The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

This week, I'm having a play around with another of the original models released with the Battle for Zycanthus boxed set: The Kaddar Nova!

The Kaddar Nova is a member of the Karist Enclave priesthood, but they are often granted operational control on the battlefield due to their experience and the reverence paid to them by members of the Enclave. Equipped with an incredibly powerful cybel reactor that serves as both a power source and a weapon, the Kaddar Nova is a distinctive figure. Their bodies are enlarged and twisted by their constant exposure to cybel energy, and their ravaged faces cut a stark contrast to their powerful frames.

As the leader and figurehead of the Karist forces, the Kaddar Nova needed a suitably impressive model kit, and so the sprue comes with a nice array of parts to build them. But as always, of course, the sprue is only the starting point, and below I'll go through some quick and easy ways to further customise this fearsome individual.

Building your Kaddar Nova straight off the sprue lets you choose from three different sets of legs, two different arms for each side, two different heads, and an optional crown piece for the more formal-dressing Kaddar.







The indents in the crown mimic the extra eyes of the alien Angels that often accompany Karist forces. You can use this to make a more mysterious Kaddar Nova by taking the head with the scull-cap, trimming his nose down flat and gluing the crown piece on upside down over his face, so that the upper rim sits just below his eyes.



Headswaps are another easy way to mix things up on your models. The necks on the original Karist sets weren't all interchangeable (something that we've corrected in later Maelstrom's Edge models) but thanks to them being plastic that's easily fixed with a little cutting or filing. On the below model, I have used a head from the Tempest Elite set, with the helmet crust removed as it would hit up against the cybel reactor.



A more inscrutable look can be achieved using a Karist Trooper helmet with the neck trimmed down to fit, and the eye lenses sanded down to produce a blank faceplate. The staff on this model is a modified Cybel Glaive from the Faction Expansion sprue.



An advancing pose can be created with some careful cutting - trim a wedge out of the groin area where the legs join, so that they can be attached in a less spread position, and glue them so that one leg is to the rear slightly. Once the glue has set, cut or file the waist down flat and assemble the rest of the model - his robes largely hide the joint, but you can use a little modeling putty to fill any resulting gaps.



Alternatively, you can look for legs from elsewhere in the range. Trooper legs are too small, as they're not cybel-enhanced like the more elite Karist warriors, but by cutting through the waist of a Tempest Elite model with a razor saw, you can replace the Kaddar Nova's robed legs with walking, armoured legs instead.



Shadow Walker legs also work, although they're a fraction shorter. This Kaddar Nova is obviously just not quite as cybel-swollen as his compatriots yet.



The Kaddar Nova is only one aspect of the Kaddar priesthood, and others will be fleshed out eventually. In the meantime, though, it's fun to see where mashing bits together can lead you... The below model is a combination of Kaddar Nova and Shadow Walker parts, with some small tentacles taken from a couple of Mature Angel kits. I call him a 'Kaddar Noctis'.



Hopefully, this has given you some inspiration for your own Kaddar Nova builds! To get started, you can pick up the Kaddar Nova along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range from the webstore here.



As always, feel free to pop along and share your work, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

- by Iain Wilson

The Maelstrom's Edge Faction Expansion Sprue introduced a couple of cybel-powered edged weapons - the Cybel Blade and Cybel Glaive - to the Karist faction. These weapons give the Karist troops a wonderful, savage look and add even more nasty, close-quarters options to their units.

Painting these sorts of weapons is a great opportunity to add some eye-catching detail to your force, so I thought it might be useful to offer some suggestions on different ways to do so, to suit varying levels of painting prowess. There's no right or wrong way - you can feel free to use whatever technique suits your style, but the below ideas might give you a starting point if you're unsure of how to go about it.

For each of the below methods, paint up the rest of the weapon however suits your force's colours, and then go to town on your blade!

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The Silver Wash Method

An easy one to kick things off. Start with a silver blade. Apply a wash of purple ink (I've used Army Painter Purple Tone). Let it dry, and you're done!

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The White Wash Method

Similar to the above, except that you start with a white blade. Apply a wash of purple ink, and let it dry.



To lift it just a little, you can then use a fine detail brush and a little white paint to highlight the raised edges.

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The Drybrush Method

Start with a silver or gunmetal blade. Apply purple ink to the back half of the blade, and let it dry.



Blend the purple into the metal by lightly drybrushing with the same metal colour that you used on the blade. This will also pick out the raised edges.

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The Crystal Method

Start with a white blade. Using a fine detail brush, apply light coats of purple ink which each successive coat covering slightly less of the blade so that you build up a gradient of purple fading gradually to white . You don't want the ink to pool - the lighter you apply each coat, the better the end result will be.



Work with the shape of the blade - you want the brightest (whitest) part of the blade on the curved part of the edge, so the purple builds up from that point towards the tip and the back end of the blade. On the top half of the blade this is reversed, so the darkest purple is on the inside of the curve, fading out to white on the ends. Once you've built up your colour to the level you want it, highlight the raised edges with a little white.

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And that's it - 4 different techniques for some very different results. You can vary these up some more by using different colours - I've gone with purple as that's the 'canon' colouring for cybel energy, but if you're using a different colour throughout your force (or looking to apply these techniques for a different miniature altogether) then you can easily substitute any colour ink.

If you're feeling inspired, you can pick up the Expansion Sprue from the Maelstrom's Edge online store here, and make sure you share your efforts on the Comm Guild Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/MaelstromsEdge)!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

Although the existence of the xenos species called Angels was not completely unknown to the inhabitants of the spiral arm, only a handful of academics and long-standing spacefarers truly knew of them before the Karists began using Angels for their military and propaganda purposes. To everyone else, they were always simply a myth or legend bragged about by starship captains who had spent too many years traversing the void.

Karists tout that these creatures are emissaries of of the Maelstrom, with their priests having helped coined the name 'Angels' to describe them. When Karist priests attempt to sway the populace of a world to their cause, they often mention Angels, or even utilize a live Angel as a demonstration. For how can creatures so powerful and strange, they argue, serve the will of the Karists if their cause were not just and true?

In Karist military actions, Angel units are typically embedded into their existing forces, giving Karist commanders access to the many unique talents the Angels can provide. However, an entire force comprised of Angels is a powerfully intimidating site, doubly so to enemy troops who have never actually seen an Angel before. Therefore on occasion, full Angel detachments, led by an Angel Keeper are deployed. They are usually utilized as a terror-force, early in a planetary engagement before the enemy has any experience fighting against them. Angel detachments are particularly effective against fortifications, where the sheer terror caused by the Angels can cause enemy troops to flee without firing a shot, allowing the Karists to take an enemy strongpoint where it would have cost them hundreds of lives otherwise.

