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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.  Rogue Traders are supposed to be bold and opportunistic explorers, not just merchants.  He shook some ships loose from their other obligations and struck out into the voids of space, seeking glory.  His story could have ended there, in ignominy or silence, but instead he returned seven months later, with a captured hoard of ancient technology secured in his holds, and his rise to power assured.

Zutash flies a number of ships when his quest calls for it, but his preferred vessel is the Endurance class warship Bargaining Position.  He has given it expensive and thorough upgrades, from its armor materials to its engine power, as well as refrigerated cargo holds for perishables.


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.”

No one human in history has ever caused as much trouble for the Cloudburst Sector since Horus as has Archbishop Haggar.  The fiery, impassioned, secretly psychic preacher turned most of a planet against the Imperium, and set the stage for another do to the same centuries later.

Haggar’s roots on the planet ran deep.  His father and mother were both employees of a large cathedral on the young colony, the largest in the system.  When he was thirteen, his father realized he was psychic, but could not bring himself to turn the young lad over to the Arbites.  Eventually, Haggar did away with his parents by means unknown, and entered the clergy, living off his parents’ wealth.
As Hagger grew, he sought out every scrap of lore about psykers that he could find, ostensibly to help identify them among his own parishoners.  As he learned, he focused his power, and gained a level of control over them that few outside the Scholastica Psykana ever gain ono their own.  By the time he was forty, and had risen to become the second highest ranking member of the Ministorum in the entire system, he had gained the ability to influence the faces of Tarot cards.

After ten more years of practice, he had perfected his Tarot skills.  A mastery of common sleight of hand and his own psychic skills allowed him to force his Tarot cards to display whatever images he wanted.
It was time to make his move.  Over the next few months, Haggar began working his way into position to succeed his superior, the current Archbishop.  When the Archbishop died of a pulmonary embolism, Haggar naturally took his place.  One year later, he made his historic announcement that he could read the Tarot.  When local Astropaths disregarded that, knowing it was impossible, Haggar had already won.  He began performing public readings, using a combination of his own psychic and sleight skills to force the cards to show whatever he liked; when he tried to read them naturally, the Emperor showed him only Death.

When a local Astropath challenged him, he used his card skills to force a broken card into the Astropath’s reading.  When the Astropath finally noticed, the mob tore him apart for daring to accuse Haggar of falsehood.

Haggar’s story ended in flame.  When the Inquisition gained news of the events on the planet from a surviving Astropath, Haggar used his psychic power to manipulate millions into coming to his aid.  The Inquisition feared his pure, righteous power, he roared, and all who did not would fight for him!  The flock he had cultivated for thirty years streamed to his side, and the lines were drawn.  A gruesome siege followed, one that did decades’ worth of damage to the planetary capital’s infrastructure.
Eventually, after using white phosphorous and other non-conventional weapons to disperse the mad gangs of Oromet citizens, the Inquisition and a small army of support troops and Thimblan Argent Swords swarmed Haggar and captured him.  They beat him into a coma and dragged him into a shuttle.  When he awoke, he was sitting across from a man who made his brain hurt.  The man, a blank in the employ of the Ordo Hereticus, tortured Haggar for information, then threw him into space.
Thus in the cold and ignominy of vacuum did the life of Cloudburst’s worst Heretic end.


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

The Blue Daggers have been standing against the Glasians since before they were even called the Blue Daggers.  Beginning in the aftermath of the First Glasian Migration, the Inquisition assembled Exigent Task Force Cloudburst to fight off any recurrence of the threat, and so they did, one hundred years later.  After the Second Migration, the Inquisition and the Adeptus Astartes representatives in the Officio Munitorum convened to establish a new Special Circumstances unnumbered Founding, one to protect the Cloudburst Sector in general and the Septiim System specifically.  Their fourth-in-command was an ambitious Deathwatch veteran named Ranult Arden, and ever since the death of his predecessor, Augustus Alderoster, Arden has served as the leader of the Blue Daggers.
Arden started in the Novamarines, but he never felt quite the same strength of tribal afiinity for his people on Honorium as some of his Battle Brothers did.  Arden was an obsessive volunteer, and offered his services for every extra training mission or neuro-data load he could.  He never felt strongly attracted to any of the specialist occupations, like the Chaplaincy or the Techmarine Brotherhood, nor is he a psyker, but he did qualify for Thunderhawk piloting and gunnery roles, and is a confirmed double ace in a Predator Annihilator.
When the chance arose to enter the Exigent Task Force, he leaped at the opportunity and joined at the left hand of his friend, Augustus.  At the time, both men served the Novmarines in their Second Company, with Alderoster being its XO and Arden serving as the heavy weapons trooper in his Command Squad.  When the Angels of Fury and Novamarines contributed their arms and Brothers to the task, Arden sat in command of the fourth of four units of thirty Marines each, breveted to Brother-Lieutenant to make it official.

When the Glasians attacked the asteroid base of the Task Force during the Second Battle of Septiim, Arden barely escaped with his life.  He rallied other Brothers who had survived the madness of the space battle against the great Cylinder and boarded Assault Shuttles, then blasted his way into the device.  He and the other members of his unit raced to the heart of the Colony Cylinder and blew it up with melta bombs.

Upon returning to his ship and escaping with a few Brothers still in tow, Arden was hailed by the Sector as a conquering hero, and with the death of two of the other three unit commanders, he was formally elevated to the rank of Brother-Sergeant by the Novamarines.  However, shortly after that, the entire Task Force became a new Chapter unto themselves.  Augustus Alderoster, who held the line in the defense of first Celeste and then Coriolis, became the new Chapter Master, while he appointed his friend Ranult Arden to the rank of Captain of the First Company.

After Alderoster died in the Third Migration fighting the Glasians in orbit over Cognomen, the surviving members of the Council of Masters elevated Arden to become their new Chapter Master.  He has served honorably since.  By the time the Seventh Glasian Migration arrived, their technology and firepower had stepped up under Tzeentch’s gaze to pose an existential threat to the entire Cloudburst Sector.  Alderoster had already begun the process of expanding the Chapter from a few dozen survivors with the geneseeds of their fallen bretheren into a proper Chapter, but Arden threw himself into the task with manic energy.  He set a standing order for Apothecaries to institute monthly checks on each Battle Brother to establish the progress of their progenoid gland reconstitution, to harvest the geneseed the instant they were mature enough to do so, and also flew to each Deathwatch Fortress to ever have had Blue Daggers stationed therein to collect any geneseed they may have had.
Then, he began the process of further expanding the Chapter itself.  He had always thought it a bit overly constraining to force the specialist branches of Chapters to such a limited size.  Why, he asked, did Techmarine Brotherhoods need to limit themselves to such constrained numbers?  Surely, the Chapter would benefit if it had dozens of Techmarines instead of twenty.  If the Chaplain attached to a Company died in battle, would it befit the Company if there were no ready replacement?  What of the Apothecarion?

Arden had no intention of Legion-building or defying the Codex, but in his mind, there was no real gain to be found in the arbitrary limitation of the specialist branches of the Chapter.  The Librarius would always be understrength, there was no way around it; Cloudburst had so precious few psykers.  The other specialist forces would suffer no such constraint.  Other Ultramarine Successors complain about this at times, but Arden does not care.

