Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Admiral Langdon Reith==
{{Topquote|Work with aliens? Why not? If they like money, they come work for me. Everybody else does, sooner or later.|Langdon Reith}}

There is no living enemy of the Imperial Navy in Cloudburst that angers them more than Langdon Reith. To the Navy, Reith is a slap in the eyes. He was one of them, a naval officer, before he turned to crime, consorting with aliens, and eventually full-scale military insurrection.

Langdon Reith grew up on Septiim Primus, in an unremarkable family he has outlived. The young Langdon eventually completed school and joined up with the Imperial Navy Officers’ Corps, becoming a Junior Lieutenant after passing the Nauphry War College with few distinguishing points. His record shows that he had relatively few noteworthy accusations and accolades in his time in school, with his only real area of excellence being academic topics like history and mathematics.

After graduation, Reith served as a lesser officer in the personal staff of Morlo Vakker, the Captain of the Imperial Navy Destroyer Wildstar. Reith worked his way up to Lieutenant Commander in just a few years.
The Inquisition and Imperial Navy Intelligence do not know whether Reith planned his crimes from the start, or if he plotted them later. Whether he intended to betray the Imperium immediately or not, he was surely laying the groundwork for his schemes by the year M41.884, when he purchased several juvenat treatment supplies, enough for four or five life extensions, out of his own pocket. Retroactive investigation reveals that Reith had begun saving every coin he had, and even taking out loans, to purchase the juvenats by then. Reith did not behave any differently at that point, at least in the eyes of his superiors. However, by the turn of the century, he was engaged in the preparations for his theft and defection.

History shows that unknown people murdered the Commissar assigned to the Light Cruiser on which he was serving at the time, Kyrsten Lannisdottir, only one year before he stole the ship. The records at the time indicated that the murderer had cut her throat while she was sleeping. No other person on the ship had had a key to her room, to prevent just such an occasion, but there had been no forced entry into her quarters. The Ordo Militarum now suspects that Reith may have asked the ship’s Security Man at Arms to make him a key so he could kill Lannisdottir himself, which may explain why said Man at Arms did not put Reith down when he began his barratry.

That is the point that sticks in the craw of so many Imperial survivors of that theft. The loss of the Light Cruiser Missileer was not a mutiny, nor a boarding action. Reith convinced the other officers to steal it with him, as well as several senior Petty Officers and the ship’s Navigator. It was a true barratry, and he accomplished it only by murdering the ship’s Captain and Second Officer, leaving himself as the First Officer to command the ship uncontested. He flew the vessel into the Cloudburst Circuit and began raiding Imperial shipping between the outposts there and the Sector proper.

Reith commands the Free Corsair Coalition as his personal fiefdom. Officers who please him and obey him undoubtingly receive command of his few capital ships, although he does ensure that only skilled officers are given the chance. He does not tolerate disobedience, and while he allows the Escorts in his fleet to select their own Commanding Officers from the ranks of senior staff aboard each one, he retains the ability to override that choice at any time. As the Flag Admiral and founder of the FCC, Reith can assume command of any vessel he pleases in the fleet, but he doesn’t bother doing so since conquering Zlodziei.

His personal staff are an eclectic mix of former Imperial officers, freelancers he has hired, bodyguards, his logistical officer/quartermaster, and Ortam Lesarien. Reith has enough of an ego to think he can continue his defiance of the Imperium indefinitely, but not enough of an ego to attempt to do so uninformed or directly. He simply doesn’t have the firepower or supplies to fight the Navy head-on, and if he keeps operating within what is ostensibly Imperial territory, sooner or later they will come after him. He relies on his network of spies, informers, and mercenaries to avoid Imperial attention and keep him informed of targets. He still has enough rejuvenat treatment chemicals to perform another life extension, but he will eventually need to steal more if he wants to continue surviving past that.

