Rhythmic sound pulsed through Amelia’s mind, the sharp beeping of a machine slowly growing louder and louder until it was all she could hear. Still she floated in an empty void, but ripples were beginning to form in the darkness surrounding her, and she began to hear another sound, a deep organic thumping synchronised perfectly with the mechanical noise. Consciousness trickled back into her soul, and she realised she could hear her own heartbeat as her soul settled back within her body. She was surrounded on all sides by what looked like rippling water, as the arcane machinery that still constricted her slowly began to withdraw. Feeling began to return to her extremities as the toxins that had flooded her bloodstream, blocking her nervous system, began to dissolve of their own accord and she felt, rather than heard, the horrific grating of metal on bone as a spinal shunt withdrew itself from her neck and slipped back into her metal hood. The waters around her grew brighter and brighter until it seemed she was enveloped in a sterile white glow. In time, her perspective reoriented itself and what had been all-encompassing became replaced with the familiar feeling of closed eyelids, glowing with light. Slowly, wincing at the bright light that lay before her, Amelia opened her eyes. Swirling eddies of shape and colour reformed themselves as her brain caught up to what she was seeing. A surgical light, suspended beneath a curved ceiling of corrugated iron, and a small terminal which beeped incessantly, displaying the rise and fall of her own heartrate.

Amelia slowly turned her head, taking in the billet still laden with the personal belongings of its former occupants, half made bunks and neatly pressed uniforms above wooden footlockers. She was alone, save for the hastily retreating form of a stormtrooper, who stepped out the door to shout for a medicae. Time was still a little uncertain and she could not tell how long she waited until a figure in a bloodstained rubber apron worn over a brown uniform stood above her, shining a small bright light into her eyes and commenting more to himself than to her. He satisfied his examination and exchanged a brief word with the stormtrooper, who hovered at a respectable distance, before once again looking to Amelia.

‘Mamzel, are you unharmed? Medically, there’s nothing wrong with you, apart from superficial burns on both your arms, but you collapsed in the battle and have spent the last six hours in a comatose state.’

The man looked kindly, his training giving him the universal bedside manner common in all medical professionals, but Amelia could feel that he was distracted. Her psychic powers were beginning to come back, in irregular peaks and troughs as the last inhibitors left her mind, and the Medicae’s mind was wandering, constantly drifting to something outside the building that she couldn’t quite grasp yet.

‘Psychic feedback from the battle,’ she lied, ‘I’m uninjured, just needed a few hours to recover.’

One of the first things she had learned was how to shut out the emotions of others, long walks along corridors that teemed with Terra’s worst convicts having taught her to block out their depraved thoughts; she had suffered not because of any outside force but because she had lost control and the technology in her hood had shut her down in response.

The Medica nodded, his carefully maintained expression hiding his disbelief, before speaking again.

‘With your permission, Mamzel, I would see to the wounded.’

Amelia nodded, almost automatically, before turning to the second figure in the room, the stormtrooper who watched the medicae with rapt attention. A horrific process of elimination played out in Amelia’s mind and she realised he must be Corporal Al’Said, the last remaining Stormtrooper under her command. In a thin, raspy, voice she spoke to him.

‘What happened while I was out Corporal?’

He snapped to attention, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder as if he was on parade, before he spoke in a voice distorted by his masked helmet.

‘Ma’am. Following your kill on the marine the Cazadores encircled the headquarters building. The men were reluctant to advance further, but I was able to persuade Colonel Forjaz to secure the building whilst I led the assault with the Arbites. The top two stories are as you would expect from a regimental headquarters, and were entirely deserted. The building extends deeper underground, at least five levels though I would recommend seismic imaging to be sure. The first three were dedicated to what appeared to be a medical facility, manned by armed staff. The last two levels appeared to be some manner of temple. I made sure the men’s eyes didn’t linger, but I have taken the liberty of quarantining the PDF who accompanied us.’

Amelia struggled to lean upright, managing to prop herself up on a pillow so she could see Al’Said without turning her head.

