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House Joun-Lee, Celeste

Where the Imperium goes, there is always war.  The beautiful countryside and endless beaches of Celeste may not routinely house invading aliens, but much of the rest of the Sector experiences warfare, from the intercene conflicts of local nobles to the private armies of Rogue Traders.  House Joun-Lee is the pre-eminent provider of men under arms in the Sector, and has been for over a thousand years.

Thanks to the rather restrictive laws regarding the legality of private militias in Sectors being different from Sector to Sector, there is little chance that House Joun-Lee will expand to other regions of Imperial space.  They have a large and competent corps of marketeers and salesmen, who have liaised with planetary officials, noble houses, field commanders, and recently Cardinal Drake to provide armed personnel for various tasks.

Despite the unsavory reputation of mercenaries in much of the modern Imperium, the majority of the House Joun-Lee contracts that they have served over the past few hundred years have been security and patrol contracts for prisons, Penal Legion camps, construction sites, and colonial outposts in the Cloudburst Circuit.  This is steady work, well-paying, and not very risky, at least not compared to warfare against aliens.  The longest contracts the House has served is providing security guards and trainers for the same to the great storage yards on Coriolis, where hundreds of millions of military families cache their larger possessions while their loved ones go on tour among the stars.  They also retain the possessions left behind when a family on deployment is killed in action until they can be auctioned.  The House Joun-Lee mercenary companies occasionally also work with Rogue Traders, but this isn’t as common among House members as it is among freelance groups, due to the low probability of returns on investment.

The House Joun-Lee is permitted a much larger contingent of soldiers than most Houses on Celeste ever will be, thanks to contracts of exclusivity granted to them by the Sector Overlord many centuries ago.  Any noble house that wanted to sponsor a mercenary group now would need to be shrewd and play a lot of catch-up work to overtake Joun-Lee’s enormous investments.

As with all mercenary work, Joun-Lee’s field is not without its dangers, especially around the times of the Glasian Migrations.  Nobles or government officials who want to prioritize the defense of a specific place, instead of the more general work of the PDF or the Astra Militarum, will hire House Joun-Lee forces to provide the extra muscle.  The fact that the House has been able to hire troops out to so many places is indicative of their logistical skills, which are often called into service to aid in the transport of PDF troops on those occasions that they work with the House.

The House buys most of their equipment from either House O’Neill or the Mechanicus, although they are also known to manufacture some simple equipment, including uniforms, in the great factories of the city of Civitavecchia.  As might be expected for a mercenary company, the House Joun-Lee logistical bottleneck is Warpflight.  Any ship that lacks a Navigator must travel for weeks and weeks at a time to go from even one cluster to another in Cloudburst’s odd astrogeography, much less navigate to a warzone.  As such, House Joun-Lee hires Navigators when they are available, and treats them like kings in exchange for long tours of service flying their troopships.
If there is one thing on which House Joun-Lee never even tries to cut costs, it is on their troopships.  Even Kasrkin and Corpus Secutarii don’t travel in such protection and luxury, such is the expense House Joun-Lee sinks into their Nebular atmospheric transports and Cetacean heavy cargo transports.  Their actual troopships that fly between stars in the Warp are a mixture of Galaxy troopships, Supercluster heavy transports (of the same model used to transport the Legio Congelatio), and their single Universe class Mass Conveyor, which they use to transport their heavy armor and occasionally House Patriarchs if the entire House’s free contingent is hired for a single task.

At the present time, literally all of the House Joun-Lee forces that are not tasked with pre-existing contracts have been hired indefinitely by Cardinal Lamarr to defend Johdclan’s Paradise.  As such, its entire fleet has been scrambled to defend the planet except those needed to resupply their long-term postings elsewhere.  It is this, above all other hirings made by the paranoid Cardinal, that has driven up the suspicion of the Ordo Hereticus.  Retaining a few troops to defend groundside holdings is one thing, but tasking an entire mercenary fleet to feed and transport an entire army is quite another.

