Rogues

House Lunther, Hapster
One of the key advantages of the complex and interdependent economy of Hapster is that its lines of patronage and commerce are very well defined.  Laws that govern noble patronage are clear and unambiguous.  There are thousands of years of precedent behind every decision, and the Imperial government has ample knowledge of all the local rules and protocols by dint of their tremendous age.  There are noble families on Hapster that predate much of the Terran aristocracy.
As a natural result, some of the ancient lines of patronage between the Hapster aristocracy and the guilds, laborers, and artists they patronize are so ironclad in their age and circumstance that they have become economic fixtures of their own.  The House Lunther, by far the wealthiest in the Subsector by two orders of magnitude, is one such fixture and the largest.  House Lunther has one colossal advantage over the younger noble families of the Sector.  Its ancient ties to the Navigator House True allow them to be the only noble House in the Sector to have a staff of Navigators on retainer.  As such, House Lunther’s ships are faster than any other in the Sector save possibly the Daggers and Basilikon Explorator.  Their ships, lacking the massive armor and weapons of a warship to slow them, can speed along Warp paths that fly narrower routes and longer distances than most others.  The speed of their ships allows them to serve in a niche that no other House in the Sector could fill: logistics.  The House Lunther fleet carries all manner of supplies, information, and passengers across the Sector, for a price.

House True is nominally based on Terra, of course, as most Navis Nobilite Houses in good standing are.  However, House True once felt a distant tie of kin to the Hapster Subsector, seeing as that is the rough region of space in which they took shelter during the ancient purges of the mutant populations of Terra.  Today, of course, most ties between True and Hapster are purely commercial.  Given how few psychics in general and Navigators specifically there are in the Cloudburst Sector, however, it is well worth the investment for True to send some of their younger scions out to the hot reaches of Cloudburst for work with the House Lunther fleet.  They have the market utterly cornered, with only official Imperial Adeptus Administratum and Officio Munitorum vessels having more ready access to the skills of Navigators there (beyond the Inquisition’s dark fleets, of course).

House Lunther is active in the politics of Hapster, too, but thanks to the highly stratified and procedure-driven laws of Hapster they can exert little direct influence over the governing or legislating of the Subsector.  Lunther flotillas occasionally contract with House Joun-Lee mercenaries for transport services.  Their most frequent subcontractor is House Ritria, for whom House Lunther often transports supplies.

House Ritria, Oglith
In the Cloudburst Sector, the supply lines of the overstressed Adeptus Mechanicus often prevent the timely installation of resources needed for large-scale construction.  Full colony ventures are usually spared this, but land development can be time-consuming and costly on those worlds that lech an industrial base.  House Ritria is a collection of nobles, related by marriage, that have stepped into the gap.  The House pools its resources and funds construction firms, most originally based on Oglith, and buys them mass transit with their equipment to worlds that need them.
House Ritria is a far more loose House than most.  Oglith has very little aristocracy, thanks to its origins as a fairly high-tech Frontier World.  As a result, its Houses are more like extended Clans, of the Thimblan sort, than a traditional Imperial peerage.  The House Ritria concerns were not originally transstellar at all, but confined to the Rampart system.  Eventually, however, the construction firms that the House patronized grew so wealthy that they were able to pay back all of the House’s investments.  Rather than cut the firms loose, the House used their new glut of money to buy passage on a freighter to Hangonne, where they were able to corner several construction niches immediately with their great wealth and experience.

Ever since then, Ritria has been an odd duck among the many noble Houses that sponsor industrial or service corporations in the Cloudburst Sector.  They stay well out of the way of Sector politics, preferring to spend as little time politicking as possible to get the job done and stay profitable.  They work well with the other Noble Houses, and spend their money promptly, rather than hoarding it forever.  The House has also been able to score lucrative construction contracts with those planetary governments that are uninterested in playing ball with the Mechanicus for metalwork and masonry.


Rogue Trader Houses

Although the Cloudburst Sector does not, by virtue of its relative youth, contain any of the truly ancient Rogue Trader Militant Houses that the Emperor and Primarchs created, there are some Rogue Trader Houses in the Cloudburst Sector so old and so wealthy that they dominate the regions into which they travel.  Some are of the more traditional Rogue Trader nature, that of the explorer and pathfinder for the greater Imperium, but most have shifted into a more corporate form.  These Dynastic Houses have long pedigrees, whole fleets of ships, holdings on many worlds, connections to Sector and even Segmentum governments, and of course, obscene wealth.  Other Houses, generally younger ones, have fewer permanent assets, but are more adventurous, and are more likely to have their Warrant holder personally venture out to engage with the greater galaxy.

