cast and ECAFs

Notable Persons
Lord Sector Cloudburst, Rhemortho Quintus
“Hate is a fine shield, but don’t mistake it for armor.  It can strengthen your arm, but if you wear it around you at all times, there will be nobody nearby when you need them but enemies.  I have so, so many enemies.”

The burden of shielding worlds from the encroaching darkness of the void is a hard one to bear.  The leaders of Imperial Sectors vary widely, but by the time a politician has ascended to such high rank that they command a large portion of the Imperium, harsh reality has generally weeded out the lazy and the overambitious.  Rhemortho Quintus serves as the Lord Sector Cloudburst, and at least nominally leads the Administratum delegates to Cloudburst Circuit colonies and outposts.
Quintus is the second of his family to ascend to the position of Sector Overlord.  He is a ruthless but pragmatic man, as he must be to survive the overwhelming political pressure exerted on him by his subordinates for resources to fight the Glasians.
Politically Quintus is a Celeste animal through and through.  He has a taste for luxury, a taste for fine women and food, and is actually a passable target shooter, by the standards of Cloudburst nobility.  His responsibilities weigh on him more and more as the strategic situation in the greater Imperium deteriorates.  He has taken to spending long days away from the noise of Cloudburst’s maze of tunnels in the resort towns of Celeste, trying to destress.  This has not helped his popularity, especially in the face of the mounting threat of the Seventh Glasian Migration.  The dozens of worlds that depend on his leadership often find themselves fending off unrest without direction from him.

This is not to portray him as incompetent.  He is simply not prepared for the absolute turmoil in which the Imperium finds itself in these dark times, with Chaos, Orks, and far more pressing at the walls.  Quintus is a capable and experienced administrator and bureaucrat, and has excellent human resources instincts.  One thing he is not is a military leader.  He has some logistical skill, but when the time comes to undertake any consequential military action in the Sector, he leaves nearly all of the work to Lord Admiral Maynard and Lord General Senioris Xoss.
Quintus does not have any sway in the Inquisitorial Palace of Cloudburst, despite his position.  This is, of course, a reality all Sector Overlords must someday come to accept, but Quintus has even less control over the Inquisition than most, thanks to the fact that the Inquisitorial Palace is in another Subsector entirely from his own palace on Cloudburst.  When he does need to interact with Inquisitors, the Maskos Palace sends somebody to find him, and they have developed an unnerving habit of simply appearing in his personal quarters or starship.

Quintus does have his own ship, but rarely uses it for more than travel from Cloudburst to Celeste.  The vessel is a Magnifico Star Yacht, which he bought from the Grand Anchor after their breakers prized it from a Space Hulk.  It is not rated to fly with a Navigator as it has no Throne for them.  If ever he needed to evacuate the system, he would need to do so aboard another ship.  The yacht, which he has named Moon Glitter for some reason, serves as a convenient meeting place for visiting dignitaries, especially those who may not pass the strict background checks needed to land in the sealed tunnel network of Cloudburst.

Despite his cool interactions with the Inquisition, the other institutions of the Cloudburst Sector receive him more gladly.  He gets along cordially with the Blue Daggers’ Chapter Master, Lord Ranult Arden, and is at least somewhat friendly with Lord Fabricator Beraxos.  He does not see eye-to-eye with Cardinal Drake, whom he sees as being profligate with the Ministorum’s wealth, and who sees him in turn as being stingy and aesthete.  The two men are cordial in public, however.  Ironically, the only other Adeptus leader in the Sector with whom he gets along quite well is Lord Marshal Oolan, in whom he sees a kindred overworked spirit.

Quintus lacks military experience, but he has worked extensively with Navigators in the past as they are assigned to vessels in the rapidly expanding Battlefleet Cloudburst.  Because of the paucity of Navigators and Astropaths in his Sector, Quintus has gotten to know several new arrivals well, and he privately agrees with the Adeptus Astra Telepathica that the sector needs more, quickly.  The Tyranids have bypassed his Sector so far, but there is no real chance of that staying the case indefinitely, and psykers are the only ones who can get out warnings of imminent Tyranid movements quickly enough to respond.

So far, Quintus has had few direct challenges from the Glasian Migrations.  Their invasion of Celeste occurred before his parents met, and they have not returned to challenge his home system’s defenses head-on.  He is one of the Sector’s loudest proponents of a radically expanded Battlefleet and support network, and his control of the Sector’s purse strings has ensured that their flow of new ships and men has gone uninterrupted.  However, there are logistical and monetary concerns that his position can’t address, such as how nearly every shipyard in the entire Sector is already making ships as fast as it can be done without errors.  Throwing more money at the problem can’t make servitors and serfs craft faster.  However, it can buy new shipyards, and Quintus has seriously considered buying pre-fabricated ship cradles from Fabique in Naxos to expand Celeste’s orbital yards.

The Quintus family has only ruled the Sector for eighty years.  His place on the throne came about as the result of an arranged marriage by the Ordo Famulous between his parents.  The Quintus family was one of the top three landowning families in the entire Celeste Subsector, so their name was well known in the Sector even before his ascension.  However, the previous Cloudburst Sector ruling family had fallen from grace after several well-publicised abuses of Ecclesiarchial resources and the monumental mistake of ordering the Blue Daggers to suppress a rival family, which neither the Ministorum nor Astartes tolerated.  The Colliard family promptly shrunk to insignificance as their economic ties evaporated overnight.  Rhemortho’s father, Blanchard Lumierre Quintus, assumed the throne, but died seven years later of a heart defect.

In appearance, Quintus is every inch the Imperial politician.  Like many high nobles in the Sector, Quintus dresses to impress, regardless of cost.  Every stitch he wears, day in and day out, comes from the prestigious Flaxweave Foundry on Thimble, as befits a man of his station.  His clothing of office integrate a small Conversion Field, just in case.  He carries with him his dueling pistol, even though he has not had to draw it in defense for over a century.  The threats to a person in his position are numerous, and it pays to be prepared.  He also carries a heavy stave of office, decorated with Thimble silver and Nauphry gold, and a master-crafted dueling pistol.

Emilie Rastimos, Chief Inquisitorial Astropath and Adept Choirmaster
“The Warp talks.  Did you know that?  Not the things that live there, no, the Warp itself.  It hisses when we fly through it.  It laughs when we curse it.  It opens its arms and its mouth and its legs when we die.  Oh, don’t be so dramatic, it’s the literal truth.  Don’t believe me?  Go look at the faces of Navigators after a day of hard work and tell me nobody’s been talking to them.”

The whispered secrets of the Inquisition are entrusted to as few people outside the holy Ordos as possible.  Lightspeed is a cruel mistress, however, and the Inquisition needs to send messages as much as the next branch of the Imperium.  When a message needs to be sent from the Maskos Inquisitorial Palace, it is Chief Inquisitorial Astropath Emilie Rastimos who orders her seven subordinates to do it, if she doesn’t do it herself.  Rastimos is a cold, eerie woman, with the lack of eyes that characterize most of her order.  She never leaves her spire in the Palace, although with an apartment as luxurious and well-appointed as hers, few would.  She oversees the conclave of seven Astropaths in the Palace, each of whom has the highest levels of security clearance a psychic can have in the modern Imperium.  When the need arises for her to weigh in on matters psionic or the Inquisition needs her expertise on a task, they come to her.  This is her own arrangement, and it allows her a specter of control over her fate that she knows to be illusory, but finds comforting nonetheless.
Rastimos is not happy with her position.  Like most psykers in the Imperium, she finds a gram of self-loathing coloring her decisions, especially under stress.  The Imperium is a horrible place to live, and a worse place for psykers.  As an Astropath, her final sight was the Emperor, cracked and withered on his Golden Throne, shivering with power and agony as he took her eyes away.
Something about that, and growing up in the psyker-fearing populace of Cloudburst, broke her spirit.  Whatever she saw as the Emperor gilded her soul, it instilled in her a sense of utterly immutable loyalty, and a depressed sense of resignation.  She, moreso than even the most Radical Inquisitor in the Palace beneath her feet, thinks Mankind can’t win its millions of wars, not unless a miracle comes.

She is only forty five years of age, but her responsibilities and hideously painful Sanctioning have rendered her seemingly older.  She dresses in a smart black robe of office with a powerful psy-crystal staff of office, a focal artifact imparted to her as a gift from fellow psychic High Inquisitor Lerica.  She and Lerica have the closest thing to a friendship that their positions allow.  Conversations between them would give the opposite impression, though, as they are silent, and consist of Lerica staring at the metal plate Rastimos has affixed over her eyes while Rastimos stares back.

Lord Fabricator Lister Beraxos, Lord of Cognomen and Liege of ABX202020
“The Machine God inspires us.  The Omnissiah directs us.  The Motive Force propels us.  There is power in knowledge.  We’ve all heard the words.  How many people stop to think about them?  I mean really think about them?  What they mean, why they’re so important?  Nobody.  Nobody but those of us who will get everybody we know killed if we misinterpret them.  So lower your voice, girl, before you do something stupid.  Have a good think about what you’ve done.”

The Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, the Archmagos Executor of the Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and Northern Oldlight Exo-zone, the Liege of ABX202020, and the Fief-Lord of Foraldshold, Lord Lister Beraxos could make a fair claim to being the most powerful man in the Sector.  From his indestructible archaeotech labyrinth in the darkest dungeon of the Castle of the Forges, Beraxos sits at the center of the spider’s web of Techpriests and Tech-adepts that are all that keep the Sector from sliding into anarchy.
He does not give this impression.  Unlike Lerica, Quintus, Drake, Maynard, or even Arden, Beraxos is a believer in the lack of need for ostentation.  Beraxos eschews any flashy garb or raiment.  For an average citizen on the streets of any planet he doesn’t rule, Beraxos looks incongruously like an ordinary Techpriest, albeit an old one.  He wears his face unadorned by gadgetry, his robes are oil-stained and loose, and he only has four visible mechadendrites.

Beneath this exterior lies the mind of a genius.  Lister Beraxos is one of the most intelligent, ambitious, and dangerous men in Cloudburst history.  He does not look like a tank because he does not want to.  He does not dress like a fop because he likes it when Drake underestimates him.  He has so few visible augmentations because his augmentations are designed specifically to look like human flesh, and he has the bare-skinned face of a junior techpriest because the pseudoflesh mounted on his state-of-the-art facial augmetics is a work of art itself.
Beraxos is more than an administrator, a director, or a priest.  He is a master manipulator, and has more connections in random places across the Sector than most of its resident Inquisitors.  His responsibilities are heavy and getting heavier, but he would rather die than let his stress show visibly.  He is determined to shoulder the burdens of ruling over the Cloudburst network of Forge Satraps and outposts, by himself if at all possible.

Similar to Quintus, Beraxos is the first man in his family to ascend to a position of high rank.  Unlike Quintus, Beraxos loves it.  Lister Beraxos is a name that history shall have etched into its metal pages, he confidently believes.  He is loyal to Mars, unshakably so, but to his subordinates, that looks more changeable than it really is.  He likes to keep his options open, or appear to, and that makes him hard to predict.
In these times of Ending, when the Imperium teeters on the brink of wholesale societal collapse, the Mechanicus benefits from men like him whether it can bear admitting that or not.  Beraxos has done more to preserve and expand Cognomen than any Lord Fabricator it has had since the day it was founded.  By his order, whole fleets of Explorator vessels ply the hot gas of the Circuit, collecting knowledge and power for his hoard.  The laboratories of Cognomen churn daily, producing data and results.  Even if some are retreading ground that Mars laid down millennia ago, that does not discourge or redirect him.

Mars rarely reflects the loyalty of its subjects.  This is a sad but true state of affairs that has persisted across the breadth of post-Isstvan history, when trust in the Imperium died forever.  Even the most loyal and pious Forge Worlds, Lucius and Voss Prime, rarely enjoy the full support of the entire Martian catalogue of ancient blueprints and STC data.
Of course, Mars doesn’t have all of the ancient blueprints and STC data, but even that which it does possess is rarely doled out generously.  Some Forge Worlds older than the Unification Wars don’t have the means to build the Baneblade, a twenty-one thousand year old tank.  Time and again, Beraxos and his predecessors and subordinates have begged for blueprints, designs, artifacts, anything to alleviate the burdens of defending and providing for the people of Cloudburst, and with the notable exception of their permission to make the Legion Congelatio, silence has been their reply.

Beraxos has had enough of silence.  By his order, the Forge World has begun building a Knight World satrap, ABX202020, in the nearby system of ABX2.  Beraxos has authorized the creation of weapons based on recovered archaeodata from the Cloudburst Circuit without waiting for a reply from Mars, and has even begun ordering his Explorators to begin conquering pirate bases in the Cloudburst Circuit and the dense nebulae between Cloudburst and Drumnos, in anticipation of needing more defenses in the region later.

The acquisition of knowledge, firepower, and bases is hardly in opposition to Martian doctrine, naturally, so there is little question as to whether Mars or the Inquisition would complain too much if he were in contact with his superiors, but Beraxos knows full well, as all Techpriests do, about the importance of ritual and protocol.  He is simply not going to wait for a yea or nay on building a force of Knights, he is not going to wait for approval to enslave the pirates he captures and work them to death in his mines, and he has stopped caring to pause for a Solar response before producing non-standard Dreadnought designs for the Blue Daggers.

Will there come a reckoning for Lister Beraxos?  Maybe.  Until then, he holds his mechadendrites high, knowing that he is doing more for Cloudburst than Mars ever has.  Privately, Beraxos knows he is crossing lines.  He does not allow his subordinates, even his planned replacement Archmagos Lucana, to know how much he hates defying the letter of the law.  His belief in Mars and the Machine are not purely doctrinal; Beraxos is a philosophical man, and he knows how easy it is to allow justification for acts to become excuses for acts.  He confides in nobody, but he can feel the weight of his silent defiance pressing on his mind as he sits alone in the Cogitation Chamber of his Castle.  It may also be, he has admitted to himself, that Mars has far bigger problems.  Perhaps their silence stems from severe distraction, not rudeness.

His other responsibilities sometimes blessedly intrude on his moody introspection.  As Lord Fabricator, the process of transforming Cognomen from the isolated patch of grass it used to be to the unthinkable powerhouse of a true Forge World falls under his purview.  Beraxos spends fully half of his waking hours on the task of overseeing the expansion of the shipbuilding capacity of the Sector, and much of the rest directing the millions of laborers and Tech-adepts under his authority to improve and multiply the manufactorae and forges of Cloudburst’s few industrialized worlds.  Beraxos himself hates fighting, and would rather run and live to run another day than risk himself in battle.  He hasn’t been to a world that isn’t Cognomen or Celeste in eighty four years, and doesn’t intend to unless Solstice needs him to fill in for its leadership in an emergency.

If the Techpriesthood of Stygies were to learn of the secret lab that he and Paris are building to study Glasian technology, they would scramble to aid him, and he has pondered telling them, perhaps in exchange for the Leman Russ Vanquisher cannon blueprints they have hoarded.  The problem there is that he would never be able to start building them without other Forge Worlds noticing and asking questions, and he is simply not as enthusiastic about the potential of Glasian tech as Paris is or the Stygies Techpriests would be.  He is fully prepared for Watch Station Peacekeeper to be a complete writeoff.

Beraxos believes in maintaining positive relations with the subordinate groups of the various Mechanicus military forces.  Among the forces of Cognomen Subsector alone, he counts PDF, Guard, Navy, Basilikon Astra, Explorators, Skitarii, Secutarii, Knights, Electro-Priests, Titans, and his own personal bodyguards.  The full count of Sector-wide Mechanicus martial assets includes Legio Cybernetica robots and the Ordo Reductor, as well.  On paper, the conventional Astra Militarum forces answer to the Subsector Overlord, but since the Subsector Overlord essentially answers to him regarding the disposition of his forces’ equipment and transport, Berxos could quite possibly give them orders.  He isn’t stupid enough to try, of course, as that would shake Mars from their distraction faster than anything else could, and if they didn’t kill him, the Inquisition would.
Still, he treats his colleagues in the autonomous or Martian branches of the military with respect and distance.  Thanks to the extensive reforms instituted after the Schism of Mars, he can directly command very few forces himself.  Ultimately, the future of his interactions with Mars comes down to their reception to the revelation of the existence of House Matraxia.  If he were to create his Knights House on Cognomen itself, he could point it to Mars and say, correctly, that Mars already has a Knight House – Taranis – so he would hardly be breaking precedent.  He chose to put the House on ABX202020 because he can exert control over who comes and goes to the system, and so that they have room to grow and flourish.  However, to anybody who sees this, it would look like a guilty party covering up knowing misconduct.  Beraxos is between a rock and a hard place, and he lives with it every single day.

Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Cassandra Lerica
“Hope is a medicine.  If you take it when you need it, and you take the right amount, it can save your life.  It can make you stronger.  It can help you survive.  If you take too much, or from the wrong place, or when you don’t need it, it kills you.  Never forget that.”

The Inquisitorial presence in Cloudburst is as old as Imperial colonization, but its current footprint is new.  Inquisitors visited Hapster and a few of the smaller border worlds that Cloudburst absorbed after its creation, but there was rarely much reason for the Inquisition to linger when their work was done.
Now, things are different.  Now, the Inquisition holds court over all manner of dangers and distractions to the mighty Imperium, and they do so from the Palace of Maskos, under the watchful eyes of Cassandra Lerica.
Lerica butchered her way up through the ranks of the Ordo Xenos.  Her ferocious cruelty towards practicitoners of the Cold Trade in xeno artifacts in the Cloudburst Circuit was the stuff of legends two hundred years before she became the leader of the Ordo Xenos in the Cloudburst Sector, or the Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst one hundred years later.  In her time before sitting on the Black Bench at the Court of Precedent in the Maskos Palace, Lerica reveled in taking to the field, alongside the Deathwatch or not, and bringing the electric agony gauntlets she wore to the faces of smugglers and heretics across the breadth of the Circuit.

