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System: Freehold

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Uncategorized Region

System Overlord: N/A

Planets: Ten, one habitable

Pirate World: Zlodiei

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 76.4%, Oxygen 22%, Argon .9%, Water .68%, Carbon dioxide .02%

Religion: Mixed

Government Type: Junta

Planetary Governor: N/A

Adept Presence: None

Climate: Zlodziei has extensive, slow-moving bands of light rain that periodically soak the ground beneath them and replenish local wildlife

Geography: 1.02 times the size of Terra, with extensive fault lines and tectonic upthrusts

Gravity: Terran Gravity

Economy: Local Scrip, Thrones

Principle Exports: N/A
Principle Imports: N/A

Countries and Continents: Twelve continents, no national divisions

Military: Free Corsair Coalition

Contact with Other Worlds: Rare

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 2,000,000 (local humans), 2,090,000 (human pirates), 491 (known alien pirates)

Description:
Zlodiei is a textbook example of what happens when humans try to make their way in life unaccompanied by the Emperor’s love.  The humans of Zlodziei made the error of attempting to escape the wholly reasonable edicts and costs of the Adeptus Terra, and now they’re paying for it every day.

Two hundred fifty years before the Seventh Glasian Migration, the people of the Mercad Hive of Thimble decided that they had had enough of the Imperium’s taxes and closeted mindsets.  Pooling their money to buy second-hand ships and basic survival gear, the hivers took flight into the darkness.  Two years later, out of food and desperate, the Thimblans stumbled across the planet Zlodziei.
The Thimblans settled down on the rocky planet, and quickly set about beginning basic agriculture and construction.  The Thimblans, now Zlodiein, refused all offers to become a new Imperial world, and the Imperium, deeply annoyed but unable to do much about it, cut off their supply lines.
The new colony struggled to find its footing.  Deaths from starvation and riots (and covert Imperial action) cost the planet three quarters of its population within the first fifteen years.  However, after a few more years of hard work, the capital city and some simple manufacturing infrastructure completed, and the colony began to reverse its fortunes.  Constant and focused terraforming of the planet’s soil and purification of its water ended the starvation, while a small force of public enforcers elected by their constituents ended lawlessness.  To the Imperium’s irritation, the colony began to prosper.
The manufacturing consortium that controlled most industry on the world rationed their materials carefully.  The Zlodziein did not manufacture one shirt or dataslate they didn’t need.  To the Imperium’s slight surprise, the people of Zlodziei were wholly uninterested in trade, either with the Imperium or with other factions.  Occasionally, a Rogue Trader would pop into the system to purchase or sell something, but beyond that, the people of the new colony refused any formal contact with the Imperium.

However, the Zlodziein were not foolish enough to think that they could spit on the Throne forever.  Knowing full well that the Ordo Hereticus was watching them remotely, and sometimes from closer, the Zlodziein manufactured great temples to the Emperor, to show their faith had not wavered, and that an Ecclesiarchial retribution for their separation was not needed.  They also began building a small defense militia, enough to fend off attackers from pirates or the occasional gutsy Ork.
So they imagined, at least.  Elsewhere in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, other factors were in play of which the Zlodziein were unaware.  The Cloudburst Sector has been, since the first day of its existence, more fluid than most.  The patchy and disjointed nature of local Warp routes and habitable star clusters is the natural byproduct of the metal-rich supernova that birthed the region millions of years ago, and colonization efforts in the Cloudburst Circuit are often limited by the distances a ship needs to travel in the Warp without stopping to get anywhere.  However, some expansion into the region does occur.  The border of the Cloudburst Sector has crept spinward and trailing, and so has the reach of its Navy.  Over time, Battlefleet Cloudburst has successfully pushed pirates and other undesirables out of its territory and into the darkness, only to run into them again later when they push into that very darkness.
One such group is the Free Corsair Coalition.  The FCC is more than a mere band of thugs and desperados, however.  The FCC is a self-contained, moble, heavily armed civilization, one of millions of people and dozens of warships.  The Coalition has raided targets as far apart as Nauphry and the Naxos border forts, and even stolen one of the few remaining Styx-class heavy cruisers.

The FCC moved in and took Zlodziei, as if it had always been theirs.  To the interest of spying Ordo Hereticus operatives in the Coalition and Zlodziein population, the FCC simply arrived in-system with two dozen warships and nine transports, and began landing assets on the surface of the planet.
The Ordo Hereticus had previously focused its efforts on the recruitment and combat portions of the FCC, those dedicated to raiding Imperial shipping and pressing its crewers into service.  The idea that the raiders would annex a planet is bizarre, given the FCC’s previous focus on maintaining mobility at all costs.  Nothing is less mobile than a planet.

However, the FCC did not massacre the populace or even rob the planet.  Instead, the FCC senior leadership arrived on the surface of the world and installed themselves as the new government.  After rounding up the previous government and moving them into the mines, the leader of the FCC, its founder Admiral Reith, named himself Governor For Life, and proclaimed business as usual.
Military assets from the FCC and its tributaries have poured in since then, adding to its defense.  However, both Zlodziein and FCC operatives of the Ordos have concluded that Reith has moved fewer than twenty percent of his fleet into the system.  While the entire non-combatant population of the FCC has since moved into Zlodziei, usually displacing the natives into the wilderness to occupy their homes, the martial assets are still staging somewhere else.

Reith has proven a canny and dangerous leader since then.  He knew in advance, thanks to his own spies, that the planet’s economy had no room in it for a sudden upswing in new residents, and neither did its agriculture.  He has kept up raids on Imperial shipping concerns, stealing food and manufactured goods, to bring to the planet to keep the populace from starving while they slave away, expanding the farms and mines.
Meanwhile, the native Zlodziein have taken various approaches to the new reality of their servitude.  Most of the populace have now either bent the knee to the pirates or stifled their dreams of freedom.  The Imperium comes up in more hopeful terms than it used to, as well, although some cynical Zlodziein think the Imperium would treat them even worse than the pirates do.
Some welcome the FCC.  They think that the martial culture of the FCC is better than the Imperium’s, since the FCC, at least, do not cloak their brutality in the mantle of righteousness.  The fact that the FCC has not disallowed the practice of Emperor-worship is especially appealing to them.

The Ordo Hereticus is aware of this decision of the FCC, but they see it more as a cunning ploy to prevent an Ecclesiarchial War of Faith against the FCC than any actual expression of faith on their part.  Still, so long as the FCC permits the worship of the Emperor, the Ordo is less concerned with their conduct than they might have been.  The problem that truly concerns the Ordo Hereticus is twofold, and ironically has nothing to do with religion.
The twofold problem concerns another facet of the FCC’s unique culture: aliens.  The Ordo has observed that alien FCC members have stepped up raids on Imperial goods and ships since the Zlodziein invasion, and that the Eldar members of the Coalition specifically have been coaching Zlodziein psykers in their alien ways.

The former is concern because of the potential of Ork spores or Eldar cultural insidiousness infecting human thoughts or flesh, of course, but the latter is a potentially devastating heresy.  The idea that humans could learn true psychic control from the degenerate Eldar and still remain truly loyal and faithful to the will of Him On Terra is laughable.  What could it possibly benefit the Eldar race, or even specific corsairs, if they teach human psykers to think like they do?  What, indeed, besides a cadre of brainwashed witches, ready to slay their fellow man at the whims of evil aliens?

The Ordo Hereticus only learned of this psychic trickery weeks before the coming of the Seventh Glasian Migration, but the discovery by a small infiltration unit of the Ordo in the ranks of the FCC has set off alarm bells across the Conclave Cloudburst.  Ordo Xenos Inquisitors demand to know what the Eldar are teaching, while Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors are screaming for blood from the race-traitors responsible.  The Ordo Malleus representatives are disgusted, but have resolved only to step in if the human psykers show signs of losing control of their power and summoning something worse than tricky aliens.

Given the massive resource drains of the imminent Glasian Migration and already-present Ork invasions, there is no real chance that the Conclave will be able to muster troops in sufficient volume for a decisive conventional invasion of FCC territory to put a stop to this.  However, the Inquisition has means beyond mere ranks of men.  Four Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, led by the murderous Jerome Paltmitier himself, have pooled their resources and amassed a respectable force of Scions, Stormtroopers, Guard, warships, and Throne Agents.  Not enough to win a war outright, but enough to heavily destabilize the Zlodziein defenses and allow a smaller conventional force to do damage out of proportion to their numbers.
All eyes now rest on Admiral Reith.  He has not yet made a statement, even on Zlodziei itself, about his intention regarding this education of human psykers by aliens.  Until the Ordos know precisely what he’s up to, and why he is allowing this, it will be difficult to create a means of stopping him without reliance on brute force or luck.
The Emperor’s Tarot has provided no guidance on the issue.  All portents point towards the Glasian Migration being a far greater threat, which even the most obsessive Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors must admit to probably being the case.  Still, until the resources needed to crush the FCC in open war become available, to take no action would simply be irresponsible, and the problem can only worsen with time.  The FCC’s pockets are growing deeper, their ranks swelling, and the Astronomican’s reach shrinking.

Outside the scope of the FCC, life on Zlodziei is not so different from life on some other Imperial worlds, namely the Prison Planet Craspian 5.  Zlodziei’s founding population of rich dissidents has long since passed away, and their descendents have attracted all manner of refugee or escapee Imperials to bolster their numbers.  Thus, the population of Zlodziei before their annexation was a mixed one, with no real pattern to ages, races, or even homeworlds outside the founding Thimblans.  Notably, Renegades and Traitors were generally received no more warmly than they would have been on an Imperial world.  The Zlodziein didn’t want a war, nor did they want the usual collection of Chaos-tainted scum and desperate criminals that Renegade and Traitor colonies usually attract.  Outside the towering cities of prefabricated concrete slabs and stone, life on Zlodziei was quiet and fairly calm.  Mines and farms, small factories and the occasional resort were all one would find more than a few miles from the two major spaceports.  A few small defense structures, mostly bunker networks with land cleared for VTOLs, dotted the countryside here and there.  Zlodziei had no orbitals and only a few satellites.

