Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Lord General Howard Lannis Halwart==
{{Topquote|Orks? It’ll be a fight, then. Lots of Orks? It’ll be a good fight. They landed on Oglith? Then it’ll be a LONG fight! Strap up, gentlemen, there’s business afoot for His Finest Men!|Howard Lannis Halwart}}

It is a well-practiced and easily verified maxim of the Imperial military that the higher one’s rank, the easier one’s job becomes. Lord General Halwart is the second in command of the Cloudburst Sector Imperial Guard, and presently the overall commander of the Imperial defense on Oglith, and he loves every second of it. Halwart is an optimist, a foolishly vainglorious one, and is probably the last line standing between the Glasian and Ork menaces and the loss of a Subsector Capital.

Born on Nauphry IV, Howard Lannis Halwart was a scion of the Halwart Transit Services Corporation, and the great-grandson of its Chief Executive. There was no chance that he would inherit his distant sire’s vast wealth and corporate power, and so his family passed him off to the military in the hope that he would make something of himself. To his own surprise, he loved it. The military lifestyle fitted him like a glove. He paid his own way through a token degree and returned to the military as a commissioned officer. Eventually, Halwart mustered to the Nauphry Guard as a Lieutenant, and he began the climb up the ranks. He saw combat alongside the Oglith Jaegers and Warriors and the Septiim Guard in the battle against the rebelling PDF army of Delving in M41.890, and found a true thrill in leading troops into the fray. He wasn’t especially good at it, but his combination of genuine but foolhardy courage and chest-pounding patriotic braggadocio at least kept morale above acceptable thresholds.

In his time with the Guard, Halwart engaged in battle with rebel soldiers with zeal, gusto, and a batman with a twin heavy shotgun protecting him from the immediate consequences of his exuberance. He ended the war with a few confirmed kills and a chest full of medals. His rise to power continued unobstructed, although he acquired a reputation of losing his aides and staffers in his zeal to reach the front. Halwart trained obsessively in what he called ‘the martial things,’ like religious history, logistics, dress codes, and obscure communication codes and hand signals, which he began working into his body language during ordinary conversation.

Once his rank rose high enough that he was expected to converse with the nobs and fops of Imperial high society, he took to it like a fish to a river. He captivated the lower nobility of several Cloudburst and Naxos worlds with his barely-exaggerated tales of battlefield daring-do, and stories of the foes he and his armies had vanquished. Of course, by that point, he was rarely allowed to engage openly against enemies in the field, and became more likely to command from the rear, but he still took every chance he got to get his hands dirty in the field, and does so even now, thanks to his juvenat treatments.

Thanks to his training and Highborn heritage, Halwart is just as comfortable interacting with the upper crust as they are with him, but he still prefers the thrill of battle. He has no children nor plans to make any, but he has adopted a series of patronages that allow him to shower with monetary rewards the many artists he has hired to decorate the cabin of his personal starship. His ship has no Navigator, but it can follow in the wake of other ships in the Warp well enough, and the first thing it usually does after exiting the Warp is bull to the front of whatever formation it was a part of, so he can be seen leading the charge.

Even in the corrupt and staggering Imperium of Man, men like Halwart usually catch a case of bolter shell to the brain for their attitude, and Halwart himself probably would have, if he didn’t have some actual skills. His combat skill is middling at best, but that is among his peers: the highest-ranked Generals in the Imperial North. By the standards of a common General or a PDF commander, he is quite skillful. Compared with masters of warfare like Ranult Arden or even Lord Maynard, he is unimpressive, though they would not fault his courage.

At the moment, Halwart is in charge of the defense of the Rampart system’s ground assets from the Orks and Glasians. Sector Command had always known that Oglith would require particular defense thanks to the need to prevent the Glasian Migration from worsening the psychic stimulation of the Orks below. Now, that is a secondary concern. If Big Chief Squiggothrider is still alive when the Glasians arrive in Rampart, the planet is all but lost. The Imperium can just barely hold back the hundreds of thousands of Orks that crashed on Oglith or rose up from beneath it; also fighting off the Glasians without destroying the Ork unity is beyond the scope of their capabilities. Halwart may be a vainglorious braggart, but he is not stupid enough to think the present war can or should go on forever. Even if the Imperium does somehow eke out a victory here, the sheer drain on the Sector’s resources that the concurrent invasions represent is enough to ensure that the two low-tech worlds the Glasians are also hitting are defended by token garrison forces at the most. Despite his best wishes, Halwart recognizes that this is not a war the Imperium is going to win if he simply throws himself at it headlong.

Thus, he has allowed himself to retreat to his command bunker in Overlord Atongwë’s castle or his Leviathan command vehicle, where he unhappily commands plastic squares around a holo table and hopes he doesn’t make any mistakes. His force has the two Ork armies outnumbered by a considerable margin, but the operational requirements of fighting Feral Orks underground and star-faring Orks aboveground are so different that he just can’t use the same tactics against both. He has reluctantly requested more forces from Lord Sector Quintus, although he knows few can be shaken loose.

Halwart’s advisors and subordinate Generals, as well as the Brigadiers and Colonels who will actually be leading the forces of the Imperium against the aliens, have been counseling him to ask for more aid from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica and the Segmentum Ultima Officio Munitorum, but Halwart is loathe to do so for two reasons. First, he does not like admitting that he is in over his head, and to be fair, if he were only fighting one implacable alien enemy, he probably wouldn’t be. The second reason is that help is already on the way, but by secret means. A Deathwatch Killteam is on the way, dispatched by Watch Commander Domack from Fortress Dascomb. It will dock on the Watch Point Earthquake, and then make its way to him for a briefing. He has also met with two people sent from Terra itself to ‘assist him,’ which is language vague enough to unsettle him. This is a rare circumstance for him.

The two people sent from Terra are quiet and terrifying; they are black-robed specters of death and fear that scare the living daylights out of him, perhaps the first beings to truly do so. Halwart is a man upon whom frightful reality dares not often intrude, but these two folks manage to do so without any real effort. The first is a Vanus Assassin, introduced to him as “Civil,” and the other is a Vindicare Assassin, codenamed “Mimic.” He had never even heard of the Vanus before meeting Civil. Mimic, however, is apparently one of the deadliest people in the Segmentum, and despite looking no different from an ‘average’ Vindicare sniper, Mimic all but radiates cold violence. Mimic barely talks, but not from the burden of great trauma or a dour personality. He has simply done so much flying about and so much killing that nothing he has seen on Oglith particularly incites his emotions, or requires his question nor input.

Halwart has never worked with Assassins before, but as all Lords General do, he knows of their secret remit and their Terran obligation. He does not know that Mimic is also tasked with killing the Subsector Overlord, nor does he know that Civil is actually present to manipulate his data streams to boost morale and encourage civilian resistance against the Orks and Glasians because the Senate thinks he can’t do it himself. Of course, if he does do it himself, that would seal the deal for his ascension to Lord General Senioris when Charles Xoss retires or dies.

Halwart cuts what he thinks to be a dashing image outside of battle, with a variety of custom uniform adornments and arms, including a great feathered hat and a pair of ivory-grip dueling six-shooter revolvers. He also carries a Power Sword he paid for from his own pocket, which is as deadly as it is ceremonial.