WH40K: Kal Jerico: Sinner's Bounty (part two)

It's time for more grimness, more darkness, and another thirty-eight thousand years. Chapter 2!


Chapter 2: Partner In Crime

​The person holding a gun to the back of his head is his (ex?)wife and trusted teammate Yolanda. Kinda expected as much. She has sharpened teeth apparently. Also, the voice that Elsob makes for her is hilarious, because it sounds like he's actually trying to affect a haughty, aristocratic accent through a mouthful of fangs. Brilliance. Anyway, they are married, he thinks, but he's not sure. Apparently their wedding ceremony was interrupted by a particularly bullet-heavy bout of gang warfare, and neither of them are positive on whether or not they actually completed the ritual before that point. She just pulled her gun on him for the lulz.

Shortly thereafter, BFF Scabs shows up as well. Characters have a noted tendency to arrive in a slightly staggered timeframe, even when they're theoretically supposed to have been moving together. I can get why they might split up and meander at different speeds, though. The scenery around here is nice, and it's not like the place is full of dangers that two people have a better chance against than one or anything. They whine and bitch at each other for a while, and not-quite-jokingly threaten each other's lives. Then Kal whistles for his cyberdog, and accidentally brings down another entire pack of mutants right on their position.

The others yell at him for that display of stupidity, and start shooting mutants again. These ones have firearms of their own, but aren't named characters, so they never hit. Jerico says that the group will scarfer if they scrag the leader (his words, not mine), and they start trying to pick off whichever mutant is in charge. You can always tell which one is the leader, because only one mutant per tribe is allowed to wear a hat, which they regard as a sacred status symbol. There are probably actual rules for this in the tabletop wargame. Anyway, they manage to find the hat-wearer, but it turns out that this particular mutant ax-chuck cannibal tribe is led by a member of a much more divergent mutant species. The "brutes" are ten feet tall, reptilian-looking, and apparently a true-breeding posthuman species that usually live in bands of their own in the lowermost subterranean foundations of Hive Primus. This one seems to have made its way up in the world, a little. Also, some brutes have a healing factor, and this is one of those.

It's the Lizard, from Spiderman. Okay.

Luckily, the mutants are fighting each other for the privilege of being the ones who get to kill and tear off the first bites. I'd ask how these things are supposed to have survived, let alone proliferated enough to be a growing threat to the underhive, if they're this suicidal, but that applies to every other form of life in this setting, including humans, so you kind of just have to roll with it. They manage to kill the Lizard by stuffing a grenade down his throat, but unusually that doesn't dissuade the rest of the mutants from feeding themselves to the trio's guns without regard for how many have already fallen. Grenades that actually work are rare and expensive in the underhive, so Kal doesn't have many more of those.

Also, the Lizard has regenerated from having his head blown off. Damn, normally they at least wait for the next issue of the comic for that.

They use Kal's only riot gas grenade to cover a retreat, and flee the mutants with their regenerating leader. Why didn't they just do that in the first place? Because then we wouldn't have been able to have the third protracted, plot-irrelevant mutant fight in two chapters, I guess. Also, Kal's cyberdog shows up and rejoins the party, so that's nice I guess. They manage to put enough distance between themselves and the disoriented monsters to call themselves safe-ish, and decide to get whatever drinks they can afford when they reach a village. End chapter.


If this book was called "Kal Jerico Fights the Mutants," I think I'd be liking it much better. As it is though, we've had a prologue that hints (clumsily, but still) at what might be some sort of heist-related plot, but then had two chapters of plot-and-character-development-free action sequence of Kal and Co fighting their way out of mutant territory. The only thing that happened in chapter one was Kal meeting up with his companions again after they got separated. And now, at the end of chapter two, they're...exactly where they were at the end of chapter one. I guess the expenditure of those grenades might be important later, but given how easily the author could have just not given them grenades in the first place, well...

I guess maybe it's supposed to be building the mutants up as a growing threat that will have to be dealt with? I guess? I still think that all of this could have been done in half a chapter without sacrificing anything.

Since I started listening to this, I've been informed that most of author Josh Reynolds' writing credits are for self-contained short stories that focus on space marine battles. In light of how "Sinner's Bounty" has been thus far, I find that completely unsurprising, and really fairly enlightening. As a series of short, self-contained fight scenes, everything in the prologue and first two chapters is perfectly serviceable. Reynolds just doesn't seem to know how to write anything besides that, so a continuous, multi-scene book leaves him floundering.

