Houses, updated

House Herrera, Septiim

The Septiim system offers endless opportunity for a freighter captain out to make some money.  Of all the systems of the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, it has the largest number of inhabited bodies, with three rocky planets, three gas giants with inhabited moons, a Forge Moon, and multiple Lagrange stations.  It was natural for such a system to develop a large merchant and freight business, and so House Herrera has grown to fill the gap.
The House started as a fairly unimpressive shipping concern until the Glasian Migrations began.  Suddenly, the House was inundated with business as people moved off Septiim to other worlds in the hopes of avoiding Glasian attention.  The House quickly began exploring other shipping contracts, such as the movement of food and textile materials from Agri-worlds and Paradise Worlds to Thimble, and moving outside Septiim proper to ship materiel for the Navy if dedicated haulers weren’t available.

Those efforts may have moved Herrera from a regional player to a large one, but it didn’t become the dominant shipping concern in Cloudburst until they scored the coup contract to become the exclusive transportation agent for the huge supply barges carrying finished goods from Coriolis and Combine to their shipping partners.  Being the exclusive shipping agency for the largest military base in the Galactic North and the most productive Agri-world in Cloudburst catapulted them ahead of their competition.

Success has gone to their heads, however.  Several members of the House’s senior leadership have recently been arrested by the Inquisition for transporting illegal gene-mod technology.  The secretive nature of the Inquisition means that the rest of the House may never know precisely what was being transported, and the shameful lack of documentation for the products in question means that the Inquisition was able to seal the incident up, probably forever.

The House may have been diminished by that scandal, but it is not broken.  Already, the House is recouping its losses and attempting to expand its fleet to operate outside the Sector proper.  However, it has so far constrained its efforts to the Exo-zone and Circuit exploratory outposts, not into the Drumnos Sector.  The Drumnos Sector mercantile concerns are far wealthier than Herrera can ever realistically hope to be, and could easily out-bid them.

House O’Neill, Thimble – manufacturing

Thimble is the beating heart of industry in the Cloudburst Sector, as a Hive World generally is.  The vast population capacity of the city allows for the planet to create and design products no other world in the Sector except possibly Cognomen could produce, or need in such volume.
Naturally, in the money-driven and aristocracy-choked hell of the Imperium, the noble houses that best sponsor the great manufacturing concerns are often able to become great profit ventures themselves, until there is no difference between the manufacturing company and its noble patrons.  House O’Neill of Thimble already had extensive patronages of manufacturing companies in their Hive, as did several other noble houses, but the O’Neills were ambitious.  In time, the O’Neill family expanded their interests to consume several of the supply companies that fed their factories, the shipping companies that moved those supplies, and even the production firms that refined the raw goods.
The O’Neill strategy was a patient one, not exactly original.  Vertical Control has been a part of manufacturing technique since M2.  However, the O’Neills mastered it, and did so with a combination of business acumen and legal finagling that has allowed them to reap ludicrous profits.  So far, House O’Neill and House Zhong have worked together to manufacture starships of such quality that the Navy could scarcely do better, and even the Mechanicus finds it distantly impressive.
However, the true triumph and core business of House O’Neill doesn’t lie in space.  The unique history of Thimble in the Sector allows it to serve as both the undisputed non-Mechanicus manufacturing hub of the region and a grossly underutilized one.  Thimble has both a complete manufacturing hegemony on non-Cognomen goods and a nearly exclusive monopsony on several refined minerals that few other worlds need.  As a result, the only competitors in scale for House O’Neill goods are the Mecchanicus and out-of-Sector businesses.
House O’Neill’s founders and strategists realized early that that meant that the Houses that managed to be the ‘competition’ for Mechanicus products and lock down those markets would effectively run totally unopposed in pricing and quality for those who couldn’t afford Martian perfection.  Aircars, clothing, construction tools, chemicals, synthetic rubber, household goods, and other products that Cognomen makes are exquisite in their production standards, but unreachably expensive for people on many worlds that lack Thimble or Celeste’s robust economy.
Therefore, House O’Neill manufactures the best knockoffs of those Cogomen products that they can, sells them on as many worlds as possible, and aggressively researches ever more ways to build and store them without sacrificing much quality or stepping on the Cognomen Magos’ Council’s toes.  The O’Neill stamp of quality can be found on all but two of the worlds in the Sector and has spread beyond.  Although the Mechanicus is somewhat exasperated by this, there is little they can do about it.  To share their own advanced designs and engineering with the House would be to elevate those uninitiated in the ways of the Sacred Machine to their own level, which their pride cannot allow.  To let the O’Neills simply research new techniques without inhibition would be sinful, and to stamp them out would be a gross impeachment of their Treaty of Mars.
So, for now, Cognomen and House O’Neill exist in a simmering state of rivalry which only the Cognomen contingent seem to care about, and House O’Neil never acknowledges.  As far as House O’Neill is concerned, as long as their customers are usually happy and they themselves are grotesquely rich, they couldn’t care less what the Techpriests think.