As her responsibilities grew, Lerica grew more and more disillusioned with her hands-on approach to punishing violators of the Emperor’s laws.  Luckily, she found herself interested in the mechanics of running large-scale infiltration and coordination missions, and her natural psychic power helped her considerably.  She used her powers and her rank to direct covert actions personnel from her retinue and the Officio Assassinorum to bring down Cold Trade and proseletyzation groups that dealt in alien lies.
Finally, after her two hundredth year in the field, the death of her superior allowed her to rise to Lady Inquisitrix of the Ordo Xenos in Cloudburst.  Along with this responsibility came the role of Inquisitor of the Chamber in the Watch Fortress Dascomb.  Her extensive experience in the field, battling those who salvage the debris of the alien empires the Deathwatch destroys, lent her some credibility in the eyes of the Watch Commander, and she has served as the Inquisitor of the Chamber ever since, even after becoming Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst.

In adjudication, Lerica strives to present a face of reason and temperance, even given the vigorous disputes among branches of the Holy Ordos in the Cloudburst Sector over how best to distribute resources to endure the Glasian and Ork menaces.  The most obvious distraction for the Cloudburst Inquisition is the fact that each Glasian Migration leaves behind gigatons of material from their ships, corpses, and vehicles.  While most Imperial citizens follow the edict not to tamper with or collect such things, Imperial Guard troops sometimes take relics as trophies, which has led to more than one death.  The competing interests and cabals within the sector conclave also spar for limited resources for their own projects.  In this regard, Lerica definitely shows favor to the Ordos Xenos and Malleus, despite her best intentions.  The lesser Ordos and the Hereticus grumble about this at times, but they would be hard-pressed to find greater consistent threats to Cloudburst than the Glasians and Orks, and the personal attention of Tzeentch.
Lerica does not like Rhemortho Quintus.  She sees the Sector Overlord as being unprepared for the dangers of his job, and possibly unable to make the call to abandon a world if there is a chance that the Glasians will take it.  Her suspicion has never been tested.  She has never hidden her contempt, but she also does not act on it; she understands the need for unity in the face of the Glasian and Ork menaces.  She has a bit more patience for Lord Fabricator Beraxos, since he shares her disgust for the Glasian technology that each Migration leaves strewn about their home Sector, and has so far obeyed her the standing order to dispose of it to the letter.

Lerica has considerable psychic skill.  Like most Inquisitors with psychic power, she has never needed Sanctioning before the Throne.  She stabilizes her psychic power with psybernetic implants in her cheeks and neck, which allows her a wide assortment of extra-sensory perception abilities.  Her weapons of choice are a digital melta and two master-crafted hotshot laspistols, which she can charge from the feeds in her artificer power armor, or with independent power cells she carries on her carapace armor.  When aboard Dascomb, she prefers a silver robe over silver noble’s attire, replete with hidden Teleport Homer/Recaller.

Lord Inquisitor Oscar Havermann, Ordo Hereticus
“So many people haven’t a clue what heresy is.  Heresy isn’t having thoughts, beliefs, ideas.  It’s about refusing to change thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.  Change them to the correct way of thinking.  That way is the way of the Emperor.  What else could possibly matter?”

Oscar Havermann scares the living daylights out of his own colleagues.  As the former Chief of Witch Hunters for the Ordo before his promotion out of the role, Havermann is the most experienced and decorated psychic-tracker in the entire Cloudburst Sector, and his own psychic power aids him immensely in this regard.  Given how low the psyker birthrate in Cloudburst is, any sign of non-Sanctioned psionic activity in the Sector is fairly easy to detect.  Before his promotion, Havermann used his Fast Clipper Banelight to skip from system to system, capturing hedge sorcerers and killing out-of-control psyker youths.

Since his promotion, Havermann oversees the efforts of the cadre of Ordo Hereticus personnel in the Cloudburst Sector.  His second, Jerome Paltmitier, fields far more often than Havermann does, now, and Havermann is just slightly too professional to resent that.  Havermann does not like having to spend so much time in the Palace in Maskos.  He would greatly prefer being in the field, doing what he does best.  Instead, he must spend time in meetings with Lerica, Heung, and Kimihira, arguing about precedence and money.
One task he does relish is interrogation.  Havermann is a relentless and penetrating interrogator, able to ferret the slightest heresy out from the most misleading of lies.  The fact that so many worlds in Cloudburst are primitive, and have only the vaguest idea of what the Emperor actually is makes this challenging.  Is somebody collected from a primitive world’s population actually a heretic, or simply poorly educated?
This is where his psychic power comes into the fore.  Havermann is superhumanly skilled at detecting lies.  He can read minds and body language like a book, except for when faced by the most skilled dissemblers.  Havermann has caught Imperial Navy officers, a Mechanicus Magos, and even members of the Adeptus Arbites in heretical thoughts, and has sent them all to the stake.

There is no person in the galaxy that troubles Professor Unarvu more than Havermann.  The two have never met, but Unarvu is a realist when it comes to the odds of his meticulous planning surviving contact with Havermann’s power and cruelty.

Havermann is whip-thin and tall, with long black hair and cybernetic eyes he can cause to glow on command.  He dresses in a black overcoat with a black waistcoat over a red business outfit from Thimble, which lends him a darkly, even theatrically threatening appearance that only somebody with his appearance could pull off.  He has no outward signs of his psychic gifts, which makes it all the more surprising when he uses them.  In battle, he employs concealed armor to it fullest advantage, wearing it under his clothing, and prefers the use of a Power Sword and Hellpistol.

Lady Inquisitrix Mizuki Kimihira, Ordo Malleus
“You know what I’ve noticed about aristos that consort with daemons?  They all regret it eventually.  Not the peasants, not the middle classes, just the nobles.  Even if it takes a while, even if it kills them, they all regret it.  I used to wonder why, but I think I know now.  They fear egalitarianism.  In the Warp, after I kill them, they’re no more powerful or important than any other dead soul.  They’re just food or sex toys for the next hungry spirit to pass by.  They regret losing the power they had in life.”

Among the daemon-worshippers of the Cloudburst Sector who actually make a study of their opponents in the Imperial government, there are none they fear more than Mizuki Kimihira.  She has been a silent, contemplative, thoughtful, and unavoidable force of order and law in the Sector for over two hundred years.  She uses a variety of technologies and psionics to maintain her aging flesh, and has essentially trapped it at the age of forty, but even if she allowed more of her age to show, it would change nothing about her capability.  Kimihira is, without question or doubt, the single most powerful psyker in the Sector.  She is at least a mid-Beta on the Imperial Assignment Scale of Psionics.

Conventional human science does not hold a place for a being of her combination of self-control and psychic power in its present evolutionary model of humans.  This is not to say she is wholly unprecedented, even among Inquisitors, but the relative lack of psychic humans in Cloudburst does make her presence all the more conspicuous.  She is an outlier, of the sort that the changing times have made ever more common of late.  Imperial medicae suspect that humanity is becoming more psionically-active, and people like her may be the proof.  No academic paper would reference her directly, however, as no person outside the Adeptus Arbites, Astartes, and Inquisition are aware of her power, save Chief Rastimos.

Kimihira is more than a potent psyker, however.  She is an experienced and capable hunter of daemons.  Clad in her silver-plated Terminator armor, armed with Power Halberd and Blessed Rotary Cannon, and outfitted with enough explosives to level a building, she often does not need her retinue of psykers, sharpshooters, and priests to assist her in purging a daemonic cult from the spires of Thimble or the rolling forests of Celeste.  When she does bring her retinue with her, she usually relies on her combat bodysuit and collection of psi-reactive knives and pistols instead.  In addition, she is a master telekine, easily able to flick a truck onto its back with a single wave of psychic power.  Her subordinates have orders to knock her out or even kill her if she ever loses all control of her power.

Kimihira hates having to lord over the Ordo Malleus, especially since she has so few chances to slip away and fight the good fight.  She and Havermann get along well, although her relationship with Hueng is more acrimonious.  She respects Lerica’s centuries of experience, but ultimately would prefer to return to the battle.  To the profound annoyance of Herman Rothschilde, she has never bought into his worldview that Cloudburst is doomed and on the verge of total collapse.  While she readily admits that the Sector’s aristocracy is entirely too concerned with appearance – and so is the Ministorum, for that matter – she thinks his gloomy worldview is just pure laziness.  Every time she has ever brought the glowing tip of her psychic-enriched Force Halberd down on the heart of a sinner or deviant, they have promptly evaporated, after all.  If Rothschilde would just shut up and get back to work, she has told him bluntly, some of the problems he insists can’t be solved would evaporate.
Some of her own subordinates whisper that she is in some degree of denial about the extent of the problems facing the greater Imprium.  Kimihira herself would insist that she is aware of them, probably better than most, and prefers attacking them head-on to letting them fester.  This has not served her well in her role as the Lady Inquisitrix of the Ordo Malleus Cloudburst.  Some of the younger, more politically-minded Inquisitors of her Ordo think her to be too easily distracted to serve as their leader.  None have yet acted on this, but if she continues her blithe disregard for the political realities of the Conclave, that may change.  As it stands, she rejects the various factional labels of the Inquisition, saying they provoke disunity in the ranks when unity is the only thing that can provide a means of finding defense against the sheer volume of foes Humanity must now overcome.
Given her distaste for the political and philosophical factionalism of the Inquisition, one could be forgiven for thinking that she rejects philosophy in general.  That would be an unfair characterization of her mindset.  She is a profoundly philosophical person, but her philosophical mindset directs towards the understanding of the presence and extent of the Emperor’s vision in the lives of His citizens, not the balance of power of its government.  Fully one third of the daemon cults she has encountered in her centuries of service have arisen from the ranks of nobles of Celeste, Maskos, and most especially Thimble.  She has seen over and over how often the idleness and philosophically dead Imperial nobility leads itself to thoughts of a better life in the Warp’s thrall, and how often those responsible have tricked themselves into thinking they will somehow escape the fates of the billions of other humans around them.