...huh. I just described Monty Oum, didn't I? Well, I suppose that's a decent comparison. Granted, Oum was a better animator than Reynolds is an action writer (like I said, the action prose themselves are competently written, but not exceptional), but same distribution of strengths and weaknesses. They also both could do some nice fantasy background scenery, on occasion.


Chapter three is called "Desolation Zoom." The prologue was called "Desolation," after the same character. This is some Hive Primus tier naming.


Chapter 3: Desolation Zoom

​Timeskip ahead several hours, to the party reaching the village of Pipefall. It's a half-floating, half-elevated sort of scrap-crannog over a pit of corrosive effluent protected by retractable bridges. Pipefall used to be a thriving techno-scavenger town a few hundred years ago, from whence explorers and engineers launched excavation missions to recover lost technological artifacts and rare materials from a few hundred years before that, but the "vein" of archaeotech ran dry, and now its just a half-empty ghost town of mold farmers and mutant-hunters.

...

This brings me to one of the few really, unironically great things about Warhammer 40K. For all its comedic splatterpunk over-the-topness, it's an example of scifi writers actually having a sense of scale. How many times have we all seen a "millennia-old" space empire, or a planet "completely covered" in city? And how few of those times have the weight of such things actually been acknowledged rather than everything looking and acting like the modern world just with flying cars?

If you actually have a fool-sized metropolis of the kind that so many scifi authors write about, and it's been in existence for as insanely many thousands of years as they often claim, then yes, there's going to be literal mountains of ancient junk building up in its foundations. If this civilization has been in a state of gradual technological decline, then yes, there's going to be an industry and possibly an entire culture of tech-scavengers building gold rush towns down in the old sewers.

And remember, Hive Primus is just one megacity on one planet of many that's been fleshed out to this extent in the 40K universe. On the wider stage, WH40K takes the seldom-examined concepts of interstellar trade and warfare, and actually asks how many ships of how immense a size would it take to have these things make any kind of sense. How many soldiers do you need to invade and occupy a planet as populated as modern Earth, let alone one that's even more industrialized and overpopulated? If you have an industrial hell-planet with limited food production capabilities, how big are the freighters supplying it with food from other words going to be? How many industrial products would such a planet have to produce to make it even worth supplying? How much more infrastructure on still other planets does it take to build and maintain these superfreighters?

Warhammer 40K spends most of its time being as ridiculous and cartoonish as it possibly can, but then it has places where it succeeds at things that more "serious" pop scifi settings fail so miserably at with such consistency that the general audience has stopped even thinking about them. This also ties in with the "grim darkness" of the setting. In a world so big and so ancient, how can any viewpoint character make a real difference in the status quo? When the megacity (and indeed, the entire galactic society that it's a part of) has been in a state of decay for this long and built so much downward inertia, what hope does any one "hero" have of reversing it, even just temporarily, even just locally?

Granted, that ties into one of the setting's greatest weaknesses, that being the monotonous focus on how bleak everything is. If 40K media placed more emphasis on people trying to protect their loved ones, meeting romantic partners and having children, etc in this doomed galaxy, it could manage some real pathos in between the zany ax-chuck fights. Maybe somewhere in the excessively vast body of published 40K media you can find those things, but - while this is the first 40K novel I've actually read - I've seen plenty of excerpts, summaries, articles, etc, and I have yet to see them. No one in this setting cares about anyone else. They might care about causes, or abstract in-groups, but never about each other as people. You can see it pretty clearly in this book, with how even the teammates who have been through hell a hundred times over together still just barely seem to tolerate one another, and even the unimportant decoy protagonist in the prologue didn't have any loved ones present or even in his given backstory. Without the characters ever experiencing love or caring, 40K isn't just incapable of brightness; it's also incapable of tragedy.

Maybe asking for poignancy from 40K is essentially asking it to stop being 40K. Again, this all started as flavor text for a game about cartoony plastic space elves hitting each other with chainsaws. But I feel like if the creators wanted to expand from just wargame flavor text into lengthy, character-focused novel series, they really should have reconsidered the setting's mission statement and emotional scope.

All that serious analysis and mixed praise is probably making 40K awfully uncomfortable. I'll go back to stepping on it and calling it a whore now, like it wants me to.

...

There's a gentle acid rain falling from the resmelting village half a mile overhead, slowly eating away at the latest ablative scrap layer piled onto the shanty roofs. The three scummers and cyberdog are sitting around a table, drinking "rotgut" and commiserating on how that mutant attack thwarted their mission and blaming each other. Apparently, they were hunting the bounty on Desolation Zoom before an improbable number of mutants attacked them and continued attacking heedless of their own loss of life for seemingly little potential reward.