Outside of their extensive manufacturing concerns, House O’Neill is a noted patron of arts and education, having sponsored great art schools on several planets, including Coriolis and Celeste.  This is not because of some great philanthropic worldview on the part of the O’Neills, but rather an effect of having so much money that there is little else on which they can legally spend it.
However, several scions of the family have perished in the use of alien weapons in the bloodsport so common among the Thimble idle rich, and have thus come under rising scrutiny from the Ordo Xenos, especially in the last hundred years.  The current Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst is herself a former Ordo Xenos Inquisitor of immense skill, and prosecuted the opposition to the Cold Trade in alien technology for two hundred years before rising in rank.  She knows perfectly well how much the Thimble Highborn love to collect alien gadgetry, and has her subordinates watching them like hawks.  House O’Neill is hurriedly performing internal review to ferret out which of its scions is responsible for the huge upswing in alien artifacts making their way into the Household before it is too late.

House Zhong, Thimble

The building of ships in the Imperium is an undertaking like few others, with the costs rising far above what any one non-governmental force could afford in most cases.  House Zhong is a rare exception.  It is the only entity outside the Mechanicus and Navy authorized to manufacture Warpcraft in the entire Cloudburst region.

Zhong holds one other distinction of note: it is the oldest surviving House in the Sector.  It can accurately trace the core of its geneline back to the original Levitna Colony Group, well over twenty thousand years before, and its origin to a long-dead Terran noble family from the age of the Terran Federation.  Zhong survived the Age of Strife and the long darkness between the Heresy and the coming of the Imperium to the region by essentially claiming the least desirable hive for itself on Levitna’s radiation-scarred surface for itself and killing all comers.  It wisely bowed to the Imperium when it arrived, and was rewarded with the honor of being the only noble house elevated in its native hive.  They were passed over for the priviledge of becoming the Planetary Ruling Clan, but has prospered anyway, thanks to being able to do something no other hive can: total industrial devotion.
In the other hives of Thimble, the hives are all fairly inter- and intra-dependent in their manufacturing needs, as could be expected from the great vertical cities.  The Zhong hive, however, which they named after themselves, is not.  It is a resource hog in every way, being unable to even develop most household goods.  The Zhong hive is dedicated solely to the manufacture of starship components, and to their elevation to space for use in the great orbiting shipyards.

As most shipbuilding concerns do, the House yards began as simply making the components of Naval ships, and not performing any assembly.  Gradually, however, economies of scale allowed Zhong to do more and more of the preparatory steps, including some circuit fabrication and assembly.  The Navy was pleased by this since they had to do less work and didn’t have to rely on the Adeptus Mechanicus as much.  Over time, Zhong shipbuilding took over more of the House’s time, until they became less a noble family and more a corporate Board of Directors, although they are still accorded a title in the Thimblan peerage.  The components they made were initially no different than those of any other shipbuilding corporation, but over time, Zhong made more of a conscious effort to diversify their offerings to lure in the cheaper Chartist Captains and Rogue Traders.  Eventually, the inevitable shift occurred, and Zhong bought their own shipyard in orbit over the Mining World of Delving.

