fresh fruit

Cognomen Skitarii are loyal to Mars first and Cognomen second.  Their postings take them all over the world, in small offices, massive barracks, and rapid response call bunkers.  Though the initial contingent was a mere eighty thousand, the size and importance of Cognomen have increased immensely, and so has the Skitarii.  Onager Dunecrawlers and Ironstriders patrol the dying savannas, marching legions of metal-legged soldiers circuit the factories and construction sites, and elite red and black robed guards keep vigil over the Containment Vaults and Iron Armory.  Cognomen’s desire to stay on Mars’ good side expresses itself in the Skitarii it arms being given the very best weapons the expanding Forge World can afford to build.  The Skitarii of Cognomen, however, take the exact opposite approach to warfare as the dour and gloomy Titanshields.  They have no fixation on penance or purging mistakes.  Skitarii of Cognomen fight to see the Imperium – through its alliance with Mars – expand and grow.  The Skitarii use weapons like the mighty Galvanic Rifle, the Transuranic Rifle, and the Eradication Beamer in their formations.  Of course, these weapons do leave some impact on the world around them, but it is transitory at worst, not the crawling horror of Phosphex or permanent irradiation of Radium Blaster Rifles.

When time comes, as it often does, for Cognomen to export weapons to the rest of the Segmentum, it does have a few foci for its manufacturing.  Although it is just as capable of building basic human and Astartes wargear as any other Forge World of its age, the world’s Fabricator Magi Council has elected to pursue excellence in specific forms of weapons rather than try to master them all without the absolute support of Mars like mighty Anvilus or Lucius.  The focus of most Cognomen arms trading for now is infantry weaponsry, specifically high quality autorifles, stubbers, lasguns, and grenade launchers.  Though this is a far cry from the diverse and technologically bizarre weapons of the Dark Age and Age of Strife, that’s the point, in Cognomen’s way of thinking.  Laser technology is one of the few fields of technology in which present-day humanity is unambiguously superior to Dark Age technology, so why not focus on what they do best?  Cognomen lasrifles and autorifles are cheap, quiet, easy to repair, easy to maintain, waterproof, and light – perfect for a Guard or PDF force without much money.  For the forces with more money, like Septiim and Celeste troops, there are all manner of options: plasma, melta, bolter, shotgun, missile, and flamer weapons of the usual variety.  By necessity, the Cognomen Forgemasters have also grown accustomed to making the various vehicle upgrade kits the Blue Daggers and Septiim Guard love so much, like sponson and pintle bolter packages.
Sniper weapons are the natural progression of Cognomen’s infantry rifle focus.  Cognomen mabufactures a line of projectile rifles dubbed the Razor series by its testers.  Based loosely on the ancient Martian and Terran hunting rifles from which it takes its name, the Razors are mechanical simplicity itself.  Using the expanding gas from the primer and powder of its discharged slugs both to propel the slug and clear the chamber, they come in automatic, semi-automatic, and bolt-action variants.  Long-barrel variants and variants with integrated sound suppressors are especially popular with counter-sniper and counter-terrorist specialists, while shorter ones with integrated forward grips and compensators or flash hiders pop up often in Imperial Guard infantry units.  Cognomen Lasweapons are based on ancient Martian designs, with few technological deviations.
Cognomen combat vehicles are a different story.  Septiim provides the template for vehicle equipping, in the post-Glasian worlds of Cloudburst.  With Septiim’s love of vehicle upgrade kits and Forge World-quality guns, this means that Cognomen must produce a massive variety of vehicular weapons and do so to the highest standards it can.  This is wholly compatible with the Cult of the Machine, of course, but logistically, this takes a toll on Cognomen’s expanding infrastructure.
To get around this cost bottleneck, the Cognomen Council of Magi has established two satellite worlds of their own Forge World, with the intent of eventually making them Forge Satraps of Cognomen.  The first is the planet Foraldshold, originally discovered by the Rogue Trader Forald Drenweiss during the First Gold Rush.  The world was earmarked early for colonization by the Administratum, but the Mechanicus’ subsequent tests revealed significant geological instability in its two continents and deep seabeds, and recommended that the world be subjected to limited Terraforming before a colony be built.  The Administratum acceded to this.  Thousands of years later, the planet is tectonically stable and ready for inhabitation, and the Mechanicus has already erected a massive city of colonists and tech-Adepts, ready to begin turning the planet into a Forge Satrap.  The other is the Forge Moon of Solstice, in the Septiim system, which is already manufacturing advanced weapons for the Blue Daggers.  Solstice is more independent, but recognizes Cognomen’s undeniably higher placement in the Mechanicus hierarchy.
What few vehicles Cognomen does not build, it would very much like to.  The planet has, after two thousand years of careful negotiating – the Martians would say ‘wheedling’ – Cognomen has finally gained access to the -hammer and Bane- hull tanks, including the mighty Baneblade itself.  Although its components and cannons are somewhat larger than the glorious Martian master design thanks to Cognomen’s less advanced (and less numerous) forges, they are no less deadly for it.  Next, Cognomen seeks the rights to build the Storm- and Shadow- series tanks, and perhaps even the Leviathan and Capitol Imperialis.
The one non-standard vehicle template that Cognomen presently has the means to build is the Cognomen-pattern Siege Dreadnought.  This Astartes-exclusive Dreadnought chassis mounts the typical Siege Drill and integrated Heavy Flamer of the Martian template, with an Inferno Cannon mounted on the other arm.  The distinction is a coaxial heavy stubber on the Inferno weapon, as well as a Storm Bolter mounted underslung from the main chassis.  Coordinating all of these weapons can be intimidatingly difficult for a newly-interred Battle Brother, especially if the optional searchlight, Fragstorm package, and smoke discharger are equipped as well.  However, the sheer amount of room-clearing power the Cognomen Siege Dreadnought allows its occupant to employ at once is telling.  More than one bunker of heretics or aliens have thought themselves impervious to the Imperium’s hate, right up until it knocked a wall down and set them on fire.

As a Subsector Capital, Cognomen is granted an honor and a responsibility that few other Forge Worlds are.  Cognomen bears the burden of leadership for the Subsector, which contains five other inhabited systems and several systems only good for mining.  This requires that Cognomen take a role in the greater Imperium for which it was unprepared.  The establishment of a well-appointed Astropathic and Adminsistrative orbital platform over Cognomen allows for the staff of the Subsector Governor to work without having to visit the dying planet below.  Any desire the people of the platform may have to visit their host vanishes at the sight of billions of acres of dying grasslands on the world below as the planet succumbs to industrial overbuild.
The Subsector Governor coordinates the logistical and political needs of the Subsector from the platform, which possesses a suite of luxury apartments for himself and more spartan accommodations for his staff and less-liked family members.  The platform has only a few small point defense weapons, and is wholly reliant on the Cognomen fleet for protection.
The work of the Administratum here is made easier by the fact that the current Lord Fabricator, Beraxos, couldn’t give a damn about the rest of the Subsector, and has no desire to challenge the Administratum for leadership of the Subsector.  This, given that Cognomen could steamroll the whole Subsector if they chose, is a great relief.  If anything, this lack of concern for their neighbors is convenient for the Governor, who can simply foist responsibility for any unpopular decisions on his indifferent counterpart.  Should Beraxos ever complain too vocally, the Governor can simply inform Beraxos that he is fully aware of the little secrets of ABX202020, while the Sector Overlord is not.