‘You made the right call. I’ll have someone from Headquarters come and asses them.’

‘Thank you, Ma’am. We also encountered another marine down there. His armour must have been faulty, as we could hear the fan on his backpack through the walls. I took the backpack from one of the melta gunners and rigged it to explode.’

He paused, like a child caught before a vandalised wall.

‘It’s not an Ad-Mech sanctioned manoeuvre, but it’s common knowledge amongst the guard. We blew in the door and tossed the melta tanks through, then hosed down the room with more melta fire. The marine seems to have been partially immobilised by the heat of the original blast, then his armour began to collapse in on itself under the pressure. The room appeared to be the centre of the temple, but I’m afraid it’s too badly burned to be of any use. The surviving Cazadores have been withdrawn to a five-hundred-meter perimeter, and the Ziggurat is awaiting your inspection.’

Amelia breathed a sigh of relief; they had beaten the odds and won, despite another space marine. With that sensation came a flow of feeling into her limbs, and she swung her legs down to the floor. As the sheet fell from her, she realised with a shock that she was shirtless and felt the first embers of cold fury before her eyes were drawn to a pile of bloodied rags in the corner. Her shirt, soaked through by Sergeant Flavius’ blood, lay in the corner of the room whilst her stormcoat and breastplate, damp from a hasty wash, were spread out on one of the bunks, along with a jacket in the familiar brown wool of the Cazadores. Feeling perhaps a little self-conscious about the stormtrooper watching her change, Amelia put on the coarse jacket and buckled up her armour. The jacket felt rough against her skin, and was several sizes too big for her but the enlarged collar fit around her bulky augmetics, and the wool was soft against her skin. Her breastplate did not fit as well over this far looser shirt, and the material bunched up uncomfortably, but there was a comforting familiarity to the steel cuirass, a welcome reminder of who she really was. She could not remember anything about her time unconscious, save for a sense of extreme helplessness and a lack of self.

Amelia paused before a mirror on the inside of one of the lockers, as expected she looked harrowing with sunken eyes and unruly charred hair, before stepping out into the cold light of day. The Raptor’s Nest was in shambles, no building had been left intact and more than a third were little more than heaps of charred rubble. Teams of Cazadores, their brown uniforms stained a grey-beige by the mixture of ash and dust that filled the air and clawed at their lungs, scrambled over the wreckage looking to all the world like ghouls risen from an ashen grave. They worked in teams hauling bodies out of the rubble, carting the dead and the living along the camp’s narrow avenues on green stretchers that were slick with blood. The bodies were piled in heaps along the side of the road, one pile for the loyalists at which the Regimental Chaplin stood, issuing a sermon to the dead, whilst another pile held the bodies of the enemy, the sons and daughters of Nova Iberia’s elite piled in a disorderly heap attended to by none. A third pile was devoted to the bodies that were too badly burned to identify; smaller than the rest, it sat in between the two and the bodies within would all need to be destroyed, loyalist and renegade alike.

The wounded were brought on stretchers to a triage centre hastily built on a hard standing with a roof but no walls. Hundreds of men lay on stretchers, writhing in agony, attended by a handful of men directed by the same medicae who had woken Amelia. He wandered amidst the wounded and dying issuing instructions to a team of assistants, a mixture of pressed soldiers and actual medical staff, deciding the fate of these men with a nod of his head or a brief word. Two groups of men were regularly sent immediately away from the triage centre. The first were walking wounded, or those whose wounds were debilitating but stable, they were brought to the landing zone to be loaded into the back of the waiting helicopters and flown to a civilian hospital fifty miles away. The remaining group were led into one of the most intact structures on camp, a simple billet inside which these men would be left to die, their injuries too severe, or complicated, to be dealt with by the already overstretched staff. Amelia tuned away from the sick smell of decay that filled the makeshift hospital, moving once again towards the Ziggurat, its immense flanks largely intact but scarred by the melta explosions that had occurred at its base.

