Regular Ferretbrain readers will have noted that I have been binging on Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 tie-in novels lately. Hot on the heels of consuming The Founding, I turned my attention to Relentless, the debut novel of Richard Williams. Whereas Dan Abnett's signature series focuses on the Imperial Guard, Williams takes as his subject the Imperial Navy, who fly all the pretty Imperial battleships across the Warhammer 40,000 universe in search of filthy xeno scum to kill. While at first I was worried that Williams would end up writing something that resembled a Star Trek novelisation that just happened to be set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Williams instead takes as his primary inspiration Hornblower-like stories of Naval adventure and intrigue, and then cranks all the dials up to 11 in order to make the story suitably over-the-top for the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

The story is set primarily onboard the Imperial Navy ship Relentless, tasked with patrolling a frontier region of the Imperium of Mankind. Despite having a glorious history, the ship's officers have become decadent and corrupt - not in an insiduous secretly-worshipping-Chaos way, but in a more realistic lining-their-own-pockets way. Contriving to avoid getting involved in actual wars, the officers of the Relentless spend their time holding up merchant ships and seizing a certain proportion of their goods as "contraband"; in other words, they've taken to piracy so that they can live the high life, and have completely neglected their role as peacekeepers.

The book commences with the death of the old captain; under the capable command of First Officer Ward, the ship continues happily in its corrupt ways. Naval High Command, however, decide not to promote Ward to Captain, but instead send Our Hero, Captain Becket, to take command of the ship. Becket soon begins a steady roll-out of standing orders, designed to maintain discipline in the officer corps, and which have the incidental effect of completely disrupting the tidy little racket that Ward has been running. Enraged by this turn of events, Ward soon realises that to regain the standard of living (and the idle life of piracy and decadence) that he is used to, Becket must die - and a crisis on one of the planets on the patrol route of the Relentless (a crisis which, it is implied, has been allowed to take shape precisely because the commanders of the Relentless have been slack in their duties) gives him the perfect opportunity. Surviving the assassination attempt, Becket is forced to rejoin the crew of his ship as an enlisted nobody in order to get back onboard and try to retake the ship - but the life of the enlisted men is a living hell, with the decks they work on resembling a cross between a slave galley, a Victorian workhouse, and a concentration camp. Things come to a head when Ward, pursuing a juicy-looking merchant ship, ends up getting the Relentless caught in the trap set by an alien race who are far better at piracy, betrayal, and malice than Ward could ever hope to be...

By far the most impressive thing about Relentless is the sudden, shocking transition we observe Becket undergoing from the life of the officer corps to the drudgery of the enlisted men halfway through the novel. For the first half of the novel, whilst the reader is vaguely aware that there are conscripts on the ship who are probably working in not especially nice conditions, the reality of life below decks is never actually described until Becket gets there. It has an interesting impact on Becket's character development, too; it's pretty clear that while he knew that stuff like this went on, he never really gave it much thought. Earlier in the book, he declares that his job on the Relentless is to win the loyalty of the officers, since where the officers lead the conscripts will follow: in fact, he ends up having to do precisely the reverse. The whole thing makes Ward's misrule of the Relentless seem even worse by comparison: not only is he using it to line his pockets and live a carefree and decadent existence, but he's doing so at the cost of destabilising the local subsector and working the enlisted scum to death in the process.

The second most impressive thing about Relentless is the portrayals of Ward and Becket, easily the most interesting characters on the ship; Ward is one of the most convincing and sympathetic fictional villains I've encountered - rather than being out to enact some diabolical plan, he just wants to keep things ticking along the way they always have in his tidy little world. Becket, meanwhile, is slightly unsympathetic in the first half of the book - he's a bit too straight-laced, he keeps getting in the way of the wonderfully fun Ward, and he's the mouthpiece of the Imperial authorities (and is therefore a bit of a fascist). He is redeemed wonderfully in the second half of the book, as he wins the loyalty of the enlisted men, just as Ward becomes less sympathetic as the price of his greed becomes vastly more apparent.

If the book had remained tightly focused on the conflict between the two men, as it does for the first half, it would be excellent; unfortunately, the second half of the book suffers from a slight drift in the focus, and a few too many irrelevancies. (There's a subplot with the ship's commissar which is simply less interesting than Becket's efforts at getting revenge, especially since the commissar is basically a faceless cipher). Nonetheless, it's a pretty decent first novel, which appears to be setting itself up as the potential start to a series.

Sadly, I'm not to interested in seeing sequels, because, naturally, when Becket and Ward finally face off they can't both survive, and it was the tension between them that really made this novel. (Also, I would be vastly more interested in a series about the one who dies than I would be in reading about the one who doesn't.)