latest additions to cloudburst

Watch Station Shade
The spinward border of the Drumnos Sector was once the border of the Imperium of Man.  No longer, however, does that bustling hub of travel and warfare constitute the limit of Mankind’s growth.  The Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors are now linked by well-mapped Warp Routes between them that cross the Drumnos Ribbon, with some crossings so close that enterprising Free Captains can even fly between them with no Navigator, albeit gingerly.  That said, there is still a band of space over eight lightyears wide between them at the thinnest; a brief journey by Navigated ship, but still out of Imperial control.
Some members of the Adeptus Terra have asked why the Cloudburst Sector has not expanded towards the Drumnos Sector, and why it focuses exclusively on expanding into the increasingly challenging-to-Navigate Cloudburst Circuit.  Surely, traveling towards such a wealthy and well-traveled region of space as Drumnos would make passage easier.  The Deathwatch has their reasons, however, chief among them being that the region is remarkably hostile to human life.  It brims and roils with xenos life, intense radioactivity, Warp storms, asteroid clusters that float about at near-absolute zero, and above all: has very few habitable worlds.  The Cloudburst Circuit, however, positively teems with the treasures of worlds, lost human colonies, and chances to establish fresh outposts of Imperial Might.
There are some Imperial servants who tread the Drumnos Ribbon.  The Deathwatch has established a mighty watch Station here, where hundreds of Serfs and a single Kill-team of Marines stand vigil.  Watch Station Shade hangs at the L3 Lagrange point of a brown dwarf that orbits a blue supergiant, at the midpoint of the Ribbon’s rimward depth, where it can hide in the clashing radiation of the two bodies.  As with all Watch Stations of the Tri-Sector, it specializes; in Shade’s case, it houses a cogitator log of all vessels sighted crossing the Drumnos Ribbon outside the official route controlled by the Adeptus Arbites.


Watch Point Balier
The dark and broken remains of a world loom high in the sight of Watch Point Balier.  This facility is a repurposed archaeotech station, placed high in orbit above the Cloudburst Circuit world of Voalta.  The star Hastern, which Voalta orbits, once hosted a strange xenos race, one that went extinct some four thousand years before the Fall of the Eldar.  By that time, humanity had begun to colonize the region, and had erected a small number of self-sustaining societies in what is now the Cloudburst Circuit.  The ancient Terran government was not aware that Voalta was inhabited at that time.  If they had ever learned that fact, they learned too late.
What information the current Deathwatch has gleaned about the Voaltan people is chilling.  Naturally psychic, the Voaltans reincarnated their souls in the Warp after dying, and were reborn into new bodies, much like the Aeldari did pre-Fall.  Unlike the Aeldari, the Voaltans were the product of natural evolution, and thus were created without the immaculate psychic control that all Eldar had innately.  The Voaltan people were not even remotely humanoid, and in fact resembled Terran jellyfish more than any primate or analog.
When the Voaltans achieved spaceflight, they dared not subject themselves to the Warp, and avoided learning any of the secrets of FTL travel.  They expanded to fill every niche of their home system, before a philosophical shift among their leading caste brought about their rapid extinction.
Fragmentary records, pieced together by the Ordo Dialogous at some great risk to their sanity, bespeak a cultural revelation that drove the Voaltans mad.  Horrifying wraiths stalk their worlds and orbitals now, the pitiful and grasping remains of a once-proud species.  These wraiths are all that linger from the Voaltan folk, who turned on themselves in catastrophic war.  The Ordo Dialogous has surmised that the leadership of the species were turned upon their followers in utter certainty that the Warp was a trap, created by their enemies, to ‘dilute’ their souls, and unmake their civilization by spreading it out.  Internecine war erupted among the Voaltans, and within four hundred years, their psychic weaponry had shriven their selves down to the horrid monstrosities that haunt their civilization’s grave.
The Deathwatch learned of this when a Missionary ship of the Rondlee Rogue Trader dynasty stumbled upon the world.  Believing at first that the Voaltans may have stolen human technology, Malim Rondlee demanded the Sisters in his retinue learn of the xenos’ demise.  When his followers uncovered the truth instead, the startled Rondlee scion promptly turned all of their materials over the Deathwatch, who have kept a weather eye out for any sign of the monstrous Voaltans’ return.
Watch Point Balier is large and well-stocked, but not by the Deathwatch.  Among the findings of the Rogue Trader and his Sisters of Dialogue, and indeed what first made Rondlee think that the Voaltans had stolen human technology, was a space station of undeniably human creation, orbiting the former homeworld of the Voaltans.  Shining dully in the pale light of Hastern, the station was boarded carefully by Rondlee’s men, who were struck dumb with awe at their findings.  The station was packed to the brim with advanced sensory technology; from mnemonic recall-machines to telescopes, to auspexes and Warp-scanning machines potent enough to detect passing asteroids or Space Hulks.  Rondlee was sorely tempted to claim the invaluable prize for his own, but instead reluctantly turned it over to the Deathwatch, in exchange for a treaty for his house to be granted ownership of the entire star system if ever the Deathwatch manages to purge it somehow.
Now, Watch Point Balier hangs high above the cursed world, keeping eternal vigil.  Its archaeotechnological systems do not require maintenance from the crew aside from occasional refueling, and at least one Battle-Brother dwells aboard at all times.  However, it has too little internal space to house more than a single Kill-team, and there is rarely one in residence.  It is smaller than the ships that come to resupply it.

