Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

===Smaller Rougue Trader Houses===

====Rogue Trader House Marcus====
The House Marcus is among the youngest Rogue Trader Houses in the region.  So far, the House consists of three people: Erleissa Marcus, the Warrant holder and former Imperial Stormtrooper, her younger sister Catalina Marcus, and Catalina’s adopted son Ivan Marcus.  The three have taken to the life well, but they started out dirt poor, and have quickly discovered that the romantic myth of the Rogue Trader as a master diplomat, merchant, warlord, negotiator, and explorer are perfectly true, once they can pay for it.

This is not to say that the three have not tackled the issue with alacrity, because they have.  Some of the older Rogue Traders based on the great station of Emissicius have even admired the Marcus family for tackling the dumbest problems head-on, delegating only when they need to, and always managing to come out on top, even if only barely.

The House began when Erleissa Marcus was awarded a Lesser Warrant of Trade and Marque in exchange for her heroic rescue of Inquisitor Dolan during a disastrous investigation of heresies in the underhives of the great silver cities of Thimble.  Over the following months, Dolan watched with interest as this Argent Sword Stormtrooper fought with a combination of quiet respect, tactical brilliance, unyielding faith, and cold cruelty that Dolan saw in the best of his peers.  However, when the campaign against the covert cell of heretics was over, Dolan decided that rather than make her an Inquisitor or Throne Agent, he would instead turn her talents outward, so her representation of good Imperial values might be best used against its foes pushing at the border.

To nobody’s surprise greater than her own, the young, battle-scarred Major was presented with the Lesser Warrant of Trade and Marque, contingent on her using her assets to aid the Inquisition in investigations of specific threats in the Cloudburst Circuit.  She was presented with a pair of destroyers recently recaptured from the Free Corsair Coalition, and ordered to get to work.

Reaffirming Inquisitor Dolan’s choice immediately, the Major-cum-Trader promptly turned the guns of her ships on the innumerable pirates that lurk in the depths of the heavily-patrolled Drumnos-Cloudburst border.  She arranged for her crews, the experience of whom far eclipsed her own, to affect a simple deception.  After coming to a protection arrangement with a freighter Chartered Captain who routinely moved goods from Thimble to the Drumnos Worlds, Marcus filled one of the cargo containers of the freighter with her own crew, given weapons from the destroyers’ arms lockers, and simple life support gear.  She then modified the freighter’s cargo manifest to read livestock and perishables, leaked its route to the right people on Clog, and waited.

Two weeks later, the bait was taken.  A pair of pirate Raider ships, the Sudden Shift and the Tidal Swell, jumped the freighter, cornered it, and boarded it by docking directly with the hull.

Inside, they found tens of thousands of Marcus ship crewers, armed to the teeth and hungry for blood.  The pirates were overwhelmed and attempted to withdraw on their own ships, only for the two destroyers to emerge from nearby gas clouds and spring a trap of their own.  With the remaining troops of the two destroyers, the two Marcus ships docked with the Raider’s outer faces, those facing away from the ‘helpless’ freighter.  Faced with the freighter and destroyer crews on one side, and hardened Imperial Stormtrooper veterans boarding them from the other, both pirate ships folded almost immediately.

The five ships eventually surfaced in the orbit of Cognomen, having slowly flown to the Forge World.  The repairs to the freighter were more than paid for by selling one of the Raiders to the Mechanicus, while the victorious Erleissa Marcus kept the other as her personal flagship, now renamed Turnabout.

Knowing better than to repeat the tactic, she contacted Dolan with the name of the pirate contact to whom she had leaked the information, told him of her new total firepower, and asked if he had any idea what his timetable would be for reinforcing him in the Circuit.

Dolan, delighted and finding the whole situation unaccountably hilarious, told her that she had fifteen years to kill before he would need her.

In that fifteen-year span, Erleissa Marcus has had bizarre ups and downs in her career.  She has taken on a full company of Argent Sword Guardsmen as the core of her forces, and has worked tirelessly, uncomplainingly hard to improve her family’s fortunes.  A Hiver born and bred, she has an innate hatred of profligacy and waste, and so her vessels are far less ostentatious than the flying cathedrals and gilded dandies of the other Rogue Trader houses.  While House Rowsdower may be the most visibly militant of the Cloudburst regional Houses, none who know of it can doubt that House Marcus is the most devotedly militant when the chips are down.

Erleissa has loaded her body up with every anti-aging technology and genemod she can legally acquire.  While living forever was not a major concern as one of the Stormtroopers, she takes her Warrant terms very seriously, and thinks she would be derelict in her duties if she died before she was done bringing the universe to heel before the Emperor’s radiant, righteous power.

