Houses

Noble and Merchant houses
House Herrera, Septiim

The Septiim system offers endless opportunity for a freighter captain out to make some money.  Of all the systems of the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, it has the largest number of inhabited bodies, with three rocky planets, three gas giants with inhabited moons, a Forge Moon, and multiple Lagrange stations.  It was natural for such a system to develop a large merchant and freight business, and so House Herrera has grown to fill the gap.
The House started as a fairly unimpressive shipping concern until the Glasian Migrations began.  Suddenly, the House was inundated with business as people moved off Septiim to other worlds in the hopes of avoiding Glasian attention.  The House quickly began exploring other shipping contracts, such as the movement of food and textile materials from Agri-worlds and Paradise Worlds to Thimble, and moving outside Septiim proper to ship materiel for the Navy if dedicated haulers weren’t available.

Those efforts may have moved Herrera from a regional player to a large one, but it didn’t become the dominant shipping concern in Cloudburst until they scored the coup contract to become the exclusive transportation agent for the huge supply barges carrying finished goods from Coriolis and Combine to their shipping partners.  Being the exclusive shipping agency for the largest military base in the Galactic North and the most productive Agri-world in Cloudburst catapulted them ahead of their competition.

Success has gone to their heads, however.  Several members of the House’s senior leadership have recently been arrested by the Inquisition for transporting illegal gene-mod technology.  The secretive nature of the Inquisition means that the rest of the House may never know precisely what was being transported, and the shameful lack of documentation for the products in question means that the Inquisition was able to seal the incident up, probably forever.

The House may have been diminished by that scandal, but it is not broken.  Already, the House is recouping its losses and attempting to expand its fleet to operate outside the Sector proper.  However, it has so far constrained its efforts to the Exo-zone and Circuit exploratory outposts, not into the Drumnos Sector.  The Drumnos Sector mercantile concerns are far wealthier than Herrera can ever realistically hope to be, and could easily out-bid them.

House O’Neill, Thimble – manufacturing

Thimble is the beating heart of industry in the Cloudburst Sector, as a Hive World generally is.  The vast population capacity of the city allows for the planet to create and design products no other world in the Sector except possibly Cognomen could produce, or need in such volume.
Naturally, in the money-driven and aristocracy-choked hell of the Imperium, the noble houses that best sponsor the great manufacturing concerns are often able to become great profit ventures themselves, until there is no difference between the manufacturing company and its noble patrons.  House O’Neill of Thimble already had extensive patronages of manufacturing companies in their Hive, as did several other noble houses, but the O’Neills were ambitious.  In time, the O’Neill family expanded their interests to consume several of the supply companies that fed their factories, the shipping companies that moved those supplies, and even the production firms that refined the raw goods.
The O’Neill strategy was a patient one, not exactly original.  Vertical Control has been a part of manufacturing technique since M2.  However, the O’Neills mastered it, and did so with a combination of business acumen and legal finagling that has allowed them to reap ludicrous profits.  So far, House O’Neill and House Zhong have worked together to manufacture starships of such quality that the Navy could scarcely do better, and even the Mechanicus finds it distantly impressive.
However, the true triumph and core business of House O’Neill doesn’t lie in space.  The unique history of Thimble in the Sector allows it to serve as both the undisputed non-Mechanicus manufacturing hub of the region and a grossly underutilized one.  Thimble has both a complete manufacturing hegemony on non-Cognomen goods and a nearly exclusive monopsony on several refined minerals that few other worlds need.  As a result, the only competitors in scale for House O’Neill goods are the Mecchanicus and out-of-Sector businesses.
House O’Neill’s founders and strategists realized early that that meant that the Houses that managed to be the ‘competition’ for Mechanicus products and lock down those markets would effectively run totally unopposed in pricing and quality for those who couldn’t afford Martian perfection.  Aircars, clothing, construction tools, chemicals, synthetic rubber, household goods, and other products that Cognomen makes are exquisite in their production standards, but unreachably expensive for people on many worlds that lack Thimble or Celeste’s robust economy.
Therefore, House O’Neill manufactures the best knockoffs of those Cogomen products that they can, sells them on as many worlds as possible, and aggressively researches ever more ways to build and store them without sacrificing much quality or stepping on the Cognomen Magos’ Council’s toes.  The O’Neill stamp of quality can be found on all but two of the worlds in the Sector and has spread beyond.  Although the Mechanicus is somewhat exasperated by this, there is little they can do about it.  To share their own advanced designs and engineering with the House would be to elevate those uninitiated in the ways of the Sacred Machine to their own level, which their pride cannot allow.  To let the O’Neills simply research new techniques without inhibition would be sinful, and to stamp them out would be a gross impeachment of their Treaty of Mars.
So, for now, Cognomen and House O’Neill exist in a simmering state of rivalry which only the Cognomen contingent seem to care about, and House O’Neil never acknowledges.  As far as House O’Neill is concerned, as long as their customers are usually happy and they themselves are grotesquely rich, they couldn’t care less what the Techpriests think.

