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When Domack does take to the field on those rare occasions when he can, he arms himself with a magnificent relic: a pre-Heresy Tigrus Bolter, master-crafted and artificed to perfection, with an integrated low-light scope, bayonet mount, and combi-flamer attachment.


Watch Captain Paris of the Blue Daggers
“Why do I bother?  Isn’t it obvious?  We’re wasting time and resources fighting these bastards the old-fashioned way!  The Glasians are crafty sons of bitches, and we can learn from their leavings.  It’s not unprecedented.  If the Officio Assassinorum can use alien weapons, who’s to say the Deathwatch can’t learn from aliens, too?”

Watch Captain Paris is a former Tactical Marine Sergeant from the Blue Daggers Chapter.  The Blue Daggers have a long-standing presence in the Deathwatch, as is to be expected in a Sector defined by periodic alien invasions.  The particular circumstances of the Deathwatch render them all but useless in fighting off the Glasians, however, in contrast to nearly every other form of alien life.  The obvious solution to the lack of adaptability among Deathwatch to the

The Deathwatch does not answer directly to the Inquisition in the field.  However, when the Inquisition gives an order to Astartes outside all but the most banal circumstances, Astartes are generally expected to follow it.
That is a line that Watch Captain Paris toes with exceptional care.  The standing order from the Ordo Xenos in the region is to destroy all corrupted Glasian artifacts.  However, High Inquisitrix Lerica has no standing order for the destruction of mundane and uncorrupted artifacts.
Thus, Watch Captain Paris is undertaking a risky study.  He has ordered the construction of a large network of tunnels, bunkers, and laboratories on the planet Loreliei.  Within, he intends to begin the reverse-engineering of multiple Glasian artifacts that have survived the deaths of their owners.  He is not in any great rush to inform High Inquisitrix Lerica, but he is confident she will see the wisdom of his order.

Paris began his career as a member of the Blue Daggers over a century before, and had an unremarkable history in the Scouts and Devastators before moving into the Eighth Reserve.  There, he had average or slightly higher marks in most fields, and excelled in commanding a Predator tank.  It was only after another four years in the Eighth, fighting pirates and Orks in the circuit, that he discovered that he had a significant talent for recognizing tactical opportunities in enemy technological use.  For Orks, it was their clunky vehicles, which he was able to outmaneuver by banking his tank on angled surfaces by slowing one tread.  He further demonstrated his idea to derive vulnerabilities from enemy technology by drawing an Ork company into a desert area to cause the sand to foul their primitive firearms.

Afterward, he was put on the short list for Deathwatch Service by Lord Arden, and when an opportunity arose, he accepted the Vigil.  Paris felt at home in the Deathwatch, more than he had in his own Chapter, and accepted every opportunity for extra training and responsibilities he was offered.
He got along famously with Forgemaster Shokunin, but had no interest in learning the secrets of the Machine himself.  He served briefly as the leader of a single Kill-Team before the team was assigned to the Watch Station Discus.
On Discus, his Kill-team served as the primary team, which responded to sightings of unknown aliens in the Oldlight Exo-zone.  He worked alongside Rogue Traders with his Kill-team over forty times in telve years, usually the same few Traders over and over.  On one notable occasion, his team worked with Lord Inquisitor Stoldst to track down what he still believes to be a shapeshifting alien, and not the human mutant who had eaten a Callidus Assassin.
While working with these explorers and merchants in the unknown regions of space, Paris earned a reputation for ambition and creativity that he had not had many chances to show off in his own Chapter.  The Deathwatch encourages greater lateral thinking and improvisation than the regular Astartes, and Paris excelled at using conventional technology in unconventional ways.  Some of these ways would have earned him a disciplinary lashing in the Imperial Guard, or a dirty look from his own Techmarines back on the Gargantuan.

After many years commanding the Kill-team, and eventually transferring to Watch Station Redshield, Sergeant Paris reached his thirtieth year serving in Cloudburst’s Deathwatch.  When his superior, Watch Captain Lawrence of the Knights of Terra, retired to his own Chapter, Paris was chosen by Domack to replace him.  Paris immediately used his new position to advocate for the creation of a new Watch Station.  He chose Loreliei for the new site – more or less arbitrarily, not that he would admit that – and dubbed it Watch Station Peacekeeper.  Watch Commander Domack and Forgemaster Shokunin debated privately, and eventually came about to Paris’ idea.
Paris proposed that Glasian relics that had no Warp element or Chaos taint be collected and studied carefully.  He posited that there are psychological or technotheological ideas to be found even in the leavings of aliens.  The Glasians were the first extragalactic intelligence ever detected; surely, they had something to their technology if it was enough to get them across the dark space between galaxies.
The loudest advocate of Paris’ idea is not in the Inquisition at all.  Lord Fabricator Beraxos of Cognomen strongly advocates for the project.  Paris is willing to take Beraxos’ help at face value for now, since Beraxos’ ambition and expansionistic ideas are well-known to the Deathwatch, ever since he entrusted them with the secrets of ABX202020 when building Redshield.  So far, since Paris hasn’t actually led any Techpriests to perform any research, their partnership has borne little fruit.  As soon as the facility comes online, however, both Beraxos and Paris expect the plan to continue at once.

