Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient (section)

==History==

Originally, Port Maxient was no port at all.  Established forty years after the Second Gold Rush in the year M39.056, this platform was originally a great supply depot, telescopic observation platform, and cartographic update hub of the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The original name of the platform was Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1, and was intended to serve as a signpost of the Adeptus Mechanicus Astra Explorators.  Humiliated by the inattentiveness that allowed for the great treasures of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit to go unclaimed for so long, appalled by the fact that the Imperium would likely have retrieved an intact STC were not for their blindness, and eager to reclaim their public image, the Adeptus Mechanicus built the station.  Assembled from pre-fabricated slabs of metal, circuitry, and stone, the station was originally a bog-standard Xerxes III with all of its combat and long-term naval anchorage modules replaced with storage blocks.  The Adeptus Mechanicus built the platform quickly.  They hoped that it would be the first in a great chain of such stations that stretched all the way from the Drumnos Sector to the very edge of the Terminus Shock Warp Storms, the physical edge of safe spaceflight.

As had transpired in the past, the Adeptus Mechanicus hoped would transpire here: new exploration would yield safe Warpflight routes.  As Mankind has not yet managed to replace the need for the Navis Nobilite in the expansion of their faster-than-light travel capacity despite the Emperor’s best efforts, it is only the Navigators that allow human ships to fly at speeds in the Warp that eclipse those of its natural currents and eddies.  Thus, as humanity expands into the areas it once inhabited, guided in the past by the psychic beacon network that no longer exists, the pace of Imperial ships can be quite hasty indeed, when they are guided by a Navigator and traveling well-mapped routes.  Other ships, lacking Navigators or flying in places where there are no mapped routes (or both), can but fly slower than the ancient human ships did.  It was the dear hope of the Adeptus Mechanicus that as the boundaries of the mapped regions of the newly-renamed Cloudburst Circuit expanded, new Warpflight routes would be found that would allow the ships of the Astra Explorator to fly deeper and deeper into the Oldlight Exo-zone and Cloudburst Circuit.

Thus, the Adeptus Mechanicus built Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1 with high hopes for redemption, and great wealth and discovery to follow.  Construction proceeded at lightning speed, as the full deep-space construction capacity of Cognomen and the Mechanicus shipyards at Hapster lent their might to the task.

Almost immediately, however, the Adeptus ran headlong into a problem.  Try as they might, none of the psykers of the Navis Nobilite nor the Adeptus Astra Telepathica could find any safe, Astronomican-lit pathways through the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Ship after ship of the Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Administratum Departmento Astrocartigraphicae, and Adeptus Mechanicus Astra Explorator came back with empty stores and no fresh finds.  Rogue Traders and Free Captains also labored to find new routes to money and power in the void.  None could find safe pathways where the Astronomican remained visible except with those rare Navigators whose sight eclipsed all others, which were far too few to allow for reliable travel.

By the time the station was completed in M39.066, all involved could tell that there would be no further mass travel to trailing.  Still, the Mechanicus maintained their hope to travel safely rimward, out towards the Terminus Shock, and there discover the very edges of space.  That, too, proved fruitless.  Navigators reported that they could see the Astronomican from the Circuit, but so dimly that travel was barely faster than in the Exo-zone.

In essence, there would be no great chain of deep voids, no massive Adeptus Mechanicus redemption that would undo the scale of their earlier error.  Some cynics in the Adeptus even said that the Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1 itself had been a complete waste of resources.  Others, including the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, insisted that the Adeptus complete and staff the station, so that the investments made thus far were not a waste of time.  Eventually, the outpost was staffed, fed, and promptly rendered useless, as Rogue Traders and Explorators took to the snail’s pace exploration of the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone, disregarding the superfluous Deep Void.

The station might have gone the route of so many before it that had been left behind on the tides of the Imperium’s fortunes, had not the Imperial Navy stepped in.  The Deep Void Xerxes III had been built so far from any habitable word that it did not realistically serve in the immediate defense of any Imperial planet.  Despite the bullheadedness of the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, the station was totally useless for providing as a great logistics hub for rimward expeditions thanks to its location.  However, it was smack in the middle of the trailing edge of the newly-charted Cloudburst Sector, and while humanity is unable to traverse the Exo-zone safely and quickly, other races are not.  The station, the Imperial Navy pointed out to the Adeptus Mechanicus, was totally useless to them, but potentially quite valuable to the Holy Fleet.

