outer zones

The Cloudburst Circuit
The Cloudburst Circuit constitutes a vast breadth of the galaxy’s northernmost border.  This is a term for the distant, hard-to-navigate, and mysterious clusters of stars and radioactive gasses that hang beyond the formal ‘edge’ of the Cloudburst Sector, between Imperial territory and the roiling Warp Storms that delineate the outer limits of the Galaxy.  Prior to the establishment of the Sector proper, this was titled the Oldlight Proximate Circuit; it was larger, and encompassed the region now known as Cloudburst Sector and the Cloudburst Circuit.  The galactic limit Warp Storms, called Terminus Shock, of severity ranging from hideously tumultuous to nearly ‘safe,’ shroud the entire Galaxy.  In the Cloudburst Circuit between the Cloudburst Sector and the Galaxy’s northern edge, the storms are thin but violent, and on the rarest of occasions, unmanned probes may even pass beyond them.  The Circuit itself has thousands of planets and superasteroids within, but thanks to the high radiation levels of the Circuit’s ubiquitous nebulae, they are hard to reach.  Among Imperial Astrocartographers, there is a persistent and empirically sound theory that the Warp storms are generated by the fact that the Warp is a mirror of all sentient life, and there are no bodies near the Galaxy that could support life.  Therefore, the Warp Storms represent not only the physical edge of the Galaxy, but the practical limit on the range of human Faster-Than-Light travel that relies on total Warp Immersion (as all human and Ork ships do).  While this also means Chaos cannot spread to other Galaxies if true, this is small comfort for the Imperium and no comfort for those mad Rogue Traders who have travelled beyond the Warp Storms to find new galaxies to inhabit, who are most surely all dead now.
The enormous swathe of territory remains largely unexplored, for several reasons.  The first is that the region is at the very limit of the weakening Astronomican’s light, so only Navigators with some skill can traverse it safely.  The second is that the regions of space that bordered the Oldlight Proximate Circuit had their own, more pressing concerns, such as the incessant piracy of Drumnos or Chaos plagues of Naxos.  Finally, the region is colossal, many times larger than an Imperial Sector, with few stable Warp Routes and no permanent Imperial colonies.
All of that changed after the legendary expeditions of Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator Magos Justin MacDonald began in M39.  In the span of a few decades, MacDonald found dozens of star systems that either had habitable worlds around them, or were full to bursting with rare resources.  Further expeditions into the region revealed lost human colonies, shipwrecks with rare technology within, aliens that threatened humankind, and even the gigantic Adamantium deposits of Tendrils.  A period of intense expansion from the borders of the adjacent Sectors eventually chopped the coreward reaches of the Circuit into seven Subsectors, plus the Hapster Subsector that already existed.
The Circuit contains many worlds with Imperial footprints, although none are accorded the status of true Imperial colony worlds.  This is a bureaucratic choice, since any proper Imperial colonies would become part of the nearest Subsector, which the Cloudburst government is not ready to oversee.  Some of the worlds in the Circuit have been waiting for colonial designation for generations, including the Abhuman world of Crispin.

Among the worlds of the Circuit sit satraps of Rogue Traders and other forces of authority that operate outside direct Imperial remit and command.  However, that is hugely asymmetric; worlds like Groskin’s Oblast and Crispin are Imperial worlds in all but name, while planets like Valholt don’t even have their orbital paths charted.  This is by no means uncommon; places like the Koronus Expanse often go through periods of thousands of years of exploration before being properly colonized.
The largest Imperial realm in the Circuit is not that of an Explorator, nor the Adeptus Terra.  It is a network of four adjacent stars in a small cluster called Lodestar, just rimward of the outer edge of the Cloudburst Circuit.  Only two worlds within the Lodestar Cluster have anything past simple space platforms for human habitation, but the Adeptus Mechanicus has identified five planets in the cluster that could be trivially terraformed to the standards of human shirtsleeves habitation.  These five sit among dozens of others, hundreds of moons, and many more asteroids that are large enough to inhabit, but have been baked to cinders by the intense radiation of the region.  The primary Imperial point of control in the Lodestar Cluster is the Imperial Navy fortress Iron Beach, which has a dark and terribly history of unexplained phenomena that scar its otherwise unremarkable history.

