The Devouring Void by Danie Ware

Author:Danie Ware
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2023-07-21T14:02:54+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danie Ware is the author of the novel The Triumph of Saint Katherine, the novellas The Bloodied Rose, Wreck and Ruin, The Rose in Anger and several short stories all featuring the Sisters of Battle. She lives in Carshalton, South London, with her son and cat, and has long-held interests in role-playing, re-enactment, vinyl art toys and personal fitness.

An extract from Leviathan.

The tacticarium had been carved from burial chambers – chiselled from catacombs that snaked beneath the city. Auspex shrines and cogitators now obscured most of the walls, but in a few places fragments of sacred art were still visible. It mostly showed tree-roots, snaking down from the world’s surface and encasing its core, cradling it in a nest of tendrils. But the more recent additions depicted the Emperor, His sword trailing leaves rather than flames and His helmet sporting a crown of knotted branches.

The chamber, once a site of prayer and sacrifice, was now full of quiet industry and the cold flicker of viewscreens. Helots and comms officers were hunched over runeboards, dressed in smartly pressed uniforms rather than priestly robes. Mind-scrubbed servitors scuttled spider-like over logic engines, their faces grey and toothless and their limbs replaced with bionics.

Lieutenant Varus Castamon of the Ultramarines First Company was aware of the chamber’s history, but his attention was focused entirely on the present. He watched parchment spooling from one of the servitors, then carefully tore some off, processing the information with inhuman speed. The symbols conjured images of warships in his mind, behemoths knifing through the void towards the outermost reaches of the system, weapons batteries coming online. He thought of his brothers, tracing their fingers over strips of vellum fixed to their armour, reciting blood-sworn oaths. The thought quickened his pulse and he wished, more than anything, that he was with them on this mission.

Across from him, Brother-Librarian Zuthis Abarim stood at the centre of the room, watching images projected from a domed holo-table, while a third Ultramarine, Brother-Sergeant Tanaro, was standing nearer to Castamon. Scattered around the rest of the room, dwarfed by the three Ultramarines, were dozens of humans – senior Militarum officers and their aides, all wearing starched regimental finery. Further back, scurrying through the shadows, making adjustments to the stacks of logic engines, were red-robed adepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

‘How long?’ asked Castamon, dropping the parchment.

‘The strike force is approaching the edge of the system now, my lord,’ said a helot, staring at a viewscreen. ‘The deep-void returns are faint, but we can just about place the ships.’ He pointed out a cluster of faint dots hanging over the holo-table. ‘They’ll shortly be passing the moons of Krassus.’

Castamon gestured for the Militarum officers to come closer. They obeyed his silent command, some trying to catch his eye but most trying to avoid it. He tried to imagine how they saw him. As a monster, probably. He was huge, of course, like any Space Marine, three heads taller than a man. His skin was dark

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