Mercy is a term foreign to her.  Alone among the entire Rogue Trader gallery of the Cloudburst Circuit, she never, ever bothers taking prisoners unless they are the result of an unconditional surrender.  Perhaps it is simply a facet of her former Stormtrooper training, but she sees surrender as a waste of time if there are any rules attached.  Of course, when fighting Orks or Chaos cultists, this is never a problem, but occasionally other foes will think to throw themselves on the Emperor’s mercy when they get the chance.  Erleissa does not bother with such things.  Her vessels have no detention bays save for her own crew.  She replaces the other detention blocks on all of her ships with ammunition and spare part storage cells, so her ships can fight even harder.

This is not to say that she is foolish, or tactically blind to the possibility of a valued prisoner.  She simply doesn’t care.  Dolan thinks that if she had become an Inquisitor, she would have become the most violently, ruthlessly Puritanical Inquisitrix he had ever seen, even more than Lerica herself.

Her sister is of a different nature.  Erleissa is medically unable to bear children, thanks to her many, many genemods, and lacks all interest anyway.  Her sister, and more importantly Ivan, do not, and both are just as ambitious, loyal, and cruel as she is.  Ivan has a caring side he keeps well hidden, but in business, all three Marcuses are brutal, frank, and uncompromising.

Their House has the lowest profit income of any House in the Sector, by both absolute volume and relative percentage, but that doesn’t stop House Marcus from kicking the hornets’ nest every once in a while.  For a groundpounder, Erleissa Marcus has an uncanny knack for void war, and her ships are all built to best accommodate her style.  Every ship in her flotilla is custom-overhauled for the highest possible ammunition storage and self-repair capability, even at the cost of prisoner storage or luxury.  Despite the size of her mansion on Cassie’s world, Erleissa’s personal quarters are only forty feet by forty feet with a twelve-foot ceiling; Thomas Walsh’s private quarters are the size of a scrumball field.

Marcus doesn’t cut costs because of some obsession with money, though.  She is simply a military woman through and through.  She is willing to deal with other Rogue Traders, and actually enjoys dealing with some of the more purposeful Houses like Zutash and Crusher.  In them, she sees a similar human spirit, driven by profit, power, piety, and the hunger to make the galaxy their own, tempered by loyalty.

That is the trait that all of House Marcus honors above all others: loyalty.  There is nothing more important.  This is why the only people in her line of succession are family, adopted or no: she can trust nobody else to be up to her standards.  Every crewer she has would die for her, reluctantly or otherwise, and she makes sure to reward them commensurately.  The risks of their job are small compared to her wrath if they betray her confidence.  Her ultimate punishment for disloyalty is to seal traitors in vac suits, connect them to voxes that let them broadcast for great distances, put them on a chain that drags behind their ship, and let the crew listen as the ship enters the Warp.  She has had to do it exactly once.

She does draw a distinction between disloyalty and disobedience.  As a former Stormtrooper officer, she knows perfectly well that it is possible for an order to be given absent the requisite intelligence.  To disobey an ill-informed order is reasonable; it allows a person to avoid unneeded jeopardy.  To be disloyal to the person giving the order is impermissible, and punished with sickening cruelty.

Her ships are a welcome sight at the Grand Anchor yards.  There, she has brought the remains of ships her vessels have killed, as well as piles of money with which to buy upgrades for her already impressive ships.  Rather than spend money and crew on maintaining as large a fleet as she can afford, she prefers to raise her existing crews and vessels to the heights of readiness.  Extra turrets, Forge World-quality starship power cores, advanced void fighters and bombers, Astartes-grade targeting equipment, and internal component cooling and repair systems are her preferred mechanisms of upgrade.

As a natural fighter, the Lady Marcus is already looking forward to her coming trials in the Circuit.  She has been sleeplessly pursuing the acquisition of wealth and material to fund her mission, even going so far as to attack targets on behalf of the Inquisition.  Those Inquisitors who have fed her House intelligence are aware that sooner or later, the House will fall into the hands of somebody who does not appreciate that, but for now, Lady Marcus is well enough aware of the true nature of the enemies of Mankind to cooperate with the Inquisition on matters of mutual benefit.  This mostly takes the form of hunting down the criminal elements on the edges of Imperial territory that harbor hedge witches from the Ordo Hereticus, and then keeping whatever assets they were using once the Inquisition is done collecting the wayward souls in question.


====Rogue Trader House Demmelwaithe====
The vagaries and cruelties of the life of a Rogue Trader can catch up at the worst times, and House Demmelwaithe has experienced this like a kick in the jaw.  The House seems cursed.  Some on the Emissicius whisper that it actually is.  The House has been assaulted by pirates, fired upon by mistaken Adeptus Mechanicus Basilikon Astra warships, sabotaged by rivals, beset by plagues that took root in its life support systems, lost battles with Eldar, and even had prominent members of the family be arrested for overdosing in public.