System: Goldlight

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Thimble Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: 10, 1 habitable

Agri-World: Cassie’s World

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 73.5%, Oxygen 25%, Argon 1%, Water .4%, Carbon dioxide .04%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local High Prince

Planetary Governor: Yes

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

Climate: Cassie’s World is a split surface world, and experiences intermittent but powerful rainstorms all over the surface

Geography: 1.1 times the size of Terra, with one large continent and one large ocean, both full of high mountains

Gravity: 1.08 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Food, Gravel, Talc, Textiles, Gold, Gemstones, Manpower
Principle Imports: Agricultural Machines, Fertilizers, Convicts

Countries and Continents: One supercontinent, no nations to speak of

Military: Cassie’s Shield, Cassie’s Rangers (low quality PDF, high quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Periodic

Tithe Grade: Solutio Extremis

Population: 84,109,000 (human), 42,000,950 (servitors)

Description:
Long before the Cloudburst Sector existed, Rogue Traders and Explorators rushed eagerly after the trail of markers and buoys left by the great Justin MacDonald.  These brave sorts had not yet come to the agreement that Fabique would later enforce about the use of precision clocks to establish the legitimacy of world claims.  The Goldlight system, so named for its brilliant yellow star, popped up in one such claim by noted Rogue Trader Explorer Cassie Fordham.  Fordham, egomaniacal and greedy in the extreme, wanted wealth, power, and most of all prestige from the finding of new worlds.  Immediately after finding the planet she instantly named after herself, she flew into its low orbit and began scanning the surface with her Cruiser’s sensors, looking for any sign of life.  When she detected no aliens, she soared back to Fabique, ready to begin the negotiations over colony rights.  When she arrived, however, two Explorator fleets were already present.  She waited impatiently for her chance in the queue, and when it arrived, she presented the maps and data of the world she had found with great delight.To her confusion, the Explorator Prime she had shown these data findings to was surprised.  The Explorator Prime heaped praise and admiration on her, thanking her profusely for taking the time out of her busy schedule to work so hard for the Mechanicus.  Fordham demanded an explanation, and the Explorator Prime, to Fordham’s horror, explained that the two fleets that had come just before hers had already mapped the world she had just told him about, but had been in-system for so little time that they had been unable to gather detailed maps of the surface.  Fordham, the Explorator magnanimously said, was to be commended for helping the Mechanicus so.
Fordham flew into a towering rage, and threatened bitter violence against the startled Explorator Prime if he did not change discovery and colonization rights to her name at once!  The Explorator scuttled from the room and returned with a full bodyguard of Tech Guard, who subdued the Rogue Trader by threatening to impound her ship forever if she did not adopt a more respectful tone.
The House Fordham and the Adeptus Mechanicus nearly came to open war – or, more accurately, the Adeptus Mechanicus was nearly inconvenienced by having to divert a few months to exterminating the upstart Rogue Trader House – before cooler heads prevailed.  Under the watchful eye of the Administratum Departmento Astrocartigraphicae and the Mechanicus Basilikon Explorator, the system of installing the precision Fabique Mapping Clocks began, and all Fabique and Oldlight-Proximate Circuit Rogue Traders from there on out would be obligated to carry one.  Cassie Fordham was not mollified by this, and demanded to know what would become of her own claim.  The Astrocartigraphicae presented her with a choice: she could lay claim to the world as a discovery of her House and be granted the trade rights as usual, or she could name it after herself and respect the more accurate Mechanicus claim.  It is a testament to Fordham’s ego that she immediately agreed to the second.

Thousands of years later, Cassie’s World remembers their Rogue Trader mapper with a single small monument in their chief starport.  The planet’s booming trade economy was, for centuries, based solely about its production of grains, vegetables, fish, swimming mammals for meat and pets, and other life forms.  Only in M41.890 was it discovered that whole mountain chains in the world’s rocky single supercontinent are full to bursting with rare ores and precious gems.  A mining industry empoying over ten million human laborers and four times that many servitors now chip away at Cassie’s massive mountains, grinding hundreds of millions of Thrones’ worth of gems and gold from the rock.  Land Trains, based on ancient military designs, chug and rumble down elevated steel tracks to mountain base camps, where separating machines tumble rocks and gems free through huge filters.

The world’s capital, the city of Magno City, is a teeming hub of humanity, and far from what the average hiver or noble would consider ‘Agri-World.’  It is a true Imperial city, like any other, with massive administration and law enforcement offices, a large starport, Mechanicus and Ministorum shrines, a Defense Laser, multiple PDF bases, sprawling Gubernatorial Mansions, and intrigue in its courts of board nobles and spoiled scions.  Eight million humans and half a million servitors toil in its factories, bottling plants, refineries, and shipping yards.

The unusal geography of Cassie’s World plays a role in this centralization.  The planet is essentially split down the middle.  From pole to pole, the planet is half water and half land.  It is not a perfect split, and all signs point to it being natural, but the sight from the world’s orbit is stark in its contrast.  The world looks like a marble, half dark blue with spots of white and brown, half green with spots of white and brown.  The massive, deep ocean serves as a natural heatsink and reservoir for the colony there.  Fishing fleets scatter on the currents, harvesting kilotons of fish and mammals for sale or consumption.  Deep rivers feed more water into the deep ocean, and cut lines through the limestone mountains that dot the landmass.

Magno City takes shelter from the naturally-resulting hypercanes of a world-spanning ocean with ingenius technology and architecture.  It is the largest population center in the Sector, they boast (not accurately, but they disregard that), to have no underground tunnel networks at all.  Instead, each major block of buildings, no matter how large or old, brackets itself from its neighbors with wedges of trees.  These wedges of trees, bred by Magos Biologis priests and maintained with careful scrutiny by the Ecclesiarchy and Adminsitratum, have root systems over ten times their vertical height, and hold the soil in place beneath them as if it were stuck in a stasis field.  Furthermore, the rooftops of nearly all buildings curl upwards in bowl shapes, and their drains lead to purification tanks in the buildings’ basements, where the water is cleaned and added to the local firefighting system’s water reserves or the city reservoirs.  Floods still happen, of course, and are dealt with when they occur.

The mountain spikes and ranges that pierce the crust of the planet are a source of great wealth to the world, one it was not expecting.  It was a party of hikers, of all people, who found the resource deposits there.  The group were inspecting a hiking trail that had just been buried by an avalanche, when one of them noticed the distinct yellow sheen of some of the fallen rocks.  Testing in the city established that, yes, it was mercury-gold and not pyrite.
Within days, a gold rush of speculators and prospectors fled the cities and latifundae, catching the administrators off-guard.  The miners hurried up to the mountains, but met Arbites and local Enforcers.  The lawmen explained that the mountains were all property of the plantary rulership, the High Prince.
The Prince was roused from his carnal diversions long enough to give the Administratum permission to sell the mountains for exhorbitant prices.  However, the Administratum, after only a few weeks’ examination, revealed that the plots of land the miners craved were so heavily valued, there was no way for any individual or even collective of miners to buy them.
In swooped the Cloudburst Mercantile Houses.  The rich strike of valuables had attracted the attention of the great merchant and corporate clans, and they saw an opportunity.  They appealed to the miners directly, promising all sorts of well-paying jobs and benefits for those workers and prospectors who agreed to enter the employ of the Mercantile Houses.  Many did so, and now the banners of the Mercantile Houses of Cloudburst fly high beside Mechanicus Cogwheels and the High Prince Emblem in the mining camps and cities.

The great mining operations may be the moneymakers of the planet, but Cassie’s World is an Agri-World first and foremost.  The continent-spanning latifundae of the planet is nothing less than a single gargantuan farm.  Originally under the nominal control of the Mechanicus, who settled the world after resolving the debate with House Fordham, the world has long since traded hands.  The Mechanicus had no more use for the planet with the establishment of Foraldshold and ABX202020, and could get their food far cheaper there.  The Administratum, however, was in urgent need of more food to meet the needs of Thimble’s rapidly-repopulating hives.  A quick exchange was made, and the world transferred owners.
Presently, the giga-farm is a messy affair.  With so many skilled workers abandoning the latifundium for the mountains or the city, the work was going undone.  Great vineyards sagged under the weight of their berries and grapes.  Fisheries darkened with overpopulation.  Stalks sagged, heavy with corn and grain.  Importing convict labor and buying extra servitors helped, but convicts and machines are unenthusiastic workers at best.  The world is barely making its food quota, and the Administratum knows it.  The new High Prince, Loius Rembon, is somewhat less of a fool than his predecessor, but his obsession with off-world culture has distracted him from the needs of his world almost as much as his father’s inexhaustible taste in luxury snacks.