The world’s religious authority was decentralized and nearly powerless.  Worship consisted of a few small shrines and a single tiny chapel, with most people expected to practice their worship of the Emperor in their hearts and not with their wallets.  Ironically, this is closer in spirit to current Terran interpretations of the Holy Emperor Cult than that of Cardinals Drake and Lamarr.
Beyond such authority, paltry as it is, sits the government of the colony.  The current leadership consists of knifepoint compliance by puppets of the FCC, but prior to this, each of the fifteen major cities of the planet were expected to select a representative to attend a planetery Congress every six months, with the representative of the city with the largest population chairing meetings to establish legislation and execute governmental edicts.
Money on Zlodziei was not backed by the great trade cabals of the Imperium or the Mint of Terra, and so its valuation defaulted to a mixture of electronic bonds and gold-backed scrip.  When the pirates came, that system stayed in place, though the pirates prefer the use of Imperial currency instead, thanks to the fact that they can spend it off-world.

Today, however, life on Zlodziei is brutal and oppressive, worse than life on Thimble had been at the time by far.  The populace yearns for heroes, and whether those heroes come from the ranks of the FCC to lead them to a future free of the Imperium, from their own folk to cast off both of their enemies, or the Imperium, to shepherd the people back to the light, none yet know.


System: Oromet

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Thimble Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Dhaedrin Lombardi

Planets: 10, 2 habitable (1 undergoing final terraformation efforts)

Civilized World: Oromet

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21.96%, Argon 1%, Water .01%, Carbon gasses .02%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Peerage

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Astra Telepathica

Climate: Rapid variation between hot and cold temperatures everywhere except the frozen poles, frequent lightning storms

Geography: 1.11 times the size of Terra, with thick bands of mountains rising from tectonic junctures and seabed subduction zones

Gravity: 1.06 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Lithium, Carbon Chemicals, Soil, Textiles, Fruit, Soldiers
Principle Imports: Luxuries, Refined Metals

Countries and Continents: Twelve continents, eighty-five nations

Military: Oromet Shield Companies (medium quality PDF), Oromet Shock Troopers (medium quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Common

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 4,134,000,000

Description:
Oromet is a world of regret and peace, a combination that rarely surfaces in the extroverted and violent Imperium of Man.
The Administratum colonized the world long after the Gold Rushes that established the Sector.  In fact, the planet slipped past the Explorators and Rogue Traders that mapped the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.  It was only many centuries later that the world came to the attention of the Imperium.
Originally, the world was an out-of-the-way colony of the old Terran Federation.  The human populace traded extensively with aliens and other human worlds, but did so through orbitals and space stations, not surface visits.  Years of work ground the rough surfaces and non-Diaspora life of the planet down to human standards, and after a time, large mercantile companies managed to gain profits and success from Oromet’s many private manufacturing concerns.
When the lean times came, they came in fire.
Absolutely unheralded and without without pity, an army of the Men of Iron slammed the planet’s infrastructure to scraps.  A war broke out on the surface, one that ended with an eventual human victory that crippled its remaining industries.  Oromet didn’t even make it to the collapse of the Terran Federation before it fell apart.  When the last of its orbitals de-orbited thanks to disuse, the resultant fires and shortages destroyed what little remained of centralized government among the people.

As was the case on hundreds of thousands of worlds across the galaxy, anarchy followed decentralization.  The population felt hope rise and fall as warlord after warlord tried to unite the fractured populace and halt their decline, only for it to inexorably resume after their death or failure.  By the time the Imperium found the world, its climate had broken down completely, its cities were rubble, and its people numbered a pitiful half a million worldwide.

Bringing the world into Imperial compliance was easy, now that the Ministorum had nine thousand years of practice.  Missionaries, Mechanicus surveyors, Ordo Dialogous Sisters, and Administratum bureaucrats descended on the world.  Plague and misfortune struck several Imperial servants low, including the leader of the Missionaries, but eventually the planet fell into line with the Administratum.
Imposing Imperial law was simplicity itself.  The Administratum just picked the most popular warlords from the surviving populace and made them local governors, a system that had worked a million times before at least.
It worked on Oromet.  Within two centuries, the wars had stopped, ecological cleanup had begun, farms and mines popped up across the plains, and the out-of-control climate machines had come under Mechanicus control.  One hundred years after that, the world was paying a tithe, it had its own Planetary Bishop, and psyker harvesting had begun.

By all exterior appearances, the world had become a peaceful success story of the Imperium’s well-oiled Compliance machine.  Small Arbites precincts and a few orbitals followed the departure of the Missionaries, and the system even received a new deep-space augury platform from the Mechanicus to keep a vigil for pirates.

Then, quite without anybody else in the Imperium noticing, all hell broke loose.

One morning, an innocuous radio broadcast from the reigning Archbishop of the planet suggested, ever so innocently, that clergy could interpret the Emperor’s Tarot as clearly as a psyker could.  That raised a few eyebrows among the world’s Astropaths, certainly, since it is patently untrue, but it was so obviously untrue that they took no action.  Any clergyman who attempted to read the Tarot would make a fool of themselves, as surely as the sun rises.
The Astropaths found their unease returning in somewhat greater force when the Archbishop, Haggar, actually carried out a Tarot reading, and apparently did so accurately, foretelling a great storm before it appeared on the planet.  The Astropaths shrugged their shoulders and tried to forget their disquiet, but more and more, it appeared to them that Haggar had actually been blessed by the Emperor in some way.  His Tarot readings were consistently accurate.

It did not take long for Haggar to shift from simply telling people he could read the Tarot to saying that only he could do it properly.  This was a step too far for the planet’s psychic population, which was disproportionately small as it is on most Cloudburst worlds.  One such Astropath challenged him on his assertion.  When he performed a public Tarot reading, however, he realized too late that the psycrystal cards Haggar gave him to read were faked.  When he proclaimed this, an offended crowd tore him apart.

By this time, Haggar had sunk into outright heresy, and turned much of the young colony against the Imperium.  Oromet’s population had swollen large from the influx of new colonists from other worlds in the Imperium, who had moved there to escape overcrowding on their homeworlds.  As such, very few of the people living in the cities and towns of Oromet were native to the planet, and Haggar benefited from such a diverse background in his minions.  The surviving Astropaths took shelter in the Arbites Precinct Fortress in the capital, but now Haggar was whipping the populace into a frenzy with oratory and promises.  His broad range of public support meant that the Administratum was all but helpless, and the Astropaths managed send out one message before the horde besieged their refuge.

With nearly a billion colonists swarming around the Precinct, there was no realistic way to keep them out forever.  Even a pile of bodies would have let the invaders climb up and into the building eventually.  The Arbites mobilized the PDF, but the Judges and Marshals knew very well that that would not buy them much time.  Sure enough, much of the PDF had fallen under the sway of the cunning Archbishop.  The PDF forces assaulted and destroyed each other in hordes outside the capital, while the Arbites used the chaos to quietly slip reinforcements in from other Precincts around the planet, and evacuate the loyal Adepts from the capital.

By the time the Ordo Hereticus had received the message, the Arbites had evacuated approximately five percent of the capital, with Capital Spaceport personnel evacuating several hundred more citizens and some loyal PDF wounded, but the writing was on the wall for all to see.  There was simply no way that the Arbites and Astropaths would be able to evacuate all the people who needed to be evacuated before the fighting between PDF elements ended and the horde assaulted the Precinct Fortress in number.  Covert sharpshooter assistance from Arbites snipers and the occasional loyal Enforcer managed to slow the process, but Oromet’s capital was doomed.

Ordo Hereticus operatives on Maskos and Thimble knew that the window in which they would be able to salvage the planet was closing quickly.  If Haggar had made some pact that let him read the Tarot, and bring a billion people under control that quickly, there was no telling what other forces he had brought to his side.  The Ordo Hereticus needed to solve the problem before it became an Ordo Malleus problem instead.  Moving as quickly as they could, the Ordo pulled together a force of Throne Agents, Arbites, and Scions from Thimble, as well as five regiments of Thimble Argent Swords.  Of course, a force of fifty two thousand could hardly defeat a force of a billion, especially without a local PDF upon which to rely, but it might have provided them enough cover to capture Haggar alive and force him to recant.

The force of Loyalists arrived in orbit over Oromet just as the last the of the Loyalist PDF retreated into the city, under constant attack from enraged citizens on rofotops with firebombs and caltrops.  The PDF rallied around the Prectinct Fortress in which the Astropaths had taken residence, prepared to make one last stand.  Arbites from other Prectincts around the planet had partially surrounded the city, but that was a mere cordon.  Hundreds of millions of brainwashed citizens packed every street, every building.  Waste overflowed the sewers and water tyreatment centers as the population exceeded the city’s infrastructural capacity by a factor of ten times what it had been designed for.  The power draw on the city was so great that the local power plants had to institute daytime brownouts, if the Loyalist PDF hadn’t blow them up first.

Quick communications with the Astropaths that remained in the Precinct Fortress established that Haggar was actually still in the city somewhere, but he had been wise enough to relay his radio broadcasts through local telecommunications infrastructure instead of using the antenna in his cathedral.  His intent was obvious enough to the Ordo troopers: force any invader to dislodge a billion people finding him.
However, Haggar’s plan hinged on none of the Astropaths that had witnessed his broken psycrystal card trick surviving long enough to report in.  To his peril, two of the Astropaths that had witnessed their partner being ripped to shreds had survived, by hiding in plainclothes Arbites evacuation vehicles and riding to Precincts in other cities with less distress.  They reported that Haggar had broken the Tarot cards he had given to the departed Astropath, but also their realization after the fact.  Haggar was a psyker himself, a remarkably disciplined one by all indications.  The Astropaths realized that his own Tarot reading had been completely genuine, and derived from a pool of psychic power, not any strange bargains or Emperor-granted blessings.

