Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Watch Commander Domack of the Imperial Fists==
{{Topquote|Cloudburst Sector is my ward, my bastion. It is a bulwark against the never-ending darkness, and as long as I live, it shall remain as such, unless the Emperor Himself dismounts the Throne to order me to do otherwise.|Domack}}

The task of securing a Sector or other large region of space against hostile aliens, and those who traffic in their goods, is arduous and expensive. Among the leaders of the Deathwatch, Watch Commanders are selected only from Adeptus Astartes officers who have earned the respect of the Inquisition and display aptitude for logistics and personnel management.

Of course, overwhelming combat power and skill are also a prerequisite, but nobody serves in the Deathwatch for long without displaying those things or dying in the process. The Watch Commander of Fortress Dascomb is an Imperial Fists veteran named Domack, and he has skill in abundance. He has served for well over twenty years as the Watch Commander, and will likely die in the role. Domack is quiet, calm, serious, patient, intelligent, resourceful, and impossible to read. Psykers and spies alike find his face and mind to be as blank as paper, even when trying to read him directly. Domack doesn’t take to the field as often as he did when he was a mere Watch Captain, but he keeps up with his training and education in the Dascomb Training Pit and Archive with unfailing promptness.

As a member of the Imperial Fists, Domack was a Tactical Marine Sergeant, the third in command of Fourth Company, when his squad and two Techmarines hot-dropped into the middle of a battle between Orks and Dark Eldar. The Orks were dismantling a Webway Gate out of boredom when the Dark Eldar suddenly launched out of it, attacking the Orks to protect their portal. The Imperial Fists assaulted both, and drove the Dark Eldar off by visibly aiming a field gun at the base of the portal. Had they fired, the shot would have collapsed the portal and stranded the Elder there, so the Dark Eldar raced towards the gun to destroy it. They did so while crossing in front of the Ork boyz that Domack had tricked into chasing him on his Land Speeder. The Orks ripped the Dark Eldar to pieces with their unexpected flank attack, and the Marines mopped up the survivors of both after destroying the Webway entrance.

This sterling performance of improvisation on the part of Domack earned him a recommendation to the Deathwatch. When the time came for a member of the Imperial Fists to don the black plate, Domack was one of three chosen, and went to Watch Fortress Dascomb. After four years of sterling work, he was elevated to command of the Kill-team of which he had previously been just another Tactical Brother. After four more years, he applied to become, and was accepted as, a Keeper for the Fortress. He still wears his Clavis, repainted to resemble a normal gauntlet.

Eventually, the old soldier became the High Keeper of the Fortress, but held the position for only eight months before deaths of two Watch Captains during a catastrophic mission in the Oldlight Exo-zone brought him laterally to fill the gap. Here he found his first actual feeling of being welcome. He had not enjoyed the somber, tense, boring life of a Keeper despite being an obvious natural for it, but as a Watch Captain, commanding thirty other Brothers on high-stakes missions with high tech gear and no room for error, he found the joy of battle rushing back in. He stayed as a Watch Captain for twenty-four years, before the sudden death of his predecessor, Watch Commander Julius Varstol of the Imperial Falchions, opened a position above him.

To his slight surprise, the Inquisitor of the Chamber, High Inquisitrix Lerica, elevated him immediately after consultation with him and his peers. Domack was taken off-guard by this because during his own consultation with Lerica about a successor, he had named Watch Captain Teega of the Hunting Hawks as his choice for the role. Lerica informed him that all four other Watch Captains, including Teega, and both the High Keeper and Lord Inquisitor Xenos Cloudburst had named Domack instead.

Feeling a hitherto unprecedented level of emotional upheaval, Domack accepted the post. To his continuing surprise, he has grown to be comfortable in the role. It combines the need for secrecy, poise, and trustworthiness of the High Keeper with the combat and command roles of the Watch Captain. He has personally selected all three of the current Watch Captains and the High Keeper, although all four were in the Deathwatch for at least eight years before he was promoted to Watch Captain.

As the Commander of an entire Sector’s worth of assets – arguably far more than most backwater Sectors like Cloudburst usually have – Domack has a massive workload. As he is both the Watch Commander and Master of the Vigil, which are also not the same position in most Sectors that have enough resources to split the functions, Domack simply does not have the time to go into the field that he used to. However, he has displayed a keen sense for potential trouble in the Sector that keeps him from being overwhelmed. Problems on the scale of the Ork and Glasian invasions the Sector is currently experiencing are larger than he can deal with by himself, and he knows it well.

In the face of the Septiim attack, he has sent a trusted Keeper and six Deathwatch Brothers armed with his secret responsibility. Like every Watch Commander since Fabique recommissioned Dascomb for the Deathwatch, he is entrusted with the terrible responsibility of enacting Exterminatus against the system should the worst come to pass. The Inquisition does not know whether Tzeentch hits the Septiim planets in every Migration because he thinks of it as a control for his experiment, or because it has some value they do not yet recognize. Regardless, the Inquisition simply does not trust Tzeentch to destroy Septiim like Chlorit if the aliens take any of its worlds. Also, Septiim has more habitable worlds in its system than any other in Cloudburst, but its defenses are massive and growing, so the odds of losing only one or two planets instead of all of them is high. What will Tzeentch do if his pawns capture such prizes? The Inquisition dares not learn.

As such, Domack is the most recent Watch Commander entrusted with the Sanction of Annihilation. It is a machine, built long ago on Mars, which contains a self-powering microtoroidal lattice electromagnet. Within, each microtoroid contains a few molecules of antimatter, and uses the interactions of energy and the magnetic fields of the adjacent microtoroids in the lattice to contain them all. The machine is no larger than a meter square, but contains within it over eighty-five kilograms of anti-protons, enough to liquefy the crust of a planet. It is one of only a tiny handful of Exterminatus weapons that humanity built, can build no longer, and can be carried by a Space Marine one-handed. The Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos Cloudburst has debated the use of the weapon, and concluded that a system of over ten billion humans falling to the beasts is simply not acceptable when destroying one planet to save the rest remains viable.

The Oglith invasion is a more conventional problem, involving a far more predictable foe, and in only one system. Domack has dispatched a cruiser, one of the Fortress’s few precious Strike Cruisers, with a Kill-team and several specialists aboard. It has not yet arrived, but the Cruiser’s resident Astropath informs him they shall arrive within a few more real-space days.

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. He has a bayonet for it, a chainsword for close-in work, and a pack of frag grenades for when the enemy is fool enough to cluster up. The bolter is a relic of the Imperial Fists, and is Domack’s own personal weapon. The Techbrothers will be sorry to see it go.