Editing Setting:Tri-Sector/Drumnos (section)

==Regional Threats==

As a major economic wellspring for the local Imperium and a net exporter of goods and wealth, the Drumnos Sector has a correspondingly powerful Chartist Captains presence.  Their Warp-freighters and cargo-hauling starships are ubiquitious in the rich Sector, flying goods and passengers across the breadth of the asteroid-heavy region.  Although even the Administratum can’t be quite certain exactly how many Warp-capable ships there are in the region at any given time, the number is well in excess of four thousand, and over six hundred of those have Navigators.  Unlike the Cloudburst and Naxos Sectors, Drumnos has no Adeptus Astartes Chapter in residence.  Also unlike those, it doesn’t particularly need one.  Its threats are not the unrelenting violence of Nurgle, nor the cyclic blitzkriegs of the Glasians.  Its predominant threats are more mundane and less centralized, and seek wealth instead of territory in the main.

There are other, smaller risks to Imperial life in the region, of course.  Any place that accumulates money and business the way Drumnos does eventually must come under scrutiny for the perfidious presence of Slaanesh, or the less dangerous and far more common problem of major organized crime.  The Orks are also a problem in the Drumnos Sector, naturally enough.  Magi Biologis of the Adeptus Mechanicus suspect that the entire Galactic Northern Fringe was visited by Orks on a broad-scale Waaagh! at some time immediately after the collapse of the Terran Federation but before the Fall of the Eldar, and was then revisited by the Orks that scattered from the collapse of the Rampage of the Beast.  This would explain the pervasiveness of extremely low-tech but nigh-omnipresent Feral Orks in an area five Sectors in volume.  The Terran Federation and the Eldar Empire at their peaks were more than capable of destroying a Waaagh! with which the Imperium would presently struggle, but they were in no position to do so after the destruction of the previously safe methods of faster than light travel.

However, the largest threat to the area is not that of Greenskins or Slaanesh.  Simple human greed has given rise to the largest threat by volume and firepower in the Drumnos Sector: piracy.  Pirate flotillas numbering in the high dozens prowl the immense asteroid chains that crisscross the entire Sector.  The Imperial Navy in Cloudburst is a fraction of the size of their southern brethren, and wars have erupted in the Naxos Sector that have claimed millions of lives that were smaller than the death counts of Naval clashes of the Battlefleet Drumnos.

Piracy isn’t just a mechanism of living or a pastime in Drumnos.  It is an entire industry.  Whole fleets of criminals, privateers, raiders, slavers, planet looters, buccaneer armies, and other spaceborne ne’er-do-wells trawl the Drumnos Sector, looking for blood, treasure, and sport.

These pirates answer to no one leader, and in fact would be offended at the very idea.  Rather than stemming from a single centralized leadership, as the FCC and other small piracy groups in Cloudburst do, the Drumnos pirate fleets answer to individual Commodores and Admirals who style themselves kings of vacuum, and fly about the Drumnos Sector proclaiming their superiority for all to see.  Some favor stealth, and conceal themselves in the asteroids that dot the navigable starlanes of the Sector, waiting to pounce on helpless victims.  Others are more overt, and prefer to use brute firepower to get what they want out of life.  The most dangerous, however, are those who feign legitimacy and even flaunt Imperial Letters of Marque, working for the Imperium when they aren’t assaulting it.  Some of these Letters of Marque are even totally real, and are either gifts from the local Sector Administratum for conquering some minor foe of theirs or were stolen from their legitimate owners.

The true number of pirates in the Sector is impossible to ascertain, as some of them do not even consider themselves pirates at all.  Some, like the historical Dark Winds pirate gang, are more of an Insurrectionist movement, complete with uniformed ground militias and manufacturing centers in great industry ships akin to the Factory-Ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus.  These pirates tend to put on airs, not as sometime allies of the Imperium, but their inevitable conquerors, with the panache of swashbuckling action heroes and the delusions of Tau who look at Space Marine Chapters and try to recruit them to the Greater Good.

In fact, this is the only Sector in the region in which the T’au Fire Caste have a presence at all.  The Tau of the Expedition, a flotilla of Tau vessels traveling across the edges of the Second Sphere territories that were sucked into a Warp Flux and thrown halfway across the Segmentum Ultima, are a rising threat in the area.  Their willingness to rip apart human technology and study it horrifies the Adeptus Mechanicus, who dare not be so incautious with the few Tau trinkets they have captured.  These Tau have few Auxilia of other species thanks to the age of their force, which by the estimates of the Adeptus Terra are now on their ninth generation separated from Tau Empire territory.  Precisely how they are sustaining their numbers, or from where they are getting their small but apparently inexhaustible resupply shipments, is a complete mystery to baffled Ordo Xenos authorities.  What is known is that they have beached two of their huge Merchantmen on a large iron-silica asteroid in the very outer edges of the Drumnos Sector to trailing.  That is an inconvenience for their attackers, since that is the limit of the Astronomican’s immediate visibility in the region thanks to the interference of several Warp Storms between there and Terra.

The Tau seem interested in converting the local humans and even Orks to the Greater Good, and have had some very small successes, usually in exchange for promises of alliance with small human fleets blown off course in the void.  They have had a noted lack of success compared to their counterparts in the main T’au Empire, however, presumably thanks to the disproportionately small number of Water Caste in their fleet: it is mostly Fire Warriors and Air Caste ship crewers.  Lacking diplomats, they have few means of interacting with the outside worlds in any lasting way save acrimony, and they have given up on trying to turn the Imperium as a whole to their side after one too many ambushes by the Ordo Xenos.  However, even the Tau, with all of their advanced technology and tactics, recognize the huge problems with piracy in the area.  Pirates have far fewer compunctions against using xenotech than the Adeptus Mechanicus or Inquisition.  Some have even attempted to rob the two beached Tau ships, only to fall apart at the seams after a hailstorm of missile and railer fire from the still very-much-intact Merchantmen.

Rogue Traders with a military bend, a large army of mercenaries, and fast ships could make a killing in the Drumnos Sector.  There are many pirates to fight, and many, many chances to steal ships.  However, the deadlier pirates of the Sector aren’t rag-tag loners with old vessels and weary crews; they are deadly and regimented fleets of dozens of vessels that fight in formation and accept no pity, surrender, or mercy.  Thus, any Rogue Trader or Senatorial Privateer who wanted to expand their fleets in Drumnos would have to undertake extraordinary care and coordination in their planning, which some Rogue Traders just don’t have time or patience for.  However, Battlefleet Drumnos has had some success with this, by using ships designed specifically for escorting larger vessels to fight in closely to enemy formations and herd enemy Escorts away to be boarded safely.