FINAL DUDES

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 no new Knight Houses built by the Imperium since before The Scouring.  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, 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.
•	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.
•	Under no circumstances may any member of the House draw a weapon on another member of the House except in ordained duels of honor.
•	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.

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 spwarlign 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.


Grand Master Princeps Adrian Phillip Ilnus
“By my word do gods reap the souls of sinners.  Tread lightly, Ermincrole.  Your toy Knights are so very breakable.”

Riding a thirty meter death machine breeds hubris.  Whomever designed the great Interface Units that allow a Princeps to embody their Titans must have understood this.  Few are the Princeps who can come away from interfacing with their God-Engines without a profound sense of awe.  For Adrian Ilnus, the sense fades quickly.  Every time he disengages his mind from the Titan, he is left gasping from the experience, but within the day, he is the same arrogant, stubborn, grouchy old man as he was before the MIU turned on.
Those with the mental stability to become Princeps, especially those who command the mighty Warlords, are staggeringly rare in the Imperium.  This is not helped by the bureaucratic incompetence and inertia that prevents some qualified candidates from entering the Mechanicus’ eye.  Those who do, however, can come from pasts as disparate as street-sweepers to nobles.  The Ilnus family were primary school teachers on Thimble when young Adrian’s exceptional mind came to the attention of the Techpriests who maintained the firing range at the school.  He passed every single test they could throw at him, with bored and contemptuous ease.  They took him from his family with their awed consent, and he was off to Cognomen to become one with the Machine.
After nine years of brutal training and eventually a year of ride-alongs with Princeps Clomach of the Reaver Scoured Alloys, he passed his final test and became the Princeps of the Warlord Titan Gold Blood, which he remains to this day.  After thirty five years of merging his mind with the Warlord, he looks ten years older than he should, and the Gold Blood is a mere two hundred years old; hardly the ancients of the Martian Legions.  The Gold Blood mounts two Reaver Melta Cannons on its shoulder carapace points and a pair of Volcano Cannons on the arms by default, although it can also switch out any of those weapons as needed.  The Cognomen forges do not yet have the blueprints for the Quake Cannon, but all other variants of Titan guns are in production.  The Gold Blood usually partners with the Reaver Titan The Hatred of The Long-Sighted in the field, commanded by Princeps Pietro Ivans, one of Ilnus’ few actual friends.

Because of the rarity and value of Princeps, they live like kings among the more spartan and unaesthete Techpriesthood.  Ilnus is no exception.  His private suite on Cognomen and on his Titan Transport, the Nebular Hammer, are identical, down the carpeting, and packed with the incredible luxuries that the only Forge World for a Sector’s distance can produce.  Like most Princeps, he has no spouse or children.  What satisfaction can merging one’s life with another mortal being after becoming one with a god?  Regardless, his life is as comfortable as the life of a person who regularly fuses with a machine can be.  He performs the absolute minimum of work himself, preferring to stay alone in his chambers, drinking expensive tea and grumbling about how things were better in his youth.