Watch Point Cezare
Sitting in the darkness of an uninhabited, planetless star system in the Thimble Subsector is a dark and terrible tool of the Ordo Xenos.  This Watch Point is nothing less than a vivisection gallery.  Under its eighty-meter steel hull are a variety of prison cells and stasis field chambers.  These are graded by inescapability, rated from ‘Infrared’ (simple cages) to ‘ultraviolet’ (impermeable by all known science).  Over all of these hang gravitic suspension devices, carefully trapping each cell with a variety of purgative fluids, just in case the occupants should overcome security.
Hundreds of task-bonded servitors, their guns and flamers arrayed against the halls, stand perfectly still outside them, as much for tertiary security as intimidation value.  Cezare is not as secure as a proper Watch Station or Watch Fortress, but it doesn’t need to be.  The vast majority of the prisoners taken by the Deathwatch, Ordo Xenos, or sympathetic Rogue Traders in the Tri-Sector are human, and thus the remit of the Ordo Hereticus.  Those that are not are usually taken to the sub-terranean prisons of the Drumnos Sector, or to the Convent on Celeste.  Aliens captured alive are usually taken to the Watch Fortress Dascomb prisons, and there they meet their end, in the antiseptic chambers of the great bastion of the Deathwatch.  However, some prisoners are important enough but not rare enough to secure within the Fortress proper.  On some occasions, the servants of the Emperor will capture His enemies in large enough numbers that storing them in the same place is unsafe, unwise, or unnecessary.  For those instances, Watch Point Cezare was crafted by the Adeptus Mechanicus, in exchange for permission to use it if the cells have vacancies.  The hundreds of prisoners that have passed through this dark and horrible orb of metal and surgery have never emerged, and have included nearly every race and esoteric entity of the xenos forms in the greater Tri-Sector.
The satellite is relatively large for a simple Watch Point, but it has to be.  The environmental habitation systems for the specimens upon the station are diverse, and take up a high percentage of the interior space.  Its external defenses are significant, and include a broad plasma weapon arrangement that can, in an emergency, discharge into the primary reactor, instantly flash-boiling the contents of the Watch Point.


