of the Ultramarine forces were on Calth awaiting Word Bearer rendezvous. The other half of this attack would be carried out by a massive battleship of a new class, the Furious Abyss, commissioned by Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum of Mars (and secret Horus ally), with the intent to shatter Maccrage's second moon and then use the debris field to bypass Maccrage's orbital defenses to deliver a payload of life-eater virus to the planet directly in a repeat of the Istvaan III Atrocity. This attack, together with the betrayal at Calth, would have knocked the Ultramarines out of the war and prevented them from rallying and rebuilding later, and without the Ultramarines as a rebuilt force later in the war serving as a counter to the traitors, Horus would have been able to commit forces in greater numbers to the Garmon Sector, allowing him to land more forces on Terra much earlier. This likely would have won the traitors the war.

The reason why the pseud-histories of the Heresy doesn't say any of that is the attack by the Furious Abyss failed, because a small group of Astartes from the Ultramarines, Space Wolves, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons legions, none of whom even know that the Heresy was a thing yet, found evidence of the Furious Abyss's weapons test against an Ultramarines battleship and investigated, followed the Abyss's trail, and ultimately destroyed it before it could succeed in its attack on Maccrage, and this battle was so small -- the Furious Abyss itself versus a pursuit force of six much smaller ships -- that it was entirely swallowed up by the chaos of the Heresy's eruption and was ultimately forgotten by later historians.

The early Heresy is so replete with devastating loyalist losses that I kind of love the idea of an early loyalist win, entirely forgotten by later histories, made by a mixed group of members of legions who'd later be on both sides of the conflict, being one of the unknown lynchpins of Horus's ultimate defeat. The Horus Heresy game book series, the Black Books, do not to my knowledge even mention this battle, because their setting sections are written in-character by a post-Heresy historian, and the narrator would have had no way of knowing Calth was intended as part of a two-pronged attack. (Actually I'm not sure it's never mentioned; if I eventually get to the Black Books while doing this readthrough I'll keep an eye out for it.) I just... I love the idea of a small, forgotten event being so important. I think it's genuinely interesting, and this sort of attempt to expand the timeline with new events that make sense (of course the traitors would have had a plan to follow up their Calth attack with an attack on Maccrage to finish the Ultramarines off completely!) is exactly what these Horus Heresy novels ought to have been doing once it became apparent that they sold like gangbusters and were therefore going to be published for a very, very long time. This is, at least in theory, what I am here for. I'm sure not here for Primarch drama! I don't even like the Primarchs! (God, me reading this series is a mistake. Yeah, Lea, read a 64-book-series where you don't care about any of the ostensible main characters; that's a great use of your time.)

Unfortunately, Battle for the Abyss just isn't very good. Fortunately, at least some of the ways it's not very good are themselves of at least some interest.

So. Let's go with a summary.

We open with Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, watching as the Furious Abyss launches from Thule, which we're told has been a moon of Jupiter for six thousand years. Jupiter doesn't have a real moon called Thule but there is an asteroid called 279 Thule, so I think we're meant to assume that this is 279 Thule, having been dragged into orbit of Jupiter six thousand years previously. The ship is described as being impossibly big. Inside, a Word Bearer is giving a speech to a bunch of other Word Bearers about how religion is cool and it's their destiny to overthrow the emperor, and how they'll finally get their revenge on the Ultramarines. (Much like Calth, there is another important pre-established bit of Heresy lore where the Word Bearers insisted on worshipping the Emperor like a god even after he told them not to, because the Word Bearer Primarch, Lorgar, believes firmly that life is only worth living in service to a divine power. The Emperor then sent the Ultramarines to the Word Bearer homeworld to humble them by leveling their biggest temple-city, which Lorgar pretended worked but actually just drove him to hate the Emperor and seek out alternate gods to worship, which lead him to Chaos.) After the ship launches, Thule is rigged to explode so everyone who worked on the Furious Abyss dies, keeping the ship's design secret.

We then cut to some Ultramarines heading towards Vangelis Spaceport (I appreciate the name) on the Fist of Maccrage, but the Furious Abyss comes out of nowhere and attacks it as a weapons test. Judging his ship doomed, the captain of the Fist orders a distress signal sent before they all die.