As can perhaps be expected, he does not have cordial and friendly relations with most of the Cloudburst major players.  He and Ranult Arden have a speck of professional respect for each other, and he is slightly intimidated by Lister Beraxos and Cassandra Lerica, but he looks down on nearly all other people in the Sector, even Magos Sneth.  He is not so far up his own asshole that he believes that he is a god, like the machine he commands, but that is not the impression one would get from a brief exposure to his attitude.  Ilnus is quite well-educated, but actually keeps his mouth shut in most meetings of Legio Congelatio Princeps.  The younger Princeps think this to be intimidating in the extreme, and that he is perhaps judging them all in stormy silence, but in reality, he is usually just stewing over some minor issue or another that he focuses on to the exclusion of all others.  Older Princeps generally do not bother directing questions to him unless they really need his input.
There is one point on which there is no discussion or contention, anyway.  He is in charge because he damn well earned it, as he rarely has to remind people.  Of the two dozen active Titans in the Legion, his has the most kills, and that was not the case when he took it over.  The tanks of Nurglite Warbands, the rickety contraptions of Ork Meks in the Circuit, even the Necron Monolith that had been raiding the Imperial border defenses in the Oglith Subsector in M41.989; there is no foe he has yet faced he has not yet killed.  Even the massive Supa-Gargant Bloodcrunch, which killed the previous Grand Master of the Legion, died when he trained his massive lasers on it twelve years later.  He is simply unmatched in Titan combat, at least among the Congelatio.  If the Legion had an Imperator, he would insist on piloting it.
Some of Ilnus’ kills and glorious career stem from his affinity for machines and innate understanding of how much more damage a wounded Titan can bear, both his own and his enemies’.  The man doesn’t even look at the vehicle damage sensors when he’s connected to his mount.  He keeps his eyes trained on the visuals of his Titan at all times, seeing through its optics and its augurs, and that can make the difference.  Another contributing factor is his reflexes.  Although the huge, lumbering Titans may not seem like they are fast enough to gain an appreciable advantage from having a pilot with sharp reflexes, as a Lightning or Avenger might, they in fact can benefit greatly from a quick pilot.  Princeps Ilnus has superb reflexes, especially for a man of his advanced age.  His Warlord may be big and slow, but having a reaction time near nil can still be very helpful in avoiding artillery.

Ilnus is a staunch traditionalist, as many Princeps are.  He believes in the purity of the Machine, albeit without much public display.  He is a strong supporter of the expansion of the Legion, but rarely rouses himself to get overly involved in that expansion.  There is one way in which he finds himself drifting away from the general Cognomen Techpriesthood, however, and that is in regards to the creation of the Knight World ABX202020.  He finds it to be a blasphemy and a crime.  The Knight Worlds, he loudly insists, are the relics of another age and should stay that way, growing no more numerous nor larger.  He says this with the conviction of a zealot,
However, now, Ilnus curses fate.  He knows that no matter how strong his reservations, no matter how harsh his critique, he can no longer do anything to stop House Matraxia from someday becoming a full part of Cognomen’s armies.  This is, he has finally admitted, because Ermincrole and Beraxos are damnably, inarguably, bitterly right.  The Imperium is on the ropes and swooning.  Cognomen does need more defenses; Cloudburst does need more heroes, Mars is giving them the cold shoulder.

This has not helped his attitude.  The Legio Congelatio is the most powerful force under arms in the entire Cloudburst Sector.  Ilnus has led them into battle alongside the Titanshields, the Skitarii, and dozens of other forces of Naxos and Cloudburst.  In these Times of Ending, as the darkness closes in and the Astronomican shrinks, the Legion will quite possibly have to bear much of the burden, and Ilnus knows it.
So far, the Legion has had few direct deployments against the Glasians.  At first, this was because the Legion was too small, but now that it can field several maniples against the beasts, they have begun to field more and more.  Ilnus is too young to have been present for the battle against the Glasians who attacked Cognomen directly many centuries ago.  Ilnus’ next battle will be against the Glasians on Dawn-break.  The Mechanicus will be basing a large force there to protect the Heliopolis.

Ilnus carries a ceremonial Cognomen Hotshot Laspistol, but has never needed to use it.




Lord General Howard Lannis Halwart
“Orks?  It’ll be a fight, then.  Lots of Orks?  It’ll be a good fight.  They landed on Oglith?  Then it’ll be a LONG fight!  Strap up, gentlemen, there’s business afoot for His Finest Men!”

It is a well-practiced and easily verified maxim of the Imperial military that the higher one’s rank, the easier one’s job becomes.  Lord General Halwart is the second in command of the Cloudburst Sector Imperial Guard, and presently the overall commander of the Imperial defense on Oglith, and he loves every second of it.  Halwart is an optimist, a foolishly vainglorious one, and is probably the last line standing between the Glasian and Ork menaces and the loss of a Subsector Capital.