Kimihira is not of noble birth herself, but she does not oppose the feudal system of the Imperium to such an extent that she would ever try to take action against the system itself.  Overall, she simply finds it too susceptible to corruption.  She and Paltmitier have taken down entire witch covens by themselves, all of them founded from the lesser scions of Noble families and Rogue Trader houses.  She has worked with the Grey Knights on only two occasions, simply because they are so rarely called to the isolated Cloudburst Sector.

Lord Inquisitor Xi Gian Heung, Ordo Xenos
“Cost?  You ugly shitter, you think you know about cost?  Throw a ship the size of a moon into a star without touching it!  Then we’ll talk about cost!  Bring me my Throne-damned gun!”

Xi Gian Hueng holds the distinct honor of knowing more about Glasian biology and technology than any other person alive knows.  The relentless, coarse-tongued cyborg warrior has been present for three Glasian invasions, more than any other person outside the Blue Daggers.  He is the only one of the four senior Inquisitors of the Conclave Cloudburst with no psychic talent, but he doesn’t need it.  His custom Power Armor and collection of esoteric human and alien weapons are more than enough to bring him victory.  He has worked with the Deathwatch and the Blue Daggers dozens of times, usually in pursuit of alien forces in the Cloudburst Circuit, but sometimes in the harder-to-navigate Exo-zone to trailing.  Hueng is a practical man, and unlike several of his peers in the higher Inquisition, does not mind his relegation to more directoral positions as he grows older.  He still takes to the field at times, and usually does so at the personal behest of his superior, High Inquisitor Lerica.
Hueng has somewhat more time available for his own research and investigations than he might normally.  The position of Inquisitor of the Chamber for the Deatchwatch of Watch Fortress Dascomb is traditionally held by the highest ranking member of the Ordo Xenos in Cloudburst, and two times out of three, that makes the Lord Inquisitor Xenos the Inquisitor of the Chamber.  However, Lerica did not forfeit her position when the Senate of the High Lords offered her elevation to Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst.  This leaves Hueng time to oversee his subordinates more directly.

His coterie of acolytes, Throne Agents, and Interrogators are the bane of the Cold Trade, the moving of alien artifacts through Cloudburst.  Thanks to the unfortunate proclivities of the nobility of Thimble, he has stationed a team of his acolytes there permanently, where they make their services available to the Arbites.
Hueng’s hate for the Cold Trade seems hypocritical to those who encounter him, given that nearly fifteen percent of his augmetics and weapons are alien in origin.  Indeed, both his favored wrist-mounted las-lancers and his thyroid-replacing augmetic are Jokaero products.  However, Hueng is also a man of limitless willpower and self-restraint when it comes to the actual use of alien technology, whereas the Highborn of Thimble have levelled buildings in their overzealous use of alien weapons in their sporting duels.
This is less of a distinction than any Arbitrator would admit in a court of law, but Hueng is long past caring about the contradiction in his worldview.  He has brought entire alien pocket kingdoms and small-scale Ork incursions to heel by himself, and has fought shoulder to shoulder with the Deathwatch against the Glasians before.  As is the case with so many Inquisitors, he ignores contradictions in his own persona conduct if the result is a demonstrable improvement in the Imperium.  Of course, as a hard-bitten old cynic, what constitutes ‘improvement’ may consist of a return to order, even if the order is just the quiet of the grave, or a terrified silence.

Hueng isn’t without compassion, but hundreds of years of hard work have burned it out of his demeanor.  It was Hueng who made the call to destroy the Space Hulk Inescapable Approach rather than attempt to salvage it, despite over two hundred Imperial Navy sailors still being trapped aboard.  Hueng also led the purge of the freighter Calliope after a passenger smuggled out a transmission that there were genestealers aboard.  Thanks to the invasions and Migrations of the Glasians, he has had to send entire cities to the pyres after they were exposed to the Warp energies of destroyed Glasian ships.
He is also the loudest opponent of Watch Captain Paris’ plan to build a bunker for Glasian tech on Lorelei, deeming it to be too large a risk.  Paris counters with his own argument that the Glasian tech is too potentially valuable to destroy if parts of it are provably uncorrupted.  Ultimately, although the Deathwatch is the Chamber Militant for the Iniquisition’s Ordo Xenos, individual Inquisitors do not have the authority to override a Watch Captain’s decisions without a substantial body of evidence, which Hueng cannot produce.
Still, Paris isn’t blind to Hueng’s centuries of experience.  He has acceded to the gravity of the circumstance, and added additional automated defenses and failsafes to the facility, which has neither made the locals feel better nor assuaged Hueng’s worry.

Of all of the Lords Inquisitor in the Sector, Hueng thinks he has the hardest job, and has occasionally even given voice to this opinion.  He may even be right, but the rest of the Conclave has little patience for such an attitude.  Hueng is less popular than Lerica outside his Ordo, not that he cares.

Lord Inquisitor Eric Stoldst, Ordo Sicarius (presumed Xenos)
“What a pretense we have, we of the Inquisitive nature.  How easy is it to see our power and assume we may kill whomever we wish?  Ah, but the Emperor was no fool, and he saw that such things were possible.  How fortunate are we, that I watch the watchmen?”

Inquisitors are a secretive bunch, even among their own ranks.  Secrets and knowledge have power.  Their misuse or overabundance can bring ruin to innocents, wreck carefully laid plans, and inspire heretical thoughts in undefended minds.
Among the Ordos of the Inquisition, there are few more secretive, yet more purposeful, than the Ordo Sicarius.  As one of the newer permanent Ordos, and also the most limited, it has a mere handful of trained members outside Terra, where there are several thousand.
The Ordo Sicarius oversees the dispatch of Imperial Assassins.  The Senate of the High Lords of Terra keeps careful watch on the Assassins, and for good reason.  However, at times, Assassins are needed to correct the balance of Imperial justice, and when they are, the Senate authorizes the Grand Master of Assassins to dispatch a killer to see the task done.  The Ordo Sicarius keeps careful watch on both the administrative and deployment functions of the Officio, to ensure the Officio doesn’t repeat the mistakes of The Beheading.

Stoldst is one of the rare Sicarius Inquisitors who is not stationed on Terra.  As part of his responsibilities, he both keeps a weather eye on any Assassins in the region, and also directs promising Culexis candidates to Terra for screening and training.  However, the Ordo Sicarius sent an Inquisitor, and a Senate-appointed Lord Inquisitor at that, to Cloudburst, where he has been posing as a Lord Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos for seventeen years.
The committee of Lords Inquisitor, consisting of Hueng, Kimihira, Havermann, and chaired by Lerica, knows perfectly what he really is, and they are the only ones.  Even the Deathwatch is presently under the assumption that Stoldst is simply an exceptionally scholarly Inquisitor.  He has deceived them all, at the behest of the Senate itself, in order to comb through the Sector’s history and present turmoil, looking for any signs of rogue Assassins.
Cloudburst is the perfect place for a Traitor Assassin who has not sold their souls to Chaos to hide.  Its planet clusters are far enough apart that travel between them without a Navigator-guided ship takes weeks, its military capabilities are expanding at a lightning pace, and its borders are in constant flux.  Beyond that, there are dozens of small criminal organizations and one or two very large ones where a genuine Imperial Assassin could ply their trade and raise little suspicion, while living like a king.  Most importantly, however, the Sector has far bigger problems.  The Glasians consume the attention of the whole Sector, and the Astronomican’s projection range continues to shrink.

Stoldst has his suspicions, and he believes that one of the higher-ranking members of the Free Corsair Coalition is a former member of the Vanus Clade, the branch of the Officio that handles indirect assassination.  Of all the clades, however, theirs is the hardest to detect, especially in contrast to the thrashing violence of the Eversor or soul-melting hate of the Culexis.  If Stoldst is right, it would help explain why the FCC has been able to expand so quickly: they have an infocyte aiding them in finding holes in the Imperial defenses.  Stoldst has been covertly sending aid and money in the direction of the task force Lerica has assembled to take down the FCC, and the task force’s members are none the wiser.

Stoldst, naturally enough for a Sicarius, rarely enters battle himself, but when he does, he relies on his absurdly oversized Iron Halo and adamantium-plated Power Armor, which cost fully seventeen times the price of a baseline suit.  When fighting the armor-piercing rounds of a Vidicare, or the razor-sharp blades of an Eversor, such things are necessary, after all.  His weapons of choice are a custom Hotshot las-rifle with underbarrel grenade launcher and a set of twin Power Gladii.  He also carries a variety of Stunner and Concussion grenades, as well as a bag of potent Phosphor bombs – in his experience, a fire is one of the things that even professionals need time to adust to mid-battle.

Inquisitor Jerome Paltmitier, Ordo Hereticus, Chief of Witch Hunters
“If you could tell a Witch by sight, my job would be so much easier, but far bloodier.  Some Witches know that they can’t shield their taint forever, but try anyway, and so in their hiding, do less damage.  If every Witch knew they couldn’t hide, they’d just kill at random.  Some do anyway, of course.”

