the latest cast (and Cygnmo)

System: Cygnmo

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Delving Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: 2, 1 habitable

Feral World: Cygnmo

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 20%, Argon 1%, Water 1%, Carbon gasses .01%

Religion: Holy Emperor Star Cult

Government Type: Primitive

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Arbites

Climate: Cygnmo has periodic ice storms that follow the planet’s long day cycle, stretching from the equator to the polar circles, but is largely desert or pine forest

Geography: 1.9 times the size of Terra, with thin topsoil and rocky formations jutting from the oceans

Gravity: 1.11 Terran Gravity

Economy: Local scrip

Principle Exports: Timber, Gravel, Textiles, Natural Gas
Principle Imports: Machined Parts, Plastic

Countries and Continents: Eight continents, roughly seven hundred small nations

Military: Celestial Guard barracks, Cygnmo Warbeasts (low quality PDF)

Contact with Other Worlds: Almost none

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 11,000,000

Description:
As the fleets of Explorators and Rogue Traders aplenty scoured the worlds of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit, patterns emerged at once.  Within solar months of the Gold Rush One beginning, these explorers found worlds with clear signs of human occupation in their past, or even some worlds that had whole populations that had since reverted to barbarism.  Cygnmo falls into the latter category.  Although there are some worlds in the Cloudburst Sector that have allowed their technology levels to rise since contacting the Imperium, Cygnmo has steadfastedly refused to allow modernity to pierce their traditionalism.  The onset of the Glasians may well bring about a change in this attitude, however.
The Cygnmen are a hardy and self-reliant force.  The Technofetishism and bland autocracy of the Imperium do not appeal to them in any way.  Although the population of the world has gained more Cloudburst-like traits over time, largely as a result of Celestial Guard barracks troops taking local spouses or going native, the hundreds of feral tribes of the world refuse over and over to be more active in the greater Imperium.  It is easy to understand why, looking at the world’s magnificent vistas, endless resources, and strong mystical traditions.  Cygnmo has withstood plagues, the passage of millennia, Imperial colonizations, and its own downfall, but their bone-deep stubbornness lingers.

For thousands of years, Adeptus Ministorum priests and Missionaries have pressured the world to adapt to the Imperial Cult, and eventually succeeded.  The ancient, variable mystical traditions of the people of Cygnmo faded in favor of Emperor-worship.  If the Ministorum had hoped that this would yield more Imperium-friendly conduct in the natives, however, they were sorely disappointed when the opposite occurred.
Cygnmen have a long history of valuing pride and military independence over cooperation.  Though avoiding inbreeding has necessitated some exchanges of clan grounds and women over the years, the individual clans, and the five or six individual tribes within each clan, would rather kill each other than work together.
Exceptions arise at times.  Chieftains of great charisma and willpower may forge multiple clans together into a proper warband.  These warbands may be allowed to run riot over the world by the Adepta, or they may be recruited into serving as the world’s PDF as needed.  Ultimately, the very mightiest of these warlords may even establish a kingdom among the clans, though these rarely outlive their first sons.

However, there is substantial evidence among the remains of these failed states that this was not always the case.  Imperial archaeologists, working in the zone the greater Imperium has claimed for itself on the surface for the Celestial Guard barracks, found architecture, coinage, art, and technology that the primitive clans of the worlds could not have possibly made for themselves in their current state.  Missionaries working with the nomadic tribes have also found evidence of complex religious hierarchies, a few scraps of working STC technology, and even complex sculptures of great formations of organized men in battle.
Any oral histories of what could have happened to break up this past triumph are long dead.  Physical evidence, however, suggests that this organization was not the result of purely local development.  To the surprise of the Missionaries and archaeologists, the Mechanicus made the fateful discovery.  While excavating resource deposits in one of the great, uninhabited, rocky islands of the world’s oceans, the Mechanicus located what could only be a sign of past interplanetary presence.  To their shock, the Mechanicus unearthed a fully functioning Maskos mining machine, complete with an STC manufacturing serial number dating to the late Age of Apostasy.  All around it, the Mechanicus found more evidence of human work, including pre-fab housing units, laser guns, and mysterious powders in the refuse piles and trash heaps.  Spectroscopy revealed that this powder was dust from Maskos’ fine sandy shores.
Eventually, the Imperial colony concluded that the world had once been approached for trading rights by Drolorium, after the Age of Strife ended but before the Imperium recontacted Drolorium.  Preliminary dating work done on the remains of the ancient Cygnmo cultural artifacts suggests the timeline is accurate.  Why Drolorium left Cygnmo to its fate, nobody knows, but it clearly happened quickly, if the invaluable Maskos mining machines had to be left behind.

However, the presence of an interplanetary colony site on the planet does not, by itself, explain why the Cygnmen seem to have once had a world-spanning and successful culture of higher standards than it currently enjoys.  It would suggest how that culture was initially supported, perhaps, but given that Drolorium seems to have given nothing to Cygnmo in return for its resources, it could not have sustained it indefinitely.  Some newer dig sites have revealed that an even more advanced culture, with some parallels to early Imperial culture, may have once existed on the shores of the world’s great oceans, and traded with the ancient Cygnmen clans.  This one appears to have been of entirely local origin, and perhaps its own collapse accelerated the decline of the majority of the worlds’ clans, as a symbiotic ecosystem fails with the loss of the largest member.

Regardless of the ancient history of the world, it is clear that the previous efforts to civilize the Cygnmen had no more success than the current Imperial effort.  The Imperial Missionary and limited Administratum efforts to bring the Cygnmen into a more modern way of life have convinced only a few dozen clans of the many hundreds that existed on the world.  Some clans have even attacked the Imperium for the temerity of suggesting that they may enjoy living in places with clean water and impartial law enforcement.  Once the offending clans were exterminated, these raids ceased, but the underlying displeasure with the Imperial lifestyle has never gone away.

Those clans who have elected to become more normal Imperial citizens have enjoyed their decision’s fruits, at least for the most part.  A modern Imperial city has sprung up in the shadows of the world’s largest mountain, and its comforts are freely available to all who dwell there.  The tall electric fence that rings the city keeps out those who would not work for what they have, while a small Precinct Fortress of Arbites keeps order and trains the friendlier locals in Imperial law.  What defenses the world has are generally in the hands of the permanent Celestial Guard barracks on the planet, though it is not uncommon for a tribe of overly hostile Cygnmen to be snatched up in the night and taken as defenders of the world in its notional PDF.  There, they can look at great Imperial buildings and bases in astonishment and awe, and perhaps come to a better appreciation of its virtues.

To the interest of the Administratum, some of the more isolated populations of Cygnmo are developing along the same historical tracks as their ancestors.  Patrilineal kingdoms of warriors, organized around a small cadre of priests and sages and led by their greatest generals, have started to conquer and absorb their neighbors.  So far, no one king has emerged to rule the others, but several have managed to assemble forces of warriors that eclipse all others the Mechanicus and Ecclesiarchy have yet seen alive on Cygnmo.  The Adeptus Administratum is preparing to align these uprising kings in the defense of the planet, should the Glasians come.



Lord General Senioris Charles Xoss
“Silver knives, hot laser, brass bullets.  That’s the way!  Let Arden and Lerica plot their plots and hatch their schemes.  Give me aliens to shoot and good men to lead, and I’ll punt these birds right in the cloaca, every time.”

As is usually the case in a full Sector of the Imperium, one or more Lords General command the ground military assets of the Sector.  In the case of Cloudburst, there are two: Charles Xoss and Gabriel Halwart.  Charles Xoss is the senior by dint of eleven years of rank, and he operates from the Cloudburst Secured Tunnel Network, only a stone’s throw from the Overlord’s Palace.  An officer of his stature rarely leaves their command center anyway, of course, thanks to the difficulty inherent to replacing them, but Xoss is old enough that he wouldn’t leave anyway.

Xoss is high nobility of Cloudburst, and in fact is a distant relative of Sector Overlord Quintus.  His military career started at twelve, when he enrolled in the Cloudburst Junior Officers’ Program.  He followed an unremarkable trajectory for advancement in the Imperial military hierarchy until the age of fifty, when the Planetary Governor of Celeste appointed him the Flag Marshal of the Celeste PDF.  However, in M41.814, twenty regiments of Celestial Guard Rifles rose to the Astra Militarum for a passing Crusade into the Naxos Sector, along with a regiment of Cloudburst Defenders and five regiments of Thimblan Argent Swords.  The combined infantry assets of the force needed a single officer to serve as their high commander, and Xoss volunteered to transfer his commission from the PDF to the Guard to serve as that commander.
Four years later, Nurgle had whittled the full ranks of the Cloudburst Sector’s contribution to the Crusade from two hundred sixty thousand down to fourteen thousand, but Charles Xoss was a hero for saving even that many from the nightmarish meatgrinder of the Imperium’s neverending battles against the armies of Nurgle.  He had shown unflinching courage, consistent and even-handed discipline, and creative tactical thinking in his opposition to the Plaguemaster.  The enlisted men of the crusade force mustered out or joined combined regiments, while the surviving commissioned officers returned to praise and thanks from the Cloudburst hierarchy, and General Xoss’ career rocketed to greater heights.

