cabal procursatio

Among those Inquisitors that do attend the Palace, there are several that had changed Ordos in the past.  Ordo membership is not lifelong, of course, but many Inquisitors do not change the one to which they gravitate early in their careers.  Among those that do, the adherence to the clades and cabals that so often define Inquisitorial activity in the more restless sectors is loose.  Inquisitors are almost never privy to knowledge concerning cabals to which they do not belong, of course, and as far as the substantial majority of Inquisitors are aware, there is only one proper, named Cabal in the entire Sector.  It is the Cabal Procursatio, a word in High Gothic that roughly means ‘skirmishing.’  Its name also could mean ‘stealing’ or ‘raiding,’ increasing its aptness, given the kleptomaniacal nature of the Cabal’s servants.

Cabal Procursatio
It is absurd to the point of comedy to suggest that an Inquisitor would ever be tasked exclusively to the pursuit of problems caused by those beings after which their Ordo is named.  An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor could just as easily bring their sword down on the neck of a heretic as an alien, for instance.  Cabals are structures within the greater hierarchy of the Inquisition created to allow experts in one form of pursuit of the Emperor’s enemies to benefit from the skills of others.  However, for the Cabal Procursatio, cooperation has become more than a gesture for improved efficiency; it has become a genuine necessity.  The incursions of xenos from other realms beyond the Galaxy proper has caused a cascade of severe problems for the Inquisition that branch beyond their initial threat appearance.  The Tyranids, for instance, spread heresy in the form of their Genestealer Cult propaganda to create cats-paws among pliable Imperial (and T’au) populations to soften worlds for invasion.  The effect that the Tyranid Shadow in the Warp has on daemons and psychics falls under the purview of the Ordo Malleus, while their very nature demands the attention of the Ordo Xenos.
The Glasians, the subject of so much attention in the Greater Tri-Sector, are another perfect example.  They are xenos, of course, and fall prey to the attention of the daemonic masters that inevitably control them, thus making them the jurisdiction of the Ordos Malleus and Xenos alike.  Trade in their artifacts then lures in bored, idle rich Imperial citizens to commit the heresies of flesh and xeno goods-trading, drawing the eye of the Ordo Hereticus.  Thus, no one Ordo has whole and entire jurisdiction over the Glasian problem, although the general consensus is that the Ordo Xenos has overarching jurisdiction over confronting them when the issue arises.  The Cabal Procursatio focuses its attention in extra-galactic threats to the Emperor’s reign in general, and by virtue of being hosted in the Glasian-menaced Cloudburst Sector, it focuses on the Glasians in particular during their centennial Migrations.

Founded in the wake of the horrifying destruction of the planet Chlorit in the Second Glasian Migration, the Cabal was initially devoted solely to skirmishing with and ultimately driving into extinction the Glasians.  However, they are no longer the first extra-galactic aliens the Imperium has encountered.  The Tyranids and possibly others among the aliens that now routinely assault the Imperium in its time of weakening following the Macharian Crusades are also extragalactic, and in the loosest sense, so are any aliens that dwell in the Warp and Webway like Enslavers and Drukhari.  Therefore, the Cabal – and its resources, recognition, and self-appointed jurisdiction – have expanded substantially, especially after the destruction of Hive Fleet Kraken proved that Behemoth was not the solitary Tyranid threat to humankind.
The Cabal Procursatio aggressively seeks and collects evidence about the extragalactic aliens that the Imperium detects.  When they find such evidence and intelligence as they can recognize, they frequently deploy Acolytes and Throne Agents to acquire it.  This could include DNA samples (or their equivalent for non-ribonucleic organisms), whole beings, dissection and autopsy reports, star charts showing their movement, technology, eyewitness reports, and of course combat analyses by the other branches of the Imperium (or Inquisitors that do not understand what they encountered in their own work).  When this evidence is retrieved, it is brought to the subterranean fortresses under the Palace of Maskos, where the Inquisition itself has its regional headquarters.  The analysis of the information and material gathered by the Cabal falls to the small but well-connected group of Techpriests, scholars, and Throne Agents entrusted by the Cabal’s leadership with learning more about extragalactic threats to the Imperium.
This group reports to no one Inquisitor, both to shorten chains of reporting among the flexible and mobile Inquisition and to prevent the unhelpful hoarding of results by any one member of the Cabal.  The analysts are aided in their work by a group of life-sworn Inquisitorial Scribes, former Adepts of the Administratum and Estate to a person.  These scribes were usually people who had the skills to serve the Adeptus Terra in some useful way, but not the temperament to serve in the enforced, crushing anonymity of the infinite bureaucracy of the Imperium of Man.  These scribes labor in secret vaults under the cities of Maskos, usually emerging only to sleep in luxurious but heavily surveyed apartment complexes owned by Inquisitorial front companies.