The Cloudburst Sector may have an anomalously low psyker birthrate, but it still has one.  Psykers are as dangerous when untrained in Cloudburst as they are everywhere else.  To find Witches, the Inquisition needs a Witch Hunter.
Oscar Havermann vacated the position to become Lord Inquisitor Hereticus Cloudburst, and Jerome Paltmitier stepped in.  Paltmitier is not psychic, but he does have a keen sense of perception, and he is almost as good at smelling a lie as Havermann is.
However, where Havermann relies on cold, sinister subtlety and psychic powers to get what he wants, Paltmitier affects brutishness.  When he is pursuing a suspected witch, he quite deliberately projects the image of a calculating but violent brute, barely holding back violence, and placated only by honesty.  When he is pursuing a known witch, Paltmitier behaves more like his true self: quiet, purposeful, and chillingly efficient.  He is one of the most successful users of acting talent in the course of his duties in the Cloudburst Ordos, and has repeatedly attempted to pass these skills along to his subordinates.  Among the other Inquisitors of the Ordo Heteticus, Paltmitier is respected for his skills, but widely held to be unlikable and distant, with no real affection for any of his subordinates or colleagues.  His skill and success rate in hunting witches speak to his century and a half of experience.

In battle, Paltmitier is an archetypal With Hunter, albeit better equipped than most.  He wears a cutom suit of Carapace Armor with a vacuum-sealable helmet in his pack, but usually goes about with the tall hat and black glasses so common to his Ordo.  He uses a Power Sword and an Inferno Pistol, one of the few in the Sector, as well as a much larger Stalker-type bolter he master-crafted himself.  It has a combi-attachment of a stake launcher, but the weapon is large enough that even the six foot four inch tall Paltmitier can’t fire it one-handed.
In fact, Paltmitier constructed many of the most powerful artifacts of the Witch Hunters of Cloudburst.  He finds the Sector’s relative lack of advanced technology irritating, both because the Mechanicus has had ample time to fix it and because others accept it passively.  In Paltmitier’s mind, there is no reason to accept a status quo that inconveniences those few humans with the power to alter their destinies.
When he is not hunting Witches, Paltmitier spends his time working in the Maskos Palace’s forge room with the few Techpriests who work there.  There, he makes the custom bolter shells of his rifle and power packs for his pistol, inscribing them with silvered Ward-sculpt and runes.  He has also made some custom weapons for his favored acolytes and Throne Agents.

Inquisitor-Captain Lord Gwiddon Thomas Walsh, Rogue Trader and Inquisitor, Ordo Hereticus
“Who says power corrupts?  I’ve been fighting for the Emperor for three hundred years, and nobody could call me corrupt.”

If Lord Cloudburst Quintus and Lord Fabricator Beraxos are the two most powerful men in the Cloudburst Sector, the third must be Walsh.  Holding the position of both a Lord Inquisitor Hereticus and a Lord Rogue Trader with a Greater Warrant of Trade, Walsh can travel anywhere he pleases and do almost anything he wants in the pursuit of the defense of the Imperium.  He has the arrogance to match his station, and wealth beyond the reckoning of most humans.  Walsh is one of only five individuals in Cloudburst history to ever level the command of Exterminatus towards a world, specifically the alien hellhole of AHG131 in the Circuit, for the crime of using planetary-scale brain networking technology looted from ancient human ruins.

Walsh has been a Rogue Trader longer than an Inquisitor.  His parents and older sister died in the catastrophic reactor failure of their vessel.  Luckily, the family’s original Warrant of Trade was in the family vault on Celeste at the time, and so he was able to prove his ownership of the family business.
Naturally, some whispers of suspicion fell on the young Thomas Walsh that he was responsible for the loss of his family, but those faded away after four decades of meteoric shifts in the family’s fortune.  Walsh made himself absurdly rich, by staking claim after claim on routes between the Sector and the Circuit, and by finding staggeringly rare archaeotech treasures for the Mechanicus out in the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Even before he caight the eye of Inquisitor Gorli and she subtly added him to her network of informants, he had laid two small alien kingdoms to waste and begun the process of adding a new world to the Imperium.
Walsh would sometimes disappear into the darkness of the Circuit with no more than a single Frigate packed with as many supplies as it could carry, stay off the grid for a year or more, and then return with vast riches and tales of adventure.  It was his ship, the Gilded Nobility, which sunk the notorious pirate Redbar Skullswipe and halted his Ork fleet in its tracks.  Walsh was there on the day that Inquisitor Lerica condmned the entire Hivrekk species to extinction and threw their asteroid hive into a black hole.

With such a record of working with the Imperium’s many institutions, it was no real surprise that the young Captain Walsh would fall into the orbit of the Inquisition.  Hundreds of thousands of Inquisitors have worked with Rogue Traders in the past, to find lost human worlds, destroy dangerous aliens, navigate treacherous Warp Shoals and Gravity Tides, and even prosecute wars against the Emperor’s foes.
However, Walsh is in the rare position of being both an actively-serving Rogue Trader and an actual Inquisitor, which while not unprecedented, is extremely rare.  Most Inquisitors find themselves hunting down their fellow man to kill them for crimes against the species, while Rogue Traders spend most of their time flying about beyond the reach of Imperial law.  Likewise, Rogue Traders’ tasks are to collect obscene wealth for themselveds and bolster the Imperial economy by killing its enemies, looting its neighboring space, and retrieving lost technological relics, while Inquisitors are encouraged to avoid becoming distracted by personal wealth.  Finally, Inquisitors have a limited remit to ignore certain Imperial laws, while Rogue Traders have been out to death – sometimes by Inquisitors – for ignoring those same lows.

However, Inquisitor Gorli saw potential in the Rogue Trader.  Time and again, when he sent her snippets of information describing un-Imperial conduct amongst his peers in the Rogue Traders of the northern Segmentum Ultima, Gorli saw a distinct contempt for the members of the Houses that ply their work near the Circuit.  Conversely, when he encountered other Traders who held themselves to a standard, Walsh’s tone was neutral, and strictly reported the facts, leaving his speculation and opinion aside.
That was the sort of behavior Gorli expected from a peasant, not a noble.  In her experience, the higher the rank of a person in the hierarchy of the Imperium, the more likely they would be to think Imperial law no longer held to them.  Gorli was intrigued enough to place him as a successor for herself if ever she perished on the job.

When she did so, rooting out the Cult of Blessed Whispers on Nauphry IV seven years later, Walsh assumed her Inquisitorial Rosette.  Other Inquisitors, especially those who knew Gorli personally, reacted with disgust, especially when Walsh added Gorli’s ship and Throne Agents to his own assets.  Walsh then disappeared into the Cloudburst Circuit, where he spends most of his time.  Unlike many Rogue Traders, Walsh has no interest in having children, intending instead to leave his Warrant and title to his neice, and thus spends as little time in Imperial space as needed.  Now, with a coterie of his own Agents and his network of Trader ships, Walsh plies the stars, looking for worlds to add to the Imperium, by word or by torch.

Ideally, at least in the minds of his Rogue Trader peers, Walsh would stay the hell away from the Imperium anyway.  His colleagues and competitors mutter that no one man should have that much power, and that nobody who has come to his title by so many coincidental deaths should be able to act with near-total legal impunity.  Regardless, Walsh now sees most of them as far beneath his station.  While his council of master economists and marketeers keep most of his financial assets churning without his personal oversight, Walsh has gradually redirected more of his attention towards hunting down heretics in the Houses of other Rogue Traders, which has shriveled up his support among his peers completely.
His largest foil among the Rogue Trader houses is a former Imperial Navy Admiral named Madeline Prinz.  She is the only Trader in the Sector with a pedigree shorter than House Walsh’s but a larger fleet, and she has made it her mission to irritate the more powerful Trader whenever she can do it without attracting the ire of other Inquisitors.

Walsh’s personal philosophy commands him to pursue those whose thinking is too deviant to benefit the Imperium, and about the only organization in the Imperium with which he has positive ties with no acrimony is the Ministorum.  He has brought Missionaries on every trip he has taken into the Circuit after the first, and makes sure to include the highest-ranking Ecclesiarchial personnel on his ship in most of his decision-making.  Nobody knows whether this is an affectation or honest faith.

Walsh routinely enters battle alongside the mercenaries and soldiers in his service, even at the head of a full battalion at times.  His preferred combat regalia is a suit of artificed Carapace armor, with a full set of Digital Needlers on each hand and a Storm Bolter custom-tuned for his physique.  Walsh looks like a holo star and knows it, and he has gone so far as to make posters for his recruitment centers with his own face and dashing profile on it, which just irritates other Imperial officials even more.

Ultimately, Walsh is a confusing figure for the rest of the Imperium.  He has lived through a life that most people would have killed for, but he apparently hasn’t.  He has made enemies and rivals in the most powerful institutions in the Cloudburst Sector, even while employed by them.  He pursues wealth and power with zeal, but no more zeal than he uses to hunt down his own colleagues when they disappoint him or betray his principles.  He has pursued his colleagues and other human heretics and criminals with terrifying vigor, yet never raises a hand against his own rival.
He is an odd man, and a powerful one.  Most other beings in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit avoid him assiduously.