After the crusade ended, the newly-minted Lieutenant General in the Imperial Guard took to commanding the regiments of Cloudburst Sector troops assigned to patrolling the border with the Drumnos Sector.  After only a few short decades, the Dark Winds pirate gang, which had swollen to a full-size rebellion against the Imperium, launched an assault on the Cloudburst Sector’s southern edge.  The combined forces of the Battlefleets Drumnos and Cloudburst, alongside several elements of the Cloudburst Mechanicus, counterattacked against the Dark Winds and crushed them entirely.  Lieutenant General Xoss was among them, and led a combined force of Septiim and Clegran troops in ground actions in support of the Skitarii of Cognomen.  Although several of his troops were mysteriously laid low by radiation poisoning, Xoss’ troops succeeded in corralling the Leman Russ Annihilators the Dark Winds fielded, and crushed them when they tried to withdraw.  Xoss was promoted to General, and became the new leader of all Imperial Guard forces on Cloudburst’s southern and Exo-zone border.

After that, Xoss went on rejuvenat treatments to extend his life, and eventually rose to the position of Lord General Cloudburst after the death by liver failure of his predecessor, Lord General Grummon.  The newly appointed Sector Overlord Quintus promoted Xoss to Lord General after consultation with the Overlords of the Subsectors.  Xoss moved from Celeste to Cloudburst proper and settled with his family into the warren of secured tunnels under the moon’s surface.
Xoss commands the growing ranks of the Cloudburst Astra Militarum from the tunnel network, in a custom-designed command structure built into the walls of the tunnels.  Because of the natural time delay in all inter-system communications, even psychic ones, Xoss can’t direct his forces at any tactical or operational level from these tunnels, but they do allow him to keep a rough count of active-duty personnel in the Sector at most times.  Of course, during the ramp-up to the Glasian invasions, the military contingents of some planets rise dramatically, which requires that he keep track of it, as their commander.

Beyond his command duties, Xoss is technically required to serve in a field command position if the Celeste system itself ever comes under attack from a force large enough to require the mustering and deployment of its full Imperial Guard and PDF defenses.  However, in a practical sense, this is both highly unlikely and unpragmatic.  Xoss is an ancient man, and even juvenat treatments can’t hide the fact that his body can’t endure much more prolonging.  Besides, even Leviathan and Capitol Imperialis superheavy transports have fewer command and communications options than his own home tunnels.
Because Xoss has command authority over all Imperial Guard forces in the Sector, he is often consulted when a planetary government requires advice or approval from Sector Command to raise a regiment.  His decades of service have granted him keen insight on the needs of a regiment when they face specific foes or obstacles, and he lends his knowledge to whatever System Overlord or Planetary Governor needs them as required.  Of course, not all martial assets in the Sector answer to him.  The Navy, the Blue Daggers, the various Mechanicus forces, and the armed enforcement wings of the Arbites answer to their own leaders.  Xoss’ forces are the most numerous by far, of course, and unlike Arden or Maynard, he bases from Cloudburst itself, and thus is sometimes called on, fairly or not, to serve as the representative of other Imperial institutions before the Sector Overlord.

As a part of his chain of command, his forces ultimately answer to both Quintus and the Master of the Administratum Ultima, but the Segmentum Fortress is too far away for it to exert much direct control in such a backwater, and Quintus has no military experience.  Xoss, therefore, must decide which threats in the Sector require the full attention of the Imperial Guard.  He is aided in this by the senior staff of Coriolis, where much of his force stages between missions.  The government of the Septiim system also aids in this.  Xoss can, on behalf of the Guard, ask Lord Admiral Maynard for the use of Maynard’s troopships, to transport Guardsmen and their gear to wherever they may be needed, and can also authorize the hiring of mercenaries, although Cardinal Lamarr has already snapped up most of them in the Sector.

Xoss is the loudest proponent of a crackdown on Lamarr.  He detests the old Cardinal for so openly flouting the Decree Passive, and has all but begged Lady Inquisitrix Lerica to do something about it.  His word, more than any other, has compelled Oscar Havermann to act on Lamarr’s actions.  However, he is now so busy with the raising and training of troops to prepare for the Seventh Glasian Migration that there is no real chance that he will be able to do something about Lamarr in person.
He gets along better with other senior members of the Sector’s hierarchy.  He and Ranult Arden have a polite relationship, while he and Maynard are at least distant friends.  He does not like Lerica very much, but she scares the hell out of him, and Lord Marshal Persinius Oolan trusts him to keep the aliens from the walls long enough for the Aribtes to do their job.
Because of his advanced age, Xoss doesn’t actually enter battle any longer, but when he did, he did so with an arm-mounted bolter on his left arm and a master-crafted hotshot laspistol in his right hand, which he could holster quickly if he needed a free hand.  He also carried a dueling saber he never needed.

Professor Merrick Unarvu
“Do you know what I want, more than anything?  I want everybody’s life to be as much fun as mine.”

The whispers of Slaanesh drift through the minds of the bored and lustful, twisting them to sin.  So claims the Ecclesiarchy, at least.  Many of those who devote themselves to the Prince of Pleasure are happy to abandon the Emperor for somebody who at least feigns affection.
The stultifying life of the peasantry ensures that many of those who serve Slaanesh are thoe who couldn’t find luxury any other way.  More cosmopolitan worlds have a middle class, full of burgeoning ideas with no place in the rigid Imperium.  Aristocracy offers wealth and boredom; fertile ground for the seeds of Slaanesh.
Slaaneshi teachers, however, are rare indeed.

Professor Merrick Unarvu is a wholly devoted servant of Slaanesh, and a dark thrall of the Lord of Excess.  Nobody would think it to look at him.  He wears tweedy robes and shirts with Imperial skulls on the lapel, and smiles patiently at students who try to bribe or flatter their way past his strict grading.  His colleagues, or most of them, think him a charming and clever old sort, the kind that make a school better for having him.  Indeed, when he lectures the students about how Terran art changed as the populace fled Old Earth in the Long March colony waves, he seems both harmless and well-informed.
Then, he goes home, puts on his true working clothes, and descends through his hologram basement wall to sink barbed hooks into the flesh of screaming vagrants and catatonic children, and his smile doesn’t change at all.
Thus it is, Professor Merrick Unarvu is both wholy aware of what he is doing and completely unable to call it wrong or cruel.  He loves to spread knowledge, whether of the minutae of the artistic themes of Post-Diaspora sculpture or what it feels like to swallow fishhooks coated in honey.  He loves to spend time with people, whether bright young students who want to know how the blending of light colors can draw out the inner beauty of a bust or the brainwashed murderers he instructs in the way of Excess.
Unarvu is insane, incurably and happily mad.  He sold his soul to Slaanesh in exchange for power that he outright refuses to use; he finds it so much more delightful to twist a person’s mind until serving the Prince is the exactly right thing to do.  He can call down towers of lightning and blast a person’s soul out through their mouth, but that’s both far more visible and much easier than seducing a failing student and turning them to the Warp.
Oh, but he has fun, him and his hundreds of friends, as they slowly spread their influence through the academic and civil institutions of mighty Coriolis.  He has had no success subverting the Supreme Marshal’s office, and with only a few hundred people on his side, knows better than to try his luck.  However, he has been able to keep the local Ministorum clergy off his back through the careful application of booze and women.

Unarvu is a beguiling and calculating man.  He knows that the only way the Imperium can survive its thousand-fold enemies is by giving itself to the Warp.  He was not born psychic, but after a night of indulging himself on nameless victims in the gutters of the great city in which he lives, whispers soothed his mind as he dreamed.  He dreamed of a new future, one where the great Prince ruled over all, and everything was better.

Merrick Unarvu is no fool.  He knows full well now what he has pacted himself to.  He has stopped caring.  The Imperium is dead, stagnant, and collapsing, and now he sees the way forward.  If the Ecclesiarchial texts call him a monster, who cares?  He serves the true power in the universe.

Unarvu is crafty, and he prefers to bait his allies and future victims in with different methods.  To his victims, he is a patient benefactor, who offers his home and knowledge to those who need it.  To his allies, he is a coconspirator, and a font of hidden power that becomes more delicious every time.
One thing about which he does not deceive is his combat skill.  He does not carry weapons, and if ever he were forced to fight without weapons, he would fall at once to any skilled foe.  However, his dark pacts grant him control over lightning and a powerful glamour, which he can use to surprise his foes.

Magos Gabris – brain surgeon
“The nerve pathway passes through a small gap in the bone structure here.  A single nervous bundle carries the signals from the sensory perceptors in the fingers and cuticles to the larger nerves in the elbow here, under the cartiledge.  See?  If you put the probe here, you can feel the pain from when I cut you, but you can’t move to stop me.  Isn’t that interesting?”

The Mechanicus ideal is that of thought and reverence unburdened by emotion, distraction, or impurity.  In all ways, the Mechanicus and its adherents strive towards the simplicity of the Machine.  Magos Gabris, the leader of the Mechanicus contingent of Lordarine, strives for the Machine, by learning as much as he can about his subjects.  Specifically, he does so by learning as much as possible about their anatomy, how much they can endure before breaking, and their tolerance for his tyranny.