Outside of his technological dealings, however, Paris is very much an archetypal Deathwatch Captain.  He has an unflinching demeanor, a sense of patience and personnel management, and remarkable combat experience.  His gear of choice is an assault pack and Mark 6 armor Corvus set, with a Kraken-loaded bolter.  In his experience, the combination of supreme mobility, near-silent movement, and anti-armor capability is perfect for provoking aliens to break formation and pursue him into traps.
He likes taking to the field, and has led Kill-teams or even entire Kill-companies into battle against alien slavers and marauders in the Circuit and Exo-zone before.  He prefers to avoid the mixing of Chapters that have traditional rivalries like al-Hasat does, dismissively calling them as ‘social experiments.’  He prefers to use Marines from Chapters he knows will work well together.


Watch Captain Roganuharu of the Celestial Knights
“No, I do not know when I will go home to my Brothers.  It’s all right, though.  This Sector is worth defending.  I have brothers with whom to train and pray, I have foes to butcher.  I have my faith and my arms, and a good ship to carry me.  No, it’s not home, but life is good here, and I shall stay.”

Captain Roganuharu is the present third in command of the Deathwatch in Cloudburst and the Captain of Watch Station Discus.
The Celestial Knights and the Blue Daggers are neighbors in the dark reaches of the nebula that created their home Sectors.  Because of their proximity, there are extensive interactions between the two when one joins the other’s Sector Deathwatch.  The Deathwatch has a far smaller presence in the Naxos Sector thanks to the extensive presence of the conventional military there.  The Celestial Knights contribute regularly and generously to the Cloudburst Deathwatch.  They believe, perhaps fairly, that the presence of the underdefended Sector to their trailing would not ablate a true threat on the scale of a Black Crusade or a genuine Waaagh, and that a threat like that would plow through Maynard and Arden and hit the Knights in the back.  Given the attrition rate and constant contamination threat posed by the Pox Ring and other Chaos-infested stallar formations in Naxos, the Knights simply can’t take the risk.

Enter the Watch Fortress Dascomb.  Roganuharu is a Watch Captain at Dascomb’s largest off-shoot, Watch Station Discus.  As a member of the Knights, Roganuharu was a Sergeant in the Seventh Battle Company (one of the notable deviations from typical Unforgiven formations is their lack of traditional Reserve Companies).  While serving with his parent Chapter, Roganuharu displayed a particular aptitude for the use of exceptionally heavy weapons.  While nearly every Marine in a Chapter spends at least some time using Special or Heavy-type weapons such as Lascannons and Missile Launchers, Roganuharu has a true skill with them.  He successfully sniped a Dark Eldar Jetbike moving at eighty six kilometers per hour from half a klick away upwind, immediately catching the eye of his Company Captain during his time in the Devastators.  That by itself would not have been terribly remarkable, had he not performed the feat with a mortar.  Subsequent decades of service showed it to be no fluke.  He displayed near artistic levels of precision with a heavy bolter and the lascannon.  He eventually moved over to the Seventh Company as a Tactical Marine, but kept his heavy bolter to serve as a squad heavy weapons trooper.
Eventually, he and his company went into a gruesome battle against two competing forces of Chaos.  The Rusted Legion of Nurgle and the Splintered Eyes of Tzeentch descended on the hapless and much-maligned Agri-world of Lardox 5 in the Naxos Sector, and the Seventh flew to stop them from destroying the vital livestock ranches there.  Roganuharu realized that both cults would stop to fight each other if there were no immediately obvious Imperial presence between them, even if both groups happened to be pursuing the same overall operational objective.  He and the half of the Company assigned to his leadership adopted maximum-range engagement tactics, sniping at enemy leaders with anti-tank weapons from absurd distances out of camouflaged nests.  If the Chaos forces noticed his troops, the Knights would seed their area with traps and mines and then run for distance, if the Chaotics didn’t, they would just start killing each other.
This worked for a time, but eventually the Splintered Eyes realized what his forces were doing.  Their leaders waited until the other half of the Company under Captain Leodhardt were stuck in place fighting the Rusted Legion, then drove their own forces directly at the area that Roganuharu’s ambush sites surrounded, gambling that the Knights had a cache there for resupplying between attacks.

