Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====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.