Cassie’s Rangers
The PDF of the world tithes ten percent of its manpower up to the Imperial Guard every decade, and invariably sends volunteer elite.  The best of the planet and well-motivated, Cassie’s Rangers are jaunty in appearance, greedy in desire, and solitary in nature.  The Rangers emply the full range of standard Guard vehicles, and do not refuse to work with Sanctionites as some regiments do.  However, though they are capable of conventional warfare and tank battles, their preferred order of battle is as small-infantry specialists.  Their long-lases and hotshots are ideal for sniper battles.  Occasionally, the Rangers also employ Hellhounds and other flamer and melta units, for flushing out buildings or stopping armored reprisal forces.  The Rangers are allowed to design their own camouflage on a company basis as long as it does not exceed their supply budget, so veteran regiments often appear in a dazzling array of colors and shapes.  Rangers follow the Septiim template for Guard distribution and rank, like most Cloudburst regiments, but place a stronger emphasis on outdoor and nighttime movement.  Their regiments train vigorously in moving silently, whether by muffling and dampening their vehicles, or by crossing ground with their special rubber-vinyl hybrid sole boots.
Ranger-attached Commissars must quickly adapt to the avarice of their outfits.  Rangers fight when the Emperor demands it, of course, but there isn’t a Ranger alive who wouldn’t prefer to accompany Rogue Traders or Crusaders, looking for new worlds to annex.  Rangers promised Resettlement Rights or the chance to become nobles and officers in a new PDF fight like they’re possessed.  Smart political officers can more easily motivate an underperforming company with promises of extra rum rations or first pick of berths on a troopship than with headshots or the lash.
The relatively loose grasp of the Ecclesiarchy on the world (compared to the Merchant Houses or the lingering influence of the Mechanicus) means that fresh Ranger Regiments rarely have more Confessors and War Clerics than absolutely needed; indeed finding enough can be a challenge.  Of all the worlds in the Sector, Cassie’s is the one hardest hit by the low psyker birthrate of the region.  Since Sanctionites are assigned by Terra and not local Imperial Commanders, this is not a crippling problem, but it does mean that all psykers assigned to Ranger regiments are from other worlds, and getting along with them is a trick for greenhorn recruits.

One point in which the Rangers take great pride is that they are the preferred non-Septiim regiments for Inquisitorial and Space Marine Crusade forces.  The tough, self-reliant, all-volunteer, well-supplied Rangers can be left alone without getting themselves killed, in one Inquisitor’s immortal words, and their pragmatic worldview and predictable motivations make them good allies for Space Marine expeditions into the darkness.  Of course, their relative lack of priests and psykers limits their helpfulness during full-scale daemon wars, but mortal armies are rarely of much help in such situations anyway.

The Rangers do not use any unique equipment, but they do specliaize.  Hotshot weapons, Hell-weapons, and long-lases are very popular in Ranger outfits, as are Thimble-made ghillie suits, and Cognomen underbarrel grenade launchers.  The combination of extreme range and accuracy of advanced lasers and squad-level force multiplier effects of underbarrel grenade launchers allows Ranger units with a bit of prep time and good situational awareness to damage enemy formations all out of proportion to their numbers.  This is the other reason they make good companion forces for Space Marines: they need not close to the same range as the Marines do to engage in battle, and thus are less likely to get in the way.


System: Soak

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Oglith Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Watanta Sjoman

Planets: 4, 1 habitable, 1 terraformable moon

Ocean World: Obelisk 2

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78.2%, Oxygen 20.5%, Argon 1%, Water 1.5%, Carbon dioxide .06%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: System Overlord (Adeptus Terra)

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Frequent superstorms, lightnight squalls

Geography: .92 times the size of Terra, with one superocean, broken by small volcanic islands

Gravity: .9 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Water, Food, Cobalt, Medicines
Principle Imports: Textiles, Ammunition

Countries and Continents: None

Military: Obelisk Sea Dragons (low quality Guard), Obelisk Waterguard (medium quality PDF)

Contact with Other Worlds: Periodic

Tithe Grade: Solutio Extremis

Population: 65,030,000

Description:

Obelisk is a world in constant turmoil.  Mostly, this is limited to the gargantuan storms that wrack its tortured surface, but at the present time, it could just as easily apply to the political morass that has now swallowed four cities and threatens Obelisk’s precious fisheries.

Settled in the second wave of colonizations that swept through the region, the planet takes its name from something about which its citizens know nothing.  Far below the buoyant cities of the planet, far below its sub-aquatic Guard training zones, far beneath its leviathan-hunting submarines, cities lie dead on the seafloor.  Ordo Xenos investigators estimate that the cities are at least four hundred thousand years old, and are made of materials not native to Obelisk.  Or, at least, if they are native, they have all been used up.
The cities notably are not sealed.  This means one of two things to the Ordo Xenos.  Either the inhabitants were water-breathers – unlikely, given how badly the items in the cities have weathered the passage of time – or they were once on the surface.  As to their cause of their abandonment, the Ordo suspects war.  Several buildings are pocked by craters, some with energy burns; nearly a third yield a chemical residue that looks suspiciously like white phosphorous.  With no exact estimate as to the aliens’ size, it is impossible to guess how many beings could once have lived in the ruins, but the most common Inquisitorial estimate falls around one billion.

The regions that lack ruins are open for business.  Cities float over them.  Reassuringly made of Mechanicus-pressed metals and rubber, polymers and plasteel, these bobbing homes on the waves drift hither and yon, harvesting fish.  Life is hard in the cities, with little industry or art to distract the people from their toil and drudgery.  The great noble yacht races and occasional gang war are the only major diversions the Obeliskans have.

Food is a scarcity on Obelisk.  The fish of the planet aren’t inedible, but they are few in number relative to the enormous size of the planet.  The word ‘overcolonization’ has come up once or twice in discussions among the politicians and Administratum Adepts in the Governor’s Megayacht.  The reason for the small fish population was eventually discovered, however, and had nothing to do with humanity.  The first sensor returns from the city that spotted the cause were dismissed as malfunction, as were the next several.  It was only after maintenance crews, sent down to repair buoys, either found nothing wrong or never came back that the truth was accepted: the planet has at least fifty colossal beasts, probably far more, well over fifteen kilometers in length, swimming around.  They appear to eat by spreading vast net-like appendages from their horrible mouths, snagging any organic object, including plastic, and forcing it into their guts.  Overeager hunters and commercial enterprises sometimes send submarines down to find the beasts, and even succeed on occasion, but any indication that these tiny vessels can destroy the monsters should be taken with a grain of salt.

What little sport and entertainment there is to find on Obelisk 2 stems from the suface, regardless.  Yacht races, with ships crewed by hand-picked local officers and sponsored by bored nobles, occur between cities that grow close enough.  These races are no-holds-barred, and often end in bloody spectacle.  Laser and gunpowder weapons are expressly forbidden, but pneumatic and hydraulic harpoon launchers are not, and yachts crewed by victory-starved sailors will often fire great anchors on magnetic clamps to enemy vessels.  Boarding actions were permitted before some people took the idea to its logical extreme.  New rules forbidding the use of flares to falsify distress signals are under consideration, as is the use of plasma guns.

Beyond the races, parasailing and surfing are also fairly popular, though climatological concerns limit these activities to the planet’s few islands.  These islands are reserved for the exclusive use of the Adeptus Terra, to the annoyance of the planet’s native polulation.  The islands glow with chapels, laning pads, weather stations, and military bases, so brightly that they shine over the horizons.  Few are large enough to house true cities, but partially submerged Arbites Precinct-Harbors with fleets of fast attack submarines and riot control craft nicknamed The Boatorcycles lurk near some popular anchorages.

The largest islands house starports for the world’s little commerce.  Terra is due her goods from Obelisk as much as from any other world.  What the world does export flies up to tithe barges in orbit from elevated VTOL squares and ski-jump-style liftoff ramps on these islands, under the watchful gunsights of Obelisk Waterguards, the local PDF.

Politically, the entire system falls under the control of the ancient noble family Sjoman.  Its current patriarch is a patron of the Ministorum in good standing, but knows that Obelisk’s time of relative stability and peace is coming to an end.  Between the fact that the world effectively can’t defend itself from a Glasian Migration, the exploding gang wars, and that the world’s fish supply can’t sustain both so many humans and the leviathans of the deep, Obelisk may soon have to evolve or die.  He has entered into secret talks with the Rogue Trader Dynastic House of Rondlee and the Merchant House Herrera to begin terraforming the moon of Soak 4, which he knows to be easily Terraformable, into a proper colony candidate, just so that the population of Obelisk 2 has somewhere to go if the worst should come to pass.  The Traders, he suspects, are stringing him along, given that what little about them he has gleaned sugeests that they can’t afford a terraformation on that scale.  The price they may demand for beseeching the Mechanicus on his behalf could be anything, if they even work together at all.

The largest industry between cities, however, is in shipping and packaging cobalt.  Several sub-surface mounts and atoll chains boast enormous cobalt deposits.  Freighters carrying self-contained extraction and purification machines, crewed by volunteers from the hydrocities, sail between the islands after the frequent hypercanes wash the sand away from these spots.  Mining and harvesting teams scurry down on levitating buoys and boats, pick up as much material as they can, and retreat before the storms return, selling their wares to the larger cities.  The larger cities, with the infrastructure to process the purified ore, then make the cobalt into ingots and powders, and give them over to the Administratum for Terra’s Tithe.

