WH40K: “Kal Jerico, Sinner's Bounty” (part fifteen)

I've used up all my jokey intro ideas at this point. Let's just keep grinding through this.

Chapter 30: Preparations​

Clovic and Kal are up on the palisade walkway. I'm picturing battlements, even though the text hasn't described it as having those. It just fits. Clovic is not happy at working with an infidel like Kal, and making no secret of it, but they've got mutants to fight. Also, Kal has Wotan with him, so Clovic is less likely to defy his boss' orders and start a fight than he would be otherwise. Across the town behind them and the waterfront before them, people are sprucing up defenses, stripping industrial equipment for potential weapon parts, and singing hymns into megaphones to psych each other up.

There's also the usual Cawdor decoration. Skulls with crazytalk carved into them, children's ears strung up on banners, prisoners being slowly roasted alive in metal cages, etc. Kal avoids paying too much attention to the latter, because he knows that "if he did, he'd have to do something about it." Ouch. But yeah, for all that he's bland and boring, Kal is definitely closer to the traditional hero mold than he wants to admit. Perhaps as close as a Necromundan ever could be. Clovic notices Kal's disgust at that last spectacle, and starts needling him about it. Kal turns it back around on him by pointing out that if the Cawdor really want to waste precious time and resources torturing prisoners to death when the mutants are about to hit them like an orbital strike, they can go right the fuck ahead and do that, he'll just try to make do with the defenses despite their idiocy.

That's good, Kal. Don't try to call them evil or immoral. Call them stupid. That actually gets to them.

Also, the historical allusion here is pretty on the nose, but I'd never expect Warhammer to engage in subtlety.

Kal toes the line of antagonizing Clovic juuust enough to not make him lose it, without letting the redemptionist rattle him into doing anything stupid in turn. Finally, Clovic takes him to talk to Zoom, who wants to talk to him about something. They hear mutant war songs echoing up from the shafts below the central temple, which Zoom regrets having lacked an opportunity to purge before the main force arrived. Zoom is sounding more optimistic again, which is implied to be down to the sheer amount of painkillers and stimulants he's been stuffing into his wounded old body. They talk about repairs on the war rig, which they'll use as part of their defense plan. And also arrangements to make sure that they all pay their obligations to one another, involving Zoom's person, the safety of Perdition, and the safe that Beatram wants.

Cut to Beatram up on one of the balconies outside. He watches through his scope as a mutant group charges the north barricades and is quickly repelled by the entrenched riflemen there. They seem like they should hold the line just fine, as long as they have ammo and the mutants don't send anything tougher. However, the mutants are coming in one small pack after the next, and it seems like they might be herding each other into suicide runs toward the wall, making the defenders waste ammo to score small numbers of kills. Additionally, each of these suicide waves distracts the defenders enough for the mutants' homemade artillery mortars to land a few more shells against the fortifications. The wall is holding so far, but if it keeps taking more of those hits it'll start to fall apart. Not reassuring. One of the shantytowns outside Perdition's walls has already been destroyed.

Beatram isn't shooting, himself. He figures that his own skills (and ammunition) would be best used at later stages of the war, and the Cawdor seem to be doing okay for now. He also doesn't have much faith at all in Kal's plan, which apparently will involve strapping even more armor and spikes onto the war rig and charging out the gate into the thick of the enemy while the boats hit from lakeside. Which sounds to Beatram and Belladonna, who quickly joins him on the balcony, like Kal is going to plan to be on that war rig, with both Zoom and the safe with the Golden Sack in it, so he can abscond from the battle with everything. Surprisingly, Belladonna is more suspicious of this plan than Beatram himself is.

Granted, it's pretty well implied that Beatram just isn't nearly as smart as Belladonna OR Jerico, and just plain isn't good at catching schemes like this. Though in that case, I'm not sure how he's supposed to have survived this long in this line of work. Eh, the power ofoverpriced plastic toy salesTzeench I suppose.

It's also clear that she's trying to throw fire onto Beatram's dislike of Kal, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean she's wrong.

Cut to the docks, where Goethe is helping prep the boats. Apparently, they're going to be sending well-crewed boats to both pepper the mutants on the shore with cannon fire, and to draw part of the mutant force away toward what look like easy targets while the war rig hits their main column. I suspect that Slabscale and his buddies are about to lunge out of the water and eat them before they can even finish casting off, heh.