Roganuharu was caught flat-footed by this bold maneuver, but managed to rally his forces to attempt a bottlenecking of the encroaching Chaotics while his serfs and Techpriests hastily repositioned their cache.  The grizzled Sergeant only managed to move half of his troops into position before the Splintered Eyes came within maximum range.  The two forces engaged each other, but to Roganuharu’s disquiet, the Splintered Eyes did not react at all to the sudden opposition.  He had merely confirmed his location to his enemy, and they were risking massive casualties to take the chance that they could push through to end the threat his demi-Company posed once and for all.
The Splintered Eyes used wicked sorcery and mobile mortar units to hem the Knights into an open field, with their supply cache and hastily-moving reinforcements beyond, and started shelling the Knights relentlessly.  That may have been the end of the Knights, had Roganuharu not had two key advamtages: most of the troops he had with him were Devastators, which he could field like few others, and a full squad of Assault Marines, with unparalleled maneuverability.
The Splintered Eyes mounted the hedgerow to push the Knights deeper into the field and expose them to line-of-sight guns, and the Assault Marines suddenly landed among them, hacking away with Power Weapons and plasma pistols.  The front line of the Eyes simply disintegrated under the fierce and unexpected counterattack.  After a predetermined length of twenty five seconds, all of the Marines suddenly engaged their Assault Packs and leaped high, just as the barrage of shots from the Devastators’ heavy weapons arrived to cut down the surviving Tzeentchians before they could rally.  Roganuharu personally led a counterattack under their cover fire and vaulted the hedgerow just as the Assault Marines landed again, several meters deeper, in the very thick of the gibbering Tzeentchian hordes.
With the Devastators now unable to fire, they sprinted out of cover for the hedgerow, while the Assault Marines and Tactical Marines formed two parallel, moving lines, pushing forward into the Tzeentchian hordes in tandem.  The Tzeentchian troops had raced full-out to endure the barrage of Roganuharu’s long-range fire; their troops were tired and they had brought few vehicles.  As such, the simple cultists fell by the hundreds as the Assault Marines pushed away from the hedgerow, and the Tactical Marines pushed behind them in the same direction.  When the Devastators arrived at the hedgerow, they added their own fire to the mix, shooting over the heads of the Assault Marines into the pressed ranks behind them.
When the heavier mutant troops caught up to the main body of soldiers, the Assault Marines leaped clear, and the Tactical Marines added their fire to the Devastators to thin the herd.  This time, however, they had no advantage of surprise, and even Marines need to reload.  The Tzeentchians rallied and pushed into closer combat, drawing Roganuharu and his squad into hand-to-hand, never his strong suit.
As the melee worsened, Roganuharu’s helm HUD showed his casualties mounting.  He fought like a man possessed, however, and after four tense minutes of non-stop slaughter, the Tzeentchians broke.  When the reinforcements from the other half of the demi-Company arrived, they massacred the Tzeentchians.

When the final tally came in, fourteen Marines were dead, eight more were wounded, and over four hundred Tzeentchians lay defeated, with another two hundred running.  Three Chaos Space Marines lay among the dead, with another two confirmed crippled.  With the majority of their fastest troops defeated, the other Tzeentchian forces were little threat to the Nurglites and Imperials, who managed to mop them up without too much more difficulty.  Roganuharu was, naturally enough, earmarked for promotion.
However, ever since the Glasian Migrations, and their Tzeenthcian sponsorship, came to the attention of the Knights, when they first helped the Navy and Carcharadons drive the aliens of of Septiim hundreds of years ago, the Knights have had a tradition.  Because of the relative youth of the Blue Daggers (which the Knights tactfully refrain from discussing overmuch) and the fact that the Cloudburst Sector is grossly underequipped for such a burden, the Knights have kept eleven Brothers in the Deathwatch of Cloudburst ever since their first establishment.  No Knight has ever risen to Watch Commander, since few Celestial Knights are willing to spend so much time away from their Nurgle-battered home, but Roganuharu may be the exception to the rule.  He has been serving in the Deathwatch for over forty years, and as a Captain for four, and as the Captain of Watch Station Discus for one.  As such, he is actually at the top of the list to command should Domack die without a clear successor.

Roganuharu was offered a position in the Vigil only a few short years after the fateful battle between his own men and the Splintered Eyes.  The Inquisition under Lerica has an eye for talent, and his ability to modify plans on the fly and exploit the composition of his forces for maximum effect are obvious benefits for a Deathwatch Kill-team.  Because Kill-teams operate without an officer to command them on the large majority of missions, they need to be able to take orders from Brothers of roughly the same rank as all other people on the team.  Beyond that, if a Sergeant is assigned to a Kill-team, he must overlook the rivalries of the Chapters that compose his force allotment.
Roganuharu may have been hired for combat skill and improvisational creativity, but he has ascended to Captain because of his personnel skills.  He has worked with other Watch Captains to find ideal matches for Kill-team composition on many occasions.  At present, he has gathered several of the most experienced Kill-Marines and Kill-teams to Watch Fortress Discus along with every ship he can find, in preparation for a special mission.
He is planning to send some of his ships and Marines to the worlds that the Glasians are about to hit, while sending his Kill-marines out in pairs or singly to silently board FCC vessels that raid the edges of the Nauphry Subsector and capture them, then either self-destruct them or fly them to Grand Anchor to get their IFFs changed.  While some officers would question his use of the Deathwatch’s precious assets against pirates, Roganuharu is convinced that the FCC is about to use their position just outside the border of the Imperium to launch raids against its vulnerable flanks during the tumult of the Glasian Migrations.

