#interceptor city

Or, “Holy shit, Dan Abnett wrote a sequel to this after twenty fucking years??”

When The Warmaster released a few years back, ostensibly providing a good stopping point for Gaunt’s Ghosts, I went back and re-read Dan Abnett’s colossal series in its entirety. While I still enjoyed myself, reading them with older eyes did give me some pause with how much they seem to glorify the act of war, and show laying your life down in battle as inherently noble. Now, this might seem a bit silly given that 40K, as a setting, is about as black-and-white as it gets. While the Imperium is certainly a fascist nightmare, when your plot is about fighting Chaos, well, the bad guys are literal hell-tainted demon men intent on wiping out humanity. When you compare this to the Tom Clancys of the world that use real-world nations, conflicts and settings as mere set dressing, 40K almost seems like the most ethical outlet possible for military fiction. It’s about as unambiguous as it gets: the bad guys are the bad guys, without even the weird moral quandary of racial predeterminism that plagues stories like The Lord of the Rings.

Still, it never quite sat right with me thematically how every time the novels broach the subject, whenever we start to peel a layer away to see the real motivation behind these characters soldiering on despite the inherent hopelessness of their situation, all we really get are some empty words about glory or service to the Emperor. And I get it, Gaunt is the main character, and his literal job is to maintain the morale of his unit, but it’s unfulfilling when a story is centered around a zealot who does what he does because he believes in the cause, and who believes in the cause because he believes in it.

Don’t get me wrong, Gaunt’s Ghosts has some thematic heft to it when it comes to making sense of war: if there’s a throughline for the series, it is the plight of the PBI, dogged footsoldiers forced into awful situations by uncaring superiors, their lives grist for the mill of a vast, unfeeling bureaucracy. And when it comes to the Tanith themselves, this lack makes sense and is expanded upon: they are, after all, the ghosts of a dead world, trying to find some meaning to gird their actions despite having no home to return to. But when it comes to Ibram Gaunt himself? We’re pretty much toeing the company line.

Enter Double Eagle, a side story, a spinoff of a spinoff that gives Abnett free reign to explore more human themes, and Interceptor City, a sequel willing to throw away nearly all of its predecessor's established characters to work those same ideas from another angle. The two certainly aren’t comprehensive thematic treatises, but they are damn good stories. They’re fables, character studies about how people carry trauma, how they cope with it, and well – this is 40K, after all – how it leads them to their tragic end. 

Double Eagle

Yep, this one holds up.

Abnett’s strength has always been his vignettes. He’ll establish characters with scenes that, while brief, are flavorful and instantly establish someone's essence; then, as the book goes on, he’ll weave even minor characters back into the tale in a way that, even if it’s just a passing mention, makes the world feel more full. His characters are built on well-established tropes, to be sure, but it’s the way those personalities interact and clash that’s the special spice. Plus, he always adds enough wrinkles through worldbuilding to keep his stories feeling unique. And Double Eagle feels like a whole book of these vignettes, written by a man who cut his teeth on the tactic for years in the Gaunt series, was temporarily freed from their ensnaring, soap-opera tangle, and approached the clean slate with enthusiasm.

We have Kaminsky’s brilliant intro, a man weary of a war we haven’t even seen. There’s Espere and his Thunderbolt’s streak of bad luck, a self-fulfilling prophecy culminating the only way it can. We get a brief glimpse of Chaos pilots, men who have replaced their own organs with blood pumps & centrifuges to handle higher G-force, thus leaving themselves incapable of existing outside of their plane’s life support systems*. Even throwaway lines contribute to Abnett’s collage of Enothis: a plane getting “chalked” already feels like an elegant turn of phrase, in the way that it means exactly what it sounds like without needing to be explained, but it then pulls double duty as we find that the names of each dead pilot are written up daily on the base chapel’s blackboard.

*A concept that would later be explored further in Interceptor City

— “Sometimes – times like this perfect dawn, for instance – it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called ‘pretend there isn’t a war’.” —

The real meat of Double Eagle’s character work, though, is a contrasting study of three pilots: Oskar Viltry, Vander Marquall, and Enric Darrow. 