She passed more soldiers searching the rubble, groups of walking wounded and small groups of men sitting aimlessly amidst the ruins awaiting the order to return. She saw a group of diggers shout to each other as they pulled a moving figure out of the rubble; a girl in her late teens, dressed in the synthskin of the death cults, was ignominiously hauled out of the ruins by a team of soldiers who immediately turned on her, kicking and punching her with a furious vengeance. Amelia could see her face through the web of feet; a beautiful girl with long raven black hair, she alternated between loud screams and despairing sobs before disappearing beneath the men’s boots. An officer, hearing the commotion, shoved the crowd aside before taking in the sight of the girl, whose pleading expression was replaced by cold fury as the stared up at him. Almost contemptuously, he drew his sidearm and shot her over and over firing four rounds into her still twitching body before throwing the men’s shovels back into their hands, wordlessly ordering them back to work. Once the sight would have horrified Amelia, but she had been numbed both chemically by her inhibitor and spiritually by the sheer sense of despair that filled the Raptor’s Nest. This was not what she thought a victory would feel like.

Almost in the shadow of the Ziggurat she found Colonel Forjaz, standing behind a forward perimeter of Cazadores who gazed fearfully at the imposing structure. He was dressed in his shirtsleeves, and Amelia connected the dots between his state of relative undress and the officer’s coat she now wore. Like his men, he was coated in a thin layer of ash and dust but unlike them he still seemed to be keeping his composure. It was a shell, a false front he was putting on for his regiment, the officers that surrounded him and, Amelia realised with a start, for her. He turned at her approach but did not smile, indeed his earlier eagerness seemed to have been reforged by the battle into steely determination. Amelia spoke first, out of respect for all the Colonel had accomplished.

‘Colonel Forjaz, I am pleased to see you are unharmed.’

‘As am I to see you have recovered, Mamzel. I only wish I could say the same about the 43rd.’

He was struggling to keep sorrow from his voice and Amelia was hesitant to ask her question but she had to know the cost.

‘What is the final casualty count.’

Forjaz sighted and, for the first time since she had met him, truly looked his age. Gone was the exuberant man who had used every favour he had to bring them here.

‘We don’t know the final casualty count yet, Mamzel. We’re still losing men in the hospital, and there are others buried under rubble. At our best estimate, we’ve lost eighty five percent of the regiment, most of that was in the fighting to advance from our beachhead, though we know at least a hundred and thirty men went down with their helicopters. We also lost at least two hundred and fifty to that astartes, though the bodies are too mangled for an exact count. For aircrew we have clearer numbers, sixty-four percent of our helicopters were downed, most as they were flying away, whilst one plane was shot down by a man-portable seeker missile.’

‘I also have forty men held in “quarantine” by your Corporal here, these men risked their lives to support his push into the ziggurat.’

Amelia could see that the limbo these men were held in wounded the Colonel worse than any of the other losses because their fate was entirely out of his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Colonel, but that was a temple to dark gods and those men were in its heart. It’s possible something they may have seen down there has corrupted them. It is said there are shapes and sigils that can twist the mind, even a glimpse of one can prove fatal. They will be assessed and, if it is safe, returned to your command.’

‘I understand the containment protocols, Mamzel. That doesn’t make this any harder to swallow. I just have to ask…’

He trailed of, clearly nervous about what he was about to say.

‘Was it worth it?’

Amelia tuned to the Ziggurat, this ancient monolith that stretched deep beneath the surface of the ground, indeed the plateau itself may have been constructed around it.

‘That is what I intend to find out.’

