Elena MacWater leaned back from the fiberboard desk in her cramped temporary quarters. The Inquisitor had delegated the task of selecting a team to explore the Space Hulk Capitalis Congestus. The Inquisitor already had an Agent aboard the hulk, but it would take one man (or woman) several lifetimes over to map the entirety of the four-hundred and fifty-two cubic kilometer spheroid of wrecked ships, asteroids, and Emperor knew what else.

Elena knew she didn't have the full intelligence brief when it came to the Capitalis Congestus. She didn't know who the Inquisitor's Agent was, nor when the survey work had begun, or even how far it had progressed. She didn't even know what system it and she were in. All she had to give to her team was an incomplete map and a prayer. She did have a rather generous operating budget, including the semi-clandestine use of a small set of void-hab modules tethered near the toehold the Inquisitor's Agent had declared "relatively secure". It wasn't enough to hire, house, and feed a particularly large team, so Elena had made her initial selections with care. Even now, other Agents were working to extract them from what lives they had and to smuggle them here. Wherever here was. All Elena had left to do was select the leader of the team.

Elena scooped up the quartet of data-slates in front of her. Each contained the bio of one of her underlings-to-be, and she quickly parsed through the summary sections again to refresh her memory.

First in the stack was Trooper Atellus Havelock, formerly of the Adeptus Arbites, Oasis precinct. The Adeptus Arbites are the Imperium's lawkeepers, and Atellus was in good standing with his superiors despite some borderline insane crap he had pulled while breaking up a few back-alley brawls. The Dossier did note that he possessed above average strength and perception, but was not possessed of a particularly strong force of will. Atellus was known to live alone at the age of twenty-one, his parents having all but disowned him when he joined the Arbites instead of the Planetary Defense Force.

The second dataslate almost made Elena's hair stand up when she considered the person whose biography was contained within: Sanctioned Imperial Psyker Cian Mac Vir Dannan, fresh off of one of the Black Ships from Holy Terra at the age of forty-two, though he had been born on Dagda. Cian had passed and survived the sanctioning process more intact than most, according to the notes Elena had before her, though his skin and hair were noted to be permanently dyed in distinctive colors. Elena shrugged this off, considering some dye, however discolored, to be preferable to the physical damage and deformities she had seen on other psykers. Cian was known to have the phenomenal strength and toughness of his deathworld homeworld, matched with the mental strength of a stable sanctioned psyker, at the cost of below-average fellowship and poor close-combat skills. What life and connections Cian had possessed on Dagda had been shorn away when he was selected by the Black Ships, leaving him adrift and alone.

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The third dataslate contained the remarkably plain biography of Novice Cleric Kathrine ‘Cat’ Megeria. A former housewife from Oasis who had taken holy orders with the Ecclesiarchy after her husband and son had died in the crossfire of a gang fight. They had been innocent bystanders, but incoming fire is indiscriminate in its targeting, and their deaths had left Cat without a home to live in or an income to support herself at the start of her third decade. She had just finished her basic instruction and taken her vows at the age of thirty-one, and her biography contained no notation as to particular skills or deficiencies. It did contain a note that Cat was capable of incredible rage and fury if suitably provoked, though it was also noted that the amount of provocation required was well above and beyond what the average Imperial Citizen would ever see.

The last dataslate contained the life summary of Technographer Zarkov Terezna Olegovich of the Adeptus Mechanicus. It, for gender was rather irreverent once a certain degree of cybernetic augmentation had occurred, was due for a rotation off of its home of the Gibil 2 shipyard in the HJG-1034 system. Born and raised in a space station, Terezna Olegovice would be at home in the low- nor null-gravity environments that could be expected in some areas aboard the Capitalis Congestus, though the low strength and fellowship (notably worse when dealing with non-voidborns) it possessed would offset that to some degree. Raised from an early age in the presence, and eventually as a member of, the Adeptus Mechanicus, the twenty-five year old Terezna Olegovich was perhaps the only recruit who could be considered technically proficient above and beyond simple things like manipulating dataslates and flipping light switches.

Elena leaned back and pressed her palms to her eyes. None of the four was marked or stood out as a natural leader, which meant that she would have to make a decision with what she knew of them from the slates, without having met any of the people or seen them interact with each other.