2024 started off with a bang, or more appropriately, a diaphragm rattling BOOM.  The End and the Death Volume 3 was always going to be the biggest book release of the year – possibly the decade – but, coming as early as it did, it left plenty of room in the calendar for other surprises.

One of them, possibly the most welcome, was Interceptor City.  The long, long, long-awaited sequel to 2004’s Double Eagle, Interceptor City follows the brave men and women of the Aeronautica Imperialis as they dive, loop, and, yes, viff their way through the unfriendly skies, splashing* bats** and having nervous breakdowns.  Interceptor City had attained semi-mythical status in the literal two decades since Double Eagle’s release… so how does it measure up?

*blowing up

**Chaos warplanes

This review will contain mild spoilers for Interceptor City, and somewhat more significant spoilers for Double Eagle, which is 20 years old at this point, so come on.

Aces High

I promise I am only going to review one book in this article, but I think we have to start off by talking about Double Eagle a bit.  The wild hype for Interceptor City is a bit odd, because Double Eagle was… a bit of an odd book.  A spinoff from the wildly popular Gaunt’s Ghosts series, Double Eagle follows the minor character Bree Jagdea from The Guns of Tanith, a perfectly serviceable but not exceptional book in its own right.  Jagdea is a Phantine pilot ace, hailing from a world of spire-cities and gaseous seas between them, a world with barely any solid land to speak of – so its contributions to the Militarum are its pilots.

Double Eagle saw Jagdea and her squad deployed to Enothis to support a desperate imperial rearguard against the encroaching Archenemy.  But Double Eagle really isn’t just about Jagdea.  It has an ensemble cast, from the young wannabe Vander Marquall and the brave cadet Enric Darrow to the wounded vet August Kaminsky and the burned-out Oskar Viltry.  The plot largely riffs on the Battle of Britain, but to be honest it barely exists at all, being mostly a scaffolding on which to hang endless dogfights and also a really enormous amount of existential angst.  The pilots of Double Eagle are stressed to the breaking point, both by the extremity of their situation and the insane danger of their profession.

Most of the book is about how they deal with that; one character kills himself out of guilt at sending cadets to die, while another deserts after the last battle, unable to keep on fighting a war that seems endless.  When death comes in battle, it is random, senseless, and not at all heroic.  Much of the book follows Marquall on his journey from raw recruit to seasoned ace, but after heroically shooting down the Archenemy’s best pilot and finally scoring his coveted fifth kill, Marquall suffocates to death in his cabin due to a broken air exchanger.

The point I’m getting at – laboriously, I’m afraid – is that Double Eagle was not at all the type of book you’d expect to see in 2004, when Black Library was much less mature and developed, and certainly not a book you’d expect to generate the wild expectation that led up to Interceptor City.  Double Eagle is a great book, in my own opinion, but I’m a weirdo, and I can admit to its flaws; Abnett struggled to describe dogfighting in a compelling way, making many of the aerial scenes confusing, and once he learned the term viff* he could not stop using it.  But while there are hundreds of Black Library books that detail what war does to the human body, and plenty that explore (with greater or lesser degrees of ponderousness) its effect on the human soul, Double Eagle is one of the very few that address the impact of stress and trauma on the human mind.

*Vectoring in forward flight

So where do we go from here?  Double Eagle was great, but it was also a complete book.  What does the sequel add?

The Right Stuff

Interceptor City picks up 22 years after Double Eagle.  The Imperial-held planet of Lysander is under siege.  The great hive-plex of Orison is locked in a death struggle with its Chaos-held twin Great Haven; between them, the Vesperus hive-plex is a burnt-out ruin, a casualty of the war.  As the book opens, the Imperials have control of the skies, but the ground war is at their doorstep; the Archenemy has been sending bombing runs through Vesperus to evade Imperial air patrols, and so the Militarum has stationed interceptors within the dead city itself to interdict them.

Into this mess flies Bree Jagdea, no longer the fighter pilot she was.  Now she’s a driver, piloting cargo resupply runs to Orison from the southern hives.  It will not shock you to learn that she tells herself that she does not miss her old life, or that Abnett skillfully weaves her doubts in the blank spaces between sentences; it will surely not surprise you to learn that, after a rendezvous with an old friend, she agrees to make a delivery flight into Vesperus to drop off supplies and new planes.  As soon as she suits up for a little milk-run with a one-day turnaround, you know she’s not coming back out anytime soon.  That’s fine.  The intro segues nicely into the plot, which can best be described as “Bree Jagdea comes out of retirement for one last job… but has she still got what it takes?”

Gentle reader, get ready to pick your jaw up off the floor: she’s accompanied by a brash young ace who thinks he knows everything already and another cargo pilot with a mysterious past and a surprisingly hot stick*.