Viltry, a veteran of multiple tours, has fully subscribed to fatalism after two near-death experiences. There’s a running theme in the book about the idea of fate’s wheel, of life and death as a game of chance run by Death himself:

“Do you know why we’re Apostles? Not because we’re especially fine pilots. Not at all. We’re Apostles because we’ve had unnatural luck. We should have died long ago, but there’s been some oversight and our souls have not been claimed. So we go on flying, and killing. And eventually, the oversight is corrected.”

As the sole survivor of multiple crashes, Viltry believes it’s only a matter of time until his ticket is punched – around every corner, he expects fate’s wheel to finally correct its overdue imbalance. This perceived lack of a future allows him to live solely in the present, though, leading him to find love while trying to escape his torment: the man from a planet with only boundless skies who finds his salvation in the sea. Ironically, he ultimately escapes from the endless game of chance due to, what else? A clerical error: Oskar Viltry, the soldier, is mistakenly marked as deceased, leaving him free to walk away from it all.

— “As usual, as she did every morning, Beqa Meyer lit three candles: one for Gart, one for her brother, Eido, and one for whoever might need it.” —

Marquall and Darrow’s stories dovetail throughout the novel. Both are send-ups of the precocious flight school ace: naturally gifted pilots in theory, who are suddenly put to the test in a situation that’s all too real. Where Marquall is kept flying, Darrow is grounded immediately after his first sortie. By applying himself and learning from those around him, no matter the situation, Darrow recognizes that strength is found in cooperation.

Marquall, on the other hand, never quite mixes in with his squad. He has an image of himself as an ace fighter pilot in his head, and simply cannot let it go. The glory of chasing kills, of marking each new tally on his plane, going so far as checking during firefights to see if those around him saw his achievements – he places prestige above all else, even when it puts him and his wingmen in harm’s way. 

Their final moments, then, locked in a dogfight with Obarkon’s pearl-white bat, parallel each other. Darrow, ever-willing to learn from those around him, remembers Eads’ advice in his moment of need and pulls off a daring maneuver that gets him to safety. Marquall, meanwhile, failing to learn from others, gets his long-sought fifth kill, making him an ace… before dying in his cabin of carbon dioxide poisoning, exactly the way Van Tull nearly did a few missions before. His plane, the Double Eagle, flies off into the horizon, yoke unmanned, its final kill tally never marked. 

— “One for Gart, one for Eido. One for– A main door opened somewhere and slammed. There was a blast of cold air. All the little candle flames blew out.” —

The only part that’s lacking in Double Eagle, really, is that Wing Commander Bree Jagdea herself doesn’t actually have much of a character arc…

Interceptor City

…well, here comes Interceptor City to fix that.

Abnett has been teasing this sequel by name for years – like, well over a decade. And as excited as I was for a followup to Double Eagle, in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think, “what a stupid fucking name for a book. The premise had better be reeeally cool to make that make sense”.

Boy, it does and then some.

Double Eagle often gets flak online for more or less being the Battle of Britain with some of the names changed. You have a few fantastical conceits – the kilometer-long, land-based aircraft carrier comes to mind – but by and large, the tactics and technology might as well be from a WWII-era air campaign. Hell, the fighter planes aren’t even using missiles!

The conceit of the sequel, on the other hand, is inseparable from the setting of 40K. Instead of the wide-open skies that define most air combat, Interceptor City’s Intercept 66 airbase is nestled deep inside a ruined hive city. Each sortie is a dance with death, even if no contact is made with the enemy: Jagdea’s wing is forced to fly supersonic jets through crowded city streets stretching thousands of kilometers tall, through burned-out, cyclopean buildings, all while avoiding crumbling buttresses & jutting rooftops,. Large parts of the city don’t even have a visible sky overhead, with the roof of the hive city looming over them instead like a crashing wave. It’s one of the illest premises I’ve ever seen – I can see why Abnett couldn’t shake it for all these years.

The best part is, this setup isn’t just an excuse for sick action setpieces – the entire conflict of the book is centered around this group being forced to cope with the nightmare scenario they’ve found themselves in. An environment that’s near impossible to fly in, let alone fight in; vehicles that couldn’t possibly be more ill-suited to the scenario; a critical lack of supplies forcing them into a non-standard and extremely hazardous launch method; unreasonable demands from their superiors that fail to acknowledge the reality of the situation; untrained recruits that are dying as fast as they can be sent in; and the ever present ‘shred’, the spectre of anxiety and dread that looms over every pilot unfortunate enough to find themselves stationed at Intercept 66.