All of the family’s misfortunes stem from one series of appallingly poor decisions by the House Warrant holder, Postla Demmelwaithe, not forty years ago.  Other members of the House are openly questioning if she is struck by a sort of madness, or perhaps has even gone Traitor.  There seems to be no logic or reason to her choices, and before much longer, the House will either fall apart or have to replace her.

Forty years ago, the House Demmelwaithe was waxing higher.  Its legitimate businesses were doing prosperous trade, its scrap businesses were churning recycled materials into circulation, its partnership with the Explorators was fruitful and amicable, and all seemed well.  Then, with no real explanation, Postla elected to collect much of the House fleet and turn it to a privateering mission from the Navy in the Oldlight Exo-zone.  The Navy contract was against some well-entrenched Ork Freebootaz that had begun assaulting Imperial exploration ships in the void, and although the pay meant the House would barely break even, the fleet dutifully packed up and set to flying.

This is where the story diverts heavily, depending on which person on the Emissicius one asks.  Some say the battle went perfectly, but the House fired on the Navy in the chaos of battle.  Others say the Orks tested some madness-inducing weapon on the House warships.  Some others say that the Adeptus Mechanicus shot down a House ship purely by accident.  The one thing all the tale-tellers agree upon is that an Eldar ship behind a holofield suddenly decloaked and fired on all parties involved, offering no quarter and no explanation.  The survivors of all three Imperial forces limped back to the Emissicius later, quarrelling bitterly the whole way.

Things went downhill from there.  There is no one record of all the misfortunes to befall the House, because so often there are few survivors of their calamities.  Some of the other Rogue Traders of the region are even becoming uneasy about the prospect of the House Demmelwaithe liquidating their assets soon, because of the concern of a curse spreading to other Houses.


Rogue Trader House Victoire
Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse; that’s the House Victoire way.  Sponsors of the production of luxury goods and fast aircars all over the Thimble hives, and general hedonists, House Victoire are wealthier than you and they love it.  The entire House, save a few of the more pious, younger scions, are concerned with the acquisition of wealth and its carefree expenditure.  They let nothing get in the way, whether that may be Imperial law or common sense.

The House was founded only four hundred years ago, and promptly catapulted to the ranks of the major Houses of the Cloudburst region thanks to their founder’s discovery of a massive, underground warehouse of truly ancient Golden Age goods on the planet AYRJ841, built under a Dark Age settlement of scarcely lesser value.  With the Mechanicus doing handsprings of joy, the House got stinking rich straightaway, and the decadence didn’t take long to settle in.  For those rare few on the high end of the Imperial wealth disparity, the opportunities to live the high life are infinite.

Appropriately, the House is based on Celeste, a Paradise World, and the heart of culture and government in Cloudburst Sector.  The House has as few duties as Imperial peers as they can manage, the more time to spend getting rich and spending money.

The Sector Administratum has no problem with this.  The House businesses are on the level and profitable, the House pays their taxes on time, and unlike certain older Houses, has never tried to levee troops from the populations of Cloudburst Sector worlds.  The extra income tax the Sector Administratum collects, and the occasional massive burst of spending the House undergoes, more than makes up for the occasional orgy cleanup or tanker truck joyride that an inebriated House scion might leave in their lubricated wake.

The Inquisition, on the other hand, is on the verge of declaring a crackdown on the House.  There are a hundred other things the Inquisition would rather do than swat down a riotous Rogue Trader House, like investigate the crash of the Predator or find the source of mutantcy on Crispin.  The prospect of assaulting or deeply investigating a very rich family of nobles is both daunting in its probable cost and a probable time sink.

However, the possibility of Slaaneshi corruption of the House must be accounted for.  The Inquisition has undertaken preliminary steps to investigate the possibility.  So far, this has taken the form of Inquisitorial spies infiltrating the crews of the House ships.  The Inquisition has also begun to investigate ties between the House and the firms that bank their money, searching for any sign that there may be financial links between the House and any known Slaaneshi infiltrators.


====Rogue Trader House Brasmel====
Most Rogue Traders specialize in some way, and this is a good way to carve out a market niche.  However, the most successful Rogue Traders at least try to break into multiple markets concurrently, to make a name for themselves and ensure that no one catastrophe can wipe out their holdings.  House Brasmel, based on Nauphry IV and ranging forth from its huge orbitals, is one of the rare exceptions.  When one says ‘House Brasmel,’ there is only one word that comes to mind: warfare.

The House Brasmel concerns itself nigh-exclusively with prosecuting wars against other human enemies of the Imperium.  Heretics, witch cabals, Traitors and Renegades, pirate fleets, Secessionists, other Imperial nobles that have gone rogue, and even occasionally retributive wars by Sector governments against rebel planets; the House Brasmel has fought them all.  More than a few members of the Imperial Guard have stated off the record that they think the Warrant of Trade the House holds should be revoked and given to another family, since the House itself barely does any trading.