Born on Nauphry IV, Howard Lannis Halwart was a scion of the Halwart Transit Services corporation, and the great-grandson of its Chief Executive.  There was no chance that he would inherit his distant sire’s vast wealth and corporate power, and so his family passed him off to the military in the hope that he would make something of himself.  To his own surprise, he loved it.  The military lifestyle fitted him like a glove.  He paid his own way through a token degree and returned to the military as a commissioned officer.  Eventually, Halwart mustered to the Nauphry Guard as a Lieutenant, and he began the climb up the ranks.  He saw combat alongside the Oglith Jaegers and Warriors and the Septiim Guard in the battle against the rebelling PDF army of Delving in M41.890, and found a true thrill in leading troops into the fray.  He wasn’t especially good at it, but his combination of genuine but foolhardy courage and chest-pounding patriotic braggadocio at least kept morale above acceptable threshholds.
In his time with the Guard, Halwart engaged in battle with rebel soldiers with zeal, gusto, and a batman with a twin heavy shotgun protecting him from the immediate consequences of his exuberance.  He ended the war with a few comfirmed kills and a chest full of medals.  His rise to power continued unobstructed, although he acquired a reputation of losing his aides and staffers in his zeal to reach the front.  Halwart trained obsessively in what he called ‘the martial things,’ like religious history, logistics, dress codes, and obscure communication codes and hand signals, which he began working into his body language during ordinary conversation.
Once his rank rose high enough that he was expected to converse with the nobs and fops of Imperial high society, he took to it like a fish to a river.  He captivated the lower nobility of several Cloudburst and Naxos worlds with his barely-exaggerated tales of battlefield daring-do, and stories of the foes he and his armies had vanquished.  Of course, by that point, he was rarely allowed to engage openly against enemies in the field, and became more likely to command from the rear, but he still took every chance he got to get his hands dirty in the field, and does so even now, thanks to his juvenat treatments.
Thanks to his training and Highborn heritage, Halwart is just as comfortable interacting with the upper crust as they are with him, but he still prefers the thrill of battle.  He has no children nor plans to make any, but he has adopted a series of patronages that allow him to shower with monetary rewards the many artists he has hired to decorate the cabin of his personal starship.  His ship has no Navigator, but it can follow in the wake of other ships in the Warp well enough, and the first thing it usually does after exiting the Warp is bull to the front of whatever formation it was a part of, so he can be seen leading the charge.

Even in the corrupt and staggering Imperium of Man, men like Halwart usually catch a case of bolter shell to the brain for their attitude, and Halwart himself probably would have, if he didn’t have some actual skills.  His combat skill is middling at best, but that is among his peers: the highest-ranked Generals in the Imperial North.  By the standards of a common General or a PDF commander, he is quite skillful.  Compared with masters of warfare like Ranult Arden or even Lord Maynard, he is unimpressive, though they would not fault his courage.

At the moment, Halwart is in charge of the defense of the Rampart system’s ground assets from the Orks and Glasians.  Sector Command had always known that Oglith would require particular defense thanks to the need to prevent the Glasian Migration from worsening the psychic stimulation of the Orks below.  Now, that is a secondary concern.  If Big Chief Squiggothrider is still alive when the Glasians arrive in Rampart, the planet is all but lost.  The Imperium can just barely hold back the hundreds of thousands of Orks that crashed on Oglith or rose up from beneath it; also fighting off the Glasians without destroying the Ork unity is beyond the scope of their capabilities.  Halwart may be a vainglorious braggart, but he is not stupid enough to think the present war can or should go on forever.  Even if the Imperium does somehow eke out a victory here, the sheer drain on the Sector’s resources that the concurrent invasions represent is enough to ensure that the two low-tech worlds the Glasians are also hitting are defended by token garrison forces at the most.  Despite his best wishes, Halwart recognizes that this is not a war the Imperium is going to win if he simply throws himself at it headlong.
Thus, he has allowed himself to retreat to his command bunker in Overlord Atongwë’s castle, where he unhappily commands plastic squares around a holo table and hopes he doesn’t make any mistakes.  His force has the two Ork armies outnumbered by a considerable margin, but the operational requirements of fighting Feral Orks underground and star-faring Orks aboveground are so different that he just can’t use the same tactics against both.  He has reluctantly requested more forces from Lord Sector Quintus, although he knows few can be shaken loose.