Then we meet the protagonists. Some Ultramarines on Vangelis Station lead by Captain Cestus are waiting to be picked up by the Fist of Maccrage to be... stationed at Terra, I think? But it's late and they're worried. Cestus meets up with a Space Wolf named Brynngar, who leads a couple of packs of Blood Claws (that's a type of Space Wolf unit in 40k but, importantly, not in 30k; I'll get back to this at the end), in a bar, Brynngar is carousing and fighting and drinking special Space Wolf mead that can get even Space Marines drunk (another 40k thing). Cestus and Brynngar are old battle buddies who saved each others lives a couple of times. Suddenly alarms go off -- there's been an incoming astropathic message, and Cestus thinks it might be from their late ship, so he goes to check it, but it's a bunch of ominous nonsense that kills the astropaths who receive it and then feedback from the astropaths into the station's systems threatens to overload the reactor. Cestus and Brynngar rush off to the reactor room to do an emergency shutdown and in the core of the overloading reactor Cestus gets a psychic vision of Maccrage in flames.

There is some evidence the astropathic message of doom came from the Fist of Maccrage and Cestus decides to investigate, rallying all the other space marines on the station -- his own Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, some World Eaters lead by an captain named Skraal, and a single Thousand Son, Mhotep. They commandeer a warship called the Wrathful and its escorts, captained by the reasonably cool Admiral Kaminska, who's sort of pissed off she's been drafted into this potential fool's errand, and Mhotep brings along his personal ship as well. They encounter... you know, I don't remember, either they find a debris field or an energy signal or something, they find some evidence that the Fist of Maccrage has been destroyed and are able to follow an energy signature to the Furious Abyss, which they hail, it blows up one of their escorts when the escort gets too close and there's a space battle. Our protagonists kind of freak out when they realize that's a ship full of space marines that just attacked other space marines, which isn't supposed to happen, but mainly they're like "Oh, this is a fight? Cool, I know how fights work" and then they fight. One of the Wraithful's escorts is a fighter carrier but the Abyss use a psychic attack to drive all the fighter pilots insane when they get too close, Mhotep's ship gets blown up but he escapes in a "savior pod" (one of the things 30k/40k does is give slightly off-kilter names to SF staples, so escape pods are savior pods, the teleporter room is called the teleportarium, etc) and gets picked up by the Wrathful, etc. All but one of the escorts are destroyed (the survivor is the Fireblade), so the protagonist's fleet is down down from five ships to two, and Abyss escapes.

During the fight, they damage the Abyss so the protagonists know that if they just follow it, it'll have to get repairs somewhere, and they can attack it then. The Abyss heads towards a warp jump point which serves as a known entry point to a stable warp corridor (to my knowledge this is not how warp travel is described as working elsewhere in the setting; there are stable warp corridors, but there's nothing like Babylon 5 style jump points you have to use to enter them), and the protagonists follow but after entering the corridor the Word Bearers use a psychic bomb to collapse the corridor, so the Wrathful and the Fireblade enter the unstable warp. Both protagonist ships are attacked by daemons in the warp; the space marines aboard the Wrathful fight theirs off but the Fireblade takes significant damage, and the Wrathful moves to bring it into a repair bay, but surprise, the whole ship has been compromised by daemons who've fused the souls of the crew into the ship, and the Fireblade has become a sort of giant anglerfish monster thing that attacks the repair bay as it opens. Mhotep, the Thousand Son, senses that something is off and rushes to the repair bay where he uses warp sorcery to fight the Fireblade off, breaking the Edict of Nikea (when the Emperor declared that any Space Marines who were developing psychic powers had to immediately stop using and developing them, which the Thousand Sons are bitter about because they'd made their psychic talents their whole thing). Everyone else in the repair bay dies in this process and Mhotep lies about using a ruptured fuel line to fight off the Fireblade's incursion but Brynngar the Space Wolf doesn't believe him, because Space Wolves, being viking barbarians, hate witches. (Space Wolf rune priests are not witches, as any Space Wolf will tell you.)

