Broken, The - The Lost Cathedral: With something approaching relief, the members of the Imperial expedition remained alive and unharmed following the space hulk's translation into the Immaterium. The hulk's Geller Field was obviously strong enough to keep the denizens of the Warp at bay, for no Daemon manifested itself, ready to tear them apart. The translation itself had been mercifully quick, though it had changed the mission's parameters.With the space hulk clearly controlled by an unknown and hostile faction, the Ultramarines needed to seize whatever served as a control centre for the hulk and guide the Fury back to Imperial space. This meant venturing even deeper into the hulk's interior. Even as he gave his orders, Marneus Calgar could not shake the feeling that his forces were being herded somewhere, like animals to the slaughter, even though 5th Company had yet to meet the unseen enemy.The further the Imperials advanced, the more Calgar's experienced eyes could discern the tell-tale signs of conflict. Some walls were pock-marked with small holes, clearly the impact and detonation craters of Bolter weapons. In some instances the party even found spent bolt-casings littering the ground. Had the Viridian Consuls and the Adeptus Mechanicus fought each other? And if the answer was "yes", why?Another concern was that the Imperial column stretched out though the hulk's depths for the better part of nearly two Terran miles. This left it clearly vulnerable to attack. Marneus Calgar consulted his downloaded map to find any area within the hulk large enough to present decent lines of fire should the worst unfold.The map indicated that if the Imperials ventured further along the corridors they were bound to emerge in a great hall of some kind, a suitable location to rest and reevaluate their present condition. Calgar decided to grant the Terminators who had been taking point for the Imperial party some rest and ordered Captain Galenus to designate one of his squads to carry out reconnaissance of the chamber ahead.What the scouting party discovered took them by surprise, for whilst the temperature had been steadily rising before, the newly-discovered chamber was ice-cold. Some micro-climatic quirk had even produced a steady fall of snow. At the heart of the chamber, the reconnaissance squad found a structure, obviously man-made, although it lay partially in ruin. Thick columns and walls of carved stone were still standing, an unbroken Gothic arch allowing entrance to the great edifice.With no enemy found within, the squad gave the all-clear before venturing deeper into the chamber. Their next discovery was more unsettling. Some four hundred Terran yards from the structure, there were eight human bodies, all standing locked in ice. They were the size of Space Marines and still wearing their power armour.Beneath the ice, the Chapter badge could still be seen: an Ultima icon like the one worn by the Ultramarines, bisected by a sword and flanked by two wings of flame, on a green background -- the heraldry of the Viridian Consuls Chapter.Faced with these new revelations, Marneus Calgar, Inquisitor Drake, Magos Fane and their respective retinues quickly gathered at the building's entrance. Magos Fane's scans indicated that the rock used to erect the strange building within the chamber had not been mined in the Ultima Segmentum, as its molecular composition was similar to the rock found at four quarries within the Segmentum Obscurus.The closest match was an old mine in the Dartaris System, not far from the Cadian Gate. He added that while the rock itself was several billion years old it must have been mined only at some point in the previous five millennia.The building had obviously been desecrated, even though the remnants of an Imperial Aquila were discernible on the arch's front. The keen eyes of Chaplain Murtorius were the first to note that the form of the Aquila was not the standard Imperial icon, but the Imperialis symbol beloved of the Adeptus Astartes, an Aquila centred on a skull, though the skull had been blasted to nothing.In the rubble gathered at the base of the great arch, Chaplain Murtorius further discovered the remains of Imperial statues: an angelic wing and a bolter-fragment whose votive scroll read Imperator Fidelis. Not a phrase a Heretic would tolerate on his ship.Understanding started to dawn upon Calgar and his officers. The structures within the large chamber were the ruins of the Viridian Consuls' place of worship, the heart of their Chapter cult, a true Imperial cathedral taken with them during their Penitent Crusade into the Eye of Terror.The hall they were standing in must have once been the cargo hold of one of their battle barges. The eight dead Space Marines supported this theory, but there was no indication of what had killed them. Nor was there any evidence of who had desecrated their sacred space.