One side effect of the unusual history of the Cloudburst Sector, established as it was in a great pair of Gold Rushes with no Crusade or grinding war of invasion, is that there are vast tracts of space between the clusters of worlds of the Sector.  However, there are virtually no unexplored worlds in the clusters.  While some regions of space, like the better-mapped Ixiniad, Scarus, and Calixis Sectors are homogenous in their population frequency, the Cloudburst Sector is tied together like clusters of beads on a necklace, with each cluster stuck to others by long, tenous Warp Routes.
However, these Warp Routes are those that allow for a ship without a Navigator to travel between the worlds, not those who have a Navigator.  Theoretically, a ship with a skilled enough Navigator and powerful enough engines can travek anywhere in the Sector and Circuit.  Therefore, despite the rapidly rising number of people in the Sector and the fact that there is nothing to be found within these clusters of worlds, both the Cloudburst Sector proper and the Cloudburst Circuit still retain many hundreds of Free Captains and Rogue Traders who leap at the chance to explore any pocket of nearby space.

There are three major problems with this arrangement, however.  While the Inquisitorial edict forbidding travel in the region was long since lifted, there are some parts of the greater Cloudburst region that contain navigational hazards of such size and risk that even approaching them is tantamount to suicide.  The second major problem is piracy.  While the nearby Drumnos Sector has far more lucrative starlanes, it is also heavily guarded.  While the Naxos Sector has a great buildup of Imperial military materiel to steal, much of it is in use fighting the armies of Nurgle, and there are already privateer fleets at work in the region anyway.  Thus, Cloudburst has become a growing site of piracy by the opportunistic criminals of the galaxy.  The final problem is the remit of the Trader Warrants themselves.  Many of these documents are written to provide Rogue Traders with the legal instruction to perform some task or effort in Imperial space or the Cloudburst Circuit in exchange for nobility and the sponsorship of the Imperial Government.  However, the Cloudburst Sector expands into the neighboring non-Imperial areas by gradually agglomerating territory as the Administratum finishes its colonization.  Thus, Traders who are forbidden from enacting their trade in Imperial territory but encouraged to do so outside the borders might suddenly find previous family stomping grounds forbidden to them.

Despite these drawbacks, however, the regions of space in and around the Cloudburst Sector are wealthy enough to lure in Rogue Traders and other adventurers in enough volume to keep their practice churning with activity.  Originally, the Rogue Traders of the Cloudburst area based their activities from the great astral coaching house Star Gilt in orbit over the Naxos Forge World of Fabique.  Today, most Cloudburst region Rogue Traders base their activities from either noble residences on Thimble or from the great Administratum-owned space station Emissicus.  The tracts of space that define the Cloudburst Circuit are actually somewhat limited in scope thanks to the Warp Storm on their north, and the overlapping maximum range of the Astronomican.


Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rondlee
House Rondlee is one of the ancient Rogue Trader Houses of the Cloudburst region, and often boastfully claims to be the oldest, although there is little evidence for this.  What is wholly certain is that House Rondlee has its tentacles of corruption, deceit, and outright robbery in nearly every conspiracy and backdoor deal in the Cloudburst Circuit.

The House is old; nobody could dispute that.  Its age has allowed it a certain perspective on the affairs of the Imperium in the Cloudburst Circuit.  It can see, or so its elders privately claim, the wheels of the Segemtnum government turning.  The slow patterns of colonization, proselytization, exploration, and war that edge the border of the Imperium into the Circuit; the killings and disappearances that announce the Inquisition’s arrival among the criminal gangs that rule the outer borders of the Circuit; and of course the flow of money from outposts in the Circuit into the pockets of the Sector.  It has been happening, slowly and surely, for thousands of years, and House Rondlee has been there since it started.

The Warrant of Trade that House Rondlee holds was signed by the Chancellor of the Imperial Estate over four thousand years ago, although it is free of context.  Clearly, the House originates in Ancient Sol, the core of worlds near and around the Throneworld, upon which the Senate of the High Lords exerts direct control.  Other than that, no House Records state definitively whether their House were war heroes, ancient aristocrats, merchant kings, warlords that opposed the Imperium and were punished with becoming Rogue Traders Militant, or even Inquisitors pushed out of the way of their peers.  The House usually prefers to describe themselves as being mightly conquerers in the service of the Imperial Navy, elevated to Rogue Trader status in reward for bringing some collection of worlds to the light of Man.  IN fact, they have no idea, and probably never will.