The Wrathful continue following the Abyss until it leaves the warp and stops off at a repair station, and Cestus plans a three-pronged attack involving infiltrating groups of space marines to the station and sneaking into the Abyss to sabotage it. The three groups are Ultramarines lead by another named guy who convinces Cestus to stay behind and command the Wrathful, Skraal and his World Eaters, and Brynngar and his space wolves. The World Eaters ruin everything because unlike the other two groups, they can't resist killing innocent station workers along the way to infiltrating the ship ("A bit of killing will sharpen our senses"), and this results in an alarm going up. One touch I sort of like is that at no point later in the book do our protagonists realize this was what gave the attack away; at one point they speculate that the Word Bearers may have had daemons on the Wrathful passing info back to the Abyss and then it just doesn't come up again. The attack fails, most of the infiltrating Ultramarines are killed, the Space Wolves fall back, but the World Eaters and one Ultramarine get in... and are immediately killed because when like twenty space marines try to just rush into a ship filled with hundreds of space marines on high alert, things go badly. Only Skraal survives, fleeing into the depths of the Furious Abyss.

The Furious Abyss takes off, the Wrathful follows, back into the warp with both of them towards Maccrage. On the Furious Abyss, Skraal, sneaking around in air ducts and behind pillars and things, witnesses a ritual where the Word Bearers use the corpse of the dead Ultramarine lieutenant to appease a daemon named Wsoric, while on the Wrathful, Cestus and Brynngar try to get some info out of a captured Word Bearer that Brynngar and his 40k Blood Claws brought back from his failed assault. Asking nicely doesn't work, torture doesn't work, Cestus finally loops Mhotep in to do a psychic probe and Brynngar freaks out about it. They argue, Mhotep tells them to leave so he can do his interrogation without witnesses, demons attack the ship, Mhotep finishes his interrogation and then heads to the spot of the daemon incursion and uses more sorcery to defeat them, which saves a bunch of Ultramarines but drives Mhotep unconscious. Brynngar witnesses this and decides to kill the unconscious Mhotep for witchcraft before he can wake up and share what he got from the Word Bearer, Cestus refuses, they have an honor duel about it. Cestus barely wins and Brynngar abides by the terms of the duel but makes it clear their friendship is over. Mhotep wakes up and tells Cestus the plans for the attack on Maccrage that I went over many many paragraphs ago at the start of this blog post. Cestus confines Mhotep to an isolation cell because Brynngar made it clear the next time he sees Mhotep he'll kill him, honor duel or no. Also, Mhotep touches Cestus's head and gives him a vision of the future, and confesses that he'd foreseen farseen foreseen all of this years ago and knew his fate was to die on the Wrathful.

Both ships exit the warp at Maccrage and have another space fight. Secretly, Cestus made a plan with the human crew of the ship -- all the Space Marines would enter shuttles and when the Furious Abyss opens its torpedo tubes to fight, they'd launch the shuttles toward it and enter via the torpedo tubes while the Wrathful and the Furious Abyss slug it out. During that fight, the Wrathful's engines are wrecked and it begins plummeting towards Maccrage's moon. Most of the Space Marines make it into the ship. Their plan is to blow up the torpedos the Abyss was going to use to blow up Maccrage's moon, since they entered via torpedo tubes and are therefore right there on the torpedo deck, but the Word Bearers hit them with a psychic attack. All the Ultramarines but Cestus die and Brynngar goes crazy, hallucinates being a wolf and fighting a bunch of other wolves for pack dominance, and then wakes up realizing he's killed all the Space Wolves he arrived with. He flees into the depths of the ship, has another fight with a named Word Bearer he fought and nearly killed earlier (now half-interred in a dreadnought), but nearly loses and is saved by Skraal, who has spent the last several weeks sneaking around learning the interior of the ship. Cestus met up with Skraal off-camera while Brynngar was fighting the dreadnought and he shares his new plan: Attack the plasma reactor at the center of the ship and cause a cascading failure that will blow the whole thing up. Brynngar is like "How do you know the interior of the ship well enough to be confident that will work, Cestus? Is it Mhotep's witchery? I hate witches; I'll help you with your witch's plan, but after that you and I are quits" and Cestus is sad but agrees to those terms.