Outside of their extensive manufacturing concerns, House O’Neill is a noted patron of arts and education, having sponsored great art schools on several planets, including Coriolis and Celeste.  This is not because of some great philanthropic worldview on the part of the O’Neills, but rather an effect of having so much money that there is little else on which they can legally spend it.
However, several scions of the family have perished in the use of alien weapons in the bloodsport so common among the Thimble idle rich, and have thus come under rising scrutiny from the Ordo Xenos, especially in the last hundred years.  The current Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst is herself a former Ordo Xenos Inquisitor of immense skill, and prosecuted the opposition to the Cold Trade in alien technology for two hundred years before rising in rank.  She knows perfectly well how much the Thimble Highborn love to collect alien gadgetry, and has her subordinates watching them like hawks.  House O’Neill is hurriedly performing internal review to ferret out which of its scions is responsible for the huge upswing in alien artifacts making their way into the Household before it is too late.

House Zhong, Thimble

The building of ships in the Imperium is an undertaking like few others, with the costs rising far above what any one non-governmental force could afford in most cases.  House Zhong is a rare exception.  It is the only entity outside the Mechanicus and Navy authorized to manufacture Warpcraft in the entire Cloudburst region.

Zhong holds one other distinction of note: it is the oldest surviving House in the Sector.  It can accurately trace the core of its geneline back to the original Levitna Colony Group, well over twenty thousand years before, and its origin to a long-dead Terran noble family from the age of the Terran Federation.  Zhong survived the Age of Strife and the long darkness between the Heresy and the coming of the Imperium to the region by essentially claiming the least desirable hive for itself on Levitna’s radiation-scarred surface for itself and killing all comers.  It wisely bowed to the Imperium when it arrived, and was rewarded with the honor of being the only noble house elevated in its native hive.  They were passed over for the priviledge of becoming the Planetary Ruling Clan, but has prospered anyway, thanks to being able to do something no other hive can: total industrial devotion.
In the other hives of Thimble, the hives are all fairly inter- and intra-dependent in their manufacturing needs, as could be expected from the great vertical cities.  The Zhong hive, however, which they named after themselves, is not.  It is a resource hog in every way, being unable to even develop most household goods.  The Zhong hive is dedicated solely to the manufacture of starship components, and to their elevation to space for use in the great orbiting shipyards.

As most shipbuilding concerns do, the House yards began as simply making the components of Naval ships, and not performing any assembly.  Gradually, however, economies of scale allowed Zhong to do more and more of the preparatory steps, including some circuit fabrication and assembly.  The Navy was pleased by this since they had to do less work and didn’t have to rely on the Adeptus Mechanicus as much.  Over time, Zhong shipbuilding took over more of the House’s time, until they became less a noble family and more a corporate Board of Directors, although they are still accorded a title in the Thimblan peerage.  The components they made were initially no different than those of any other shipbuilding corporation, but over time, Zhong made more of a conscious effort to diversify their offerings to lure in the cheaper Chartist Captains and Rogue Traders.  Eventually, the inevitable shift occurred, and Zhong bought their own shipyard in orbit over the Mining World of Delving.

