Kalarion
Serial Ratist
I'll try to dig up the relevant passages when I get off work later today.
As promised. This is from The Devastation of Baal, second book of the Dante trilogy, by Guy Haley. Plot synopsis: Several years into the Gathering Storm era, Hive Fleet Leviathan invades Baal, home planet of the Blood Angels. Dante, Chapter Master and all-around Methuselah (at the time of this book's printing he was the oldest living Space Marine of the current day) badass, leads the defense.
Guy Haley said:...there was Baal, home world of the Blood Angels, lying directly in the swarm's path.
This was not accidental.
The sages of the Imperium thought the hive mind a non-sentient intelligence. They believed...
The Imperial scholars were wrong. The hive mind knew. The hive mind thought, it felt, it hated and it desired. Its emotions were unutterably alien, cocktails of feeling not even the subtle aeldari might decipher. Its emotions were oceans to the puddles of a man's feelings. They were inconceivable to humanity, for they were too big to perceive.
The hive mind looked out of its innumerable eyes towards the dull red star of Baal. It apprehended that this was the hive of the warriors that had hurt it so grievously, who had burned its feeding grounds and scattered its fleets. It hated the red prey, and it coveted them. Tasting their exotic genomes it had seen potential for new and terrible war beasts.
And so it drew its plans, and it set in motion its trillion trillion bodies towards the consumption of the creatures in red metal, so that their secrets might be plundered, and reemployed in the sating of the hive mind's endless hunger. This was deliberate, considered, and done in malice.
The hive mind was aware, and it desired vengeance.
Unfortunately I don't see how this can be retconned outside of a blatant canon change ala Haley's "second edition" Dark Imperium (where BL just straight changes the book), since Guy Haley explicitly used third-person omniscient for this passage (so no "well this is how it was perceived"). It was the one thing that left a bad taste in my mouth from the trilogy. Other than that it was a fun read though; I like Haley's Dante, and the two scenes at the end of this book (Dante talking to Sanguinius in a vision during a Sus-an-induced coma, and Dante's meeting with Guilliman) were enjoyably sappy.
Lyric Suite if you want good bedtime reading that tries hard to take the setting seriously, may I once again recommend giving Guy Haley a try? Absolutely everything he's written is at worst enjoyable and at its best, exceptional (for BL).