Contents

Cover

The Fields of Abundance – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Fields of Abundance

David Annandale

The scythe came down on Iaspis. Its defenders had expected it, but they had not, Typhon thought, anticipated its reality. No world could prepare for the Death Guard.

Iaspis had believed itself ready. It had known the XIV Legion were heading its way. Resource-rich, loyal to the False Emperor, on the direct path of Mortarion’s sweep through the galaxy, it had foreseen invasion and planned to withstand it. The world had possessed good defences: strings of gun platforms in orbit, strong walls around its major cities and an army of millions, though it was not quite strategically important enough to rate any protection from the loyalist Legions.

Against the Death Guard, those defences were meaningless. The Terminus Est had swept the gun platforms from the heavens, sending them planetward as a hail of flaming wreckage. The fire that streaked the Iaspan skies served as the opening fanfare of the war, the announcement of the destruction to come. Dark contrails followed the fire, as the vessel unleashed a great rain of drop pods and transports.

Then the reaping of the scythe had truly begun.

A week after Typhon’s battleship entered the Iaspis System, the planet’s agony had entered its terminal phase. Impressive as Iaspis’ industrial base was, it had not diminished the gleam of the city spires or the limpid clarity of its atmosphere. Massive, sustained, widespread rad and chem bombardments changed that. The world’s forests burned, and so did its seas, awash with uncontrolled promethium spills. Ash and smoke turned the skies black, and the air roiled, thick with poison.

Amidst a storm where the wind blew hard, cutting through an oily-brown miasma, Typhon led the attack on the capital city of Polita. Basilisk artillery barrages had thrown down the walls and phalanxes of Death Guard legionaries fanned out along the main boulevards, supported by Spartan Land Raiders and rumbling tank formations. Typhon had no intention of capturing the city. He had come to flatten it.

Flatten. Raze. Erase. Those were the orders from Mortarion, and the First Captain had passed them on to his Great Company. The civilisation of Iaspis would cease to be, another blight of loyalism extinguished. The Death Guard would scrape the resources the fleet needed from the planet, and leave a blackened cinder behind, useless to any force that might have otherwise thought to reclaim it.

Flatten. Raze. Erase.

Yes, the process was well underway. Typhon would see to it that what had been here before his arrival would be gone forever.

And yet…

He could not ignore the inner voices that told him there was more, that the possibilities presented to him were deeper and more complex, much richer than simple annihilation.

He experienced that richness now. The squads he led were moving through an industrial sector where it bordered a residential zone. Iaspan defenders retreated before them but kept up a steady hail of defensive fire. Lightly armoured conscripts in the uncounted thousands supported divisions of the Solar Auxilia, grim figures in their dark carapaces. Their greater protection and fierce determination did little to stop the wave of Death Guard, their volleys simply increasing the damage dealt to the buildings around them. Typhon marched with flames on either side, roaring high and spreading. The manufactory was on the top of a squat plateau, and as he strode forward, hand flamer incinerating the slow and the foolhardy, he recognised the structures to the right as the high, column-like pumps of a waste reclamation plant.

He ordered a tank salvo, and a few moments later shells slammed into the plant. The pumps collapsed, felled giants dropping into their funeral pyres. The walls of the huge containment pond shattered.

Typhon hurried forward to the edge of the plateau to observe the effect of his work. A massive wave of dark, foetid water thundered down the slope. It drowned enemy troops and tumbled armoured groundcars and tanks. It hit the bottom of the plateau and rushed, five metres high, into the residential sector. The impact of the wave toppled hab-towers, and the flood reached far into the streets. The stench, thick and cloying, cut through the sting of the smoke.

Typhon paused to contemplate the scene. He had created destruction, well and good, and more of Polita had been turned into a ruin. But the flooded ruin was not the same as the burning one. The sector was now unusable, and deadly to those within it. But there would be a slower destruction that followed, a death by degrees, and a suffering multiplied by contagion and infection. With the great wave of waste water, he had ended the identity of the sector as it had been, but something else was beginning. He had done more than scour the terrain. The water, poisoned, filthy, was his tool of creation. Disease would spring from its passing, a great flowering of corrosive life. He was destroying Iaspis, as Mortarion had commanded, but he was also transforming it. The two acts were not incompatible.

Not for the first time, he gazed at what he had done, and knew it to be important.

A few hours later, he saw a different kind of destruction, and the difference prompted him to another kind of action, another kind of transformation.

His squads completed their murderous arc of advance, and hooked up with other elements of the Great Company as they mopped up their designated combat zones, completing a phase of the mission that had lasted two days and nights without pause. The enemy forces broken, the rest of Iaspis open to final annihilation, Typhon called a halt for the remainder of the night. The rest would allow his forces to organise the terminal sweeps.

One of the last squads yet to rejoin the larger formation was that led by Sergeant Nevak. By this time, almost all of Polita was rubble. Nevak laid siege to a psyker quarantine. He and his men took the building apart with brutal, systematic efficiency. Tongues of fire shot out of windows, the flickering sign of the inferno their flamers unleashed in the halls.

Alone, Typhon watched Nevak’s work from the top of a rubble heap across the way from the quarantine. Within the hour, nothing remained of the austere rockcrete building. Nevak filled its halls with phosphex, incinerated whoever had survived the hissing yellow-green death, and then levelled the structure.

Typhon could not fault Nevak’s tactics. The sergeant achieved precisely what had been commanded. He completed his task, leaving nothing alive, nothing standing, and no future for the area he had been assigned.

The success of his mission was beyond reproach. It was precise. Typhon smiled at the word. It felt right. The scythe of Nevak’s attack shone silver, spotless. It left the ground dead and clean.

Clean.

Click here to buy The Fields of Abundance.

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Fields of Abundance © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. The Fields of Abundance, 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: 978-1-80407-338-4

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

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). 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.

* 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.