The Delving yard was a metaphorical goldmine for the House Zhong.  Here, with direct access to the refined minerals from the planet below, the House was abe to produce ships of nearly Navy quality without any interference from the Thimble authorities, and to meet contracts from Rogue Traders.  Unlike some of their Great House contemporaries, however, Zhong never compromises on quality.  A shoddy toaster or clock may be a minor inconvenience, but a shoddy starship engine can kill hundreds of thousands of people.  Thus, and to the Mechanicus’ approval, the breakaway from the stifling leadership of the Thimble government did not yield a reduction in appreciable quality from the Zhong industrial output.
Zhong yards today work around the clock in the great orbitals of Delving and Thimble, manufacturing vessels for Rogue Trader and Departmento Astrocartigraphicae mapping voyages.  They have patronized the Grand Nachor yards more than once, buying shipwrecks and scrapping them for parts, and have even played a role in the disassembly of Space Hulks that managed to achieve stable orbits in Cloudburst systems.  Zhong merchants ply their wares of spare parts and upgrade kits at every private shipyard in the Sector and even some in the Naxos Sector beyond.

However, the House Zhong does have its limits.  They know better than to try to break into the territories of the far older and wealthier merchant combines in the Drumnos and Naxos Sectors.  Drumnos has far busier space lanes, but has its own Houses to supply it, and the Naxos Sector is a crumbling warzone, too dangerous to insure properly thanks to the Nurglite pirates ripping it apart.
Likewise, the House subcontracts uncomplainingly to the Mechanicus in two critical ways.  The psionic Thrones Navis used by Navigators to pilot ships through the Warp, and the actual Warp Drive Cores used to propel them, are the exclusive remit of the Cognomen Orbital Yards, and the House Zhong has no attention to try to break into that market.  Only Adeptus Mechanicus techpriests of Forge World certification are permitted anywhere near the blessed components when they are purchased in bulk from the forges of Cognomen and Solstice, and the House pays their prices without complaint.  The Warp is simply too dangerous to risk tampering with.

House Carvan, Celeste

From the impossibly abundant fields of Combine to the sprawling latifundae of Cassie’s World, the breadbaskets of Cloudburst do business at every turn with House Carvan.  This young and expanding mercantile concern has sprawled over the Sector like an indolent cat, and has a partial or fully vested ownership in fully a third of the farms on the technologically advanced worlds of the Sector.
Unlike some of the other manufacturing Houses of the Sector, however, Carvan rarely administrates most of their holdings directly.  They prefer a less centralized approach to business that has served them well in the slow-acting field of agriculture.  The science of agriculture is also more challenging than most interstellar trades, thanks to the combination of the slowness of Warp travel and the fact that no two planets have seasons of the same length (and may not have seasons at all).  As a result, the work that Carvan does has to be customized to their target markets, and can’t be applied uniformly, thanks to the sheer variety of their vendors.  This includes great deep-space hydroponic floater ranches where animals breed, live, and die in zero gravity so as to have less burdensome bones, seabed sponge farms, great herds of grox and cattle on the plains of wind-swept worlds, and slaughterhouses that fill whole cities.  Attempting any degree of uniformity in most regards would be nothing better than a waste of time.

Thus, House Carvan prefers to rely on local oversight and supervision for their partner and subsidiary food vendors.  The House has override and veto authority on most crucial decisions, but only employs it when needed and never without review, and always works their hardest to comply with the relevant Sector and Imperial laws.  These laws concern things like tolerable bacterial and synthetic molecule load, expiration dates, and shipping regulation, as well as things like supplying ships that travel outside Imperial jurisdiction.
This does not mean Carvan is lax in its scrutiny of its foods, of course.  The Carvan name can be found from the undercrofts of Gorum’s Folly castles to the gourmand kitchens of the highest Celeste society, and everywhere in between.  Carvan’s most prestigious contracts are generally awarded by members of other Imperial noble families and Houses, including the Quintus family itself.  The House also does not force itself to comply with a single brand identity, and has created thousands to apply to every conceivable market.  Their most profitable is the ‘Clear Suns spacer foods’ brand, sold by the gigaton to ship crews, and often containing the most preservative-filled but guiltily delicious foods a low-ranked crewer can look forward to eating between the stars.  For crews of very small ships, or ships that take decades to travel to between destinations, Carvan offers the ‘Solitas Meals’ brand, consisting of far higher-quality foods that stay good so long as specific storage and preparation requirements are met, since nothing drives an overstressed crew stuck in the Warp mad faster than lousy food.