Within the ranks of the Deathwatch, Roganuharu is a somewhat controversial figure.  His record is sterling, and his nature professional and courteous, but his beliefs are anathemic to some of his subordinates.  On the face of it, he is a perfect Dwathwatch Captain, but his Chapter’s ideology is simply inaccurate, in the eyes of his comrades.
Like all Celetial Knights, Roganuharu believes that the Primarchs split and turned on each other during the Horus Heresy.  He believes that there were nine Traitors, who turned their coats to Chaos and assaulted the Imperium to make Horus the new Emperor.  He also believes that there were seven Loyalist Primarchs who did not, and remained in the Emperor’s service.  The Celestial Knights merge the roles of Vulkan and Ferrus Manus into a single individual named The Smith, and Sanguinius and Lion El’Johnson into a single being named The Angel.  Other Chapters find this perplexing and offensive, and Roganuharu has learned to keep his trap shut about it, to avoid provoking his comrades.

However, unlike most of his Chapter, he has not remained staid in his beliefs.  As he serves on the multi-Chapter Deathwatch, alongside others who descend from the Lion or from one of the Smith Chapters, he sees increasing evidence that his Chapter is simply wrong.  The Salamander and Iron Hand Marines in  his Company have mutually exclusive worldviews in so many ways, ven if they can get over it to work together.  The Blood Angels and Unforgiven in his force couldn’t be more different.  Even more than worldviews and traits, the different histories, homeworlds, and conduct of the Chapters his own Chapter tells him have the same origins baffles him.
It is hard for him to place his disquiet.  The feeling grows worse when he sees how his own Chapter receives the brunt of so many jokes and disgusted glances from other Chapters.  Worst of all is when his own parent Chapter, the Dark Angels, look down on his brothers despite their sterling service.

Roganuharu does not yet feel that he can speak up about these remarks and doubts.  Initially, of course, his impulse was to deny that any such a mistake had been made.  However, for over fifteen years, the highest-ranked Chaplain in Dascomb has been Gregorius of the Dark Angels, who has made his seething contempt for Roganuharu both abundantly clear and carefully detailed.  No Space Marine Captain is fool enough to ignore the words of his Chaplain, and Gregrorius is more acerbic than most.  At long last, after one hundred ninety years of life, Roganuharu in uncertain.
However, he has resolved to face the huge problems before the Deathwatch before taking it up with his home Chapter.  He knows of ten other members of the Knights in his or nearby Deathwatch structures, and he intends to ask them their opinions eventually, once his current campaign against the FCC wraps up.


Watch Captain al-Hasat of the Storm Dragons
“I understand rivalry, and I understand animosity.  I can tell them apart.  Some Chapters have one or the other, some have both.  Our enemies have them too.  Balancing them perfectly is an art form.  I have mastered it.  It’s like heating gas molecules: predicting the movement of one is impossible, but if you control the space into which they flow, they take the shape you want even if keeping track of specific bits can’t be done.”

The Deathwatch may entrust their members with higher autonomy than most Chapters, but that doesn’t mean they have no hierarchy.  Watch Captain al-Hasat is the longest-serving Watch Captain in the history of the Cloudburst Sector, and commands second behind Watch Commander Domack himself.  He understands the importance of hammering the hierarchy of the Deathwatch into his Kill-teams before they ever have to put their lives on the line.
When the Deathwatch asked the Storm Dragons for a Brother with proven improvisational skills in battle against aliens, al-Hasat’s name was at the top of the Storm Dragons’ list.  Quite beyond his ability to stay cool under fire, al-Hasat has a superb sense of battlefield scale, and excelled in the Dragons at balancing the assets he had against alien forces without overcommitting.
His most glorious moment, and the moment that sealed his aptitude for his future role in the Deathwatch, was when he successfully led a team of only twenty-one other Storm Dragons and three platoons of Scions in the defense of the Red Glow Promethium Refinery in the Stutlu system against a horde of rampaging Orks for over two months.  He did so by carefully sabotaging the mountain passes that led to the site with metal-detector-triggered mines and claymores, and ordering his troops to avoid those specific spots in the area to give the illusion of gaps in his defenses.  When the Orks arrived and set off the bombs, they pushed through, causing more casualties and sealing gaps in the rock.  Al-Hasat’s forces engaged at the first sign of movement within vision range, which forced the Orks into charging to minimize casualties.  Al-Hasat had known they would, and so concealed grenades on tripwires in their path, causing further chaos and decreasing their numbers further.  Finally, when the Orks came into range of his primary weapons, their numbers had dropped forty percent before they were able to fire a shot.