The First Contact faction objective represents a number of new avenues for our game. It is the first of several planned new faction objectives tied to particular models, helping to create different types of themed forces you can choose to utilize within the overarching umbrella of the existing forces. To this end, your force must include an Angel Keeper for you to be able to use the First Contact faction objetive.

First Contact

This objective may only be utilized if your force contains an Angel Keeper. If an objective type requires you to choose a force commander, it must be an Angel Keeper.

This objective can generate a maximum of 3 VPs per game, after which your units no longer benefit from the IrratIonal Fear ability.

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Partial: (conditional) Each time a non-fearless enemy unit fails any type of discipline check (even an automatic failure) while affected by the Fearsome ability of your Angel units, gain 1 VP.
Full: N/A

Irrational Fear: Friendly models with the angel designator gain the Fearsome (1) ability, or add +1 to their existing Fearsome ability.

You can download a printable version of this card here.

The existing basic faction objectives ('Secret Cache' for the Karists, 'Now You See Me' for the Broken and 'Automated Uplink Relay' for the Epirians) all work roughly the same way: they provide your forces an optional bonus, which you can choose to forgo each turn to instead gain +1 victory point. First Contact, on the other hand, provides your force with an automatic bonus: namely improving your Angel's 'Fearsome' ability, and successfully utilizing that bonus is what scores you the objective's victory points. Even better, this is the first faction objective where it is possible to earn the maximum 3 victory points in a single turn, even theoretically in the first turn of the game, which would definitely put your opponent on their back foot right out of the gate!

But that raises the obvious question: how can First Contact possibly be balanced compared to the existing two faction objectives? The answer is that the other two objectives provide you with better situational control. When you need a victory point, you can generate one, but when you need the bonus provided by the objective, you can utilize that instead. With First Contact, once you've generated your 3 victory points from it, the bonus provided by it ends and you're stuck the rest of the game without it, even if you would have preferred to keep the bonus around longer in lieu of gaining all 3 victory points.



In addition, generating victory points for First Contact ultimately relies upon your opponent failing discipline checks while within range of your Angels. Depending on how the game plays out and how crafty your opponent is, it is entirely possible for you to finish the game without earning some or even all of these victory points. Or in other words, this is the first faction objective where you have to rely upon your opponent doing something (failing discipline checks) in order to generate your victory points, which is inherently more risky.

We would love for you to try out some games with both the Angel Keeper and First Contact rules and let us know what you think about them. If you've got any feedback (with or without playing any games with the rules), please feel free to provide it either by replying to this article directly, or on our Comm-Guild Facebook group or in the Maelstrom's Edge forum on Dakka Dakka.


You can flesh out your shape-shifting alien force by picking up an Angel Keeper and any of the different types of angels from the Maelstrom's Edge webstore here!

- by Iain Wilson

I'm taking a little break from new releases this week to have a look back at another of the original release units - The Karist Shadow Walker!

The Shadow Walker sprue contains two different torsos (twisted in different directions from the front) and two of each arm in different poses. This allows you to create two very different, dynamically posed models from those parts. You can find the general assembly guide on the Maelstrom's Edge website here.





Somewhere along the design process, the sprue went from being intended to create a single model to including parts for two full models with the lack of only a second head. Luckily, several other Karist kits come with extra heads, so it's not too difficult to purloin a leftover in order to build that second Walker. The right hand model below uses the bare head from the Karist Trooper sprue, and there's another bare head available on the Faction Expansion Sprue.



Alternatively, the resin Karist Heavy Weapons set comes with two troopers and three heads - two helmeted, and one bare. The helmeted heads are very similar in style to the Shadow Walker's, with a couple of extra eye lenses. The model below has also been reposed slightly, with the right arm extended and filled with 'green stuff' putty, and the right shin repositioned so that his front foot matches his line of fire.



While we're reposing our models, it is really easy to add a little more motion to the pose by cutting off the bent leg just below the knee and reattaching it at a sharper angle and off the ground, to create a 'lunging' pose. The below Shadow Walker has clearly just Rifted in and is charging into the action:



Borrowing parts from different kits does, of course, work both ways. The Karist Praetorians below were given Shadow Walker legs to help them stand out a little from regular troopers and to create a more dynamic pose than is possible from the Trooper legs. The added loincloths are from the Faction Expansion sprue.



As I was working through these models, I found myself wondering what it would look like if Shadow Walkers had their own specialised mini-factions. From there, I wound up with the 'Shadow Dancer', carrying a regular cybel blade on place of the usual Shadow Walker's wrist-mounted version, and with an added prehensile, mechanical topknot which, I expect, would whip around as the Dancer flips and whirls about his opponents, and shoot out toxic darts or hallucinogenic gas from the emitter on its tip. The cybel blade was taken from the faction expansion sprue, and the topknot made from a piece of guitar string and the muzzle from a Karist radwave emitter.



By contrast, the 'Shadow Stalker' eschews close range combat where possible, opting instead to carry out his work from afar with his nox rifle. This model has an assault rifle arm taken from the new Broken Forsaken Tech Chieftain model with the bayonet and muzzle removed and a silencer made from a length of plastic tube attached. The head is the bare head option from the Karist Heavy Weapons pack.



I don't have a name for this next one yet (feel free to leave suggestions in the comments!) but how about a Shadow Walker sect that has found an alternative to teleporting? Using arcane science to fuse Angel DNA to the human form, this Shadow Walker variant is equipped with void-gel wings!





Of course, if you're going to have bizarre sub-sects of the Karist Walker breed, it wouldn't be too surprising to have a clandestine offshoot of the regular Kaddar priesthood overseeing them. And so the Kaddar Noctis was born - like the flying Walker above, this model fuses Human and Angel DNA, with the traditional Shadow Walker cybel blade replaced with an Angel's void-gel tentacles. The legs and torso are from the Kaddar Nova sprue, with most of the Cybel reactor removed and replaced with a modified cybel glaive head from the Faction Expansion sprue. Arms and head are from the Shadow Walker sprue, with the small tentacle parts taken from a pair of Mature Angel models.

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To add some sneaky, pointed 'negotiation' to your own Karist Force, you can pick up the Shadow Walker along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range from the webstore here.

As always, feel free to pop along and share your work, or ask any Maelstrom's Edge- or hobby-related questions on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

Originally posted on Dakkadakka by Sgt.Oddball.

Hey all,

When you buy Karist Heavy Weapon troopers, you get two guys a pack, with a selection of 3 weapons. I want to be able to use all the weapon types, but I dón't want to paint three guys just so I can use any of the three weapon types (my chosen way of painting Karists is slow...). Magnets are the answer. Luckily, these guys are quite simple to magnetize. Here's how:

What you get in a pack. I love these sculpts and the model quality is fantastic. Very crisp.