The Delving yard was a metaphorical goldmine for the House Zhong.  Here, with direct access to the refined minerals from the planet below, the House was abe to produce ships of nearly Navy quality without any interference from the Thimble authorities, and to meet contracts from Rogue Traders.  Unlike some of their Great House contemporaries, however, Zhong never compromises on quality.  A shoddy toaster or clock may be a minor inconvenience, but a shoddy starship engine can kill hundreds of thousands of people.  Thus, and to the Mechanicus’ approval, the breakaway from the stifling leadership of the Thimble government did not yield a reduction in appreciable quality from the Zhong industrial output.
Zhong yards today work around the clock in the great orbitals of Delving and Thimble, manufacturing vessels for Rogue Trader and Departmento Astrocartigraphicae mapping voyages.  They have patronized the Grand Nachor yards more than once, buying shipwrecks and scrapping them for parts, and have even played a role in the disassembly of Space Hulks that managed to achieve stable orbits in Cloudburst systems.  Zhong merchants ply their wares of spare parts and upgrade kits at every private shipyard in the Sector and even some in the Naxos Sector beyond.

However, the House Zhong does have its limits.  They know better than to try to break into the territories of the far older and wealthier merchant combines in the Drumnos and Naxos Sectors.  Drumnos has far busier space lanes, but has its own Houses to supply it, and the Naxos Sector is a crumbling warzone, too dangerous to insure properly thanks to the Nurglite pirates ripping it apart.
Likewise, the House subcontracts uncomplainingly to the Mechanicus in two critical ways.  The psionic Thrones Navis used by Navigators to pilot ships through the Warp, and the actual Warp Drive Cores used to propel them, are the exclusive remit of the Cognomen Orbital Yards, and the House Zhong has no attention to try to break into that market.  Only Adeptus Mechanicus techpriests of Forge World certification are permitted anywhere near the blessed components when they are purchased in bulk from the forges of Cognomen and Solstice, and the House pays their prices without complaint.  The Warp is simply too dangerous to risk tampering with.

House Carvan, Celeste

From the impossibly abundant fields of Combine to the sprawling latifundae of Cassie’s World, the breadbaskets of Cloudburst do business at every turn with House Carvan.  This young and expanding mercantile concern has sprawled over the Sector like an indolent cat, and has a partial or fully vested ownership in fully a third of the farms on the technologically advanced worlds of the Sector.
Unlike some of the other manufacturing Houses of the Sector, however, Carvan rarely administrates most of their holdings directly.  They prefer a less centralized approach to business that has served them well in the slow-acting field of agriculture.  The science of agriculture is also more challenging than most interstellar trades, thanks to the combination of the slowness of Warp travel and the fact that no two planets have seasons of the same length (and may not have seasons at all).  As a result, the work that Carvan does has to be customized to their target markets, and can’t be applied uniformly, thanks to the sheer variety of their vendors.  This includes great deep-space hydroponic floater ranches where animals breed, live, and die in zero gravity so as to have less burdensome bones, seabed sponge farms, great herds of grox and cattle on the plains of wind-swept worlds, and slaughterhouses that fill whole cities.  Attempting any degree of uniformity in most regards would be nothing better than a waste of time.

Thus, House Carvan prefers to rely on local oversight and supervision for their partner and subsidiary food vendors.  The House has override and veto authority on most crucial decisions, but only employs it when needed and never without review, and always works their hardest to comply with the relevant Sector and Imperial laws.  These laws concern things like tolerable bacterial and synthetic molecule load, expiration dates, and shipping regulation, as well as things like supplying ships that travel outside Imperial jurisdiction.
This does not mean Carvan is lax in its scrutiny of its foods, of course.  The Carvan name can be found from the undercrofts of Gorum’s Folly castles to the gourmand kitchens of the highest Celeste society, and everywhere in between.  Carvan’s most prestigious contracts are generally awarded by members of other Imperial noble families and Houses, including the Quintus family itself.  The House also does not force itself to comply with a single brand identity, and has created thousands to apply to every conceivable market.  Their most profitable is the ‘Clear Suns spacer foods’ brand, sold by the gigaton to ship crews, and often containing the most preservative-filled but guiltily delicious foods a low-ranked crewer can look forward to eating between the stars.  For crews of very small ships, or ships that take decades to travel to between destinations, Carvan offers the ‘Solitas Meals’ brand, consisting of far higher-quality foods that stay good so long as specific storage and preparation requirements are met, since nothing drives an overstressed crew stuck in the Warp mad faster than lousy food.

