“The Last Chancers”, by Gav Thorpe

768 pages, Games Workshop, ISBN-13: 978-1844163007

I love the Warhammer 40K universe – Space Marines! – but The Last Chancers omnibus by Gav Thorpe showed me a fresh perspective to it. The stories contained within, while slightly predictable (40K being 40K, there is only so much wiggle room), have more than enough action, violence and twists to satisfy the average SciFi addict. The tales were as cold, hard and dark as the 40K universe is intended to be, a universe wherein Mankind is at war with everything and everything is out to exterminate Mankind. The pacing of the stories did slow down in a couple of spots, but overall was just right to keep you wanting to finish just one page more. Before continuing, some background: The Last Chancers are in fact The 13^th Penal Legion of the Imperial Guard, a special regiment composed of Imperial criminals and convicts who were hand-picked by the fiercely uncompromising Colonel Schaeffer, usually because of some natural talent they displayed or because they possessed an uncanny instinct for survival so that they could serve as part of an elite ad hoc military team intended to achieve some difficult, usually borderline insane military mission objective of the Imperium. The convicts are given a “last chance” by Schaeffer to be forgiven their crimes in the eyes of the Emperor of Mankind through an Imperial pardon from the Colonel, said pardons awarded only to those members of the regiment who survive a number of military operations as determined by Schaeffer. The Last Chancers, then, is a kind of Dirty Dozen in space, and since they appear to be the most notorious of the Imperium’s many Penal Legions, the whole “grim darkness of the far future” thing is cranked up to 11.