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Blood Harvest – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Blood Harvest

Richard Swan

Nobody had wanted to be assigned to Zone Tertius. They were all going to die anyway – of that, Mukta Lim was certain. But there was dying with the faint hope of miraculous rescue, and there was…

Well. There was Tertius.

North Farms Collective Zone Tertius, to be precise. A swath of land on the agri world of Raphaela about fifty miles south of its capital city, Elinor Vektra. It was an enormous plain of geneered crops, tangled with overhead maintenance grids and huge agri-monotaskers. Any trace of its natural verdancy had long been spoiled by ranks of polluted irrigation ditches, frequent plagues of mutated vermin, and vast clouds of smoke that billowed from its processing plants and crop refineries. Tertius was famous for the Raphaelan mudfruit, a high-calorie yield which, when mulched and dried, formed a perfect ration block for the many Astra Militarum units in the sector. Now it was about to become infamous for being the first part of the Vektra Approaches to weather the oncoming horde.

They weren’t given much information as conscripts – weren’t given much of anything, except a green cap with an orange stripe on it and a lasgun several days from obsolescence – but they knew that the attempts to stymie the advance in orbit and on the equatorial salt flats had failed. They knew that they were going to have to fight, knew that they were being depended on to fight. That was information enough.

Mukta would have liked to have been in the reserve – the real reserve – somewhere a thousand miles away. But he was here, in the 2119th Glorious Defenders of Raphaela (Conscript) (Reserve) Brigade. Reserved in name only.

Tertius was the new front line.

The faint hope of miraculous rescue had gone at about the same time they had laid eyes on their enemy. At first, Mukta had thought it to be a sandstorm. But it was not a sandstorm. Nor was it a tsunami, as many of his fellow conscripts had opined.

It was a wave, but not of water. It was a wave of horrors. Uncountable thousands of them. ‘Bioforms’, a piece of propaganda had named them – ghastly mutated xenos who thought of nothing except consumption. ‘Terror-nids’, others called them, though no one was quite sure if that was right. They would devour everything in their path and then they would depart aboard their hellish space vessels, leaving Raphaela nothing more than a ball of barren dirt.

Mukta wasn’t even sure he had been conscious at the time the creatures smashed into their line. Flashes of memory came to him: the smell of the aliens, the sound of them – a sound that was physical force, a stampede of madness. He remembered blood and screams and something, many things, crashing into him and his fellow conscripts. It felt as if it had happened days before, not hours. Emperor, it was still happening.

It had all been – was still – too much to bear. His mind had closed off. He had fled. And now he was hiding in the large five-seater cabin of a bright yellow agri-monotasker. Already – already – most of the brigade was dead. The soil, artificially rich and carefully tended by servitors who knew nothing except the urgent need to maintain that fertility, was cake-soft and thick with the blood and viscera of his fellow conscripts. The screams of the dying were cut short by packs of aliens who swarmed them like rats. Abandoned orange-stripe caps were everywhere, as the people who had donned them were consumed, or fled, or were shot by their own commissars and then consumed – and then the commissars were consumed.

Mukta was not an emotional man – a dour forty-year-old Administratum clerk, grey-skinned, grey-minded, running out the clock on his life – but now he wept helplessly as the sheer horror of what was happening suffused every part of him.

‘Emperor’s mercy,’ someone whimpered as they ducked into the cabin. She jumped when she saw him. ‘Throne! Are you… alive?’

Mukta looked up into the eyes of a woman, probably in her thirties. She had the perennially burnt pale skin and the rangy, muscular body of a labourer. Her combat jacket was unbuttoned. She was coated head to toe in red, human blood.

‘I think I might be,’ Mukta said. He had to say it again over the endless zap-pop of lasguns and the thunderous explosions of artillery shells detonating in the distance. It was difficult to tell the noises apart – a million million hoofs and claws pounding at the earth made a sound like a never-ending thunderstorm.

‘This was supposed to be a light encounter.’

‘I think they might have lied to us.’

‘No shit!’

Creatures rampaged past in an endless torrent. It was like watching water thunder out of a sabotaged dam. The line which they had manned – two parallel trenches and some hastily erected flakboard – had been swept away. Now there was nothing except turned earth, bodies, and perhaps several hundred defenders in little pockets firing hopelessly until their powercells ran dry. Even the air was filled with them. They screeched and keened like Raphaelan clawbats, except these bats had guns that fired acid and living bullets. The entire mass of them moved inexorably towards the capital.

‘I think… I think this is it,’ Mukta said, holding the grips of his lasgun with sweaty, trembling fingers. He hadn’t fired it yet. At first it was because they had only been given two powercells and he’d wanted to husband his ammunition; then, when faced with the incomprehensibly enormous volume of enemies, shooting had just seemed so utterly pointless.

‘What’s that?’ the woman asked reflexively as a whining shriek filled the air. But this was not the whining shriek of organic matter, the sound of air passing over alien vocal folds. This was the mechanical shriek of an engine moments from failure. They turned to see the boxy shape of a Valkyrie troop carrier, its green-and-brown camouflage markings spattered with monster blood and its hull scorched and rent in a dozen places, plough a deep, explosive furrow into the soft earth a hundred yards from their position. Smoke and debris and flames burst into the sky. The cockpit tore free and cartwheeled off, the airframe twisted and buckled, and the landing ramp opened and sheared away. Corpses and materiel spilled out the back, littering the battlefield.

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Cover illustration by John Michelbach.

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