Obelisk 2 has one other major problem besides crippling ennui: gangs.  The floating cities can house up to seven hundred thousand residents, which is more than enough for tribalist war.  Facepainted thugs jump travelers and tourists in back alleys; fishermen report their vehicles stolen and taken for joyrides, drug busts are up four hundred percent in two years, and joygirls and joyboys totter into Enforcer precincts to report being attacked because their pimps didn’t pay protection on time.  The cities are falling into gang conflicts so quickly that the Enforcers are beginning to suspect the hidden hand of a cult at work.  They are correct.
The Circle of Whispers is a pretentious name for a pretentious group.  The Circle was oringinally nothing more than an occult interest group, but as is so often the case in the decaying Imperium, casual interest in mysteries led to a more consuming need.  In exchange for carefully doled out articles of xenotech and offworld goods, the Circle has paid over a third of the gangs of the world into serving them, usually to do nothing more than vent their anger at their horrible living conditions in more organized ways.  Other gangs have been tapped to directly attack local governmental institutions, though even the most corrupt Circle members strongly recommend avoiding actual Imperial facilities.  Picking a fight wth local police is one thing, but a protracted battle with Arbites or the Priesthood can only end in fire and terror.
Above the few thousand rank and file members of the Circle, however, a darker force reigns.  The original, founding members of the Circle are all, unbeknownst to their lieutenants, committed Techno-recidivists.  The abundance of alien relics on the seabed is of immense interest to them and they loot them freely, but that pales in scope compared to the secret the Arbites and Techpriesthood hides on the surface.  One of the islands near the main starport of the world, they believe, holds a stasis-fielded underground bunker, in which the residents of the world prior to its abandonment and flooding took shelter.  The Techno-recidivists believe that this bunker contains incalculable billions of Thrones’ worth of xenotech, including the fabled Hydrocopaeia, a machine they believe can turn any form of water molecule into any other.  This would include the forms that cannot, strictly speaking, exist in our universe, and would be worth any price they could ask of the Dark Mechanicus or even unscrupulous Martians.
The truth, which even they do not know, is that the bunker is very real, but contains nothing of the sort.  The bunker is the final resting place of a race of strange robotic beings that nearly overran the islands several centuries before.  The anarchy of the first Glasian Migration prevented the robots from grabbing more attention than they did, but the Mechanicus is sure that more are out there on Obelisk somewhere.
The robotic things, the Mechanicus archaeoforensic team asserts, are not the original inhabitants of the world, as ascertained by their completely different arrangement of limbs than the beings that built the seabed cities.  Instead, they appear to have arrived thousands of years later, from parts unknown.  That would make Mankind the third inhabitants of Obelisk 2, at the least.
The Inquisition is aware of both the Mechanicus’ findings and the existence of the Circle of Whispers, though they are under the false impression that the Circle is unaware of the bunker.  For now, the Inquisition is unwilling to assault the Circle in open war, since retribution from their cats-paws gangs would almost surely destroy whole cities of the foundering colony.  The Inquisition is instead biding its time, recruiting their own ganger stooges as muscle, and waiting to see what happens next.

Obelisk Sea Dragons
The fierce and difficult life of the Sea Dragons is a testament to the people of Obelisk.  This is not a compliment, most would admit.  The Sea Dragons need fully twice the disciplinarians and Commissars of most regiments of equivalent size.  The constant inter-city rivalries and gang tribal identity fights the conscripts of the Dragons display requires so much oversight that some regiments have been forced to practicethe ultimate disobedience sanction: Manualis Decimatio.  This is the practice of picking a squad member by lottery, and forcing the squad leader at gunpoint to beat the chosen soldier to death by hand.  Refusal leads to instant death for one full fireteam from each squad in the platoon that contained the objector.  It is the most vicious form of punishment the Imperial Guard can legally inflict on a non-Penal Legion force, the most disgusting to watch, and their Commissars grimly assert in the case of the Sea Dragons, necessary.
When Sea Dragon regiments can be whipped into line, however, they excel in exactly one way: boarding actions.  Their custom speed boats, boarding craft, three-person jetskiis, liberal use of Voss-Pattern Mako-class stealth submarines, and even parasail-launched boarding gliders allow them to take a ship at lightning speed, often before the crew even realizes what’s happening.  Captain RIchtein of the Blue Daggers’ First Company Veterans was once heard to note, while watching a Sea Dragon company board a ramshackle Ork Karrier, that Sea Dragons were the most efficient shipboarding force he had ever seen.
Preferring the use of serrated short swords for cutting through nets and lines, carbines for their compact size, and suppressed shotguns for cabin-clearing, Sea Dragons are a brutal force in close combat.  Lacking (understandably) in artillery and tanks, they are among the most specialized military forces in the entire Sector, and are among the few that the Cloudburst Munitorum does not earmark for general deployment even in the strapped times of the Age of Ending.  The Sea Dragons are at best mediocre in general infantry duties, but can make passable Rough Riders on snowmobiles and other simple mechanical mounts; they are not so terribly different from the ubiquitous wartercraft of their homeworld.


System: Spindle

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Capital Thimble Subsector

System Overlord: Harek abn Alnasr, Clan Ahad, Lord Subsector Thimble

Planets: Two, one inhabited

Hive World: Thimble

Satellites: Two moons, Iocanto and Malvaceae, both inhabited

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 76%, Oxygen 19%, Argon 1%, Water 1%, Carbon Dioxide 1%, Ozone 2%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra Council

Planetary Governor: Yes

Adept Presence: Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astartes, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Administratum

Climate: Hot, windy, very little free water

Geography: Wide, barren blocks of land, separated by dry riverbeds, roughly 2.4 times the size of Terra, three continents, little tectonic activity

Gravity: 0.97 Terran Gravity (with evidence of higher gravity prior to Terraforming)

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Textiles, Shoes, Finished Clothing, Manpower, Industrial Goods
Principle Imports: All raw resources possible, Food, Raw Materials, Fertilizers, Water

Countries and Continents: No national divisions or continental definition

Military: Thimblan Argent Shields (medium quality PDF), Thimblan Argent Swords (medium quality Guard), Thimble Night Slaughter (special circumstances)

Contact with Other Worlds: As the only Hive World in Cloudburst, Thimble is in constant contact with other worlds by mundane and psychic means

Tithe Grade: Exactis Prima

Population: 28,000,000,000 (human), 12,000,000,000 (servitor)

Description:
Resembling nothing more than its namesake, Thimble is one of the two great industrial centers of the Cloudburst Sector, the other being Cognomen.  Thimble is a Subsector Capital, System Capital, a military staging area, a fleet anchorage, and the biggest resource sink outside the Forge Worlds for a hundred light years in every direction.  Known throughout the Segmentum Ultima as the final word in fashion, in quality of clothing manufacture, and in perfectionist zeal, Thimble is an odd world, and utterly critical to the Imperium in Cloudburst.

Thimble was once called Levitna, a world of the ancient Terran federated government.  Remarkably little of its ancient past is still categorized, even by the Administratum, but it is known that it was one of the worlds of the Long March Colony Fleet’s destinations.  Why Levitna and not Septiim, Celeste, or Goldlight, all far more comfortable worlds, the Administratum does not know.  Levitna was first colonized in M16, making it one of the first few worlds colonized such a distance from Sol.  In those days, neither humanity nor the Eldar had yet reached their peak, and occasional alien attacks were neither uncommon nor inconsequential.  At some point after that, a great defensive structure, long since decayed, rose on the moon named Iocanto.  The remains of this structure are still visible with binoculars from Thimble’s orbit, and the Imperial attempts to rebuild it have barely touched the surface.  A Salamander assigned to a Deathwatch Kill-team, here to dispatch a Ymgarl Genestealer pack some decades before the Glasian Migration invasions, noted its eerie similarity to the ancient Prometheus Station in orbit over Nocturne, only apparently larger.