•	The Restored Armament [Storm Wardens]) Many of the Traitor Warbands that assail the Imperium are led by Chaos Space Marines, and most of those are former Loyalists that turned their coat.  While some of the First Founding Traitor Legions have means of replenishing their gene-seed, Renegades from later Foundings generally do not.  Thus, many of the smaller Chaos Warbands of the galaxy are little better than Warp-tainted pirates and thieves.  This weapon was recovered from one such warband by the Storm Warden Techmarine Warren o’Donnliervie, and upon bringing it to Watch Fortress Dascomb, it was subjected to several consecutive months of purgation, to free its Machine Spirits from the taint of the Warp.  After its final consecration, it was added to the stores of the Armory Cuprum in 754.M41.  It is a Bolt Pistol of the highest reliability, and its Machine Spirits seem to thirst for the blood of Chaos-tainted enemies.  Storm Warden Techmarines speak proudly of it, and its seeming desire to avenge its desecration by Traitors.
•	The Emperor’s Vision [Black Templars] The Crusading Brothers of the vast Black Templars Chapter are, of course, quite diverse, as their missions take them across the span of the Imperium and beyond.  As a result, many of the Deathwatch Brothers are former Black Templars, simply because of their huge recruitment pool.  This weapon was a favored tool of the Black Templar Brother Khass, who served for eight years on Watch Fortress Shade in the 800s of M41.  Khass was a meditative but zealous warrior, who honed his craft obsessively in the firing and sparring chambers of that austere stealth platform.  When he took to the field, this finely-crafted bolter was his constant companion.  When he was recalled to his Chapter for a Crusade against the splinters of Hive Fleet Behemoth, he left the bolter behind, hoping his future Brothers could benefit from its astounding precision.
•	Landscorcher [Crimson Fists]) This weapon is among those in the Deathwatch designed for a specific purpose, and abandoned afterward.  This is hardly unique, of course, being the origin of many of the Imperium’s weapons; the Ordinatii Majoris and Land Raider Helios among them.  This specific weapon was created by the Crimson Fists artificer Brother Rajoy, and is one of seven designed for the sole function of eradicating Orkyforms.  The system of algal and fungal growths that distinguish Orkoid growth in an environment can produce Orks and their bioforms for millennia after their arrival, even depleting soil; they are a menace that must be opposed for human habitation to be safe.  This weapon uses costly and noxious chemicals added to the fuel mixture to penetrate the soils of an Orkyformed area, destroying the algal pods below the surface.  The Ordo Xenos holds the weapon in especially high reverence now, given the rising tide of greenskins in the Cloudburst Circuit and the Rampart Subsector.

•	The Scion’s Knife [Black Templars]) The Black Templars are a rare Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes; their relations with the Adeptus Ministorum and Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus are closer than most.  This is largely a result of the Templars slowly adopting many of the religious traditions of the times, rather than their founding intent; the Templars predate the adoption of the Imperial Cult by a thousand years.  This weapon’s history lies in those ancient ties.  It was forged in great haste by a Black Templars Techmarine with aid from a crafter of the Ministorum, to cut through the unnaturally resistant hide of a daemonhost, at the height of the purgation of Vaxilor Hive, over eight thousand years ago.  How the weapon fell into Deathwatch hands is unclear, although the Templars are aware of it, and have not yet requested its return.

•	Silvermantle [Black Templars]) The Black Templars excel at the detection and neutralization of witches.  Over the eleven grinding millennia of their existence, the Chapter has grown by leaps and bounds, and their equipment specialization has allowed them to pursue their tasks with zeal.  This armor is the preferred raiment of the Templars in the Deathwatch of the Tri-Sector when the time comes to hunt witches, human or otherwise.  It is layered in alternating plates of ceramite, silver, and adamantine, and outfitted with extra osmotic gill packs in case the witch summons poison or water to drive off pursuers.  SIlvermantle was created by a Black Templar Tech-brother seconded to the Inquisition in the Cloudburst Conclave, and bequeathed his armor to the Deathwatch after his death.  Hexagrammatic wards turn aside witchcraft-fueled spells, while its hefty plate is proof against nearly all small arms.
•	The Faithful Son’s Hauberk [Blood Angels]) Sanguinary Priests are functionaries of their Chapter, as well as being warrior-scholars and healers.  The Sanguinary Priesthood safeguards the lineage of Sanguinius, and impress upon their brothers the utter need of the Imperium’s eternal vigil against the forces of the Heretic.  This armor was created specifically for the Sanguinary Priests in their role as the Apothecaries of the Chapter.  It is a finely-artificed suit of Mk VII Aquila armor, and has an auspex, a Narthecium, and an expanded Combat Webbing system mounted upon it directly, as well as additional laminators to better-light areas where emergency surgeries and transfusions are needed on the battlefield.  It was crafted by a Blood Angels Techmarine named Arvendroma, one hundred years after the foundation of the Watch Fortress Dascomb following the Second Glasian Migration.  Arvendroma left the armor on Watch Fortress Dascomb itself in the new Armory Cuprum, knowing any Sanguinary Priests who followed in his footsteps could benefit from it.