His advisors have a clear rank hierarchy, but the ones that accompany him at any given time are the ones he needs. When he doesn’t have them in his personal company, his advisors stay in their temporary workspace on the Dead Lights space platform, which trails in the wake of the planet Zlodziei by three light seconds. Reith himself sleeps in his quarters on the Inescapable, which he has conditioned as a combination tactical review chamber and private casino. When the Inescapable is not afield, he keeps it docked on the Dead Lights, where he entertains guests, usually officers from other pirate groups he is trying to lure into his service.

The Dead Lights has few weapons, relying instead on its distance from Zlodziei to protect itself. Reith does not want to commit any more resources to it as long as the fleet is trying to keep itself mobile. He has attached a few small shipbuilding modules to Zlodziei’s existing orbitals, of which the locals only had two, but he is ready to sink them at a moment’s notice if the Imperials are in position to steal them. His largest asset, however, in terms of impact on his organization, is Imperial herself.

Twelve years before the FCC conquered Zlodziei, a woman approached Reith during a raid he was conducting on the Imperial freighter Flying Money. Without firing a shot, she managed to outmaneuver his guards, his crew, and the entire boarding complement of the Inescapable. Reith was standing on the bridge of his ship, watching the feeds as his men stormed the freighter, when Lixivium Dill simply stepped past the bridge guard in a moment of distraction and cleared her throat.

Five minutes later, Lixivim Dill was the new Chief Strategist of the FCC, and the Coalition had gone from being just another ambitious gaggle of pirates to being the prime threat to Imperial border security that isn’t a tainted alien bird. Dill explained to Reith that she was a Vanus Assassin, which Reith had never even heard of prior to her joining him. The Vanus Assassins manipulate others into killing for them. They have put down rebellions against Imperial authority simply by turning various anti-Imperial factions against each other. Lixivim Dill is not Reith’s new friend’s real name, but rather an anagram of her kill count, which is one of the first things she told Reith.

Reith isn’t stupid enough to think that somebody like that can ever be truly controlled. Dill doesn’t want an open war against the Imperium of Man any more than he does, but that doesn’t mean her ambition isn’t as high as the skies and just as endless. Dill is the fourth in command of the entire Coalition, after Reith, his brother, and Lesarien, and Reith knows that she could bypass and kill all of the others if she wishes to rise in rank.

However, Dill is running from something. Reith does not precisely what it is that makes Dill sometimes spontaneously look over her shoulder, but he has a sneaking suspicion that it is a fellow Assassin of greater skill and loyalty. He hasn’t pressed the matter, however. Dill’s casual demonstration of skill has made it abundantly clear to him that she could have killed him any time she wanted, and the Officio Assassinorum isn’t foolish enough to send an Assassin of lesser skill to kill her or him when the time comes for that. If what she fears is another Assassin, only fate knows how it will end.

Reith is not a man of idleness. Although he doesn’t look particularly dangerous, he does have one huge advantage in combat, one that he has employed more than once in boarding actions. Reith has a variety of cybernetic implants, but they are stolen Cognomen implants and augmetics, not the clunky, metallic ones of most Forge Worlds. As such, they look like normal flesh, even while in use. He has a Refractor Field built into his back that powers off a power generator he keeps hidden in the ammo bags on his combat uniform, meaning that shots at him simply do not kill him. Between that and the emergency air phial he has built into his ribcage, neither being shot nor spaced can kill him as quickly as they could a normal human. The Imperial Navy has attempted counter-boardings against his ships more than once, and two separate naval armsmen have reported a fatal hit on him that he found noninjurious at worst. For his part, Reith hates Admiral Maynard right back, and thinks him the one man in the Sector that might actually be able to stop him.

Away from the troops, Reith is a larger-than-life figure. He drinks, he smokes, he gambles, he beds whores, he keeps up with pistol and Power Cutlass training, and he addresses his bridge crews with loud roars instead of clipped pronouncements. He is an even six feet of height, and dresses more like a Rogue Trader than his Imperial Navy roots would suggest.