Ranult Arden is not a man given to much philosophical introversion, but that doesn’t stop him from doing what he needs to do to defend the Cloudburst Sector.  He does not have the trust issues that affect some other Chapter Masters, athough he also does not hide his disdain for those Imperial officials who do not provide the aid his Chapter is due in the defense of the Sector.  The leaders of the Septiim Adeptus Sororitas are chief among these.

In battle, Arden uses a suit of artificer armor and a Power Bastard.  His ranged weapon of choice is a custom Combi-pistol of his own creation.  The primary weapon is a Conflagrator Pistol, one of only a handful in the Septiim system.  Its secondary attachment is a four-shot Heavy Stubber pistol, a gun that fires .60 caliber tracer bullets, with Mechanicus-grade Helix armor-piercing slugs.  It’s a combination that he believes unique, and allows him both anti-tank and anti-infantry capability up close.


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.”

Nearly all Imperial institutions are under siege in these decaying times.  The edges of the Imperium are crumbling away, and Cloudburst sits on the very edge itself.  Cloudburst and the Imperium need defenders, people who can and will put their lives on the line to protect it.
One such man is Beleph Dour.  Born to a family of Imperial Navy officers, the Scholam Progenium system picked him up when the ship on which his family served was lost in battle against pirates.  Dour entered the Commissariat, and displayed a natural skill for logistics, discipline, and higher learning that suited him well for the task.  Eventually, Dour became the Regimental Senior Commissar for a regiment of Thimble Argent Swords.
While serving the Swords, Dour caught the eye of Lord Inquisitor Cloudburst Vahnden, an Ordo Malleus Inquisitor who was first assembling the Night Slaughter.  The Night Slaughter only took the very best of troops from the Thimble military, those who did not have any sort of disciplinary problems or families to miss them.  Thus, while the presence of a Commissar for morale or oversight would be helpful, the Commissar in charge of the Night Slaughter’s training would not need to worry as much about refusal to follow orders or other common Imperial Guard problems as they would in the Argent Swords.

Dour was a natural choice, and took over the training of the Slaughter.  Because of their non-standard hierarchy, mission goal, and training circumstances, the Night Slaughter are led by their Senior Commissar instead of a flag officer.  The Slaughter has not yet fielded, although Lady Inquisitrix Malleus Kimihira thinks that will change soon.  The foundations of the Imperium are eroding away, and nowhere is the problem more obvious than the outer frontiers of human space.  Dour shares Kimihira’s belief that the Night Slaughter shall deploy soon, but has kept up the cryo-preservation routines and secret manufacturing that has characterized the entire Night Slaughter’s history, just in case.

Because of his responsibilities, Dour has few chances to do anything other than his job.  As one of the very few members of the Night Slaughter who is allowed to leave their secret underground base and go to the hives, Dour does infrequently get to enjoy some leave, but he takes the chance to do so less and less as time goes by.  As the Night Slaughter grows, he has more to oversee.
On a personal level, Dour lives up to his name.  He is quiet when off-duty, and he is slowly sliding into the habit of drink, but he is still smart as a whip.  Thanks to his juvenat treatments, he has lived for over two hundred years.  There will come a point after which they no longer work, but until then, he serves as the longest-presiding member of the Night Slaughter, bar none.

Dour carries a master-crafted bolt pistol and Power Sword as his personal arms, and is rated on all variants of the Guard standard truck, groundcar, and Sentinel.


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.”

There is no living enemy of the Imperial Navy in Cloudburst that angers them more than Langdon Reith.  To the Navy, Reith is a slap in the eyes.  He was one of them, a Naval officer, before he turned to crime, consorting with aliens, and eventually full-scale military insurrection.
Langdon Reith grew up on Septiim Primus, in an unremarkable family he has outlived.  The young Landon eventually completed school and joined up with the Imperial Navy Officers’ Corps, becoming a Junior Lieutenant after passing the Nauphry War College with few distinguishing points.  His record shows that he had relatively few noteworthy accusations and accolades in his time in school, with his only real area of excellence being academic topics like history and mathematics.

After graduation, Reith served as a lesser officer in the personal staff of Morlo Vakker, the Captain of the Imperial Navy Frigate Iron Light.  Reith worked his way up to Lieutenant Commander in just a few years.
The Inquisition and Imperial Navy Intelligence do not know whether Reith planned his crimes from the start, or if he plotted them later.  Whether he intended to betray the Imperium immediately or not, he was surely laying the groundwork for his schemes by the year M41.884, when he purchased several juvenat treatment supplies, enough for four or five life extensions, out of his own pocket.  Retroactive investigation reveals that Reith had begun saving every coin he had, and even taking out loans, to purchase the juvenats by then.  Reith did not behave any differently at that point, at least in the eyes of his superiors.  However, by the turn of the century, he was engaged in the preparations for his theft and defection.
History shows that unknown people murdered the Commissar assigned to the Light Cruiser on which he was serving at the time, Kyrsten Lannisdottir, only one year before he stole the ship.  The records at the time indicated that the murderer had cut her throat while she was sleeping.  No other person on the ship had had a key to her room, to prevent just such an occasion, but there had been no forced entry into her quarters.  The Ordo Militarum now suspects that Reith may have asked the ship’s Security Man At Arms to make him a key so he could kill Lannisdottir himself, which may explain why said Man At Arms did not put Reith down when he began his barratry.

That is the point that sticks in the craw of so many survivors of that theft.  The loss of the Light Cruiser Missileer was not a mutiny, nor a boarding action.  Reith convinced the other officers to steal it with him, as well as several senior Petty Officers and the ship’s Navigator.  It was a true barratry, and he accomplished it only by murdering the ship’s Captain and Second Officer, leaving himself as the First Officer to command the ship uncontested.  He flew the vessel into the Cloudburst Circuit and began raiding Imperial shipping between the outposts there and the Sector proper.

Reith commands the Free Corsair Coalition as his personal fiefdom.  Officers who please him and obey him undoubtingly receive command of his few capital ships, although he does ensure that only skilled officers are given the chance.  He does not tolerate disobedience, and while he allows the Escorts in his fleet to select their own Commanding Officers from the ranks of senior staff aboard each one, he retains the ability to override that choice at any time.  As the Flag Admiral and founder of the FCC, Reith can assume command of any vessel he pleases in the fleet, but he doesn’t bother doing so since conquering Zlodziei.
His personal staff are an eclectic mix of former Imperial officers, freelancers he has hired, bodyguards, his logistical officer/quartermaster, and Ortam Lesarien.  Reith has enough of an ego to think he can continue his defiance of the Imperium indefinitely, but not enough of an ego to attempt to do so uninformed or directly.  He simply doesn’t have the firepower or supplies to fight the Navy head-on, and if he keeps operating within what is ostensibly Imperial territory, sooner or later they will come after him.  He relies on his network of spies, informers, and mercenaries to avoid Imperial attention and keep him informed of targets.  He still has enough rejuvenat treatment chemicals to perform another life extension, but he will eventually need to steal more if he wants to continue surviving past that.