Long thin resin bits can end up bent.



This is easy and quick to fix: dip in hot water, straighten, dip in cold water.



All the bits for one guy, without the ammo I forgot at this point.



I drilled a 3mm hole in the torso. The sculpt is such that you know exactly where to drill. If you go too deep you may end up making a hole on the other end where the head goes. You won't see this with the head in place.



In the hole goes a 3x2mm magnet. Try to match the amount which the magnet sticks out to the amount the original resin stuck out. If you want to use the left arm that holds the gun, it's critical that the magnet doesn't stick out too much, or you won't be able to line up the gun with the left arm.



Then put a magnet in the gun arm in the same way. The sculpt shows you where to drill. Don't drill too deep or you'll go out the shoulder guard. Also, if you lay the arm down like this and then press down hard with your drill, you could deform the shoulder guard a little.



As with the torso, you want the magnet to stick out as much as the resin did, or else your left arm won't line up. It's not just the amount by which the magnet sticks out, but also the angle. It's better to have the magnet in a little too deep: it'll still catch and your alignment will work. Of course, if you just use the left arm that holds the ammo, alignment isn't a problem. Easiest way to get it right is to have the left arm glued in place and then dry-fit.



The other guns get the same treatment. Beware of polarity ;)



Here's the missing ammo, which I glued to his belt. Also, you can see the torso and arm line up nicely on the rear.



Front alignment also works out with the left arm in place.



Ravager gun works too.



As does the grenade launcher.



Four guys with interchangeable weapons.

Once I paint these, they'll show up in my 'painted stuff' topic on Dakka :)

- by Iain Wilson

The Karist Angel Keeper has added his goad-wielding distinctiveness to the Karist Enclave model collection, and so this seemed a good opportunity to grab a few and have at them with the exacto knife and superglue.



An addition to the new resin range for Maelstrom's Edge, the Angel Keeper comes supplied with his angel goad and grenade launcher.



Assembly is really simple: Glue feet to base, glue head to neck, glue hands to arms. The goad also has a separate piece for the blade end, which sockets onto a convenient pointy end on the shaft.



The more eagle-eyed rules watchers may have noticed that both weapons are held in hand, but the Keeper actually comes with both by default. This allowed for players to choose which would be held in hand while still keeping the parts count down for practical purposes, and rules-wise isn't an issue since we can assume that all default gear exists whether it is specifically shown or not. If, like me, you do prefer to have all of your models' gear modeled, this isn't a difficult task.

If you have modeled your Keeper with goad in hand, just grab a spare grenade launcher from the Faction Expansion Sprue and glue it onto his back beside his pouch.



If you prefer to have the grenade launcher at the ready, you can use a piece of 1.6 mm diameter plastic rod to replace the shaft. Here, I've also removed the detail piece from the bottom, to be reattached onto the new shaft.





You can also use a shaft from the Cybel Glaive on the Faction Expansion Sprue.



OK, but what if you want both weapons in hand, you say?

Luckily, resin cuts really easily, so the easy option here is to carefully remove the left hand from the stock of the grenade launcher - just trim it down to a flat surface and file it smooth if necessary.

For the goad, cut through the shaft either side of the right hand, and then reattach the bottom of the shaft to the top.





For a slightly more complex (but more hardcore!) alternative, why not combine the two weapons into one?

Take a grenade launcher from the Faction Expansion sprue, cut off the pistol grip and trim down the stock so that it is level with the bottom of the ring around the muzzle.

Trim down the back side of the goad blade so that it is flat, and cut a small, flat inset into the end of the goad shaft where the blade normally attaches.



Then glue the back end of the grenade launcher to the goad shaft, and the goad blade to the stock of the grenade launcher.



The Keeper's head has the same ball joint neck as most of the rest of the Karist range, so you can easily swap in different heads to either customise your Keeper a little, or use the model as a specialist in a Karist Trooper or Praetorian unit. The below model has a head from a Karist Heavy Trooper.



You can also create unit champions by swapping out or modifying the weapons. Below, I've filed down the shoulder pads and added Karist Trooper pads over the top, and used a head and cybel blades from the Faction Expansion sprue to create a Praetorian Tetrarch.



What have you done with your Angel Keepers? We would love to see your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

To pick up the Angel Keeper, or any of the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range, visit the webstore here.

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here

Spiral Arm Studios are proud to present our latest release in our continuing one release per month cycle - The Karist Keeper.

This high quality resin kit contains one Karist Angel Keeper model with two weapon options and a 25mm base. The cybel Goad can be assembled in a variety of angles for added dynamism. This Command model enables an all-Angel Karist army to be fielded, creating a very visually distinct force.

Angel Keepers are a strange, isolated offshoot within the Karist Priesthood. For hundreds of years, the Keepers of the Karist Enclave have enslaved the alien creatures known as Angels, keeping them docile using regimented doses of cybel energy. The Keepers experiment on their captives, using different forms of cybel energy and electromagnetically charged cages to shape the Angels, encouraging them to grow new limbs or shapes to match the Enclave's requirements. While all Karists are secretive, Keepers take this mantra to another level. Keeper Initiates hand-picked from amongst the ranks of Novitiate priests secretly study sacred texts from venerated Keepers on both the Karist faith and the complexities of caring for the Angel creatures. Some Initiates drop out when they witness the trapping of Angel Minnows with tainted cybel energy. But those who persevere with their training find Angels to be magnificent, transcendent beings, and pledge their lives to the cause. Junior Keepers undertake a vow of silence, abandoning common human pursuits to focus solely on the miraculous Angels. Keepers study Angels for many years, learning to train and even speak to them in a rudimentary, computer-assisted, language. Those that graduate to the full rank of Angel Keeper undergo surgery to replace their vocal cords with a cybernetic enhancement, effectively allowing them to 'speak' the language of the Angels.

Keepers are the least public of the Kaddar sect, having little to do with local populations, but fulfilling the critical role of Angel harvesting and training. On the battlefield, Keepers are tasked with marshalling Angel units to attack the enemy, an often tricky prospect. As the Angels feel the effects of mass and gravity far stronger than their other senses, Keepers can lead Angels around using the pulsed gravitic generator attached to their voicebox. The combination of sound and gravitic waves is irresistible to smaller Angels, but headstrong Mature Angels often ignore these orders if more tempting prey is available. Therefore, Keepers also utilise grenade launchers equipped with Swarmer rounds to douse enemy units with Na-Cybel. Not only do enemy units become incapacitated through temporary euphoria, but the Na-Cybel also draws the attention of any Angels nearby. When a Keeper and an Angel are in harmony, the consequences for their enemies can be devastating.

