pirates

“Commodore Axe
“I have come to your blood-filled house, Emperor of Man.  I will kill every man you send against me, and when I have killed enough, I will stack their shipwrecks higher than your walls, and I will invade your realm, and Hell will ride with me.”

The Commodore of the Motherlode pirates is a former Imperial officer, as so many pirates are.  This one is an Imperial Navy Commander, who jettisoned his old name for a new one when he rose to admiralty over the Motherlode’s web of pirates.  His old name, Josiah Veru, he has left behind, and renamed himself Axe Augustus, presumably to sound more imposing.  Commodore Axe is a swaggering brute of a man, driven by a loathing of the Imperium of Man that stems from a mixture of real insult and fantastic imaginings of persecution.  As a young Imperial officer, Josiah Veru was stymied for promotion to Captaincy over a squadron of Sword Frigates in the BattlefeetBattlefleet Naxos.  While he had served competently as Commander of the pair of Cobra Destroyers he commanded, he was subsequently passed over for promotion to loftier rank at every chance.  Vain and egomaniacal, Veru imagined himself the victim of conspiracy.  In truth, the Captaincy went to another because Veru seemed untrustworthy with the elevated responsibilities of command in the eyes of Battlefleet Naxos.  The Commander was then sortied with great urgency to repulse a swarm of pirates flying stolen Imperial transports at the Ninth Battle of Corumbino.  During the battle, a torpedo from a pirate vessel flew between two other Imperial ships and hit Veru’s vessel, costing hundreds of lives.  Veru flew into a rage, claiming he was the victim of abandonment by the Emperor and the scorn of his peers.  His bridge crew attempted to bring him under control, so he slew them all.  When the pirates boarded his ship, he joined them without a second thought.

In his earlier life, Veru was a member of the uppermost classes on the planet Asklepian, the Fortress World that serves as capital of the Naxos Sector.  Like many of his peers among the younger children of noble houses in that sprawling, war-torn Sector, the young Josiah dreamed of glory fighting Traitors and Renegades in the heart of the Sector’s Pox Ring, reaping a tally of criminals and cultists to nebulous evil.  The higher in rank he rose, the more disillusioned he became with the Imperium and its means.  Even when he could see the sense of the Imperium’s draconian and violent control of its citizens, the enormity of the Imperium’s task drove his sense of loyalty down and down.
For whatever reason, and the Imperial Naval Intelligence department doesn’t know it, the natural progression of class superiority and the chain of command did not impress itself on Josiah Veru.  His moral structure twisted and wrought into a bizarre combination of meritocracy and anarchy, which put him in the mindset for piracy.  Whether Veru concluded that the Imperium can’t beat the Traitors, or that he would be killed trying, is not clear, but the end result is the same: he has joined them, and blames the Imperium for every problem in his life.

Now a member of the Motherlode pirates, Veru swiftly abandoned his old name and took on an officers’ role in the host of criminals.  At first, he was assigned command of a rebuilt Imperial Navy Frigate named the In Excelsis Maxima, but he swiftly outgrew the position.  Over the next twenty years, the renamed Captain Axe became a confidant of the old leader of the Motherlode pirates, and was eventually entrusted with command of the ship itself.  He sped up the retirement of the previous Commodore with mercury poisoning, and now rules the chaotic band of brigands with an iron fist.  He has begun expanding the fleet that calls the Motherlode home, in anticipation of preying on the war-weakened Imperial North.

In battle, Commodore Axe employs a stolen Astartes Inferno Pistol, one his Tech-Adept servants, betrayers of Fabique, have carefully retrofitted for him to use.  His extensive cybernetics are the only reason he can even lift it.

His rage and eagerness to point fingers has blinded him to the real threat.  The touch of Nurgle is upon the Motherlode, as it is nearly everywhere in the Naxos Sector and the adjacent realms of the Circuit.  In his eagerness to turn the Motherlode pirates from aimless marauders to a genuine opponent to the Imperium, he has failed to notice that not all of his allies want to tear down the Emperor’s domain to rule the ashes.  Instead, his lieutenant, an Aeldari Corsair named Kirosa Lasimie, wants to give them to somebody else.


Fleet Captain Kirosa Lasimie
“Climb the mountain of bodies I have made of those who came before you, Corpse-slaves, and be sure to wash in their cleansing rot.  Soon, you shall forget your Corpse, and you shall think only of my Rot, and of my dear Grandfather.”

A horrifying sociopath, draped in the skin of a thoughtful grandmother, and the single greatest threat to the souls of the Cloudburst Circuit’s humankind, Kirosa Lasimie is not a Man at all.  She is Aeldari, formerly of the Kaelor Craftworld, until she took up the Path of the Outcast.  Almost at once, she found herself drawn to the Naxos Sector, and the limitless opportunities for danger and power there.
While fighting in secret in the retinue of the Pathfinder Eriatias as he stalked the Chaotic raiders of the galactic northern fringe, Kirosa indulged in her own arrogance.  She would throw herself into the fiercest fights, swinging her Wraithsword like a berserker, and heedless of the violence she employed to get her way in a galaxy that seemed to despise her.  As time went on, however, she felt less and less joy in the claiming of the lives of those who opposed her.  Years crawled past, until the formerly bloodthirsty Ranger found nothing but ennui in her life of sharpshooting and wilderness combat.
Eventually, Kirosa abandoned the Pathfinder and Ranger group she had served for a century.  Wandering around the Cloudburst Circuit for uncounted years in the smallest ship she could operate – lacking the desire for companionship and crew – the Outcast explored much, including worlds no Eldar had seen since before the Fall.  The relative lack of Maiden Worlds in the region meant there were few Aeldari void-sailors around of her own kind, and with only Drukhari and Mandrakes issuing from the hidden Webway gates in the heart of the Corumbino Nebula, there was little friendly contact to be had with the others of her kind anyway.
After many years of aimless wandering, Kirosa found something.  Hurtling through the radiation-soaked depths of the Cloudburst Circuit was an amalgam of shipwrecks and chunks of stone, a Space Hulk.  Kirosa had observed many such Hulks before in her time, but something about this Hulk specifically called to her.  Matching speeds, Kirosa boarded the dead ships, seeking whatever it was that sang to her in an irresistible song.

