Review: Sanguis Irae

eBook edition. 

 Sanguis Irae by Gav Thorpe is a short story that is often packaged with another short story, Sin of Damnation, both of which are stories adapted from the background of the last (as of this writing) edition of the Space Hulk tabletop game. 

It starts off with Calistarius, the Blood Angel Librarian Terminator from the Space Hulk game* being launched into a space hulk via a boarding torpedo. He was summoned by Terminator Sergeant Dioneas whose squad found the body of another Blood Angel Terminator. Only this one has been dead for quite some time, preserved in a sealed ammunition magazine. The Sergeant had requested Calistarius' presence so that he could probe the mind of the corpse in order to figure out how he had died and who the assailants were...

+++++++++SPOILERS AHEAD!+++++++++++

Vespesario was the dead guy's name, but that wasn't the only thing that Calistarius was able to probe from the body's mind. Vespesario was going through the Black Rage at the time of his death so every time Calistarius probes Vespesario's mind he sees a vision of the Blood Angel Primarch Sanguinius leading his charge against the battle-barge of the traitor Horus as well as seeing a vision of what was really going on with Vespesario and his team in their final moments. He was seeing two events everytime he probed Vespesario's mind: The final actions of their dead Primarch during the Horus Heresy and the final fate of Vespesario. 

eBook edition twinned with Sin Of Damnation.

Ultimately it is revealed that the xenos filth that killed Vespesario and his team were Genestealers (c'mon, were you surprised?) and that not long after their Terminator team had launched their assault on this Space Hulk that it had jumped into the warp, trapping them on board and cutting them off from their support. Not wanting to repeat this scenario Sgt Dioneas wants to push on and purge the Genestealers immediately but Calistarius insists on probing the dead mind of Vespesario more. It is revealed that the Genestealer Patriarch has a unique quality (I'm not going to totally spoil this story!) that allows it to control when the space hulk goes in and out of the warp. In fact it's intentionally trying to a trap Space Marines for it's grim designs. Luckily the insight gleaned from the mind of Vespesario allows the the Blood Angels to prevail. 

• 
  Did I like it? Yes, very much so. It's definitely the better of the two stories in this book. 
• Was it hard to put down? It was quite a gripping tale actually and just the right length. I do think Gav Thorpe's short stories are his better ones.
• Could I care about the characters? The thing about short stories is that it's hard to get to know the characters, but it seems that Gav pulled it off since we really only have about four characters to care about here. Calistarius has essentially a race against time to get the info he needs from the body of Vespesario before Sergant Dioneas calls the mind probe off so that they can get on with Genestealer hunting or before the Space Hulk slips back into the warp. There is also the added risk that seeing and reliving (albeit vicariously) Vespesario's Black Rage visions could trigger his own slip into the Black Rage. Calistarius has a lot going on. Sgt Dioneas is there to create tension, so it's tough to advocate for him really. Vespesario himself however, despite already being dead, one cannot help but remorse for his fate, yet his ultimate victory is so rewarding. And then there is Sanguinius, whose story has been written to death (unintentional pun?) so it's no surprise Horus kills him. And although it was kind of neat to see what someone's Black Rage vision would be, by showing this it sort of diminishes (to me any way) the mystique behind the whole curse. The story would go faster also if you just skip the Sanguinius bits as they do not service the story hardly at all.

  

  Librarian Calistarius.
  

• Did the writer truly grasp how the 'world' of the 41st millennium works in the sense that it doesn't betray or retcon previously established (as I know it) lore? Gav has more than earned his lore cred at this point. Oddly, this story works so much better than Sin Of Damnation in the way that it fits into the 40k universe that it's unfortunate that it takes a backseat to that story as it is so much better; it's almost as if Gav wrote this as a sort of penance for the war-porn that was Sin Of Damnation...

  

  A Terminator Compilation. 

• Was I being talked down too? This was a good, tight, and focused short story and it didn't trip itself up like some Black Library stories do by getting lost in the minutiae of the setting or devolving into war-porn. 
• How predictable is this story? The thing about Black Library short stories is that they have a tendency to be fairly unpredictable. Or just predictable enough but with a hard twist at the end. And this story was just weird enough to be just that, which was fairly refreshing. 
• Do I recommend this book? This is a good short story, and I enjoyed this one. So yeah, if you come across this short story, give it a shot. It has an interesting twist regarding the main antagonist which I really thought was pretty cool, and I have done what I could to not spoil it here. So check it out! 

*The version that came out around 2010