Of course, the nobles of the Sector wouldn’t be caught dead eating such things unless they wre slumming it, and so Carvan also offers the ‘Nine Star Dining’ courses, which consist of locally-prepared gourmet foods and come with a price tag to match.  Most of these foods are actually prepared and eaten on the same planet on which they were grown or butchered, making the ‘Nine Star Dining’ brand ironically the most widely-varying in quality.

However, while Carvan are savvy marketers and regulators, their record of actual quality is less than perfect.  Whole lots of megatons of food have had to be recalled by Carvan at catastrophic losses when pieces of metal from broken scoops or agitators were found in boxes of food labelled ‘metal detector certified.’  While alien bacteria is rarely a concern for human pathogens thanks to humanity’s unique cell membrane and receptor composition, it is a huge concern for food storage since some alien bacteria can digest nearly anything that is dead even if it is harmless to living humans.

The House Carvan headquarters is technically located on Celeste, but it may as well not be.  Almost four sevenths of its production and eighty percent of its corporate staff are located on Combine, where they produce gigatons of food for the Imperium.  Because Combine is one of the precious Agri-worlds that is in no danger of soil depletion, the world also takes in some fertilizers from other worlds to replenish the nutrients of the soil in a proportion to the rate it is taken away, instead of the more machine-like agriworlds that simply run their soil ragged.  Carvan’s presence on the world means that they are able to take a more active role in the oversight of their vendors and farms than they usually are, even heading up the staff on several themselves.

Carvan is one of the few merchant Houses in the Sector that began as a merchant family and only gained a nobility title later, which is the source of some derision from their peers.

House Albert, Celeste – law

While some Imperial worlds practice the harsh and draconian law of their own warlords, civilized Imperial worlds prefer to adopt customs that allow for the benefits of Imperial law without the lack of subtlety inherent to the more primitive worlds.  This can result in civilized worlds adopting vast and intricate law systems that have a dizzyingly complex array of subcodes and strictures that no layman could ever understand.  While the Arbites enforce Imperial law with as close to true neutrality as they can muster, the law of some planets is so convoluted that dedicated experts are needed for consultation on its finer points and applications.

Enter House Albert.  This ancient House is the smallest by employee count of all of the intact Great Houses of the Sector, but its wealth and influence could well eclipse most others.  The House Albert staffers and barristers are able to aid and advise on nearly any legal matter of the worlds Cloudburst, Celeste, Septiim, Cognomen, Hapster, Nauphry, and Thimble, and their senior council of trial lawyers has worked with the Arbites on twenty worlds more.  Albert’s lawyer staff are specifically forbidden by Sector law from participating in the House’s actual duties as members of the Cloudburst peerage, and so the House nobility and barristers can’t be the same people.  House Albert’s staff has absorbed several private law firms and sponsors law colleges on Thimble and Celeste, and is always looking for fresh talent.  The sheer length of time that some Arbites-led trials can take allow for Albert lawyers to be called in from offworld in many cases.

House Joun-Lee, Celeste

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

Thanks to the rather restrictive laws regarding the legality of private militias in Sectors being different from Sector to Sector, there is little chance that House Joun-Lee will expand to other regions of Imperial space.