Indeed, the House Brasmel has committed itself to no more financial transactions and commerce than it needs to support its war goals.  This is horribly stunting to its development as a monetary concern, obviously, but it has some benefits.  Other Traders with far more money may look down on Brasmel House, but they do so with concern and a kind of awed respect.  Brasmel can free itself completely from the desire for money, and its pursuit of the human foes of the Imperium is a grinding nightmare for its targets.

Lord Ayiid Brasmel, the current Warrant holder, is a brutal tyrant of a man, who lurks in the social gatherings he deigns to grace like a combination of vampire and grox, glowering at anybody who approaches and never laughing.  He and his father and brothers are all men of killing and triumph, who have stood high atop mountains of corpses and planted the Imperial flag.  Notably, most of his family’s actions are against human forces in other Sectors, but he has deployed men in his own home Sector, including on Hapster.

Periodically, the vast body of the Imperium rocks from the spasmodic violence of insurrection from Heretics, Liberals, rebels, or just cultural dissidents.  Naturally, police and Arbites presence is enough to quell this most of the time, but when they and even the PDF fail, the Imperium must mobilize proper military assets to constrain the violent.  Most of the time, this consists of mobilizing any available Imperial Guard and Scions in the system itself, or calling for some more from offworld if there aren’t enough available on-planet.  On some occasions, whole regiments may be raised on more stable worlds to put down the violence.  On the rarest of events, even the Adeptus Sororitas or dreaded Adeptus Astartes may get involved.

However, on some occasions, a Planetary Governor or System Overlord doesn’t need much more firepower than they presently have to win a civil war.  Sometimes, the world just needs a few hundred thousand more men, or a few thousand tanks, or a few bombers, and that will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  Enter House Brasmel, which functions as much as a consultancy firm as it does a band of warriors.  Although lacking the immediate military heritage of House Marcus, the House Brasmel has far more collective experience in ground battle, and eschews void war.  The House Brasmel offers itself to any System Overlord or Planetary Governor, as a counselor or advisor, or perhaps as a mercenary force.  They charge little and offer much, especially for a Rogue Trader organization.  The group is more than capable of handling flash mobs, or even small insurrections, without any assistance.  In cases of global conflict, the House Brasmel forces can act as a force multiplier for a native militia or Guard force.  They can also serve as an elite corps of troops that can be relied on not to break when confronted with long odds, although even Brasmel units don’t fight to the death unless it is absolutely called for.

Precisely why House Brasmel is so thirsty for blood, and why their hate and focus on other humans is so direct, is not clear to many outside the House.  Even the Brasmel troops themselves, a group of hundreds of thousands of soldiers tasked to the Brasmel name and recruited from across the Galactic North, are not greatly forthcoming on the issue.  They may not know, themselves.

However, the Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus suspects that the entire issue may well stem from several events in the House’s history.  The first few Warrant holders, the records show, were not as destructive, and in fact focused themselves entirely on the recovery of lost ships from Warp anomalies and Space Hulks around the Sector.  They did well for themselves and made decent money, and the clearing up of navigational hazards endeared them well to the Chartist Captains’ collective, which is normally ambivalent at best to Rogue Traders.  Over time, however, the Family gradually stopped these activities entirely, in favor of their later martial activities.  The Inquisitors who have inspected the House’s activity suspect that the House uncovered some terrible secret of ancient Mankind in their collection of derelict ships.  Some covert probing by the Inquisition has led the concerned Inquisitors to suspect that the secret concerns the nearby Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath, the massive Warp Storm that ripped the Ecclesiarchal fleet apart during the savage rule of Goge Vandire.  While the Inquisitors are yet unable to learn exactly what it is that troubled the old House so, it has clearly been passed along to each new generation of Brasmels, who now rarely do anything but collect the profits from their remaining businesses and spend it on warships and tanks.  They do not fight void wars for pay, but use their ships to protect their ground assets.

Their fleet may not be large, but it is obsessively well-maintained, to the extent that they have actually hired Cognomen and Fabique shipyard bosses and Techpriests for the purpose of keeping their ships in perfect fighting trim.  Their troopships are also of high quality, and are as fast as they can be made to be.  Their dedicated ground forces are more a motley collection of soldiers, however, mostly Officio Munitorum dischargees.  The loyalty and reckless devotion of their leaders bleeds into the conduct of the troops, making them fanatically faithful, though not suicidal.  The House Brasmel headquarters from the sprawling military fortress Ironpoint on Celeste, which a home for the Warrant holder in the same way that a silo is home for a missile.