Inquisitor Herman Rothschilde, Ordo Malleus – isstvanian in denial
“Cloudburst!  What an apropos name it is, for this benighted cluster of stars!  Wastrel worlds with wastrel guardians, shivering in the cold when they should be running towards a fire.  Darkness is coming to Cloudburst, and its people are too lazy to evade it!”

In this Time of Ending, enemies beset the Imperium on all flanks.  Times like these produce heroes, when the folk of the Imperium are thrown into the crucible of war.  In times such as this, the greatest leaders and prophets of Mankind have arisen to lead humanity from the darkness.
Herman Rothschilde thinks himself one such hero.  His colleagues think him a whiner.  His subordinates worship the ground he walks on, and if any outside his immediate circle knew the full extent of his plans, they would burn him at the stake.

Rothschilde was a student at the Scholam Progenium on Septiim Primus, and his instructors settled on the Inquisitorial path for him.  As a boy, he was always asking questions, trying to learn things no classmate cared about, and trying to see the why of things when most people just cared about the how.  His superiors rightly concluded that that was the correct mindset for an Inquisitorial prospect.  He was elevated to the rank of Lesser Acolyte in the retinue of Lord Inquisitor Nolan in M41.831, and has served in the Ordo Malleus ever since.  For the first forty years of his Inquisitorial service, initially under Nolan and later as an Inquisitor himself, Rothschilde was a profoundly Puritan Inquisitor; he was quick to bring down the silver blade on the slightest hint of daemonic corruption.  However, after that time, things began to change.  Slowly, Rothschilde felt more like the Cloudburst Sector was to blame for its own problems.
He loathes the Chaos Gods and the other beasts of the Warp, but Rothschilde now thinks that at least some of the problems that bedevil the Sector are caused by the Sector itself.  Not in the spiritual sense, like the Titanshields Secutarii of Cognomen, but the sense that so many of the Cloudburst Sector’s leadership is either too lazy to learn the risks of their roles, or too lazy to actually implement any meaningful improvements in the Sector, or its defense against daemons.
Rothschilde thinks that the Sector’s current predicament, the Ork and Glasian invasions, are proof positive about his own personal views on the Sector.  Beyond any machinations of the Great Enemy, Rothschilde hates how stagnant and unprepared the Sector is.  After each Migration, the only instiututions of the Imperial government that seem to prepare for the next ones are the Daggers, the Navy, and the Mechanicus.  The Administratum just falls back into their lockstep routine, the Guard practically goes on holiday, and the Ministorum goes back to leeching the proles dry.  The other Adepta barely even matter in the overall scheme of the Sector, even the Sororitas, who seem to view the Glasian Migrations as a minor annoyance and not the catastrophic threat they are.

However, among all the institutions of the Cloudburst Sector, there are none for whom Rothschilde reserves more scorn than the Ministorum.  Rothschilde hates the Ministorum, or at least its local branch.  He sees the Ecclesiarchy as the ultimate problem for much of the Sector, and he has a whole laundry list of arguments to support his claim to anybody who will listen.
They deviate from the more restrained path of Sebastian Thor, but that is the least of his concerns.  He sees how they vacuum up all of the money in the Sector that isn’t sewn into their parishioners’ pockets, and wonders what kind of defenses such money could bring.  He has watched with growing disbelief as they have entirely failed to select a new Cardinal for Thimble, despite it having a large enough population to justify one for hundreds of years.  Septiim will be large enough to merit one in a few more years, and they haven’t even begun the process of selecting a Cardinal for the system.

The Ministorum is doing reasonable work in the Circuit and the primitive worlds of the Circuit, but their indolence in the bureaucracy and the utter mess they made of Thunderhead are still crippling both.  Cardinal Lamarr is so openly flouting the Decree Passive that it’s a miracle Havermann hasn’t burned him at the stake, or it’s evidence that Havermann is even more distracted than Rothschilde.
Almost as infuriating is the Ecclesiarchy’s complete inability to enforce their own strictures.  Woldenbar, Haggard, and half a dozen other major Heretics in the Cloudburst Sector’s history have come from the Ecclesiarchy’s ranks.  Rothschilde has learned of Lamarr’s fixation on Eldar and finds it confusing – there are no major groups of Eldar in Cloudburst.

With indolence and impiety come Chaos, and Rothschilde has fought the servants of the Great Enemy many times, usually on Imperial soil.  Tzeentch’s machinations mean that there are few daemonic incursions in the Sector proper, so Rothschilde usually works on the border between the Cloudburst and Naxos Sectors.  There, he has seen the armies of Nurgle trying to smash down the gates of Cloudburst.  While fighting the Heretics and daemons they bring to the very edge of his home Sector, Rothschilde has seen hundreds of thousands of lost souls, clawing at the membrane-thin walls of Imperial defense that hold back the powers of Ruin.
He is now convinced, after watching Cloudburst do essentially nothing to prepare itself for what comes after the end of the Migrations, that Cloudburst is doomed to fail.  In his mind, the walls are coming down; even if Cloudburst survives the Glasians (which seems unlikely to him), there is no way that the Sector will survive what comes next.  He is, ironically, unaware of the Night Slaughter.

His beliefs have dragged him closer and closer to Radicalism.  He does not think of himself has being a member of any of the political philosophies that dominate the Inquisition, but the closest to his personal worldview is the Isstvanian.  Rothschilde has begun covertly instigating small-scale battles in the Cloudburst Sector, and lending aid to others who do the same.  His hope is that if the Sector faces military challenges outside the Glasian Migrations, they will become more able to survive when the Migrations worsen or end.
So far, he has turned material from shipwrecks over to Orks to alow them to build more weapons, he has turned a blind eye to the actions of small cults on Thimble and Cassie’s World, and pressed arms on several mercenary groups that have shown willingness to side against the Imperium if paid well enough.  He has also diverted a few uncorrupted Glasian artifacts to the Thimble Highborn houses, in the hopes that their intercine squabbles provide adequate training for the Thimblan Argent Shields.
He has plans to start shifting more resources, perhaps even whole Guard regiments, away from their current duties and into fighting these threats soon.  The FCC and the Ork incursions are perfect for his plans.  The irony that these wars are draining the Imperium of the very resources it needs to fight the Glasians is lost on him.

There is one line he is not yet ready to cross, and that is engaging with the powers of the Warp directly.  Rothschilde is not a psyker, but even he knows the risks of trying to use the Warp to his advantage.  Thus, he has not tried to soften the guard against the powers of Nurgle, nor has he risen to actual sabotage of Imperial military forces.  If he became aware of Professor Unarvu’s plans, he would probably try to stop them.  He has also avoided using Chaos-tainted equipment from the Glasian Migrations.
The greatest threat to his continual use of his strategy is other Inquisitors, as is often the case for Radicals.  If Oscar Havermann were to learn of what he is doing, the cruel Lord Hereticus would almost certainly kill him for it.  If Lerica were to learn he has used some un-corrupted Glasian equipment in his arsenal, she would drag him in for censure.
Thus, Rothschilde walks a razor-thin line between sabotaging the Imperium and trying to strengthen it.  His cadre of personal supporters and agents think him a genius, and undyingly complete his tasks in anticipation of his eventually being proved right, when the walls come down and the stars fill with the armies of Nurgle.
In battle, Rothschilde uses a custom suit of Power Armor that interfaces with his cybernetic implants.  He prefers the use of a Power Sword and Thunder Shield, but has made use of a bolter as a ranged backup when needed.

Inquisitor Lawrence deWalt Prang, Ordo Xenos – Counter-biological Warfare specialist, used to be Ordo Hereticus
“If only humans were the only species that knew how plagues work.  Throne, that would be so much better.  But no, no, of course not.  Eldar, Chaos, everybody uses bioweapons these days.  So long as they do, I’ll be there, outsmarting them.”

Of all the Imperium’s servants, Inquisitors must face the broadest variety of threats.  The sheer range of potential troubles an Inquisitor can see on the job is staggering to the uninitiated, and no one Inquisitor can possibly have the resources to contain them.  As such, some Inquisitors dedicate themselves to cataloguing all of the threats they have encountered, to smooth the path for their successors.
Chief among them in the Cloudburst Sector is Ordo Xenos specialist Lawrence deWalt Prang.  Prang got his start in the Ordo Hereticus, investigating rumors of human experimentation by recidivist Hereteks in the Drumnos Sector.  After becoming an Inquisitor in his own right, Prang followed whispers of similar activities to the Cloudburst Sector.  After finding and apprehending his targets, Prang stayed in Cloudburst to learn what he could of the local Conclave’s knowledge of such things.
However, in little time, Prang learned that the true threat to Cloudburst wasn’t Hereteks (ironically, he is unaware of Magos Gabris’ experiments).  The Inquisitor learned of the horror of Ghald, and the strange spores its mountains use to control the minds of any eukaryotes they encounter.
Prang was fascinated by the spores.  As he investigated similar organisms, looking for parallels, he eventually found himself being drawn into the art of Xenobiology.  Eventually, he switched Ordos entirely, and took up pursuit of his current mastery of counter-biological warfare.