The victory over the Orks came quickly, then, and al-Hasat continued with ever more impressive feat of tactical success as he rode to become the second in command of the Second Company of the Storm Dragons.  When he entered the Deathwatch, he served as a Tactical Brother for ten years.  Eventually, he caught the eye of the Watch Commander before Domack, and Domack elevated him to Watch Captain.  Al-Hasat’s tactical skill may have elevated him above the ranks of his own Chapter, but the Deathwatch only recruits the best of the best, and so his skills were useful but not unique in his new home.  However, it was only after he had entered his current rank that he learned of another skill he had never exercised before: logistics.  Perhaps taking well to the image of his Primogenetor, Roboute Guilliman, al-Hasat is a natural logistician, with a head for mobility, numbers, safety, and cost that serves the Deathwatch well.  Despite presently having fewer Watch Captains than it has in the past, Watch Fortress Dascomb is operating efficiently and smoothly, in part because of al-Hasat.
His talent for logistics makes it easier for Dascomb to draw recruits from far afield, and cover the costs of so doing.  He has been able to draw recruits from other Segmentae, and as far afield as Macragge and the Halo Zone Pacificus.  One focus of his is combining Marines from Chapters that traditionally do not work well together, in the hopes that this will force the Imperium’s many moving parts to combine and function better when the time arises.

Before his elevation to Watch Captain, Domack had intended for al-Hasat to serve as a Keeper, which al-Hasat would not have minded, but both are satisfied with his current course.  When he is not commanding a Watch Station on Domack’s behalf, al-Hasat fights in the field with his Kill-teams, and prefers the use of a Power Sword, Combat Shield, and Plasma pistol, along with a large cache of grenades and explosives.  He also has a custom Auspex affixed to his left arm, a gift from Cognomen’s Magos for rescuing two of them from a shipwreck caused by colliding with an errant asteroid near Watch Station Vault.


High Keeper Vanados Elkop of the Novamarines
“I stand watch over the darkest secrets of Cloudburst.  I command our ships, and they fly.  I cull those who not deserve the honor of His Majesty’s trust.  You want to know what I value?  Restraint.  Our work would be a billion times smoother if every mortal with a sense of curiosity could keep it in check.  The darkness is old and full of horrors, from which humans should keep well enough away.”

Historically, the Deathwatch was meant to be little more than a joint-service elite strike force, consisting of Space Marines from different Chapters with different tactics, to face the many alien enemies of Man with its full array of options.  Over time, the Deathwatch absorbed other functions.  The Inquisition now uses some Deathwatch Fortresses as caches for archaeotech or xenotech too dangerous to entrust to the Mechanicus (or Inquisition).  Other Fortresses serve as de facto deconstitution points for Chapters that have been wiped out completely but can’t stomach the idea of survivors being absorbed into another normal Chapter, so the remainder can serve as Blackshields.  To oversee the protocols and facilities of the Deathwatch in all their various forms and dangers, the Deathwatch has create the custom role of the Keepers.
Chief of the Keepers on Watch Fortress Dascomb is Vanados Elkop of the Novamarines, a former Sternguard Sergeant.  His service with the Novamarines was lengthy but undistinguished, but he took the Vigil with gusto and deftness.  Like the Techmarine and Chaplain roles in a conventional Chapter, the Keeper role is a volunteer one and admission is controlled by the incumbents.  Watch Commanders can nominate individuals to serve as Keepers, but they only go through the tests and initiations at their own request, and there is no lasting stigma against failed candidates – not everybody can keep secrets as a Keeper must do.

Vanados volunteered for the role, and barely made it in, but settled in well.  Prior to becoming a member of senior officers of the Watch Fortress, he served for seventeen years as one of the seven Keepers stationed on Dascomb at all times, then as a Shipmaster for the Deathwatch Frigate Unseen Blade.  After that, he rose to command Watch Station Bunker for four years, and then returned to Dascomb to guard its hidden inner vaults of lost xenotech and gene samples.
After that, he rose by default into the position of High Keeper by merit of seniority.  He is a skilled and patient Keeper, but so far, has not proved himself exceptional in any particular way.  Of course, by mere virtue of being a Veteran High Keeper of the Deathwatch, he is already far above most Marines in skill, but as is a natural consequence of being in the Deathwatch, what is extraordinary elsewhere is ordinary there.