====Rogue Trader House Crusher====
House Crusher is a fixture on Thimble, Cassie’s World, Septiim Secundus, Delving, and all of the other worlds of the Cloudburst Sector that are rapidly expanding their industrial capacity.  The House has made a massive amount of money by selling the archaeotechnological discoveries and trade goods of the Circuit in these industrial dynamos, even to the extent of surprising the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The House Crusher has pumped untold dozens of billions of Thrones into the economies of these worlds, and it is all due to the ambitions of their ruling family.

The House Crusher are wealthy, expansive, and eager to build.  As is often the case, legacy and lineage are important to House Crusher, but they have no restrictions on marriage so long as the wedded-in members of the family swear to place fealty to the House after only the Emperor.  Any other concern is tertiary at best, and the House takes this with proper weight.

However, even good breeding and loyalty are second to ambition.  House Crusher has not risen to power on the basis of its lack of drive.  The money they make, the discoveries they commercialize, and the alliances they forge are all products of a burning will to seize more, more, more.

The House does have a singular Warrant, of course, as every House does, but they do not place any special emphasis on its holder being the sole leader of the House.  Rather than have a single House Warrant holder, the Warrant is left in a stasis field in their orbiting palace above Hapster, and instead, the ‘official’ Warrant holder simply casts the final vote in the periodic ballots for the future of the House.  For the past eighty years, the ballot has been for expansion, into more markets, more fields, more exploration.

This manifests as frequent explorations of the Cloudburst Circuit, and even the more dangerous Exo-zone.  The House has lost ships, and even Crusher family members, in the pursuit of opportunity in the void of space.  The House has had far more successes than failures, however.  It was the House Crusher that discovered the Abhuman world Crispin, and the world of man/machine hybrids called AHG131 (a point of contention, since Thomas Walsh ordered it destroyed before House Crusher was done robbing it).  House Crusher was the force that blazed the trail through the Warp to the Oldlight Exo-zone colony of Misty Step, and funded the arrival of the first six thousand colonists from the Drumnos Hive World of Arquebus.

House Crusher has many small businesses under their thumb, of course, and even a few controlling shares in large corporations on Thimble and Septiim.  By far their most profitable venture in that regard is their thirty percent share in the Flaxweave Foundry, which produces the highest quality clothing and outerwear available in the entire Galactic North, even selling to two Astartes Chapters.  However, the House’s passion for discovery and new places can’t be sated by sitting behind a desk watching a stock ticker.  The House Crusher is always pushing for more, and funds whole convoys of ships and escorts into the deep clouds of the Circuit, seeking glory and treasure.

They occasionally find what they seek.  House Crusher has developed a solid reputation as Hulk-finders.  Their collection of highly skilled Navigators and Astropaths have meticulously scoured the nearby regions of space for any signs of the thinning of the Immaterium veil that presages the violent exit of a Space Hulk.  The House remains one of only three non-transhuman forces in the Sector to have successfully enacted a Hulk capture.  The others are House Marcus and the Imperial Navy’s Hulkbreaker squadrons from Cypra Mundi that sometimes dock at Coriolis.

House Crusher has developed very positive relationships with the Adeptus Mechanicus, thanks to decades of extensive trade with the Techpriesthood.  They have exchanged starmaps, technologies, refugee populations for projects, and the aforementioned Space Hulks.  In return, the Adeptus Mechanicus has rewarded them with mountains of upgrades for their ships, their land-based businesses, and the small space stations the House maintains for their fleet.  Mostly, the House prioritizes sensor and augur upgrades, allowing their assets to peer deeper into the darkness.  The other upgrades go to their business structures on the worlds that house their legitimate trades.  These include cheaper, cleaner energy sources, Forge World-quality fabricators, Techpriests to oversee it all, high-efficiency cogitators, and other things that give an edge of superiority over competing brands.

Perhaps it is because of this positive relationship that the House has been able to make inroads to the Oldlight Exo-zone that the other Rogue Traders of the region rarely do.  The Mechanicus has as much interest in looting the ancient knowledge and wealth of the Exo-zone as any other party in the region, and perhaps more.  The Oldlight Exo-zone, however, has two distinct risks to it that few other regions do.  First, the Exo-zone is almost entirely unmapped.  Although it is well known that the forces of the Imperium waged savage wars against the aliens that lived there during the Great Crusade, its territory now is vacant of much Imperial life, thanks to the difficulty in detecting the Astronomican there.  The fact that Navigators have such difficulty seeing there makes exploration faster than a snail’s pace rare and hazardous, despite actually being closer to Terra than the Eastern Fringe.  The second reason is that of entrenchment by the Imperium’s opponents.  Just because the ships of the Imperium rarely travel there doesn’t mean the inhabitants of the Exo-zone are unaware of it.  The Imperium of Man has been an active force in the universe for over one hundred twelve centuries; few in the galaxy aren’t aware of it.  There are pocket kingdoms of non-Warp capable aliens, human wildcat colonies, Orkholds, and worse that dot the entire Exo-zone, and it would take immense resources to ferret them all out.  These are resources the Imperium presently can’t spare.