House Senai, Coriolis – artwork
House Lunther, Hapster – logistics
House Ritria, Oglith – metalworking, masonry

Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rondlee
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Atongwë
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Vermouthe
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Arins
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Arpel
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Zutash
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rowsdower
Rogue Trader House Marcus
Rogue Trader House Demmelwaithe
Rogue Trader House Victoire
Rogue Trader House Brasmel
Rogue Trader House Crusher
Rogue Trader House Howe

Knight House Matraxia
This house of Noble Knights in the service of the Mechanicus of Cognomen is the newest noble house in the Sector.  Its remit as a house of Mechanicus Knights is one of defense.  Its Knights serve, or will serve, as the spears in the grip of the Mechanicus of Cloudburst.
Founded by Lord Fabricator Lister Beraxos and Magos Erin Ermincrole of Cognomen in M41.959, House Matraxia is a covert House, which is squarely counter the perception of Knights in the minds of the Imperial military.  However, its covert nature is an absolute necessity, for now.  The House is too small to withstand a real challenge from orbit or even a peasant uprising, although the ranks of the House are expanding quickly.  The Mechanicus is recruiting people from the Forender Agri-worlds and from Foraldshold with the mental aptitude to pilot Thrones Mechanicum.
The other reason for the covern practices of the House is that it is technically against the law, or so Lord Fabricator Beraxos believes.  There have been few new Knight Houses built by the Imperium since before The Scouring, and none outside Forge Worlds in ove fourteen millennia.  Martian practice is so steeped in ancient theology that the building of new Knight Houses may well be against their interpretation of the will of the Omnissiah, or so Beraxos fears.
He and the Magos responsible for actually building the House, Erin Ermincrole, are interested in eventually making House Matraxia more public.  They both recognize that keeping Knights secret forever is not feasible.  Their hope is that the Mechanicus shall eventually recognize the potential of the House, and see it for being the gesture of worship towards the Machine that it truly is.  To their cautious optimism, the Skitarii stationed on ABX202020 seem to agree.

House Matrxia’s reigning monarch and principal point of contact between the House and Cognomen is High Queen and First Princeps Remilia Matraxia, formerly of Foraldshold.  Remilia is a pilot of immense skill and leadership.  So far, most of her subordinates in the hierarchy of her House are her family, of whom her husband Cobus is the second in command.  Eventually, the population brought in from Foraldshold and Forender (and possibly Underbar, if the Mechanicus thinks they can get away with it) will augment the House up to the numbers of older ones.
House Matraxia does not view this as an undermining of their power, as some Knightly Houses would.  The Knightly Houses elsewhere in the galaxy are anywhere from fourteen to twenty-three thousand years old.  Matraxia has no luxury of pedigree, nor special right of independence from the Mechanicus.  In fact, the House is actually a Questor Mechanicus House, in direct allegiance to Cognomen.  They wear the trappings of a normal Imperial House, using the titles of one and decorating their Knights as such, but this is nothing more than a means for Cognomen to pre-empt criticism of empire-building by Mars.  Remilia Matraxia knows that and toes the line, for now.
The House consists of Remilia Matraxia, her husband Cobus, and their four children Ronald, Colin, Augustus, and Paulo.  The six of them are all Knight pilots, bonded with their Thrones Mechanicum, and champing at the bit to get out among the stars and get to work.  Other members of the House consist of people from Foraldshold and Forender, most of them Imperial Guard veterans selected, by Techpriests loyal to Lister Beraxos, for higher service.  The Cognomen forges are working slowly enough that the House does not yet have more than a dozen Thrones Mechanicum.  This irritates the Matraxia Sacristans to no end, but the Thrones are an ancient and complex technology that the Mechanicus does not have the means to mass-produce.  The collection of the pilots is also slow going, although the pace has picked up since the completion of several terraforming projects on the Forenders.

Houe Matraxia has specific internal rules of conduct for its members to follow.  The structure of these rules is more akin to the classic structure of an Imperial military institution, thanks to the House being so young, but the High Queen is a reader of history.  Perhaps the rule structure one day will appear more chivalric.
The code of conduct of the House is as follows:
•	All Knights must swear a binding Oath of Fealty to the Household Matraxia, to uphold and protect its values, and defend its citizen-subjects.  To violate it is punishable by irreversible exile.
•	All Knights must vouch their honor and freedom on the secrecy of the House and its construction until released from that duty by the Magos of the system.  To violate it is punishable by imprisonment by the Mechanicus.
•	Under no circumstances may any member of the House draw a weapon on another member of the House except in ordained duels of honor.  Punishments vary by severity and intent.
•	To deliberately sabotage the wargear or Knight Suit of another member of the House is punishable by sixty years imprisonment, plus the permanent forfeiture of rank.
•	To disobey a direct order from the appointed Ruler of the House is to put one’s life in jeopardy of execution unless the order was given uninformed.
•	At all times, the Knights of the House must put the wellbeing of the peasants of their world as a concern in their affairs of court, for no House can eat the air or drink well-wishes.
•	No person from outside the House may enter the Crypt Matraxia.  Unauthorized entry is punishable by death by electroflogging.

