Eva Eisensturm History

Eva Eisensturm had been a model, if unsung battle sister of the Imperial Fists Fifth Company for thirty years after her induction therein. She had served admirably and excelled in the fields of guncraft upon the scarcely countable battlefields her Devastator suqadron had been called to rain ordnance upon. While she always displayed competence in every destructive instrument of the armory, it was with relish that she took to energy weapons - favoring plasma cannons and multi-meltas when left to her own discretion. Off the battlefields and away from firing ranges and tactical drills, she honed her intellect to an edge finer than her combat blade, studying dutifully the Codex Astartes and more esoteric methods of assault and defense.
Eisensturm first earned distinction during the Ulayoth 97c Campaign, wherein the Fifth Company was dispatched to respond to a high-priority Adeptus Mechanicus distress call. Like many worlds forsaken to the void between patrolled and charted Imperial sectors, the threats on the barren, sand-choked world had only been forshadowed by the skeletal, cyclopean ruins rising from the dust, towards a sapphire-sunned sky. A Mechanicus Explorator dispatch had been conducting xenoarchaeological research on the dead civilization, to determine if the world was merely forgotten or lost through misfortune, or if it indeed had been a tomb for the eldritch characters depicted in countless corrupted data-stacks and atomic shadows.
It would be a more pleasant galaxy if the dead remained so, and the bio-technical horrors that rose from the hydrocarbon pools and shifting mountains of sand provided all the evidence the Explorators needed to die with less ignorance.
It was after the initial bombardment and subsequent campaign that, early in the sortie the designated Force Commander had been killed gruesomely in an overwhelming ambush. Soon after attempts were made to rally, Eva deduced that their enemy could somehow intercept and decode the astartes' vox communications. Around this fact did she, and the field-promoted battle-brother Leoniv Karskov, orchestrate the counter-attacks and continuation of the campaign. It was with her keen guidance that her Devastator squad and seconded Tactical Squads sundered key infrastructure in feint-and-strike operations that crippled the xenos return and left them vulnerable to their ultimate purging - upon that world, at least.
The second incident of note in Eva's career was the defense of Al'Qassam's Terminus, a shrine world that was the final conquest of the Kadesh Crusade, and final resting place of the Lord Solar Al'Qassam. The Fifth had been dispatched to break a Dark Eldar invasion and end their harvest of the billions of pilgrimaging faithful. The Fifth was sent knowing that the war ahead would be punishing, between the capricious and deviant natures of the piratical Eldar and their own limited numbers. The ensuing theater proved even more taxing due to the unexpectedly disciplined cunning employed by the xenos.
Cunning that Eisensturm turned against them, by turning a grand cathedral of the Emperor's glory into a blood-drenched deathtrap. Eisensturm had anticipated civillian movements to the temple-turned-bastion, and under the scrutiny of both the Dark Eldar and the Fifth's command staff, directed her squad to move into defensive positions to catch the inevitable raiding detachment off guard and vulnerable.
Her plan had worked too well, and drew overwhelming xenos reinforcements - that her team had rended into burning wreckage, singing bodies, and flowing alien blood, knowing that even as the cost against her own squad mounted, they bought time and opportunity for the remainder of the company. At the end of the siege, she was discovered at the main gates of the cathedral atop a mountain of brass shells and spent plasma flasks, Dark Eldar toxins pushing her towards death - but with the civillians behind the welded doors unmolested.
The chapter declared her a hero, but she remains skeptical of the appelation and suspect of her own judgement. The bones of her honorably fallen comrades and the memories she attaches to them urge her towards a redemption only she deems necessary. It was under such furtive auspices that she volunteered for seconding to the Deathwatch.