Keeper Rengris of the Angels Vermillion
“Exterminatus is meant to be irrevocable.  There are no second chances.  Nor should there be; the Glasians are not inclined to pity nor mercy.”

Born on the planet Corinal to a family of Imperial Navy enlisted sailors, Rengris seemed destined for greatness even in his youth.  Excelling at every field of survival study or martial technique to which he applied himself, Rengris was a natural choice for the Angels Vermillion Initiate protocol.  Surviving the brutal, bloody Initiation, Rengris received his implants and became a Space Marine at the age of only seventeen.
His first several decades of time in the Angels Vermillion were unremarkable beyond his natural talent for microgravity combat.  As soon as he was elevated to Sergeant in the Eighth Company, however, his leadership talent and exceptional grasp of 3D maneuvering became clear, and he quickly transferred to the Thunderhawk wing of the Chapter Fleet.
There he stayed for many years more, quickly coming to rival in skill pilots of far longer tenure.  He worked his way into the ranks of the Shipmasters of the Chapter’s Fourth Company, and eventually became second in command of the Marine contingent of the Chapter’s Strike Cruiser fleet.
At this point, the Deathwatch called the Chapter to provide an expert in identifying and sinking alien ships to serve.  Rengris was the natural choice, and he flew to the nearest Watch Fortress to be initiated.  Shortly thereafter, the Deathwatch supreme command on Talasa Prime transferred him to Watch Fortress Dascomb, where he has served for the past seventeen years.
Rengris was quickly drawn to the Keepers, and entered into their ranks after a brief but thorough screening by High Keeper Elkop.  Putting his mastery of ships, microgravity tactics, and alien combat to use, Elkop assigned Rengris to command the ships of the Dascomb fleet when they receive assignments to engage in rapid transport of Killteams to war fronts against the Glasians and Orks that infest the Sector.

Although Keeper Rengris is not the longest-serving of the Keepers of Cloudburst’s Deathwatch contingent, he is the one trusted to range farthest afield.  Like many Keepers, he is trained in the art of secrecy and stealth.  However, he does not preside over dark, shadowy vaults of alien relics in the heart of a fortress; rather, he is responsible for the dispatch and use of Exterminatus weapons should the need arise.  The Dascomb vaults are hardly the ancient lock of horrors that some older Fortresses are, of course, but like all Deathwatch installations of the right size, it does possess an Exterminatus weapon to be used if a world falls beyond salvation.
Specifically, Watch Fortress Dascomb contains an antimatter lattice weapon, one capable of producing eighty-five kilograms of antiprotons.  If it is activated, and its two-user authentication system confirmed, it ejects the antimatter from its magnetic containment torus, causing instant annihilation of the surrounding continent.

Dascomb has never had to use it, but if the coming Glasian Migration costs the Imperium a world, it will be Rengris that kills it.  He does not enjoy that responsibility, but he understands it well, and will carry it out mercilessly.

Champion Keilro of the Black Templars
“If the Emperor did not want us to put an end to witchcraft, he would not have sent me to slay xeno sorcerers.”