That made the Ordo’s two tasks quite different.  Finding a preacher of superhuman luck and charisma wasn’t typically difficult, and finding one with psychic power and no Sanction to shield his soul was even easier.  However, a psyker can also assert control over the hearts of the weak and the weary, and there was every chance that the great mob in the city below would be able to fight on long after a rational force had broken and withdrawn, if Haggar was using his own power to compel him.
All this together meant that Haggar would be easier to find and harder to extract alive with conventional forces alone.  The PDF Loyalists on the ground were exhausted, their ammunition all but depleted by killing their traitorous comrades, and morale hung by a thread.  While the Ordo Hereticus task force awaited the arrival of the Thimblan Guard regiments, the presiding Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor sent an instruction to the system’s Lord Marshal to estimate how much time they had before the mass of civilians attacked.
The Lord Marshal estimated two days.  That was how much time the Inquisition had to find the guilty Archbishop and get him out, or kill him if that was not an option.  The Inquisition waited until the last minute, then ordered a white phosphorous dispersal attack on random spots around the capital.
The PDF was understandably reluctant to dump burning phosphorous on a city full of unarmed people, but enough units followed the order that the Inquisition was able to get their Scion force down into the spaceport unopposed in the chaos that followed.  Meanwhile, psychic Inquisitors and Agents in orbit used their power to triangulate on any sites of unexpected psychic activity in the wake of the total panic from the incendiary attack.
They found Haggar at once, in an armored bunker beneath an abandoned PDF base.  The Inquisition struck, sending dozens of Throne Agents and Arbites elites into the bunker to clear it out and capture Haggar.  They found him hunched over his precious radio, still pouring psychic power into his words, commanding his brainwashed followers to kill, kill, kill.

A Tempestor Prime reached him first and beat him into a bloody coma, while the remainder of the Hereticus force attacked outwards from the spaceport.  Without the psychic impulses driving them, most of the civilians ran screaming from the scene of massacres, burning corpses, and ruthless Inquisitorial justice.  The ones who didn’t were either the true believers over whom Haggar had never needed to exert psychic control, the ones who had some other grievance towards the Inquisition, looters who preferred death to capture, or those driven to rage over the use of white phosphorous against civilians.

By the time the Thimblan Argent Swords arrived and joined the fighting, some roads had fifteen-foot walls of bodies.  Thousands more died from being trampled or crushed by cars as the populace abandoned the cty in great walls of unwashed bodies.  Tens of thousands more died or went mad from the Archbishop’s psychic presence suddenly vanishing from their minds, and PDF casualties mounted to ninety eight percent by the end of the whole affair.

In the end, Haggar was taken offworld for interrogation, and some semblance of peace reigned over Oromet, one buried in a mountain of corpses.  Ultimately, however, blame for the entire affair fell on the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.  How had they missed a psyker as powerful as Haggar?  How had a group of local Astropaths been the only ones to realize something was wrong when a clergyman could read the Tarot?  Embarassed but defiant, the Adeptus pointed out that Oromet’s own government and law enforcement had failed too, both to prevent a cleric from gaining such control over the local military and for allowing a psychic to slip through the fingers of their tithe.

As is so often the case when assigning blame takes precedence over preventative maintenance, little was done in the aftermath of the cleanup.  The Munitorum assigned the Argent Sword regiments to the planet as its new PDF, and new Astropaths and Arbites flew in from Terra to replenish the local ranks.  It took fourteen years of nonstop work to bring the city and its infrastructure back online, and the populace never quite recovered from losing several million people to death and millions more to madness and trauma from their psychic assaults.

Perhaps, as some sages assert, history is a cycle, and all the trappings draped over it by one era of mankind’s civilization are just terrain for the next one, but whatever lesson the local Ministorum should have learned from the Haggar incident, they did not.  Not four hundred years later, yet another Oromet clergyman turned his soul’s coat.  Deacon Woldenbar was no psyker, but he wanted to be.  In the hateful night, as he raged and fumed over the inherent unfairness of it all, he reached out to the Emperor and begged for power.  It was, predictably enough, not the Emperor who answered.
Over the next few months, thoroughly enthralled by his new daemon patron, the Deacon began his dark work.  Woldenbar knew he would never be able to capture as many souls publicly as Haggar had, but his master was insatiable, and to save his own soul from the daemon’s hunger, Woldenbar turned to baser methods of control than Haggar’s subtle mind control.  Starting with his parish’s children and slowly expanding his grip outward, the Deacon wended his way through the faith of his neighbors, until his Chaotic power had brought hundreds to heel.  He whispered lies about the Emperor’s power, and when those lies did not take root, he would rip the souls from the truculent and cast them into the Warp to be eaten, in front of others contemplating resistance.

Naturally, the planet’s Astropathic and Arbites authorities were on the lookout for any sort of heretical or unauthorized psychic after the dangerous behavior of the Archbishop a few centuries before.  Woldenbar avoided working his toxic magic on the minds of the people nearest these centers of power, staying instead in the slums and the poorhouses, where the Ministorum went and few others bothered.  Over time, his lies and promised swayed more and more loyal citizens to the cause of the Dark Gods.

Beyond a point, however, the increased vigilance of the Arbites, Ministorum, and Inquisition could not be evaded.  By the time the Ordo Hereticus had taken notice of the goings-on, and sent an appropriate reprisal force of Battle Sisters from the convents of Maskos and Septiim, Woldenbar had already corrupted a million souls directly and indirectly.  With his tools of witchery and blackmail, Woldenbar had twisted an entire city to his words.

However, a million bewitched pawns are no match for four thousand Battle Sisters with an Inquisitor at the head and a brigade of elite tanks in the rear.  Woldenbar’s dark patron, having accomplished its insidious goal, made it clear that it would abandon Woldenbar as soon as it looked like he was going to lose.  When the Inquisition showed up and started infiltrating his city, Woldenbar panicked.  Rousing his herd to action, he ordered his thralls to assault the Inquisitorial delegation while he attempted to undertake a ritual to bring his patron to the Materium.
His daemonic master, however, was having none of it.  Having a far better idea about the content of the Inquisitorial delegation than the untrained Woldenbar, it chose instead to cut its losses.  As Woldenbar pled and pled for the being of the Warp to honor its bargains and defend it, the outside of the city caught alight.

The Sisters of Battle are not a subtle force of the Emperor’s divine judgment.  With the rage of four thousand Power Armored killers and eight hundred Arbites Marshals, the Inquisitorial task group assaulted the city in a lighting raid just before sunrise.  Massive flare bombs that released glowing gasses and spikes of light up above the city showed hordes of Power Armored women cutting through vast ranks of Chaos-worshippers.

What the light did not reveal was something odd: a daemon had backed out of a bargain with a mortal, and not claimed their soul.  Woldenbar’s pathetic entreating and meandering ritual disgusted his daemonic patron, who retreated from Woldenbar’s corrupt soul when it sensed the righteous hate of the Sisters approaching.  As soon as over half of the hostile force suddenly broke or threw themselves on the blades of the Sisters, the Inquisition knew what had happened.

Once the slaughter was done, the Inquisitors cut their way to Woldenbar.  Ignoring his panicked pleas and explanations for mercy, the Inquisitor at the head of the task force beat him unconscious and dragged him to a shuttle, and then took him to Celeste for cryo-imprisonment.

Oromet has only barely begun to recover from this pair of crippling heresies.  Although only one city was affected the second time, the fact is that the entire planet is now suspect in the eyes of many Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors.  The name Oromet is coming up quite a lot in recent discussions in the Maskos Palace, and not favorably.  What is it, they wonder, that brings heretics and those vulnerable to the whispers of heresy on Oromet?


Quite aside from its predisposition to errant behavior, the planet has a few other distinct features.  Oromet language, fashion, agriculture, art, and regional history are all similar across population centers.  This is an artifact of its relatively large pilot population of settlers, all of whom came from the same continent on the same planet: Grhalskr, a Hive World in Drumnos Sector.  Much of the Hiver culture is long since gone, of course, but Inquisitors have asked in the past if the planet’s relatively high homogeneity may lend itself to deviant thought.  Or, failing that, it may at least help explain why it spreads so quickly through the populace.

Oromet’s primary interaction with the Imperium at large isn’t heresy, despite its reputation.  Instead, it is a heavy exporter of complex batteries.  Oromet has the best battery manufacturing facilities outside Cognomen, and this is all due to the composition of its crust.  Oromet congealed from the mingling gasses of two local nebulae, seeded by the supernebula of the ancient exploding star that shrouds the whole Cloudburst Sector.  The crust has vast deposits of lithium, manganese, copper, zinc, aluminum, iron, and cobalt, all of which are valuable to the creation of batteries, capacitors, and transistors.  The Mechanicus closely oversees these extraction, refinement, and shipping of these valuable metals.  Its adherents see this duty as a sacred one, as they ensure the safe birth of the carriers of the Motive Force that illuminates all technology.  Oromet batteries and capacitors find a home in electronics across the Circuit, thanks to their common use in tools and equipment among Rogue Traders and Explorators.

The planet also has extensive vine-growth agriculture, thanks to its many mountains and volcanoes.  The soil near these mountains is often rich and thick, thanks to the nutrients dislodged or deposited by these upthrusts and eruptions.
Therefore, once the local plants are cut back, this soil is perfect for growing creeping and climbing vines.  Huge frameworks of hollow transparent plastic dot the sides of the mountains, growing megatons of beans, fruits, and feedstock for animals.  Agri-combine trucks from House Carvan transport the food to shipping and bottling plants in the cities, which then transport the food to markets and spaceports.