Gabris started out as just another lowly Cognomen Techpriest, but in time, his natural skill at carving away pretense and personal investment in his projects raised him the eyes of his superiors above the entry level of the clergy.
As with all Magos, Gabris had to distinguish himself and advance the Quest for Knowledge in order to accomplish his rank.  He did so by pioneering the combination of specific natural stone crystals, sometimes no more than thirteen molecules in width, with tungsten-iron alloys in cutting tools, which he was able to prove through historical reference was a technique certain ancient surgeons had used.  Once elevated to Magos, he continued his research into the archaeotechnological techniques of ancient human cultures.  As an expert in the field, he was the natural choice to lead the Mechanicus team researching the ancient human surgical tools in the mines and subterranean cavernways of Lordarine.

Initially, Gabris’ projects produced remarkable results.  Although he never quite managed to determine the exact methods of some of the more complex neurological reconstruction equipment in Lordarine’s ancient laboratories, he was able to get them to work perfectly as long as they were prepped properly first.  He also found detailed instructions on their cleaning and basic maintenance, apparently written by somebody named Manuel.
The documents revealed that if used properly, the equipment is both safe to use and relatively painless, thanks to the redundant nerve suppressors in the surgical tools.  Gabris studied these documents extensively, in the hopes of finding something that would allow him to replicate the technologies and send something of value to Mars.  Eventually, he was able to repeat the results of the ancient researchers on two human volunteers, and he was off to the races.

However, nature or the fickle hand of the Warp intervened.  At this point, the nearby Warp Storm Vasari’s Cruelty flared up catastrophically, throwing wafts of energy from the Rift at its heart into space.  Several hit Lordarine.  The resultant ecological damage, lightning storms, and loss of property disrupted Gabris’ work.
The humans of Lordarine begged for shelter from the elements, and Gabris, as the unofficial leader of the colony, was forced to begrudgingly permit this.  After lengthy storm effects that partially levelled the Lordarine mining and research colonies, the damage done to the surface buildings was so bad that several hundred humans had to take up residence in the ancient tunnels instead.

However, while most of the humans who fled into the tunnels during the damage escaped great harm, Gabris did not.  The exposure to Warp energies he sustained during the Warp Storm unhinged him.  Although he is not corrupted by Chaos, he is definitely mad, and his madness is growing.  With each successive Warp Storm, his measures against his own populace are growing worse.  He has even begun to inflict the surgical tools at his disposal against dissidents in his population outside the times of the storms.
This is a rising problem for him, as well, as the Warp Storms and the resultant lightning squalls have become so frequent and so disruptive that Gabris has had to fully disconnect the nervous systems of several hundred colonists just so that they aren’t harmed by the Wapr energies.  He and his cyber-guards imagine themselves immune to the effects of the Warp thanks to their cybernetic replacements of their body parts, and to their credit they do suffer the Warp effects less than the humans do, but they are not actually immune.  Slowly, the Magos is losing his mind, and his guards aren’t far behind him.

The Magos carries a custom-built Twin Galvanic Pistol and a Power Axe, but he hasn’t used either in years.


Magos Lethicos
“Fuck this place.”

Adamantium is one of the rarest and most valuable metals in the entire galaxy.  It is the only thing sparing the world Tendrils from destruction.
Magos Lethicos of the Cognomen Explorator fleets discovered vast sums of it after his ship detected a slight radio wave transmission with unknown encryptions from an unexplored system in the northern edges of the Cloudburst Sector.  When Lethicos arrived, he was immediately attacked with primitive ballistic weapons from the surface of the world.  After seeing off the missiles with the guns of his battleship, Lethicos retreated a safe distance and scanned the surface carefully.  He found both a hostile alien civilization of unknown organisms and the largest deposits of Adamantium ore for a hundred light years.

Lethicos quickly and excitedly sent news of his findings to the Cognomen Explorator command, and included notes about the primitive defense capabilities of the residents of the planet.  Despite the obvious superiority of his weapons, Lethicos knew not to try to engage an unknown alien race with only a single battleship and minimal ground troops.  However, the issue quickly rose away from his direct control.
As news of his discovery of enormous adamantium deposits made its way up the chain of command, word eventually reached the Senate of the High Lords of Terra.  As Adamantium is the most valuable metal in the galaxy after Aurumite, the Senate took an immediate interest in the issue, especially since it was accompanied by the discovery of a race of hostile aliens inside Imperial borders.  Magos Lethicos was ordered to return to the planet with fresh supplies and dedicated orbital surveying equipment and conduct a proper scan of the surface and its defenses.

Lethicos did so, and flew back to Tendrils three years later.  To his shock, the world had visibly changed.  Even granting that he had not heavily scanned the population or surface beyond mineral surveys the last time, the world’s surface was too different to be confused for its original appearance.  The number of aliens, which he dubbed Tendrilites, was far lower.  However, despite an apparent population drop, the construction on the surface was vastly higher.  There were far more buildings, and signs of extensive excavation all across the rain-lashed surface.  Again, the aliens fired a barrage of cruise missiles at the Mechanicus ship, but this time, they fired over three times as many, and they were significantly faster.  His defenses still swatted them down without trouble, but the noted improvement that the Tendrilites gained in the time it took him to fly home and get new orders shook Lethicos.  He sent this new discovery to the Senate via Astropath, and started more detailed surveys.

Even as his ships watched from orbit, he saw the world below changing.  Alien constructs and fortifications erupted from all around major cities.  Populations of aliens vanished as they moved underground.  Lethicos even spotted a few small-scale battles, perhaps between political factions.  In the years since then, the planet has hardened against any further attempts to attack, while Cognomen dithers and focuses on other things.
Seventy years have passed.  In that time, Magos Lethicos has returned to Tendrils over and over, and each time, their society has seen radical advancements in technology and culture, to an extent that horrifies Lethicos.  Their technology alone has advanced immensely in the brief time that Lethicos has been watching them.  They have progressed from a mixture of flintlock weapons and simple missiles to gas-propelled infantry rifles and complex cruise missiles with in-built anti-countermeasures that his ship can barely stop by itself.  Culturally, they have progressed from warring intercene states to a nearly unified global military autocracy.  The Tendrilites have also begun stockpiling truly shocking volumes of biological weapons that Lethicos has seen them testing on each other for lack of an understanding of human anatomy.

Four times, Lethicos has sent pleading messages to Cognomen, Fabique, even Mars itself for backup, and every time, he has had nothing but unfulfilled promises and buck-passing.  Cognomen insists that it is too busy shoring up the defenses against threats that can actually attack back, Fabique doesn’t wish to become too involved in a Cloudburst matter, and Mars is no better at returning Lethicos’ calls than Beraxos’.  Then, Lethicos tried Cloudburst Command, but after waiting as long as he had in the hopes that the Mechanicus would help him out, but now the Cloudburst military authority are caught up in preparation for the impending Glasian Migration.  As the millennium draws to a close, the Senate of the High Lords has delivered an ultimatum to Lethicos.  Either he handles the Tendrilites, or they may send somebody who will do it for him.


Outside of his onerous duty of watching his job getting harder before his eyes, Lethicos is a quiet and stately man, with few hobbies or interests outside his clerical duties.  When he is not staring in morose silence at the distant planet that is the source of his woes, he is usually tending to the spiritual needs of his crew, or carrying out research on the data his sensors collect about the Tendrilites.  He is Cognomen born and raised, and until Beraxos’ sudden inability to help him arose, considered Beraxos a friend.  When he enters battle, he does so with a master-crafted transuranic rifle of his own design, and a pair of Arc Pistols he carries for self defense.


Governor Chadwick Haupstmann – Subsector Overlord of Cognomen Subsector
“Sometimes I wish I did not have to rely on others to do my job.  It’s hard to find good help, but you can if you try hard enough.  I just like the peace and quiet.  You know?  I do my best work with a cup of water and a lho stick where I can reach them, total silence all around me, and no people in white and red getting in my way.”

The common image of the Masters of the Administratum among the commoners is that of an elderly person, ink-stained and lho-smoking, far from harm or the common touch.  It’s not always true, of course, but in the case of Chadwick Haupstmann, things couldn’t be closer to the mark.
Chadwick started life in a family of Administratum Adepts on the planet Cognomen’s orbital platforms.  They would flit from orbital to orbital as needed, addressing the myriad concerns of the Subsector’s administration and government that the Mechanicus chose to ignore.  Unlike most other positions of Imperial high office, the position of Master of the Administratum Cognomen (usually just shortened to Overlord Cognomen to avoid confusion with the similar titles of Lister Beraxos) is not a particularly prestigious one.  Because the entire Cognomen Subsector is essentially a satrap of the Mechanicus, the Subsector Overlord has precious little to actually do.  Their Battlefleet is a tiny one, since the Mechanicus prefers to build ships to protect its own territory, and the Battlefleet is dependent on the Mechanicus for parts and fuel anyway.  The civilian population of most of the Cognomen Subsector worlds are under the authority of either the Mechanicus or Ecclesiarchy in the majority, and there are few new colonization efforts to undertake nearby.
Therefore, the only real draw to the position is the range of benefits afforded the families of the Overlord.  They are afforded the very best education, commissions in the military if they want them, and a variety of permissions when dealing with other powerful Imperial officials, like the right of refusal if Rogue Traders attempt to press them into service in their crew.  Since the position of the Lord Subsector Cognomen has little to do compared to their counterparts in Oglith, Nauphry, or Delving, some members of the Cognomen Administratum compete to succeed the incumbent family if ever something should happen to them.