Weapon and model rules are available at the Karist online unit cards section of the Maelstrom's Edge website.

The Karist Keeper is available for purchase right now at the Maelstrom's Edge store.

- by Iain Wilson

This week saw the release of the next Maelstrom's Edge resin set into the wild, with the addition of heavy weapon troopers to the Karist Enclave lineup. Here, we're having a quick look at how to assemble these great new models!



The Karist heavy troopers come in a pack of two troopers, with three heavy weapons between them. They also include 3 optional heads - two with helmets and one open-face, an extra left arm with a spare cybel cannister, and a bunch of extra cybel cannisters to attach to their belts.



As always with resin models, it's a good idea to give them a quick wash in warm, soapy water to clear off any residual mould release, as this can affect paint adhesion. If any of the parts are a little bent, this is also the time to drop them in some hot water and then reshape them - although the casts I received of these models were all beautiful and straight, with extremely minimal mould lines, so very little clean-up work involved.

The two bodies are all one piece, and so once the frame lugs are trimmed off the bottom of the feet, can be glued straight onto your base. Because these are resin rather than polystyrene like the regular plastic kits, use a good quality superglue or fast-setting epoxy glue, rather than plastic cement.



The arms have nice, sturdy locator pins that fit snugly into the sockets in the shoulders.



Dry-fit them first to get a feel for how they sit, and then I find the easiest way to ensure the arms fit together nicely is to put a drop of glue into each shoulder socket, a small drop on the left palm, and then sit everything into place and make any minor adjustment quickly before the glue grabs. You can glue one arm at a time if you prefer, but it can be trickier to get a perfect fit that way, depending on the angle of the arms.



Finally, glue the heads in place, and you're ready for paint!



You can add a Quintarch to the unit using a regular Karist trooper, or you can add parts from the Trooper sprue and/or Faction Expansion Sprue to another heavy trooper body to keep with the heavier armour look for the whole unit.



You could also use weapons and arms from the Trooper sprue on the heavy trooper bodies to make special weapon troopers for your regular Karist units.



And for a final bit of fun, I made some conversions a while back of some Tempest Elites with shoulder-mounted weapons (from the Spotlight article here). That conversion becomes even easier with the pulse cannon and cannister arm from the heavy trooper set!



To build your own army of Maelstrom-worshipping, explody Doom, you can pick up the Karist Heavy Trooper set, along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range, from the webstore here. As always, we would love to see your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

Spiral Arm Studios are proud to present our latest release in our continuing one release per month cycle - Karist Heavy Weapons.

These weapons are resin, with slightly up-armoured Karist troopers carrying and operating them. One of the weapons can now be added to your basic Karist Trooper squads for +1 to +2 points, or you can build an entirely new Anvil unit with two heavy weapons - the Karist Trooper Heavy Squad.

Weapon and unit rules are available on the Karist online unit cards section of the Maelstrom's Edge website.

The models are available for purchase right now at the Maelstrom's Edge store.

You'll also notice that the kit comes with a Karist trooper head which has the mask removed, revealing the human underneath.

The above model is also demonstrating the alternate arm option, holding a cybel ammo cannister. Parts are broadly interchangeable with the rest of the Karist range, opening up further options and conversion possibilities!

Originally posted on Dakkadakka by Sgt.Oddball.



What follows is a brief overview of how I built this Karist temple, inspired by the stepwells seen most commonly in India. A couple mostly water-related things did not work out at first, so here’s how to avoid those things.



1. I took the lid from one of those boxes they put wine bottles in, measured things, and glued my foam stairs to the lid. The steps are sized to accommodate normal 25mm based dudes without them tipping over. At the back: I just used scraps of foam to hold everything up. I then used foam again to make the basin.



2. I then stacked bits of foam to create the rock around the stairs and the temple entrance.



3. With fingers, a hobby knife, a serrated knife and a hot soldering iron I shaped the foam to look like rock.



4. I then undercoated the whole thing with white textured wall paint. Next, I used a hobby paint mixture to make everything rocky a yellow-sandish colour. The inside of the basin was painted a bright blue. The rock was then washed in diluted brown paint and the water area highlighted with progressively lighter shades of blue-green (lighter towards edges). The rock was highlighted with probably the base colour again and then adding in a sandy colour and white. I also used various coloured washes (reds, greens, browns) to give the rock colour some variation. All highlighting is simple drybrushing/overbrushing. In the last picture, I’ve poured Woodland Scenics E-Z water in the basin and in the water source on top, which is a resin you melt before pouring. This is the first thing you should not do. This stuff was just not suitable for this purpose. It shrunk and cracked as it cured and had a yellowish tint.



5. It’s not at all easy to remove E-Z water once it’s set, especially if you want to keep the surrounding terrain in one piece. Getting rid of it involved trying all sorts of methods, eventually a chisel was most effective. I then tried a more familiar (to me) product, which is Woodland Scenics Realistic water. This is awesome stuff and gave me a very nice pool. For the water drop and a little ripple effect I used Woodland Scenics Water effects, which is also nice.

Then I did the second thing you should not do. I figured I could add some white to the water by mixing white paint into the Water effects stuff and applying it where appropriate. However, Water effects itself is white until it cures, hence I couldn’t see how much the white paint coloured the Water effects. Of course, I didn’t bother to test my batch (all this water stuff takes forever to cure and I have no patience). Turns out I used too much white paint and all my water now looked ridiculous (basically like that picture of the uncured Water effects). The thing is, it’s impossible to get rid of. I think I tried painting over the whole thing? Not sure. Anyway, in the end I decided it was time to once again dig out the whole basin.

This time was worse, as the Realistic water isn’t as easily chiselled as the E-Z Water. It stays a little soft. After much perseverance I got everything out, but I destroyed some of the paint job and actual foam bits around the basin. I had to redo all that and also build new steps into the water (round steps this time). Now that I knew what not to do, again using Realistic water and Water effects got me the desired result (still room for improvement, but I’ll leave that for another project).



6. The final steps were making temple doors with the Karist logo out of plasticard, and detailing. The Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue supplied a control panel. The doors were painted brown, then bronze, then drybrushed pewter and silver. The logo got various purple paints, washes and highlights. I used green weathering powder to colour the rock a bit in the crevices and then sprinkled on fine blended green turf for some moss, and the dried contents of some teabags around the edges of the basin to represent fallen leaves and such muck accumulating there. This muck, of, course, didn’t appear wet so I added a final coat of Realistic water (this is the white sheen you see in the last image). The colour from the tea bled a bit more than I’d like, so this is probably another thing I’d find a better procedure for next time. To finish up I glued some coarser, darker green turf to the rock to represent vines, washed that with a brown wash and then highlighted with an olive colour. I then broke a skewer in two and wrapped the ends in narrow masking tape to make two torches and planted these near the entrance, painted brown and metallic.