Stoic, courageous, and seething with hate, Champion Keilro is a member of the Black Templars to the core.  He has served with the Deathwatch for nine years, and has taken on the role of Emperor’s Champion for two of them.  Again and again, he has thrown himself into battle against psychic aliens, from Weirdboyz to Aeldari pirates, seeking a glorious end in battle against the Emperor’s foes.
To the more Puritanical Inquisitors, it is not difficult to detect a dangerous level of presumptuousness in Keilro’s beliefs.  Keilro behaves as if it is he, and he alone, who is qualified to judge who is and is not using psychic power in the service of the Emperor; he tolerates Sanctioned Psykers with only the barest edge of restraint.  His resentment and distrust of psychics has only risen in the service of the Deathwatch, as he has been exposed to forces wielding the Warp in ways he had not even known possible.
However, his drive to slay the witch is tempered by two things: his service to the psychic Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Cassandra Lerica, and his morbid certainty that he will die in battle against the Emperor’s enemies soon.  Superstitious for a Space Marine, Kielro is troubled by frequent and worsening dreams that wrack his mind in sleep.  When, for whatever reason, he is unable to use his Catalepsean Node to avert the need for sleep, he is often struck by dreams that smack of prophecy.  Most Black Templars would find these visions to either be the influence of some unseen enemy, or perhaps visions from the Emperor.  Keilro does not; he believes them to be whispers of doom that his mind is puzzling through when he is at rest.
When Brother Keilro came to the Deathwatch, it was as a specific request for an experienced Crusader who knew well the dangers of battling psychic aliens at close range, to join the Vigil against the imminent arrival of the Seventh Glasian Migration.  At the time, he was a Veteran Brother of the Shoaler Crusade Fleet, campaigning its way through the Ork-infested regions to coreward of the Drumnos Sector.  He leaped at the chance to earn honor and glory for his Chapter in the Deathwatch, and readily accepted a position within it.
At first, he fit in well with the elite brotherhood, but tensions slowly rose the longer he stayed.  After brutal battles against a tribe of humans that had been corrupted by the presence of an alien artifact on an outpost in the Cloudburst Circuit, he became embittered.  His loyalty never flagged, but Keilro’s unwillingness to work with psykers in battle rose to near-mania.  When his dreams started, he first ignored them, but as they persisted, and he was unable to explain them, he withdrew into himself, eventually donning the Armor of Faith.
The Kill-teams with which he had served were taken aback by this, but did not object.  For the next two years, Keilro has thrown himself into the fiercest melee battles he can find, and at times, has returned on the verge of death.  His humors have not improved from survival, and have not been aided by the increasingly unsubtle attention paid to him by the Lady Hiqh Inquisitrix, who believed his dreams are the beginning of something more.


Curator Gein Smithlog, Keeper of the Hall of Arms
“By the hand of Man is the darkness of the xeno extinguished.  In the signing of this oath do I pledge myself eternally to the service of the Deathwatch, until I go to stand at the side of the Emperor Himself.”

Deep within Watch Fortress Dascomb, there is a great chamber called the Hall of Arms.  This is where the products of the Armory are kept; all of the weapons available to the Deathwatch Marines of the fortress can be found and requisitioned here for missions.  As Curator, Smithlog is tasked with the identification and preservation of the sacred arms of the Deathwatch, and ensuring that the relics that are specific to the history of individual Chapters are properly accounted for.  This is a delicate task, especially given the sheer number of Space Marine Chapters that have taken the Oath of Apocryphon over the millennia – upwards of nine hundred.
Some question why a mere human man is given the responsibility of ensuring the safe storage and distributuion of Astartes arms, given that most mortals are not even allowed to touch them.  The answer is that Gein Smithlog is an artificer beyond compare, perhaps the most skilled so outside the Techpriesthood in the Sector.  He is not unlike the Lastrum Core Clan of Terra, those most blessed with the chance to labor in the making of the armaments of the Emperor’s own Custodians.  Even those Techmarines that arrive on the station with the most dismissive and resentful attitude towards normal Mankind come away in astonishment at his savant skills with the Machine Spirits.
Gein himself owes everything to the Deathwatch.  One of the few people who successfully escaped the destruction of the world of Valhagoth in the Cloudburst Circuit, he was brought by ship to Watch Fortress Dascomb.  Athough the people of that world bore no suspicion regarding the world’s destruction, as there was realistically nothing that could be done to stop a Hrud Migration on that scale, they were not welcome anywhere else, as the superstitious Imperial people saw them as being cursed, or having invited the aliens.
Young Gein was left on the station as others slowly found new homes and resettled elsewhere.  Eventually, he was taken in by the Adepts of the station, who saw in him a strange potential for interaction with the machines, given how the cleaning and repair servitors in his dormitory’s ward never seemed to fail.
Their faith was borne out; as Gein was educated, he showed an understanding and recall of the fine points of weapons maintenance that shone unrivalled among the non-Techpriest population of the station.  Although the Techpriests of the Watch Fortress initially resented his elevation to the Curator role, their complaints have faded, as he had demonstrated staggering ability to clean, repair, identify, store, placate, and catalogue all manner of human weapons and wargear.
He resides in a sizeable apartment near the Hall itself.  Gein is aware of his talents, and takes pride in their use.  He treats his Deathwatch masters with courtesy, and makes his displeasure known in subtle ways if the Kill-teams do not bring ‘his’ gear back in the finest of working order.