Of course, the nobles of the Sector wouldn’t be caught dead eating such things unless they wre slumming it, and so Carvan also offers the ‘Nine Star Dining’ courses, which consist of locally-prepared gourmet foods and come with a price tag to match.  Most of these foods are actually prepared and eaten on the same planet on which they were grown or butchered, making the ‘Nine Star Dining’ brand ironically the most widely-varying in quality.

However, while Carvan are savvy marketers and regulators, their record of actual quality is less than perfect.  Whole lots of megatons of food have had to be recalled by Carvan at catastrophic losses when pieces of metal from broken scoops or agitators were found in boxes of food labelled ‘metal detector certified.’  While alien bacteria is rarely a concern for human pathogens thanks to humanity’s unique cell membrane and receptor composition, it is a huge concern for food storage since some alien bacteria can digest nearly anything that is dead even if it is harmless to living humans.

The House Carvan headquarters is technically located on Celeste, but it may as well not be.  Almost four sevenths of its production and eighty percent of its corporate staff are located on Combine, where they produce gigatons of food for the Imperium.  Because Combine is one of the precious Agri-worlds that is in no danger of soil depletion, the world also takes in some fertilizers from other worlds to replenish the nutrients of the soil in a proportion to the rate it is taken away, instead of the more machine-like agriworlds that simply run their soil ragged.  Carvan’s presence on the world means that they are able to take a more active role in the oversight of their vendors and farms than they usually are, even heading up the staff on several themselves.

Carvan is one of the few merchant Houses in the Sector that began as a merchant family and only gained a nobility title later, which is the source of some derision from their peers.

House Albert, Celeste – law

While some Imperial worlds practice the harsh and draconian law of their own warlords, civilized Imperial worlds prefer to adopt customs that allow for the benefits of Imperial law without the lack of subtlety inherent to the more primitive worlds.  This can result in civilized worlds adopting vast and intricate law systems that have a dizzyingly complex array of subcodes and strictures that no layman could ever understand.  While the Arbites enforce Imperial law with as close to true neutrality as they can muster, the law of some planets is so convoluted that dedicated experts are needed for consultation on its finer points and applications.

Enter House Albert.  This ancient House is the smallest by employee count of all of the intact Great Houses of the Sector, but its wealth and influence could well eclipse most others.  The House Albert staffers and barristers are able to aid and advise on nearly any legal matter of the worlds Cloudburst, Celeste, Septiim, Cognomen, Hapster, Nauphry, and Thimble, and their senior council of trial lawyers has worked with the Arbites on twenty worlds more.  Albert’s lawyer staff are specifically forbidden by Sector law from participating in the House’s actual duties as members of the Cloudburst peerage, and so the House nobility and barristers can’t be the same people.  House Albert’s staff has absorbed several private law firms and sponsors law colleges on Thimble and Celeste, and is always looking for fresh talent.  The sheer length of time that some Arbites-led trials can take allow for Albert lawyers to be called in from offworld in many cases.

House Joun-Lee, Celeste

Where the Imperium goes, there is always war.  The beautiful countryside and endless beaches of Celeste may not routinely house invading aliens, but much of the rest of the Sector experiences warfare, from the intercene conflicts of local nobles to the private armies of Rogue Traders.  House Joun-Lee is the pre-eminent provider of men under arms in the Sector, and has been for over a thousand years.

Thanks to the rather restrictive laws regarding the legality of private militias in Sectors being different from Sector to Sector, there is little chance that House Joun-Lee will expand to other regions of Imperial space.  They have a large and competent corps of marketeers and salesmen, who have liaised with planetary officials, noble houses, field commanders, and recently Cardinal Drake to provide armed personnel for various tasks.