At present, however, Governor Haupstmann is unlikely to vacate his position.  He has been in the current Governorship for only nine years, but has settled in well.  He and Lord Fabricator Beraxos do not see eye-to-bionic on many topics, but they do have an understanding about the ABX202020 construction: Haupstmann doesn’t tell Quintus, and Beraxos leaves Haupstmann to his work.
Privately, Haupstmann actually does approve of the ABX202020 project, especially since Beraxos has assured him that the forces built there will be devoted to the expansion of the Sector into the Circuit and Exozone, a cause Haupstmann supports.  However, Haupstmann doesn’t see any need for Beraxos to know that.
Haupstmann refuses to assign himself to any special political identity, and his jurisdiction is far more limited in the scope of his power than most Subsector Overlords.  Rogue Traders who deal with the Cognomen Techpriesthood aren’t particularly common given how many Traders operate in the Circuit, thanks to Beraxos’ personal dislike of Rogue Traders as an institution.  That means that there are few chances for Haupstmann to interact with others of his own social standing and power.  However, Haupstmann does prefer peace and quiet, so this is less of a personal disadvantage than it would be for Lowelthal or Oskoldr.  His daily routine is identical.  After breakfasting with his incredibly bored children, he goes to his office and sits alone for ten hours, broken only to smoke and eat, then dines with his incredibly bored wife, watches the holo for a few hours, and then goes to bed.  Every few weeks, he goes on a sudden health kick and exercises in all of his spare time, then loses interest a few days later and goes back to sloth.

He refuses to carry a weapon out of general principal, and he has never been in combat.

Master of the Administratum Maskos Samantha Lowenthal
“This is my ancient home, sir.  Do not disrespect it.  I said do not!  Rogue Trader you may be, but I am an Overlord, and if ever you dare levy troops from my factory workers again, I shall have you fed to my lions.  What, you don’t have your own lions?  Hmm.”

Samantha Lowenthal is old money in the Maskos high society.  As a descendent of one of the families that originally supported Missionary Maskos himself, her family has been in the public eye of the people for as long as history records.  Thanks to that publicity, and no small amount of economic finagling, the Lowenthal family has been able to remain a constant presence in the Imperial nobility and merchantry for thousands of years.
Lowenthal is the ninth of her family to ascend to Subsector Overlordship.  Like many of her predecessors, she has refused to divest her family of its many, many businesses, although she does begrudgingly allow the Arbites to routinely inspect her family’s finances to make sure her decisions do not overly favor her own businesses.  Lowenthal is fabulously wealthy, moreso than one would suspect an Overlord of a system founded and named after a Missionary would be.
She is also ruthless, prideful, and a bit sef-conscious about her position.  Her rank as a Subsector Overlord may be secure, but Cloudburst is hardly an auspicious or prestigious posting compared to Drumnos or Naxos.  Still, Lowenthal presents herself like a queen.
Some Governors and Overlords are very much bureaucrats, but Lowenthal is a classic Imperial aristocrat.  To her social inferiors, she is a towering figure, as are her children to a lesser extent.  However, every time she decides she is the most important person in the Subsector, High Inquisitrix Lerica arranges for some tiny, near-invisible reminder that the Inquisitorial palace of Cloudburst is a few hundred miles away, and full of people with far, far greater power.

Lowenthal is a product of the times.  Politics on Maskos tend towards the dynastic, but the upset caused to the surface by the Glasian Migration (or First Glasian Migration, as it now called) led the people to demand a strong new leader.  The existing Subsector Overlord, Marco Pazzi, stepped down after the people nearly rose up in arms in outrage at the state of the planet’s defenses.  The new Overlord, voted in by the Sector Overlord and his Council, was Lowenthal’s ancestor Julius Lowenthal.  Julius sent the fullest force of his family’s business interests to the ravaged surface of Maskos, rebuilding and fortifying what remained, and earned his way into the people’s trust.  As centuries wended their way past, the collective wealth of the Lowenthal family expanded and expanded, until the family was both the wealthiest in the system, and its ruler.  The family also bears extensive scrutiny from the Ordo Famulous of the Adeptus Sororitas, and most of its marriages are arranged by the church.  While the Lowenthal family members do not always appreciate it, this has prevented inbreeding or any strains of the psyker gene manifesting, and has allowed the family to stay in power uncontested, despite the violent nature of the Cloudburst Sector’s recent history.

Samantha is not a psyker, but as the hostess of the local Inquisition, she does have some dealings with psykers as employees or guests of the Inquisition.  Chief Rastimos keeps the Inquisition’s business their own, and does not rely on Maskos’ own Astropathic Choir to messaging, but periodically the Inquisition does make requests of Maskos assets the Overlord is not in a position to deny.
Lowenthal also sees much of the power of her family as a birthright, and treats it as such.  She finds it personally offensive when other nobles ask for favors, as if it would ever be anything other than a business or political transaction in her mind.  She has no military experience, and does not carry a weapon as a matter of course.


Harek abn Alnasr, Clan Ahad, Lord Subsector Thimble – Subsector Overlord of Thimble Subsector
“By the threads of my looms are the Emperor’s armies clothed, by the sweat of the brows of my citizens do they soar over the land, and by the work of my hands, shall my family rule in the Emperor’s name.”

Thimble is the most heavily populated Imperial world in the Cloudburst Sector, and economically the mightiest.  Its silvered spires soar high over the baked earth outside, and its foundries and looms feed the economy of the Sector like no other world save Cognomen.  Clan Ahad has presided over the Sector for over a thousand years, and its leadership has enabled the planet to rise nearly to the level of productivity it had between the fall of the Terran Federation and its own collapse.
Lord Harek is responsible for much of its growth.  His combination of ruthless economic exploitation and expansion, and his family’s personal wealth, have fueled much of Thimble’s growing export business.  The planet exports aircars, clothing, and some small amounts of metals, as well as various industrial goods and alloys.
Clan Ahad has been able to push Thimble’s power throughout nearby space.  Their policy for colonization is aggressive; both of the moons of Thimble are undergoing extensive construction at Harek’s order.  Harek is pouring his money into his own project; namely his resurrection laboratory.
Harek is obsessed with living long enough to see his clan’s vision for the Subsector come to fruition.  Working with an army of Hereteks and mercenaries, he led the roundup of over thirty thousand scavs and underhivers from Singer Hive, which he traded for all manner of illegal mind-transferrence and cloning technology.  In the secret laboratory he has built on the moon Iocanto, his servants are crafting him a genetically-identical body, one that is essentially him at the age of 20.  When his current body ages beyond its limit, he intends to transfer his memories and his mind to that body, and return to the public eye as his own grandson.

Aside from these Heretek servants and a few members of his immediate family, nobody yet knows of his plan.  Certainly, Overlord Quintus does not know what Harek is doing.  If Lord Beraxos were to learn of what Harek is doing, he would have the Overlord’s execution warrant printed and ready for Inquisitorial approval in hours.  Harek knows this, and has taken ever precaution to prevent anybody from learning about his plan.
The damnable part is, he thinks, that there is no harm in what he is doing.  If the technology works and produces a clone that is free of outside influence or risks, then why should it be illegal?  It is because he can’t think of an answer that he assumes that there is no answer.  In reality, the Heretek level of understanding of the cloning technology is at best tenuous.  It is quite possible that whatever happens during the mind transference will destroy the body’s neural system.  Of course, the group has neglected to inform Harek of this.

Beyond his ‘dynastic’ ambitions, Harek abn Alnasr is a model Imperial Subsector Overlord.  The people who enjoy the benefits of hive life adore him, while the proles find him amusing or annoying, if they think of him at all.  He periodically showers the upper hives with gifts largesse, but mostly couldn’t be asked.  His ties to the military are those of duty alone; he has never served in the military.  He leaves much of the running of the system’s affairs to his subordinates as he focuses on the larger concerns, such as the rest of the Subsector’s preparations for the imminent arrival of the Glasians.  Although the Thimble Subsector does not contain any worlds that the Glasians are going to hit in the Seventh Migration, the possibility that the aliens succeed in destroying a world and then move to a Thimble Subsector system, as they did with Chlorit and Coriolis, means that the Thimble Subsector still must be protected.  Of course, the invasion of the Orks of Squiggothrider into the Rampart system also drew the attention of the Navy.  Lord Harek has diverted every ship he thinks the Subsector can spare to the defense of the Rampart system from further alien incursions.

Lord Harek has an uncomfortable relationship with the Inquisition.  Of course, they can never learn of his mind transference lab, but he also has more political power than the majority of nobles or even Overlords in the Sector, thanks to his colossal wealth and the fact that he controls the only Hive World in the Sector.  The enormous shipyards of the Spindle system allow his world to manufacture ships and metallurgical goods in a volume that can change the course of a small-scale war, purely on the basis of their volume.  However, while High Inquisitrix Lerica is in a position to disregard the undeniable good that Harek’s industrial work has done for the Imperium, lesser Inquisitors tend to watch their step around the canny Overlord.

