crusher and howe

Rogue Trader House Crusher
House Crusher is a fixture on Thimble, Cassie’s World, Septiim Secundus, Delving, and all of the other worlds of the Cloudburst Sector that are rapidly expanding their industrial capacity.  The House has made a massive amount of money by selling the archaeotechnological discoveries and trade goods of the Circuit in these industrial dynamos, even to the extent of surprising the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The House Crusher has pumped untold dozens of billions of Thrones into the economies of these worlds, and it is all due to the ambitions of their ruling family.

The House Crusher are wealthy, expansive, and eager to build.  As is often the case, legacy and lineage are important to House Crusher, but they have no restrictions on marriage so long as the wedded-in members of the family swear to place fealty to the House second only to the Emperor.  Any other concern is tertiary at best, and the House takes this with proper weight.
However, even good breeding and loyalty are second to ambition.  House Crusher has not risen to power on the basis of its lack of drive.  The money they make, the discoveries they commercialize, and the alliances they forge are all products of a burning will to sieze more, more, more.

The House does have a singular Warrant, of course, as every House does, but they do not place any special emphasis on its holder being the sole leader of the House.  Rather than have a single House Warrant holder, the Warrant is left in a stasis field in their orbiting palace above Hapster, and instead, the Warrant holder simply casts the final vote in the periodic ballots for the future of the House.  For the past eighty years, the ballot has been for expansion, into more markets, more fields, more exploration.
This manifests as frequent explorations of the Cloudburst Circuit, and even the more dangerous Exo-zone.  The House has lost ships, and even Crusher family members, in the pursuit of opportunity in the void of space.  The House has had far more successes than failures, however.  It was the House Crusher that discovered the Abhuman world Crispin, and the world of man/machine hybrids called AHG131 (a point of contention, since Thomas Walsh ordered it destroyed before House Crusher was done robbing it).  House Crusher was the force that blazed the trail through the Warp to the Oldlight Exo-zone colony of Misty Step, and funded the arrival of the first six thousand colonists from the Drumnos Hive World of Arquebus.

Houe Crusher has many small businesses under their thumb, of course, and even a few controlling shares in large corporations on Thumble and Septiim.  By far their most profitable venture in that regard is their thirty percent share in the Flaxweave Foundry, which produces the highest quality clothing and outerwear available in the entire Galactic North, even selling to two Astartes Chapters.  However, the House’s passion for discovery and new places can’t be sated by sitting behind a desk watching a stock ticker.  The House Crusher is always pushing for more, and funds whole convoys of ships and escorts into the deep clouds of the Circuit, seeking glory and treasure.

They occasionally find what they seek.  House Crusher has developed a solid reputation as Hulk-finders.  Their collection of highly skilled Navigators and Astropaths have meticulously scoured the nearby regions of space for any signs of the thinning of the Immaterium veil that presages the violent exit of a Space Hulk.  The House remains one of only three forces in the Sector to have successfully enacted a Hulk capture (aside from the Navy, Mechanicus Basilikon Astra, and obviously the Blue Daggers).

House Crusher has developed very positive relationships with the Adeptus Mechanicus, thanks to decades of extensive trade with the Techpriesthood.  They have exchanged starmaps, technologies, refugee populations for projects, and the aforementioned Space Hulks.  In return, the Adeptus Mechanicus has rewarded them with mountains of upgrades for their ships, their land-based businesses, and the small space stations the House maintains for their fleet.  Mostly, the House prioritizes sensor and augur upgrades, allowing their assets to peer deeper into the darkness.  The other upgrades go to their business structures on the worlds that house their legitimate trades.  These include cheaper, cleaner energy sources, Forge World-quality fabricators, Techpriests to oversee it all, high-efficiency cogitators, and other things that give an edge of superiority over competing brands.

Perhaps it is because of this positive relationship that the House has been able to make inroads to the Oldlight Exo-zone that the other Rogue Traders of the region rarely do.  The Mechanicus has as much interest in looting the ancient knowledge and wealth of the Exo-zone as any other party in the region, and perhaps more.  The Oldlight Exo-zone, however, has two distinct risks to it that few other regions do.  First, the Exo-zone is almost entirely unmapped.  Although it is well known that the forces of the Imperium waged savage wars against the aliens that lived there during the Great Crusade, its territory now is vacant of much Imperial life, thanks to the difficulty in detecting the Astronomican there.  The fact that Navigators have such difficulty seeing there makes exploration faster than a snail’s pace rare and hazardous, despite actually being closer to Terra than the Eastern Fringe.  The second reason is that of entrenchment by the Imperium’s opponents.  Just because the ships of the Imperium rarely travel there doesn’t mean the inhabitants of the Exo-zone are unaware of it.  The Imperium of Man has been an active force in the universe for over one hundred twelve centuries; few in the galaxy aren’t aware of it.  There are pocket kingdoms of non-Warp capable aliens, human wildcat colonies, Orkholds, and worse that dot the entire Exo-zone, and it would take immense resources to ferret them all out.  These are resources the Imperium presently can’t spare.