Despite the unsavory reputation of mercenaries in much of the modern Imperium, the majority of the House Joun-Lee contracts that they have served over the past few hundred years have been security and patrol contracts for prisons, Penal Legion camps, construction sites, and colonial outposts in the Cloudburst Circuit.  This is steady work, well-paying, and not very risky, at least not compared to warfare against aliens.  The longest contracts the House has served is providing security guards and trainers for the same to the great storage yards on Coriolis, where hundreds of millions of military families cache their larger possessions while their loved ones go on tour among the stars.  They also retain the possessions left behind when a family on deployment is killed in action until they can be auctioned.  The House Joun-Lee mercenary companies occasionally also work with Rogue Traders, but this isn’t as common among House members as it is among freelance groups, due to the low probability of returns on investment.

The House Joun-Lee is permitted a much larger contingent of soldiers than most Houses on Celeste ever will be, thanks to contracts of exclusivity granted to them by the Sector Overlord many centuries ago.  Any noble house that wanted to sponsor a mercenary group now would need to be shrewd and play a lot of catch-up work to overtake Joun-Lee’s enormous investments.  Additionally, House Joun-Lee has a significant force of atmospheric transports and fighters, most of them not quite up to Forge World standards or even Naval ones, but more than enough to flatten a small city if need be.  These are expensive to transport and even more expensive to refuel and rearm after missions, so they are fielded only for the most exhorbitantly pricey contracts.

As with all mercenary work, Joun-Lee’s field is not without its dangers, especially around the times of the Glasian Migrations.  Nobles or government officials who want to prioritize the defense of a specific place, instead of the more general work of the PDF or the Astra Militarum, will hire House Joun-Lee forces to provide the extra muscle.  The fact that the House has been able to hire troops out to so many places is indicative of their logistical skills, which are often called into service to aid in the transport of PDF troops on those occasions that they work with the House.

The House buys most of their equipment from either House O’Neill or the Mechanicus, although they are also known to manufacture some simple equipment, including uniforms, in the great factories of the city of Civitavecchia.  As might be expected for a mercenary company, the House Joun-Lee logistical bottleneck is Warpflight.  When a contract is levelled to hire House Joun-Lee troops, the client is generally expected to pay for transport or supply it themselves.  When a Rogue Trader is the contractor, this is trivial, but when the contractor is merely some noble or Governor who may not have a fleet of their own, transport is usually provided by sympathetic merchant Captains, who may well appreciate having a massive anti-boarding force at their disposal.  When no other option exists, the House Joun-Lee leaders can hire House Lunther logistical ships to transport them.  The Household would also very much like to buy a Universe class Mass Conveyor, but the Inquisition has kindly informed them that that would subject the House Joun-Lee to a far higher level of scrutiny.  After all, Lord Primarch Roboute Guilliman specifically divided up the Imperial military to avoid a Horus Heresy on smaller scales in the future, where one charismatic Traitor turned half the Imperial military by subverting eight people.  Of course, as a house of the Imperial Peerage that has no actual presence in the Administratum, House Joun-Lee isn’t technically bound by that separation of forces edict, but the Inquisition has enough headaches to deal with, and the House isn’t willing to press their luck any harder on the subject.

At the present time, literally all of the House Joun-Lee forces that are not tasked with pre-existing contracts have been hired indefinitely by Cardinal Lamarr to defend Johdclan’s Paradise.  As such, its entire ground contingent has been scrambled to defend the planet except those needed to resupply their long-term postings elsewhere.  It is this, above all other hirings made by the paranoid Cardinal, that has driven up the suspicion of the Ordo Hereticus.  Retaining a few troops to defend groundside holdings is one thing, but tasking an entire mercenary fleet to feed and transport an entire army is quite another.