With every step she took the Ziggurat filled more of her view until the sky itself was blocked out. The building was made of great grey blocks of stone, pressed together seamlessly without any sign of mortar or cement. Once she stepped through the archway Corporal Al’Said and her squad of Arbites illuminated their torches, sending thin beams of light darting throughout the top two floors. These floors were nothing special, the mirror image of headquarters across the imperium, the only significant ornamentation being a portrait of the planetary governor flanked by two long lists, written in black letters on wood panels. The list on the Governor’s left detailed the long history of the station's commanders, dating back a hundred years, though other lists had doubtless been moved into storage. The second list was far more intriguing, it detailed the victors of the Warriors Trial as well as the date on which they had won. Every stolen memory Amelia had surrounding the warrior’s trial suggested that it was a team competition, and yet the list was of individual names. Each name had a small engraving of a closed eye next to it save for the current champion who had no engraving at all. The inscription read ‘674.M40, Trial Champion Maria Benevente’. Amelia recognised the name immediately, it seems the girl who had persuaded her father to go to war with the Imperium had been right to do so, she had clearly won her little test and moved on to whatever the closed eye represented. It was interesting information, but only because the name was familiar, and Amelia quickly moved on.

Al’Said led her to a stairwell that ran down the core of the Ziggurat. Made of ancient stone blocks it was clearly as old as the temple itself, with wiring pinned along its walls by ancient-looking metal staples. Occasionally they passed the bodies of uniformed soldiers, the bodies of Noble soldiers and Cazadores alike left where they fell to preserve the integrity of the investigation. The next three floors seemed to be a medical facility of some sorts, bodies in white coats lay amidst well-lit halls atop wipe-clean plastic sheeting. Most of the rooms on this floor were unused whilst the medical wing seemed to have been built far later than the temple itself; equipment was placed with little regard to the layout of the room, and several doorways were blocked by storage cupboards or arcane equipment. One room contained a suite of sophisticated sensors and scanners, ranging from simple heart rate monitors to full-body immersion tanks host to cloudy green liquid inside which clusters of wiring drifted in a circular pattern.

There was a cogitator in one corner of the room. Strangely it had two keyboards, one for human hands and another far larger. The terminal glowed with the thin light of green text on a black background and it sprung to life in Amelia’s hands, imperceptible lines of machine-cant scrolling down the screen before settling into a file directory. Inside the terminal Amelia found medical information on thousands of subjects dating as far back as 229.M36. Every conceivable piece of information about the human body was stored in each entry; fully accurate brain scans, average heart rate at resting and active, blood type, allergies, even whether the subject was fertile. The computer was placed in front of an open arch and Amelia could see stacks and stacks of cogitators each used to store this immense quantity of information, they had even spilled out into the adjacent rooms. This temple predated the plateau, but the cogitators and their records only went back around four thousand years.

Maria Benevente’s details were listed, Amelia could now learn more about the woman than she knew herself, but what was most useful was a small addendum to her document. ‘Subject achieved victory in the trial and was transferred to the primary site.’ There was an attached video, it showed a quartet of cultists engaged in furious combat watched by a red-armoured marine. The girls were carving into each other with their knives but gradually the balanced melee shifted in favour of Maria. She drove her knives into her sisters and cousins without any sign of remorse, indeed she seemed to be revelling in the slaughter. Eventually she alone was left, collapsed in a bloody heap amidst her dead family. Two white-coated figures gently lifted her onto a gurney, under the watchful stare of the Astartes.

As Amelia stepped below the third sublevel, she began to feel the chittering of the warp pressing against her head. She reached up to her hood and flicked a switch on its side, flooding her mind with an icy cold stab of energy that numbed her emotions, and reduced the pressure on her mind. In this fugue state she wandered the halls, passing room after room of bones stacked atop each other, and another room in which the bodies of three death cult assassins were slowly decomposing. This floor was a mausoleum, and a monument to dark gods, and only the cold filling her head prevented Amelia from retching at the sight. She still turned, and began to make her way back up to the medical floors. Though she could not see beneath his mask, she could tell Corporal Al’Said was confused by her behaviour.

‘Ma’am, there are another three mausoleum rooms before we get to the body of the marine.’

Amelia turned to look at her expectant followers and she could see that they were each as unnerved by this place as her, but felt duty-bound to press on, likely because she was with them.

‘I am not interested in the specifics of whatever blasphemous rituals these heretics were conducting. There is no need for us to risk corruption just to gain information that will taint us. The answers are upstairs in the data they left behind.’

‘There is nothing down here but death.’