So. The entire story up until now was them trying to get home after another failed attempt to find Zoom.

Why was this the starting point?

Why was this even in the goddamned book?

I'm guessing they're just going to go try and find him again now, right? So what the fuck was the point of even including this initial attempt? What did it change in the status quo? What difference would it have made if the story had started during their next attempt?

Again. If the book were about a ragtag bunch of misfits trying to fight their way back to safety through a mutant-infested ruin, that would have been a perfect starting place.

Sigh.

Anyway, the bounty on Desolation Zoom is thirty times bigger than the prices Kal and Co usually collect. Guess whatever Zoom stole was pretty important. That's a mystery the book could be building up, but it isn't really putting much emphasis there at all. Kal muses on how silly of a name "Desolation Zoom" is. Considering that this is a setting where every other spotlight character is named after some permutation of Satan, and that this book in particular is set in the city of Hive Primus on the planet Necromunda, that's a pretty bold claim (granted, the irony is likely intentional).

We also get a bit of background on Zoom's order of evangelist bandits. Bandelists? Evandits? Evandits. The Redemptionists are a militant cult that's been growing in popularity among some segments of Hive Primus' underclass. They've managed to accumulate some resources by offering their evandits as mercenaries for various gangs, scavengers, and mutant-hunting organizations, which has led them into competition with the Guild that also provides those services. There's been an uneasy truce between the two organizations for a little while now, but then a rogue redemptionist evandit went and raided a Guild vault. If he isn't caught soon, other evandits might decide to start taking his side against the Guild after all, and the big old turf war could resume. So, catch Zoom before his brothers in faith and brigandry can stop wringing their hands indecisively, or else it's a moot point; the Guild will be too busy fighting a war after that point to pay bounties on any one offender.

The official story is that Zoom just stole a bunch of weapons, ammunition, and trade goods, but I suspect there's more to it than that. There must have been a reason he broke the truce to loot that particular Guild facility, after all.

And also, apparently Kal and his people have made not just one, but several attempts to capture Zoom since the bounty went out. In fact, they and some other hired guns even caught sight of his vehicle at least once before it eluded them.

...

Wouldn't that have been a better expedition to start the story with?

Get rid of the randos in the prologue. Instead, the prologue is an in media res account of Kal, Scabs, and Yolanda making a similar ambush attempt. Zoom thwarts it as per the existing prologue, killing everyone except the three of them, who scattered in different directions. End the prologue with Kal making a sarcastic comment to himself as a gang of mutants show up attracted by the carnage, as the sound of Zoom's prayermobile fades away in the distance.

Then chapter one can start with them fighting off the mutants and regrouping to return to Pipefall. Or having already returned to Pipefall, griping at each other about their performances against the mutants who just chased them all the way home. Either/or. Anyway, this scene in Pipefall shouldn't have had to come any later than the end of chapter one. And possibly even the beginning of chapter one.

Also, I want to make it clear that these structural criticisms I've been making have nothing to do with 40K as a setting (though other books in the franchise may have similar issues). This is all on Reynolds as a licensed author.

...

While Yolanda talks to some informants at the bar, Kal and Scabs muse on how many other bounty hunters must be on Zoom's tail by now. It's a really big bounty. On the other hand, the Redemptionists have a reputation for avenging their fallen evandits, and Zoom's transgressions may or may not have distanced him enough from the rest of the cult to make this an exception. So, it depends on how many other hunters are willing to take those chances, or are confident enough in their ability to deal with repercussions if they come. Eventually, Yolanda comes back with another round of drinks and a plate of fried rat. Word around town is all about the spike in mutant activity in the area. Maybe the plot actually is going to be about that after all? That would be a pleasant surprise. Nothing new about Zoom, though.

The chapter ends with them looking over a recent-ish map of this quadrant of the underhive from an information broker that Kal knows and tolerates. After looking at it for a while, Kal suggests that Zoom might be headed to the congregation of an accomplice of his over in Redemptionist territory further south. If so, there's a point along the slime canals of the "downtown" underhive where they can hopefully catch him. End chapter.


I think I've said everything I care to about this chapter during the readthrough itself. Let's do at least one more before calling it a post.


Chapter 4: Adjurator

​I'm guessing adjurator is another pseudo-Latin Warhammerism. 40K has that in common with Harry Potter, I just realized. Bastardized Latin, and three wasted pages for every important one. Rowling should write for Games Workshop.