And that’s basically it! Apart from messing around with the water a lot (this cost me so much time, it ain’t funny), it’s a fairly simple project.

We at Spiral Arm Studios are proud to announce the immediate release of the Karist Angel Hellblaster unit. A valuable addition to any Karist force and our first ever resin model! It seems fitting to release a monstrous creature on Halloween!

The Angel Hellblaster is a juvenile form of an Angel. Larger than a minnow but smaller than a mature Angel, juvenile angels can take many forms, but Karist Keepers try to goad certain Minnows into a Hellblaster form for the many tactical advantages the Hellblaster type offers.

First and foremost, the Cybel Blast ability sets these guys apart from the rest of the Karist forces. Using a powerful template blast, they can really hold their own.

Cybel Blast: Range 24", SHO 2+SB, PEN 4, DAM 1, Special: AoE (SB), Explosive (6+).

The full Angel Hellblaster profile and force builder elements can be found on the Force Lists section of the Maelstrom's Edge website.

Two distinct models are available in a single pack:

The Hellblaster sits on a 44mm base, the same as the Epirian Spider Drones and Hunter Warmechs. Here's what the Angel range looks like now:

If you have wanted to build an all-Angel army, we are just one model away from it being completely viable, and the Angel Hellblaster will be the Hammer of your force.

The Angel Hellblaster is available now in the Maelstrom's Edge webstore.

- by Iain Wilson

The range of plastic miniatures available for Maelstrom's Edge covers all of the units and options currently available in the game. There's a lot of fun to be had by taking those miniatures and exploring other options beyond the current limits of the game, whether to field with home-brew rules or just for one-off display pieces to flex the creative muscles. This week, we're looking at a model from the latter category, built just for fun, because it never hurts to have a bigger stick.

When the Faction Expansion Sprue was released, I took one look at the awesome cybel glaive on the sprue and couldn't resist the urge to create a double-ended version by sticking the head of one glaive onto the bottom end of the shaft of a second. The resultant, admittedly slightly over-the-top, marvel of blades and energy emitters needed a suitably awe-inspiring model to carry it, so I turned to the ever-imposing Kaddar Nova kit.



The head is taken from the Karist Trooper kit, with the front sanded down smooth.



Painting started out with a basecoat of Army Painter Dragon Red. From there, I built up shadows using thin, multiple layers of Army Painter Purple Tone, before higlighting the edges with white and then a final wash of Army Painter Red Tone over the top to mesh everything together.



The cloth parts were painted with Vallejo Heavy Brown, and then shaded with layers of Army Painter Strong Tone. Similarly, the black parts were painted with Vallejo Heavy Grey, highlighted with some Vallejo Neutral Grey and then shaded with Army Painter Dark Tone.



Metal parts started with some more Heavy Grey, and then a coat of P3 Pig Iron, and finally a wash with Dark Tone to give it some depth. Finally, the glaive blades were painted white and then worked up to the purple with layers of Purple Tone. The panel behind his head was given some purple light with a layer of Citadel Warlock Purple, drybrushed with a little Citadel Tentacle Pink and then a final drybrush of white.



The end result is a spiky, sinister-looking character who will probably wind up spawning yet another Karist force in my collection. I'm thinking of this guy as a 'Kaddar Militant' - a subsect of the Kaddar Priest class, who lean a little more towards brutal subjugation to get their way than is the norm for Karist forces. Stay tuned - there may well wind up being a rules card at some point in the not too distant future, tweaking the standard Kaddar Nova rules to allow for the double-ended Glaive and some revision to the normal unit selection matrix.

If this has inspired you to get creative with some plastic, you can pick up the Maelstrom's Edge terrain sprue from the webstore here. As always, feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

- by Iain Wilson

A little while ago I shared an Epirian bot army that I had been assembling, which you can find here if you missed it the first time. It didn't seem like the done thing to let all of those blasphemous machines hog the limelight, and so this week it's time for the pure and wholesome forces of the Karist Enclave to shine.



I wanted a Karist leader with a bit of presence - the sort of no-nonsense character who would stride about the battlefield secure in the rightness of his cause and confidence in his inevitable victory. So I took the Kaddar Nova kit and modified the legs slightly to give him a walking pose.



The conversion involved cutting some plastic away from the groin where the two leg pieces join, to bring the legs in for a more upright pose. One leg was angled slightly back by rotating at the waist joint, and the ankles were carefully twisted to straighten them out. The end result is a walking but slightly bow-legged pose, which helps to show the weight that the Nova is carrying around with that backpack!



The painting on this force is quite simple, as I wanted something quick and easy that I could expand on later as I add more models to the roster. The purple is an old Citadel metallic purple washed with Army Painter Dark Tone. The brown cloth sections painted with Vallejo Heavy Brown and washed with Army Painter Strong Tone form a nice contrast to the purple, and the weapons are painted in a no-nonsense metal scheme using P3 Pig Iron washed with Dark Tone.

While I was aiming for a fairly small, elite force this time around, I still needed a unit of Troopers to fill in the required Core slot. I decided to go for a 5-man unit, to help them stand out from the more compact specialist units I was going to include and to give help them last a little longer once they get in range of all those Epirian guns.



The Quintarch for this unit was based loosely on an early piece of Maelstrom's Edge artwork, with robes made from a leftover Kaddar Nova robe and some green stuff putty.



A unit of Tempest Elites provide some fire support, with their fearsome Hellstorm Energy Mortars.



For some extra firepower where it counts, I included a Reaper Cadre. This is a homebrew unit that I put together for an article a while back. They're basically elite troopers armed with a long rifle version of the Pulse Carbine. You can find the conversion article and a rules card here.



I obviously needed to include some angel units, and to keep them in line I also took along an Angel Keeper. He forms the HQ option for a second detachment.



The Keeper is a playtest unit offered up some time ago for those who wanted some extra angel-related shenanigans in their forces. The model is a conversion using parts from a few different kits, as there is no official model (yet!) for it - you can find the conversion tutorial and rules card here.



In the Keeper's charge are a unit of Minnows. These were converted to add some extra motion to their poses, by mixing up the pairing of the wing parts and filling in any resultant gaps with a little green stuff.