She stole through the guts of the Space Hulk, fighting xenos horrors that clawed and rent at her, until at last she came upon a strange stone.  Locked away in the hold of a human vessel of a make she did not know, the stone pulsed with a strange, deadening effect.  Kirosa’s psychic senses seemed to dull and flatten as she drew near, as if the stone were acting as a Null effect.  Cautiously, the Outcast drew closer, with curiosity overcoming her as she did.
Had Kirosa bothered to learn about the humans she belittled, she might have known their icons.  Had she known their icons, she might have realized that she was in the belly of an Inquisitorial fast clipper, bound for the Grey Knights’ homeworld of Titan.  Had she not been alone, others might have sensed the strange coils of psychic focus that surrounded the stone that invisibly drew hooks into her soul as she reached for it.  Had she not been overcome with ennui for so long, and kept up her mental edge, or if she had not spent a century indulging base avarice, she might have thought twice about grabbing a psy-active artifact without examining it first.
As it was, Kirosa Lasimie died the second she touched the stone, her soul ripped out and cast at the feet of ravening daemons.  Into her husk flowed the dark power of one such daemon, Gluyth’rak the Accommodator, a most insidious and darkly clever beast of Nurgle.  Taking stock of its new form, Gluyth’rak found it to its liking.  Now unobstructed by things like ‘mortality’ and ‘greed,’ the daemon, enfleshed and with purpose,’ fought its way to the nearest operational ship bridge in the Space Hulk, and nudged it onto a new course: that of the Motherlode.  Only a few light-years away, the vessel made the journey in a few centuries, while the daemon Gluyth’rak merged itself invisibly into the corpus of the former Eldar.  Even the most skilled and well-trained psychic would have trouble spotting the taint of the daemon on her now.
When the Motherlode’s archaeotech sensorium detected the Space Hulk, it swarmed out boarding craft to collect the vessel’s vast treasure for the piratical hordes.  To the surprise of the boarders, the Hulk was filled with the corpses of thousands of Genestealers, Orks, and less readily-identifiable xenos, all of them slain by a combination of Aeldari weaponry and strange sorcery.  Upon finding the perfectly-intact Eldar starship that Kirosa had used to board the Hulk, they made their way to the bridge, to find Kirosa sitting at the helm, one foot up on the console, wraith weapons in her lap, casually awaiting them.

It took very little time for the daemonhost to integrate itself into the command structure of the Motherlode.  An Eldar pirate of such clearly-unequaled skill at arms was a rare ally for the debased avaricious pirates.  Through a combination of subtle Warp-touch, long practice, and genuine combat talent, ‘Kirosa’ made her way up the ranks of the Motherlode pirates with adroitness.  The daemonhost used ‘her’ immense knowledge of the Imperium, Drukhari, and the forces of Nurgle to turn the Motherlode pirates from a serious pest to the Imperium to a catastrophic security threat.  That suited Commodore Axe and his predecessor well, given their loathing of the Imperium.  ‘Kirosa’ was the perfect advisor, always ready with smoothly-spoken advice to the pirates about the best places to hit the Imperium in the back, forcing it to draw assets away from the frontlines with the Aeldari and Chaotic fleets.
Commodore Axe is too blinded by his intense lust for revenge against the Imperium and his wrath against its monolithic power bloc to notice his own damnation.  The captured Adeptus Mechanicus personnel that Axe has enslaved to upgrade and maintain his ship have their suspicions about the ‘Eldar’ in their midst, but none are in a position to act on them.

Gluyth’rak has a specific goal it seeks to accomplish with its lengthy deception.  The Drukhari of Naxos have long stymied its Grandfather’s plans to devour the whole Galactic North with his plagues and the maws of his children.  While it, like any child of Nurgle, has nothing but loathing for the powers of psychics and witches, the psychic power of Kirosa Lasimie was colossal, and not worth passing up.  Kirosa is placed to do great damage both to the Drukhari ability to intervene in Grandfather’s plan to weaken Slaanesh by feinting at the Pox Ring’s containment (and the valuable Exodite Worlds beyond it, more to the point) and to the Imperial Navy.  Even more delicious, the Celestial Knights have, over the past centuries, shifted more and more of their focus to the containment of Warp-tainted aliens in the Naxos and Cloudburst Sectors; Kirosa’s existence is totally known to them.  Gluyth’rak has a real chance, it estimates, to topple the Imperial and Aeldari space forces entirely if it can play them against each other at just the right moment: when Tzeentch begins his centennial Glasian Migration experiment.
Of course, some things need to happen first.  The Motherlode pirates have long since stripped the Space Hulk that carried Lasimie to them, and are using the colossal resources aboard it to expand their fleet as rapidly as possible.  That, by itself, is good, but much more firepower will be needed to risk direct, open war against the Kabal of the Fiend Ascendant.  That particular breed of Commorragh-dwelling parasite is curiously unwilling to raid their Exodite brethren, and would almost assuredly come to their aid if the hidden Exodites were attacked.  Also, Commodore Axe would never waste ammunition against the Drukhari if he could spend it on the Imperium instead.
Still, Gluyth’rak is confident it can turn the pirates to the cause of the Grandfather.  All it needs is time, and in the Materium, time is abundant.