Open on another, even more depressing, shantytown called Steelgate. A "primus class adjurator" named Beatram Arturos is drinking a cap of foul-tasting, but expensive tea with a cyborg Guild member named Forgan Glommer. The text spends a lot of time on describing how fucked up Forgan's transhuman surgeries have made him look, and how his fashion sense is expensive and terrible in equal measures. Elstob has chosen to give him a voice that sounds like a particularly wheezy old grandmother. Okay then. Beatram, on the other hand, is also a cyborg, but of the trim and well-maintained combat biomech kind, and with a voice that sounds like Elstob is trying to act a creepy little anime girl or something. Both men note each other's high socioeconomic status, and how unusual it is for them to be working in the underhive. In Forgan's case, its because he goes where the Guild needs him. In Beatram's, its because he feels like the freaks and scum of the underhive need to see an impressive specimen like himself from time to time to remind them of their place. So, he's a slightly humbler and more compassionate than average man in WH40K.

The two of them blab evilly at each other until a musclebound local gang leader named Corg with a cybernetic mouth who sounds like Darth Vader with a Russian accent interrupts them. He's hear to talk business. Zoom related business.

Cue a prolonged conversation between these three recounting things that the reader already knows about Zoom, his organization, and his misdeeds. Like, literally, it's just the exact same stuff we already know, nothing new, not even really a fresh perspective. Does Games Workshop pay by the word?

Beatram and Corg pull weapons on each other for reasons that elude me, and Forgan has to calm them both down. Anyway, Beatram isn't sure that hunting Zoom is of much interest to him, until Forgan tells him that one of the bounty hunters already after him is Kal Jerico, who Beatram has a grudge against. Maybe this is something that happened in a previous book? I know there were several Kal Jerico books before this one, so maybe Beatram is a recurring antagonist. In Beatram's mental narration, we learn that "Kal Jerico" isn't the guy's birth name, and that he was actually born the bastard son of some bigshot aristocrat all the way up in the spires. Beatram finds Jerico's decision to throw aside his highborn status nothing short of heretical (yes yes, blam, heresy, memes, shut the fuck up you're not funny), and the fact that Jerico has beaten him to the prize multiple times in the past really chaps his asshole. So, the opportunity to hopefully win a rematch against him gets Beatram onboard.

They exchange the details about a few other well-known bounty hunters who he's going to have to compete with. A full-body-replacement cyborg. A cigar-smoking minotaur. A mysterious individual known only as "skullface." Etc. More importantly, it turns out that Forgan is one of the Guild higher-ups who had valuables stashed in the vault that Zoom raided, including an incredibly valuable and highly illegal offworld item that he doesn't want his own colleagues to know about.

This is why he's making a point of hiring a special super bounty hunter like Beatram from outside of the area. The Big Thing that Zoom made off with is going to either get stolen and sold off by whoever catches Zoom, or brought back to the Guild with the other loot, and then the Guild inspectors will realize what Forgan was secretly keeping in their warehouse. So, he's making a special, under-the-table deal with Beatram to take Zoom out first and return the illicit item to him personally without telling anyone.

Alright. I figured something like this was going to be revealed sooner or later.

Forgan doesn't want to tell Beatram what he wants recovered. Just that it should be in a sealed container with a specific seal inscribed on it, and that Zoom probably has it stashed away in his war rig with all the rest of the plunder. Just bring the box back, no need to open it, and get the big cash moneywad on top of having beaten Kal Jerico. That's the job.

Is it the god emperor of mankind's scrotum? I'll bet that's what it is.

Corg, meanwhile, wants Beatram to bring Zoom recovered alive. Extra money for that. As far as Kal Jerico and other bounty hunters go, Forgan and Corg don't care; Beatram can deal with them as he sees fit.

After the meeting, Beatram leaves the building, lights up a space cigarette, and listens in on the mic he planted under the table. There's apparently a woman named Lady Gina who actually owned the emperor's nutsack, and who Forgan is trying to get it back on the behalf of while keeping her name clear. Her accent sounds exotic, and aristocratic; either Necromundan nobility, or an offworlder. The plot thickens. They're also talking dismissively about Kal Jerico, despite them (unlike Beatram) having no reason to care about him more than any other random competitor except insofar as they used him to motivate Beatram. Great writing.


And that's chapter four. So far, I'd say "Sinner's Bounty" is a mediocre pulp scifi novel with better-than-average scenery and worse-than-average structuring and time management. About what I expected, in terms of overall merit. I'll do a few more chapters next week, after my next review in the queue.