Watch station

A watch station is an Imperial facility used by the Space Marines of the Deathwatch.

A watch station differs from a watch fortress in that while watch fortresses are large complexes and relatively rare, watch stations are far more numerous and smaller, less potent Deathwatch facilities.

Role
While Deathwatch watch fortresses are relatively scarce across the galaxy, there are far more of the smaller facilities known as watch stations. These are often no larger than a small Escort ship, and some are little more than a rockcrete bunker situated upon a lonely mountain top.

Watch stations are located so as to provide watch against a specific threat, or to guard a particular location. They may have been placed centuries ago, perhaps on the word of a mystic's prophecy or an especially auspicious reading of the Emperor's Tarot, or it may be that a great enemy was defeated at that location and its possible return is being guarded against.

As with the watch fortresses, watch stations can take many forms. A great many are silent sentinels in orbit around a world, while others are lonely towers standing guard over a long-dead battlefield.

Watch stations provide facilities for little more than a single Kill-team and the Battle-Brothers are rarely stationed on one for any great length of time; the resources of the Deathwatch are too scarce for every such station to be permanently staffed.

Instead, watch stations may be used as a staging point should a threat become apparent, and to this end they are always stocked with vast reserves of ammunition, arms and equipment.

While they are not always manned by Battle-Brothers, many watch stations are home to a skeleton crew of sensor-techs and watch-serfs. These live out their entire lives performing their duty, ever watchful for the threat of the alien and ready to call upon their Astartes masters should such an event occur.

Many of these serfs have lived and died and never met a Battle-Brother, yet all are indoctrinated and conditioned into their duty, and their watch never tires.

A great many watch stations are not crewed by Humans at all, but are controlled by Machine Spirits (artificial intelligences). It is only by the blessings of the very highest acolytes of the Machine God that this is possible, for such devices that can be entrusted are rare indeed.

Orbiting many a Dead World might be found, by one who knows to look, a silent mechanical picket, its glass eyes scrutinising the surface far below, its transmitters trained upon distant relay stations. The primary task of any watch station is to gather information and to pass this back to the nearest watch fortress.

The nature of the information may be detailed activity logs compiled by watch-serfs, or at the other extreme, it may be the constant chatter of raw machine language beamed in a never-ending transmission across the void.

The most important watch stations are attended by an Astropath, but others rely instead on regular visits for their reports to be collected.

In many cases, it is not a sudden and disturbing report of alien activity that draws the attention of the Deathwatch, but the absence of any report at all. Standard Deathwatch doctrine dictates that any unexpected silence must be investigated immediately, and a Kill-team dispatched to forestall possible alien attack.