Gavin G. Smith’s first Black Library story, Apex Predator is a tale of Knightly rivalry stretching back millennia, as Sethena of House Cadmus and the remnants of her lance desperately try to survive while outnumbered and hunted by Traitor Knights. With Imperial forces stretched to breaking point, Sethena’s Knights remaining battered and under-resourced, and a full-strength lance of enemy Knights on the prowl, the war on Turris appears all but over. At the edge of endurance, Sethena looks for any possibility of fighting back, and the ghosts of her Throne Mechanicum offer tantalisingly vague hints of new tactics to employ.
It’s a little mislabelled as a Chaos Knights story, told as it is from the Imperial viewpoint. As much as anything it’s a clever story about the symbiotic relationship between a Knight’s current pilot and the spirits of their long-dead predecessors in the Throne Mechanicum, along with the strengths and weaknesses of chivalric Knightly conduct and how that forces Knight pilots to think and act. Look elsewhere for a Chaos POV or much detail of the Chaos Knights beyond the veneer of horror that Sethena sees, but if you like your 40k to feature on-the-edge-of-broken characters, lashings of chivalry and desperate clashes between (awesome) giant robots there’s plenty to enjoy here.