Yeah, I'm pretty solidly on Wart's side at this point. The mutants taking Perdition would definitely be the greatest good for the greatest number.

Suddenly, Goethe is joined on the docks by Zoom. Zoom thanks him for his help back in Two Pumps, and remarks on how pleasantly surprised he was to see Goethe turn up again here. Hahaha, Zoom knows. Goethe isn't even going to survive to see the gatormen attack. Zoom goes on some weird tangent about the stars in the sky that he had the pleasure of seeing when he plied the wastes outside of Hive Primus, or rather, the layer of air pollution that prevented him from seeing them but was prettier than the underhive ceilings nonetheless.

Goethe thinks Zoom has just totally lost his marbles at this point, but then the artillery barrage against the northern gate resumes, and Zoom's words turn to inspirational holy war stuff. We see some of Zoom's much vaunted charisma at play here; when he goes into rallying mode, Goethe actually feels ashamed of his betrayal and general cynicism, and earnestly wants to fight and possibly die at Zoom's side. Hmm. Maybe Zoomdoesn'tactually know about that betrayal, then? Or maybe he does, but he's using it instead of killing Goethe over it. Either way, the chapter ends with the north gate attack suddenly escalating, and the naval assault presumably about to start as soon as the Cawdor forces are all drawn away from the coastal defenses.


Surprisingly decent chapter. It was mostly about all the viewpoint characters besides Kal being completely awful, but most of them were nuanced in their awfulness.

Zoom in particular being a standout here, even if we don't technically get his POV in the chapter. He might be a genocidal fanatic, but at least he's a sincere and honorable genocidal fanatic. The fact that he's also desperately trying to outrun his growing, secret crisis of faith and get himself killed in battle before he has to actually deal with it is also a plus, especially when we get to see how oblivious morons like Goethe are to it. Beatram, meanwhile, is just his usual, comically hateable self, albeit framed more amusingly than usual in his scene this chapter.

The writing is also good enough in this chapter to make me eagerly look forward to their deaths (or at least near-death humiliations, in the case of those who Tzeench wants to sell toys of) rather than just wanting to stop hearing about them. That means that it hits the mark.

Again, with the exception of Kal. He's shown himself to be by far the least bad person out of the ones this chapter features, but he's still just not very interesting.

Overall, though? This kind of makes me wish that Reynolds didn't feel compelled (or wasn't actually compelled by the publisher) to shoehorn so many pointless fight scenes into the story. He's really pretty good at character writing when he gives himself the opportunity to do it.

Chapter 31: Reptilian Death​

Hopefully this title refers to Slabscale killing some fools, rather than Slabscale being killed himself.

Heh, man, I really thought he was just a one-off random encounter when we first met him.

Open on Scabs helping put the war rig's engine back together. Yay, Scabs! He also gets to lord over some Cawdor punks who barely know what they're doing, and to bond a little with a less-bad-than-most older mechanic who seems to have been coopted into the Cawdor organization when they took Perdition rather than really being one of them. Said mechanic talks about "machine spirits" and such, giving him a redneck pseudo-techpriest vibe that's sort of charming. I could see myself building this guy as a player character. As they work, Amenute joins them (to the consternation of the punks) and pulls Scabs away for a moment to try to convince him to run away with her again.

As they move through the street, Amenute uses her psi powers to keep any of the Cawdor from flipping out at the obvious ratskin and suspected witch. Scabs tells her to cut that out. She asks him why should she? It's no different from controlling any other dangerous wild animal.Ouch, that was a zinger Amenute landed there. Scabs reminds her that that's exactly what they think about ratskin, and Amenute simply shrugs and tells him that the difference is that she is right in her assessment, and they are wrong in theirs.

I mean...normally this would just sound like just more bigotry and cultural chauvinism from yet another angle, but in context it really isn't. She hates the Cawdor for what they do. The Cawdor hate the ratskin for existing. The latter justifies the former.

She brings Scabs up to the palisade walkway above the waterfront. In the darkness of the dome overhead, she points out the movements of distant dire bats; the smell of blood seems to be attracting wild specimens, on top of the mutants' tame mounts. She also helps him notice the engine smoke rising over the lake, indicating a much bigger mutant navy than anyone expected. None of the Cawdor noticed this, for some reason? Ah, never mind, it wasn't actually the smoke that let Amenute find the boats, she's just using it to confirm their presence now that she knows what to look for. She was using her animal telepathy to see through the senses of some aquatic creatures, and happened to catch a glimpse of the gatormen moving in. She then backtracked their approach vector, and spotted the evidence of Guttel's ships. Now that's using your class abilities. Anyway, the point she's making is that the mutants are smarter and more resourceful than the "uphivers" are willing to give them credit for. With an amphibious assault about to hit just as the north gate buckles, things are not going to go well for the defenders. They should leave. Now.