His advisors have a clear rank hierarchy, but the ones that accompany him at any given time are the ones he needs.  When he doesn’t have them in his personal company, his advisors stay in their temporary workspace on the Dead Lights space platform, which trails in the wake of the planet Zlodziei by three light seconds.  Reith himself sleeps in his quarters on the Inescapable, which he has conditioned as a combination tactical review chamber and private casino.  When the Inescapable is not afield, he keeps it docked on the Dead Lights, where he entertains guests, usually officers from other pirate groups he is trying to lure into his service.

The Dead Lights has few weapons, relying instead on its distance from Zlodziei to protect itself.  Reith does not want to commit any more resources to it as long as the fleet is trying to keep itself mobile.  He has attached a few small shipbuilding modules to Zlodiei’s existing orbitals, of which the locals only had two, but he is ready to sink them at a moment’s notice if the Imperials are in position to steal them.  His largest asset, however, in terms of impact on his organization, is Imperial herself.

Twelve years before the FCC conquered Zlodziei, a woman approached Reith during a raid he was conducting on the Imperial freighter Wellspring.  Without firing a shot, she managed to outmaneuver his guards, his crew, and the entire boarding complement of the Inescapable.  Reith was standing on the bridge of his ship, watching the feeds as his men stomed the freighter, when Lixivim Dill simply stepped past the bridge guard in a moment of distraction and cleared her throat.

Five minutes later, Lixivim Dill was the new Chief Strategist of the FCC, and the Coalition had gone from being just another ambitious gaggle of pirates to being the prime threat to Imperial border security that isn’t a tainted alien bird.  Dill explained to Reith that she was a Vanus Assassin, which Reith had never even heard of prior to her joining him.  The Vanus Assassins manipulate others into killing for them.  They have put down rebellions against Imperial authority simply by turning various anti-Imperial factions against each other.  Lixivim Dill is not Reith’s new friend’s real name, but rather an anagram of her kill count, which is one of the first things she told Reith.
Reith isn’t stupid enough to think that somebody like that can ever be truly controlled.  Dill doesn’t want an open war against the Imperium of Man any more than he does, but that doesn’t mean her ambition isn’t as high as the skies and just as endless.  Dill is the fourth in command of the entire Coalition, after Reith, his brother, and Lesarien, and Reith knows that she could bypass and kill all of the others if she wishes to rise in rank.
However, Dill is running from something.  Reith does not precisely what it is that makes Dill sometimes spontaneously look over her shoulder, but he has a sneaking suspicion that it is a fellow Assassin of greater skill and loyalty.  He hasn’t pressed the matter, however.  Dill’s casual demonstration of skill has made it abundantly clear to him that she could have killed him any time she wanted, and the Officio Assassinorum isn’t foolish enough to send an Assassin of lesser skill to kill her or him when the time comes for that.  If what she fears is another Assassin, only fate knows how it will end.

Reith is not a man of idleness.  Although he doesn’t look particularly dangerous, he does have one huge advantage in combat, one that he has employed more than once in boarding actions.  Reith has a variety of cybernetic implants, but they are stolen Cognomen implants and augmetics, not the clunky, metallic ones of most Forge Worlds.  As such, they look like normal flesh, even while in use.  He has a Refractor Field built into his back that powers off a power generator he keeps hidden in the ammo bags on his combat uniform, meaning that shots at him simply do not kill him.  Between that and the emergency air phial he has built into his ribcage, neither being shot or spaced can kill him as quickly as they could a normal human.  The Imperial Navy has attempted counter-boardings against his ships more than once, and two separate Naval armsmen have reported a fatal hit on him that he found uninjurious at worst.

Away from the troops, Reith is a larger-than-life figure.  He drinks, he smokes, he gambles, he beds whores, he keeps up with pistol and Power Cutlass training, and he addresses his bridge crews with loud roars instead of clipped pronouncements.  He is an even six feet of height, and dresses more like a Rogue Trader than his Imperial Navy roots would suggest.


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.”

All congregations need a leader.  While the Cardinals of the Cloudburst Diocese, all two of them, could claim credit for that feat easily enough, the lay members of the flock of the Emperor in Cloudburst know the true exemplar of the Emperor’s divine will is Monica Lanbrie.  She could make an honest claim to being the most overworked Sororitas in Cloudburst.  Lanbrie’s own Sisters are among the best disciplined and most loyal people in the Sector, of course, but the Sisterhood in Cloudburst contains all of the Orders of the Sororitas at once.  The Hospitallers, the Famulous, and the Dialogous are eternally busy, advising noble families and assisting Missionaries in the Circuit.  Because of the lack of technological base and millennia-spanning tradition in her Order, Lanbrie must oversee all Sororitas activities in most of the Sector and the entire Circuit.  Of course, there is another Convent in the Sector, so she is not without aid in this task, but it is still taxing.

This is made worse by the fact that her superiors throw away money like it’s going out of style.  The Convent in which Lanbrie bases her operations is a magnificent piece of Imperial architecture, to be sure, and the overall state of the Sisterhood in Sector doesn’t suffer much, but the Ecclesiarchy in Cloudburst is almost shockingly profligate.  Lanbrie feels genuine disgust for the sheer volume of wealth the Ecclesiarchy squanders on looking good.  She is notably not taking action to rectify this, however.

Lanbrie has another obstacle some of her kin in other Convents does not.  The Chamber Militant, her Battle Sisters, are somewhat underequipped.  As much as Lanbrie would like to be able to blame this issue on Drake and Lamarr’s overspending, however, she can’t.  This is instead the fault of the Cognomen armories, which have only barely been keeping up with the immense demand of Cloudburst’s rapidly expanding population.  The fact that the Ecclesiarchy is quite stingy with the blueprints for their arms is not helping matters.

As the Canoness Extraordinary of the capital system of the Sector, Lanbrie nominally has authority over all Canonesses of equal or lesser rank in the Sector.  In practice, her Sisterhood, like most, is as self-sufficient as possible, so this rarely comes up.  Rarely, her Convent will play host to the leaders of Sisterhoods elsewhere in the Segmentum Ultima, and on those cases, she tries to be the best host she can, despite the circumstances.
Her Sisterhood is a potent force in battle despite their less than perfect weaponry stocks, and as part of her policy to never allow the forces of Doubt and Disbelief to creep into the sparse and hard-to-patrol Cloudburst Sector, Lanbrie simply does not allow her Battle Sisters to enter the fray without at least company-strength numbers, ever.  This is expensive, of course, and when lone Sisters accompany Rogue Traders and such into the Circuit it may not be possible, but it does ensure that their casualties are low and their reputation terrifying.

Not all deployments of the Sisters go as planned, but so far Lanbrie has a sterling success rate against the enemies of the Imperium at the edges of its territory.  Her Elder Celestian units, codenamed Pike and Javelin, are without question the deadliest short-range combatants in the Sector outside the Blue Daggers (and Inquisitrix Kimihira’s bodyguards).  Their record has no defeats, not since Lanbrie took over as their leader seventeen years before, and not one Elder Celestian squad has suffered a casualty in nine years.  They make use of the rare Mars-built weapons which the Sanguine Soul has access to, including its master-crafted combi-bolters, which each Sister is allowed to customize however they wish (silver plating and custom grips are popular).  On rare occasions, Lanbrie even leads them into battle herself, armed with a pair of master-crafted and heavily artificed Power Gladii, gifts from Oscar Havermann’s predecessor as the Lord Inquisitor Hereticus Cloudburst.  For ranged battle, she instead makes use of a combi-bolter from the same pool as Pike and Javelin.