As a product of the same Highborn schools and academies as most other Thimble nobles, Harek had an early grounding in politics, economics, religion, history (at least the sanitized version taught to Imperial Highborn), and at least a grounding in warfare theory.  However, Harek quickly proved to be a voracious reader, and he fairly gobbled up knowledge about the system, about its past, and most especially about the ancient labs on its moons.
Harek has had a few notable interactions with the Deathwatch.  As the system in the Subsector with the largest volume of civilian shipping (at least until Cognomen finishes its expansions), the Spindle system has had numerous problems with alien pirates or infiltrators.  On four occasions since M41.822, the Deathwatch has sent Kill-Marines to the Spindle System to either hunt down alien troublemakers or advise Clan Ahad on how to do so.  Notably, one of these Kill-Marines was current Master of the Defenses Arthur Molliere.  One of these visits happened while Harek was Overlord, and another happened two years before his elevation to the role.

As perhaps befits a Heretek, Harek has wildly different public and private levels of defense.  He seems to carry no more than a ceremonial dueling pistol, and even then, it is usually in the hands of his second and bodyguard, Niles Lancaster, one of the few people who knows of his secret lab.  However, he has a highly illegal precision laser blaster built into his prosthetic left wrist, and carries a hardened polymer blade under his trousers on both legs, neither of which will show up on a metal detector or smell wand.

Lord Subsector Nauphry Matheus Soldati – Subsector Overlord of Nauphry Subsector
“My planet is bipolar, but by the Throne are we hitting our quotas!  I say, do you think it would make things better or worse if I announced a formal competiton to see who can open the most new mines in a month?”

Some Subsector Overlords rule through fear, others through inertia.  Some rule through military glory, others the clenched fist of the law.  Matheus Soldati rules through a combination of jovial nature, excellent breeding, the public support of the Ecclesiarchy, and complete denial of facts he doesn’t like.
Born and raised in a tropical island chain at the equator of the Nauhpry IV demilitarized zone, Soldati lived his entire early life in the combination of unapproachable isolation, unfathomable wealth, and religious instruction that defines much of the Imperial nobility of the Nauphry Subsector.  As a citizen of neither of the two super-nations that have rent the Nauphry IV surface and ecology in twain, he feels no particular attachment to either.  In truth, he barely cares for the two nations, seeing them as being essentially inert in their ability to actually look forward to serving the Imperium.  Playing their competitive edge against each other is all well and good for economic reasons, and it has certainly done immense good for the Nauphry shipyards and factories, but he finds them distasteful in the extreme.
However, Soldati has hid this well, as he should.  As Nauphry IV has no Planetary Governor, thanks to its absurdly bipolar rulership, he is the de facto ruler of the planet as well as the System and Subsector governments.  Of course, even his critics in the two nations begrudgingly admit that there is simply no way that even the best-educated men such as Soldati can rule so much at once.  Thus, he delegates.  Soldati has appointed over fifteen hundred Ministers and Lords Excellent to rule the system, Subsector, and parts of the planet in his absence, although they have limited power over Nauphry IV itself.  To keep the rather large militaries of the system from exercising tribal affinity for one nation over the other, Soldati has also strictly enforced the harsh rules that separate troop levies from the places from which they were levied.  Of course, these rules long predate him, but he has been downright forceful in his denial of the two Federocracies in denying them.

Perhaps because of his ironclad upholding of certain planetary laws, he has a somewhat more comfortable relationship with the various Arbites and Enforcers that cross his path than most Subsector Overlords.  The Arbites enforce the Lex Imperialis, and couldn’t care less for the bipolar nature of local law as long as the Emperor’s Word is obeyed; the fact that Soldati has the same opinion has earned him the distant respect of the world’s Judges.
However, Soldati hs no patience for the local and galactic-scale Guilds that operate much of the actual economic work of the planet.  The constant urging of the two Federocracies has made it clear to the Guilds that they should have no time for failure.  The Guilds have a penchant for putting tiny bureaucratic obstructions in just the right spots to bottleneck the industrial work that is the lifeblood of the Nauphry IV tithe payment, just to remind the governments in turn how much power the Guilds have.

In person, far from the shouting matches that characterize the Nauphry IV population and politics, Soldati is a jolly fellow, with a grandfatherly air and physique.  He has a booming voice and an infectious smile, and when the planet’s not giving him an ulcer, he has found contentment in the glass-bottomed boats that sail around the island chain on which the Imperium bases its holdings.  He has a wife and four children, and caries only a vox and pen-knife, never a gun.

Lord Subsector Delving Miles laDremankine – Subsector Overlord of Delving Subsector
“The darkness rises against the Aquila’s endless light.  I see it every year.  I can read the projections of my mines and refineries, you know.  Every year, a bit less goes to luxuries and a bit more goes to warships and such.  How much longer can we hold shut the gates of hell?”

For somebody with no military experience, Miles laDremankine puts on a heavily martial air.  He has never served bcause of his extensive genetic defects, but he does not allow that to stop him from pretending he is a soldier’s soldier at every chance he thinks he can get away with.

laDremankine is a dwarf, and has served as the Lord Subsector for forty years.  He and Lord Ranult Arden work together to arrange the defense of the Subsector during the centennial Glasian assaults on Septiim, and sometimes other worlds in the Subsector.  He is also in charge of coordinating the immense shipments of rare metals from Delving to Cognomen and Thimble, as well as serving as the figurehead of the Delving militaries.
And what a figurehead he is.  When he goes about in public, he wears a custom-designed military uniform he has never earned, and carries a shockingly expensive master-crafted Hellpistol he can barely draw.  He also visits all of the weekly strategic meetings of the plantary Marshal and High General (in charge of the SDF/PDF and Guard, respectively).  He has memorized the entire Low and High Gothic radio code and alphanumeric response code, all of the PDF and SDF current landing aircraft codes, and the names of the thirty highest-ranked Blue Daggers.  He is on speaking terms with both Lord Inquisitor Hueng and Lord Admiral Maynard, and has a recall of the ships and Captains of the Subsector Battlefleet Delving that puts some of its actual officers to shame.
Lord General Xoss once remarked, well out of earshot, that it was not laDremankine’s vigor or brains that kept him from proper military service, but his stature.  Precisely why laDremankine so favors the military, Xoss does not know, nor does he especially care.  In reality, laDremankine has told nobody, and there is no one incident or event that contributed to it.  He is simply fascinated by the military and its stylings, and he finds the subject endlessly educational.

As one could imagine, the upswing in interest the military has enjoyed during laDremankine’s tenure is no bad thing for Subsector Delving’s many valuable assets.  To be sure, Battlefleet Delving and the Blue Daggers are better equipped now than they have ever been, and laDremankine has been carefully polishing and refining the mechanisms of government in the Subsector in anticipation of the lean times for decades.  His love of the armed forces does not blind him to the very real possibility that the Glasians might actually score another victory some day, and he has taken some preparations to ensure a loss on that scale does not cripple the Subsector forever.  This level of pragmatism soothes the working relationship between himself and Arden, who has little patience for the slowness of the Imperial bureaucracy.


As Subsector Overlord of the Delving Subsector, laDremankine is at the focal point of the incessant resource needs of the rest of the Imperium, and the precarious ecological balance his planet has to endure for its people to survive.  He spends enough time on his military matters that he has not been able to divert his full attention to the ecological repair and improvement of Delving.  It he spent no more time on military affairs than he needed to, that would be easier to forgive, but as it stands, many Delving civilian and Administratum leaders have begun to question if this obsession of his has led him to distraction.
To be fair, Delving has many concerns.  The Glasians hit Delving in the Third Migration, and the planet’s civilian population took a horrific pounding from the aliens before the Blue Daggers and the Cognomen Skitarii drove them off.  After that, the Delving Guard became the primary concern for the planetary government.  It took two hundred years, but eventually, the Delving Guard rose to a level of competence that ensured that it would only be dependent on the Daggers for the direst circumstances.
Thanks to the enormous vulnerability of the Delving terraforming machines, which no other Mining World under Administratum control in the Sector needs, most of the Home Guard are tied up in asset protection instead of garrison duty.  Overlord laDremankine tours these facilities as often as he’s able to do so.  He has attended the dedication ceremonies for several Delving Guard regiments raised to fight in the Circuit, and after he finally realized he wouldn’t be able to accompany the Delving regiment raised to defend Oglith, he couldn’t be talked out of his room for a day and a half.
As befits a martially-obsessed person of his status, laDremankine carries a dueling pistol at all times, and sometimes even wears a flak jacket to work.

Lady Subsector Hapster Astrid Oskoldr
“The blood in my veins is bronze.  My people have killed, bled, prayed, sailed to the tune of the Senate for eleven thousand years.  Let Celeste take the credit for building Cloudburst; my people know the truth.  Hapster is Cloudburst, and the Glasians will have to kill every single one of us to break us.”

