Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Spindle (section)

====Thimble Military====

As a Hive World, Thimble has two things in abundance at all times: industry, and extra people.  The days when Thimble had so much empty living space that colonists had to be imported from other worlds to keep the machinery running have been over for a thousand years.  With the notable exception of Amethyst Hive (which has no underhive because its sublevels are one giant power plant) and Singer Hive (the scav population of which all mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago), all the hives of Thimble have more bodies than beds.  Thimble is also a Subsector Capital, and is thus responsible not only for raising a great domestic army to defend itself, but also a fleet and field army to defend its holdings.  As such, massive tithes of men in fresh uniforms appear in the ledgers of the Officio Munitorum every year.  The people of Thimble take active pride in the quality of their forces, which is ironic in the Munitorum’s eyes; they’re not very good fighters.  For whatever reason, be it diet, lifestyle, mindset, or just simple poor genes, Thimble troops outside their elite Scions seem predisposed to coming in squarely in the middle of Munitorum readiness and fitness exercises.  This does not make them a liability, of course, they are still fine fighters for the Imperium.  They are simply less qualified than the Munitorum traditionally expects hivers to be.
Hiver soldiers of the Imperial military have the reputation of being tough, self-reliant, and good at working in teams; these are all traits that the Navy and Guard prize.  Thimble hivers, however, have few of the gang allegiances that Necromundan or even Terran hivers possess.  All Hive Worlds have crime, and therefore all Hive Worlds have Imperial Guard conscripts ready to go, but Thimble has not (yet) developed the rampant criminal tribalism that leads to so many hiver gangs forming.  This leads to less early-life combat that could drive survival instincts home in childhood.  Perhaps this explains their lack of the stereotypical hiver Guardsman traits, like body tattoos and thuggish language.

Regardless, when Thimblan Argent Swords fight, they do so clad in the very best uniforms and armor money can buy.  Many worlds build their weaponry, also, with Cognomen providing advanced firearms, Maskos providing grenades and flamers, and Cognomen and Solstice splitting the vehicle requirements between them.  Argent Shields work and train in their bases on the planet itself, in walled-off hab blocks and bases on the surface, shielded from the boiling air by Mechanicus technoarcana.  The fact that all wars in Thimble history have occurred inside the hives means that Thimble troops are not well trained to work in concert with artillery or airstrikes.  As urban warfare troops, they are rated third behind Maskos Warriors and the elite Cloudburst Defenders overall in the Cloudburst Sector.  Again, like most hives, Thimble builds as much of its own wargear as it can.  The sheer number of troops it tithes up every year means that Cognomen can’t equip its general infantry with their masterpiece rifles; they have to equip dozens of other worlds, and do not have enough left over for Thimble’s troops too.  Therefore, Cognomen provides the designated marksmen and snipers of the Thimble regiments with their weapons, and the rest are either manufactured locally or shipped in from Fabique or Solstice.

The Thimblan Argent Swords prefer the use of Leman Russ tanks and rarely field anything larger.  The confined interiors of the Thimble hives mean that the Swords do not need to worry about claustrophobia in their deployments, which makes their special operations and urban fighters adaptable to space combat.

The Imperial Navy recruits many of its crews from the Spindle system, and its many thousands of space habs, space stations, void platforms, moon bases, and of course Thimble itself regularly pledges hundreds of thousands of people to the Navy’s crews.  Notably, Thimble does not have much of an officer’s tradition.  Instead, the majority of the Navy’s officers come from Oglith, Nauphry, and Coriolis.

Thimble also controls one other specialist formation, one unique to Thimble.  Beyond the Scions and Commissars provided by its Schola Progenum, Thimble has one military deployment in addition to its Navy and Guard commitments.  In a supposedly abandoned agricultural station in the dead zones near the Ork crash sites, the Mechanicus built a great tunnel, leading down through the rock and dead dirt to a natural cave they expanded with Maskos mining machines.  The Mechanicus dug out more caves and caverns, until nearly two cubic miles of space stretched out under the surface, with food and power provided from the surreptitiously-reactivated agri-station.

