Opportunity Cost by Jonathan D Beer

Author:Jonathan D Beer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction: space opera (FLS)
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Jonathan D Beer is a science fiction and alternative history writer. Equally obsessed with the 19th century and the 41st millennium, he lives with his wife and assorted cats in the untamed wilderness of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Dominion Genesis, and has also written the Warhammer Crime stories ‘Old Instincts’, ‘Service’ and ‘Chains’, as well as the novel The King of the Spoil.

An extract from Dominion Genesis.

I am not wholly human.

If I were, I would be equipped to express the emotion – cruel, logic-corrupting emotion – that pours from what is left of my amygdalae as my ship bursts from the empyrean’s grasp, and I behold the apocalypse that bears down upon my home.

Tears might spring from lacrimal glands, but they, along with the rest of my organic eyes, were excised on the thirty-eighth anniversary of my induction into the Most Holy Cult Mechanicus.

Anguished cries might erupt from my lips, had my skull not been artfully reshaped in steel and bronze. My lips are immobile, subtly sculpted to permit the function of the vox-grille that has replaced my teeth.

I could tear my hair, or rend my clothes. But my scalp bears a dense weave of monofilament mechadendrites that permit coupling with my ship, and my robe is marked with the griffon-and-cog of my home world. Even in the depths of despair, I will not damage my connection to the Peregrinus, nor besmirch the icon of my forge and home.

I am not denied an outlet for my anguish solely by the incompatibility of my physical form. My rank requires that I prevent any trace of the torment that dominates my thoughts from spilling into the communion, the noospheric connection I share with my crew. I am Talin Sherax, ductrix and explorator superior of the Peregrinus. It falls to me to set an example for my adjutants, my acolytes and thralls.

There have been few times over the course of my long life when I have wished to be free of the gifts of the Omnissiah, unburdened by the demands of rank, that I might indulge the remnants of my humanity and give voice to the heartbreak that grips my animus.

But seeing a tide of xenos horrors approaching my home world, I dearly wish for it now.

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