Thimble itself weathered the changing of the times well, but the rise of the Iron Men hit Levitna hard.  With its labor force in uprising and its population in panic, the Terran Administrator unleashed horrible weapons of mass annihilation on the lower levels, destroying the renegade Iron Men but instantly crippling the massive plasma-thermic reactors at the hearts of the Hive World’s infrastructure.  The subsequent abandonment of the Edar and the madness of the Psychic Awakening did Levitna no favors.  Its population fell from over forty billion human souls to under four hundred million in only fifty years, a die-off that even Mars had never experienced when its Terraformer Engines failed during the Age of Strife.
The Inquisition has strived in vain to establish precisely how the damage to the world was done, and so quickly.  The best the investigators can come up with is that somehow, a Warp Entity, perhaps not even a true daemon, managed to worm itself into the massive power grids that kept life on the dying world stable.  When the Administrators tried in urgency to restart them after the rise of the Iron Men, the Warp being spread some terrible contagion around the world, instantly striking much of the world low.  Such simultaneous and massive death would have opened a Warp portal in the latter-day Imperium, when the Warp was stronger and the ancient Eldar defenes against such things were in place, but at the time, it did not.  The event, the Imperium surmises, was still more than enough to utterly ruin the world’s habitability.  The planet’s population fell to barbarism and poverty.  Interestingly, there are hints in the world’s remaining population that approximately four thousand years before the world was recontacted by the Imperium, the world underwent some internal renewals.  There are two distinct layers of ruins in some hives, one newer and lower-tech.  As best the Inquisition can surmise, the world enjoyed a brief respite from oblivion thanks to a charismatic leader who rose from the ashes to try to restore the plasma power cores, but after failing, was torn down by his own people.

By the time the Imperium had made contact with the world, thanks to legendary Explorator Justin MacDonald, Levitna was a graveyard.  The hives were still more or less intact, thanks to massive jerry-rigging, but the biosphere was wrecked, the moon base was nothing but scrap and dust, and the world population had dropped to twenty million at most.  MacDonald observed that the world looked like a thimble from orbit, with its divot-covered hive towers looming high through the atmosphere.  The name stuck, and when the population joined the Imperium in desperate hope for a future, the name changing on them was the last thing they worried about.

As Cloudburst grew, so did Thimble.  Vast forces of Mechanicus workers labored day and night to bring the plasma-thermic reactors back online.  They were structurally similar to the ones that powered some of the ancient Terran hives, but the power infrastructure had decayed so much that some had to be replaced entirely before reactivation could be safely attempted.  When it was, all of the hives managed to turn on, one by one, and Thimble lived.

Two thousand years have passed, and life in the great silvered hives is very different.  At one point, merely finding water was next to impossible.  Now, the amount of water in the hives is just barely enough for the needs of all the planet’s residents.  The food influx is a problem, however, given the loss of Chlorit.  Though the hives have largely managed to avoid food riots so far, with only a few hundred deaths to show for it, the creeping approach of famine may not be avoidable much longer.

After the reacquisition of Thimble for the Imperium, the restoration kicked into full speed.  Two hives were so badly damaged that their residents had to relocate to another hive while repairs progressed.  The Mechanicus was eventually able to bring the hives’ outer shells to impermeability once more, but internally, there is no denying that some hives were more badly damaged than others were.  Even after thousands of years, the hives that were more badly damaged prior to Imperial reannexation are noticeably more likely to have significant poverty and water cleanliness issues.

The Ecclesiarchy was the loudest proponent of repopulating the hives rather than tearing them down after the Mechanicus.  In their minds, a world that could house so many billions more people was ideal for the purposes of the Emperor.  Adding so many faithful followers to the Ecclesiarchy, of course, was a worthy goal in its own right.

Inside individual hives, unique cultures have adapted.  As the hives repopulated and reindustrialized, the populace enjoyed a brief period of dizzyling fast standards of living improvement.  This naturally led to disorder as the subsequent industrial demands and tithe payment quotas set in.  In the interim, the Imperium had elected not to import noble families from other worlds, but to let the natural winners of the race to make themselves more useful to the Imperium become the world’s new Highborn.  This was perhaps not the ideal solution, as the vicious competition for the most comfortable residences on the crowns of the vast hives drew blood almost at once.  The lower hive levels quickly turned to lawlessness as the Mechanicus activated factories and machines that had long since been converted to residence space, displacing even some of those who had stayed free of the conflict in the crowns.

After a hundred years of increasingly pointed demands from the Administratum and Mechanicus, the Imperium had had enough of waiting.  Dispatching a force of Stormtroopers from Hapster and over two hundred thousand Ecclesiarchial Missionaries and Priests to restore order and faith.  After ten years of simmering hostility, the Emperor’s word slowly calmed raging tempers.  The Administratum did their part by organizing huge showings of pre-Imperial recordings of Thimble life, with the scav tribes and cannibal gangs rampaging through what were now thoroughfares and factories, just as an unsubtle reminder of the improvements the Thimblans were enjoying, and who was responsible for them.

After order slowly returned, the families that had managed to be the most publicly loyal to the Imperium during the anarchy were given residence in the crown palaces of the hives, and the rest of the population put to work.  Though the populace largely decried the rewarding of such flagrant brownhounding, the result was a world that eventually fell in line with Terra and Cloudburst, and that was all right in the Administratum’s mind.

The population of the world exploded over the next few thousand years.  Families were given no initial birth limits, and food was abundant in the early years, as the supplies from a dozen Agri-worlds put a chicken in every pot.  The factories churned to life again as billions of kilotons of raw materials and processed ingots arrived for use.  Above all, though, the future of Thimble was decided by the reactivation of a single, colossal factory in the croft of Amethyst Hive, the largest hive to survive the Old Night relatively intact.
Amethyst, so named for the color of the dirt around it, was unambiguously the manufacturing hub of what had once been Levitna’s northern continent.  The hive had a higher percentage of factory-to-residences than any other.  Its extensive surface solar panels, more than any other hive by a factor of four, showed clear signs of maintenance and frantic upgrading, dating to after the loss of the main power grid.  Moreover, the hive crown palace was completely gone, literally flattened at the foundation level into the hive structure itself.  That told Imperial archaeologists that the inhabitants had tried to seal themselves off from the collapse of the industrial levels and been thrown down for it, or something of equivalent weight in social war.
The Imperium put a high emphasis on bringing Amethyst back online.  Its distinctive green and grey solar panels and oversized hybrid plasmic core thrummed with power again before long.  The factories themselves, the Imperium noted with interest, apparently devoted the high majority of their output to clothing of every sort.  Amethyst, the Administratum decreed, would serve just that function for the rest of the planet.

Years later, as Amethyst came back online, the world began receiving gigatons of every fabric, dye, textile, flexible polymer, and lesther imaginable.  Factories churned out billions of articles of clothing of every sort, from the most mundane to the complex nanoweave lattice armor that Cloudburst Inquisitors now buy here exclusively.  Mechanicus discoveries of clothing fabrication technology from other worlds STCs and factories filtered down to Thimble through the army of enginseers and tech-Adepts that maintained the great foundries.
There were, of course, many Thimblans who resented the fact that their world had been pidgeonholed as the haberdashery of the stars.  The fact that the planet also produced trillions of Thrones’ worth of other goods was rarely reflected in the planet’s reputation, after all.  The clothing factories got all the credit for the world’s economic renaissance, and the other ones get none, they grumble.  This is a fair assessment, given that Thimble also manufactures extraordinarily cheap aircars and the best vinyl paint in the Segmentum Ultima that isn’t from a Forge World.

Outside the hives, Thimble is a barren orb of brown and grey.  Thimble is a Hive World in the vein of Armageddon, in that the world beyond the hive walls is survivable, but bitterly unpleasant.  Some Mechanicus eco-stabilization efforts have made the polar regions at least comfortable, but the equatorial and tropical regions are wastelands of abandoned cities, collapsed waterways, and dead earth.  The polar regions are above freezing temperatures year-round, but benefit from occasional snowstorms and deep resevoirs of fresh water.  This allows some small agricultural work to occur here, using artificially bred pollination organisms and creeping fruit vines that grow on any surface.  The equatorial area is the most interesting to Imperial historians, who note the abundance of Ork shipwrecks there.  The complete lack of any Ork spores in the system suggests that the Ork ships were killed in orbit, presumably by energy weapons given the lack of impact marks on the Ork wrecks.  Mechanicus teams in heat-resistant armor have retrieved megatons of Ork scrap there and fed it into the foundries of Thimble’s hives.  Now that they have moved on, scavengers pick over the oxidized remains, looking for their fortune among the garbage.