Halwart’s advisors and subordinate Generals, as well as the Brigadiers and Colonels who will actually be leading the forces of the Imperium against the aliens, have been counseling him to ask for more aid from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica and the Officio Munitorum, but Halwart is loathe to do so for two reasons.  First, he does not like admitting that he is in over his head, and to be fair, if he were only fighting one implacable alien enemy, he probably wouldn’t be.  The second reason is that help is already on the way, but by secret means.  A Deathwatch Killteam is on the way, dispatched by Watch Commander Domack from Fortress Dascomb.  It will dock on the Watch Point Earthquake, thenand then make its way to him for a briefing.  He has also met with two people sent from Terra itself to ‘assist him,’ which is language vague enough to unsettle him.  This is a rare circumstance for him.
The two people sent from Terra are quiet and terrifying; they are black-robed spectres of death and terror that scare the living daylights out of him, perhaps the first beings to truly do so.  Halwart is a man upon whom frightful reality dares not often intrude, but these two terrifying folks manage to do so without any real effort.  The first is a Vanus Assassin, introduced to him as “Civil,” and the other is a Vindicare Assassin, codenamed “Mimic.”  He had never even heard of the Vanus before meeting Civil.  Mimic, however, is apparently one of the deadliest people in the Segmentum, and despite looking no different from an ‘average’ Vindicare sniper, Mimic all but radiates cold violence.  Mimic barely talks, but not from the burden of great trauma or a dour personality.  He has simply done so much flying about and so much killing that nothing he has seen on Oglith particularly incites his emotions or requires his question or input.
Halwart has never worked with Assassins before, but as all Lords General do, he knows of their secret remit and their Terran obligation.  He does not know that Mimic is also tasked with killing the Subsector Overlord, nor does he know that Civil is actually present to manipulate his data streams to boost morale and encourage civilian resistance against the Orks and Glasians because the Senate thinks he can’t do it himself.  Of course, if he does do it himself, that would seal the deal for his ascension to Lord General Senioris when Charles Xoss retires or dies.

Halwart cuts what he thinks to be a dashing image outside of battle, with a variety of custom uniform adornments and arms, including a great feathered hat and a pair of ivory-grip dueling six-shooter revolvers.  He also carries a Power Sword he paid for from his own pocket, which is as deadly as it is ceremonial.

Lixivim Dill, real name unknown – rogue Vanus Assassin in employ of FCC, official kill count 1667
“I can kill with a whisper.  I do kill with a whisper.  The best kills are the ones I read about in the news a week later.”

Lixivim Dill is a codename, as are the names given to all Imperial Assassins.  Some use combinations of numbers and letters, some use the names of the first few Imperial Assassins over and over in homage to their roots, but Lixivim Dill uses an anagram of the numeral of her kill count.
Dill started life in the gutters of Terra, but her cleverness and willingness to rob Imperial institutions to get by drew the attention of the Officio Assassinorum.  Dill doesn’t remember a thing before her abduction, thanks to extensive hypno-conditioning.  As with all Vanus assassins, she is trained as an infocyte.  Her speciality is traveling the streams of data that cross most Imperial system and planetary data webs, collecting knowledge and fielding it against the enemies of Mankind.
However, fourteen years before the Thirteenth Black Crusade, Dill simply vanished from Terra.  The Officio Assassinorum keeps up-to-the-minute track of all of their Assassins; those as experienced as Dill were permitted some leeway in accomplishing their missions, but were not allowed off Terra any more than a neophyte would be.  Dill had traveled the galaxy many times before, coordinating Sector Commands to root traitors out into the open in rebellions, or covertly directing Planetary Defense Forces to overthrow Heretic cabals without overt Imperial influence.
This was different.  The Officio Assassinorum dispatched personnel to find her, but she was simply gone.  For two years, the Officio sent agents to places where they suspected Dill might have hidden.  When the Ordo Sicarius learned of the Officio’s lapse, they were understandably disgusted and outraged.  The Ordo dispatched Assassin-Acolytes to locate Dill, all of whom returned empty-handed.