Personally, Vanados is a quiet, focused, calm, and reliable Marine, who does not care for ostentation.  He has entered the confidence of High Inquisitrix Lerica, and she has trusted him with the keeping of several xenotech relics recovered from alien habitation sites that were scoured of life during the Crusade or even earlier, in the hopes of studying them once she leaves her role as Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst.
In battle, he uses an exquisitely artificed suit of Mark 8 armor with a Clavis, Power Glaive, and twin Bolt Pistols he custom-loads with special munitions, as well as an Iron Halo and expanded comm system.


Forgemaster Shokunin Asutori of the Bone Knives
“Offending the Machine Spirits will get you killed in the field faster than anything else possibly could.  How aliens fight after scaring theirs into submission, I will never know.”

The Deathwatch maintains their own equipment whenever possible, just as a matter of pragmatism.  The Mechanicus’ reliability aside, Deathwatch postings are usually remote and dangerous.  Routine resupply is expensive and impractical for most of their locales.  Thus, the Forgemasters of the Deathwatch have to be more than solely veteran alien-killers.  They need to be able to adapt their technology to circumstances – hard enough in the stagnant Imperium – and also balance the technological needs of the thousand-plus Astartes Chapters.  Some Forgemasters balance each Chapter’s varying ideas about technology and the Machine Spirits with precision and care.
Shokunin Asutori does not.  He is as bull-headed and stubborn as a grox and twice as leathery.  He is as flexible as the job needs him to be and not one inch more, and his policy about adapting xenotech to Imperial needs is about as yielding as a million-year-old glacier.  He can be friendly enough to those who shut up and get out of his way, but if those options aren’t in one’s immediate plans, he is as tough as an Ork and about as forgiving.
Asutori has only been Forgemaster for eight years, and served as a normal Deathwatch Techmarine before that for seven.  Normally, the process of selecting a new Forgemaster would arrive at its end in a far slower way, but there was no real choice in the matter.  Two Techmarines of the Deathwatch at Dascomb were lost with their Forgemaster during a recovery mission on an Adeptus Astartes ship of unknown age found crashed into an Eldar corvette near Vasari’s Cruelty when the Eldar shuip suddenly self-destructed.  The vacancy demanded a new appointment, and High Keeper Vanados and Watch Commander Domack had to make the choice quickly.
Since then, he has filled the task of Forgemaster with talent, but he has left his fellow Techmarines in the dust.  Asutori’s rapport with machines is not something learned, it is something innate, and thus hard to pass on to others.  He works in silence, with his prayers to the machine spirits unvoiced and his instructions internalized.  Other Techmarines and Techpriests watching him labor over weapons and equipment can only watch in awe, and at the end of his labors, he is often less able than they are to explain how he achieved his marvelous feats of artificing and manufacting.
This is no hindrance for those who use his advanced technology, of course, and his specialized bolter payloads are the bane of xenoforms across the breadth of Dascomb’s jurisdiction.  The problem is that since he seems unable to pass on his skills, there is every chance that whomever replaces him will not be able to reach his heights of technoarcana.  Asuotri is aware of this and finds it a distraction.  In his mind, he is not supposed to be a teacher.  If others can’t keep up with him, that’s their problem.

Compounding the issue is that he has an at best inconclusive policy towards the use of xenotech.  He admits that using salvaged xeno-weapons in an emergency in the field is probably harmless, but his protocol for bringing captured xenotech back to Dascomb is inconsistent.  Often, he will stop whatever he is doing to examine recovered xenotech himself for any sign of corruptuous traits, further disrupting attempts by others to follow his work.  His policy, he insists, is unyielding, but he rarely shares exactly what that policy is.
In battle, however, all ambiguity fades.  He is a monstrously skilled close-range combatant.  He has outfitted all of his mechadendrites with arc dischargers, allowing him to engage up to five targets in melee concurrently.  His ranged options include a bolt pistol, a plasma pistol, and a conversion beamer he refurbished himself.


Master of the Defenses Arthur Molliere of the Ultramarines
“I am the bulwark of the Deathwatch.  My Brothers are free to pursue the alien wherever they may hide because they know I have their backs.”

Arthur Molliere is in charge of the slowly expanding defenses of the greater Cloudburst Deathwatch, and it is a monumental task.  His assets include a few Defense Monitors, a handful of permanently detached Imperial Guard troopers at various Watch Stations, two Astropaths, and the small fleet of trans-system warships in the Deathwatch fleets.  Individual ships answer to the Keepers that Dascomb assigns to command them, but Molliere decides their overall distribution priorities.  As a former member of the command squad of the Master of VIctualers for the Ultramarines, he has plenty of logistics experience, and he has worked extensively with the leaders of Cognomen’s Council of Magos to establish a deeper channel of supply between them and Dascomb.