Regional Threats
Other parts of the Cloudburst Circuit have their own problems.

Rak’Gol
The Rak’Gol, plague of the Halo Stars, have begun violently expanding into the region.  Long a pest in other places in the Galactic North, where their homeworlds sit beyond the reach of Imperial law, the Rak’Gol have begun assaulting the Imperium’s forces in the Cloudburst Circuit with their typical manic intensity.  These strange, bionic-fetishizing beings have assailed and even destroyed some Imperial stations and ships along the Cloudburst Circuit’s leading edge.
The Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos has invoked the aid of the Deathwatch in curtailing the monsters.  However, while the Deathwatch has done so, and scored some small skirmish victories against the xenos, the behavior of the Rak’gol has left them puzzled.  The Rak’Gol encountered in other regions of the galaxy have never been so purposeful.  Never before have they focused their efforts on specific worlds in the Imperium, nor mustered ground forces for displacement invasions.  On no fewer than nine occasions in the past three thousand years, the Rak’Gol have deliberately attacked and occupied Imperial worlds instead of simply raiding them for food, slaves, and technology.  The Ordo Xenos savants studying the beasts suspect the Rak’Gol may be fleeing from something, perhaps a Tyranid invasion.  However, Watch Commander Domack thinks it more likely that they were displaced by a Necron dynastic force awakening, probably from the Icnarus Dynasty.  A lone Necron Monolith had tested the defenses of the region in 989.M41, with a sudden attack against the planet Oglith in the Rampart system.

The Motherlode
Deep within the Circuit, other threats stir.  Rogue Imperial officers, like Admiral Langdon Reith, have built fortresses and pirate fleets there that can nearly rival an Imperial Subsector Battlefleet.  While few desire direct confrontation with Imperial forces, some could actually withstand it, which draws Admiral Maynard’s ire.  Under the circumstances, the Imperial Navy must expand to protect its worlds, but the shipyards of the Sector are under the utmost strain, and can produce no more rapidly.

The piratical threats are dominated by the Free Corsair Coalition under Admiral Langdon Reith, but he is by no means the only piratical threat.  Another significant force of piracy in the region is the Guiding Hope, a massive Age of Rebirth-era colony barque.  The ship was a cousin of the Archetype, the ship that flew the first Cognomen settlers from Mars, but unlike that vessel, the Guiding Hope did not find its destination.
In the year 398.M31, long after the Horus Heresy but before the slow collapse of the post-Age of Rebirth Imperium, the populace of thousands of the stations and void platforms that dot the mineral-rich Centauri Cluster grew weary of their homes being used as a strip mine for the resource-hungry Sol system.  Gathering hundreds of thousands of dissident citizens of these platforms into a massive ship they pooled their money to buy, the Guiding Hope, the population took flight through the Warp to the northernmost fringes of habitable space.  The ship took years to travel, since that era had had little exploration in the region now known as the Tri-Sector.  The mighty Drumnos and Naxos civilizations were still reeling from the internecine wars of the Horus Heresy; the Forge Worlds of Syracuse, Punic, and Fabique lay in ruins.  Cognomen was naught but a colony then, and even Hapster was teetering on the brink of rebellion.  None of those worlds could have housed the population of the Guiding Hope.

The ship flew and flew, seeking a world to dwell upon, until its supplies were exhausted.  Riots and starvation claimed the lives of the passengers and crew, until after one great fight, there was nobody left alive on the ship to helm it.  Within a month, there was nobody left alive on the massive vessel, which slowly drifted through the vacuum of the Cloudburst Circuit.
None alive can say what luck kept the ship from being drawn into the Warp and turning into a Space Hulk, but it did survive the millennia.  After drifting until 572M41, the vessel was finally found by a handful of human pirates.  Most pirates would have looted the ship and left it to drift, but their leaders recognized the value of the archaeotechnological treasures aboard.
A century later, raids by small vessels against Imperial assets along the Circuit border of the Cloudburst and Naxos Sectors had increased significantly.  The ships flown by the raiders and pirates were small, fast things, usually reconditioned transport and security ships, but sometimes larger ships they managed to take intact.  At first, Imperial Naval Intelligence believed that the raids were random acts of piratical crime by disaffected former Imperial voidmen, but time has revealed commonality to them.  The raids were all coming from the same region of the Cloudburst Circuit, and still are to this day.