Dill had prepared over two hundred false identities during the planning of her escape from Imperial leadership.  To her mild chagrin, she only needed three to elude the Imperial pursuers.  Over the next two years, she made her way out to the remote Cloudburst Sector, stopping only long enough to buy some camping supplies, a few guns, and a few sets of driving gloves, and to steal a Mechanicus dataslate from an unattended battery truck on Calathos.
When Dill arrived in Cloudburst, she immediately got herself a job on the freighter Flying Money, which she had calculated was the vessel most likely to be highjacked by the Free Corsair Coalition.  In no time, the FCC did indeed target the freighter, and disabled it after a brief echange of fire.  When FCC troops swept into the ship, Dill navigated effortlessly from cabin to cabin, staying out of the line of sight of the boarders.  When the FCC encountered more resistance from the crew than anticipated, thanks to Dill arming several crewers before the attack with illegally-purchased slug pistols, they moved more troops to assist the boarders.  Dill snuck past them effortlessly, and maneuvered her way into a cargo pod that the pirates were loading onto their own ship.  When it stopped moving, Dill emerged from the cocoon of life support equipment she had made from her camping supplies, walked casually up to the CIC of the warship, walked in after setting off a bomb in an adjacent room to distract the guards, caught Admiral Reith’s eye, and cleared her throat.

After Langdon Reith’s bodyguards were done dogpiling her, Dill pulled out a dataslate packed with Mechanicus data, and a step-by-step breakdown of how she had accomplished her feat.  Reith instantly recognized the implication of her information: she could have killed him with disgusting ease, but had come asking for work instead; it was a profoundly unsubtle gesture.  It was more than enough to make the point.

Reith hired Dill to serve as his Chief Strategist, and so far she has been a great investment.  With her skills as an infocyte, she has been able to ferret out vulnerabilities in the Imperial and other human governments of the region, including some out in the Cloudburst Circuit that the Rogue Traders of the region have not yet found.  Reith has successfully conquered a star system with her help, and his organization is now expanding so quickly that even the other pirate groups in the region are giving him a wide berth.
For Dill’s part, she has found the FCC to be suitable to her needs, at least until the Sicarius hounds draw closer.  She knows there’s no real chance that the FCC can or even would try to protect her from another Officio Assassinorum killer, certainly not if the faint whispers of completely impossible sniper kills on Oglith are true.  She and Mimic have never met, but she knows there is no way she could elude him forever.  For now, Dill is focusing on evading Imperial attention, and expanding on her own plans.

The Officio Assassinorum, meanwhile, has compiled an extensive dossier on Dill’s activity, and paired it with her records from her Assassinorum mission listing.  The Officio and the Inquisition are attempting to learn why Dill abandoned her post.  So far, the best the Officio can come up with is that at some point in M41.984, Dill was exposed to something that damaged her mind or loyalty, and for the next two years, she plotted to flee Terra and pursue an unknown goal.
Exactly why Dill snapped is open to debate.  Her superiors suspect a data daemon, her peers suspect her hypno-condition broke down somehow, and the Inquisition believes her to come under the influence of a higher, corruptive power that seeks to control the Assassin for its own ends.
The Inquisition is increasingly worried about Dill falling to Tzeentch.  Vanus Assassins are masters of data manipulation and long-range plots.  Tzeentch is a plotter beyond his kindred, able to weave complex strategies and plans that span centuries or longer.  The possibility that Dill may have been explosed to Chaotic corruption somehow, perhaps through a literal daemon or a scrapcode blast in data she was processing, is one the Inquisition can’t ignore.  Terra-based members of the Inquisition are actively investigating this, sending Throne Agents and Assassin-Acolytes of the Ordo Sicarius to the Vanus Temple to examine her data material more closely.
Meanwhile, both the Officio Assassinorum and the Ordo Sicarius have initiated containment protocols.  While the Officio lost track of Dill almost immediately, the Inquisition’s Lord Eric Stoldst is on Dill’s trail.  He has not yet been able to confirm that Dill is present in Cloudburst, but he knew that this was a perfect place for a rogue Assassin to hide.  The rise of the FCC was something Dill knew she had to risk if she wanted to flee the Imperium, and she could hardly join a pirate gang and just serve as one of the grunts.  Her plan involves accumulating power at a pace an infocyte typically doesn’t keep, and her alternatives were either find a pirate gang or a pliable Rogue Trader.  Rogue Traders ultimately answer to the Imperium, however, so the FCC was a good fit for her.