In orbit, Thimble sports the array of traffic buoys and other platforms that any Imperial Hive enjoys.  A complex web of over one hundred thousand satellites and stations dances along their orbits, shepherded into the right slots by their control platform.  The massive Thimble Orbital Command and Logistics Station is a monster of the void, with over fifteen kilomters of radomes, antennae, hab blocks, defense guns, cogitator banks under two hundred meter armor walls, Mechanicus shrines, and docking bays.  It more strongly resembles an Astra Militarum space station in its layout, and indeed the Imperial Navy and Guard both have local command offices here, for the coordination of the vast manpower tithes the world periodically gives up.  The lumpen, irregular, hastily-designed platform grows in fits and starts as the Navy or Mechanicus find themselves needing new offices built, storage spaces erected, or budgetary surplus quickly spent.

While this has resulted in a void station that is uglier than sin and a budget crime to maintain, it has also resulted in the perfect administrative hub for the Thimble Subsector.  Once it became clear to the Departmento Astrocartigraphicae that Levitna could be rebuilt as Thimble with no long-term loss of economic power for the Sector, there was no real question as to whether it would serve as the Subsector Capital.  Whine as other world’s Administrators may, the disproportionate power of Thimble in the Cloudburst Sector ensures that it will reign over the Subsector, come what may.

The buildup of Agri-worlds in the Sector goes a long way towards feeding the hungry people of Thimble.  Although it benefits to some extent from the limited agriculture of its own world, Thimble is a toxin zone on too much of its surface to feed itself, like most Hive Worlds.  With Forender diverting its own product to Cognomen, Thimble instead draws its nutrients from the Goldlight and Oromet systems, with some extra provisions from Gorum’s Folly.

Deep in the base levels of each hive, often extending hundreds of meters down into the crust of the planet, the industries of Thimble churn.  Great elevators and pressure lifts allow for the workers who don’t just live in their factories to commute to their plants, while limited living spaces inside the factories ring around the clock with the hum of great presses and magno-looms.  The Machine God has blessed the workers lucky enough to live in these apartments, the Mechanicus insists.  The factories play host to spools of fabric miles long, extruded from polymer presses and textile cutters.  Vats of dye and reeking, noxious cure whiz by on overhead conveyors.  In sound-proofed galleries, technicians inspect each bolt of cloth and curl of leather for flaws and defects.
Company stores in each hive allow employees to buy their own uniforms if they wish, often customized at the employee’s discretion.  The rates are high, given how abundant the materials are, but some workers take pride in wearing their work, or so the human resources administrators insist.
Beside the great clothing factories, other industries make do with what space they have.  Metal forges and grav-lift fabricators slap and clamp together the famous Thimble Sparrow aircars, while munitions presses the size of an Astartes Cruiser churn out ammunition by the kiloton.  Protein recyclers and water purity engines work constantly to provide as much as they can for Thimble, as its growing population is taxing nearby Agri-worlds ever harder.  Meanwhile, the very most subterranean cores of each hive glow blue-green with plasma energy, as the hybrid plasma-thermic power plants suck heat from the world and plasma from their gantries, and generate electricity for the self-contained worlds above.  Amethyst Hive enjoys somewhat more comfortable homes and better-built factories than the other hives, and more energy too, but it is also held to a standard of production the others are not.
In Amethyst, vast factories of Dark Age manufacture and Mechanicus maintenance produce the products for which Thimble is justly famous.  Here is the great Flaxweave Foundry, the most prestigious clothing factory in the Sector and beyond for many hundreds of light years.  Each floor is individually sealed from the others with machines of Old Terran brilliance.  This ensures that a mold spore outbreak on one floor – always a problem in hive factories – will not destroy the stocks of textile on adjacent ones.  It also prevents illnesses carried by workers on one floor from spreading to the next, so that the whole factory need not close down in the case of a viral epidemic.  Steam and radiation sterilizers purge undesirable life-forms from the raw material, while armies of hundreds of technicians maintain the vast microseparator that ensures a total lack of contaminant materials in each batch of product.
Each floor specializes in the production of one specific form of clothing.  The lower floors produce various undergarments and bandages, often with the same materials.  Waves of flowing fabric material whip back and forth between eight-storey spindles and megalooms.  The workers of the factory, always quick to find some levity in their drudgerous work, have named the huge nylon-sorters the Superloominal Planes, which the Administratum Overseers find annoying and the tech-Adepts find hilarious.
One floor up, the elastic corers and polyester spinners churn out billions of socks, from those worn by farmers in waist-deep mud to those a dilettante might don in the hopes of looking well-heeled.  Beside them, artisans develop the real deal.  This is footwear so expensive that even some actual Highborn would look at the price tag twice to make sure they read it correctly, then see Flaxweave’s name on it and buy it just for that.  Silk and nylon pressers and combs the size of firetrucks spin together athletic wear that only a planetary champion scrumball team could afford.
Above them comes the real moneymaker.  The next several floors consist exclusively of tunic, pantaloons, and belt manufacturing.  The foundries here, including the Flaxweave ones, make nigh-indestructible torso- and waist-wear, including the ever-popular Celestial Duelling Ascots and the tabards that the Librarians of the Blue Daggers wear into battle.  The fact that Flaxweave has the exclusive liscence to manufacture the clothing the Daggers can’t or won’t make for themselves is a point of pride for the owners of the clothing combine, and they check every single article of clothing for a single thread out of place.  Ballroom outfits have their own sub-floor.  The Flaxweave Design Council briefly pondered hiring their own Astropath to communicate the latest fashion trends from the noble ballrooms of Celeste directly to them, but a few chilling warnings from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica put a stop to such musings.  That, and the staggering cost of hiring a psyker in Cloudburst in the first place.
Above those floors comes the glove and belt section, where specialized handwear and belts drop from mile-long conveyors into velvet pouches at the ends.  Scurrying menials carry the bags to quality assurance technicians, waiting in sealed compartments with loupes and magnifiers.  Each glove and belt is carefully examined for flaw, assuming the order was placed specially by a customer, and isn’t part of the bulk orders of gloves that Thimble sells by the tens of billions, often to their own citizens.
This is the only place beside the Blue Dagger tabard section that manufactures dedicated, purpose-ordered military gear.  Most military clothing comes from dedicated assembly lines in sealed parts of the hives, not just Amethyst, but gloves are cheap enough and often enough replaced that every hive that makes clothing makes them, and even Flaxweave is no exception.  Fingerless sniper gloves, fire-proofed Flamer-carrier gloves, water-tight sub-oceanic bomb disposal gloves for the Sea Dragons, and even the single-use vinyl gloves used by Guard surgeons and cooks: Thimble makes them all.  Some clothing combines specialize, making one kind to the cost of the others, but if it exists and you can wear it on your hands, somebody on Thimble will make it for you.
Headgear and shoes are not part of the general combine productions.  These require both more specialized tools and are not made in such profusion, and so while most combines at least have a controlling share in a hatter or cordwainer of some kind, their productions are rarely integrated into the main factories.  The different materials usually used in such production also play into this; to save storage space, they are located on-site where the hats and shoes are made.  Thimble provides the helmets for nearly all of the Guard forces and Navy forces in the Sector, save the ones with integrated electronics, which come from Cognomen.  The Daggers make their own, as do most Inquisitors, but even the Celstial Guard itself buy their general infantry helmets from Thimble.  Thimble’s many cordwainers do a roaring trade in making every kind of shoe, from the supported ones for Ministorum Preachers who have to stand and gesticulate for hours at a time, to the silent ones for PDF Killteams, sneaking after mutants in undercities.  Of all the items of clothing made on Thimble, it is shoes that it sells to its own citizens in the greatest volume, coincidentally.

Of course, Thimble makes things besides clothing, its many other business owners would loudly protest.  Indeed, Thimble makes the famous Sparrow Aircar, the cheapest non-Forge World model in the Segmentum.  Though perhaps not the most reliable machine in the universe, this electric-fuelled hybrid aircar can soar up to seventy meters over a solid surface and fifteen over a liquid, and even comes with various environmental-proofing technologies to allow its owners to fly them through low pressure zones or forest fires.  It is a common sight for travelers visiting Thimble to see a halo of aircars orbiting the silver peaks of its artificial hive mountains as local well-to-do flaunt their wealth.  For even wealthier customers, the Thimble Pterodactyl is the luxury limousine of choice, or the Moonshot for the people so rich that the only thing left to buy is a flying house.  Any larger, and the line between an aircar and a luxury airplane becomes somewhat blurred.