Industrially, much of Oglith’s production relates to its enormous battery and capacitor manufacturing, but not all.  Much of Oglith’s processed materials go to Thimble, to feed that recovering world’s insatiable need for goods.  Several dozen freighters can be found on its routes back and forth, flying raw goods and food to Thimble, and bringing back fertilizers and finished products.

Oromet’s orbital infrastructure is underdeveloped, even for a world as relatively new to the Imperium as it is.  Aside from some basic defensive structures and a small anchorage for its SDF gunboats, it lacks any means of repelling serious attempts at landing on the surface.  While it does have a few small surface guns, they are mostly for asteroid diversion, not the destruction of warships.
Asteroid diversion is a serious concern for Oromet, however.  The Mechanicus has seen fit to bless Oromet with eleven Kintetic Repulsives, surface silos that fire rockets containing powdered lead weights, to either fly alongside asteroids and divert them with gravity wells or slam into them and redirect them.  The space around Oromet is aflood with debris, even worse than Thimble and Delving.  The rough concurrence of several Warp routes around the world, including several crossing currents, ensures that any asteroids that get sucked into the Warp for dozens of lightyears around inevitably find themselves flung at Oromet.  Of course, most fly directly into the star, but every once in a while, one passes close enough to the planet to necessitate deflection.  This also means that when a Space Hulk flies through the Cloudburst Sector, Oromet is usually the first planet to see it.

This necessitates a considerable groundside defense, as an Ork-infested Space Hulk – or worse, a Genestealer-infested Space Hulk – could easily arrive in orbit over a world with as few orbital guns as Oromet.  Oromet prefers quantity over quality for its armed forces, and its Shield Companies are a middling PDF at best.  Training usually lasts six months, after which members of the service rotate to their hometowns, to be called up in an emergency.  By contrast, the Oromet Shock Troopers are a full-time, professional force, usually recruited from volunteers of the Shield Companies.  Although the Oromet Shock Troopers model their appearance and tactics after Cadian templates, actual Cadians would find a direct comparison rather offensive.  Oromet troops lack most varieties of Leman Russ tank and have far lower standards of discipline, by virtue of not having an eleven thousand year tradition of martial excellence.  Of course, to dismiss the Oromet Shock Troopers would be a mistake, since their extensive field deployments on other planets has lent them the ability to adapt to most terrain types, and they work well with psykers, unlike many Cloudburst regiments.

Oromet does have another distinguishing feature in its military.  The planet plays host to a massive prison, the size of a city.  Inside, over eighty million prisoners from across the Thimble Subsector, mostly Thimble itself, reside and labor for the Imperium.  The prison sits on an island far from the mainland, within eyeshot of a large volcano on the planet’s north polar circle.  Inside the prison, the prisoners are given three choices: sit out their sentences in ordinary confinement, trade time for labor and work it off quicker, or join a Penal Legion and redeem themselves through fighting for their lives.
The planet fields over a million Penal Legionnaires annually, with the vast majority going to fight on behalf of the Imperium in the nearby Naxos Sector.  Naxos suffers intense raider and Chaos invader problems, and the inflow of Penal Legionnaires blunts the damage on the sector’s own precarious population.


System: Liprel Shoal

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Oglith Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Seven, one inhabitable, one moon terraformable

Frontier World: Hangonne

Satellites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 20%, Argon 1%, Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%.

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Republics

Planetary Governor: Yes, position presently vacant

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus

Climate: Largely temperate, with arid grasslands at the equator and frigid glaciers at the poles

Geography: Flat plains with occasional sharp, dirt-less mountains, tidal basins, broad rivers with slow water, deep oceans with fast currents, .97 times the size of Terra

Gravity: Hangonne has .91 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Textiles, Magnesium, Coal, Nitrogen, Leather, Silver
Principle Imports: Complex Alloys, Military Equipment, All-Terrain Vehicles, Satellites, Teachers

Countries and Continents: Hangonne has eighty local governments over four continents

Military: Hangonne Rangers (high quality PDF), Hangonne Light Rifles (medium quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Uncommon

Tithe Grade: Solutio Prima

Population: 69,820,000

Description:
Hangonne is a place of peace and plenty, and is so thankful for it that it colors every aspect of its citizens’ lives.  If there were a world that could be said to carry the Emperor’s personal blessing, Hangonne would be it.  Of all the worlds in Cloudburst, none can be called luckier than Hangonne.  Its people look at the stars every night and thank Him On Terra for their survival, and their underlying unease grows every time.  Soon, change will come to Hangonne, and every occupant knows and dreads it.

Founded long before the establishment of the Sector, the Frontier World of Hangonne sits quietly in the edges of Imperial territory, minding its own business.  Like Oglith itself, it is a Frontier World and pleased by that.  Realistically, there are few ways the Imperium can physically expand past Hangonne, unless humanity tries once more to colonize the Oldlight Exo-zone.  As such, it is a Frontier in the physical sense as well as in its logistical and infrastructural nature.  While the world does have a few large cities, they are not the towering spires of Celeste or the sprawl of Maskos.  Most Hangonne cities are neat, compact affairs with walls and sturdy architecture, more akin to Clegran than Septiim.  The scouring wind whips past the cities on its way from the sea to the mountains, sometimes carrying rain or snow to water the hardy plants that emerge from the scratch and hardpack.

The majority of the population lives in the thousands of small towns and villages that settlers built all across the globe.  These towns fish, hunt, farm, ranch, and dig for their food, and usually produce just enough for their own needs, a bit of storage, and leftovers to export.
Politically, the planet’s settlers split into a patchwork of roughly eighty republics, each of which convenes every ten years to select a President who represents the world to the Imperium.  That President serves as the de facto Plantary Governor.  The system does not yet qualify for a System Overlord by necessity, although the Sector Administratum is free to select one for convenience any time they wish.  Hangonne’s economic prospects for the future are limited by its anomalously low content of the elements needed to make steel and low-quality soil, but its population has ample room to grow, and may someday need a true System Overlord.

However, Hangonne’s own populace does not wish for that responsibility.  Hangonne enjoys its isolation, for the most part, and its people have decided, collectively, that greater participation in the Imperium is not for them.  Election after election has shown that the Hangonne populace prefers to remain disconnected from larger affairs of clergy and state.
Until, of course, the Glasians arrived.

When the aliens assaulted Hangonne in the Third Migration, the planet was barely prepared.  The destruction of Chlorit in the previous Migration weighed heavy on the minds of the planet’s defenders, which consisted of eight regiments of the Imperial Guard and the world’s own PDF.  The possibility that the planet could fall to the Glasians informed every decision the planetary government made.  Every chapel, every church, every shrine on the planet crammed with Hangonnians desperate to avert their fate.
Fate listened, or perhaps the Emperor, or just simple luck.  Regardless of the source of their fortune, the Glasians never even arrived on the planet.  As their ship, a lesser Cylinder, emerged from FTL, its presence lit up every single sensor in the outer system.  This was the first sign that something was different; usually their vessels arrived in strealth.  Hours later, the report filtered in from Mechanicus fueling platform minders at the termination shock of the system: the Glasian ship had collided with an asteroid as it emerged from its mysterious Faster Than Light mode, and had triggered a catastrophic overload of its reactor.
Seven hours later, the glare from the blast reached orbital telescopes.  Riotous cheers erupted across the planet, as Cloudburst celebrated the first casualty-free (and to date only casualty-free) defeat of the Glasians.

Understandably, piety and thanks were the order of the day, month, and decade after that.  The Ministorum had no need to parlay this unexpected deliverance into a message from the Emperor, as the relieved people did that by themselves.  Of course, the fact that the Emperor had not seen fit to deliver every other system the Glasians had ever targeted went neatly overlooked.
Still, regardless of the source of their rescue, the planet survived, and the Glasians have not targeted it since.  The regmiments on planet quickly shipped off to other worlds to help alleviate the strain of their own invasions, while the preparations Hangonne had undertaken to survive the Migration sat fallow and unused.

In the aftermath of the abortive invasion, the Mechanicus undertook its various data-takings, visiting the site of the wreck and attempting to learn more, which ultimately failed.  The Glasian technology that had surived the impact and explosion was still too heavily tainted to attempt to reverse-engineer, and had to be disposed of by flinging it into the sun.

Still, while the relief on the planet was evident in its inhabitants’ every action for years after, the question lingered in the hearts of the local government.  How had their level of readiness been so low that they had needed eight Imperial Guard regiments at least, just to have a hope of drawing even?

Hangonne is a world of cultural stasis, even stagnation, by its own choice.  While that suits the tastes of its people well, it does not lend itself to defense from hostile aliens.  The world was born from the desire of many of the Naxos economic elite to escape the combination of hostility and pollution that hangs over that sector’s few remaining worlds that have not yet been the site of Nurglite cult uprisings.  Hangonne colonists were early all travelers and settlers from rich worlds in Naxos, and they came to Hangonne to escape the lives they lived.  On Hangonne, the people don’t live in harmony with nature so much as cloister themselves from the rest of the Imperium’s assault on it.  Cities on Hangonne never take up more land than needed, food never goes uneaten because people never grow more than they need to eat or export, and most of all, the people do not force technological niches into their lives that they need mechanisms to fill.

The people of Hangonne don’t identify as holistic in their lifestyle, but the world could certainly export more than it does and import orders of magnitude more than it does.  This does not go over well with the Administratum, of course, but the planet’s unshakable piety and loyalty do allay concerns in Cloudburst’s subterranean halls that the world’s leaders are simply being greedy, and denying Terra her Due.