On rarer occasions, members of the Ordo Hereticus will come to her with secret missions.  Usually this merely involves imprisoning individuals the Inquisition has already taken alive, which Lanbrie readily does in her secret prison, but sometimes it involves inserting specific Sororitas into the retinues of other Inquisitors or Rogue Traders.  Lanbrie rarely refuses, because these requests serve two major purposes.  Firstly, they allow her Sisterhood to improve their connections to organizations across the Sector, and gain prestige, wealth, converts, and equipment in exchange.  Second and more importantly, they allow for the sight of the Emperor to reach incredibly powerful people, who might otherwise convince themselves that they are beyond it.

Lanbrie is a grandmother, which is a trait that few other Canonesses hold.  Her grandchildren are both students in the Canon Academy of the Imperial Sacrosanct, a prestigious private school on Celeste.  Lanbrie was a terrible mother, but age has shown her that family is something you can’t get back when you lose it, and so she has done her absolute best to make a place for her grandkids in her life.


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?”

The Archdiocese Cloudburst is exactly two people, and Cardinal Drake is in charge.  Despite the population of Cloudburst very rapidly creeping toward one hundred billion, somehow the Adeptus Ministorum has not yet seen fit to assign Cardinals to Thimble and Septiim.  Until that happens, the Cardinal of Celeste is the de facto head of the entire Cloudburst Sector Ecclesiarchy.
True to his calling, Cardinal Drake is a leader of the faithful in the Sector and has been for centuries.  He has benefitted from two juvenat treatments so far, but his DNA is now too degraded to accept another.  Ever since he was a teenager in the slums of Civitavecchia, Drake felt the need to be in charge, and the need to direct and amplify the faith of others.  Drake took to the Ministorum as soon as he was old enough, and followed the hierarchial path up through the ranks become the Cardinal of Celeste.

Drake embraced the trappings of office at once.  Before he had even gained his present rank, Drake sank vast sums into beautifying several properties of the Ministorum, even those that had had significant investments already.  There had already been a loud and costly trend towards expensive decoration and expression among the Celeste Ecclesiarchy, but Drake took it to new heights.
There are strong rules in place in the Ecclesiarchy about the pursuit of personal wealth.  These date back to long before Drake, to the Age of Apostasy and the Reign of Blood and the Plague of Unbelief.  Drake does not defy them, not in his mind.  However, an impartial viewer would have some difficulty interpreting that claim as he does.  The Ecclesiarcial protocols command Cardinals not to amass such personal wealth as Drake has spent, but Drake could point out his nearly-empty bank account and claim innocence.  However, some parishioners have asked, is that a distinction without a difference?  The Cathedral in which he lives is an extraordinarily beautiful, jewel-encrusted, heavily-guarded colossus, and he never leaves it.  Does that qualify as having no personal wealth?  He also has a ship of his own, with a Navigator he hired from Ecclesiarchial funds.  Does that qualify as having no personal wealth?

To Drake, this is all distraction.  In his mind, he does the work of the Emperor without hesitation or misstep.  Even his critics admit that he does do an admirable job of inspiring the entire congregation of Cloudburst and Celeste.  He bellows speeches and sermons about faith and deviance, about loyalty and heresy, and he does so with ironclad conviction and a strong voice despite his age.
However, off the pulpit, Drake is a terrible administrator.  As a figurehead, he is capable, but when it comes to navigating the intre-office politics of the Ministroum, Drake is wholly inept.  His aides and Deacons run nearly his entire establishment for him, while he imagines himself indispensable.  More to the point, his age has grown past the limits of his juvenat treatments.  He likely has only a few months to live, and has no idea save for a growing weariness when he rises from bed.

Drake is a friend to the Adeptus Sororitas inasmuch as they theoretically answer to him when outside their capacity as the Chamber Militant of the Inquisition Ordo Hereticus.  However, Monica Lanbrie, the Canoness Superior of his home system, finds him distantly annoying, and she is more aware than most of his creeping senility.  The various measures that she and others have taken to remove him from most command positions have so far not tipped the man off to his predicament.
There are people far more vicious –  or malevolent, depending on who you ask – with their eyes on Drake.  The Ordo Hereticus has so far tolerated his absurdly spendthrift lifestyle for the success it has brought the Cloudburst Ecclesiarchy in bringing in converts from beyond the Sector’s edge, but now it has reached a volume that is actually impeding the work they should be doing.  The Ordo has not yet noticed his medical degredation, ironically because of the efforts of Lanbrie to hide it until he dies.

Drake has never been in a fight in his life, and does not carry a weapon or armor by habit.


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.”

Cardinal Lamarr is the second of the two Cardinals of the Archdiocese Cloudburst and rules from the planet Jodhclan’s Paradise.  Unlike his superior, Cardinal Drake, Lamarr concerns himself somewhat less with the aesthetics of the Ministorum, and more with its defense.  More specifically, his personal defense first, and that of his homeworld second.
Lamarr began his life in the Ecclesiarchy in the Imperial Navy, as a member of the crew of the warship Titanclad.  After hearing the Chaplain of the vessel administrate to the souls of two crewers who died in a munitions loader accident, he found himself moved to join the Ministorum, and partake of such a holy calling.  He was a natural; an orator, a confidant, and a genuinely pious leader of men.
In no time, he had risen through the clergy of Jodhclan and entered a highly public position: that of the primary Confessor of the planetary administrators.  While a man of lesser moral caliber or fewer ethics might have been tempted to use such a position and the abundant blackmail opportunities it presented, Lamarr did no such thing.   With connections to the rich and powerful of his homeworld, a sterling record of discretion, a dazzling rise in personal power, successful military service, and a public sense of right and wrong, Lamarr seemed destined for greatness.

When the Cardinal of Jodhclan died, Lamarr’s superior, Serano Schneider, rose to fill the position.  Lamarr rose from Confessor to the capital city to serve as Schneider’s underling, the Bishop of Durantsberg.  After seventeen years, Schneider died, and to the surprise of roughly half the Bishops of the Sector and the weary acceptance of the other half, Schneider’s testament named Lamarr as the new Cardinal.  With only one other Cardinal in the Sector, Drake rubber-stamped Lamarr’s ascension to the position, which he has held loyally ever since.

Unlike Cardinal Drake, Lamarr understands that wealth is not a perfect indicator of the level of piety.  However, he has not actually taken any significant steps away from the use of the same garish, overwhelmingly decorated art styles for the buildings under his control.  He has far bigger problems, in his mind.  It is not unfair to claim that his job is far harder than Drake’s; Drake needs merely tend to the leaders of the Sector and represent Cloudburst on Terra, but Lamarr rules a world.  Jodhclan’s Paradise’s name may be apt, but the planet still has billions of residents that need both spiritual and administrative leadership.  In fact, Lamarr spends over eighty percent of his time at work performing leadership functions for the planetary government.  The rest of the time, he is either recording sermons or performing them live.