Of course, the planet itself has laws, as does the Mechanicus, and so ABX2 residents do have their own codes of conduct they must follow.  The peasants may not bear arms except in times of imminent invasion, the Skitarii are sworn to disclose the existence of the planet only in the direst emergencies (which Lord Beraxos relievedly notes has been observed).  Also, the members of the House may not enter battle until Magos Ermincrole specifically allows it.

The House bases from the unfinished Citadel Matraxia, a staggeringly vast fortress in the heart of an endless forest in the center of ABX202020’s largest continent.  The planet’s sole working starport is located some forty miles away, connected to the Citadel by an underground tunnel network.  The Citdael will eventually have fully five independent power sources, two of which are potent enough to power the Citadel by themselves: the thermoplasmic generator and the fusion plant.  The geothermal tap, solar cells, and wind turbines are there to augment the power of the main sources in case of siege, or to help power mundane things like appliances and small vehicles.
The Citadel itself is a sprawling structure, consisting of one huge arrangement of stone and metal walls that do not disconnect from each other to form discrete buildings.  Except for the keep, the entire complex is one single building, technically, although not all the wall segments have been erected yet.  When it is finished, the building will be over a mile square, with walls over fourteen stories high outside that.  The complex will eventually have a second wall outside the first to serve as a killing field should something get past it.
The complex Citadel will eventually also have extensive anti-air defenses, and a Void Shield capable of blocking a Frigate’s man gun, plus a Mechanicus-curated selection of anti-tank wall guns.  Matraxia has toyed with the idea of a trench line between the two walls, but that is an idea for a later date.
Inside the main building, the House Matraxia is building its strength.  It caches its Knight suits in a great armored vault below the central keep.  There, over a hundred Sacristans trained on Cognomen labor over the suits, keeping their Machine Spirits placated and ready for battle.  The great Chamber in which the prospect Knight pilots undergo their Ritual of Becoming and emerge as true Knights is lower yet, near the geothermal core, and its interior walls hide the Crypt Matraxia.
The Crypt is more than a tomb for the dead Matraxia House members, which it should be, given that no Matraxia has died yet.  Although it is eventually to be a true tomb, it also serves as a vault, containing the accumulated wealth of the family, and also the original copy of the contract of fealty signed between Remilia and Lord Fabricator Beraxos.

Above, the Citadel houses a school for the family’s children, as well as a huge granary to hold the food of the nearby peasant settlements, which have carved out plots for themselves in the forest.  The large population of farmers and other Menials from the four Cognomen satrap worlds have been able to make the world nutrient-surplus with only a few decades of work, and their lumber camps, food processing plants, and mines are almost paying for the planet’s development.

House Matraxia also has ties to a few other institutions.  None of them include the Deathwatch.  The Ordo Xenos Chamber Militant Watch Station Redshield hangs over ABX202020, keeping a weather eye out for aliens.  House Matraxia is aware of this, but has made no effort to interact with their erstwhile defenders, nor is the Deathwatch inclined to extend the hand of friendship.

