With two weeks of downtime to spend, you immerse yourself in honing your skills. You spend hours wandering the decks of the Visitor, never straying too far from base, honing your perceptive skills in picking details out of the gloom on the fly. You spend more hours immersed in your copy of the Codex Astartes, studying its treatises, strengthening the fortress of your mind against future onslaughts. You have already slain one daemon, and surely more will follow in time.

You spend the most time working with Interrogator MacWater. She has served Inquisitor Ironside for some time, and in that time has served in boarding and salvage operations almost exclusively. This is her first ‘solo’ operation, and it has escalated beyond anything she expected when she was dispatched. What was supposed to be a quiet, if dangerous, survey has turned into a Deathwatch operation. But her Inquisitor hasn’t pulled her from the field, and she still has theatre command, even if she does listen closely and consider thoroughly the words of her adviser: you. Young for such a position, and ignorant of much of what the Deathwatch is and does. Though you both serve the Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition, you are normally in separate departments. You can’t give away any Deathwatch secrets any more than she can give away Inquisitorial ones, but the banter between the two of you gains at least a shade of friendship.

Eventually a covert supply ship passes through the system, and the gun-cutter drops off a restored Gorlin and, surprisingly enough, a new member of your squad. The tabard at his waist bears the caduceus mark of an Apothecary, and the white cross on his left pauldron and upright bearing mark him as a Black Templar. The presence of a reductor for extracting geen-seed and a narcartheium for administering medications confirm his specialization as an Apothecary, while the bolter, bolt pistol, and combat knife at his side reminds one and all that a Space Marine Apothecary is still a very capable combatant. The lack of scars and service studs on his face tell you that he is newly inducted into the ranks of the Space Marines.

“Alpha three reporting for duty sir!”

“At ease Apothecary.”

Formal, eager, and the hungry glory-hound edge to his voice that you heard in all to many new scouts. You’ll need to temper that, but you expect that the Capitalis Congestus will help you do that. Perhaps that is why the Watch-Commander assigned him to your squad? You could certainly use an Apothecary, and your long service as a scout-sargent is known to the Deathwatch. You puth these musings aside for the moment and look over Gorlin. He has a helmet on, so you can’t see the extent of the scarring, but they must have replaced both his eyes and leg in addition to repairing his Power Armor.

“Ravager, how’s the leg? And the eyes?”

“Greh. Serviceable enough Hunter. The scars still itch though.”

You take note at how Alpha Three twitches slightly when Gorlin speaks. It’s a small thing, but telling of a first time deployment alongside the aggressive Flesh Tearers.

“Come into my office, such as it is. We can get introductions done in private and begin planning our next mission.”

Stockpile Update:

890 rounds of 0.75 caliber bolt ammunition. Suitable for bolters and bolt pistols. 124 rounds of 0.75 caliber Hellfire bolt ammunition. Suitable for bolters and bolt pistols.

Specialist rounds for special targets; Hellfire Ammunition bypasses all natural or organic armor, and liquefies the target from the inside out.

12x frag AP grenades, hand throwable. 13x krak AT grenades, hand throwable. 86x units of armor repair cement, for patching armor breaches in the field. Enough combat rations to feed your squad for twelve weeks.

Alpha Three’s name turns out to be Hagrdict, and he is just as shiny-new as you guessed in the hangar. As with all Black Templars, he does have a zealous streak to him, alloyed with more than a hint of the glory-hound. Hagredict was seconded to the Deathwatch as part of a ‘show the flag’ operation: even if the Black Templars themselves are crusading elsewhere, they will keep a presence in as many corners of the Imperium as they can. Hargedict himself requested / volunteered for this mission when Gorlin and the dead, nameless Imperial Fist arrived at the Watch Fortress. An Apothecary was due to be dispatched anyway, and Hagredict was eager to recover more relics of the Imperial Fists, the Chapter that founded the Black Templars some eleven millenia ago.

It is Gorlin who comes up with Hagredict’s callsign of Preacher, much to Hagrdict’s protests.

“Why not stick with Alpha Three?”

“Greh. Cumbersome over the vox. Annoyingly inhuman to use in person.”

You grin, “better to accept it now Preacher. The more you fight it, the more Ravager is going to use it just to annoy you.”

“As you say sir.”

“Just call me Hunter, or Marcellus.”

“As you say Hunter.”

You rap your knuckles on the top of the rations crate you are using as an improvised table, the one in the common room of the Void Hab being both too small and too flimsy for your use. “Let’s settle down and get to planning then. Our overall objective is to recon the Capitalis Congestus with an eye to later operations, and eventually a full scale Purge. Standing secondary objective is to smite anything that gets in our way.”

Both Ravager and Preacher nod at this.

You give a lopsided grin. “Simple enough, but as we all know the simple objectives are the difficult ones.To that end I purpose we learn more about the ships that make up the Capitalis Congestus. We have the Roll of Honor for the Bladewind Squadron, composed of four Sword class Destroyers lead by an Ambition class Cruiser. That list includes the Unflagging Resolve, the Mhongu Khagahn, and The Macedonian, all lost and presumed destroyed during the Gothic War. Lost with them were their squadron mate Vladimir Von Carstein and the squadron flagship the Gilded Collar.

“The Unflagging Resolve and the Mhongu Khagahn have been mapped, though not fully explored. The location of the Vladimir Von Carstein is unknown, though she is presumed to be somewhere in the bulk of the Hulk. However we do have the location of both The Macedonian and the Gilded Collar. Neither wreck has been fully explored.

“Thus to our next operation. While the Gilded Collar is the closer of the two, and is the squadron flagship, the Roll of Honor indicates that both Unflagging Resolve and The Macedonian had Imperial Fist Tactical Squads aboard. We have already recovered one Imperial Fist from the Unflagging Resolve, and we will recover any more that may still be aboard The Macedonian. Our objective is to search The Macedonian, recover any Imperial Fists we find, and return them to their chapter. We don’t leave our dead behind.

“Questions?”

Ravager twitched his pauldrons in an imitation of a shrug, “expected opposition?”

Your grin becomes broad, “The usual; Xenos, Chaos, Moral, and Environmental. Orks and Tau known to be present, and at least one Eldar ship has been encountered so they can’t be ruled out. The presence of Cultists, the Lost and the Damned, and Heretic Space Marines has been confirmed. One Daemonette was encountered and destroyed, so the presence of more Moral Threats is possible. And of course the Capitallis Congestus itself is going to do its damnedest to kill us too.”

Preacher’s grin matches yours, “a true Test then. Let us make our Oath of Moment and begin.”