Over its history, the Cabal has found much useless information about aliens and some few scraps of helpful truth.  Anything the Cabal learns about xenos, their ways, their worshippers, their powers, and their combat capabilities that the Cabal can not use in its goal of driving all extra-galactic aliens extinct is passed along to other Ordo Xenos Inquisitors or to the Deathwatch as appropriate.  The Cabal’s narrow focus helps maintain security and drive; no one Cabal, no matter how well-appointed, can possibly oppose all of alien-kind concurrently.
The research of the Cabal and its minions expands dramatically when the Glasian Migrations draw near, or when Tyranid Hive splinter sighting occur in the Greater Tri-Sector.  Because the first are scheduled and the second is (locally, anyway) rare, the Cabal sometimes goes into a dormant period, only infrequently stirring to action when Glasian relics are discovered among xenos Cold Traders on Thimble or a Genestealer Cult is detected in the Drumnos Sector.  The Migrations’ approach drives the Cabal into a frenzy, as its member Inquisitors dispatch every Acolyte, Throne Agent, spy, and mercenary on their payroll to record as much information as they possibly can about the Glasian menace.
This has its risks.  The Glasians are no threat to the genetic purity of humanity, but their strange science and daemonic patronage is still a colossal danger to the Imperium, especially in the lightly-populated and underdefended Cloudburst Sector.  More than one Cabal Procursatio agent has died fighting Glasians.  Others have had to waive off the pursuit of relics because non-Cabal Inquisitors such as Lord Hueng have destroyed them.  One was even slain by the Blue Daggers Chapter of the Imperial Space Marines, simply because that particular agent was incautious enough to try to loot a Glasian weapon from a dead alien before the Space Marines had left the planet on which it had been slain.

Actual, fully-inducted Inquisitors rarely pursue the Cabal’s goals directly, and when they do, it is almost always covert.  The Cabal’s goals, those being the extirpation of all aliens from other galaxies, is by all means in alignment with Imperial government doctrine and religious scripture, and any Imperial citizen would be mad to oppose it.  Its methods, however, are patently illegal for anyone other than an Inquisitor to undertake, given that it involves trafficking alien corpses, goods, and weaponry among Imperial worlds.  Lerica, Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, is very much aware of the Cabal, and regards them with exasperation and annoyance.  Their ultimate goal is the same as hers and everybody else’s, but their sheer bloody-mindedness in cataloging and studying these xenos is sometimes quite unhelpful.  Their occasional jurisdictional battles with the rest of the Inquisition are not helping their reputation along.

The goals of individual Cabal members may conflict.  Some, for instance, wish them and every trace of their existence erased from reality.  Others wish for their technology to be seized by the Inquisition, to be reverse-engineered.  After all, the Glasians use plasma weapons and drives that are wholly unalike to those created by the human race, and have faster-than-life travel that has no dependency on the Warp.  If humanity were to seize that advantage and turn it against the forces of Chaos, it would prove to be a massive improvement in humanity’s ability to avoid the terminal dependency on the Warp that the Emperor Himself had sought to escape with his Webway Project (although only a handful of Inquisitors are aware of that failed plan).  Others yet among the Cabal believe that the mere existence of the Glasians represents an opportunity to study extragalactic life without the insane risks of caging Tyranids.
The problem is that no one Inquisitor may claim their goals to rise above all others, and the Cabal has introduced policy conflicts that the leadership of the Cabal has not been able to quash.  They have never risen to violence, but even among Inquisitors, the disputes of ideology and philosophy can be fierce.  The leader of the Cabal is Ordo Xenos Inquisitor and former member of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica Ryan Lee, who joined the Cabal four decades before the Seventh Glasian Migration.  The Cabal shares resources for the majority of its actions, although ideological disagreements sometimes lead to hoarding.