House Crusher is one of the few forces of the galactic north that still makes the effort.  The House Crusher fleets have even traveled to Deathwatch stations in the region to share knowledge collected on indigenous aliens, albeit rarely.  Other Crusher ships scour the few mapped starlanes in the region for any sign of surviving Terran Federation colonies, or their remnants.

However, these expeditions are expensive and take immense time to perform.  House Crusher augments their income with other tasks.  At times, the House has even accepted privateering contracts from the Segmentum Ultima to assist the Battlefleet Drumnos with their occasional wars against pirate gangs or Freebootaz.  These contracts pay well and offer some action, so younger scions of the House are encouraged by their elders to take up the sword for the family’s sake.


Rogue Trader House Howe

The Inquisition is entrusted with oversight of all but one of the branches of Imperial governance and life.  Even the Adeptus Arbites are ultimately answerable to the Inquisition, although naturally not often.  The obvious exceptions is the Talon of the Emperor, those martial offices that are part of the Sisters of Silence and Adeptus Custodies, who couldn’t care less about Cloudburst.
Thus, the Inquisitorial authority extends over all of the Sector unimpeded, and a portion of it is currently fixed on Rogue Trader House Howe.  The House is currently under active investigation by the Ordos Xenos and Hereticus for all manner of debauchery and crime, with the lead suspect being the imminent Warrant holder and scion of the House, Waldeon Howe.  Waldeon is a scion of the family and a product of its extensive ties to the Celeste nobility.  He is a hedonist and a brute, who despite his obvious intellect simply cannot countenance not being the most powerful person in any given room.  He has real talent for business, for battle, and for certain artistic pursuits, but he has no tact or restraint.

Out in the Circuit or Exo-zone, of course, that could be a major advantage, but in the Sector proper, it is a huge liability.  The current Warrant holder, Lawrence Howe, is on the verge of death, with his many cybernetics and augmetics on the verge of final failure.  He is not fully conscious, and may be wholly oblivious to his grandson’s mania.  The Inquisition has given up informing him, since he seems not to respond, and has now focused their efforts on the task of investigating Waldeon’s antics.

So far, they have uncovered strong evidence that at the very least, he is engaging in copious acts of the Cold Trade.  The Trade is the traffic of proscribed xeno artifacts to buyers in Imperial space.  For centuries, the current Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, former Ordo Xenos High Inquisitrix Cassandra Lerics, was the bane of the Cold Trade in the region.  She pursued its participants with chilling precision and wrathful zeal.  However, since she has had to shift her attention more and more to the affairs of high office and her ad hoc leadership of the Deathwatch overseers, she has had understandably less time to pursue the Trade and its buyers.
Thus, in the absence of the cat, the metaphorical mice play, with freighters occasionally slipping up to a ton of xeno artifacts into the wrong hands.  Lerica’s replacement, Lord Inquisitor Hueng, has far bigger concerns, and simply doesn’t care as much about the issue as he does about the Glasians.  This doesn’t mean that he devotes no effort nor subordinates to the problem, it is just not his priority.

Meanwhile, the House Howe is getting filthy rich.  Unlike other Houses, they do not focus much on a large fleet.  Instead, the House has begun to prepare for massive expeditions into the border region between the Cloudburst Circuit and the Oldlight Exo-zone.  There is no physical boundary between the two, so it is somewhat nebulous.  This is made literal since the area is in fact a giant nebula.  There are whispers on Emissicius that there are entire star systems in the border nebula that are just waiting to be plundered, and worlds where ancient Imperial forces under Lion El’Jonson and Leman Russ assaulted the northern holdings of the Rangdan xenoforms.
The Inquisitors tasked to observing House Howe is aware of these rumors, but for now is inclined to let Howe explore the region.  If there is nothing to be found, then the House will be weakened, and more vulnerable to Inquisitorial action.  If there is, looting it all will take time, and by the time the House Howe forces return, the purge of their ranks may well be over in their home territories, leaving the Howe fleet leaderless for Inquisitorial co-opting.

House Howe is not openly criminal in its actions, however.  They do maintain several wholly legitimate manufacturing and printing companies, as well as multiple pirate ships they have stripped and repurposed as freighters.  Most of the House’s legitimate income stems from the sale of goods to worlds that are undergoing colonization or terraformation, many of which were discovered or colonized by House Howe ships.