What else is known clearly about the House is that they take for granted several functions of the Imperium in their business dealings.  Their Warrant is very clear: they are to explore and pacify the Oldlight Proximate Circuit, now known as the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit.  Beyond that, few means are forbidden from their repertoire.  The House may trade in narcotics, sell explosives, run ‘indentured servants,’ traffic xenotech or even actual xenos, ally with heretics, and do more or less anything that they choose out in the Circuit.

Within the Sector itself, however, the House is a paper tiger.  In the past, certain members of the House have taken the fact that the entire Sector except Hapster is part of the former Oldlight Proximate Circuit to which they are tasked as authorization to do as they please within that territory.  A savage and public humiliation of the House patriarch and near-revocation of their Warrant of Trade by the Inquisition swiftly put those ideas to rest.  Every so often, a new House Scion with something to prove challenges the Inquisition on this, at which point the Celeste Penal Legions gain a new member.

The higher ranks of the Inquisition, especially Lord Inquisitor Hueng, view House Rondlee as a crime against the Imperium waiting to happen.  If the House weren’t protected by vast wealth and a Warrant of Trade, they would almost certainly have begun an investigation into the House’s senior leadership by now.  As it stands, the House is already on thin ice.  Just because the House is theoretically allowed to break the laws of the Imperium doesn’t mean that they actually do in all cases, of course, but Lord Hueng is personally involved in the issue because he suspects that the House has begun trafficking live xenos as bodyguards for Thimble nobles.  Warrant or not, enslavement, sentient trafficking, and xeno-harbouring are crimes the Imperium does not permit on Thimble, and he is itching for the chance to take the Rondlees down a notch.

Aside from their rumored criminal activities, however, the House also has laid claim to several unnamed and uncategorized stars in the depths of the Cloudburst Circuit, far from the Sector border.  There, the family is rumored to be mining out rare minerals in huge quantities, for covert sale to Forge Worlds outside Cloudburst.  This would explain their growing wealth and their unusually friendly relationship with the Mechanicus, certainly.  As befits an ancient House, the Rondlee fleet is quite varied.  They have specifically avoided any vessels larger than a Battlecruiser, just for logistical concerns, but their flagship, the Auric Fists, is so upgraded that it can fight toe to toe with a Grand Cruiser.  Presently, the Warrant-holder is House patriarch Lovis Rondlee of Celeste, who has a reputation even worse than that of his family.

Rogue Trader Dynastic House Atongwë
The House Atongwë is a decorated one, and its great and public piety made it the darling of the Ecclesiarchy for centuries.  Its name decorates the halls of office for many Imperial institutions on Maskos and Drimmerzole.  Indeed, a relative of this sprawling family reigns from the seat of power on Oglith as the Lord of the Subsector.
However, in more recent years, the House Atongwë has fallen on hard times.  The family is still wealthier than most Imperial families could ever be, and its political ambitions are still strong, but the Rogue Trader branch of the family is on the rocks.
By no means a spent force, House Atongwë regardless has lost hundreds of millions of Thrones’ worth of money in the last few centuries, to a variety of sources.  Costly labor disputes, legal wranglings, property damage, shipwrecks, jurisdictional battles, alien troubles, and even a few high-profile deaths and social gafffes, have conspired to make the House Atongwë a diminished presence in the dynamics of Cloudburst Sector.  Some whisper that that is more than mere hyperbole: there actually is a conspiracy agains House Atongwë, and may even have had some sponsorship from jilted rivals or envious Administratum personnel.

However, if there is a hidden hand at work in the damage done to the venerable Atongwë dynasty, there is no evidence for this.  Indeed, nearly all the parts of the family have taken a beating lately, including the distant and barely profitable packaging businesses the family owns on Delving that have no bearing on the greater family holdings.  It is as if the entire Sector has turned on them, by no conscious choice.
The greater Cloudburst Sector has reason to be worried.  House Atongwë has a hand in many of the great discoveries of the religious fleets and Missionary convoys of the Sector’s past.  It was an Atongwë who discovered the entire Maskos Subsector (except for Loreliei), after all, and carried Maskos himself to the planet that would later bear his name.  The Atongwë family also hold high station on Celeste and Cloudburst itself, and though it will likely never be proven, there are whispers that an Atongwë even served as a Blue Dagger.  The House’s incredible run of bad luck lately is seen by some in the superstitious Imperium as a sign of the imminent collapse of the entire Sector.