The Hapster Subsector is the oldest continually-inhabited Imperial territory in the Cloudburst Sector, and the planet Hapster itself has served the Imperium loyally for over eleven thousand years.  The Oskoldr family was not the first to serve as its Overlords, but they have held the post for most of that time.  A distant ancestor was executed by the Inquisition for not preventing the Voidlife flotilla from robbing Hapster’s orbitals, but beside that unfortunate incident, the Oskoldrs have been in charge of the Sector, whether politically or economically, for eight millennia.
Astrid Oskoldr is a capable and talented leader, but her reputation is that of a somewhat fearful taskmistress, who has no qualms about using whatever dirty tricks or influence-peddling she needs to get things done.  Astrid was educated in an Ecclesiarchial school built on the grounds of a common estate in her closed noble enclave in her home city.  By the age of twenty, her grandfather had already promised her the position of heiress to succeed him as the Subsector Overlord.
Only two years later, her younger sister attempted to poison her.  Their youngest sibling, a brother, caught her in the act, and Astrid turned her over to the Arbites without a second thought.  She has a small soft spot for her brother Brian, although she would never admit it.  Now that Astrid has arisen to the rank of Subsector Overlord, she has been able to enact her iron-fisted vision on Hapster with none to oppose her, since Brian has taken to business instead of politics.  Astrid has driven much of the senior bureaucracy of her grandfather’s administration from their posts and replaced them with people of cunning and loyalty to her, whether the displaced Adepts were bad at their jobs or not.  However, the people of Hapster are warming to Astrid’s style, as it has undeniably produced results.  Hapster was hit in both the Fifth and Sixth Glasian Migrations, and now the people know it will be hit in the Seventh.

Astrid’s brutal and clinical assessment of the planet’s capabilities has left no room for doubt: Hapster can’t survive another invasion unaided.  Too much of the planet is inhospitable to humans for a global-scale defense to be enacted with the personnel she has available.  As such, she immediately swallowed her pride and asked for assistance.  Much of the Sector’s defenses are focused on Oglith or Dawn-break, but some ships from Battlefleet Cloudburst’s reserves are on the way, as are a handful of Inquisitorial assets.
The largest asset that Hapster shall enjoy in this upswing of protection, however, is Lord Admiral Maynard.  The canny old officer was already in orbit over Hapster when the news of its impending invasion broke, because he had correctly anticipated that Tzeentch would target it again.  Thanks to his foresight, he has been able to arrange for a significant increase in the fixed and orbital defenses of the planet’s fleet, and has summoned every ship that can be spared from the defense of the two Feral Worlds in the Glasians’ path without jeopardizing them.
Astrid and Maynard get along well enough to work together, and that is the extent of their co-operation.  Astrid herself has a personal rule of strong martial training, and is a dead shot with a slug-loaded shotgun thanks to her extensive hunting practice.

Politically, Astrid is a calculating and efficient person, who insists on the usual cruft of bureaucrats and Adepts that run Hapster serving her directly.  When she isn’t getting away from it all in her mountain retreat, she is directing the Subsector’s government from the Imperial Castle.  Of course, with so much of Hapster undergoing ecological reconstruction at any given time, the region of the planet over which she can actually preside at any time is limited.  Astrid has essentially browbeaten the Planetary Governor into following her instructions concerning defense and taxation, to the extent that the Administratum of Cloudburst are somewhat taken aback; some have even begun to whisper of reprimanding Astrid if she doesn’t start adhering more clcosely to her position’s traditional limits.

Astrid carries a conventional military slug pistol at all times, and displays it openly.  Publicly, she does so to assure the people that she is as ready as she can be to fight off the Glasians, but she could do so just as easily with a ceremonial dueling pistol, as most of her fellow Masters of the Administratum do.  She uses an unadorned, ugly combat pistol as a subtle – or perhaps not so subtle- reminder to her fellow nobles that she is not to be trifled with.

Lord Subsector Oglith Darren Atongwë – Subsector Overlord of Oglith Subsector
“The green tide threatens to drown us all.  How many generations of my family have utterly failed to fix this problem?  I fear that before this is over, the Atongwë family will have a new martyr in its holy ranks.”

The blood and sweat of the Atongwë family has brought hundreds of millions of souls to the light.  So the family claims, anyway.  The ancient Rogue Trader branch of the family established two worlds that eventually became Subsector Capital worlds, and now rule one of them by dint of ancient right of discovery.
In truth, however, it was partly because of the failures of ancient generations of the Atongwë family that the Rogue Trader house has seen its fortunes decline so severely in the last few centuries.  The house once reigned as the wealthiest in the Sector and much of those adjacent, but the sheer cost of the Oglith problem has drained their coffers ruinously fast.
Today, Darren Atongwë sits the throne of Rampart, as its Subsector Overlord.  The Planetary Governorship has long passed to another family, but the Subsector still counds Atongwë as its leader.
Darren suffers no illusions nor delusions of the future.  The time of the Atongwë family’s political supremacy is over.  He knows that the Administratum and Astra Militarum have no reason whatsoever to allow his family to continue to rule over the Oglith Subsector, not after thousands of years of unaddressed failures.
First there was the initial failure to address the subterranean Orks on Oglith itself.  Then there was a different ancestor’s throwing in with a privateer group that was a mere few months from being declared Perdita by the Segmentum Command Office.  Then there were the centuries of dithering and denialism over the continuing Ork problem, then the rising pollution and gang problems on Soak, then the massive and possibly illegal buildup of mercenaries on Jodhclan’s Paradise.
Darren Atongwë knows of the two Officio Assassinorum agents that are now active on his planet.  He suspects, with morbid certainty in his heart, that the Vanus Assassin is on Oglith to kill him.  Why else would a knowledge manipulator be accompanying the master sharpshooter codenamed Mimic?  Orks don’t care about human information services or agitprop.  The only targets that merit a Vanus’ attention are human ones, as far as he believes.
Only the Senate of the High Lords of Terra can commission an Assassin to field within the Imperium’s borders, let alone two.  Surely, Darren thinks, this means the Senate has lost all patience with him, and means to put him in the ground.  Perhaps in the final days of the war, a pack of his own subordinates will descend on him and rip him apart, or undetected Ork sympathizers in the populace shall suddenly gain widespread access to his personal aircars.  Or maybe the Officio will wait until the Glasians have landed and kill him in the chaos of Chaos?

However, Darren Atongwë is a fatalist, but not a pessimist.  He is a profoundly spiritual and pious man, and he has not allowed his suspicion of his imminent doom to delay him from doing his work.  He has focused his every waking hour into preparation for the arrival of the aliens; first the Glasians, then the sudden arrival of Big Chief Squiggothrider.  Atongwë actually knows very little about Orks and Glasians, despite the obvious risks.  He has a highly compartmentalized mind and little room for knowledge of heretical aliens.  Were he better at facing reality, he might have made a decent Bishop.  Alas, he is a politician through and through, replete with the frailties of mind and spirit that entails.

He is not a poor politician, but he relies on public image work and messaging to get his point across to the proles, not actions.  Oglith is – or was – a world rising fast in the estimation of the Imperium.  Their exceptional Scions and potent fleet made them a lynchpin of local defense on the very outermost edges of Imperial space.  The natural increase in economic power for the nobles and standards of living for the general populace ensured a relatively low level of crime, and Atongwë managed to convince himself, even in the face of contrasting evidence, that all could be well, even if the Glasians were coming.
He should have known better, and now he sees this.

As a child, Darren was groomed for leadership from the age of six.  By the time he was twenty, he had already enrolled in the ranks of the local commissioned officers’ corps of the Oglith Warriors, and never once took to the field.  He thought it was because he was too valuable to risk, when in fact he was simply connected to highly for his COs to survive the damage to their careers if they got him killed.
After leaving the Guard with desultory honors and participation trophies, Atongwë took to study of the family business.  The House Atongwë family merchant business was far less robust or expansionistic than it once had been, and Darren proved an unexceptional scion of the family at most.  However, by right of age, Darren became the new Subsector Overlord after a token vote by his peers.  As the Subsector Overlord, he was unable to direct his control over individual planetary governments at the level of granularity he would have liked, but as time went by, he found himself less and less interested in the day-to-day minutiae of governance anyway.

Of course, when the Orks came, all that changed.  Suddenly, every armchair general and actual general in the Sector was screaming for his head, the Inquisition was suddenly asking him some very uncomfortable questions, and two strange people, who never smiled, and wore tight black clothing, arrived on his doorstep.

Antongwë never bothers carrying arms, even when outdoors.  In his mind, if the aliens or the Inquisition truly decide to kill him, nothing he could carry on his person could make a difference.  He’s not wrong.

High Queen, First Princeps Remilia Matraxia
“I used to shuffle papers.  Now I rule a planet, when they let me.  Soon, there won’t be an alien alive in the Sector who isn’t terrified of me.”

From the ashes of total mediocrity rose the phoenix of Remilia Matraxia.  Once, she was a mere stylus-pusher for the Adeptus Administratum.  Now, she is arguably the most dangerous resident of the sector whose existence is not common knowledge.
Remilia Alenhoff Matraxia was born to an unremarkable household on Forender, where she capably served as an Adept in the Mechanicus’ internal organizational structure.  Her work was mind-numbingly boring, and held no real room for improvement.  She was engaged to another Adept of lower standing, in whom she saw little more than comfort and perhaps solidarity.  In her free time, she practiced a variety of combat sims and educational games, and sometimes dreamed of something better.