The Guiding Hope, renamed the Motherlode by its new captain, has been gutted.  Many of its original archaeotechnological treasures are intact, but every scrap of equipment, internal compartments, and uneeded ornamentation has been stripped out and sold.  The empty space has been filled with life support systems, treasure rooms, barracks chambers for the pirates, and luxury suites for the officers.  The original archaeotech Geller Field Projector and Warp Drive are still in place, maintained with fervent prayer and not a small bit of luck by Here-tek Priests that have gone renegade from the Adeptus Mechanicus (or been kidnapped to fill their current roles).
The ship was originally a massive colony barque, and its lines and holds are undeniably still intended for that role.  No amount of engineering nor retrofitting will change that.  While it has some more weapons than it did when it was first deployed from Proxim Station over nine thousand years ago, it is not designed for battle against pure warships of equal tonnage.  The ship is well over eleven kilometers long, however, and has void shields to match its bulk; no Imperial Navy Captain worth a damn would charge headlong into battle against the Motherlode without serious planning and ample guns.

Aboard the Motherlode, the crews of the piratical hub ship and those pacted to it live out their lives in something akin to comfort.  Being essentially sessile and unable to enter the Warp (as the crew has no Navigator rated to handle the gargantuan ship), the vessel’s underguts have been torn asunder, and many of its compartments that originally served to hold vast numbers of colonists and their personal effects now house bawdy taverns, slave pens, and places of sinful carnal persuit.  Mutancy among the crew is rampant, and any crewer who either is or gives birth to a mutant is driven into a network of interconnected corridors called The Run.  Inside The Run, hapless victims are given a suit of chainmail and a few planks of wood, and must survive moving from one end of The Run to the other, peppered by jeering spectators with blowguns, firing darts tipped with various stimulant chemicals.  Any mutant or mutant-birther who survives is knocked unconscious, given brutish medical care, dressed in mocking clothes, and left to scamper for their life in the corridors of the ship… until the next Run.

Elsewhere, the conduct of those lucky pirates who get stationed on the nigh-impregnable mothership is hardly more cosmopolitan.  Ships bring in food by the ton, while biological waste is protein-cycled and made into corpse starch.  Hygiene is at best a fading affectation outside the officers’ and NCO’s corps, and disease is frequent.  Those pirates who wish to worship the Emperor are permitted to do so, although this is viewed negatively by most.  Medical treatment is provided by the small collection of doctors that the pirates count among their number, a number that fluctuates as ship’s medicae and physiks are captured on Imperial and Free Trader ships.



Leadership
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, Josiash Veru was stymied for promotion to Captaincy over a squadron of Sword Frigates in the Battlefeet 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 few 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.

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.

The Oldlight Exo-zone
The Astronomican’s psychic light defines the limits of the Emperor’s reach.  The mechanisms of navigation that allowed humanity to span the stars of the galaxy during their technological height are long gone, save the Navigators themselves.  The shadows cast in the Warp by Warp Storms can render even that great last beacon undetectable, and thus inaccessible to Imperial ships.  However, there are a few rare Navigators that have the means of traversing the Exo-zone’s shadows.  These Navigators are usually those that work for specialized agents of the Emperor, not the general body of vessels that serve the Chartist Captains and Imperial Navy.
The Oldlight Exo-zone is defined by the ripples in the Warp cast by the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath, and the innumberable smaller storms from the rimward edge of the Segmentum Obscurus.  Within the Exo-zone, threats to the Imperium are effectively impossible to address; merely reaching them is extraordinarily difficult for all but the most skilled Navigators.  The Inquisition is not without other options, but the majority of the threats within that darkened realm are beyond direct assault.