House Senai, Coriolis
When it comes to the beauty of the natural world, the artificial society, and their blending at the seams, there are few worlds in the whole Cloudburst Sector that have quite captured the art of it all like House Senai.  The Coriolis-based House of military nobles are high-standing members of the Sector Peerage, and have ruled an entire Fortress-citadel on Coriolis for over two thousand years.  Their indulgence in high art is a more recent phenomenon, and of all of the House patronages in the Sector so far, the relationship between the nobles of the House and the group they patronize is most distant in Senai’s case.  Very few of the Senai famile members are actual artists, as opposed to House Joun-Lee, which has several of its youths as actual midshipmen in their command Universe, or House Albert’s many family lawyers.
As is the case in many of Coriolis’ noble families, the roots of the House Senai are planted deep in the Imperial Navy.  The Holy Fleet of the Imperium is a refuge for the untalented youngest children of many Imperial peer families, of course, and has been since after the Scouring ten thousand five hundred years before, but for House Senai, it is a point of pride.
The House Senai origins are all tied up in the ancient remit of the Imperial Navy to supply transport and air combat roles for the Imperial Guard.  As was imposed by the Lord Regent Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, over ten thousand years ago, the Imperial Guard may no longer maintain a fleet of its own, and no armed air or space craft.  Instead, those were to be provided by the Imperial Navy or Adeptus Mechanicus, so that no one faction of the Imperium may amass both enough ground and space firepower and transport capability to conquer any territory.  House Senai was originally a household of lifer Imperial Navy officers, many thousands of years ago, who were responsible for transporting the many millions of Segmentum Solar and Ultima soldiers and colonists who built the first wave of Cloudburst colonies.  Eventually, the House settled down, then nothing more than a very wealthy family with a very small noble title, in the leadership of a refurbished Navigator fortress on Coriolis.
Eventually, the House expanded their remit over the surrounding land, using their money to create efficient and clean irrigation systems, surveillance networks, and galleries of entertainment and sport for the people who lived around their fortress.  When Coriolis was formally declared a Fortress World of the Officio Munitorum, the Senai family was elevated to a proper title of Earldom, and given a high posting in the newly established Coriolis aristocracy.

As with all noble families that received their title through hard work, the Senai family lorded their position over their rivals, and immediately began flaunting their power.  Keeping up the tradition of sending their youngest off to serve in the Navy with commissions, deserved or no, the House Senai family never quite lost sight of their roots in service, but have taken to the Coriolis nobility like a Terran Highborn.  The family eventually lost the position of fortress administration with the shifting tides of economy and politics on the planet, but by that point, they had diversified their holdings to include far greater varieties of money-making businesses.  By that point, the House had moved into direct patronage of many of Coriolis’ artists and universities.

As a part of their patronage of the many art colleges of the planet Coriolis, the House Senai funds many up and coming painters, sculptors, and photographers in their journey through their mediums.  Many of the House itself have no involvement in the process at all, and simply spend a bit of money to enjoy the outcome.  However, the House Senai elders have hired many vendors and curators to dispense and sell the artwork of their patronages to galleries and museums across the Sector and beyond.  As can be expected, the Ordo Hereticus and Ecclesiarchy have covertly examined the artworks the House distributes for signs of Slaaneshi corruptions.

Senai-affiliated merchants also salt the works of their patronages through the great auction halls and guild offices of the greator Sector, as much for exposure as money.  After all, Senai isn’t the wealthiest noble house around, but there’s no harm to be found in good publicity.

Artworks that the House has taken possession of directly are stored in huge, pressure- and moisture-controlled vaults.  These vaults have expensive cogitator-controlled thermostats and light level controls purchased from the Cognomen factories, to prevent the natural damage that artworks can suffer when improperly exposed to the environment.  When a piece is bought, it is loaded by House technicians into simple gravsleds and lifted into waiting shuttles for delivery to the happy customer.  All Senai facilities are guarded by House Joun-Lee mercenaries, despite that being something of an overkill gesture on the most heavily defended planet in the Sector.