One night, she awoke to find her bed emptied of her fiancé, who she saw unconscious on the floor beside the bed, and four men in the robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus standing beside her.  She listened, first terrified and later intrigued, as the Techpriests made her an offer.  The Cognomen Priests informed her that they had been surveilling her for over two years, and that she had great untapped potential.  They explained that there was a great and holy undertaking, made in secret and executed far away, to which she could be an integral part.
Remilia looked down at her fiancé, out the window at her planet, back at the Priests, and asked when she started.

Six hours later, Laramie Gunli and ‘Remilia Matraxia’ died in a bizarrely unlikely propane fire, Remilia Matraxia was being fitted her for new Queenly robes, and the planet ABX202020 had a new leader.  Since then, Remilia has ruled her new planet with an iron fist and combination of pragmatism, cold logic, fiery impatience, and intellectual curiosity that drives Lister Beraxos alternately to heights of pride or deep annoyance.
Remilia is no mere figurehead, although even Beraxos didn’t want her to be one.  She is a fiercely independent and disturbingly insightful woman that no Magos has made the mistake of underestimating twice.  Her combination of utterly flawless genes and untapped brilliance at strategic affairs have actually allowed her to accept life-extending DNA treatments and Mechanicus edicts that would have crippled any other Adept in Beraxos’ employ.  Privately, he’s not even sure he could have done a better job turning ABX202020 from a forest grove into a ringing hall of chivalry and Mechanicus still.  At least, not so covertly.

Since she has received the bone-curdlingly invasive and agonizing treatments needed to prolong her natural life, Remilia has overcome their side effects completely.  She looks thirty, despite being over sixty, and will not need traditional juvenat treatments for at least another eighty years.  She has put her old life firmly out of mind, and has since wed another man, Cobus Dallde, who decided to take her name.  She has borne him four children, each of whom has completed the Ritual of Becoming and assumed the mantles of Noble Knights themselves, as has Cobus.  Now quite done with such child rearing, she has instead devoted herself fully to the cause of the newly minted House Matraxia.  She spends her every waking day training, reading, working, and preparing for the day when the House banners shall rise over the blood-soaked soil of worlds far away, and her Knights will roar their defiance from a dozen guns and engines.

Of course, she needs actual Knights first.  So far, Cognomen has only been able to keep their manufacturing of Knights at a snail’s pace.  Because Cognomen’s resource and product manufacturing protocols must account for a rapidly-growing Sector population – and six Feudal and Feral Worlds that shall someday join it properly – they are increasing their industrial output as fast as they logistically can.  That means that there are few opportunities for Cognomen to devote entire factory complexes to the hard work of manufacturing new Knights or Thrones.  Of course, the chance does arise once in a rare while, and when the chance comes, Beraxos has taken it.  The supply of Thrones and Knight suits to ABX202020 has been inconsistent, but Matraxia almost has enough suits to supply her first corps of Knights.

Outside of her work, Remilia shows a side the planet at large doesn’t get to see: her exhausted one.  Her firebrand politics, energetic style, and ferocious support of her planet (even if it doesn’t seem to improve the lot of the people much) has left her bone-weary.  She hasn’t yet faltered in her physical and pilot training, but even her own children are beginning to question how much longer Remilia can maintain such a pace.
Of course, where people who aren’t her immediate relatives can see her, Remilia maintains absolute control.  Everything from her martial style of dress – modeled after the off-duty uniforms of the Sanguine Soul Celestials – to her severe tone of speech to her rather spartan house flag suggests total authority.  Of course, the Sacristans of her house know who really calls the shots, but Remilia doesn’t let that stop her.

She has a somewhat rocky relationship with her nominal superior, Magos Ermincrole.  He is as strong a proponent of a more powerful House Matraxia as she is, but he finds her personnel management style annoying and confusing.  Remilia has chosen to disregard the fact that her subordinates on the planet are technically her slaves.  She treats them as peasantry, but not bonded thralls.  She has no court to hear complaints, but her children sometimes adjudicate legal disputes on her behalf.  She and her husband spend hours pouring over ancient records of other Knight houses that have no pertinence to their own, and sometimes pull the maddest ideas from them about chivalry and independence.  Ultimately, Matraxia knows she has to dance to Ermincrole’s tune for now, so she does, but she has made it quite clear that one day, she will be his equal, not his servant.
She carries a bewildering variety of weapons depending on the circumstances, but at the moment, Remilia prefers a pair of silvered dueling daggers.

High Prince, Princeps August Cobus Matraxia
“To the Throne do I offer my service.  To my High Queen do I offer my loyalty.  To the Machine God do I offer my obedience.  To my species do I offer my shield.  To the foe do I offer my hate.  To my world, do I offer my nobility.  Finally, to my family, I offer myself, and may I lead you into battle until my eyes fail and my bones turn to dust.

By the metrics of Imperial success, Cobus Matraxia is a nobody.  So many worlds of the Imperium measure success by heretics burned, aliens slain, money accumulated, and other mechanisms that simply don’t apply to him.  However, Cobus is no mere Menial or void crewer, destined for nothing of note.  Cobus is the second-in-command of the Noble Knightly House Matraxia, and his lack of burned foes is indicative only of the low numbers of his House.  As soon as the Martians let him off his leash, he confidently asserts, Cloudburst’s enemies will die in droves.
There may be something to Cobus’ confidence.  Cobus is a Prince of ABX202020, and the husband of Remilia Matraxia, its High Queen.  His combat performance skills equal hers in simulation, and he has made extensive use of the various training devices with which Cognomen has supplied ABX202020 to train his talents ever higher.  Among the hundreds of simulated battles in which he has engaged while he awaits a larger pool of talent for his House, Cobus has improved his teamwork and coordination immensely.

Cobus began life as Cobus Dallde, a common laborer on Cognomen.  He attended school and studied the Will of the Machine Spirits, as most children on Cognomen do, and eventually entered the labor force in a factory that built parts for the Legio Congelatio.  However, when a position opened up above him, and he applied for it, his application was rerouted to the colonization effort for ABX202020.  When offered a position as a member of the pilot colony for the planet, he accepted, and off he flew.
Upon arrival, he was selected by genetic screening algorithms as a potential Knight pilot, and to nobody’s surprise greater than his own, he was chosen as one of the first Nobles of the planet, by virtue of the Mechanicus not wanting to simply put their own people on the Thrones Mechanicus.  It was during his training that he met his future wife and High Queen, Remilia Matraxia.  Instantly smitten but wise enough not to show it straightaway, Cobus engineered every opportunity he could to be present for her, and the two of them eventually merged their houses, which consisted solely of themselves, into the new Royal Family of ABX202020.  Of course, to hear Cobus tell it, his was a suave and charismatic wooing and courtship, but the new House did take Remilia’s name.

For over thirty years, Cobus has been obsessively pursuing training in his Knight suit.  He passed his Ritual of Becoming on his first try, and although his skills are only average among the Knight pilots on ABX202020, his and Remilia’s scores drag the average up.  The entire Matraxia family are now Knight pilots.
Of the six, Cobus is the loudest proponent of fielding the incomplete House now, before all of the prospective Knights in the House are fully equipped and have mounts to ride.  Knights are the ultimate mobile force multiplier, requiring a crew of only one and able to deliver firepower not far less than a Titan.  With the greenskin hordes, the FCC, and the ever-annoying Glasians on the way, Cobus argues that House Matraxia should take to the skies and battle the foes wherever they may be found, regardless of their underexpanded force.

Cobus is a passionate and clever man, but he lacks his wife’s natural talent at statecraft, and he is less able to argue in parity with the Mechanicus overlords of his fiefdom.  As a natural function of the Questor Mechanicus system, House Matraxia will eventually have to take on lesser nobles who may not necessarily be directly related to his own as subjects in their House, and he is not looking forward to that.  Still, he understands the necessity of the expansion of the House.  Unlike Remilia, he does not dread the day that the Inquisition learns of the secret of ABX202020.  In his mind, the Inquisition are fainthearts when it comes to contradicting the Mechanicus.
Cobus wears his silver saber of office and no other arms, most of the time.

Magos Prannan duPree
“Faster, Tech-rate!  Faster, you fool!  Praise the Omnissiah, I’ll take this Hulk or I’ll kill you all for not taking it for me!”

The Imperial Navy looks on in private awe at the ships in the Basilikon Astra.  The Mechanicus keeps the very best ship models for themselves.  It’s easy for them to justify as needing the best ships to enact their Quest for Knowledge, of course, and even the Astartes would be slow to deny the fairness of the shipbuilders getting the best ships, but the Mechanicus’ warships are for more than war.  The fleets of Cognomen and Solstice ultimately answer to one man: Prannan duPree, and he commands his ships ever onward.
duPree is the Magos Dominus of the Basilikon Astra Cloudburst, and commands the Basilikon from the Oberon battleship Lucubrate, a nine-kilometer monster.  His roots in the fleet run deep; he has been serving aboard one Basilikon ship or another since the age of twelve.