Molliere is very much an Ultramarine officer.  He has a more scholarly bent than some, but he values honor and martial pride more than anything else save skill.  He studied logistics not only because his forbearer Roboute Guilliman did, but because in his mind, it makes him a better soldier.  As he rose through the ranks of the Ultramarines, he absorbed every speck of lore and extra training he could without deviating from his role in the Company.
Unlike most Deathwatch officers, Molliere actually asked to be added to the Deathwatch.  The Ultramarines let him go with the understanding that he did not intend to depart forever.  As he explained to Lord Calgar, the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines, the Chapter had allowed their overriding mission to protect the Segmentum Ultima to distract them.  The Glasians had arrived before the Tyranids, yet the Ultramarines had never faced them.  After the arrival of the Tyranids and reawakening of the Necrons, the Thirteenth had devoted the vast majority of their efforts to fighting those two specific threats, with obvious exceptions like the Second War for Armageddon.
In Molliere’s mind, the Ultramarines have allowed themselves to become blinded to the possibility that certain alien threats may hold the counter to certain others.  The Necrons obviously hate the Tyranids for destroying not only their pool of slaves, but their pool of potential new bodies.  The Tyranids know no hate, only hunger; while they harvest genes and biomass to create new forms for themselves, they never bother to adapt technology for themselves.  In the Glasians, the galaxy sees an enemy that is fleeing the Tyranids, but also arming themselves with Chaos.

Therefore, to Molliere, the opportunity posed by engaging the Glasians, relentlessly and thoroughly, is enormous.  They are the only extragalactic force the Imperium has encountered in untild thosuands of years besides the Tyranids, and the only one the Imperium stands a fair chance of beating in their current state.  What could the Imperium learn if they study how Chaos is able to control the Glasians utterly?  What could the Imperium learn if they examine the tactics Tzeentch lets the Glasians use?  What if the Ordo Xenos is right, and the Glasians are fleeing a successful Tyranid invasion; might that not offer the Imperium to see what a failed attempt at outlasting the Tyranids looked like?

He is less enthusiastic about the prospect of studying their technology directly than Watch Captain Paris is, however.  Molliere’s interest in the Glasians stems from their unique origin and psychology, not their technoarcana, as much as he must admit that their plasma guns are simply better.
Master Molliere has proposed that an attempt be made by a blank or Pariah agent of the Inquisition to capture a leader of the Glasian invasion forces alive, for interrogation by the Ordo Xenos.  High Inquisitrix Lerica thinks this is an idea worth pursuing only if it means that the planets of her Sector are not jeopardized.  Of course, Molliere’s service in the Deathwatch is not based wholly on his desire to analyze the Glasians.  Before he was Master of the Defenses, he was a Deathwatch Kill-Marine.  He put his exceptional education and broad skillset to work in the Cloudburst Circuit in the company of Lord Trader Zutash.  There, he saw first-hand dozens of worlds, Imperial and not, that could easily support the populations of all of the ships in the known Glasian fleet, untouched and uncolonized.  As far as he’s concerned, this is just more proof of the Inquisition’s working theory that the Glasians are under Tzeentch control.

In person, Molliere is a staid, respectful fellow, who emphasizes discipline in everything he does.  He is a skilled ornithopter pilot, and his preferred wargear loadout is a custom Stalker bolter, outfitted with specialized multi-loader ammo slots he built himself.  He also carries an anomalous weapon for a Space Marine: an Imperial Guard styled gas-propelled grenade launcher, with a breech-load and a custom grip and stock.  He wears a standard suit of Mark 7 armor, plain and unadorned by ostentation.


Lord Admiral Maynard
“How does a region of space so empty cause me so many Throne-damned problems?”

Born on the L5 Lagrange station of the planet Septiim Pentius, Lord Admiral Maynard has arisen over one hundred years of work to command the entire Naval contingent of the Cloudburst Sector.  He headquarters from the warship Vulpes Ferrum, stationed in the Celeste system and presently on duty in the Hapster System.

Maynard is a grumpy, cynical, and thoroughly unlikeable man, who has nevertheless managed to rip the claws of the Glasians and Orks off the necks of the Cloudburst Sector’s innocents once already, and will do so again.  So he proclaims, although his contribution to the defense against the Sixth Migration consisted of at most, fighting off a few fires in the hangar of the Cruiser on which he was stationed as a First Loaderman’s Rate.  His early career is one marked by roundly indifferent performance on his part, and indeed he probably would have languished in obscurity and retired young, had chance not knocked on his mantle.
When he was thirty one and serving as a Senior Lieutenant in the service of Battlefleet Nauphry, his Captain gave him a chance to impress him by negotiating a complex asteroid belt in simulation.  Maynard promptly left the simulator and brought over another junior officer who had far more aptitude than he for solving such three-dimensional puzzles.  Amused but irritated, the Captain then posed to the Senior Lieutenant a series of theoretical problems in the ship’s fighter contingent to solve, and found himself impressed despite it all when Maynard chose to hand them off to the ship’s Junior Commissar and Flight Boss instead.