Sadly, the field is wide open.  The ever-more hoarding nature of the Mechanicus prevents their discoveries from percolating out to the rest of the galaxy.  Prang has ample resources and decades of experience, but few other Inquisitors aid him in his research.  By the direct and pleading request of the Subsector Overlord, Lady Lowenthal, he has moved his research into the belly of his ship, a remodeled Itus livestock barge, where he and a team of loyal Tech-adepts labor over his gene sequencers and plastic molders, seeking to learn how humanity’s enemies have made their weapons in the past.
Every once in a while, other Inquisitors will come across something that they need from him, or perhaps wish to trade to him, and he usually cooperates as long as they don’t disrespect him or waste his time, which is also disrespectful to him.  His ship, the Vitiae, has traveled the length of the Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors, seeking remnants of ancient weapons and current xenos civilizations.  On rarer occasions, members of the Astra Militarum have approached him directly to beg aid in overcoming new alien weapons, and when properly motivated, Prang may even take to the field alongside them.  When he does, he wears a custom-built suit of Power Armor with extra redundant environmental seals, and a built in Heavy Flamer.

Rogue Trader Lord Crado Zutash
“Money, dear boy, money!”

Nothing turns the average Rogue Trader’s eye like a bit of wealth.  Among Rogue Traders in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, Crado Zutash is the one viewed with the most envy by his peers.  Zutash has a positively uncanny ability to find valuable salvage, from armor to whole starships.  He has led expeditions into the darkness between Imperial worlds for over seventy years, seeking treasure and glory, and he has found both.  Zutash sunk the notorious pirate Light Cruiser Robber with nothing more than his two frigates and some cleverness, only a few months before his father died and left him his Warrant.

Other Traders eye Zutash with a mixture of awe and suspicion, not because of any suspect conduct on his part, but because he seems to be able to perceive things others can’t.  He has found ships thought lost for centuries in heaps on alien moons; he found and escaped the Eldar ghost ship Elrenoss, and he was the one who discovered the ruins of the Rak’gol warship Unglok on the edge of the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Zutash has actually built up his fortune faster than Walsh has, despite Walsh’s greater connections.  He is a frequent and welcome patron of the Grand Anchor; he has contributed multiple shipwrecks to their collection.  Like most of the Rogue Traders in the Sector, Zutash has a single ship from which he commands his assets.  Unlike most other Traders, he also uses a personal deep void platform to cache his treasures between missions, and stages his fleet from there.  He also has a mansion on Celeste, as many Rogue Traders do.

Zutash is a heavyset man with a preference for expensive clothing, and never travels without an extensive retinue – warriors for the field, beautiful women around the home.  He has clashed with Lord Sector Quintus on jurisdictional mediations between his own House and the Mechanicus in the past, but he hasn’t forced the issue.  He knows the Mechanicus is too valuable in his own efforts to alienate completely.  He doesn’t like Quintus, and the feeling is mutual.
Lord Zutash does get along better with one person: his son Fox.  Fox is a treasure hunter in his father’s employ, and usually travels with him on his missions, learning the secrets of the acquisitions trade.  The two men are inseparable, which is especially remarkable given that neither can remember who Fox’s mother is.

When in the field, Lord Zutash travels clad in a great Power Lifter he has reconditioned with what he earnestly hopes to be the flashiest possible gold plating job ever applied to a powered exoskeleton.  He finds that it capably distracts potential enemies from the team of cameoline-clad snipers that usually follow some distance behind him.  He usually arms himself with an Inferno Pistol and a Power Sword, just to show off that he can afford them.

The Zutash family is one of the oldest families among the Rogue Trader houses in the Cloudburst Sector, but it only became one of the richest after Crado took over.  The house has been able to survive as long as it has because it had over one hundred smaller businesses bringing in wealth from the freight lines and Circuit Outposts.  However, by the time Crado took the Family Warrant from his own father, he recognized that that was not why his family had been gifted a Warrant.

Archbishop Haggar of Oromet – Captured and executed
“Souls aren’t a currency, you twit.  They’re worth so much more than gold or glory!  Gold goes up and down in price, people forget gory, but SOULS!  Oh, they are eternal, and they are all mine!  To guide.  Yes.”

Lord Chapter Master Ranult Arden – Master of the Blue Daggers
“If the Glasians tracked casualties, my name would be their leading cause of death.”

Lord Commissar Beleph Dour – Master of the Night Slaughter
“My stalwart warriors, know this: one day, this Sector will flood with terror.  Daemons will walk in the daylight and scour the innocent.  When that happens, we will be there, unshakeable and proud, and we will smite them to the ground.”

Admiral Langdon Reith, leader of the FCC
“Work with aliens?  Why not?  If they like money, they come work for me.  Everybody else does, sooner or later.”

Monica Lanbrie, Canoness Superior of Celeste
“So you still have no desire to repent?  Truly?  I am saddened.  No, not for you, but the Exsanguination Harness takes so long to clean after each use.  I shall have to get one of the Initiates to do it.  No, it’s too late now, you had your chance.”

Cardinal Drake, leader of the Arch-Diocese Cloudburst
“Faith is a beautiful, lovely, perfect thing, and thus must be protected.  It must be shepherded and guarded carefully, nurtured when underfed and glorified when natural.  It must also look good.  Faith that isn’t expressed properly is just… it doesn’t mean as much, you know?”

Cardinal Lamarr, leader of the Jodhclan Diocese
“NOOO!... Oh, Page.  No, thank you… just the nightmares again.  Do me a favor, my lad, order another patrol of the walls, would you kindly?  The knife-ears almost got me that time.”

Ortam Lesarien, Eldar Corsair commander of the FCC
“Gold is for idiots and the easily distracted.  Give me sport!  Give me challenge!  Give me power!  That is treasure, oh yes, true treasure.  What can gold bring me that personal satisfaction and the terror of my enemies can’t?”

Watch Commander Domack of the Imperial Fists
“Cloudburst Sector is my ward, my bastion.  It is a bulwark against the neverending darkness, and as long as I live, it shall remain as such, unless the Emperor Himself dismounts the Throne to order me to do otherwise.”

Watch Captain Paris of the Blue Daggers
“Why do I bother?  Isn’t it obvious?  We’re wasting time and resources fighting these bastards the old fashioned way!  The Glasians are crafty sons of bitches, and we can learn from their leavings.  It’s not unprecedented.  If the Officio Assassinorum can use alien weapons, who’s to say the Deathwatch can’t learn from aliens, too?”

Watch Captain Roganuharu of the Celestial Knights (nepali for germs) [cataphractii armor terminator honors]
“No, I do not know when I will go home to my Brothers.  It’s alright, though.  This Sector is worth defending.  I have brothers with whom to train and pray, I have foes to butcher.  I have my faith and my arms, and a good ship to carry me.  No, it’s not home, but life is good here, and I shall stay.”

Watch Captain al-Hasat of the Storm Dragons
“I understand rivalry, and I understand animosity.  I can tell them apart.  Some Chapters have one or the other, some have both.  Our enemies have them too.  Balancing them perfectly is an art form.  I have mastered it.  It’s like heating gas molecules: predicting the movement of one is impossible, but if you control the space into which they flow, they take the shape you want even if keeping track of specific bits can’t be done.”

Lord Admiral Maynard – supreme admiral of cloudburst
“How does a region of space so empty cause me so many Throne-damned problems?”

Lord General Senioris Xoss – supreme general of cloudburst
“Silver knives, hot laser, brass bullets.  That’s the way!  Let Arden and Lerica plot their plots and hatch their schemes.  Give me aliens to shoot and good men to lead, and I’ll punt these birds right in the cloaca, every time.”

Professor Merrick Unarvu – leader of Slaanesh cult on Coriolis
“Do you know what I want, more than anything?  I want everybody’s life to be as much fun as mine.”

Magos Gabris – brain surgeon
“The nerve pathway passes through a small gap in the bone structure here.  A single nervous bundle carries the signals from the sensory perceptors in the fingers and cuticles to the larger nerves in the elbow here, under the cartiledge.  See?  If you put the probe here, you can feel the pain from when I cut you, but you can’t move to stop me.  Isn’t that interesting?”

Magos Lethicos – discoverer of Tendril
“Fuck this place.”

Governor Chadwick Haupstmann – Subsector Overlord of Cognomen Subsector
“Sometimes I wish I did not have to rely on others to do my job.  It’s hard to find good help, but you can if you try hard enough.  I just like the peace and quiet.  You know?  I do my best work with a cup of water and a lho stick where I can reach them, total silence all around me, and no people in white and red getting in my way.”

Master of the Administratum Maskos Samantha Lowenthal – Subsector Overlord of Maskos Subsector
“This is my ancient home, sir.  Do not disrespect it.  I said do not!  Rogue Trader you may be, but I am an Overlord, and if ever you dare levy troops from my factory workers again, I shall have you fed to my lions.  What, you don’t have your own lions?  Hmm.”

Harek abn Alnasr, Clan Ahad, Lord Subsector Thimble – Subsector Overlord of Thimble Subsector
“By the threads of my loom are the Emperor’s armies clothed, by the sweat of the brows of my citizens do they soar over the land, and by the work of my hands, shall my family rule in the Emperor’s name.”

Lord Subsector Nauphry Matheus Soldati – Subsector Overlord of Nauphry Subsector
“My planet is bipolar, but by the Throne are we hitting our quotas!  I say, do you think it would make things better or worse if I announced a formal competiton to see who can open the most new mines in a month?”