Prannan duPree began life on Cognomen as the seventh of twenty four vat-grown offspring of two Magos he never met.  He chose his name from a list, as is usually the case for the title-obsessed Cognomen culture, and promptly entered the seminary.  duPree displayed natural aptitude for the traits that an officer of the Basilikon Astra would need, including three-dimensional maneuvering, and quickly shunted into that program in the seminary’s instruction.
duPree was able to climb the ranks in the crew of the cruiser Ekpliktikos, thanks to his drive and determination to find the lost treasures of the Omnissiah.  However, when the chance came to select which branch of the Basilikon he would enter, he chose the military wing of the Basilikon Astra instead of the Explorators.  He sees the possibility that the many annoying aliens of the Exo-zone, Halo Stars, Circuit, and other non-Imperial regions of the galaxy might find and loot valuables that rightly belong to the Mechanicus as an insult, and he sees the Basailikon Astra Dominus Cloudburst as the best way to prevent that from happening.

No sooner had he eventually arisen to command his own ship than he applied for the status of Magos in the Priesthood.  Awarding that status is traditionally earned by an individual and bestowed from above, and asking for it is rarely something one would do unless that particular person had very good reason to think their contributions to the Quest have been overlooked.  duPree was understandably given a very high threshold for success, but managed to clear it.  He gathered the fleet leaders of Cognomen (at the time, Solstice did not have a fleet to speak of) and explained in great detail his plan to slowly push the Oldlight Exo-zone back by establishing Mechanicus and Adeptus Astra Telepathica communication points along the trailing edge of the Oglith Subsector.  He demonstrated the feasibility of the plan with a series of well-rationed plans, graphs, and explanations, and included both a cost and benefit analysis with his presentation.  Of course, all the plans of the Mechanicus can come to nothing if the proper work isn’t applied, and so as soon as he left, duPree took his one ship and its three Escorts, and flattened a small pirate base on the outer fringe of Imperial territory.  As his men combed the rubble for valuable raw or processed materials, he planted the flag of Mars, and installed the first of over two hundred fifty telescopes that now scan the Exo-zone for trouble.

Eventually, he was granted the status of Magos he desired, and has since commanded ever larger ships and missions on behalf of the Basilikon.  Technically, he has to forego his personal allegiance to Cognomen like a Skitarii does, as he now represents Mars in the fleet, not his homeworld.  So far from Mars, of course, and so often scorned as Cognomen is, that he does still feel pangs of loyalty to Cognomen, and has had to balance that with his orders to provide extra safety to Solstice until the little Forge Moon is able to stand on its own.
Of course, duPree has many tools at his disposal.  Unlike the Imperial Navy, which keeps track of their fighters and warships in a Sector down to the last rivet, the Cloudburst Basilikon Astra is in constant flux.  All of its ships are accounted for, of course, as to not do so would be an offense to the Omnissiah and the Machine God, but their ships are eternally rotating in and out of the Sector proper.  duPree is one of the mose fervent advocates for the unrestrained expansion of the Cloudburst Sector into the Cloudburst Circuit and Exo-zone, and his vessels are constantly testing the borders of nearby dark spaces on the map, even as the Explorators do the same.  While some Explorators are somewhat less than pleased by duPree’s generous understanding and interpretation of his remit to protect the Imperium and Mechanicus, duPree rationalizes the dispatching of his ships outside Mechanicus-controlled territory by pointing out that the entire history of Cloudburst is one of people not noticing things right under their noses.  How long had Septiim sat within non-Navigated flight of Cognomen?  How long had Dawn-break, Gorum’s Folly, and Fathon Prime sat unexploited and unknown, within sight of Hapster?  Would the Imperium have a working STC if Maskos, Nauphry, Oglith, Triune, and Coriolis had been discovered during the Crusade or Heresy, or even the Scouring?
This is difficult for the Explorators to dispute, and certainly duPree doesn’t treat the presence of offensive warships and Explorator vessels in the same place as being a competition – quite the opposite.  He has so far directed his vessels to come at once to the response of any legitimate distress call of any Imperial or Martian ship within their range, even if they are perhaps somewhat afield of their normal jurisdiction, and every scrap of archaeotech he has ever found has gone straight to Lord Fabricator Beraxos.

The largest ship in the Cloudburst Sector is the presently the eleven-kilometer Ark Mechanicus Comprehension, which is technically not under duPree’s authority.  It, and other vessels of its fleet, are actually Explorator vessels, which use their combination of absurdly heavy armor and weapons to protect themselves when they fly beyond the range of the guns of the Navy and Basilikon Astra Dominus.  Thus, duPree has used a Battleship as his command vessel, custom-built to lead the fleet in the region, thanks to the massive yards of Cognomen.  He has routinely flown the ship to Syracuse and Fabique to exchange knowledge and sensitive reports with his counterparts in Drumnos and Naxos.

Pursuant to his drive to find every scrap and sample of archaeotech he can while also vigorously defending what little he has, duPree has done everything he can think of to stay in the good graces of the Council of Magos of Cognomen and Solstice.  He and Magos Lethicos of the Explorators are more than colleagues and peers, they are personal friends, and he and Lord Fabricator Beraxos are thick as thieves when it comes to the planning of their radically-expanded Mechanicus.  As the man ultimately responsible for securing ABX202020 and Solstice until their own defenses are complete, he takes his job to keep the secrets of House Matraxia confident and the survival of Solstice with utmost seriousness.  Of course, to visit ABX202020 more often that would be needed for a simple logging colony would give away the game, and so he visits only rarely and never without a secondary purpose.  Likewise, the fact that so many of his ships are needed to protect Dawn-break and Forender (and Foraldshold) during the Glasian Migrations means that he has had to entrust Lord Ranult Arden and Overlord Neverember with the defense of Solstice, which burns him.  Solstice is his ward, and both Syracuse and Fabique have entrusted him – not Beraxos, him – with the survival of their investments there.

duPree is not a great boss, as his immediate staff can attest, but as a natural result of his drive, connections, charisma, success rate, and experience, many of the junior officers of the Basilikon Astra have attached themselves to his coattails in the hopes that they will be carried with him to power and glory.  Of course, the consequence of so many of the Sector’s best and brightest all crewing one ship cuts both ways.  The Lucubrate may be a chillingly powerful warship, thanks to its dizzying large array of upgrades and elite crew, but its loss would instantly cripple the Basilikon Astra for hundreds of years, just like it was after the destruction of the Archetype.

In personal battle, which he carefully avoids, duPree carries a Refractor Field and five slug magnum revolvers he custom-built with sealable chambers so they can be virtually silenced, a truly odd collection of arms for a Magos.

Lady Trader Admiral Madeline Prinz
“Money’s nice, but by the Throne do I look good.”

Rogue Traders are vain creatures, as a general rule.  Even the ones with ties to the Ecclesiarchy tend towards the grandiose and opulent.  Lady Prinz is so opulent, so determined to conduct business with maximum ostentation, that her rivals think it can’t be anything but a front.
It isn’t.  Madeline Prinz is obsessed with appearance, with presentation, and with wealth.  She has made herself the personal foil of Lord Captain Walsh, the Inquisitor and Rogue Trader whose enigmatic journeys have become a source of speculation for every other Trader in the Circuit.  Exactly why she seems so fixated on defeating or at least showing up Walsh, nobody but her immediate staff knows.  For his part, Prinz disgusts Walsh.  He thinks her a dilettante and a showboat, at best.  To her credit, she was a decorated Imperial Navy Captain prior to becoming a Rogue Trader, but on the surface, she does sooner chase money and glory than accomplish anything for the strict good of the Imperium.

Walsh has also sourly noted that the Lady Admiral is both a highly unconventional admiral and a profoundly incomprehensible one.  Her victory record does nothing to suggest she deserves the title she’s given herself.  Worse, she seems to follow him around at times, even interfering in his missions, albeit never without a cover story to allow her to deny any wrongdoing to the Inquisition.  Yet despite her cavalier attitude, for some reason, fate or the Emperor smiles on her at times, allowing her to escape certain doom or the rage of the Lords Inquisitor Council.

Prinz’ personal history is a complete mystery to her peers prior to being given a Warrant of Trade by the Sector government and cosigned by the Master of the Administratum Ultima eleven years ago.  What little her rivals know is that she was a Captain in a squadron of Escorts in the Navy.  Her opponents other than Walsh know there is more to her story, and there’s no way Walsh doesn’t know with his Inquisitorial credentials, but he is tight-lipped on her past to his peers, even as his resentment at her conduct grows.

There is simply nothing to grasp, as far as her rivals can tell.  She has no one world she seems to favor, and her accent is purely neutral Celeste nobility.  She likes to back up her promises with withering firepower, but she eschews aid from her former employers in the Navy as often as not.  Ultimately, there is little for the other Rogue Traders of the Cloudburst region to find with Madeline Prinz.  Her overall plan shall remain enigmatic, for now.


Lord Marshal Persinius Oolan – Chief of Arbites
“In theory, Law serves Justice, and the Arbites serve both.  In practice, this Sector is full of hopeful idiots, each of whom think they know the law better than me.  I don’t mind.  It keeps the mind sharp, and the truncheon swinging.”