— “I’ll tell you what I’d like, Jagdea. I’d like not to be here. I’d like to be flying a war sky environment that wasn’t so murderously difficult. I’d like better replenishment and provision. I’d like to be supplied with birds that were fit for purpose. I’d like experienced sticks who won’t fly into a wall the first time they drop, because these children, Jagdea, these children they keep sending us, are young and overzealous, and they think they’re immortal, because all they’ve ever known is thirty or forty hours in the wide open skies of the Eastern Front. God-Emperor bless and protect us all,” he said quietly, gazing at the floor,  “they are so damn young, and they are so damn eager, and they are so damn useless.” —

The memorable prologue, focused on a hydraulics malfunction of all things, is a perfect encapsulation of the book’s themes, and to me represents 40k at its best: the absolute, bleak, uncaring cruelty of 40k’s universe, rendered with such banality and specificity that it seems entirely plausible.

If I had any criticism to levy at Interceptor City: it’s a real bummer to read an Abnett book with no map in the front.

— “The gauge was barely registering. Jagdea did what all pilots have done since the beginning of aviation. She leaned over and flicked the glass dial with the fingers of her good hand. As with all pilots since the beginning of aviation, it made no difference.” —

The action, of course, is excellent as always. The final battle sequence – in which the recon flight finds a bat nest and engages in a suicidal counterattack – exemplifies Abnett’s particular talent at writing action, and that is his control of the tempo. For much of the book, he’ll drag out action scenes: a small skirmish with 5 total planes might last an entire chapter, because he’s lavished it with detail and context, giving the reader time to drink in the world and become familiar with it. Then, when the narrative demands it, he’ll crack the whip – suddenly everything is happening at once, each viewpoint embroiled in chaos. The prose shifts: short sentences, terse descriptions, just enough so the reader understands what’s going on, but always leading them on to the next sentence so they devour it at a feverish pace.

— “Rain was bleating in across the launch platform. From the top of the Campanile, the hive was a malicious rumour lurking behind polluted cloud.” —

And, at last, Jagdea gets her due. Interceptor City is laser-focused on her, to a degree that is uncommon amongst Abnett’s ensemble casts. There are no alternate POV characters or vignettes outside of the prologue, no peeks at events on the Chaos side of things. Hell, there’s not even a wider-scope look at the war as a whole – unlike Double Eagle, where the postscript indicates the Phantine’s final battle was no less than a turning point in the war for Enothis, in Interceptor City it’s not clear that any of the events of the book have any wider-reaching ramifications whatsoever.

Instead, it’s a personal story about recognizing when you don’t like the kind of person you’ve become, and having the strength to change that. It’s about the darker side of the hero’s journey: the inability to reintegrate into normal society afterwards. After making a name for herself as a legendary wing commander across multiple campaigns, Jagdea went out on top. After a crash that nearly killed her, she understood that if she stayed enlisted, there was only one way out: her pride and bloodthirst would eventually drive her to a senseless death. Mirroring Viltry before her, she chose to walk away.

By the time of Interceptor City, this mindset has manifested as a disdain for the glory-seeking & kill counting that defined Marquall’s tragic arc in Double Eagle, a trait she shares with Gumm:

“It smacks of competition. The comparing of reputations, the immortalisation of glories, real or imagined. The Aeronautica is obsessed with reputation. The legend of the hero pilot, and the influence and favour that bestows. It’s exceptionalist bullshit, and I never had any time for it.”

As the book goes on, though, fate conspires to ensnare Jagdea once more: once she’s in the thick of it, she just can’t help but try to improve the situation, learn new tricks, reduce attrition rates. In fact, that very same comparing of service records, that sharing of glory stories, ends up being what saves Jagdea in the end: she is told straight-up that command wouldn’t have diverted the resources to rescue her from her emergency landing if it hadn’t come out that she was the hero of the Zoph.

And so after all that time, after running from it for so long, the addiction returns – Gumm’s proverbial bottle brought back to her lips. The cycle repeats. There is no escaping. Teeth out, faced with impossible odds in the final battle, she dives back into the fight. Jagdea justifies it later as rescuing her fellow pilot, but she knows the truth: the shred is no longer lurking over her shoulder, because she’s let it back in. The shred is inside her, driving her. As it will until the day her luck runs out.