However, he has also spent several hours per week of late indulging in a personal fear.  Cardinal Lamarr is utterly terrified of the Eldar race.  He is convinced, beyond logic or hope, that they will come for his world, and they will do so any day now.  The work he has done to lead the people of Jodhclan is quickly shrinking in significance in his mind, compared to the overwhelming threat of the Eldar hordes.
So he imagines, because of Jodhclan’s Paradise.  The planet is a magnificent natural resources, bursting with picturesque views, abundant food and minerals, huge energy generation and residential potential, and habitable neighbors in-system.  The world fits all the criteria he can think of to fit the pattern of planet-thieving the Eldar have iterated hundreds of times in history.

Many tens of thousands of years ago, the Eldar Empire instituted mass terraforming (or Xenoforming, more accurately) of thousands of planets around the galaxy with abundant frozen water but no biosphere.  Using their technosorcery to reshape the planets’ atmospheres and water to forms that resembled the tropical worlds on which their people’s empire was built, the Eldar named these slow-acting crustal rebuilding projects the Maiden Worlds.  Since the collapse of the Eldar pantheon, the Eldar, especially the Exodites and Harlequins, have had far more pressing concerns, but the Craftworlders occasionally find the need for a habitable planet for some reason.  Periodically, humans and other species that have taken up residence on these tropical paradises find themselves evicted at gunpoint from their homes, some of which humanity has been occupying since before the end of the Age of Strife.

Cardinal Lamarr is convinced that Jodhclan’s Paradise is one of these.  He is convinced enough that a Council of Farseers probably couldn’t dissuade him at this point.  To the end of protecting himself and his demesne from the xenos, he has decided to harden the defenses of the world as much as humanly possible.
The problem with that idea is that the Ecclesiarchy, of which he is a senior and public member, is expressly forbidden from collecting and employing ‘men under arms.’  Of course, the Adeptus Sororitas is an exception to the rules since even Sebastian Thor understands that a defenseless Ecclesiarchy benefits nobody.  However, Sororitas require decades of training, highly expensive equipment, and space-consuming vehicles.  Likewie, Sororitas answer to the Inquisition over the Ecclesiarchy despite being under the Ministorum’s nominal control.

Mercenaries do not have that problem.  Cardinal Lamarr has gotten around his lack of legal grounds to raise an army by buying one instead.  He has sent out contacts and invitations to nearly every mercenary organization in the entire Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and even Naxos Sector, recruiting hundreds of thousands of men to Jodhclan.  Technically, the Decree Passive does not prohibit members of the Adeptus Ministorum from hiring bodyguards or emergency security in the case of alien invasions, but it does prohibit the indefinite hiring of hundreds of battallions of men and artillery units to protect an entire planet from aliens who may not even know it exists.  Lamarr has been stockpiling guns, troops, and pre-fabricated buildings for over eleven years.  The only reason his hiring is stopping now is that he is running out of mercenaries.  There are still mercenary groups that exist in Cloudburst, but they are either anti-Imperial or too small to bother with.

Lamarr is under investigation from the Ordo Militarum, a specialized Ordo Minoris of the Inquisition.  However, he is unaware of this, and is still desperately hiring military assets from across the Sector and beyond to shore up his defenses.  The people of Jodhclan are unsettled by this, although he has so far refused to deploy his troops against the citizens, so most give him the benefit of the doubt.
His paranoia manifests in other ways.  Lamarr has collected a small circled of administrators, doctors, bodyguards, deacons, and subaldermen to himself that he feels he can trust absolutely.  He has not informed all of them of his secret plans, but they are gradually taking over his responsibilities for running the planet, leaving him more time to plot the world’s defense.  However, even a coterie of Imperial elites would have trouble securing a star system from an Eldar invasion, so Lamarr is spending more and more time learning Imperial history and military strategy, which is not helping the case for his loyalty in the eyes of his Ordo Militarum observers.  Aside from his preparations, Lamarr is also now troubled by dreams.  He has dreamed of the Eldar coming to take everything away from him, to the point that it is now costing him sleep.

When not pursuing his obsession, Lamarr is a far better leader than Drake.  Unlike Drake, he doesn’t mind getting his hands on the controls of the operation of his diocese.  He has personally appointed dozens of the clergy in the Jodhclan command structure.  When he needs to, he can be just as personable and kind as he was when he began his rise to power.  He has never raised his hands in anger, and he has strictly pursued justice against those who have used their position to bring harm to the parishoners of Jodhclan.  He wears a Rosary, but never bears a weapon.


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?”

Even the pirates who work in the FCC are a bit leery of Ortam Lesarien.  He’s an alien, for starters, and over eight hundred years old.  He is also a psyker, albeit one who never uses his powers except in self defense.  Above all other factors, though: he is a pirate too, and has killed thousands of humans, both with his Wraithstave and his pistol, as well as the heavy cannons of his ships.

To everybody except Lesarien and Reith, his joining the FCC is a complete mystery.  He has no stated motive, he detests most of the FCC’s officers, and he doesn’t give a damn a about money.  He and Reith know, however, that Lesarien is a creature of spite, thrill-chasing, and vengeance.  Reith prefers this in his senior officers; he knows Lesarien has no interest in displacing him as the supreme commander of the Coalition.  He also knows that the best Lasarien can offer to his organization is his own service.  Lesarien’s exile from his own Craftworld precludes any chance of a takeover or reinforcement from Lugganath.

Lesarien’s childhood was as unremarkable as an Eldar’s can be, but his progress down the Paths of the Craftworld came to a screeching halt at once.  He had been a member of the Striking Scorpions Aspect Warriors for only seven years before stealing a small ship and fleeing into the Webway after a battle against human raiders assaulting an Exodite world.  He turned up four years later, clad in a strange mix of human and Eldar armor, and cutting a swathe through Imperial border shipping.  As the Imperial defenses of the Drumnos Sector again hardened against pirates like him, after softening in the aftermath of the destruction of the Dark Winds, he found himself being pushed into the Cloudburst Sector.  He had gathered a small crew of a few dozen Eldar Corsairs to his side by this point, but he burned through them quickly with his reckless disregard for the survival of his men, and ever-greater pursuit of thrills.

Eventually, the problems with such a lifestyle caught up to him.  After a while, his name was mud with other pirates, who outright refused to work with him.  His own refusal to take on crew from the ships he robbed and lack of overall direction meant that his crew dwindled below the number needed to maintain his ship.  When the Imperial frigate Bloodhound cracked the superstructure of his ship in a skirmish near the Oldlight Exo-zone, that was the end of Ortam Lesarien’s career as a pirate captain.  He managed to limp to the nearest habitable planet, where he put his ship in stationary orbit while he and his remaining crew considered their options.

Salvation came in the form of the pirate destroyer She’s One Of Ours, Sir, which stumbled across the Eldar ship while evading an Imperial Navy patrol.  Lesarien boarded the ship with his surviving warriors and captured it, then escaped into the Warp, leaving the wreck of their ship behind to distract the Imperial patrol.  Eventually, the She’s One Of Ours, Sir made port at one of the dozens of nameless pirate dens that pop up every so often in the Cloudburst Circuit.  There, Lesarien abandoned the ship with the surviving Eldar crew.  However, Eldar unboarding a human priate ship do not go unnoticed, and a representative of the FCC observed it.  He contacted Lesarien and extended an offer of recruitment, and to the surprise of his own crew, Lesarien accepted.