The Drumnos Ribbon: A dense, hard-to-approach region of space between the Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors.  It was this mixture of Warp Storms, asteroid clusters, xenos worlds, and radiation clouds that once delineated the Imperium of Man.  Now, however, the Cloudburst Sector’s establishment has pushed that boundary back.  However, the physical and Immaterium obstacles between the Drumnos Sector and what lies to spinward is still quite intact.  There are pirates in the millions that lurk in the Drumnos Ribbon, and they do not hesitate to pounce on even the best-defended Imperial shipping and colony forces.
This incongruously simple name does not to do justice to a fiendishly hard-to-pierce shield of hazard that shrouds the Cloudburst Sector’s coreward reaches.  It was here that the Dark Winds flotilla based themselves before their assault against the Cloudburst defenses; here was where fully a third of the Ork assaults against Cloudburst have begun.  There are Warp Storms in the Ribbon that stretch for a dozen lightyears, and seethe with the screams of the damned.
However, it is passable.  Patient labor by Navigators of the Navis Nobilite have revealed numerous passages through the Ribbon, such as the Long Bridge, the Quicksand Pathway, and the safest crossing by far, Provender’s Corridor (so named for the agri-world on the Drumnos end of the route).  Thanks to these mapping efforts, the ships of trade and colonization can enter Cloudburst from coreward as well as spinward.
The Ribbon’s official crossings are overseen by a deep-space control station of the Adeptus Arbites, which collects the passage tolls from all vessels of profit that make the crossing.  This includes Free Captains, Rogue Traders, Guild ships, and unregistered mappers, but obviously excludes the Departmento Exacta – there is no point in tithing ships carrying Terra’s Due.  The Deathwatch has neither the resources nor inclination to intercept all trespassers, but instead maintains the archive on behalf of the Inquisition.  Inquisitorial ships frequently come to check the records to aid in investigations.  In exchange, the Inquisition shares the maps they have made of the unregistered crossings to Drumnos, and allows the Deathwatch to use them in secret.

The Greater Tri-Sector: A vast, sprawling region of space at the extreme galactic north, near the border of the Segmentae Ultima and Obscurus.  Within the area, there are three Imperial Sectors, one region into which the Imperium is actively expanding, and an area that is psionically blocked to most human passage.  Separating the three neighboring Sectors are thin bands of intense stellar debris, mostly consisting of gasses and asteroids from a long-gone hypernova that defined the shape of the Galaxy’s outer border.  The Greater Tri-Sector contains the Drumnos Sector, the Naxos Sector, and the Cloudburst Sector, as well as parts of the accessible Cloudburst Sector and inaccessible Oldlight Exo-zone.


(an addition to the Drumnos Sector portion of the document)