Back on the Wrathful, Admiral Kaminska does one of those scenes you get in space navy science fiction where she orders all the crew into the savior pods but her bridge crew all refuse to go, preferring to die with her, and she's mad about it but also appreciative... and then her second in command doubles over like she's being played by John Hurt in Alien, and the daemon Wsoric bursts out of her and then kills Kaminska and the rest of the bridge crew, also emanating a chill aura that kills everyone on the ship... except Mhotep, who leaves his cell and heads to the bridge. They fight, Wsoric taunts Mhotep about corrupting Brynngar and using his hatred of witchcraft to turn him against them, and tempts Mhotep with escape and hints at the Thousand Sons siding with Horus, Mhotep resists temptation and stuffs a grenade in Wsoric's chest during a moment of daemonic instability (daemons don't hold together well in realspace). Wsoric blows up and Mhotep lies down on the deck plating just in time for the Wrathful to impact the surface of Maccrage's moon and be destroyed. Mhotep dies triumphant.

Brynngar, Skraal, and Cestus get to the plasma reactor, pursued by Word Bearers, and once there, Skraal charges the Word Bearers to give Cestus and Brynngar some time. He makes it to the head Word Bearer guy and injures him before being killed. Cestus's plan is to sacrifice himself by jumping into the plasma reactor with a bunch of grenades but Brynngar says nope and does it instead, implicitly apologizing for being so hostile earlier. Brynngar jumps into the plasma reactor with a bomb strapped to his chest and dies triumphant. With the ship about to explode, the head Word Bearer runs off to escape, Cestus follows him, they have a duel, and Cestus is wounded but cuts off the Word Bearer's head. He then succumbs to wounds the Word Bearer inflicted on him during the duel and dies triumphant as the Furious Abyss explodes. The end.

It would be theoretically possible to write a good book based on the above outline. I don't think there is intrinsically anything wrong with the idea of a full-length, 416 page novel that is just one extended battle-chase-battle-chase-battle. Fury Road was great.

Battle for the Abyss doesn't manage it. The prose is workmanlike and the characterization is flat. Everyone is a stereotype and plot points keep relying on things working in noncanon ways, like the warp jump point thing. Not only is everyone a stereotype, everyone is a 40k stereotype, most notably the drunken Space Wolf. There is a whole subplot I didn't go into above where the narrative keeps cutting back to the Word Bearers as they speak exposition to each other and they're all plotting against each other for status, like a group of Decepticons comprised entirely of copies of Starscream. (And not the cool version of that from Transformers Animated.)

That said... I still think the characterization is better than in False Gods. Everyone is a flat stereotype but almost nobody is ever holding the idiot ball. (Exception: Whoever designed Vangelis Station so that bad astropathic feedback, something that people in 30k already consider extremely dangerous, can trivially jump to the power grid and overload the reactor. Like, come on, guys, the Emperor considers psychic stuff so dangerous he's busy forcefully reorganizing every human civilization in the galaxy to weaken it; don't plug it directly into the mains. More to the point, if your story outline requires a crisis where your space station is going to blow up so the heroes can save it, please have the crisis unfold in a way that doesn't leave me wondering why the space station was designed so as to be improbably, plot-conveniently vulnerable.) In False Gods everyone made infuriatingly stupid decisions and failed to see through laughably obvious manipulation constantly for the sake of clumsily driving the central tragedy through; here, people make reasonable decisions and are just sort of boring about it. There is a type of reader who considers the latter worse but I'm not him.

Furthermore... when this book was written, what 30k Space Wolves were like hadn't been established yet. Horus Rising has mention of Devastator Squads, which are a 40k generic space marine thing that aren't in 30k, so I can't be super mad about this book giving the Space Wolves a couple of Blood Claws squads, a 40k Space Wolf thing that aren't in 30k. Later writers would develop 30k setting elements in new directions, and I can criticize Ben Counter for failing to see he had an opportunity to do that here (maybe if he'd done something more interesting with Brynngar it'd have stuck and we'd have gotten an entirely different version of 30k Space Wolves than we did, because later writers might have followed his lead), but I can't criticize him for failing to guess what later writers would eventually do with them.

Ultimately it's bolter porn. It's just okay bolter porn; it's not even especially bad bolter porn, and it's about what is at least in theory an interesting forgotten early loyalist victory. Next to the violence False Gods did to the plot setup and characterization in Horus Rising, it looks okay.

I can't recommend reading it, though. There are better ways to spend your time.