Dill is not a member of the more combat-oriented branches of the Officio, but she does have extensive survival and self-defense training.  In combat, she prefers to engage at maximum range, and slings a silenced slug rifle when she can bring it with her, although she is a perfectly capable martial artist as well.

“Mimic,” official kill count 2102, estimated kill count 6201
“Subject has experienced liquefaction from the mid-stomach upwards.  Assessment: prototype necrocyte round is overkill.  Recommendation: immediate deployment.”

If Lord Sector Quintus, Lord Fabricator Beraxos, and Lady Inquisitrix Lerica have all the power, and Lord Walsh has the money, Lord Halwart has the secret weapon.  The Vindicare Assassin codenamed Mimic is the single deadliest person in the Sector, on a scale that would even give Oscar Havermann pause.  Mimic has been killing enemies of the High Lords, sometimes whole familes of them, for over forty years.  He has spent much of that time in hypno- or cryo-sleep, and his neural cybernetics have been pumping him full of technical data and mission profiles the whole time.  He has killed a Black Apostle of the Word Bearers, a Necron Praetorian, and most recently and impressively, the rogue Inquisitor Xavien in the nearby Drumnos Sector.  Now, he has set his sights squarely on the Ork who leads the army that is assaulting Oglith, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.
If anything, Mimic’s total kill count is actually too low.  He has stopped counting the security guards and other, similar trash that litter the path he crosses to reach his targets.  If he did, the number would be well over five thousand.  Halwart has even asked him – with exceptional care – if advertising his presence would shore up the morale of the troops a bit, but Mimic knows that he is externally no different from any other Vindicare, so it would mean little.

Mimic’s youth was wasted, as he would admit if he could remember it through the haze of memory conditioning.  He was swept into a Guard scum tithe on Primiza Station in the Centauri Cluster, and earmarked for Officio Assassinorum training after he was found to posess a specific combination of alleles for intelligence and strength.  His training progressed at a rate that left his supervisors impressed.  However, there was little to suggest that his talents were particularly above average until he began target training with the practice rifles.  Thus, he was one of the very few Vindicare Temple assassins who did not rise up to the Officio as a result of Scholam Progenium training.
Within a month of practice, Mimic was breaking records that had lasted thousands of years.  His accuracy was near-perfect, of course, as all Vindicare’s scores need to be, but his ability to rapidly re-target and re-focus his weapon between shots was so fast that some of his instructors wondered among themselves that he had a cybernetic augmentation.  Mimic, then using the callsign ‘Regrets,’ first deployed against a cabal of daemon-worshipping Heretics in the Scarus Sector, and polished them off by perching on the maintenance catwalk under an illuminated billboard, camouflaged by the contrast of light.  Mimic eradicated the entire cabal within an hour by using a combination of motion-sensitive sensor pods and his Exitus weapons.