The Adeptus Mechanicus, in their wounded pride, did not simply consent to handing the platform over to the Navy.  They insisted that the sheer cost of building it would need to be offset.  The Imperial Navy countered that only the Adeptus had insisted on building it, and that they should have calculated its cost and potential use before undertaking the project.  The Mechanicus shot back that if the Navy thought there would be a chance that the station would be useful to them, they could have contributed to its construction at any time.

Eventually, with much exasperation, the Adeptus Arbites stepped in.  Determined to resolve the affair in their courts before it terminally delayed the blistering pace of expansion into the new Cloudburst Sector, the Arbites insisted that the claim be broached before them, and a fair outcome determined.  With much begrudging acceptance, the Navy and the Mechanicus sent representatives to the Lex Imperialis Court on the Star Gilt in neighboring Naxos Sector for a resolution.

For months, the Imperial Navy made offers and suggestions for transferring the platform to the control of their forces, while the Adeptus Mechanicus made claims and counteroffers of differing value.  Charts of space, sums of money, listings of value and precedent crossed desk after desk as the Judges sat and watched it all.  After nearly half a year of intense legal wrangling, the Arbites reached a verdict.

They ruled that the Imperial Navy had not been obligated to make an offer, and that the Mechanicus was in no way obligated to turn over the station.  However, if the Mechanicus was truly responsible in full for the station’s construction, as they had insisted, and if it truly had become useless in its current form, as they had reluctantly admitted, then they were potentially liable for spending so many resources on the project that could have been better spent on the Imperium’s safety and expansion.

Therefore, the Adeptus Mechanicus, while not legally liable to sell the platform, should have seen that it was in the best interest of the Adeptus to do so, and that the entire affair, from day one, had been a massive waste of time and resources.

Duly chastened, but still quite unwilling to part with a whole Xerses III without good reason and just recompense, the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen petitioned the Lord Fabricator of Fabique for aid.  Utterly disinterested, the Lord Fabricator signaled back that Cognomen should have just sold the blasted platform and moved on.  Out of allies and stung by the Judges’ words, the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen finally buckled and reached a compromise with the Imperial Navy.  The station would be ceded to them in exchange for the help of the Navy in the station’s upkeep, and for the Mechanicus to maintain occupancy rights and resupply permits for half of it.  The Navy would hold overall command, and would also be entitled to freely enforce ship’s law on their half, and be allowed to use the station’s external docking and internal storage bays for whatever they wished.

The Navy agreed at once, leaving the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen wondering if he could have gotten a better deal.  The two fleets returned to the station to find its skeleton crew bored out of their skulls and sitting on a stockpile of rations that had almost entirely spoiled.

One hundred years later, the station was cleaned, repainted, restaffed, and emptied of spoiled goods.  The station, now under Imperial Navy control, began adding additional defensive modules to its hull, to better serve its new role as a border station to protect the Imperium from xenos attacks from the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Now named Port Maxentius, which language drift has changed to Maxient over time to the distress of its Cognomen-trained Techpriests, the station began slowly expanding.

Centuries passed in routine aboard the station.  The Navy, quick to enforce its discipline on its crewers this far from the Emperor’s light, did make some small allowances for the needs of the people.  Crewers posted here in the long term were permitted to move their families there, as were officers stationed there for decades at a time.  Beyond that, some recreation areas blossomed in decks and quarters unused for the task of defense.  The original storage modules for supplies, which were several times the needed space for simple border defense, hung empty at first, before slowly filling with new occupants.  Generally, these occupants were non-military family of crewers, desperately seeking entertainment, and taking to building things to alleviate their boredom.  The original Xerxes III was able to accommodate six of these massive modules, and since then, all six have filled with new contents.

Over time, no culture can remain static, and thus has Maxient’s populace grown more diverse.  So too has its appearance, as it is now many, many times the size of a standard Xerxes III.

The defenses of the station have been tested more than once.  Since its original construction, the platform has come under substantial xenos assault on five separate occasions.