House Crusher is one of the few forces of the Galactic North that still makes the effort.  The House Crusher fleets have even traveled to Deathwatch stations in the region to share knowledge collected on indigenous aliens, albeit rarely.  Other Crusher ships scour the few mapped starlanes in the region for any sign of surviving Terran Federation colonies, or their remnants.

However, these expeditions are expensive and take immense time to perform.  House Crusher augments their income with other tasks.  At times, the House has even accepted privateering contracts from the Segmentum Ultima to assist the Battlefleet Drumnos with their occasional wars against pirate gangs or Freebootaz.  These contracts pay well and offer some action, so younger scions of the House are encouraged by their elders to take up the sword for the family’s sake.


====Rogue Trader House Howe====
The Inquisition is entrusted with oversight of all but one of the branches of Imperial governance and life.  Even the Adeptus Arbites are ultimately answerable to the Inquisition, although naturally not often.  The obvious exception is the Talon of the Emperor, those martial offices that are part of the Sisters of Silence and Adeptus Custodes, who couldn’t care less about Cloudburst.

Thus, the Inquisitorial authority extends over all of the Sector unimpeded, and a portion of it is currently fixed on Rogue Trader House Howe.  The House is presently under active investigation by the Ordos Xenos and Hereticus for all manner of debauchery and crime, with the lead suspect being the imminent Warrant holder and scion of the House, Waldeon Howe.  Waldeon is a product of the House’s extensive ties to the Celeste nobility.  He is a hedonist and a brute, who despite his obvious intellect simply cannot countenance not being the most powerful person in any given room.  He has real talent for business, for battle, and for certain artistic pursuits, but he has no tact or restraint.

Out in the Circuit or Exo-zone, of course, that could be a major advantage, but in the Sector proper, it is a huge liability.  The current Warrant holder, Lawrence Howe, is on the verge of death, with his many cybernetics and augmetics on the verge of final failure.  He is not fully conscious, and may be wholly oblivious to his grandson’s mania.  The Inquisition has given up informing him, since he seems not to respond, and has now focused their efforts on the task of investigating Waldeon’s antics.

So far, they have uncovered strong evidence that at the very least, he is engaging in copious acts of the Cold Trade.  The Trade is the traffic of proscribed xeno artifacts to buyers in Imperial space.  For centuries, the current Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, former Ordo Xenos High Inquisitrix Cassandra Lerica, was the bane of the Cold Trade in the region.  She pursued its participants with chilling precision and wrathful zeal.  However, since she has had to shift her attention more and more to the affairs of high office and her ad hoc leadership of the Deathwatch overseers, she has had understandably less time to pursue the Trade and its buyers.

Thus, in the absence of the cat, the metaphorical mice play, with freighters occasionally slipping up to a ton of xeno artifacts into the wrong hands.  Lerica’s replacement, Lord Inquisitor Hueng, has far bigger concerns, and simply doesn’t care as much about the issue as he does about the Glasians.  This doesn’t mean that he devotes no effort nor subordinates to the problem, it is just not his priority.

Meanwhile, the House Howe is getting filthy rich.  Unlike other Houses, they do not focus much on a large fleet.  Instead, the House has begun to prepare for massive expeditions into the border region between the Cloudburst Circuit and the Oldlight Exo-zone.  There is no physical boundary between the two, so it is somewhat nebulous.  This is made literal since the area is in fact a giant nebula.  There are whispers on Emissicius that there are entire star systems in the border nebula that are just waiting to be plundered, and worlds where ancient Imperial forces under Lion El’Jonson and Leman Russ assaulted the northern holdings of the Rangdan xenoforms.

The Inquisitors tasked to observing House Howe is aware of these rumors, but for now is inclined to let Howe explore the region.  If there is nothing to be found, then the House will be weakened, and more vulnerable to Inquisitorial action.  If there is, looting it all will take time, and by the time the House Howe forces return, the purge of their ranks may well be over in their home territories, leaving the Howe fleet leaderless for Inquisitorial co-opting.

House Howe is not openly criminal in its actions, however.  They do maintain several wholly legitimate manufacturing and printing companies, as well as multiple stolen pirate ships they have stripped and repurposed as freighters.  Most of the House’s legitimate income stems from the sale of goods to worlds that are undergoing colonization or terraformation, many of which were discovered or colonized by House Howe ships.


====Rogue Trader House Prinz====
The House of Lilith Prinz has swelled from a meager handful of ancient destroyers into a starfaring force of nature, in a mere few generations.  Unlike the meteoric rise of some of their competitors, the House of Prinz arose from origins that were neither humble nor particularly prideful.