Deathwatch Involvement
The Data-mechanics of Syracuse have another duty that they carefully conceal from the general public.  The Imperial citizenry, and the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus alike, are ignorant of the role that the Data-mechanics play in the service of the Adeptus Astartes.  Although it would be well outside of the jurisdiction and remit of the Space Marines of the Emperor to involve themselves in the internal affairs of the Techpriesthood, the Techpriests themselves have made the role known to the Deathwatch.  Like many of the relationships between the branches of the sprawling Imperial bureaucracy, it is transactional, at heart.
Data-mechanics, deep in the colossal and untamed data-stores of Syracuse, have made frequent discoveries of information lost to the rest of humankind.  Usually, it is of no value beyond its theological weight to the data-fixated Syracuse Techpriesthood, but on occasion, scraps of important knowledge are reclaimed.  This has included starmaps, blueprints, and even a few tiny pieces of STC design and production data.  As the Imperium has expanded into the Tri-Sector’s neighboring space over the millennia, the Data-mechanics have become aware that not all is static within the Wild Data Stores.  When reports filed by the Adeptus Astartes on the campaigns and Crusades they have undertaken in the time since the Horus Heresy has entered the cogitators and servers of Syracuse, that has developed a startling pattern of triggering inexplicable reactions within the Wild Data Stores.
Many of these discoveries seem to be simple cause-and-reaction responses to triggering data from the data entries themselves.  At the time of the entry of a report by the Celestial Knights about a great battle between themselves and an allied Knight House in the Naxos Sector against a horde of Chaotic raiders, Data-mechanics found themselves suddenly having access to a previously-encrypted cogitator detailing blueprints for a discontinued ship the raiders had used.  No Data-mechanic had requested the information; the notification of clearance simply arrived on the great data-terminal the Data-mechanics used.

Years later, a force of the Deathwatch engaged in battle against an unknown race of serpentine xenos that had attacked the Drumnos Sector from the Oldlight Exo-zone.  When their mission reports were filed with the Inquisition, an Inquisitor cross-searched the Wild Data Stores for mention of the beasts.  When he did so, several random Data-Mechanics found their permissions level for the world’s Noosphere dramatically increased, and discovered information about the aliens that they could scarcely have known before.
Other puzzles arose over the millennia as the Wild Data Stores expanded.  While the technology level of the Imperium decayed, the data sieves and server banks of the Wild Data Stores grew, in danger as well as size.  Eventually, the data-obsessed Syracusian Techpriesthood lost all control of its scale and depth, and now, only the bravest venture within.
Some suspicious Inquisitors have noted that the Wild Data Stores seem to disgorge information more freely now than they have before the millennia-spanning rot of the Imperial technical literacy set in.  As the Data Stores grew, they even seemed to contain information that could not have possibly preceded their expansion, such as details about the Cloudburst Sector, which did not exist at the time.
These Inquisitors are increasingly certain that the Wild Data Stores contain an autocthonic, wholly holistic Abominable Intelligence.  Perhaps one was stored on a server or cogitator bank that was sacrificed to the Wild Data Stores as they outgrew their housing in the great underground tunnels of Syracuse, or perhaps it arose, immaculately birthed by the exabytes of information that have entered them.  More likely, the algorithms that thousands of years’ of Techpriests have installed on the data sieves to index them have taken on a life of their own.
Whatever the origin of the helpful but bafflingly unpredictable nature of the random data triggers of the Wild Data Sieves, they are undeniably more common now than they have been before.  As the Deathwatch expands into the Greater Tri-Sector, Inquisitors of a more Radical nature have begun releasing Deathwatch reports, only cursorily redacted, into the Wild Data Stores, simply to observe the results.  Data-mechanics, superstitious and fearful creatures at heart, have taken the sudden release of new information into their dala-looms resulting from these reports being uploaded as bestowments of divine favor.  Indeed, they are eager to share their findings with their superiors in the Tech-clergy.  It is child’s play for those self-same Inquisitors to pass along any pertinent information to the Deathwatch.

This has, at times, led to massive activity on the part of the Deathwatch’s field-deployed Kill-teams.  Whole Watch Companies have taken flight to do battle against previously-unknown forces of xenos that were revealed by the intercepted Inquisitorial reports.  On the very rarest of occasions, the Wild Data Stores and their mysterious guiding hand have even revealed archaeotech cached in their buildings to questing Data-mechanics.  When this happens, Inquisitors typically hear of it from Data-mechanics they have subverted to their cause, or simply from observing the religious ecstasies of celebrating Tech-clergy on Syracuse.