The world’s government is an inefficient one from the perspective of the three Adepta that require resources from the Imperium’s worlds, however, even accounting for its deliberately primitive technology levels.  The Ecclesiarchy is generally happy with its collections and level of thankful piety, though the small, humble religious institutions the world builds are a bit too small for its liking.  The choice of ejecting all unneeded technology from daily life is a hostile one in the eyes of the Mechanicus, but they tolerate it thanks to the world’s exports of high quality metals (except steel) and food to Cognomen.  The Administratum dislikes any world that doesn’t have a single, centralized government with which to negotiate and from which to collect taxes, but generally puts up with it to avoid unnecessary jurisdictional battles.
All of that may change.  Although the Glasians show no sign of returning, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume they will never do so in the future.  Despite the comfort and peace it usually brings, the Hangonne lifestyle leaves the world terribly vulnerable to attack by enemies.  What if, the Officio Munitorum has asked, the Glasians had sent multiple ships?  What if instead of a single Cylinder with its escorts riding on the hull, it had instead been a convoy of Orks, like the one attacking Oglith?  Or, perhaps, a Chaos warfleet, which always arrive in a new system in a dispersed formation to prevent just such a disaster?  Isolationism and primitivism served Hangonne well when its biggest concern was privacy and overreliance on the Mechanicus, but against the foes of man, it will just make their tasks harder.

As such, there is a gradual, somewhat resentful shift in the world’s politics, toward centralization of some governmental bodies and infrastructure.  The planet has opened a Scholam Progenium, for instance, as well as a few larger Mechanicus-owned factories to produce local weapons.  Like many Frontier Worlds, Hangonne depends as little as possible on commerce with other worlds, but what it can export to Cognomen, it does, mostly silver.  It also exports some textiles to Thimble, which it grows on its wide, windy plains where no vegetables can take root.

Each of the planet’s dozens of republics controls one or two large cities, a few towns and manufacturing centers, and hundreds of villages and small ranch holdings, with none having a population larger than a million.  Most have far fewer, and the exceptions are all larger as a result of having built up around rivers and seas, where more opportunities for farming and trade exist.  Most of the world’s power comes from geothermal and wind turbines, with the Mechanicus only bothering to install other sources in places that need round-the-clock power in great volumes, like the world’s few vehicle factories.  Economically, the Imperial Administratum does not believe Hangonne will need such a low tithe grade for much longer, as long as its population continues to expand at its current rate.

The Hangonne military uses the opposite approach to warfare as Oromet or Lorelei.  Those worlds depend on masses of lightly trained militia and the largest number of professional soldiers it can afford, trained to reasonable levels, while Hangonne deploys small teams of professional PDF and Guard as different branches of the same service.  The Rangers serve as the PDF, and select small numbers of each republic’s own forces as the pool for their own numbers.  Rangers train under a cadre of full-time instructors, learning things like balance, pain tolerance, how to identify edible plants, and riding.  Officers train further in various morale and leadership roles, while enlisted men train on heavy weapons and vehicle operation, sharpshooting, and field encamping.  The Hangonne preference for not using unneeded technology extends to Rangers, who only employ electronic devices when the mission profile calls for it.  Despite this, the Rangers do use whatever weaponry they have on hand when fighting, usually various slug rifles and lasweapons, with the usual assortment of vehicles for a PDF, albeit a slightly low-tech one.

The Hangonne Light Rifles, however, are a more generalized force, and use a mixture of Ranger tactics and more general Guard tactics for their task of augmenting whatever force they’re attached to.  As a Light Rifle unit, they prefer the use of man-portable weapons and fast vehicles, usually Chimaeras or Tauroses, and only field tanks when the need is dire.  Being from a world without much wealth or high technology, the Hangonne Light Rifles prefer subtlety when the option exists.  There is no denying that they are not a particularly capable force outside their mission profile, but this is often the case for Frontier World Guard units.  The discrepancy in their noted quality profile stems from the fact that Guard are often called upon to participate in a wider variety of missions than a PDF, and although they are even better at serving as a stealth recon force or light small-unit tactics asset than the Rangers, they are simply not good at garrison or boarding actions.
This does limit their deployability.  On a world with more wealth or love of high technology, or a world with a larger population, the recruitment pool may be large enough to allow for multiple specializations in their Guard forces.  Instead, Hangonne military forces choose to do one thing very well.

Hangonne’s barrenness and open plains make for great practice space for its armed services.  Recently, the Hangonne PDF has begun importing hundreds of all-terrain vehicles for its units to practice on, to augment horse cavalry in its Rough Riders.  It has also continued the program of satellite launches that the Navy employed to harden up its orbital defenses in advance of the arrival of the Glasians, which sat unused for centuries after the aliens failed to reach them.


The outer reaches of the Liprel Shoal include a handful of uninhabitable planets, including 6-19, a moon of a gas giant.  The moon is large enough for gravity and atmosphere, and the Administratum has plans to make it into a terraformed breadbasket world, to feed extra food and textiles into Thimble and Cognomen’s never-full warehouses.


System: Limmerdine

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Hapster Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Connor Rodiel

Planets: Eight, one habitable

Death World: Limmerdine 3

Satelites: none

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 79%, Oxygen 19.7%, Argon .2%, Water .6%, Unknown 0.1%, Carbon Dioxide .4%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Extended Emergency Coalition (Mechanicus/Administratum/Ecclesiarchy)

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Astra Telepathica (system’s edge)

Climate: Mixtures of natural weather and rot

Geography: 87 million mi² of surface, alternating between strips of clean land and rotting waste

Gravity: 1.04 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: N/A
Principle Imports: Ecobalance Equipment, Hazard Suits, Food, Ammunition

Countries and Continents: Nine continents

Military: Celestial Guard and Thimblan Argent Swords

Contact with Other Worlds: Rare

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 82,342

Description:
Once, Limmerdine was a verdant world of pine forest analogues, with extensive agriculture and a healthy population.  Now, it is a toxic wasteland, only halfway through an arduous and expensive reconstruction process that experts think will take another twenty five centuries at minimum.

The planet’s history in the Imperium is one of false starts, beginning days after the Administratum first formed the colony.  When the Imperial settlers arrived from Hapster in M37, before the Cloudburst Sector existed, the Mechanicus had surveyed the planet and found nothing that could cause a failure of its colony plans.  However, within a few weeks of settling on the planet, just as pre-fab structures were going up to provide more power and clean water, the Mechanicus withdrew the entire population into space.  To their own embarrassment, they had missed something.
As they dug the main colony site’s first thermoplasmic generator, the Mechanicus located enormous metal structures mere feet below the surface.  When they learned of this, the Administratum leaders of the colony expedition raged at the Mechanicus for missing something in their surveys that a shovel or a magnet could have located.

Embarassed and racing the clock, the Mechanicus began large-scale excavations posthaste, and found that the metal structures at the colony site were mostly empty, and appeared to be storage.  Further investigation, conducted by Tech-adepts rushing to overcome the stranded colonists’ dwindling food supply, showed the buildings to be over eleven thousand years old, predating even the Rise of the Iron Men.  The buildings had their own power supplies, a collection of broken solar panels and batteries.  Beneath them, the Tech-adepts found caverns filled with junk and garbage.

Inside the structures, though, there seemed to be nothing to find.  The walls of the buildings were intact, thanks to the metallurgical wunderkraft of the ancient Terrans, but their actual function and intended contents remained mysterious.
Eventually, faced with the imminent loss of the world’s food supply, the Mechanicus allowed the colonists to return and resume their plans.  Although several colonists nearly died of starvation before emergency relief supplies arrived from other worlds, the disruption caused no more than a year’s delay once the colonists were back from space.  The structures remained inscrutable, and were reburied, albeit with access doors dug from the surface down to allow further examination.

The colony persisted for a few more years, until M37.789.051.  One dreary morning, with no warning of trouble at all, the Tech-adepts boiled out of their tunnels like ants defending a nest.  They set on the other human colonists and began ripping them to pieces, shooting and cutting, and using welding torches to burn them up.

The six Arbites assigned to the pilot colony responded quickly and blasted the Tech-adepts into oblivion.  Once order was restored, the Arbites braved the depths of the tunnels, but returned at once.  The walls had begun vibrating at resonant frequencies, they reported, and only when they engaged the audio muffling of their helmets did going anywhere near the walls become possible.  Later, each would admit to being nearly overwhelmed by the urge to kill, which faded only when they turned on their muffles.

Clearly, there was far more going on than the Mechanicus had realized, now twice in two years.  The Administratum ordered the archaeotech destroyed, over the Mechanicus’ objections, and relocated the colony to elsewhere on the planet.


Thousands of years of hard work later, the planet had become a productive Agri-world of the Imperium.  Its primary export was softwoods, grown in carefully tended arboreal ranches by professional farmers.  Huge timber and pulping mills processed the softwoods and turned them to paper and wood products, then magnetic trains lifted them into cargo containers for its spaceports.
The world had a variety of local industries that allowed it a measure of independence from the infrastructural dependencies of other Agri-worlds.  The planet’s power grids had a series of local geothermal power plants and solar farms that provided abundant electricity for the cities, and the Mechanicus mined large polar deposits of manganese and nickel to produce steel for off-world foundries.

However, Limmerdine was not beyond the sight of the Emperor’s enemies.  As Limmerdine sat on a Warp Route, the planet often served as a source of food and supplies for Imperial Guard infantry, which would sometimes fly by on troopships for dispatch to wars.  One such convoy of troopships arrived in orbit of Limmerdine in M38.799.  After sending the appropriate codes and pleasantries, the lead vessel in the small convoy asked for permission to send down some troops to enjoy a few days’ leave and buy some supplies.  Limmerdine’s traffic control agreed, and the convoy sent some shuttles down.  Then, this time unannounced, they sent several hundred more.  Limmerdine traffic control demanded an explanation, but all channels were dead.  The shuttles landed to a hasty reception from local military, but nothing could have prepared the people of Limmerdine for what happened next.  Tens of thousands of Nurglite cultists and warriors poured out of the shuttles and attacked the spaceports of the planet, overrunning them in minutes.  Local PDF and Arbites forces responded in kind, and the cities dissolved into fractious warzones in hours.
As any sensible planetary administrator would do, the Governor gave the call to evacuate the cities into other locales with no invaded spaceports.  Meanwhile loyal SDF vessels assaulted the troopships in orbit.  Two of the troopships exploded as soon as the SDF closed to firing range, revealing themselves as Q Ships, and crippled three SDF gunboats.  The others attacked the SDF despite being slightly outgunned, buying time for their bretheren on the surface to carry out their dark work.

