Contents

Cover

Heloth — Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Heloth

L J Goulding

Hive ship. Bio-wreckage. Ruined mother of monsters, and the twitching birth-sac of insidious, alien horror.

#70443 Heloth was all of these things, and more besides.

The stench of her burning choked the jungle – flakes of sticky ash drifted in a nauseating rain, settling amidst the mud and gore slicks of the area around the crash site. Slain out in the void, she had come tumbling like a clutch of falling stars to smite Miral Prime with her immense, smouldering bulk, spread now across an area the size of a small city. Little of the original landscape remained beneath her, and the fire was still spreading.

Even in death, it seemed that the hive ships of the tyranids might visit destruction upon their prey-worlds.

Thus had Veteran-Brother Menele’s thoughts been darkened as Second Company pulled back to their Rhino transports. With the horrendous losses they had suffered, it had not been an orderly withdrawal so much as a rout, though his admittedly wounded pride in the Chapter would never allow him to admit it.

On the bouncing, shuddering floor of the Rhino’s troop compartment, Captain Agaitas was dying. His armoured midriff had been torn open, the blood loss catastrophic. Attended by the Apothecary, he writhed and groaned in agony, cursing the xenos and rolling his blinded eyes in a face raw with fresh burns.

‘They… have us…’ he gurgled. ‘The Coffin… will… fall…’

Menele looked to the Apothecary, who shook his head grimly. He was not a member of Agaitas’s command squad, and so Menele couldn’t recall his name. It hardly seemed to matter, now.

Brother Vasilis crouched against the far wall, clutching the ragged company standard tightly in his gauntlets. The fabric still steamed where it had been splattered with bio-acid from the attack that had killed Kostis and Gallagar, and Agaitas’s last command had been for Vasilis to raise it up again from the mud. ‘The noble horsemen of Sotha do not lie at the feet of abominations,’ the captain had said, right before one such abomination ended him. It was Menele who had ordered the retreat.

Like all of his company-brethren, he knew every stitch of the banner as though it were his own flesh: Conabos, the dark horse, rampant upon a chequered mosaic field and overlaid with the golden scythe of Second Company. None of them would see it lost to the tyranid onslaught, here on this unworthy and barbaric world. The Scythes of the Emperor had already lost too much.

The Rhino’s internal comm-link chimed. ‘Two more large hostiles, coming around to outflank us from the south-east. Moving to evade.’

Menele glanced back through the transport’s viewing aperture. Their driver was pushing the engine to its maximum load, the blazing trees and undergrowth rendered as a fiery blur surrounding the column as they sped from the crash site. Behind them, Third Squad’s Rhino was aflame, the hull’s gold and sable Chapter livery blistering away in the heat, and their driver was struggling to keep pace.

Further back still, the Scythes’ pursuer was gaining.

It towered over the jungle, its great forelimbs thundering through the burning trees with each heavy step, toppling and shattering their trunks in cascades of bright embers. The titanic beast let out a roar loud enough to rattle the troop compartment around Menele even over the shriek of the protesting engines, before spraying another wild flurry of bio-plasma bolts into the Rhino convoy.

Each impact was a burst of green-white fire that flashed like summer lightning. Most tore harmlessly into the ground, showering scorched earth and sickly glowing fragments of wood, but he saw one strike another transport in the left frontal track housing. It was only a glancing hit, but something sheared off within the mechanism and sent the vehicle slewing madly to crash into a protruding spar of bio-debris from the fallen Heloth, some five metres thick. The Rhino’s momentum lifted its rear end clear off the ground before hammering back down, the engine stalled out.

Menele cursed, and slammed the aperture slot closed before turning back to his brothers. ‘That’s Ninth Squad. They struck out hard.’

He looked down at Agaitas, whose delirious curses had given way to what looked like murmured prayers – his slack, bloody lips were moving, though barely any sound seemed to escape them.

Click here to buy Heloth.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2017
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan.

Heloth © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Heloth, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-549-4

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.