Since then, Lesarien has learned to accept his limitations as a leader.  His Eldar warriors, whom he is unable to replenish, form an elite corps of boarding specialists, with the psykers among them acting as force multipliers of immense potency in the largely low-psyker Cloudburst Sector.  However, he is also stubborn, rude, callous, and greedy, and these are traits that are harder for him to accept.  His subordinates among the humans of the FCC find him nearly impossible to talk to, since he likes to retreat into the linguistic complexity of Eldar compared to Low Gothic to escape conversations he doesn’t like.  His Eldar subordinates are happier working for a human than they were for him, however, which has deflated his ego somewhat.

Lesarien has a level of trust in Reith that would shock his family on Lugganath.  Not once in the decades that both men have been working together has Reith ever misled or lied to Lesarien, and always gives him a generous cut of the spoils of raids even if Lesarien has no use for it and usually gives it back to him.  Ironically, the human Admiral is one of the few people for whom Lesarien has ever felt even the vaguest nugget of admiration.  By contrast, Reith barely cares about Lesarien, and only keeps him on retainer despite his behavior because of his superhuman skill.  However, Reith is also a skilled dissembler and hides his contempt well.


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.”

The task of securing a Sector or other large region of space against hostile aliens, and those who traffic in their goods, is arduous and expensive.  Among the leaders of the Deathwatch, Watch Commanders are selected only from Adeptus Astartes officers who have earned the respect of the Inquisition and also display aptitude for logistics and personnel management.
Of course, overwhelming combat power and skill are also a prerequisite, but nobody serves in the Deathwatch for long without displaying those things or dying in the process.  The Watch Commander of Fortress Dascomb is an Imperial Fists veteran named Domack, and he has skill in abundance.  He has served for well over twenty years as the Watch Commander, and will likely die in the role.  Domack is quiet, calm, serious, patient, intelligent, resourceful, and impossible to read.  Psykers and spies alike find his face and mind to be as blank as paper, even when trying to read him directly.  Domack doesn’t take to the field as often as he did when he was a mere Watch Captain, but he keeps up with his training and education in the Dascomb Training Pit and Archive with unfailing promptness.

As a member of the Imperial Fists, Domack was a Tactical Marine Sergeant, the third in command of Fourth Company, when his squad and two Techmarines hot-dropped into the middle of a battle between Orks and Dark Eldar.  The Orks were dismantling a Webway Gate out of boredom when the Dark Eldar suddenly launched out of it, attacking the Orks to protect their portal.  The Imperial Fists assaulted both, and drove the Dark Eldar off by visibly aiming a field gun at the base of the portal.  Had they fired, the shot would have collapsed the portal and stranded the Elder there, so the Dark Eldar raced towards the gun to destroy it.  They did so while crossing in front of the Ork boyz that Domack had tricked into chasing him on his Land Speeder.  The Orks ripped the Dark Eldar to pieces with their unexpected flank attack, and the Marines mopped up the survivors of both after destroying the Webway entrance.
This sterling performance of improvisation on the part of Domack earned him a recommendation to the Deathwatch.  When the time came for a member of the Imperial Fists to don the black plate, Domack was one of three chosen, and went to Watch Fortress Dascomb.  After four years of sterling work, he was elevated to command of the Kill-team of which he had previously been just another Tactical Brother.  After four more years, he applied to become, and was accepted as, a Keeper for the Fortress.  He still wears his Clavis, repainted to resemble a normal gauntlet.
Eventually, the old soldier became the High Keeper of the Fortress, but held the position for only eight months before deaths of two Watch Captains during a catastrophic mission in the Oldlight Exo-zone brought him laterally to fill the gap.  Here he found his first actual feeling of being welcome.  He had not enjoyed the somber, tense, boring life of a Keeper despite being an obvious natural for it, but as a Watch Captain, commanding thirty other Brothers on high-stakes missions with high tech gear and no room for error, he found the joy of battle rushing back in.  He stayed as a Watch Captain for twenty four years, before the sudden death of his predecessor, Watch Commander Julius Varstol of the Imperial Falchions, opened a position above him.
To his slight surprise, the Inquisitor of the Chamber, High Inquisitrix Lerica, elevated him immediately after consultation with him and his peers.  Domack was taken off-guard by this because during his own consultation with Lerica about a successor, he had named Watch Captain Teega of the Hunting Hawks as his choice for the role.  Lerica informed him that all four other Watch Captains, including Teega, and both the High Keeper and Lord Inquisitor Xenos Cloudburst had named Domack instead.

Feeling a hitherto unprecedented level of emotional upheaval, Domack accepted the post.  To his continuing surprise, he has grown to be comfortable in the role.  It combines the need for secrecy, poise, and trustworthiness of the High Keeper with the combat and command roles of the Watch Captain.  HE has personally selected all three of the current Watch Captains and the High Keeper, although all four were in the Deathwatch for at least eight years before he was promoted to Watch Captain.

As the Commander of an entire Sector’s worth of assets – arguably far more than most backwater Sectors like Cloudburst usually have – Domack has a massive workload.  As he is both the Watch Commander and Keeper of the Vigil, which are also not the same position in most Sectors that have enough resources to split the functions, Domack simply does not have the time to go into the field that he used to.  However, he has displayed a keen sense for potential trouble in the Sector that keeps him from being overwhelmed.  Problems on the scale of the Ork and Glasian invasions the Sector is currently experiencing are larger than he can deal with by himself, and he knows it well.
In the face of the Septiim attack, he has sent a trusted Keeper and six Deathwatch Brothers armed with his secret responsibility.  Like every Watch Commander since Fabique recommissioned Dascomb for the Deathwatch, he is entrusted with the terrible responsibility of enacting Exterminatus against the system should the worst come to pass.  The Inquisition does not know whether Tzeentch hits the planet in every Migration because he thinks of it as a control for his experiment, or because it has some value they do not yet recognize.  Regardless, the Inquisition simply does not trust Tzeentch to simply destroy Septiim like Chlorit if the aliens take any of its worlds.  Also, Septiim has more habitable worlds in its system than any other in Cloudburst, but its defenses are massive and growing, so the odds of losing only one or two planets instead of all of them is high.  What will Tzeentch do if his pawns capture such prizes?  The Inquisition dares not learn.
As such, Domack is the most recent Watch Commander entrusted with the Sanction of Annihilation.  It is a machine, built long ago on Mars, that contains a self-powering microtoroidal lattice electromagnet.  Within, each microtoroid contains a few molecules of antimatter, and uses the interactions of energy and the magnetic fields of the adjacent toroids in the lattice to contain them all.  The machine is no larger than a meter square, but contains within it over eighty five kilograms of anti-protons, enough to liequfy the crust of a planet.  It is one of only a tiny handful of Exterminatus weapons that humanity built, can build no longer, and can be carried by a Space Marine one-handed.  The Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos Cloudburst has debated the use of the weapon, and concluded that a system of over ten billion humans falling the beasts is simply not acceptable when destroying one planet to save the rest remains viable.