Mimic proceeded through the path of his career as a member of the Emperor’s marksmen, distinguished but never quite pulling to the head of the pack in the eyes of the Officio Assassinorum.  It was only after his seventeenth mission that he catapulted to the very highest ranks of the Vindicare Temple and formally took on his new title.
The Officio had sent him on a mission on behalf of the Senate of the High Lords to assassinate the rebel General Clodsdan, a nototrious opponent of Imperial expansion into the previously neutral zones between the Ixiniad and Lorcam Sectors.  However, Clodsdan had enacted an orbital web protocol that meant that every ship that didn’t have his own personal approval couldn’t land on the surface of the planet where he had planted his flag.  As a result, Mimic was able to get to the system in question, and a stealthed shuttle meant that it would be impossible for the General to know precisely where he touched down, but the un-permitted heat flare of a descending shuttle is impossible to mask completely.  Thus, when Mimic touched down, the General had known he was coming long enough to hide successfully.  Clodsdan settled into a bunker complex that had no unobserved exits, and there he stayed.
Mimic made his way over two hundred kilometers overland and hid outside the bunker.  He knew Clodsdan would never be tricked into exiting the bunker, so instead he mapped out the local routes of nearby aircraft.  Once he found an appropriate aircraft flying ini his general direction, he waited until the right moment to strike, and then shot the engines of the aircraft.  The plane tumbled out of control and slammed into the bunker, collapsing several levels.  Clodsdan panicked and sent out every guard he had to flush the area, and none reported contact.  Only then did he leave the bunker to evcacuate, and as soon as he stepped into the daylight, Mimic shot him through a two-inch gap in the shieldwall his guards had erected around the exit.  He escaped into the night and flew back to Terra, mission complete.

That was enough to seal Mimic’s reputation as the best.  Mimic’s subsequent assignments were the sort that the Officio only acted on because the Senate asked them to, or the sort that would normally require an entire Imperial Guard regiment.  Mimic’s reputation within the Temple grew as he shot the drivers of tanks through quarter inch lexan sheets while moving, blasted engine blocks out of trucks moving a hundred miles an hour, and in one notable incident, shot a Chaos-tainted crystal out of the chest of a mutating daemonhost, driving the fiend back into the Warp.  Eventually, the Master of Vindicare selected Mimic to test several new ammunition types, including the prototype Necrocyte round, which was designed to kill Genestealer Patriarchs and other large Tyranid organisms with one bullet.  The Master is even pondering Mimic as his own successor, although Mimic’s eye for talent in others appears to be unremarkable at best.

Mimic has been crisscrossing the Imperium, killing its enemies, for so long that he no longer views it as a particular challenge.  His focus hasn’t waned, but he no longer feels like he has much to do with himself.  In the eyes of the Officio Assassinorum, dispatching both him and Civil to solve one Ork problem is a bit of overkill, but it is their hope that once he is present and working, he may be able to help with their other problem: the disappearance of Lixivim Dill.  Ironically, they do not actually know where she is, while Lord Inquisitor Stoldst is a few weeks from figuring it out first.

Mimic has long abandoned the practice of formally tracking his kills.  He has killed so many guards, body doubles, seconds-in-command, and other rabble on the way to his targets that he doesn’t particularly care to count them.  If pressed, he would estimate his true kill count to be around six thousand, but his count of named targets is two thousand, one hundred two.  The death of Big Chief Squiggothrider will bring that up one, and perhaps more if the Officio or Lord General Halwart bring him new names for his list on the Senate’s authority.

Like most Vindicares, he carries an Exitus rifle, an Exitus Pistol, his standard uniform and mask, and a set of simple survival tools.  However, Mimic carries far more ammunition than most Vindicares.  As the master Vindicare has entrusted him with the responsibility of testing new ammunition types, he carries a variety of odd rounds.  In addition to the usual ammo types of the Vindicare Temple, he carries prototype necrocyte ammunition, which dissolves tissues around impact by lysing cell membranes, and lumenshock ammunition, which emits a blinding light upon impact.  He also carries Hawk rounds, which move below sonic speeds for most of flight, then abruptly speed up when near the target, to bypass some forms of energy shield that turn away supersonic objects.  As these rounds are prototypical, he only carries a few, and reports to the Officio on their efficacy after each use.  Thanks to his hard work, necrocyte rounds will probably enter Deathwatch service within twenty years.  The Officio usually keeps its technology to itself, but as they are privy to the secrets of much of the Senate, the Officio knows how far the Imperium is out of depth against the Tyranids.  Thus, they are begrudgingly willing to share the technology with the Deathwatch, to augment or replace Hellfire rounds in use against Patriarchs or Zoanthropes.