The Minnows' big brother rounds out the second detachment for now. I put together a model of a Mature Angel in its flight form a while ago, and so he had to go into this force. This model was built using the body from the Mature Angel kit, a tail made from green stuff and some wings from a demon model from the Reaper Bones range. You can find a walkthrough of the conversion here



The force all together:



This leaves me with a roster that looks something like this:

Detachment 1

Command: Kaddar Nova - 15 points

Core: Karist Troopers
- Ripper Grenade Launcher - 18 points

Hammer: Tempest Elites
- Hellstorm Energy Mortars - 25 points

Vanguard: Reaper Cadre
- 2 Pulse Lances - 15 points


Detachment 2

Command: Angel Keeper
- Ripper Grenades - 10 points

Core: Angel Minnow Pack - 10 points

Anvil: Mature Angel - 23 points

Total - 116 points.



If you would like to put together your own Karist strike force, you can pick up the various Maelstrom's Edge kits from the webstore here. As always, feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

The assembly guides on the Maelstrom's Edge website are missing the new units added by the Faction Expansion Sprue. Last week, we went over the assembly of the Epirian Suppression Team, and so this time around we'll look at the other unit created from the sprue, the Karist Praetorians.

Karist Praetorian Assembly Guide

General Notes

Polystyrene cement - only use superglue if you want to go insane! All of our models are designed to be assembled with polystyrene cement as it gives some time to re-pose while gluing, fuses the models together and prevents brittle joins like other glues do. Make sure you have polystyrene cement in your toolkit before you begin!

We want you to experiment! We've broken our models up into lots of parts and given a fair few spare parts so that you can push yourself out of your comfort zone, learn new skills and create some really unique models. We've tried to price things so that it won't break the bank if you make a mistake, so please cut stuff up and have some fun. Start simple with a slice here and a re-pose there, and watch your confidence and skills increase until you are a master modeler!

Basing - Always make sure you glue your model to its base with an eye on the arc markers on the sides of the base. The arc marker indents should be at the halfway point between the front and back of the model to show the front and back halves of the model when gaming. See the Maelstrom's Edge rulebook for more detailed notes on this.

Dry fit before gluing! - There are lots of pose options possible, but that means there is also the freedom to screw up and make some bad poses! Sticking the parts together and seeing how things look will usually lead to a model that is fairly static and repetitive. You should consider knee, hip, torso, and arm positions when gluing and ensure that you have a pose in mind before you start gluing things together. If in doubt or insecure about your talents in the posing area, we recommend you try to copy the poses from some of our studio models found here in the gallery.

Karist Praetorian Assembly Notes

Karist Praetorians are fairly straightforward to assemble, being just a modification of the basic Karist Trooper. Three models can be assembled using the following sprues:

Karist Trooper Sprue:


Faction Expansion Sprue

You will need the below parts from those sprue. We've used one rifle and one pistol just to show how they go together, but you could of course choose to use all rifles or all pistols when you assemble your own unit.

One design decision that might seem a little odd is the splitting of the legs from the lower torso/crotch piece. This had to be done because the upper leg armour is not possible to mould in injection moulded plastic without having to make some ugly tweaks to it that would have really reduced sharpness beyond what we were willing to tolerate. We decided to split the legs at the top instead, allowing ease of conversions and sustaining the crisp armour plates.

All three lower torsos (part F) are identical, as are all three torsos (G). Legs are paired with the same letter (eg; part M is both the left and right leg of the same pose). We recommend the first step in your Karist Trooper assembly should be sticking the legs on the lower torsos.

Add the loincloths next, as this is easiest before there are other parts to get in the way. There is a recess on the inside top of each loincloth that fits neatly over the groin armour. All three loincloths work with all three leg poses, but as usual it's a good idea to do a quick dry-fit before gluing to check that they look how you want them.

The most complex part of the build is the arm / weapon assembly. This is because three points need to be glued at the same time - the arms to the torso and the hands to the arms. If you are using polystyrene cement, you'll get a minute or two of re-posing time which can make this a lot easier. Arms are paired by code as well (eg; part C is both a left and right arm that go together). Mixing up your paired arms will mean some odd posing!

The shoulderpads (part A) are designed to be optional if you are so inclined - underarm detail is sculpted on the upper arms. We've not made any models without them though as we enjoy the distinctive profile the shoulderpads gives to the Karists. If you postion the arms so that the shoulders are just below the top of the armour, the shoulder pads will butt up neatly against the sides of the torso.

From the Karist Trooper sprue, Part K is the Karist Pulse Carbine. Part J is the Radwave Emitter and part L is the Grenade Launcher.

There is no Karist hand that holds the cybel blade neatly, although with a little conversion you can make the closed fist work. The easiest approach though is to glue the sword to the model's back, where it would presumably be held in place with a magnetic lock.

The cybel glaive does have a hand on the expansion sprue to hold it. You can use any of the right arms from the Karist Trooper sprue for this. Some of the rifle arms have a small wedge of wrist attached to angle the rifle correctly across the body. While not essential, it will look a little better if you cut this wedge off along the front edge of the forearm armour.

Once the hand is attached, you can glue the arm onto the torso, and then the glaive into the hand.

As with most models with poseable heads, we recommend building the whole model and then putting the head in place last of all.


For some more ideas for building or converting your models, check out the Karist Praetorian Spotlight article here.

You can pick up your Contractor and Expansion sprues from the Maelstrom's Edge webstore here. As always, feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.

One of the things we were most passionate about when we started working on Maelstrom’s Edge was making a new world. We love games where there are lots of stories and background material to get people excited about the context surrounding the game itself - where are the battles taking place, who is fighting and why is there a conflict between them?

As part of the initial universe design, our lead writers Stephen Gaskell and Tomas L. Martin wrote a number of short stories exploring different parts of the setting. These first insights into the Maelstrom’s Edge universe were released in our first short story collection, ‘Tales from the Edge: Emergence’. In addition, during the runup to the Kickstarter for the Maelstrom’s Edge game, we approached a number of other professional writers to provide their take on our world, including exploring new factions, planets and ideas. Now, a second anthology, ‘Tales from the Edge: Escalation’ has been released, containing a wealth of fantastic new short fiction from award-winning and bestselling authors such as Alastair Reynolds, Aliette de Bodard, Jeff Carlson and Jaine Fenn.



From the beginning we also knew we wanted to launch with a set of stories telling the backstory of our first set, the Battle for Zycanthus, and so following on from those initial short stories, Tomas and Stephen wrote the fiction that would become our first two novels, Faith and Sacrifice, set on the planet of Zycanthus. Zycanthus is a frontier planet a few light years from the Maelstrom’s Edge, halfway through terraforming by the Epirian Foundation and their robots. In the boxed game, there is a conflict between Foundation and the shadowy religious group known as the Karist Enclave, who wish to convert the people of Zycanthus to their beliefs about ascension in the presence of the Maelstrom. To set up the battles that people were going to be playing with their miniatures, our team of writers set out to tell the story of what happened on Zycanthus just before the events portrayed in the box set, when the Karist Enclave first revealed itself and the fighting began.