*I guess this means he’s a really good pilot.  They use the phrase enough in the book that I eventually stopped giggling every time I read it.

I may sound like I’m being a little sarcastic here, because I am, but honestly it all works.  Dan Abnett’s greatest strength is building compelling characters from very few moving parts.  He doesn’t need to drop ten thousand words each building up Pilot Officer Tilo Wilzar or Pilot Officer Sagittarius Gumm; they both leap right off the page, with their distinctive personalities and physical characteristics artfully sketched out just enough to bring them to life.  This is what Abnett is good at, and he makes it look easy.

The novel really picks up when the trio arrive at Intercept 6-6, a nest of pilots and crew in a ruined cathedral at the heart of Vesperus.  When a calamity strands Jagdea and her new companions there, she and Gumm are pressed into service, flying and fighting alongside the hardbitten veterans of 6-6.

Glory Stories

This is where the book comes alive.  The theme of stress and anxiety from the first book returns, now referred to as the Shred – the lurking fear at the heart of every pilot, anthropomorphized in startlingly similar terms to depictions of possession.  The Shred rides every pilot, but none so much as the interceptors of Vesperus, who have to contend with the insanely hostile conditions of their “war sky.”  Flying around inside a city – a city so massive (in all dimensions) that you are forced to dogfight within its crumbling buildings and abandoned tunnels – is lunacy.  It’s the ne plus ultra of 40k, combining the suicidal fanaticism and ludicrous scale of the Imperium, reifying the theme of “life in the ruins of the past” in the most grandiose way.

It also just works.  With the shattered hive-grave as a referent, the dogfights are much more compelling than Double Eagle’s; there, you had to expend effort just to keep track of who was pointing where and how they were moving, while here the existence of the city frames and scaffolds the action.  It’s much easier to follow, which means you can focus on the actual thrills of high-speed, zero-error-margin air combat.  Someone has also turned down the viff dial significantly, which is a relief.  Interceptor City’s pilots can viff a little, as a treat, but they’re not viffing right off the page.

The pilots of 6-6 are a treat.  The constant stress has cracked them all; half of them are hardline Imperial puritans, while the other half are hard-drinking, stimm-abusing carousers.  They all go by call signs, awarded by their fellow pilots, which range from the functional (“Gangster” for the belly-dancing Verghastite ganger Disa Yesof) to the theatrical (“Harlot” for the libertine Glavian Reno Lopard) to the insulting (“Driver” for Jagdea, who, the other pilots keep reminding her, is just a cargo driver).  There are more than a dozen callsign-indicated pilots who get actual descriptions in the book, and to their credit, they’re each given enough space to strut a bit.  Abnett really nails the 40k details, too, so you won’t think you’re reading Flight of the Intruder.  I will specifically call out here Bloodspot, Slipstream and Mischief, three bio-impulse bonded pilots who are literally plugged into their planes.  As Jagdea notes, prolonged linkage without periodic disconnection leads to brain damage, organ failure, and death… but 6-6 doesn’t have the resources to unlink and relink them, and the attrition rate is so godawful anyways, they still volunteer.

And the planes!  The planes in Double Eagle had some character, but the Voss-pattern Lightnings of Interceptor City practically are characters.  From the massive console (aptly nicknamed the Headache) to the powerful engines (described in terms more appropriate to a spirited and not-quite-broken horse), Abnett really communicates the power and danger of a combat aircraft.  Jagdea’s Lightning isn’t just a tool that lets her fly; it’s a companion, a partner, and sometimes an enemy.

All this makes the book splendidly atmospheric.  You constantly hear about how bad a posting Vesperus is, how terrible morale has gotten, but you feel it too.  There’s camaraderie here, but it’s gone bad, poisoned by stress and trauma.  There is no mentorship, no moral support, only a sense of we’re-all-fucked-together bonding and desperate, manic release.  Jagdea may or may not be ready to fly again, but she’s really not ready for the pressure cooker of 6-6.  So when she sees how bad things are, she starts to make a few changes.

Dead Drop

The standard archetype for this book would be something along the following lines: talented rookie shows up; vets do not take her seriously at first; rookie proves herself; rookie realizes some secret or accomplishes some goal that gives the Imperials the edge in the air war; rookie realizes she has become the vet and turns to mentor a new generation.  That plot doesn’t work here, because Jagdea is about the farthest thing from a rookie, and the book doesn’t let you forget it.  After a brief period of hazing, the pilots of 6-6 learn who she really is and their scorn flips to hero-worship.  And because Jagdea is, as established, an absolutely ace pilot (pun very much intended), we don’t have to deal with a long montage of her fumbling and fucking up; after a sufficient intro to make it feel earned, she’s shaken off the cobwebs and up to her old tricks.  In a sense, the plot is an inversion of the traditional scheme: hardened veteran shows up among a bunch of talented rookies and whips them into shape.  That’s not quite right either, because 6-6 has plenty of veterans, but Jagdea’s mentorship of the “smokes” (the book’s rather unfortunate pejorative for inexperienced fighter pilots) is a major plot point.