#  The first came seventy years after primary construction, in M39.136.  A flotilla of pirates from the Drumnos Sector’s many criminal fleets assaulted the station with the intent of robbing its vast storage of munitions and dried food.  The pirate fleet consisted of four frigates and a light cruiser, all of Imperial make.  The local defenses, including the trio of corvettes stationed there at the time, succeeded in fighting them off, only to learn from the wreckage that the pirates had been alien hijackers of Imperial ships.
#  The second was a brutal boarding attack by Orks in M39.968.  Fifteen Ork ships, ranging in size from a few ramships to a Battle-Krooza, flew in and began mass boarding of the station.  This was a total disaster for the Imperial military, who evaded capture of the station only after two consecutive years of savage fighting that saw over eighty percent of its residents butchered.  Rescue came in the form of the Deathwatch and a contingent of Battlefleet Cloudburst ships, which managed to dock with the Ork ships still attached to the station and pincer the Orks inside the embattled portions of the station.  Repairs of Maxient took over seventy years to complete, and a few scars from the invasion can still be found on the emergency bulkheads of some interior compartments.
#  The third was another wave of assorted, mongrel aliens, this time with humans in the crew.  This attack came in from the darkness beyond the border of the Exo-zone, and resulted in a protracted ship battle.  In M41.313, the forces of Battlefleet Cloudburst, local defense ships, nine Rogue Trader fleets, and a few mercenaries hired by the Sector Overlord, engaged and battled the swarm of over two hundred small alien vessels that had besieged Port Maxient.  The aliens had not successfully landed vessels on the huge station, but upon the arrival of sufficient Imperial assets to repulse them, the alien fleet commander locked out the controls of his subordinates’ ships, directed them to ram the station, and made his escape.  The station was nearly destroyed, but tireless repair efforts by the Adeptus Mechanicus managed to stave off utter catastrophe.  The entire Defense Monitor contingent of the station was lost in the battle.
#  The fourth was a teeming horde of Ork Freebootaz.  This attack, alone of the five, was one for which the Imperium had had some warning before it occurred, in M41.898.  An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor in the Inquisitorial Palace of Maskos had foretold the attack using a pack of psi-crystal Tarot cards.  After taking care to decipher the message, the Inquisitor directed a fleet of Inquisitorial ships to reinforce the startled Port Maxient flotilla.  It was nearly not enough.  When the aliens came, they slammed into the station’s defenses with the force of a storm.  This fleet was five times the size of the one that had nearly conquered the station before.  As Imperial and Mechanicus ships trickled in to reinforce, the balance of power slowly tipped in the favor of the human combatants, but it was by no means a sure thing.  The fighting continued for over seven months of non-stop space combat.  The war came to a sudden end when the Imperial Battlecruiser ''Aquillian Gold'' managed a fluke bridge hit on the Ork command ship ''OrdgargZak'', which rammed the station after the Warboss leading the attack suddenly died in the explosion.  The surviving Ork ships broke and ran, pursued by weary Adeptus Mechanicus Basilikon Astra vessels.
#  The fifth and final major attack came fifteen years later, in M41.913, from a foe the Imperium has not seen before nor since.  The assault came from beyond the border, as the third had.  Examinations of the ship hulls encountered in the battle by the Deathwatch against their extensive hull categorization database on Watch Fortress Dascomb have revealed nothing of the origins of this mysterious fleet.  Larger than any attack save the fourth, it consisted of well over a hundred small ships and a few larger ones, and attacked the station after emerging from the Warp just inside its sensor range.  The full strength of Battlefleet Cloudburst responded, albeit piecemeal, and the aliens were repulsed, but over seven thousand of them managed to board the station before then.  Days of bitter fighting between Skitarii and Naval provosts, and the alien attackers, followed.  The end result was the destruction of the hideous crab-like aliens and their fleet, but nearly as bad were the friendly fire incidents between Naval provosts and the Skitarii they caught using Radium weapons in Naval sections of the station.  Only the direct intervention of the Adeptus Arbites prevented the fighting between the ostensible allies from escalating into a larger shooting battle.

The disputes and conflicts over the history and operation of the station, and even its name, have reached lofty ears.  While the Senate of the High Lords of Terra initially did not regard the platform as being one of any real consequence, given the larger demands on their time, it has grown in size and power since then.  The sheer power of Port Maxient now, and the ever-fluctuating jurisdictional battles and expenditures it has caused, have begun to provoke discussion on Terra and Mars.  To simply abandon the station, or rewrite its Arbites-approved charter, would be unthinkable, but the Senatorum Imperialis is unlikely to allow the situation to grow much worse without intervening.  The last thing the High Lords want to care about now is a childish rivalry between two parties who should know better.  Perhaps predictably, the Lord High Admiral Ultima and Lord Fabricator General of Mars have taken opposing sides in the political bickering that has arisen.  Time alone can tell how long they choose to allow the locals in the Cloudburst backwater to squabble and spend on something so utterly irrelevant to their mission.