As Maynard rose in rank, his true skills showed through.  Despite his demeanor, Maynard is a genuinely exceptional personnel manager, with skill at quickly analyzing the root of interpersonal squabbles and cutting through pretense and posturing.  His skill as an actual Navy officer are nothing to scoff at, either.  With nothing but a single Frigate and a Cobra Destroyer, he assaulted and obliterated the notorious pirate Commodore Barzeblood when he slunk from a drubbing in the Drumnos Sector with three ships.  Maynard’s ruthless ambush and use of the different ranges of the main guns of the two ships he had at his disposal are still displayed as a study template in the Nauphry and Hapster War Colleges.
Later, Maynard rose to command a four-ship formation of the Sector Fleet, consisting of his own Sword Frigate and three more.  He excelled at using the ships’ identical weapon loadouts to form perfect defense perimiters when transitioning them from deep-space formations to asteroid sweep formations, and no convoy he has defended has ever lost a ship to Ork Freebooterz.
However, while he is a perfectly competent fleet officer and skilled Captain, his true strength is his eye for talent, and he knows it as well as every one of his subordinates.  His officers would throw themselves out of airlocks to prove themselves to him.  Unlike Lord General Halwart, he doesn’t mind aristocratic families offloading their less interesting children on him with purchased commissions, since he knows how desperately the Navy needs both men and money.  However, he outright refuses to offer them special privilege, and has weeded several into dead-end careers by simply giving them every chance to fail.

Without family or any intent to retire, Maynard is a man undistracted.  He does drink, but never to excess.  He does eat gourmet foods in a carefully-designed dining hall on the Vulpes Ferrum of his own making, but never enough to throw off his humours.  He does lash out at subordinates, but only when they have cost him men and money.  Ultimately, his staff stand between awe and resentment of him at any given time.  He is impossible to like, easy to disappoint, and sometimes offers gleams of such brilliant manipulation of assets and fortunes that it overcomes all his flaws.
It is hard to gague how the man behaves outside of command positions, because he hasn’t left the Vulpes Ferrum in over a year.  He has stayed on its decks to command the defenses of the Hapster Subsector for four years, first on the hunch that the Glasians would hit it again, then in certainty.  He is perhaps the loudest advocate of the piratical nature of the Battlefleets Rampart and Delving, and even gives his approval to Lords Trader and Privateer Commodores who ask for permission to steal pirate ships.  In his mind, the fact that Lords Trader and privateers don’t serve him directly is a minor one.  After all, if they fail to defend the Imperium when the walls close in, wherever shall they spend their money?
Maynard knows well that Watch Captain Roganuharu and Lord Trader Zutash are both preparing to take major action against the Free Corsair Coalition as soon as possible, and plans to stay well away until the dust settles.  He thinks both men naïve if they think they stand any real chance against Langdon Reith.
The old Lord Admiral hates Admiral Reith.  To him, Reith is emblematic of everything wrong with the Imperial Navy.  The two men are so alike that such an opinion is stinging to Maynard himself, but he believes it fervently.  Reith had a chance to make the Imperium far better, and chose instead to rob it.  True or not, Maynard thinks Reith to be lazy and self-entitled.  Officers who have actually met Reith disagree, but Maynard’s mind is made up: Reith could only have broken from the Imperium so young if he had planned on coasting through Imperial Navy service until greed got the better of him.  The irony of the master Human Resources manager having such a blind spot to the true strengths of his most hated enemy is lost on both of them.
For his part, Reith hates Maynard right back, although neither man has ever even seen the other.  Reith fears Maynard’s growing fleet, which is swelling with fresh and refurbished ships at a rate that actually equals Reith’s own, despite Reith’s lack of bureaucracy to wade through.  Of course, Maynard has more shipyards.

Maynard carries his silvered sword of office and a dueling pistol he has never drawn.  He is not a fighter, he insists, but a thinker.


Lord General Senioris Xoss
“Silver knives, hot laser, brass bullets.  That’s the way!  Let Arden and Lerica plot their plots and hatch their schemes.  Give me aliens to shoot and good men to lead, and I’ll punt these birds right in the cloaca, every time.”

As is usually the case in a full Sector of the Imperium, one or more Lords General command the ground military assets of the Sector.  In the case of Cloudburst, there are two: Charles Xoss and Gabriel Halwart.  Charles Xoss is the senior by dint of eleven years of rank, and he operates from the Cloudburst Secured Tunnel Network, only a stone’s throw from the Overlord’s Palace.