Similarly, while it’s true that Jagdea discovers a secret that helps the Imperial war effort, it’s not some earth-shattering revelation that assures them victory.  In fact, she uncovers two such secrets, but the effects are somewhat muted and local; the stakes in this book are much more personal than in Double Eagle.

This leads into my criticism of the book, which I am afraid to tell you I am contractually obligated to deliver.  As I read Interceptor City, I kept thinking I had figured out what kind of book it was, only for meaning to squirt out from between my fingers.  To a degree, that kind of elusiveness is a good thing – a book that just flat out tells you what it’s trying to convey is boring.  But Interceptor City, like its pilots, is flighty, never quite settling on a theme.  By the end, I found myself wondering just what Abnett was trying to say.

That’s not to say the book doesn’t have good ideas – in fact, it has perhaps too many of them.  Jagdea deals with secret intel about Vesperus, the presence of a silver-banded Hell Blade (who echoes Khrel Kas Obarkon’s pearl-white bat from Double Eagle, though doesn’t get nearly the buildup or screen time), and the potential threat of a “white crow,” or serial killer hidden among the pilots of 6-6.  Not all of these plot threads resolve in this book, and some of them seem inconsequential to the overall plot.  In particular, it feels like Interceptor City settles on the “white crow” plot as the driving action as the climax approaches, but it isn’t even introduced as a plot element until nearly three-quarters of the way through the book, and resolves itself pretty quickly in a trademarked Abnett Ending: on re-read, he sprinkles some hints earlier in the book, but they’re so vague and ambiguous that it would be impossible to realize anything was wrong until he comes right out and smacks you with it.

Similarly, it doesn’t seem like Abnett is quite sure what to do with Jagdea’s inner journey. Jagdea gets plenty of time to introspect and conquer the Shred, but facing and coming to terms with your fear was a theme heavily explored in Double Eagle, and so this book left me wanting a bit more.  To Abnett’s credit, there is more, but it’s never quite clear where this is all going.  Is the book about making peace with the knowledge that your best days are behind you?  Is it about dealing with addiction, knowing that the threat of relapse will never leave you?  Is this book tying up Bree Jagdea’s storyline and giving her a happy ending (of sorts), or is it setting up another sequel (or series of sequels)?  There’s plenty of material for all of these options, but the book never commits to any of them.

Abnett has left lots of threads dangling – in particular, I’m intrigued by his mention of the Imperium’s Marauder Nightstalkers, modified night-fighting planes that mount a stripped-down volcano cannon to blow away the Archenemy’s super-heavy strategic bombers.  There’s a whole book screaming to be written about the mad(wo)men who fly those things, but it ain’t this book; they’re mentioned early on, described in tantalizing detail, and then transition into Sir Not-Flying-In-This-Novel.  So maybe this book is meant to set up sequels.  It works – I’d happily read them – but if that’s the goal, then the primary story is given somewhat short shrift.  Given the immense lapse of time between Double Eagle and now (both in-universe and out), I think that it is certainly justifiable to spend as much time as Abnett does just setting the table again, but he does so much setting that there’s barely room for the main course.

The Aeronautica Remembers

So, the all-important question: do I recommend Interceptor City?  (That’s actually not the all-important question, but it’s the one I know you all want to ask, and I am nothing if not dedicated to my readers).  I don’t have any problem saying yes.  You’ve been waiting for this book long enough, you’ll read it with or without my blessing, but I give it anyways.

The most important thing a 40k book can be is fun to read, and Interceptor City delivers in spades.  It’s a thrilling book, and I devoured it in 2 days (which was slow for me, but cut me some slack, I have a toddler and a demanding job).  I did not want to put it down.  I cared about all of the characters, and I got upset when they bit it, one by one.  I wanted Jagdea to make it, to figure out the mystery and teach the smokes how to fly.  I wanted to see planes explode, and yes, I wanted to see a little viffing.

Abnett delivered everything he promised with Interceptor City, and as much as I carry an instinctive distrust for sequels, I hope he writes more about Intercept 6-6.  He’s created an amazing, unique setting with Vesperus, and I’d love to go back.

One final note: the Super Mega Deluxe Pay Pig edition, which I shamelessly purchased, comes with a neat little secondary book, which is basically the diary of another pilot (not a major character).  It’s truly great.  I love things like this, but I really hope that this little book gets a release alongside (or inside) the hardback of Interceptor City.  It’s a really cool look at the Aeronautica, and while there are no earth-shaking revelations inside, there are cool illustrations and lots of censored swearing.  See if you can find someone to lend you their copy.

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