“Civil,” official kill count 157
“If another human sees me at work, something has gone horribly wrong.”

The Vanus Assassin codenamed Civil is the leader of a cell of infocytes tasked with the defense of the Cloudburst Sector against the greenskin menace.  The Officio Assassinorum generally does not care about the morale of the Cloudburst or any other Sector save Sol, but the possibility that two Ork invasions and the Glasian Migration might collapse Imperial authority there has them concerned, especially since they know a Lord Inquisitor Sicarius is there for some reason.  The Officio Assassinorum does know that Lxivim Dill is present in the extreme galactic north somewhere, but they do not know precisely where.  If Civil does discover Dill’s location, he is to start trying to kill her immediately, while also sending a message back to Terra to notify the Officio of his discovery of her.
Dill is far more experienced than Civil.  Civil and Mimic are aware of each other’s presence, having taken the same ship to the Rampart system, and Civil is hoping that Mimic’s signature super-long range sniper kills will catch the rumor mill to disguise Civil’s presence.  For his part, Mimic suspects that Civil is using his presence in what amounts to a relatively small Ork invasion for something, but he is long past caring.  Civil has a tertiary objective: resolve the problem of Oglith’s incompetent representation in the Sector.  Maddeningly to General Halwart and others tasked with saving Oglith from the Orks and Glasians, the Planetary Governor of Oglith is a personable, loyal, intelligent, capable, and reasonable man, but Subsector Overlord Darren Atongwë has made only half-hearted attempts to dislodge the Orks (as have his relatives) for centuries.  There is genuine concern in Sector and Segmentum Command that the Rampart system may fall, and fall soon, should the Orks still be present when the Glasians arrive.
Thus, the Senate has tasked Civil with the tertiary objective of using his media manipulation skills to rie up the people of Oglith against the aliens, and also make them at least amenable to a regime change if Atongwë has to die.  Civil has focused some of his manipulation efforts on the Oglith media machine, planting whispers and rumors in the right places in the holovid studios, newscast centers, refugee camps, and even Atongwë’s own palace.  Civil has based their infocyte operations from a hardened room dropped from orbit by the Senate ship that brought him and Mimic there, which can be just as easily transported back up to the ship overhead by a Bratan or Cetacean cargo shuttle.

Civil is a product of the Schola Progenia system, as all but a tiny handful of Vanus Assassins are.  He was born on Cypra Mundi to parents who promptly died in selfless battle against a Dark Eldar raider four years later.  He has a relatively low kill count because he was, until recently, stationed on Terra itself.  Civil was rooting out and arranging for the murder of Imperial nobles that controlled and sometimes abused corporations on the Throneworld.  The noble families based on Terra are sometimes unfathomably ancient, with bloodlines and pedigrees that stretch back all the way to the Golden Age over thirty thousand years ago, and have defenses of archaeotech and bonded servants that the Senate can’t easily bypass.  Still, ancient wealth breeds grudges, indolence, and sinful thoguhts, and so the Vanus Assassins sometimes send amateur members of their Clade after those nobles who step out of line as training.  When those trainee Assassins discover that there is a larger or more dangerous conspiracy or heresy in the house they are tasked with purging, they must call for assistance; until recently, that assistant was Civil.
Civil’s retasking to Cloudburst ensures that he can put his talents to work far from the Palace.  In fact, Cloudburst is at the very edge of Imperial space; he is as far from the Palace as he can realistically be and still be in the Galactic North.  He has never been to Cloudburst before.  If all goes to plan, he just might kill Squiggothrider, Atongwë, and Dill without ever setting foot out of his armored module.

Civil carries a pair of Martian-built Hellpistols for personal emergency defense, as well as the usual arrangement of cybernetic animals, netfly drones, and other info-tools of the trade.  As with all Vanus Assassins, he avoids combat when at all possible.