Dead Houses
Rogue Trader House Calavna
Few Rogue Trader dynasties die as abruptly as House Calavna.  The House was once the most militant Rogue Trader dynasty in the entire Cloudburst region, and possessed the attention and respect of multiple major Imperial institutions in their efforts to grind the primitive and Warp-tainted aliens of the Imperial borders to dust.  Whole nations burned as the Calavna scions unleased warheads and lances from high orbit, scorching worlds clean with the flame of the Emperor.
Eventually, the Calavna forces managed to become major players in the Hapster Subsector’s political sphere, and came to be seen with jealous eyes by the Imperial Navy officials who guarded what was then the Imperial outer border.  Whether that jealousy, or envy, at least, played a role in the fall of the House is unknown, but what is known is that the Navy was quick to respond to the fall of the House.
As the Rogue Trader head of the family, Roger Calavna, was aboard his ship Lucre William, in orbit over Hapster, nine Infidel raiders never seen before or since abruptly attacked the system, and made a beeline for the vessel.  To the shock of the system, the Cruiser was almost immediately captured by the force of black-clad pirates, armed with a motley assortment and human and alien weapons, that swept aboard.  Roger Calavna himself survived only by shoving himself into a messenger pod and ejecting it in the atmosphere of the world below.
When rescue teams dug him out, most of his bones weer broken, but his augmentic organs had kept him alive.  Learning that his Warrant had been on the Cruiser at the time, he swore undying revenge against the pirates, which he did not live long enough to execute.
House Calavna bears the unwelcome distinction of being the last of the Hapster Rogue Trader families to be destroyed prior to the creation of the Cloudburst Sector as a formal body of government.

Rogue Trader House Richter
House Richter used to a force of mercantile might in the Cloudburst Sector, but its primary source of prestige was always exploration.  Clad in armor of Martian quality and outfitted with the very best instruments and auspexes, the House Richter fleet often spent years drifting through the void, scouring the hot gasses and radioactive wastes of the Cloudburst region for any signs of lost human life.  They found Space Hulks, they found a dead Deep Void Platform, they found pirate nests built on the foundations of Terran Federation colonies, and they found aliens of every sort.  Their close ties to the Mechanicus allowed them a certain precedence of authority and technoarcana to better prepare themselves for the rigors of deep void exploration, and for centuries, the House Richter succeeded in slowly coloring in the dark places of the map.
However, the House was eventually brought low, as most Houses have over the eleven thousand years of the institution.  In the case of House Richter, however, they had nobody but themselves to blame.  The House had always fought in the past against those who had a vested interest in the small size of the Imperium, whether Eldar protecting their out of the way colonies or pirates who did not wish their hidey-holes to be surrounded by Imperial territory.  However, on the fateful occasion of the beginning of the end of House Richter, the usual tactics that the House had to employ to survive were simply not enough.
House Richter vessels, led by the second-in-command of the entire House flotilla, appeared in the depths of space near the Abhuman world today known as Crispin.  The world had long been harassed by pirates of unknown origins, seeking to enslave the strong but simple Beastmen of Crispin for use as shock troops and slaves.  However, the Mechanicus became aware of this during Explorator journeys into the region.  While the Mechanicus would normally love to take credit for locating a habitable world for the Imperium, two factors weighed into their decision not to in this instance.  First, the Mechanicus of the Naxos Sector is dreadfully overworked keeping the Celestial Knights and Battlefleet Naxos supplied, and the task of simultaneously subjugating a world of abhumans and conquering unknown alien pirates would be a daunting one.  Second, the aliens seemed to have Warpcraft that were slower but more stable than Imperial ships of equivalent tonnage, and could thus navigate the area more easily.

Into the gap stepped House Richter, who took on the assignment of mapping the local Warp routes to aid in the locating of the pirates.  However, they had barely begun the task when the aliens abruptly shifted their attacks to the House Richter fleet, and assaulted them without any transmissions or mercy.
The Richter ships began pairing up to avoid the power of the pirates overwhelming them, but the aliens simply redoubled their attacks, and assaulted the Richter vessels without skipping a beat.  By the time the Richter fleet had regrouped and escaped the noxious radioactive gasses of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit, they had lost ten percent of their ships outright, with another one crippled.  However, to their horror, regrouping and withdrawing was not enough.  As they moved along the Warp and conventional travel routes out of the Circuit, the alien pirates kept coming, shooting down another thirty percent of the Richter fleet almost overnight.

When the tattered remains of the Richter House Fleet arrived at the edge of the Fabique Star Yards, Mechanicus alert sirens sounded at once.  The pirates had actually followed the Richter fleet all the way to the Mechanicus’ territory, and pressed their attack to the very doorstep of the enormous Forge World.  It took another seven weeks of brutal fighting at the heart of the Star Yards between Richter, Navy, Space Marine, Basilikon Astra, and Inquisitorial ships, and the alien raiders, before they were at last ground to dust.