Initially, the task of telling this story was split into two – Stephen Gaskell wrote a series of stories set from the viewpoint of Zafah, one of the Karist missionaries who lands in secret on Zycanthus, whilst Tomas L. Martin wrote the opposing view of the Epirian Foundation, where a backwater Sheriff called Kyle Wynn uncovers the Enclave’s secret invasion. We wanted to publish the books ourselves to have the freedom of getting it to our players in whatever format worked best, but printing a book of that size is challenging and would have meant needing to charge more than we felt was appropriate, so we made the decision to split the story into two smaller novels, Maelstrom's Edge: Faith and Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice. You can find them in the Kindle store right now.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter Five of the first book, Maelstrom's Edge: Faith, where a pair of Epirian lawmakers encounter the Karist Enclave, including a monstrous alien Angel, for the first time.

Kyle Wynn is an Epirian Sheriff keeping the peace in the small desert town of Venusai on the planet of Zycanthus. When he and his partner Randall get reports of terraforming robots disappearing in the desert, they head out to investigate. When they find a set of footprints and strange markings in the sand, they follow them, never expecting the dangers they are heading into...



Maelstrom's Edge: Faith, Excerpt from Chapter Five

Wynn and Randall tracked the footprints for several hours. They sent the drones a few klicks ahead of the prowler, set them crisscrossing the trail with infrared cameras. The evening had really started to set in now, and only the dull purple glow of the Maelstrom in the east gave any illumination. It cast cruel shadows in its sickly half-light.

“I hate that thing,” Randall said, staring up at the bruised sky. “Just staring down at us like that, so you never forget that it’s coming.”

Wynn wondered if the Maelstrom was all that was coming to Zycanthus. When he had been a prospector, he’d heard stories from worlds close to the Edge. Before their destruction, there had been reports of strange creatures attacking isolated outposts, shadowy coups, riots and public executions. These stories seemed to get more and more intense and confused as the Maelstrom got closer, ending in tales of destruction that Wynn had always written off as a product of the panic that set in as the planets fell apart.

Now he wasn’t so sure. The footprints continued to march across the sand for klicks, rarely breaking out of their steady pattern. Wynn thought he could spot at least five different tracks, but he also occasionally saw the imprint of something larger, but always indistinct, as if the thing making the impression was hardly touching the ground at all.

They were nearly at the location of the third terraforming drudge when the signal of one of the patrol drones winked out.

“Huh?” Randall tapped a monitor, on which the drone’s sensor feeds had been replaced by static. “Where did it go?”

Wynn said nothing. He was watching the other patrol drone’s feed. It was hovering above a ravine. In the rocks at the bottom, he could see five figures, clad in frost-white armour. Heavy carbines dangled from their shoulders, and canisters filled with purple energy were strung around their waists. They were the most dangerous looking people Wynn had ever seen on Zycanthus, and they were staring straight back at him.

“Randall,” he said, “We have company!”

Wynn flicked a switch and sent the video feed to Randall’s station. Hidden in a hollow, the group of armoured figures stood, checking heavy looking weapons. From the looks of it, they were military, but Wynn didn’t recognise their markings, two scythe like points either side of a circle, deep black against their white armour.

“Who the hell?” Randall said. “Those are not a bunch of kids. When exactly did we get invaded?”

“Apparently a few days ago,” Wynn murmured, studying the footage. The soldiers held themselves bolt upright, with the discipline of many years of training. Their armour was wickedly curved at the edges, and their helmets had only one eye, with a trio of small lenses where the other eye should have been. “They can see the probe,” Wynn said. “Why aren’t they shooting it down?”

Something flashed across the drone’s camera, blocking the view to the soldiers. Something big. Wynn took in a dark blue body, with a gaping maw above glassy, alien eyes. Below the tortured face, the structure faded away into an amorphous mass of tendrils. Wynn and Randall had one more look at its face before a lithe limb snaked out and snapped into the drone, and the video feed cut out.

“Call for backup,” Wynn said, staring at the screen. “Call for backup right fucking now."

“I’m trying!” Randall said. “There’s no satellite coverage out here, I can’t get a signal.”

“Well, keep trying!” Wynn said. He grimaced as he imagined what that creature would do to the prowler. The vehicle was tough, but it definitely hadn’t been designed to be alien-proof.

“What the fuck was that thing, Kyle?” Randall reached over and locked the prowler’s door. “What did they bring here?”

“I think they called them Angels,” Wynn said slowly, thinking back to the stories he’d heard out in the black. “I heard some spacers talk once about how they show up as the Maelstrom approaches. How the hell did it get here?”

“Sheriff,” Randall said. “How far away was that drone?”

Wynn looked up. In the gloom of the Maelstrom-tinged sky, he could see in the distance the raised silhouette of a pair of recessed cliffs, below which a ravine fell down to the dry riverbed.

“They’re less than a mile away,” Wynn said.

“Who are these people?” Randall said. “And what the hell do they want with us?”

Wynn killed the engine, and reached for his rifle.

“I don’t know,” he said, turning the headlamps and the lights of the cab off. “But I think if we don’t kill them, we’re not going to make it back to Venusai alive.”

“Wait,” Randall said. “Sheriff, what are you doing? Why aren’t we getting out of here?”

Wynn turned and pushed his deputy against his seat, his face close.

“You saw that thing, Randall. That Angel, or whatever you want to call it. Whatever it was, that thing was flying. Do you really think we’d get far?” Randall fell silent. Wynn reached over the seats and grabbed Randall’s shotgun and ammo pack, and shoved them into his deputy’s arms.

“The course they’ve taken,” Wynn told him. “It leads right back to Venusai.”

“What?” Randall’s eyes bulged wildly. Wynn had seen men taken by panic before during the hairier moments of prospecting new worlds. They couldn’t afford for that to happen today. Not if they wanted to get out of here alive.

“Now,” Wynn said as calmly as he could manage, “I don’t intend for that to happen. I intend to stop them before they can go home to Rania, Maggie and the rest of the town. So I’m going to get out of this truck as quietly as I can, move to a defendable position, and take them down. I can’t do it by myself, so I need you to calm down and move with me. Can you do that?” Randall thrashed about for a second, his eyes darting to every possible escape route. Then his body seemed to relax, and he nodded.

“Ok,” he said. “All right. I’m not going to let whoever they are get to Maggie.”

“Then let’s go before they get here,” Wynn said. He pulled his rifle onto his shoulder and cracked open the driver’s door of the prowler.”