There are many such threats, from Necron Tomb Worlds to Tyranid Hive Splinters.  Some agents of the Inquisition have returned from the region speaking of entire debased xenos empires, Dark God-worshipping dens of fallen humankind, and Eldar Craftworlds that no human has ever seen.
However, there are a few small pockets of Imperial might.  The great Watch Fortress Excalibris sits at the very edge of the galaxy, in a slender pocket of space where the Astronomican’s light shines.  A few hardy Imperial colonies cling to life, scattered throughout the region, and some Inquisitorial and Adeptus Mechnicus research outposts exist beyond the Imperium’s practical borders.
In the darkness, a green menace stirs.  The portions of the Oldlight Exo-zone closest to the Tri-Sector contain little in the way of Tyranid Hive elements, but significant numbers of Orks have been detected in systems just beyond the Imperium’s borders.  Many of these are Freebooters, who sail the sea of stars for loot and battle, with a stronger drive towards piracy than empire-building, but there are more territorial Orks in the Exo-zone as well.
The perennial problem of the greenskin lingers just as vividly in the lightly-inhabited regions of space as it does in the densely-inhabited.  Greenskins are a menace to humankind; indeed, they were one of the first.  As far back as records are kept, Orks have plagued humanity, but at the apex of human and Aeldari technological might, they were easily-curtailed.  Now that the Aeldari people are all but gone (save in dark and horrifying Commoragh) and humankind’s technological peak is an abandoned myth, the greenskin looms high over humanity’s future.  Occasional purges of Orkyforms in the Tri-Sector typically keep them in check, and very rare purges of Orkysystems succeed in erasing them from worlds entirely, but outside the borders of the Imperium, this is effectively impossible.
Still, there are potent opportunities for Explorers, Rogue Traders, and the Inquisition among the Orks of the Exo-zone.  Some of these Orks made their Orkholds on the ruins of lost Imperial colonies, or even ancient Terran Federation ones.  Other Orks make their ships from the remains of lost human vessels, or those of xenos that exist well outside the reach of Man.  Should these worlds, resources, and shipwrecks fall into Imperial hands, they could surely be traded to the Adeptus Mechanicus for vast sums of wealth.

First, these Orks must be defeated.  The Deathwatch of the pre-Cloudburst era of what is now the Tri-Sector made periodic forays into the Exo-zone from Drumnos’s trailing edge to kill what Orks lurked there.  As the Imperium decays, Cloudburst’s expanded size has allowed the Deathwatch to strike deeper, but the reliability of the Astronomican’s visibility has prevented much more activity in that regard.

The highest and most immediate xenos threat in the Oldlight Exo-zone of which the Imperium is aware is the Ork Boss Bluddwrencha, who has been gradually assembling a sizeable fleet along the Drumnos and Cloudburst border with the Exo-zone.  So far, the Adeptus Mechanicus Basilikon Astra has been able to hold the Ork back without serious trouble, but the Boss is clearly only testing the defenses of the Imperial border.  Bluddwrencha makes its headquarters upon the hollowed-out moon Xaff, just frustratingly out of reach of most Navigators’ skills of guidance.  There, the Boss has begun drawing together disparate forces from multiple Clans of Orks that dwell in the Exo-zone.
What the Imperium has not yet discerned is that the Boss is but a servant of a much deadlier threat.  The Warboss Grimbones, a Freebooter turned conqueror, defeated Bluddwrencha into the service of Waaagh! Grimbones, which the new Warboss has assembled with speed that would horrify the Inquisition if they were to learn of its existence.  It was Grimbones’ Waaagh! that the Big Chief Squiggothrider was going to join when the Space Hulk diverted to Oglith.  It was the psychic call of Grimbones’ Weirdboyz that the Orks now trapped on Foraldshold were answering when that conflict began.  Even now, Space Hulks and warships of the Greenskin menace creep through the Warp, seeking out the beacon of Grimbones’ psychic agitation to join the Waaagh!