As refugees poured into the outlying cities, though, the Nurglites revealed the depth of their true, depraved plan.  The illnesses they carried had taken root in the water supply of several cities, and several refugee convoys fell sick over the next week with a variety of horrid Warp-spawned poxes.  Millions fell sick and died, and the PDF and Arbites were not spared.  Despite their numeric advantage over the invaders, they lost their grip on the initially-targetted cities.  The surviving Nurglites consolidated their numbers in the capital to begin the process of summoning a monstrous daemon to reality and consume the world.

Ultimately, however, consolidating their numbers was their biggest mistake.  The surviving Ecclesiarchial and military authorities of the world recognized that their objective was to create a Daemon World.  If that happened, it did not matter how many people survived the plagues, for an eternity of things far worse would follow, and the living would see the dead jealously.
Whipping the surviving Limmerdines into a frenzy, the preachers and officers of the Adepta charged the civilian populace of the world into the capital in a force of over seventeen million, most unarmed.  The Nurglites had not expected this display of backbone and foresight from the Imperium, and they only held back the horde of roaring faithful for minutes.  A solid wall of running people slammed into the ritual site, overrunning it and interrupting the conjuration.  The ships in orbit, seeing that all was lost, took off for the safety of the Naxos Sector’s Nurglite worlds, and the day was technically won.

The world that the Nurglites left behind, though, was no world the Imperium wanted.  Of the two hundred million residents of the planet, there were thirty left uninfected by something.  An entire continent would require sterilization, with careful bacteria and plant reintroduction over thousands of years being the only way to restore it to inhabitability.  Even after the death of all of the Nurglites and the Imperials they infected with their diseases, the planet would need millennia to recover.  The exact amount needed ranged in estimation, from roughly five thousand to a more realistic seven thousand, with dour predictions landing at eight thousand six hundred.  The surviving population had to be checked for diseases and shipped to other worlds, lest they grow ill as well.

Now, on the eve of M42, the planet has recovered approximately forty five percent of its damaged surface area.  The rivers of pus and blood that poured into the local water table and ocean were easier to clean up, but the land area has required extensive prayer from both the Mechanicus and Ministorum, as well as untold millions of Thrones to salvage.  In some areas, the Mechanicus has sinmply given up on the challenge, and resorted to using brute force terraforming techniques to restore the land.

With so many worlds having swelled the numbers of the region since the incident that led to the destruction of so much of Limmerdine, some in the Administratum have begun to question whether the process to restore Limmerdine is really worth the effort.  There are several primitive worlds in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit that could easily replace Limmerdine’s industrial and agricultural output.  The fact that the planet was the site of a near-victory by Nurgle over the Imperium is just another reason to abandon it, as far as the Astra Militarum is concerned.

The loudest voice for the planet’s restoration, however, is not the Mechanicus or Ministorum, but the Inquisition.  Inquisitors of the Ordos Hereticus and Malleus are convinced by the behaviors of Nurglite groups in the past that the cult that attacked Limmerdine did so for a reason, and they may well return to the site to attempt their ritual again.  Lady Inquisitrix Mizuki Kimihira of the Ordo Malleus has been studying the ways of Nurglite cults for over two hundred years.  She thinks that the physical location of the planet, relative to the Pox Ring of Nurgle worlds in the Naxos Sector, is of great significance to the efforts of Chaos in some way.  She desires the world’s restoration, and for its defenses and population to be ready for the return of the Nurglites.
Whether there is truth to her suspicion, only time can tell, but certainly the Nurglites have affected attempts to retake the world for themselves.  As recently as one hundred ten years before the First Glasian Migration, Nurgle-aligned pirates and raiders assaulted the small Imperial restoration task force on the planet, carrying out harrying strikes and distraction runs as if keeping the Imperials from noticing something.  Whatever their goal, they retreated after losing a ship, and did not return.


Today, Limmerdine has only a few tens of thousands of people on it, all of them members of either the restoration task force or the military barracks protecting them.  The tiny contingent of Arbites and Ecclesiarchial personnel attached to this task force spend their time obsessively patrolling and praying over the workers, ensuring that their souls remain properly aligned to their task, and do not stray from the light of the Emperor.

Their task is worsened by battle.  Periodically, the shambling remains of the dead from past populations of the world rise from the dirt and attack the camps.  Most of the remains are human, and most of those are from the Imperial colony, but sometimes large animals from the deep woods or humans from the original human colony the world hosted thousands of years before the Imperium rise also.  The camps of the restoration task force started as flakboard and slat, but have since upgraded to reinforced plasteel and ferrocrete bunkers, with entirely air-sealed interiors and extensive auto-turrets.  Unfortunately, the planet’s scars will not heal faster if more money or people are thrown at them.  The Mechanicus can’t accelerate all natural processes, and so some of the restoration of the planet must come from effort and not resources.

When the reanimated skeletons rise, however, they do so in groups, and they attack regardless of the hour.  The reanimated beings have caused more than two hundred interruptions in work protocols serious enough to merit delay while the field teams recall to their bunkers for safety.  Arbites and Guards in their Thimble-built aircars swoop and soar above the hordes of teeming undead, using incendiaries and concussion bombs to crack their bones.  Once the hordes have abated, the work can resume.  To the Inquisition’s cautious hope, areas that have had Mechanicus and Ministorum abatement work done and prayers recited rarely have problems with the animated dead, which means the restoration work may be having the intended effect.  The skeletal beings are less durable while walking over ground that is so hallowed, too, so the perimeter becomes easier to secure with each passing year.


System: Avius

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Maskos Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Seventeen, one inhabitable

Frontier World: Lorelei

Satellites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21%, Argon 1%, Water .99%, Carbon Dioxide 0.01%.

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Hegemony, Elected President-By-Consent

Planetary Governor: Yes,

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Astartes

Climate: Thick, broad ice caps and seasonal glaciers above polar circles, vast jungle and arctic rain forests, some isolated plateau have year-round dryness

Geography: Wide plains between tropics and polar circles, some with heavy foresting; extensive river networks with abundant natural water springs; long chains of volcanic islands, light crustal materials means little volcanism and upthrust, .96 times the size of Terra

Gravity: Hangonne has 1.01 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Metal Ores, Unrefined Plant Matter, Talc, Ice
Principle Imports: Aircars, Crafting Materials, Teachers

Countries and Continents: Lorelei has no nations on seven continents

Military: Lorelei Militia (low quality PDF), No Guard yet, Deathwatch (fluctuating)

Contact with Other Worlds: Uncommon

Tithe Grade: Solutio Extremis

Population: 19,744,000

Description:
Lorelei is a profound pain in the fundament.  There is no world in the entire Cloudburst Sector that is quite like Lorelei.  Not restive Hapster, not frequently assaulted Oglith, not bipolar Nauphry IV.  No world in the Cloudburst Sector, the Cloudburst Circuit, or the pitiful collection of colonies in the Exo-zone routinely comes so close to outright defiance of Imperial rule than Lorelei, and its inhabitants are innocently unaware of just how close they are to a reprisal that will give their grandchildren the night terrors.

Lorelei is a young colony of the Imperium.  Among its many, many worlds, there are natural categories into which they all fall, usually defined by climate or population level.  Like some other worlds in peripheral and sparse Cloudburst, Lorelei is a Frontier World, meaning that it is, or used to be, a world with little central Imperial infrastructure, and used to be near the edge of Imperial space.  It also has a low population, and largely undeveloped resources.  Beyond that, Lorelei has developed a trait that some other Imperial Fronteir Worlds have acquired in their past, to their detriment.
Lorelei, unlike Hangonne and Oglith, has a rebellious streak that local law enforcement and military can’t seem to stamp out.  The world’s location near the edge of all formal Imperial territory has drawn in hundreds of thousands of outlaws and isolationists from the greater Imperial heartland, some from as far away as the Scarus Sector.  The world has never officially turned on the Imperium, but some Arbites assigned to the world’s sole Precinct Fortress think that to be only a matter of time.

The planet’s populace lives in scattered towns, each more or less identical in its content.  Most have a small mine and a few ranches, a few large farms, and a chapel, plus residences, a few markets and shops, and a variety of local businesses.  These are no low-tech idyllics, however, but instead employ the same levels of technoarcana and business savvy of wealthier worlds, except for a few specific cases.

The prevailing view of the Imperium among the populace is that it is, at best, a distraction, and at worse an active impediment in the ability of the people of Lorelei to live their lives as they wish.  This is, in the eyes of the Adepta, obviously the case.  The Adeptus Terra would not exist if the people of the galaxy were capable of making the right decisions about government, religion, and defense without it.  Lorelei is not special, they scoff, it just wants to be, and so pretends that the thing keeping it from that specialness is what every other world takes for granted.
This is an understandably unpopular opinion on Lorelei, but there will always be nonconformists in any large enough group of people.  Actual crime is no higher on Lorelei than on Oglith or Hangonne.  The Adeptus Ministorum has a tenuous grip on some of the towns, but there are enough clergy on the world to prevent the trend of anti-Imperial sentiment from translating into an overwhelming force of lawlessness.