Physically obtaining samples of this archaeotechnology is another matter.  There are many Deathwatch facilities that employ archaeotech, of course, given their nature and incredible sensitivity, but outside of facilities manufactured for the specific purpose of interacting with it like Watch Fortress Erioch, the Deathwatch can rarely simply reach out and collect it.  Syracuse is no different.  Convincing members of the Data-mechanics to simply forfeit or even loan archaeotech their Wild Data Stores have produced would be a tall order indeed.  Thus, the transactional approach.  Inquisitors who believe that artifacts uncovered from the Wild Data Stores’ maps and hidden compartments foretell dangers for the Imperium trade for them with the Adeptus Mechanicus, usually for large sums of less significant archaeotech, or for test subjects for Syracuse’s weapon research.
This leads other, more puritanical Inquisitors to the brink of madness.  The brazenness of these more Radical Inquisitors, the Puritans insist, is a sign of incredible danger.  The mere idea that there could be an un-curtailed Abominable Intelligence loose in the most important data-stacks in the Segmentum Ultima must be faced with the utmost seriousness.  Yet, these Puritans are unable to act.  They can’t involve themselves in the attempts of the Radicals without being tainted with the same crime.  They can’t confront the Radicals without cause, but they can’t confirm their suspicions.  They can’t go to the Techpriests and ask them to put a stop to it, because that would mean admitting that they knew it was happening, and did nothing.  They can’t simply ignore it, because the Radicals are occasionally right, and the Deathwatch has put a stop to genuine threats to the Imperium, by acting without awareness upon the dark knowledge of the Wild Data Stores.  They can’t destroy the Wild Data Stores, because that would cause instant and terrible war between the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Inquisition that the Inquisition would lose.  They can’t report the existence of an Abominable Intelligence to Mars, because they have no proof.  Finally, they can’t simply report the transactions to Syrcuse’s High Fabricators, because many of them are former Data-mechanics themselves, and would surely refuse to act against their oracular sources of knowledge.
Thus, the Puritanical Inquisitors find themselves in the grip of the same clutching frustration that drives so many of their number to extremes and Radicalism in Conclaves across the Galaxy, and simply hang on to their sanity with their fingers while praying for a miracle.

When the Radicals who have performed this surveillance and data-injection do find themselves in the possession of actionable intelligence or archaeotech from the Wild Data Stores, they make for Watch Fortress Dascomb.  High Inquisitrix Lerica’s close scrutiny of the Cold Trade and the xenotech of the Cloudburst Sector means that she has little patience for the mysteries of the Radicals, and even those from other Sectors, outside Cloudburst, must take care when interacting with Lerica.  Her terrible power, with the presiding Lordship of the Conclave Cloudburst and psychic might she can bring to bear, makes lying to her about the sources of their knowledge and hidden treasures untenable.  Yet, by presenting clearly human archaeotech and verifiable information of the justly-respected Data-mechanics of Syracuse to the Deathwatch, they can often gain aid from the Vigilant without invoking the Inquisitrix’s scorn.  Inquisitors have pursued their errands, even to the extent of doing what the mysterious intelligence of the Wild Data Stores implies they should, with the Deathwatch’s full co-operation.
Watch Commander Domack has his own suspicions about the seemingly-inexhaustible sources of the intelligence and archaeotechnolgical trinkets of the Inquisitors who hail from Drumnos.  Domack was chosen as Watch Commander because of his sterling reputation for insightful and decisive leadership, not investigative skills, but he is no fool.  He has not failed to observe that the Inquisitors bearing gifts have all come from the same place, and that many of the leads that they send his subordinates to chase have been sequential – reports he has filed with the Inquisition have produced subsequent investigations ‘coincidentally’ addressing parallel topics.  Nor has Watch Commander Domack failed to note that many of the archaeotechnological items these Inquisitors bear are of ancient Adeptus Mechanicus make, yet are outside the Techpriests’ apparent control.

For now, given the successes that the Kill-teams dispatched alongside these Drumnos Inquisitors have attained, he is content to simply keep a watchful eye on the situation, especially given the immense demands on Sector resources that the Glasian Migrations present.  If these diversions continue, however, he may choose to take more direct actions.