Inside the complex, a force of killers trains and waits.  The Thimble Night Slaughter, the premier Inquisitorial black ops force in the Segmentum north of the Maelstrom, hides away from the world.  The Night Slaughter know the real reason that Thimble’s asymptote of average soldier quality isn’t that the world has no gangs or that the Scions take all the good fighters.  The real reason is that they are quietly siphoned away from the conscript yards and enlistment centers, and taken blindfolded to the secret, nameless bunker.
Beneath the planet’s surface, tens of thousands of soldiers wait and train, each hypnoconditioned and commanded by implants to serve.  Every week, there is at least one casualty in the fierce, vicious training the Night Slaughter endures.  Training takes place in teams of ten, with a member cycled out every week to keep the groups fresh and the drills interchangeable.  Under the watchful eye of Lord Commissar Beleph Dour, these killers train to fight in unpredictable circumstances, like the fluctuating gravity of a Space Hulk or the blinding madness of the Warp, or even the twisting halls of the Webway.  The Holy Ordos convened this army of specialists, none of whom are listed as alive or even missing on Astra Militarum records.
The Inquisition knows that one day, perhaps one day soon, the armies of Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Khorne will team up to battle Tzeentch in the streets and skyways of the Cloudburst Sector.  Someday, either Tzeentch’s experiment will end, or the other three Chaos Gods will work together to stop it, and when it does, every heretic, every cultist, every traitor, every uncollected psyker in the Cloudburst Sector will rise up under Tzeentch’s thrall, and the Chaos Civil War in the sector will begin.  When it does, the Night Slaughter will also rise, to battle them.  Consisting of tens of thousands of brainwashed soldiers, or so their leaders think, the Slaughter are trained to the highest standards the human body can endure, even beyond that of the Urgent Response Forces of the Adeptus Arbites.  Genetic enhancement, hypnosis, cybernetic augmentation, even psychic impulse-planting make these soldiers into the absolute peak of human potential.  Night Slaughter troops that age past thirty-six cycle into Inquisitorial Stormtrooper service so that their training does not go to waste.

The Night Slaughter troops think that this is the secret plan of the Ordos; they assume that the Inquisition wants these soldiers to be constantly training in anticipation of the day that they will fall on the surprised Traitors and drive them from the Sector.  What Lord Commissar Dour knows is that the ‘accidents’ that account for the losses the Slaughter endures in their training are nothing of the kind.  Every week, the best soldier in the Slaughter is knocked unconscious and stashed in a great cryo-crypt, even deeper under the surface, and protected by psy-wards and techno-sorcerous barriers of the Dark Age.  Four psychic Inquisitors live in residence in this secret vault, watching over the thousands of frozen killers, looking for even the slightest sign of daemon incursion.  After all, armies are expensive, and while most active members of the gradually expanding Night Slaughter will never see battle against the forces of Chaos, to let their skills go to waste would be downright criminal.  Hundreds of thousands of cryo-crypts sit unfilled beneath the training grounds, with tanks, non-Carapace-linked Power Armor, guns, armored vehicles, combat servitors and Servo-skulls, and even a platoon of Martian Baneblades with full wargear upgrades ready to go.  When Tzeentch drops his charade, the Ordos will be ready.

Of course, the question has arisen in the ever-contentious Ordos about whether the resources spent on them are actually spent properly.  This constitutes an entire army of multiple brigades of elite soldiers, and a platoon of Superheavy Tanks.  Surely, this would be better spent, the doubters argue, in active expansion of the Cloudburst Sector, or the defense of Oglith.  If not, perhaps for the rest of the Imperium.  There are Hive Worlds in the Segmentum Solar with a greater industrial output than the whole Cloudburst Sector; Mars creates more goods for the Imperium than Cloudburst four times over.  Perhaps this elite, loyal, secret, and well-equipped army would be better deployed against the Ork Waaagh! creeping ever closer to Armageddon, or the forces of Khorne rampaging through the Solar/Obscurus border.  Cloudburst may be a vibrant, loyal, and expanding region, but it is not yet indispensable.  Those Inquisitors who have staked a claim on the project, however, believe that the forces of Chaos are gnawing at the seams of the Sector.  The region was only barely Imperial, three thousand years before.  Of course the rest of the galaxy could use an extra elite, secret army.  Surely, though, if the Imperium were to abandon Cloudburst in the face of a quantifiably Chaotic threat, that would signal to its other enemies a weakness, an exploitable weakness.  Necron Dynasties across known space are already staking claims on Imperial worlds and even whole sectors.  Wouldn’t giving up Cloudburst without a fight in the face of a threat greater than the Glasians suggest that they could stake a claim on even more?

Ultimately, this debate rages on in the Palace of Maskos.  As with so many Imperial Inquisition debates, there is no clear, unambiguous answer.  For now, the Night Slaughter awaits in their crypts and their barracks.  In an emergency, they could deploy.  What would constitute such an emergency, none yet know.