The House Prinz began when Lilith Prinz, a Subsector Overlord of the Nauphry Subsector, was awarded a Warrant of Trade and a single Endeavour Light Cruiser as a means of getting her out of the way.  The other Subsector Overlords had been unable to convince the Sector Overlord of the necessity of her removal, thanks to the ties she had to his own office.  Thus, they were unable to legally vote her out of office.  However, they were able to persuade the Administratum Ultima to award Prinz the Warrant with the clear subtext of their own sabotage of her own ventures in the Subsector if she didn’t take what was offered.

Precisely why the Subsector Overlord was needed out of the picture, history does not record, although Inquisitorial records hint at a public ambition and ruthless disregard for the wellbeing of the Administratum that may supply the answer.  However it came about, Prinz accepted the Warrant with ill grace, and took ship to the Circuit.

After forty years of up and down fortunes, victories and losses, Trader Prinz retired and left the Warrant to her grandson, who had similar fortunes.  After two more lackluster generations, however, the Warrant fell into the hands of Capsei Prinz, the father of the current Warrant holder.  His daughter Madeline, the future Warrant holder, entered the Navy as soon as she was old enough, in preparation for her father’s plan to revitalize the House.  Meanwhile, Capsei himself took to the trade with vigor.  He spent every scrap of money he could spare on new vessels for his fleet, many of them sub-lightspeed transports and gunboats.  He and the rest of the family threw themselves into the business of buying ships and equipment for their low-gravity metallurgical factories and other legitimate businesses in the Celeste system.

Meanwhile, Madeline was rising through the ranks.  Although some of her initial postings were quite easy, thanks to her superiors being unwilling to put somebody of such a pedigree in a position of risk or danger, she still managed to climb through the pay scales of the Imperial Navy, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Commander in a squadron of Escorts.  When her father began to consolidate his increasingly large and unwieldy fleet into a single cohesive force, Madeline started unsubtly pointing her own ambitions towards command.  After a few years of carefully positioning herself in points of prominence in the flotilla, she was eventually given command over one of the Escorts.

As she did so, her father’s plan to make the Prinz fleet the pre-eminent force under arms in the region advanced.  The House Prinz fleet based from Celeste, which is not a place lacking in defenses or in orbital security.  Thus, the large flotilla of non-Warp ships the Prinz family has amassed are rarely used for anything other than simple patrols.  However, the system has come under threat by the occasional Ork or pirate in the past.  The Prinz fleet offered itself as contract security for the system, which would allow the Sector and Subsector fleets to focus their construction efforts on Warp ships to defend the rest of their territory.  Thus, the Prinz fleet was able to ingratiate itself with the Sector command.

After several years of hard work, of defending the Sector from pirates and other miscreants, Madeline Prinz was appointed to Captaincy in the Battlefleet Cloudburst to command a squadron of three Escorts.  At that point, however, whatever long-term plan she and her father had been working on collapsed, with his sudden death from overwhelming embolism.

Prinz promptly handed in her commission and returned to Celeste to command the House assets directly.  The schemes she and her family had been working on may well be in play in some form or another, but for now, the House Prinz assets are spread thin.  Although the family’s flotilla of non-Warp capable defense vessels for hire in the Celeste system are still dutifully puttering away on patrol to protect the Sector Capital and other spots in the region, the majority of House Prinz is on a war footing.

In the forty-seven years since the Prinz family Warrant passed to Madeline, she has been obsessively expanding her fleet, even in direct competition with other Rogue Traders.  To the consternation of other Houses, she has even entered into a rivalry of sorts with Lord Captain Inquisitor G. Thomas Walsh, whom she delights in stymieing at every chance she can get.  House Prinz now owns the largest fleet by helm count in the Sector not under Imperial Navy control.


====Rogue Trader House Walsh====
The House Walsh is not one of the old Houses of the Sector, by the scale of the Sector’s relative youth.  However, it is a glorious one, one entrusted with high honors by the Imperium, and one that seems marked for success by the Emperor Himself.

The House gained a Warrant through a combination of gallantry and quick thinking, after a series of disastrous setbacks by the Imperial Officio Munitorum.  The Imperial Luna Cruiser Triedes Fists suffered barratry when its officers betrayed the Captain and Chaplain, killing both, and declaring for a pirate fleet operating in the Drumnos Sector.  The crew and midshipmen fought back, led by Erlin Walsh.  The Sergeant at Arms led the ship’s enlisted men in driving back the barrateering officers and seized the bridge and engine room.  When the pirate ship on the way to provide a relief crew realized the Imperium still had control of the ship, it fired on the Triedes Fists.  The vessel fought back and managed to drive the pirates away.

The Sergeant at Arms was promptly promoted to the ship’s Second Officer position after a replacement Captain and XO were flown in from Celeste.  Erlin Walsh went on to have a sterling and exemplary career in the Navy, which eventually culminated in a Warrant of Trade from the Sector Administratum in exchange for the discovery of two inhabitable systems in the Cloudburst Circuit.

