Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader Dynastic House Vermouthe====
Although most Rogue Traders are wealthy and ambitious by their nature, many also meet a bad end in the pursuit of money and power.  House Vermouthe came a hair’s-breadth from the latter fate, and only a single act of mercy by the Inquisition prevented that.

House Vermouthe was awarded a Warrant of Trade as recompense, after an Imperial Navy Commander named Haxtor Vermouthe fought alongside an Explorator ship that had been jumped by the Eldar Corsair vessel Haliantho Ab’ris.  Having saved the life of the Explorator and more importantly, having saved the immense cargo of archaeotech stashed in its hull, the Adeptus Mechanicus persuaded the Imperial Navy to award the young Commander Vermouthe with a limited Marque of Trade.  This would turn him into a professional privateer who was also authorized to carry out limited trade beyond the borders of the Imperium.  Within ten years, Vermouthe had taken fourteen journeys into the space between the Naxos and Caedra Sectors, and had taken three pirate ships as prizes, rescued four convoys under Ork attack, and flattened a renegade Imperial Guard company that had captured an Imperial Temple and begun making demands.

Eventually, the Adeptus Administratum recognized that a force of destruction and ambition as great as the young Free Captain was best suited for attacking the Emperor’s enemies, lest he become one himself in the pursuit of ever greater power.  The Adeptus Administratum revoked his Marque and awarded the House Vermouthe with a Lesser Warrant of Trade, which made him a proper Rogue Trader.

While Haxtor Vermouthe himself was a capable and ultimately loyal leader of men, his grandsons were less able to live up to his legacy.  They might have made good Imperial Escort Squadron Leaders, Commanders and junior Captains who could work well together, fight under orders, and obey instructions from high; those are not the ideal traits for a Rogue Trader.  A Rogue Trader’s authority must be absolute, their will must be unambiguous, they must be able to work alone, and above all, they must not need a support structure to get things done.  Under the leadership of the two grandsons, the family became little more than well-dressed pirates, and although they never abandoned the restrictions and commands of their Warrant, they never quite made a name for themselves.

That changed when both men died in a horrific starship crash, and the elder grandson’s own daughter inherited the Warrant.  As soon as Amanda Vermouthe took the Warrant, she went on a spree of destruction and chaos that left scars on the faces of fifteen worlds.  Gathering her family’s now rather large fleet to herself, she sent it plunging into the Loqui Deeps of the Drumnos Sector, bringing savage war on the pirates and xenos that lurked there.  She met with some initial success, thanks to the dwellers of the Deeps having had no idea at all that she was coming.  Imperial Navy ships that had entered the area to skirmish with the pirates and aliens found a charnel house of shipwrecks, plundered vaults, and sometimes Imperial vessels that had been destroyed by xeno armaments.

While her early victories were certainly to the Imperium’s benefit and accomplished much of the regional pacification, she had no head for logistics, and before much time had passed, her vessels could continue the fight no longer.  Her individual ship Captains pled for her to return to the family holding and cash in all of their booty and plunder.  She refused without discussion.  Subsequent pleas had equally unhelpful outcomes.

The Captains were seriously considering confining her to quarters and turning the ships back on their own when a message came through for the Lady Trader.  To the shock and horror of her Captains, her vessel had unknowingly entered a region of the Deeps in which the Inquisition was staging for a secret, terrible mission.  Although the Inquisition’s messenger did not inform her what that mission was, the messenger was unambiguous in his instruction: the Vermouthe ships were to turn back and go no further.  They had served the Imperium well, but now it was time to go home.

By this time, Amanda Vermouthe was in no shape to listen.  Her bloodlust and natural arrogance had taken her completely.  She ordered the Inquisitorial courier fired upon, and before the bridge crew could react and stop her, one of the ship gunnery crews had already done so.

That one shot was not enough to destroy the courier, and the courier boat immediately fled.  The ship Captain declared barratry on the spot and beat the startled Vermouthe unconscious while the gunnery crews immediately stood down once the Chief Gunnery Officer relayed the facts to them.  The ship’s Astropath desperately begged the Inquisitorial courier to wait and hear out their explanation, but it jumped into the Warp without a word.

With Vermouthe now sedated in the medical wing, the ship Captain had to make a tough call.  There was simply no way the Inquisition would let that incident slide, but the ship crews were clearly innocent of the crime.  After some deliberation, the Ship Captain flew the vessel and the rest of the surviving Vermouthe flotilla to their home base in the Naxos Sector.

As expected, the Inquisition was waiting.  The Vermouthe ship Captain turned the raging Amanda Vermouthe over to the Inquisitorial vessels and sat by, awaiting judgment.

It came on cold words.  The entire Vermouthe fleet was to turn over all of the lucre they had captured, all the ships they had captured, and all xenotech they had acquired from anywhere, within one day.  The House Vermouthe members on the surface protested until the Inquisitor present showed the footage of the Vermouthe ships firing on them, at which point the Vermouthe Household complied.

Now utterly bankrupt, the Vermouthe House nearly had to sell their Warrant.  It took decades of hard work by the new Warrant holder to get back into profits, and twice as long to get back into the good graces of the Inquisition.  Even now, thousands of years later, the House is still something of persona non grata among Naxos Inquisitors.

Perhaps that is why House Vermouthe moved to the Cloudburst Sector eventually.  There, farther from the Inquisition’s eyes, the House has been able to stake a great claim to the stars.  The Vermouthe fleet has managed to recover from their errant venture, and has even managed to purchase a modest mansion on Celeste, where they can rub shoulders with other nobles of the Cloudburst Sector and awe them with stories of their fleet’s deeds among the dust clouds of the Circuit.

The most recent incident of note in the Vermouthe family was their brush with the Lomax Pirates, who drift from system to system in a nomadic cloud of slow-moving but Warp-capable ships.  The Lomax Pirates have long haunted the nebular drifts that separate the Nauphry and Rampart Subsectors, and ambushed several Vermouthe freighters that only barely managed to call in reinforcements before they were overrun.  When Vermouthe ships arrived, the freighters had already been boarded.  The Vermouthe vessels then had to enact boardings of their own ships, which cost a fortune and still did not succeed in retrieving them all.