When Domack does take to the field on those rare occasions when he can,

GET THE INFORMATION FROM AA


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 Paris is a former Tactical Marine Sergeant from the Blue Daggers Chapter.  The Blue Daggers have a long-standing presence in the Deathwatch, as is to be expected in a Sector defined by periodic alien invasions.  The particular circumstances of the Deathwatch render them all but useless in fighting off the Glasians, however, in contrast to nearly every other form of alien life.  The obvious solution to the lack of adaptability among Deathwatch to the

The Deathwatch does not answer directly to the Inquisition in the field.  However, when the Inquisition gives an order to Astartes outside all but the most banal circumstances, Astartes are generally expected to follow it.
That is a line that Watch Captain Paris toes with exceptional care.  The standing order from the Ordo Xenos in the region is to destroy all corrupted Glasian artifacts.  However, High Inquisitrix Lerica has no standing order for the destruction of mundane and uncorrupted artifacts.
Thus, Watch Captain Paris is undertaking a risky study.  He has ordered the construction of a large network of tunnels, bunkers, and laboratories on the planet Loreliei.  Within, he intends to begin the reverse-engineering of multiple Glasian artifacts that have survived the deaths of their owners.  He is not in any great rush to inform High Inquisitrix Lerica, but he is confident she will see the wisdom of his order.

Paris began his career as a member of the Blue Daggers over a century before, and had an unremarkable history in the Scouts and Devastators before moving into the Eighth Reserve.  There, he had average or slightly higher marks in most fields, and excelled in commanding a Predator tank.  It was only after another four years in the Eighth, fighting pirates and Orks in the circuit, that he discovered that he had a significant talent for recognizing tactical opportunities in enemy technological use.  For Orks, it was their clunky vehicles, which he was able to outmaneuver by banking his tank on angled surfaces by slowing one tread.  He further demonstrated his idea to derive vulnerabilities from enemy technology by drawing an Ork company into a desert area to cause the sand to foul their primitive firearms.

Afterward, he was put on the short list for Deathwatch Service by Lord Arden, and when an opportunity arose, he accepted the Vigil.  Paris felt at home in the Deathwatch, more than he had in his own Chapter, and accepted every opportunity for extra training and responsibilities he was offered.
He got along famously with Forgemaster Shokunin, but had no interest in learning the secrets of the Machine himself.  He served briefly as the leader of a single Kill-Team before the team was assigned to the Watch Station Discus.
On Discus, his Kill-team served as the primary team, which responded to sightings of unknown aliens in the Oldlight Exo-zone.  He worked alongside Rogue Traders with his Kill-team over forty times in telve years, usually the same few Traders over and over.  On one notable occasion, his team worked with Lord Inquisitor Stoldst to track down what he still believes to be a shapeshifting alien, and not the human mutant who had eaten a Callidus Assassin.
While working with these explorers and merchants in the unknown regions of space, Paris earned a reputation for ambition and creativity that he had not had many chances to show off in his own Chapter.  The Deathwatch encourages greater lateral thinking and improvisation than the regular Astartes, and Paris excelled at using conventional technology in unconventional ways.  Some of these ways would have earned him a disciplinary lashing in the Imperial Guard, or a dirty look from his own Techmarines back on the Gargantuan.

After many years commanding the Kill-team, and eventually transferring to Watch Station Redshield, Sergeant Paris reached his thirtieth year serving in Cloudburst’s Deathwatch.  When his superior, Watch Captain Lawrence of the Knights of Terra, retired to his own Chapter, Paris was chosen by Domack to replace him.  Paris immediately used his new position to advocate for the creation of a new Watch Station.  He chose Loreliei for the new site – more or less arbitrarily, not that he would admit that – and dubbed it Watch Station Peacekeeper.  Watch Commander Domack and Forgemaster Shokunin debated privately, and eventually came about to Paris’ idea.
Paris proposed that Glasian relics that had no Warp element or Chaos taint be collected and studied carefully.  He posited that there are psychological or technotheological ideas to be found even in the leavings of aliens.  The Glasians were the first extragalactic intelligence ever detected; surely, they had something to their technology if it was enough to get them across the dark space between galaxies.
The loudest advocate of Paris’ idea is not in the Inquisition at all.  Lord Fabricator Beraxos of Cognomen strongly advocates for the project.  Paris is willing to take Beraxos’ help at face value for now, since Beraxos’ ambition and expansionistic ideas are well-known to the Deathwatch, ever since he entrusted them with the secrets of ABX202020 when building Redshield.  So far, since Paris hasn’t actually led any Techpriests to perform any research, their partnership has borne little fruit.  As soon as the facility comes online, however, both Beraxos and Paris expect the plan to continue at once.

Outside of his technological dealings, however, Paris is very much an archetypal Deathwatch Captain.  He has an unflinching demeanor, a sense of patience and personnel management, and remarkable combat experience.  His gear of choice is an assault pack and Mark 6 armor Corvus set, with a Kraken-loaded bolter.  In his experience, the combination of supreme mobility, near-silent movement, and anti-armor capability is perfect for provoking aliens to break formation and pursue him into traps.
He likes taking to the field, and has led Kill-teams or even entire Kill-companies into battle against alien slavers and marauders in the Circuit and Exo-zone before.  He prefers to avoid the mixing of Chapters that have traditional rivalries like al-Hasat does, dismissively calling them as ‘social experiments.’  He prefers to use Marines from Chapters he knows will work well together.


Watch Captain Roganuharu of the Celestial Knights [cataphractii armor terminator honors]
“No, I do not know when I will go home to my Brothers.  It’s all right, 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.”

Captain Roganuharu is the present third in command of the Deathwatch in Cloudburst and the Captain of Watch Station Discus.
The Celestial Knights and the Blue Daggers are neighbors in the dark reaches of the nebula that created their home Sectors.  Because of their proximity, there are extensive interactions between the two when one joins the other’s Sector Deathwatch.  The Deathwatch has a far smaller presence in the Naxos Sector thanks to the extensive presence of the conventional military there.  The Celestial Knights contribute regularly and generously to the Cloudburst Deathwatch.  They believe, perhaps fairly, that the presence of the underdefended Sector to their trailing would not ablate a true threat on the scale of a Black Crusade or a genuine Waaagh, and that a threat like that would plow through Maynard and Arden and hit the Knights in the back.  Given the attrition rate and constant contamination threat posed by the Pox Ring and other Chaos-infested stallar formations in Naxos, the Knights simply can’t take the risk.