However, the trend of opposition to the Imperium tends to peter out among the ruling classes.  Like most Imperial worlds, some of the families of Lorelei have naturally drawn towards leadership, and although the President-by-Consent of the planet is elected by locals and Adepts do not get to vote, the last eight Presidents have all been in favor of greater integration with the Imperium.  The benefits are obvious to any official who pays attention, and as the Planetary Governor, the President-by-Consent naturally gravitates towards that integration.  The problem for them is that the populace strongly opposes it, and so each President publicly decries it even while pursuing it out of sight of the people, to varying degrees.

At the moment, this is proving to be a huge liability.  Many of the populations that contribute to the election of planetary and regional governments presently oppose higher integration into the Imperium.  However, the planet is also suffering under the effects of a plague.  So far, over ten percent of the planetary population has come down with this viral illness.  Discreet Ordo Malleus investigation has revealed that the illness is not Nurglite in origin, but its effects are still crippling.
The plague begins by causing costant coughing, followed by severe and uncontrollable excretion and dehydration.  This is followed by high fever, dizziness, sore throat, and lymphatic swelling.  Death follows in ten percent of cases.
Naturally, the people of Lorelei would very much like aid from their government in solving this problem.  However, no cure or vaccine exists, and the Inquisition has placed the entire planet under quarantine until a solution presents itself.  The people are outraged and demanding the quarantine lift, and some towns are even discussing open rejection of the quarantine in favor of seeking off-world help, perhaps from the Mechanicus’ biological sciences offices.

If the people of Lorelei pursue this to its natural conclusion, the retaliatory action by the Inquision would cause a death toll higher than the disease.  The Inquisition has been highly specific on this point, which has driven the stubborn streak of the people even higher into prominence.  So far, the official actions the planetary government has taken to contain the illness have seen some success, but if the people of Lorelei continue to resist common sense, there is no telling what might happen.  What the Inquision has not seen fit to tell the people is that they are entirely convinced that the pathogen responsible for this trouble is alien in origin, and probably artificial.  At the moment, Ordo Xenos Inquisitor deWalt Prang believes that the same force of mysterious aliens responsible for driving the Ork fleets of the Oldlight Exo-zone back from the borders of the Cloudburst Circuit in M41.839 is responsible for this disease.  This is based on some few genetic samples recovered from a crippled savior pod from an alien ship found adrift after the three-way brawl for the edge of the Circuit ended.  If the people of Lorelei were to learn this, the Emperor alone knows how they would react.

One Imperial institution on the planet has not seen widespread protest: a prison.  The Lorelei Isolation Penitentiary is one of the securest locations in the Sector.  Located deep under the surface of the water in one of Lorelei’s deep green oceans, the Penitentiary houses some of the worst criminals in the entire Cloudburst Sector, save those in the secret prison of the Sanguine Soul Convent.  As part of the deal to manufacture the prison on the planet with the Lorelein Government’s approval, the Adeptus Arbites agreed to foot most of the bill, and also hire Lorelein workers when possible.  The fact that they didn’t have to pay for it, and the fact that it creates high-paying jobs for natives, has overtaken resentment among the people for Lorelei being a destination for the Sector’s worst scum.  In the poorly-lit cage in the ocean, the condemned are given a choice between an 85% sentence length in exchange for hard labor, a normal sentence, or a conditional removal of sentence in exchange for working in Penal Legion minesweeper teams.


However, there is another point of contention between the Imperium as a whole and Lorelei.  The Deathwatch has constructed a Watch Station on the planet, and they did so with the permission of the Planetary Governor.  Nearly any other world in the Imperium would consider this a positive development, but the Loreleian stubborn side has produced considerable opposition to this effort.

The Watch Station, ironically codenamed Peacekeeper, is the Deathwatch’s intended defense-in-depth of the Subsector against alien incursion.  The possibility that the plague that bedevils the planet is alien in nature has added a sense of urgency to the Deathwatch’s construction of the facility.  Peacekeeper sports several fixed guns for its defense, and the locals are quite put out over it.  The problem the locals have with the Deathwatch isn’t the defenses per se, since they are clearly static and useless for impressing Deathwatch edicts on the populace.  The problem in the minds of the Loreleians is that the mere presence of these defenses may serve as provocation to the Glasians.  The stubborn mindset of the local colonists does not allow for the idea that the Glasians might just attack them anyway, which the Deathwatch has patiently explained again and again.
The Planetary Governor has made similar declarations of the blindingly obvious, to no avail.  The possibility that he may be voted out of office by the Loreleians for daring to side with the Deathwatch over the will of the people hangs heavy over the Governor’s head.  He has pleaded with the people to see reason, and his pleas have gone unheard.
Loreleian Military
The various city-states of Lorelei do practice self-defense, although none are presently at war with each other.  As the world is Imperial despite its best wishes, it does muster a PDF, although the world has managed to weasel its way out of raising Guard regiments so far.  It pays its tithe instead wth metal ores, raw textiles for Thimble, and blocks of ice, as well as the world’s abundant talc.

However, its PDF is undistinguished.  Lorelei has never faced external attack.  Its troops specialize in the use of snipers, minefields, and Rough Riders, and in fact has some of the best Rough Rider PDF in Cloudburst, at least in terms of their marksmanship.  Loreleian lack of discipline affects the PDF, and its troops are notoriously unreliable even under their own officers.


Oglith	4
Celeste	5
Hapster	5
Cognomen	8
Delving	5
Maskos	5
Thimble	5
Nauphry	7


Departmento Cartographicae Planetary Database: Cloudburst Circuit
Crispin – toxic death world – produces beastmen auxilia
GNR97DC – feral world of cavemen and mutants

Noble and Merchant houses
House Herrera, Septiim – shipping

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.
House O’Neill, Thimble – manufacturing
House Zhong, Thimble – shipbuilding
House Carvan, Celeste – agriculture
House Albert, Celeste – law
House Joun-Lee, Celeste – mercenaries
House Senai, Coriolis – artwork
House Lunther, Hapster – logistics
House Ritria, Oglith – metalworking, masonry

Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rondlee
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Atongwë
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Vermouthe
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Arins
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Arpel
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Zutash
Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rowsdower
Rogue Trader House Marcus
Rogue Trader House Demmelwaithe
Rogue Trader House Victoire
Rogue Trader House Brasmel
Rogue Trader House Crusher
Rogue Trader House Howe

Dead Houses
Rogue Trader House Calavna
Rogue Trader House Richter


Notable Persons
Lord Sector Cloudburst, Rhemortho Quintus
“Hate is a fine shield, but don’t mistake it for armor.  It can strengthen your arm, but if you wear it around you at all times, there will be nobody nearby when you need them but enemies.  I have so, so many enemies.”
The burden of shielding worlds from the encroaching darkness of the void is a hard one to bear.  The leaders of Imperial Sectors vary widely, but by the time a politician has ascended to such high rank that they command a large portion of the Imperium, harsh reality has generally weeded out the lazy and the overambitious.  Rhemortho Quintus serves as the Lord Sector Cloudburst, and at least nominally leads the Administratum delegates to Cloudburst Circuit colonies and outposts.
Quintus is the second of his family to ascend to the position of Sector Overlord.  He is a ruthless but pragmatic man, as he must be to survive the overwhelming political pressure exerted on him by his subordinates for resources to fight the Glasians.
Politically Quintus is a Celeste animal through and through.  He has a taste for luxury, a taste for fine women and food, and is actually a passable target shooter, by the standards of Cloudburst nobility.  His responsibilities weigh on him more and more as the strategic situation in the greater Imperium deteriorates.  He has taken to spending long days away from the noise of Cloudburst’s maze of tunnels in the resort towns of Celeste, trying to destress.  This has not helped his popularity, especially in the face of the mounting threat of the Seventh Glasian Migration.  The dozens of worlds that depend on his leadership often find themselves fending off unrest without direction from him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emilie Rastimos, Chief Inquisitorial Astropath and Adept Choirmaster
“The Warp talks.  Did you know that?  Not the things that live there, no, the Warp itself.  It hisses when we fly through it.  It laughs when we curse it.  It opens its arms and its mouth and its legs when we die.  Oh, don’t be so dramatic, it’s the literal truth.  Don’t believe me?  Go look at the faces of Navigators after a day of hard work and tell me nobody’s been talking to them.”
The whispered secrets of the Inquisition are entrusted to as few people outside the holy Ordos as possible.  Lightspeed is a cruel mistress, however, and the Inquisition needs to send messages as much as the next branch of the Imperium.  When a message needs to be sent from the Maskos Inquisitorial Palace, it is Chief Inquisitorial Astropath Emilie Rastimos who orders her seven subordinates to do it, if she doesn’t do it herself.  Rastimos is a cold, eerie woman, with the lack of eyes that characterize much of her order.  She never leaves her spire in the Palace, although with an apartment as luxurious and well-appointed as hers, few would.  She oversees the conclave of seven Astropaths in the Palace, each of whom has the highest levels of security clearance a psychic can have in the modern Imperium.  When the need arises for her to weigh in on matters psionic or the Inquisition needs her expertise on a task, they come to her.  This is her own arrangement, and it allows her a specter of control over her fate that she knows to be illusory, but finds comforting nonetheless.
Rastimos is not happy with her position.  Like most psykers in the Imperium, she finds a gram of self-loathing coloring her decisions, especially under stress.  The Imperium is a horrible place to live, and a worse place for psykers.  As an Astropath, her final sight was the Emperor, cracked and withered on his Golden Throne, shivering with power and agony as he took her eyes away.
Something about that, and growing up in the psyker-fearing populace of Cloudburst, broke her spirit.  Whatever she saw as the Emperor gilded her soul, it instilled in her a sense of utterly immutable loyalty, and a depressed sense of resignation.  She, moreso than even the most Radical Inquisitor in the Palace beneath her feet, thinks Mankind can’t win its millions of wars, not unless a miracle comes.