Others, including the Inquisition and other Rogue Trader dynasties, are far more realistic.  The House has made some poor decisions, that’s all.  Their explorations into the Cloudburst Circuit keep stumbling over worlds already picked clean by their predecessors, their expeditions into the Oldlight Exo-zone were grossly underequipped to explore the most hostile region of explorable space, and Darren Atongwë is an imbecile.  The businesses that the House patronizes have suffered immense losses not because of curses or conspiracies, but because they are based on Delving, a planet of catastrophic volcanism.  Even the faux paus that have damaged the family’s reputation on Celeste have been nothing more than overeager family scions taking their competition to succeed their patriarch too seriously and in public.

The House is not exhausted yet.  Despite the losses of several of their ships in the voids beyond Imperial territory, they still have much of their core fleet intact, including the Exorcist Grand Cruiser Messenger From on High.  The current family patriarch is ailing from age, but is determined to restore his family’s glory.  Named Moloarch Atongwë, he has a fiery determination to claw the family back from the brink of disaster, through grit, determination, and piety.

Piety is core to the worldview and outlook of the Atongwës.  Their family were originally little more than commissioned officers on the Battlefleet Ultima Oberon Battleship Impressive, until they were awarded a Warrant of Trade for saving the life of Solar Admiral Belquist twice during the Rupture Nebula War.  Belquist noticed the ambition and utterly unbreakable faith of his rescuer, and awarded the former pressedman a Warrant, sensing the potential for greatness in the young Lieutenant.

This was a prescient decision on Belquist’s part.  The Atongwës immediately took ship in the upgraded frigate they had been granted, and within fifteen years, the family had crewed the vessel to bursting with eager voidsmen who were ready to carve up the stars in the Emperor’s name.  The Atongwë family captured pirate ships, sunk the Traitor Coba She’s One of Ours, Sir with a brutal ramming strike, and even located the future Imperial colony world Azreid for the Explorators.

Flush with success, the family tackled the edict given to them alongside their Warrant: when the House was ready, and had the proper means to do so, they were to secure the passage between the Naxos Forge World of Fabique and the Ecclesiarchial Shrine World Cinma’s Glory from the vicious pirate flotilla of Ironboots da Gitshoots.  The Atongwës did not merely adopt a patrol route, however, as the Navy was sure to have tried already.  Instead, the family spent a fortune on a small, decommissioned freighter, the C-153b, and loaded it with over eight hundred gigatons of aluminum, cesium, and magnesium thermite, thousands of bottles of compressed oxygen, and fifty thermobaric warheads, and then spread the rumor that the freighter was instead carrying ammo for the Sisters of Battle stationed on Cinma’s Glory.  Lurking in a dispersed escort around the ship at one of its ‘routine’ navigation stops along the route it woul have to take to get from Fabique to Cinma’s Glory, the Atongwës watched as the freighter was taken by Ork pirates that swarmed out of nearby asteroids, then gave chase.  Using the skills of the Navigator assigned to their flagship, the flotilla chased the Orks to their hidden moon base in a nearby dead system, waited until the freighter had docked on the ramshackle Ork base, then pushed a button.  Some few weeks later, a Mechanicus patrol ship discovered an anomalous thermal bloom on a scan of an uninhabited moon near the appropriate Warp lane, and the Atongwës popped the corks.

Freed from their primary burden, the Atongwës have since been able to leave a token patrol garrison on the Star Gilt, and focus the remainder of their time becoming filthy rich.  The House grew and grew along with their fortunes, and expanded hand-in-hand with the Ecclesiarchy into the Clouburst Circuit after the initial Gold Rush.  The Atongwë family did not partake in the former, but the second Gold Rush had the Atongwë family at the head of the pack, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Ecclesiarchial personnel.

Today, the Atongwë Rogue Trader House keeps their wealth in a series of bank vaults across the Maskos and Rampart Subsectors, while investing the majority elsewhere.  By law, part of their fleet is tasked with providing escort along the Warp conduits between Fabique and Cinma’s Glory.  However, this is a pittance of their true force, especially since the fleet has already wiped out the Orks.

Rogue Trader Dynastic House Vermouthe
Although most Rogue Traders are wealthy and ambitious by their nature, many also meet a bad end in the pursuit of money and power.  House Vermouthe came a hairs-breadth from the latter fate, and only a single act of mercy by the Inquisition prevented that.