Lord Subsector Delving Miles laDremankine – Subsector Overlord of Delving Subsector
“The darkness rises against the Aquila’s endless light.  I see it every year.  I can read the projections of my mines and refineries, you know.  Every year, a bit less goes to luxuries and a bit more goes to warships and such.  How much longer can we hold shut the gates of hell?”

Lady Subsector Hapster Astrid Oskoldr – Subsector Overlord of Hapster Subsector
“The blood in my veins is bronze.  My people have killed, bled, prayed, sailed to the tune of the Senate for eleven thousand years.  Let Celeste take the credit for building Cloudburst; my people know the truth.  Hapster is Cloudburst, and the Glasians will have to kill every single one of us to break us.”

Lord Subsector Oglith Darren Atongwë – Subsector Overlord of Oglith Subsector
“The green tide threatens to drown us all.  How many generations of my family have utterly failed to fix this problem?  I fear that before this is over, the Atongwë family will have a new martyr in its holy ranks.”

High Queen, First Princeps Remilia Matraxia – leader of ABX202020
“I used to shuffle papers.  Now I rule a planet, when they let me.  Soon, there won’t be an alien alive in the Sector who isn’t terrified of me.”

High Prince, Princeps August Cobus Matraxia – Second of House Matraxia
“To the Throne do I offer my service.  To my High Queen do I offer my loyalty.  To the Machine God do I offer my obedience.  To my species do I offer my shield.  To the foe do I offer my hate.  To my world, do I offer my nobility.  Finally, to my family, I offer myself, and may I lead you into battle until my eyes fail and my bones turn to dust.

Magos Prannan duPree – Magos Dominus of the Basilikon Astra Cloudburst
“Faster, Tech-rate!  Faster, you fool!  Praise the Omnissiah, I’ll take this Hulk or I’ll kill you all for not taking it for me!”

Lady Trader Admiral Madeline Prinz – Walsh’s rival
“Money’s nice, but by the Throne do I look good.”

Lord Marshal Persinius Oolan – Chief of Arbites
“In theory, Law serves Justice, and the Arbites serve both.  In practice, this Sector is full of hopeful idiots, each of whom think they know the law better than me.  I don’t mind.  It keeps the mind sharp, and the truncheon swinging.”

Marshal C. (Chrysanthemum) Lumina Copperlain – Chief Arbitrator of Hapster
“I can arrest lawbreakers until the cell walls buckle, but I can’t plug a hole in the sea.”

Lord General Halwart – leader of the Oglith defenses
“Orks?  It’ll be a fight, then.  Lots of Orks?  It’ll be a good fight.  They landed on Oglith?  Then it’ll be a LONG fight!  Strap up, gentlemen, there’s business afoot for His Finest Men!”

Lixivim Dill, real name unknown – rogue Vanus Assassin in employ of FCC, official kill count 1667
“I can kill with a whisper.  I do kill with a whisper.  The best kills are the ones I read about in the news a week later.”

“Mimic,” real name unknown – Vindicare Assassin under Lord General Halwart, official kill count 2102
“Subject has experienced liquefaction from the mid-stomach upwards.  Assessment: prototype necrocyte round is overkill.  Recommendation: immediate deployment.”

If Lord Sector Quintus, Lord Fabricator Beraxos, and Lady Inquisitrix Lerica have all the power, and Lord Walsh has the money, Lord Halwart has the secret weapon.  The Vindicare Assassin codenamed Mimic is the single deadliest person in the Sector, on a scale that would even give Oscar Havermann pause.  Mimic has been killing enemies of the High Lords, sometimes whole familes of them, for over forty years.  He has spent much of that time in hypno- or cryo-sleep, and his neural cybernetics have been pumping him full of technical data and mission profiles the whole time.  He has killed a Black Apostle of the Word Bearers, a Necron Praetorian, and most recently and impressively, the rogue Inquisitor Xavien in the nearby Drumnos Sector.  Now, he has set his sights squarely on the Ork who leads the army that is assaulting Oglith, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.
If anything, Mimic’s total kill count is actually too low.  He has stopped counting the security guards and other, similar trash that litter the path he crosses to reach his targets.  If he did, the number would be well over five thousand.  He simply can not be stopped.  Halwart has even asked him – with exceptional care – if advertising his presence would shore up the morale of the troops a bit, but Mimic knows that he is externally no different from any other Vindicare, so it would mean little.

“Civil,” real name unknown – Vanus Assassin under Lord General Halwart, official kill count 157
“If another human sees me at work, something has gone horribly wrong.”



Emergency Command Asset Force (ECAF):
This formation is unique to Cloudburst.  It consists of a single flag-grade officer, usually a Brigadier General, along with their Honor Guard, a small group of specialists including Chaplains, Sanctioned Psykers, Commissars, and Stormtroopers, a handful of vehicle crews, and roughly two hundred veteran infantry.  These forces stage from Coriolis and Septiim and fly to their destinations in Fast Clippers manufactured over Hapster.
Each ECAF dispatches to locations where official Guard leadership is needed, and take command of whatever forces await them.  ECAFs dispatched to sites of larger conflicts, where an officer higher in rank than Brigadier would command, instead serve as advisors to whomever is already present, perhaps to fill gaps in a chain of command.  The field units from each filter out to cover deficiencies in the present Guard or PDF structure, while the specialists and advisors either attach to the command staff to consult, or take to the field as well as force multipliers.  The exact composition of ECAFs can change as Sector Command attaches or removes assets as needed.
For instance, it is common practice to append an extra sniper or rangefinder to an ECAF that will be taking command over an artillery-heavy formation, to augment their target acquisition capability, or a snowmobile Rough Rider unit to an ECAF that will take over an arctic warfare infantry force.  ECAFs can exert no control over Navy assets, but they do sometimes include paratroopers with an attached Imperial Navy transport.

Each ECAF lasts only as long as it needs to in order to complete a mission, after which all surviving personnel and equipment are recycled into the general pool of assets on Coriolis and Septiim.  When an ECAF is needed, the Imperial Guard authorities on Septiim and Coriolis pack whatever personnel are needed into the new ECAF, which is then given a serial number and the services of an Astropath, shoved into a Navy ship, and sent wherever they are needed.  Of course, not all Imperial Guard and PDF officials take well to being displaced by a newcomer from off-world, but when the alternative is losing a war, they generally manage to stifle their pride.

Elevation to ECAF General is challenging, and the criteria are different from most advancement opportunities in the Imperial Guard.  In order to be promoted to a flag-grade rank and become eligible to assume command of an ECAF, an Imperial Guard officer must have spent at least two years as a Colonel or Lieutenant Colonel in the Guard and have won at least two campaigns against the Emperor’s enemies.  Given that wars in the Cloudburst Sector are usually either small brush fires among factions in a planetary population or fought by Rogue Traders in the Circuit, this means that there are relatively few opportunities for a Guard officer to actually qualify to run an ECAF inside the Sector proper.
Thus, many ECAF Generals rise to their rank by beng part of a regiment raised to fight in the constant battles against Chaos in the Naxos Sector or against the neverending pirate hordes of the Drumnos Sector.  The Inquisition is aware of this and encourages it, for the most part.  High Inquisitrix Lerica may not call herself a Mondominant, but she does hold its tenets that humans should work together to drive all other contenders for galactic rulership extinct in high regard.

Some ECAfs arrive in time to see the war they were supposed to oversee end before they can make a difference, either because the Imperium has lost or because the PDF and Guard were able to drive their threat away.  When that happens, by the request of Sector Command, the presiding General can become a permanent part of whatever remains of the Astra Militarum structure on the planet, or collect any survivors and take them for quarantine and interrogation elsewhere.  On the rarest of occasions, an ECAF may merge entirely with the command structure of an existing larger formation of the Astra Militarum, and serve as the elite core of that formation.  However, this costs Sector Command their most experienced assets, and is done only if Sector Command believes that there is a significant chance that the planet in question might actually fall if it is not done.

Because of the scarcity of psykers in Cloudburst and the sheer distance between Cloudburst and Terra, ECAFs are sometimes the only source of Primaris psykers and War Psykers in an Imperial command structure.  Their use against pirate forces in Drumnos is especially devastating; even pirate lords with a pet hedge witch or two cannot counter the raw, horrible power of a Terra-trained Adeptus Astra Telepathica War Psyker.  A Primaris Senior can devastate a whole infantry company with just a few seconds of prep time, drive daemons back into the Warp, or explode the minds of Orks; mere pirates stand little direct threat.

The ECAF model is so successful that some Imperial Commanders have pointedly asked why so few other Sectors have embraced them.  The obvious answer of territorial conduct by nearby Sectors, jealous of their own structures and tactics, doesn’t seem to hold up, since the Imperium is desperate for advantages over its enemies.  In reality, however, the layout of most Sectors prevents the ECAF structure from being especially useful elsewhere, since most Imperial Sectors are more densely-packed with worlds than Cloudburst.  Cloudburst’s astrogeography has small clusters of worlds shoved close together by the billowing gas of its host supernebula, isolated from each other by up to a dozen light years of hard-to-traverse, radioactive space and Warp rifts.  It also has a relatively low population and few psykers.  Other Sectors simply do not have these problems, and so the ECAF structure would be more redundant than helpful.