After a few centuries of gradual expansion of the Walsh business empire, the family’s fortunes received a shot in the arm after their discovery of a great cache of archaeoweapons in the ruins of a human colony at the very outer edges of the Oldlight Exo-zone.  The House Walsh rose to greatness one generation later when the brilliant logistician Torotino Walsh successfully funded, transported, and defended an entire Administratum outpost in the Cloudburst Circuit, by himself, with nothing but the promise of remuneration for his efforts.  When he eventually was paid, he used the immense payment to purchase the Battlecruiser Law of the Gun.

However, the roots of the current ties between the House and the Imperial government began one generation later.  The Ork Empire of Greenfisk Orghlahk in the Oldlight Exo-zone abruptly expanded its borders, capturing a small independent human empire with which it had previously skirmished.  The Orkhold, over twenty-eight lightyears beyond the edge of the Imperium, was shrouded to the Imperium’s eyes, thanks to its location being blocked from the light of the Astronomican by intervening Warp Storms.

The Ecclesiarchy found out about this annexation thanks to the abrupt pleas for help from its covert Missionary force in the small human pocket kingdom.  The Ecclesiarchy of the Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors all but begged the Administratum of those two Sectors to pool their resources and take the fight to the greenskins.  There was much to gain, they argued.  It would be an economic boost to the region; it could allow for millions of human souls (even non-Imperial ones) to be saved from the grip of the alien, and it would allow for the Imperium to more carefully map the darkness.

Eventually, after much badgering and hectoring, the Greenfisk Expurgation Task Force assembled in the Drumnos Forge World of Syracuse.  To the manifest surprise of both the Ecclesiarchal and Officio Munitorum personnel there assembled, it was Donnatella Walsh that was selected as the leader of the Task Force, by virtue of her decades of hard work leading the Walsh fleet into the void in search of plunder and glory.  She had spent that time mapping the Oldlight Exo-zone, fighting aliens for scraps of wealth and knowledge, and commanding a large and disparate fleet under her House’s banner, even before inheriting her Warrant.

Despite the reservations the other personnel of the Task Force held towards serving under a Rogue Trader, especially one that spent little time being a ‘normal’ Imperial noble, the Task Force assembly proceeded.  When its full strength mustered, the Force included over a hundred ships, many of them from the Rogue Trader Houses Rowsdower and Walsh.  The Force also included over four hundred thousand mercenaries and one million Imperial Guard, as well as the Household Troops of six noble Houses, and three thousand Skitarii to protect the Syracuse Battle Robots.

When the force of humanity set out into the void, they arrived at their first navigational checkpoint to collect more reinforcements: six squads of Blue Daggers, led by future Company Captain Savoir.  They were joined by fifty thousand Frateris Militia and eighty thousand House Joun-Lee mercenaries, as well as more ships from House Walsh itself.  After another four months of slow, arduous flight into the Oldlight Exo-zone, the flotilla arrived in the system the Orks had claimed as their own.

Donnatella Walsh did not panic as a swarm of Ork small vessels swarmed around the flotilla.  Instead, she rallied her escorts and struck out with a lash formation, breaking the Ork fighter swarms and clearing a path to the planets at the heart of the system.

The next half a year of fighting broke the Ork forces in space and on the ground, thanks in part to Walsh’s brilliant leadership and tactical skills.  However, it was her actions at the end of the campaign that sealed her reputation as one of the most dangerous people in the Cloudburst region.  After the Orks had all but broken between the combined forces of the Imperial and local human forces, the Rogue Trader gathered a few select ships and flew to the center of the Ork empire.  The Orkhold hung in space like a wart, and its remaining defenders dispatched their own ships to repel what they assumed was an Imperial retaliatory effort.  It was not.  Walsh, under the instruction of the Inquisition, unleashed a cyclonic torpedo barrage against the planet.  Its biosphere cooked, its crust dropped into its mantle, and its fault lines imploded, as a final warning to the Orks.

Upon returning to the system where the Task Force was busily mopping up the last of the Orks, Walsh calmly informed the rest of the Task Force of her actions, and presented an ominous warning to the shocked local humans.  They were too far from the Imperium to join it thanks to the lack of the Astronomican visibility, but they could and would worship the Emperor and pay a reasonable tithe to Terra, or face her wrath.

The House Walsh today makes its fortune from the immense exploratory efforts of the House, as well as the mysterious missions and efforts of the Lord G. Thomas Walsh in his Inquisitorial duties in the Cloudburst Circuit.  His actions there are unusual by the standards of a normal Rogue Trader, since they concern themselves so much with policing the behavior of other Rogue Traders and Imperials in the Circuit.  However, the Inquisition has clearly vested immense trust in him, since he is permitted to profit from his actions, which normal Inquisitors are not.