House Vermouthe was awarded a Warrant of Trade as recompense, after an Imperial Navy Commander named Haxtor Vermouthe fought alongside an Explorator ship that had been jumped by the Eldar Corsair vessel Haliantho Ab’ris.  Having saved the life of the Explorator and more importantly, having saved the immense cargo of archaeotech stashed in its hull, the Adeptus Mechanicus persuaded the Imperial Navy to award the young Commander Vermouthe with a limited Marque of Trade.  This would turn him into a professional privateer who was also authorized to carry out limited trade beyond the borders of the Imperium.  Within ten years, Vermouthe had taken fourteen journeys into the space between the Naxos and Caedra Sectors, and had taken three pirate ships as prizes, rescued four convoys under Ork attack, and flattened a renegade Imperial Guard company that had captured an Imperial Temple and begun making demands.
Eventually, the Adeptus Administratum recognized that a force of destruction and ambition as great as the young Free Captain was best suited for attacking the Emperor’s enemies, lest he become one himself in the pursuit of ever greater power.  The Adeptus Administratum revoked his Marque and awarded the House Vermouthe with a Lesser Warrant of Trade, which made him a proper Rogue Trader.

While Haxtor Vermouthe himself was a capable and ultimately loyal leader of men, his grandsons were less able to live up to his legacy.  They might have made good Imperial Escort Squadron Leaders, Commanders and junior Captains who could work well together, fight under orders, and obey instructions from high, those are not the ideal traits for a Rogue Trader.  A Rogue Trader’s authority must be absolute, their will must be unambiguous, they must be able to work alone, and above all, they must not need a support structure to get things done.  Under the leadership of the two grandsons, the family became little more than well-dressed pirates, and althrough they never abandoned the restrictions and commands of their Warrant, they never quite made a name for themselves.

That changed when both men died in a horrific starship crash, and the elder grandson’s own daughter inherited the Warrant.  As soon as Amanda Vermouthe took the Warrant, she went on a spree of destruction and chaos that left scars on the faces of fifteen worlds.  Gathering her family’s now rather large fleet to herself, she sent it plunging into the Loqui Deeps of the Drumnos Sector, bringing savage war on the pirates and xenos that lurked there.  She met with some initial success, thanks to the dwellers of the Deeps having had no idea at all that she was coming.  Imperial Navy ships that had entered the area to skirmish with the pirates and aliens found a charnel house of shipwrecks, plundered vaults, and sometimes Imperial vessels that had been destroyed by xeno armaments.

While her early victories were certainly to the Imperium’s benefit and accomplished much of the regional pacification, she had no head for logistics, and before long, her vessels could continue the fight no longer.  Her individual ship Captains pled for her to return to the family holding and cash in all of their booty and plunder.  She refused without discussion.  Subsequent discussions had equally unhelpful outcomes.
The Captains were seriously considering confining her to quarters and turning the ships back on their own when a message came through for the Lady Trader.  To the shock and horror of her Captains, her vessel had unknowingly entered a region of the Deeps in which the Inquisition was staging for a secret, terrible mission.  Although the Inquisition’s messenger did not inform her what that mission was, the messenger was unambiguous in his instruction: the Vermouothe ships were to turn back and go no further.  They had served the Imperium well, but now it was time to go home.

By this time, Amanda Vermouthe was in no shape to listen.  Her bloodlust and natural arrogance had taken her completely.  She ordered the Inquisitorial courier fired upon, and before the bridge crew could react and stop her, one of the ship gunnery crews had already done so.

That one shot was not enough to destroy the courier, and the courier boat immediately fled.  The ship Captain declared barratry on the spot and beat the startled Vermouthe unconscious while the gunnery crews immediately stood down once the Chief Gunnery Officer relayed the facts to them.  The ship’s Astropath desperately begged the Inquisitorial courier to wait and hear out their explanation, but it jumped into the Warp without a word.

With Vermouthe now sedated in the medical wing, the ship Captain had to make a tough call.  There was simply no way the Inquisition would let that incident slide, but the ship crews were clearly innocent of the crime.  After some deliberation, the Ship Captain flew the vessel and the rest of the surviving Vermouthe flotilla to their home base in the Naxos Sector.

As expected, the Inquisition was waiting.  The Vermouthe ship Captain turned the raging Amanda Vermouthe over to the Inquisitorial vessels and sat by, awaiting judgment.

It came on cold words.  The entire Vermouthe fleet was to turn over all of the lucre they had captured, all the ships they had captured, and all xenotech they had acquired from anywhere, within one day.  The House Vermouthe members on the surface protested until the Inquisitor present showed the footage of the Vermouthe ships firing on them, at which point the Vermouthe Household complied.

Now utterly bankrupt, the Vermouthe House nearly had to sell their Warrant.  It took decades of hard work by the new Warrant holder to get back into profits, and twice as long to get back into the good graces of the Inquisition.  Even now, thousands of years later, the House is still something of persona non grata among Naxos Inquisitors.

Perhaps that is why House Vermouthe moved to the Cloudburst Sector eventually.  There, farther from the Inquisition’s eyes, the House has been able to stake a great claim to the stars.