Thimble’s immense manufacturing base and extensive, positive trade relations with nearby wealthy worlds means one thing for its military: logistical boons.  The Thimblan Argent Shields enjoy uniforms demonstrably better than those of poorer Sectors’ Inquisitorial Stormtroopers, with only their helmets made off-world.  The Argent Swords, their Guard equivalent, have combat fatigues only a Mordian wouldn’t mistake for dress wear.  As the Inquisitorial presence on the planet has carefully – at times lethally – ensured that the ruling caste’s obsession with the finest clothes does not fester into a Slaneeshi attitude or corruption, this foppery is permitted, albeit with some bewilderment by green Throne Agents.  Who could ever possibly care this much about clothes, they wonder.

Thimble also contains many thousands of smaller shops and businesses that are perfectly willing to make special orders.  Inquisitors sometimes send people to shop here for them, or even do it themselves.  Thimble’s many fabric works allow small traders here to make ropes, backpacks, assault webbing, and other plasticine fabric items here at tiny costs to themselves, allowing them to sell gear that would cost twice as much on Celeste or Septiim Secundus.
Thus, the discerning Rogue Traders, Inquisitorial Agents, and Imperial Flag Officer shops Thimble first and Cognomen second.  Some shops sell goods to Rogue Trader dynasties for so long that they are eventually bought out by the Rogue Traders and told to change no part of their business, so successful do these relationships become.  Custom dueling suits, exploration gear, camouflage for exotic locales, even vehicle upholstery: if it’s flexible and you touch it, you can buy it from the specialist shops of Thimble’s upper marketplaces.

Of course, not all of the buildings in the hives are dedicated to industry and fashion, not even in Amethyst.  The middle and upper levels of the hives are stuffed full of domiciles.  Every hive has hab blocks, individual apartments and mansions, and poorhouses under Ministorum control.  Shrines to the God-Emperor of Man perch like birds on the outsides of massive factory blocks, accessible only by aircar or elevator.  In other places, where the original designs of the hives peek through, more orderly mass transit systems and sound-proofed apartments provide choice places to live for the discerning middle manager.
Above them, the great Thimble Docks stick like birdfeeders above the thin clouds of the planet.  These tall structure split away from the stalks of their hives and allow for exterior access, though of course many of the outer structures in most hives have at least some air vents or a patio under a bubble.  These are no picturesque vistas, though: these are vaulting, massive spaces of travel and trade.  The Thimble Docks have support beams below that travel all the way to the punctured bedrock below, and some even have starship-grade intertial dampers and artificial gravity plates for stability.  Here, mile-long VTOL pads let whole flotillas of shuttles and cargo barges to deposit their goods from orbit, or send up fresh product to space.  The great mag-lev trains that connect the hives stick their tracks outside the hive’s outer surfaces here, race down the sides, and pull up to skim over the ground below in armored tubes.  Each hive, regardless of how hard the Mechanicus had to work to make it habitable again, enjoys a core of scrumball field-sized elevators near their Dock, if they have one, to move people and cargo to whatever level they need.  It takes a full hour for each to go from the top of its route to the bottom.
Reaching the upper levels requires using different elevators.  Cynical observers may note here that these elevators tend to be the places from which local Enforcer and even Arbites precincts emerge.  It is true that the Arbites are obligated to protect all Imperials, but even the Highborn, if they cared enough to debate the topic, would admit that they tend to focus more on the Highborn themselves, as it should be.  After all, it isn’t like the Emperor put the commoners in charge.

The higher levels of the hives, like in most Hive Worlds, are places of leisure and gluttony.  Here are the elite haberdasheries and clothiers, but here also are the arrays of businesses that cater to anybody with wealth or taste.  Now well above the clouds and pollution of the exterior and interior of the hives, the Thimble Peers and the merchant families that compete viciously to join their ranks live here in splendor.  Though not quite as impossible to speak to as the Highborn of older Hive Worlds like Scintilla or even Terra, the residents of the Thimble Hive palaces have a distinct trend towards boredom and lavishness.  The intrigues of the Subsector Court are the only diversion some scions have, especially if they are from one of the families that made their mark early in Thimble’s history of Imperial competitive cooperation and sat on their laurels afterward.  Courtly battles and even death duels are disgustingly common among the nobles of Thimble, but they are rarely so effete and dainty as they may be in other Hive Worlds, where publicly losing at regicide or a public fart are scandalous.  Thimble noble duels have consumed whole buildings as the participants unleashed artifacts they received in trade from visiting Rogue Traders in exchange for their foundry’s exotic clothing.

Thimble Highborn
As the only Hive World in the Cloudburst Sector, and therefore the only place with enough people and enough money to generate them, the Highborn Hiver populace live like jealous kings.  The highest families and the relatives of the System Overlord Clan are fully aware of how boring and how inhospitable life would be outside the hives, as indeed several million dirt farmers could attest.  Life for the scavengers who pick over the rusted Ork hulks at the equator have it even worse, since they get all of the harshness of wasteland living without the benefits of not boiling to death if they step outside unshielded.  The lesser noble houses, however, live in carefree oblivion.  These are the houses of the Great Families; they are the familial networks that own the massive clothing foundries of the hives.  Some have spread their wealth to the stars and bought or founded whole trading clans, with fleets of ships and even a few Navigators, plying the stars and delivering goods.  Still, the peculiar noble structure of the Thimble peerage places them below the families that rule the hives directly, and the world itself.

The Thimble Planetary Governor serves as the leader of the Clan that answers to the System Overlord, which is not an arrangement that the Governor’s family always appreciates.  The Overlord of a system is all-powerful within their system under the Cloudburst Administratum, and only death or a unanimous vote from the Subsector Overlords can dislodge him… but the current System Overlord is the Subsector Overlord, and as such, by ancient Segmentum law, can claim the Planetary Governorship of his own homeworld any time they want.  As such, the Planetary Governors of Thimble in the past have not uncommonly drunk themselves into an early grave out of boredom or spite.  Whenever a heresy pops up in the Thimble Subsector, so the joke goes, the Governor started it.
At present, however, this is a minimal concern.  The current Planetary Governor’s clan is engaged in a far higher degree of work and oversight of Thimble than they would normally be.  This is because the System and Subsector Overlord, Harek abn Alnasr of Clan Ahad, has been working feverishly on the Moon Development Project.  This is an ambitious goal by any measure.  The Project seeks to build extra facilities on the moons of Thimble.  The first, Iocanto, has already been built on once before, that much is obvious.  Harek has toured collapsed Dark Age buildings there, stuffed full of archaeotech and treasure by their builders.  The Overlord would like nothing more than to rebuild this base, and establish a new one on Malvaceae.  So far, nothing more than pilots have arisen, but both are promising.  The stations the Mechanicus has built there, thanks to the urging of the Adeptus Terra Council that Harek leads, will someday serve as the command and control hubs of the entire Subsector, and project their firepower so far away from their surface that they will be able to hull a Glasian Cylinder, Harek boasts.  The somewhat more grounded claims of the Mechanicus put this between ‘Abbadon will repent any day now’ and ‘Guilliman’s just sleeping off a hangover’ in terms of likelihood, but they agree that more defenses can’t hurt.  Beyond serving as an extra layer of defenses, however, Harek has other plans for the moon stations.
Harek’s ultimate goal for the moon bases is to serve as the focal point of a completely new colonization project.  The ambitious Overlord obsessively pours over the reports coming in from Explorators and Rogue Traders in the Oldight Exo-zone and Cloudburst Circuit.  He has read page after page after page of reports about strange aliens, dark tombs, dead planets, and gleaming gems of life and sustenance out in the voids of non-Imperial space.  Harek’s dreams are aflood with schemes and plans to make his system, and it is his system, into the launching point for a wave of thousands of colony and trader ships, to carry Clan Ahad’s descendents out to rule a whole second Subsector in his name.  His relative youth for a Subsector Overlord means he may even live to see it happen.  More likely, though, the inevitable delays in the work of the Administratum and Mechanicus in categorizing and securing these worlds mean he will be long dead by that time.  That doesn’t trouble him, though, for the Hereteks to whom he traded a full underhive’s worth of scavengers promise that the brain-transferrence machine and personal cloning device in his secret laboratory on Iocanto are working perfectly.