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

Lord Fabricator Lister Beraxos, Lord of Cognomen and Liege of ABX202020
“The Machine God inspires us.  The Omnissiah directs us.  The Motive Force propels us.  There is power in knowledge.
We’ve all heard the words.  How many people stop to think about them?  I mean really think about them?  What they mean, why they’re so important?
Nobody.  Nobody but those of us who will get everybody we know killed if we misinterpret them.  So lower your voice, girl, before you do something stupid.  Have a good think about what you’ve done.”
The Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, the Archmagos Executor of the Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and Northern Oldlight Exo-zone, the Liege of ABX202020, and the Fief-Lord of Foraldshold, Lord Lister Beraxos could make a fair claim to being the most powerful man in the Sector.  From his indestructible archaeotech labyrinth in the darkest dungeon of the Castle of the Forges, Beraxos sits at the center of the spider’s web of Techpriests and Tech-adepts that are all that keep the Sector from sliding into anarchy.
He does not give this impression.  Unlike Lerica, Quintus, Drake, Maynard, or even Arden, Beraxos is a believer in the lack of need for ostentation.  Beraxos eschews any flashy garb or raiment.  For an average citizen on the streets of any planet he doesn’t rule, Beraxos looks incongruously like an ordinary Techpriest, albeit an old one.  He wears his face unadorned by gadgetry, his robes are oil-stained and loose, and he only has four visible mechadendrites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beraxos believes in maintaining positive relations with the subordinate groups of the various Mechanicus military forces.  Among the forces of Cognomen Subsector alone, he counts PDF, Guard, Navy, Basilikon Astra, Explorators, Skitarii, Secutarii, Knights, Electro-Priests, Titans, and his own personal bodyguards.  The full count of Sector-wide Mechanicus martial assets includes Legio Cybernetica robots and the Ordo Reductor, as well.  On paper, the conventional Astra Militarum forces answer to the Subsector Overlord, but since the Subsector Overlord essentially answers to him regarding the disposition of his forces’ equipment and transport, Berxos could quite possibly give them orders.  He isn’t stupid enough to try, of course, as that would shake Mars from their distraction faster than anything else could, and if they didn’t kill him, the Inquisition would.
Still, he treats his colleagues in the autonomous or Martian branches of the military with respect and distance.  Thanks to the extensive reforms instituted after the Schism of Mars, he can directly command very few forces himself.

Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Cassandra Lerica
“Hope is a medicine.  If you take it when you need it, and you take the right amount, it can save your life.  It can make you stronger.  It can help you survive.  If you take too much, or from the wrong place, or when you don’t need it, it kills you.  Never forget that.”
The Inquisitorial presence in Cloudburst is as old as human colonization, but its current footprint is new.  Inquisitors visited Hapster and a few of the smaller border worlds that Cloudburst absorbed after its creation, but there was rarely much reason for the Inquisition to linger when their work was done.
Now, things are different.  Now, the Inquisition holds court over all manner of dangers and distractions to the mighty Imperium, and they do so from the Palace of Maskos, under the watchful eyes of Cassandra Lerica.
Lerica butchered her way up through the ranks of the Ordo Xenos.  Her ferocious cruelty towards practicitoners of the Cold Trade in xeno artifacts in the Cloudburst Circuit was the stuff of legends two hundred years before she became the leader of the Ordo Xenos in the Cloudburst Sector, or the Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst one hundred years later.  In her time before sitting on the Black Bench at the Court of Precedent in the Maskos Palace, Lerica reveled in taking to the field, alongside the Deathwatch or not, and bringing the electric agony gauntlets she wore to the faces of smugglers and heretics across the breadth of the Circuit.

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

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

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

Lord Inquisitor Oscar Havermann, Ordo Hereticus
“So many people haven’t a clue what heresy is.  Heresy isn’t having thoughts, beliefs, ideas.  It’s about refusing to change thoughts, beliefs, and ideas.  Change them to the correct way of thinking.  That way is the way of the Emperor.  What else could possibly matter?”
Oscar Havermann scares the living daylights out of his own colleagues.  As the former Chief of Witch Hunters for the Ordo before his promotion out of the role, Havermann is the most experienced and decorated psychic-tracker in the entire Cloudburst Sector, and his own psychic power aids him immensely in this regard.  Given how low the psyker birthrate in Cloudburst is, any sign of non-Sanctioned psionic activity in the Sector is fairly easy to detect.  Before his promotion, Havermann used his Fast Clipper Banelight to skip from system to system, capturing hedge sorcerers and killing out-of-control psyker youths.

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

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

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

Lady Inquisitrix Mizuki Kimihira, Ordo Malleus
“You know what I’ve noticed about aristos that consort with daemons?  They all regret it eventually.  Not the peasants, not the middle classes, just the nobles.  Even if it takes a while, even if it kills them, they all regret it.  I used to wonder why, but I think I know now.  They fear egalitarianism.  In the Warp, after I kill them, they’re no more powerful or important than any other dead soul.  They’re just food or sex toys for the next hungry spirit to pass by.  They regret losing the power they had in life.”
Among the daemon-worshippers of the Cloudburst Sector who actually make a study of their opponents in the Imperial government, there are none they fear more than Mizuki Kimihira.  She has been a silent, contemplative, thoughtful, and unavoidable force of order and law in the Sector for over two hundred years.  She uses a variety of technologies and psionics to maintain her aging flesh, and has essentially trapped it at the age of forty, but even if she allowed more of her age to show, it would change nothing about her capability.  Kimihira is, without question or doubt, the single most powerful psyker in the Sector.  She is at least a mid-Beta on the Imperial Assignment Scale of Psionics.

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

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

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

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

Lord Inquisitor Xi Gian Heung, Ordo Xenos
“Cost?  You ugly shitter, you think you know about cost?  Throw a ship the size of a moon into a star without touching it!  Then we’ll talk about cost!  Bring me my Throne-damned gun!”
Xi Gian Hueng holds the distinct honor of knowing more about Glasian biology and technology than any other person alive knows.  The relentless, coarse-tongued cyborg warrior has been present for three Glasian invasions, more than any other person outside the Blue Daggers.  He is the only one of the four senior Inquisitors of the Conclave Cloudburst with no psychic talent, but he doesn’t need it.  His custom Power Armor and collection of esoteric human and alien weapons are more than enough to bring him victory.  He has worked with the Deathwatch and the Blue Daggers dozens of times, usually in pursuit of alien forces in the Cloudburst Circuit, but sometimes in the harder-to-navigate Exo-zone to trailing.  Hueng is a practical man, and unlike several of his peers in the higher Inquisition, does not mind his relegation to more directoral positions as he grows older.  He still takes to the field at times, and usually does so at the personal behest of his superior, High Inquisitor Lerica.
Hueng has somewhat more time available for his own research and investigations than he might normally.  The position of Inquisitor of the Chamber for the Deatchwatch of Watch Fortress Dascomb is traditionally held by the highest ranking member of the Ordo Xenos in Cloudburst, and two times out of three, that makes the Lord Inquisitor Xenos the Inquisitor of the Chamber.  However, Lerica did not forfeit her position when the Senate of the High Lords offered her elevation to Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst.  This leaves Hueng time to oversee his subordinates more directly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Inquisitor Herman Rothschilde, Ordo Malleus – isstvanian in denial
“Cloudburst!  What an apropos name it is, for this benighted cluster of stars!  Wastrel worlds with wastrel guardians, shivering in the cold when they should be running towards a fire.  Darkness is coming to Cloudburst, and its people are too lazy to evade it!”
In this Time of Ending, enemies beset the Imperium on all flanks.  Times like these produce heroes, when the folk of the Imperium are thrown into the crucible of war.  In times such as this, the greatest leaders and prophets of Mankind have arisen to lead humanity from the darkness.
Herman Rothschilde thinks himself one such hero.  His colleagues think him a whiner.  His subordinates worship the ground he walks on, and if any outside his immediate circle knew the full extent of his plans, they would burn him at the stake.

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



Inquisitor deWalt Prang, Ordo Xenos – Counter-biological Warfare specialist, used to be Ordo Hereticus
Rogue Trader Lord Crado Zutash
Archbishop Haggar of Oromet – Captured and executed
Lord Chapter Master Ranult Arden – Master of the Blue Daggers
Lord Commissar Beleph Dour – Master of the Night Slaughter
Admiral Langdon Reith, leader of the FCC
Monica Lanbrie, Canoness Superior of Celeste
Cardinal Drake, leader of the Arch-Diocese Cloudburst
Cardinal Lamarr, leader of the Jodhclan Diocese
Ortam Lesarien, Eldar Corsair commander of the FCC
Watch Commander Domack of the Imperial Fists
Watch Captain Paris of the Blue Daggers
Watch Captain Roganuharu of the Celestial Knights (nepali for germs) [cataphractii armor terminator honors]
Lord Admiral Maynard – supreme admiral of cloudburst
Lord General Senioris Xoss – supreme general of cloudburst
Professor Merrick Unarvu – leader of Slaanesh cult on Coriolis
Magos Gabris – brain surgeon
Magos Lethicos – discoverer of Tendril
Governor Chadwick Haupstmann – Subsector Overlord of Cognomen Subsector
High Queen, First Princeps Remilia Matraxia – leader of ABX202020
High Prince, Princeps August Cobus Matraxia – Second of House Matraxia
Magos Prannan duPree – Magos Dominus of the Basilikon Astra Cloudburst
Lady Trader Admiral Madeline Prinz – Walsh’s rival
Lord Marshal Persinius Oolan – Chief of Arbites
Marshal C. (Chrysanthemum) Lumina Copperlain – Chief Arbitrator of Hapster
Lord General Halwart – leader of the Oglith defenses
Lixivim Dill, real name unknown – rogue Vanus Assassin in employ of FCC, official kill count 1667
“Mimic,” real name unknown – Vindicare Assassin under Lord General Halwart, official kill count 2102
“Civil,” real name unknown – Vanus Assassin under Lord General Halwart, official kill count 157