A Deathwatch kill-team gone dark in Hive Primus. Four Astartes survived the downing of the Vigil Eternal over the ash wastes sixty years ago. They were Deathwatch — a mixed-Chapter kill-team hunting a genestealer brood believed to have infested the hive's lower reaches. The brood is still down there. So are they. Comms to the Ordo Xenos were lost the day they went beneath the rockcrete, and successive Inquisitorial enquiries have been quietly buried. The Forsaken don't know the hunt was written off. They're still executing their mission orders, one underhive block at a time, and they've stopped distinguishing between hive scum and the taint.

Team lead. Silver-etched left pauldron still shows the Deathwatch rune beneath decades of grime. The Iron Hands half of him accepts that the team is dead and the mission must continue regardless; the Deathwatch half of him refuses to acknowledge either. Speaks only in Low Gothic mission code. The chainsword is named Severance and has not been silent in six decades.

Demolitions and breach. Lost half his face in the crash; the ceramite helm is fused to what remains. Maintains the squad's armour and weapons in a repurposed refinery forge beneath Sublevel Theta. The meltagun is the ship's original — he kept it because Vulkan teaches that a weapon is a promise.

The youngest. Still a Scout-sergeant when the ship went down, he is the only one who remembers sunlight. Rigidly Codex-compliant in a squad that long since stopped pretending. Holds the plasma gun because he is the steadiest shot and because an Unstable discharge will hurt him less than the others — Transhuman physiology reducing a catastrophic overload to a handful of wounds is, in Kaemon's logic, "acceptable risk".

Overwatch. Speaks once a month. Moves through the hive's vertical shafts with the drop rig as if the crash was a promotion. Believes the kill-team is being tested by Corax and that extraction will come when they are worthy. The other three have stopped correcting him.