Most families of wealth and power on Thimble have less horrible aims and means, however.  These families rule the great manufacturing combines of the planet, and they couldn’t care less about moon bases, non-hiver scavengers and farmers, or the burdens of rulership.  The self-maintaining factories and companies they own are well-oiled machines, run by Administratum and Mechanicus elites.  The noble owners, from great houses of Cloudburst like O’Neill and Zhong, kick back and explore ever more expensive ways to relieve their boredom.
The headaches this causes the Ordo Xenos cannot be overstated.  There isn’t a Rogue Trader worth his weight in paper who doesn’t buy their house’s clothing from Thimble.  More than a few Rogue Traders have traded xenotech for particularly nice clothes, and the Imperial Navy increasingly relies on the noble-owned clothing foundries of Thimble for their fireproof vacuum repair suits for their ships.  This means that military-grade Imperial and Xeno weaponry winds up in the hands of Thimble noble scion twits with appalling frequency.  Ordo Xenos invesitagors have arrived on the scene of massacres in noble estates on reports of small-scale alien invasions, only to find that a single servant pressed a button they shouldn’t have while cleaning the master’s alien grenade collection.
Sometimes, these artifacts serve a darker, more purposeful role.  The Ordo Xenos is aware that the general public is not conscious of the role Tzeentch plays in the Glasian Migrations, but is aware that their technology is sinful and must be destroyed.  This has never, ever prevented enterprising humans from trading and buying things, not once in mankind’s history.  As a result, the Cold Trade of proscribed Glasian hardware into Thimble noble houses is brisk and competitive.  Aristocrats with no other occupation in their minds pay outrageous sums to own real Glasian Ruin Guns or Corkscrew Rifles.  Sometimes these are more than conversation pieces or emergency personal defense weapons.
The Inquisition is alarmed at how easily this technology seems to be filtering into the population of Thimble.  An interdiction of arms freighters is simply not possible, given that Thimble is the number one supplier of manpower to the Imperial military in Cloudburst.  As such, all the Inquisition can do to stop this Cold Trade is publicly execute all participants they capture, and pray that if the forces of Chaos are planning something, the Arbites will catch it in time to stop it, as they did on Maskos fourteen centuries before.

Thimble Military
As a Hive World, Thimble has two things in abundance at all times: industry, and extra people.  The days when Thimble had so much empty living space that colonists had to be imported from other worlds to keep the machinery running hve been over for a thousand years.  With the notable exception of Amethyst Hive (which has no underhive because its sublevels are one giant power plant) and Singer Hive (the scav population of which all mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago), all the hives of Thimble have more bodies than beds.  Thimble is also a Subsector Capital, and is thus responsible for not only raising a great army to defend itself, but also a fleet and field army to defend its holdings.  As such, massive tithes of men in fresh uniforms appear in the ledgers of the Officio Munitorum every year.  The people of Thimble take active pride in the quality of their forces, which is ironic in the Munitorum’s eyes; they’re not very good fighters.  For whatever reason, be it diet, lifestyle, mindset, or just simple poor genes, Thimble troops outside their elite Scions seems predisposed to coming in squarely in the middle of Munitorum readiness and fitness exercises.  This does not make them a liability, of course, they are still fine fighters for the Imperium.  They are simply less qualified than the Munitorum traditionally expects hivers to be.
Hiver soldiers of the Imperial military have the reputation of being tough, self-reliant, and good at working in teams; these are all traits that the Navy and Guard prize.  Thimble hivers, however, have few of the gang allegiances that Necromundan or even Terran hivers possess.  All Hive Worlds have crime, and therefore all Hive Worlds have Imperial Guard conscripts ready to go, but Thimble has not (yet) developed the rampant criminal tribalism that leads to so many hiver gangs forming.  Perhaps this explains their lack of the stereotypical hiver Guardsman traits, like body tattoos and thuggish language.
Regardless, when Thimblan Argent Swords fight, they do so clad in the very best uniforms and armor money can buy.  Their arms are built on many worlds, also, with Cognomen providing advanced firearms, Maskos providing grenades and flamers, and Cognomen and Solstice splitting the vehicle requirements between them.  Argent Shields work and train in their bases on the planet itself, in walled-off hab blocks and bases on the surface,shielded from the boiling air by Mechanicus technoarcana.  The fact that all wars in Thimble history have occurred inside the hives means that Thimble troops are not well trained to work in concert with artillery or airstrikes.  As urban warfare troops, they are rated third behind Maskos Warriors and the elite Cloudburst Defenders overall in the Cloudburst Sector.  Again, like most hives, Thimble builds as much of its own wargear as it can.  The sheer number of troops it tithes up every year means that Cognomen can’t equip its general infantry with their masterpiece rifles; they have to equip dozens of other worlds, and do not have enough left over for Thimble’s troops too.  Therefore, Cognomen provides the designated marksmen and snipers of the Thimble regiments with their weapons, and the rest are either manufactured locally or shipped in from Fabique or Solstice.

The Imperial Navy recruits most of its crews from the Spindle system, and its many thosuands of space habs, space stations, void platforms, moon bases, and of course Thimble itself regularly pledge hundreds of thousands of people to the Navy’s crews.  Notably, Thimble does not have much of an officer’s tradition.  Instead, the majority of the Navy’s officers come from Oglith and Coriolis.

Thimble also controls one other specialist formation, one unique to Thimble.  Beyond the Scions and Commissars provided by its Schola Progenia, Thimble has one military deployment beyond its Navy and Guard commitments.  In a supposedly abandoned agricultural station in the dead zones near the Ork crash sites, the Mechanicus built a great tunnel, leading down through the rock and dead dirt to a natural cave they expanded with Maskos mining machines.  The Mechanicus dug out more caves and caverns, until nearly two cubic miles of space stretched out under the surface, with food and power provided from the serreptitously-reactivated agri-station.
Inside the complex, a force of killers trains and waits.  The Thimble Night Slaughter, the premier Inquisitorial black ops force in the Segmentum north of the Maelstrom, hides away from the world.  The Night Slaughter know the real reason that Thimble’s asymptote of average soldier quality isn’t that the world has no gangs or that the Scions take all the good fighters.  The real reason is that they are quietly siphoned away from the conscript yards and enlistment centers, and taken blindfolded to the secret, nameless bunker.
Beneath the planet’s surface, tens of thousands of soldiers, each hypnoconditioned and commanded by implants to serve, wait and train.  Every week, there is at least one casualty in the fierce, vicious training the Night Slaughter endures.  Training takes place in teams of ten, with a member cycled out every week to keep the groups fresh and the drills interchangeable.  Under the watchful eye of Lord Commissar Beleph Dour, these killers train to fight in unpredictable circumstances, like the fluctuating gravity of a Space Hulk or the blinding madness of the Warp, or even the twisting halls of the Webway.  The Holy Ordos convened this army of specialists, none of whom are listed as alive or even missing on Astra Militarum records.
The Inquisition knows that one day, perhaps one day soon, the armies of Nurgle, Slaneesh, and Khorne will team up to battle Tzeentch in the streets and skyways of the Cloudburst Sector.  Someday, either Tzeentch’s experiment will end, or the other three Chaos Gods will work together to stop it, and when it does, every heresy, every cultist, every traitor, every uncollected psyker in the Cloudburst Sector will rise up under Tzeentch’s thrall, and the Chaos Civil War in the sector will begin.  When it does, the Night Slaughter will rise to battle them.  Consisting of tens of thousands of brainwashed soldiers, or so their leaders think, the Slaughter are trained to the highest standards the human body can endure, even beyond that of the Ammo Thralls of the Custodes.  Genetic enhancement, hypnosis, cybernetic augmentation, even psychic impulse-planting make these soldiers into the absolute peak of human potential.
The Night Slaughter troops think that this is the secret plan of the Ordos; they assume that the Inquisition wants these soldiers to be constantly training in anticipation of the day that they will fall on the surprised Traitors and drive them from the Sector.  What Lord Commissar Dour knows is that the ‘accidents’ that account for the losses the Slaughter endures in their training are nothing of the kind.  Every week, the best soldier in the Slaughter is knocked unconscious and stashed in a great cryo-crypt, even deeper under the surface, and protected by psy-wards and techno-sorcerous barriers of the Dark Age.  Four psychic Inquisitors live in residence in this secret vault, watching over the thousands of frozen killers, looking for even the slightest sign of daemon incursion.  After all, armies are expensive, and while most members of the gradually-expanding Night Slaughter will never see battle against the forces of Chaos, to let their skills go to waste would be downright criminal.  Hundreds of thousands of cryo-crypts sit unfilled beneath the training grounds, with tanks, non-Carapace-linked Power Armor, guns, armored vehicles, combat servitors and Servo-skulls, and even a platoon of Martian Baneblades with full wargear upgrades ready to go.  When Tzeentch drops his charade, the Ordos will be ready.