“Sheriff, wait.”

Wynn’s heart sunk. If he couldn’t get Randall to overcome his fear, they’d be sitting ducks in the cab of the prowler. But to his surprise, his deputy wasn't cowering. He was clambering over the back seat into the control centre jabbing a finger at the controls. He passed Wynn a headset with a bud microphone curling down from its strap, and then put one on himself.

“We need all the help we can get,” Randall said. “I’m activating all the remaining drones. Even the unarmed ones can provide a distraction.”

“You can’t stay here,” Wynn insisted, pulling on the headset. “You saw what that thing did to the terraformers, we’d be carved apart.”

“I’ll stay long enough to get all the drones moving,” Randall said, stabbing at the control panel, “and then I’ll take the remote headset and move to higher ground. But it’ll take a few minutes to get them all activated, so you should get somewhere you have good line of sight, and I’ll join you later.”

Wynn hesitated for a moment, then nodded and clambered out of the cab. Randall’s plan was about the best they could hope for, and it would do neither of them any good to waste any more time.

He dropped the last few rungs of the ladder to the ground, and set off on a crouching run towards a series of escarpments leading up to a rocky bluff to the right of the prowler. As he left the vehicle he heard the whine of several drones starting up, and a couple sprung up from the rack and began buzzing about the sky, as he pulled himself up onto a prominent cluster of boulders. Wynn dropped to a prone position and unfolded the stock of his rifle, resting it against the edge of the rock, looking down at the prowler some twenty metres away. His rifle, an Ednotech maglock weapon, had been with him since his prospecting days, although he’d upgraded pretty much every component over the years. He cocked the rifle, pulled the butt in against his shoulder and settled his eye at the scope. Just like old times.

For several minutes, nothing happened, except the occasional flash of movement as a drone left the prowler’s rack. Wynn began to hope that maybe the intruders had not heard the prowler, had assumed the drones were on their own and carried on walking. But then he saw a flash of off-white armour plating at the foot of the valley and all thought of getting out without a fight vanished.

“I see them,” Wynn told Randall through the headset. "At the foot of the valley. Try and keep the drones hidden until I can get a shot off.”

“Gotcha,” Randall replied. “Three more to launch.”

Wynn tapped the microphone in reply, and settled into his position. He watched the soldiers advance, using the cover of the boulders that lined the valley, moving in pairs. There was no hope of Wynn getting all of them in one go, they were too well trained for that. His first shot had to work.

One of the soldiers peeled off the main group and crouched, aiming his weapon at the prowler. It was a larger gun than the others, with a belt that fed canisters of what looked like cybel energy into the magazine. Cybel energy, harvested from the cybel network that linked the stars, was incredibly potent and powered many of the ships and industries of the galaxy, but the stuff was so volatile that only the most foolhardy or brave would use it as a weapon.

The soldier barked a command at the other three and fired a round off. The ball of purple-white energy looped up in the air like a mortar shot, splashing into the ground with a sound like thunder. A crater exploded into being in the sand beside the prowler, rocking the vehicle and spraying it with debris but not harming it. With his range sighted, the soldier shifted position for another shot. He would not get another try. Wynn squeezed the trigger of his rifle, sending a bullet straight down the line of the valley. The shot splintered the soldier’s helmet just below the three lenses that covered the soldier’s eye, spraying most of his head onto the rock behind him. The soldier collapsed to the ground, lifeless.

The others span and aimed their carbines in Wynn’s direction, trying to work out where the shot had come from. Wynn reached forward slowly and capped the lens of his scope, hoping to stay hidden for just a bit longer.

“Ok,” he said quietly into the mic, “They know I’m here. Go crazy with the drones, and then get to cover.”

“You got it,” Randall said. A phalanx of patrol drones rose from the stones, pinging laser shots at the soldiers, sending them diving for cover. While they were distracted, Wynn risked another shot, but the soldier in his sights moved at the last moment and the bullet impacted harmlessly into the sand.

One of the drones found its mark, burning a dark hole in the back of one of the soldiers’ armour, sending him sprawling. The remaining intruders sprayed shots at the drones, sending two robots crashing to earth. Then the soldiers hunkered down out of sight and called out to someone behind them.

A tortured sound filled the air, like the squeal of metal on metal. The desert breeze carried the smell of ozone, reminding him of the workshop’s smell when Rania used her plasma cutter. Then the monster emerged from behind the shadow of the escarpment.

The creature was massive, as tall as the prowler. Its features were squid-like in some ways, and bat-like in others, but attempting to compare it to an animal could only vaguely approximate its strangeness. Its body was an elongated smooth surface, with a number of limbs stabbing out from it. Two of these furled back against its body, thin membranes hanging between them as wings. More indistinct limbs propelled the beast along the ground, while at least four more tendrils dangled in front of it, their tips armed with sharp spikes or pseudopods. It was a deep dark purple, almost but not quite black, that seemed to be eaten up by the Maelstrom-tinged shadows of the escarpment.

Behind the creature was a much smaller figure, a crooked, thin man in a hooded robe, carrying an awkwardly large satchel across his back. He had a large staff held in both hands, a large flask of purple cybel energy at its base. The man used the other end to stroke the skin of the creature, and prod it forward towards the prowler. The creature opened the maw at the centre of its body and screamed that tortured metallic sound, like two spaceships colliding.

“Skyfire,” Randall swore. “Are you seeing this thing, Kyle? Is that really there?”

“An Angel,” Wynn muttered. “It’s real all right. You better get out of there.”

“Are you kidding me?” Randall said. “Against that thing? I think I’d rather take my chances in the prowler. Let’s see how it likes a bit of the Foundation’s finest.”

Randall’s surviving drones rejoined their formation, hovering in one place to let the last few launch from the prowler. Then he sent the five robots flying at the new appearance, buzzing the creature with the lasers and light machine guns mounted on their wings and cupolas.

The Angel screeched and flinched at the impacts on its body. Through the rifle’s scope Wynn could see most of the bullets passing harmlessly through the creature’s body, the holes they made closing behind the slug’s passing like it hadn’t even been hit, as if the drones were firing through water. Then with a sudden movement, the Angel leapt forward, its wings unfolding and tendrils leaping out from its body, further than their original length appeared to allow, the creature’s flesh changing in mid-action. Within seconds the drones had been smashed to the floor, strewing mechanical parts across the sand.

“Well,” Randall said in a breathless voice, “Storms. That could have gone a bit better.”

###

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from the first novel in the Maelstrom’s Edge universe. You can read more in Maelstrom's Edge: Faith by Tomas L. Martin and Stephen Gaskell - on Kindle now!