Enter the Watch Fortress Dascomb.  Roganuharu is a Watch Captain at Dascomb’s largest off-shoot, Watch Station Discus.  As a member of the Knights, Roganuharu was a Sergeant in the Seventh Battle Company (one of the notable deviations from typical Unforgiven formations is their lack of traditional Reserve Companies).  While serving with his parent Chapter, Roganuharu displayed a particular aptitude for the use of exceptionally heavy weapons.  While nearly every Marine in a Chapter spends at least some time using Special or Heavy-type weapons such as Lascannons and Missile Launchers, Roganuharu has a true skill with them.  He successfully sniped a Dark Eldar Jetbike moving at eighty six kilometers per hour from half a klick away upwind, immediately catching the eye of his Company Captain during his time in the Devastators.  That by itself would not have been terribly remarkable, had he not performed the feat with a mortar.  Subsequent decades of service showed it to be no fluke.  He showed near artistic levels of precision with a heavy bolter and the lascannon.  He eventually moved over to the Seventh Company as a Tactical Marine, but kept his heavy bolter to serve as a squad heavy weapons trooper.
Eventually, he and his company went into a gruesome battle against two competing forces of Chaos.  The Rusted Legion of Nurgle and the Splintered Eyes of Tzeentch descended on the hapless and much-maligned Agri-world of Lardox 5 in the Naxos Sector, and the Seventh flew to stop them from destroying the vital livestock ranches there.  Roganuharu realized that both cults would stop to fight each other if there were no immediately obvious Imperial presence between them, even if both groups happened to be pursuing the same overall operational objective.  He and the half of the Company assigned to his leadership adopted maximum-range engagement tactics, sniping at enemy leaders with anti-tank weapons from absurd distances from camouflaged nests.  If the Chaos forces noticed his troops, they would seed their area with traps and mines and then run for distance, if they didn’t, they would just start killing each other.
This worked for a time, but eventually the Splintered Eyes realized what his forces were doing.  Their leaders waited until the other half of the Company under Captain Leodhardt were stuck in place fighting the Rusted Legion, then drove their own forces directly at the area that Roganuharu’s ambush sites surrounded, gambling that the Knights had a cache there for resupplying between attacks.

Roganuharu was caught flat-footed by this bold maneuver, but managed to rally his forces to attempt a bottlenecking of the encroaching Chaotics while his serfs and Techpriests hastily repositioned their cache.  The grizzled Sergeant only managed to move half of his troops into position before the Splintered Eyes came within maximum range.  The two forces engaged each other, but to Roganuharu’s disquiet, the Splintered Eyes did not react at all to the sudden opposition.  He had merely confirmed his location to his enemy, and they were risking massive casualties to take the chance that they could push through to end the threat his demi-Company posed once and for all.
The Splintered Eyes used wicked sorcery and mobile mortar units to hem the Knights into an open field, with their supply cache and hastily-moving reinforcements beyond, and started shelling the Knights relentlessly.  That may have been the end of the Knights, had Roganuharu not had two key advamtages: most of the troops he had with him were Devastators, which he could field like few others, and Assault Marines, with unparalleled maneuverability.
The Splintered Eyes mounted the hedgerow to push the Knights deeper into the field and expose them to line-of-sight guns, and the Assault Marines suddenly landed among them, hacking away with Power Weapons and plasma pistols.  The front line of the Eyes simply disintegrated under the fierce and unexpected counterattack.  After a predetermined length of twenty five seconds, all of the Marines suddenly engaged their Assault Packs and leaped high, just as the barrage of shots from the Devastators’ heavy weapons arrived to cut down the surviving Tzeentchians before they could rally.  Roganuharu personally led a counterattack under their cover fire and vaulted the hedgerow just as the Assault Marines landed again, several meters deeper, in the very thick of the gibbering Tzeentchian hordes.
With the Devastators now unable to fire, they sprinted out of cover for the hedgerow, while the Assault Marines and Tactical Marines formed two parallel, moving lines, pushing forward into the Tzeentchian hordes in tandem.  The Tzeentchian troops had raced full-out to endure the barrage of Roganuharu’s long-range fire; their troops were tired and they had brought few vehicles.  As such, the simply cultists fell by the hundreds as the Assault Marines pushed away from the hedgerow, and the Tactical Marines pushed behind them in the same direction.  When the Devastators arrived at the hedgerow, they added their own fire to the mix, shooting over the heads of the Assault Marines into the pressed ranks behind them.
When the heavier mutant troops caught up to the main body of soldiers, the Assault Marines leaped clear, and the Tactical Marines added their fire to the Devastators to thin the herd.  This time, however, they had no advantage of surprise, and even Marines need to reload.  The Tzeentchians rallied and pushed into closer combat, drawing Roganuharu and his squad into hand-to-hand, never his strong suit.
As the melee worsened, Roganuharu’s helm HUD showed his casualties mounting.  He fought like a man possessed, however, and after four tense minutes of non-stop slaughter, the Tzeentchians broke.  When the reinforcements from the other half of the demi-Company arrived, they massacred the Tzeentchians.

When the final tally came in, fourteen Marines were dead, eight more were wounded, and over four hundred Tzeentchians lay defeated, with another two hundred running.  With the majority of their fastest troops defeated, the other Tzeentchian forces were little threat to the Nurglites and Imperials, who amanged to mop them up without too much more difficulty.  Roganuharu was, naturally enough, earmarked for promotion.
However, ever since the Glasian Migrations, and their Tzeenthcian sponsorship, came to the attention of the Knights, when they first helped the Navy and Carcharadons drive the aliens of of Septiim hundreds of years ago, the Knights have had a tradition.  Because of the relative youth of the Blue Daggers (which the Knights tactfully refrain from discussing overmuch) and the fact that the Cloudburst Sector is grossly underequipped for such a burdem, the Knights have kept eleven Brothers in the Deathwatch of Cloudburst ever since their first establishment.  No Knight has ever risen to Watch Commander, since few Celestial Knights are willing to spend so much time away from their Nurgle-battered home, but Roganuharu may be the exception to the rule.  He has been serving in the Deathwatch for over forty years, and as a Captain for four, and as the Captain of Watch Station Discus for one.  As such, he is actually at the top of the list to command should Domack die without a clear successor.

Roganuharu was offered a position in the Vigil only a few short years after the fateful battle between his own men and the Splintered Eyes.  The Inquisition under Lerica has an eye for talent, and his ability to modify plans on the fly and exploit the composition of his forces for maximum effect are obvious benefits for a Deathwatch Kill-team.  Because Kill-teams operate without an officer to command them on the large majority of missions, they need to be able to take orders from Brothers of roughly the same rank as all other people on the team.  Beyond that, if a Sergeant is assigned to a Kill-team, he must overlook the rivalries of the Chapters that compose his force allotment.
Roganuharu may have been hired for combat skill and improvisational creativity, but he has ascended to Captain because of his personnel skills.  He has worked with other Watch Captains to find ideal matches for Kill-team composition on many occasions.  At present, he has gathered several of the most experienced Kill-Marines and Kill-teams to Watch Fortress Discus along with every ship he can find, in preparation for a special mission.
He is planning to send some of his ships and Marines to the worlds that the Glasians are about to hit, while sending his Kill-marines out in pairs or singly to silently board FCC vessels that raid the edges of the Nauphry Subsector and capture them, then either self-destruct them or fly them to Grand Anchor to get their IFFs changed.



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.”

High Keeper Vanados Elkop of the Novamarines
“I stand watch over the darkest secrets of Cloudburst.  I command our ships, and they fly.  I cull those who not deserve the honor of His Majesty’s trust.  You want to know what I value?  Restraint.  Our work would be a billion times smoother if every mortal with a sense of curiosity could keep it in check.  The darkness is old and full of horrors, from which humans should keep well enough away.”

Forgemaster Shokunin Asutori of the Bone Knives
“Offending the Machine Spirits will get you killed in the field faster than anything else possibly could.  How aliens fight after scaring theirs into submission, I will never know.”