Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====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.