House Senai, Coriolis

When it comes to the beauty of the natural world, the artificial society, and their blending at the seams, there are few worlds in the whole Cloudburst Sector that have quite captured the art of it all like House Senai.  The Coriolis-based House of military nobles are high-standing members of the Sector Peerage, and have ruled an entire Fortress-citadel on Coriolis for over two thousand years.  Their indulgence in high art is a more recent phenomenon, and of all of the House patronages in the Sector so far, the relationship between the nobles of the House and the group they patronize is most distant in Senai’s case.  Very few of the Senai famile members are actual artists, as opposed to House Joun-Lee, which has several of its youths as actual midshipmen in their command Universe, or House Albert’s many family lawyers.
As is the case in many of Coriolis’ noble families, the roots of the House Senai are planted deep in the Imperial Navy.  The Holy Fleet of the Imperium is a refuge for the untalented youngest children of many Imperial peer families, of course, and has been since after the Scouring ten thousand five hundred years before, but for House Senai, it is a point of pride.
The House Senai origins are all tied up in the ancient remit of the Imperial Navy to supply transport and air combat roles for the Imperial Guard.  As was imposed by the Lord Regent Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, over ten thousand years ago, the Imperial Guard may no longer maintain a fleet of its own, and no armed air or space craft.  Instead, those were to be provided by the Imperial Navy or Adeptus Mechanicus, so that no one faction of the Imperium may amass both enough ground and space firepower and transport capability to conquer any territory.  House Senai was originally a household of lifer Imperial Navy officers, many thousands of years ago, who were responsible for transporting the many millions of Segmentum Solar and Ultima soldiers and colonists who built the first wave of Cloudburst colonies.  Eventually, the House settled down, then nothing more than a very wealthy family with a very small noble title, in the leadership of a refurbished Navigator fortress on Coriolis.
Eventually, the House expanded their remit over the surrounding land, using their money to create efficient and clean irrigation systems, surveillance networks, and galleries of entertainment and sport for the people who lived around their fortress.  When Coriolis was formally declared a Fortress World of the Officio Munitorum, the Senai family was elevated to a proper title of Earldom, and given a high posting in the newly established Coriolis aristocracy.

As with all noble families that received their title through hard work, the Senai family lorded their position over their rivals, and immediately began flaunting their power.  Keeping up the tradition of sending their youngest off to serve in the Navy with commissions, deserved or no, the House Senai family never quite lost sight of their roots in service, but have taken to the Coriolis nobility like a Terran Highborn.  The family eventually lost the position of fortress administration with the shifting tides of economy and politics on the planet, but by that point, they had diversified their holdings to include far greater varieties of money-making businesses.  By that point, the House had moved into direct patronage of many of Coriolis’ artists and universities.

As a part of their patronage of the many art colleges of the planet Coriolis, the House Senai funds many up and coming painters, sculptors, and photographers in their journey through their mediums.  Many of the House itself have no involvement in the process at all, and simply spend a bit of money to enjoy the outcome.  However, the House Senai elders have hired many vendors and curators to dispense and sell the artwork of their patronages to galleries and museums across the Sector and beyond.  As can be expected, the Ordo Hereticus and Ecclesiarchy have covertly examined the artworks the House distributes for signs of Slaaneshi corruptions.

Senai-affiliated merchants also salt the works of their patronages through the great auction halls and guild offices of the greator Sector, as much for exposure as money.  After all, Senai isn’t the wealthiest noble house around, but there’s no harm to be found in good publicity.

Artworks that the House has taken possession of directly are stored in huge, pressure- and moisture-controlled vaults.  These vaults have expensive cogitator-controlled thermostats and light level controls purchased from the Cognomen factories, to prevent the natural damage that artworks can suffer when improperly exposed to the environment.  When a piece is bought, it is loaded by House technicians into simple gravsleds and lifted into waiting shuttles for delivery to the happy customer.  All Senai facilities are guarded by House Joun-Lee mercenaries, despite that being something of an overkill gesture on the most heavily defended planet in the Sector.


House Lunther, Hapster – logistics

One of the key advantages of the complex and interdependent economy of Hapster is that its lines of patronage and commerce are very well defined.  Laws that govern noble patronage are clear and unambiguous.