Cut back to Kal, who has made it down to the streets and is using his laser gun and cyberdog to take out a few mutant raiders who managed to get through an artillery-breach in the north wall. He meets up with Gor, who is doing the same with his bare hands and considerably more gusto. They did good work, but the main force is still hammering the north gate, and now a fire is spreading around the shanties outside of the walls and will likely make it inside the city soon regardless of how the shooting match goes. In any case, Kal uses a break in the combat to pitch a more permanent offer of alliance to Gor. When Gor seems potentially interested, they muse on the possibility of growing this into a full-on bounty hunter worker cooperative.

Then Yolanda comes stumbling over and whines about how democracy and working together are both dumb, and that this is the underhive so they all need to be antisocial dicks all the time even when it's counterproductive.

...

You know, I'm starting to feel like Yolanda is the real villain of Kal's arc in this book.

...

As Kal resists the urge to just shoot Yolanda in her stupid mouth, Scabs and Amenute come running over to them. Before Scabs can utter his words of warning, the waterfront palisade shatters under a naval mortar barrage, and a pack of crocodilemen loom up out of the water and stride onto the promenade. It looks like they won't be able to get their own boats out onto the water after all.

As Team Jerico struggles to adapt, Slabscale picks out Kal and comes right toward him with a pair of crocoman-sized axchucks, gloating that he's finally caught up to him again.

With the rest of the group distracted by other crocs, it's just Kal and Wotan versus Slabscale, and this time in terrain that favors the latter much more heavily. They fight as well as you could reasonably expect, but a regenerating brute that manages to sneak up into close quarters isreallyhard to deal with. Soon, Kal is on the ground with a broken shoulder, and Wotan is sprawled out a few meters away spitting sparks, while Slabscale has taken only moderate damage in return.

But, through the power of friendship, Kal is saved! Gor has a plasma gun like Belladonna's, apparently, and that's one of the few weapons that can no-sell even a crocoman's insane healing factor. He already dealt with the one that came at him, and he takes out Slabscale with a clean shot just as he's plodding over to finish off Kal. Looks like this is the beginning of a beautiful partnership after all.

It turns out that Kal's shoulder isn't broken so much as just dislocated, and Gor resets it and manages not to crush him in the process. Wotan manages to reboot and get back up as well. Convenient, lol. Regardless, even with the crocoman assault blunted, some of them have still managed to get inside around the peripheries of the breach, and the mutant ships are bearing down after them laying suppressive fire on the defenders and preparing to release more infantry when they get close enough to the shore. As Kal is figuring out wtf to do, Amenute and Scabs regroup with him, and Amenute has an offer to make. Kal is ready to agree to just about anything at this point, but he wants to make sure he doesn't leave this place without Zoom. So, as they talk he goes to find the crazy old bastard. End chapter.


Okay, so, this was a fight scene with actual meaning and stakes. Slabscale is a recurring (if still somewhat incidental) antagonist with an understandable reason to want Kal dead. The fight changed the situation in a way that will seriously impact the plot (the amphibious assault ruined Kal's plan, even if they managed to mostly repel the first wave, so now they need to think of another plan or else just defer to Amenute's scheme). And, it brought the little arc with Gor and Kal to a climax and resolution, with Gor choosing to save Kal's life despite the risk of future competition even though he could have easily waited for Slabscale to kill him before firing (and probably would have done just that up until today).

This had all the ingredients of a GOOD action setpiece. This is what most of the fights in the book have been lacking in.

On the down side, I feel like Amenute is being treated as a deus ex machina rather than a character. Her powers seem to keep expanding as necessary to make the plot work, to the point where it defies belief that she ever could have been captured and caged back in Two Pumps. Eh, maybe she's just been leveling up since then.


There should only be two or three more Kal Jerico posts after this one. Anyway, this installment was a lot more enjoyable and had more to talk about than most, so I have hopes that the book will get a strong ending to somewhat counteract the downright glacial first half.