House Richter never managed to overcome the damage done to their fortunes, and the House liquidated twenty years later.  Their Warrant fell into the legal remit of the Naxos Sector, which eventually returned it to the Senate of the High Lords for reissuance.

Rogue Trader House Grenfoe
At one point in the Sector’s history, the House Grenfoe was an institution.  Its huge central wealth concentrated in a vast bank, in which it was also the primary investor and customer.  The bank was named after the founder of the House, and located on the main square of the city of Civitavecchia on Celeste.  The House specialized in financing Imperial expeditions, to find new colonizable worlds in the Circuit and in the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Its early claim to fame was in sponsoring the passage between what are now the Subsectors Rampart and Nauphry, and thus enabling a whole new wave of Warp travel to those regions.
However, the House eventually ran into extensive financian trouble.  The laws of banking on Celeste may be stagnant, but they are not static.  Eventually, groups of less reputable business combines began to hide their earnings in the guise of legitimate business with the bank.  This blossomed into a full money-laundering scheme, one of which the House remained blissfully unaware.
When an investigation by a local journalism agency uncovered it all, embarrassed planetary government officials ordered the assets seized, which the startled House could not contest.  With the core of their financial system in peril, the House made a show of funding several expensive trips by explorers and traders into the uncharted places of the Oldlight Exo-zone, hoping to strike it rich.  They did not.  The subsequent loss of several of their brightest beneficiaries brought ruin to the House, which were only slightly alleviated by the House selling the rights to Combine to the Mechanicus.

Eventually, the Warrant of Trade for the House fell into the hands of its scion, Vilheim Grenfoe, who could read the changing of the tides as well as anybody could, and sold the remaining House assets to a rival mercantile concern, then retired to enjoy the Celeste high society unburdened by responsibility.

Rogue Trader House Jiax

The fate of House Jiax is an object lesson, to be sure.  What is unsure is precisely what that lesson is.  Jiax, once a wealthy and prosperous house of explorers and traders, was eviscerated and crushed in five days by a force of Inquisitorial and Officio Assassinorum force more traditionally reserved for those who emulate Horus.

Once, Jiax was the name of a house of hereditary Rogue Traders and explorers who made the region of space between the trailing edge of the Sector and the border of the Oldlight Exo-zone their home.  There, they looted ruins, charted Warp routes, skirmished with pirates, and generally expanded the borders of the Imperium as Rogue Traders are wont to do.  Over time, they accumulated enough wealth to become de facto nobles on the planet Celeste, and even extended some of their ordinary trade routes into the nearby Drumnos Sector.

Then their world ended.  The only hint of trouble that came in advance was that all of their Astropaths simply resigned on the same day, leaving the House abruptly unable to call for help or coordinate their efforts.  The next morning, while the House was still desperately wondering what in the world had just happened, a fleet of Inquisitorial and Officio Assassinorum ships appeared in orbit over the House manor on Celeste.  While the government of the planet flew into a terrified panic, dark arrowheads of Inquisitorial ships descended on the world, carrying shiploads of dead-faced men and grim combat servitors, who landed all around the Jiax residence compound.  Two hours later, the facility was a smoking ruin, and the Inquisitorial vessels departed with no more explanation than they had provided upon arrival.  For the next five days, Jiax ships and holdings around the Sector similarly disappeared or exploded.  The members of their House that had escaped the initial Inquisitorial purge threw themselves on the mercy of their allies and friends in the Imperial peerage, but those friends wisely turned their backs on the House as the Imperial government mercilessly slaughtered them.

One week after the beginning of the purge, it concluded, with the few remaining Jiax assets turned over to the Sector Government, which then liquidated them.  Even centuries later, there is no explanation forthcoming from any party involved to explain the Inquisition’s motives.  Those few who even know it happened can only suppose that the heads of the House must have invoked dread treason indeed, to merit the simultaneous attention of the Inquisition and Officio Assassinorum, which could only act in concert as they did against Jiax with the express instruction of the Senate of the High Lords.