Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

===Noble and Merchant Houses===
In any place where the immense wealth of the Imperium is allowed to concentrate into a small handful of families, the inevitable effect is patronage. The noble Houses of the Cloudburst Sector may not have the immense pedigrees of the Sol Sector families, but there are some who have managed to accumulate so much wealth that they have been able to subsidize entire industries to their will.

====Mercantile Noble Houses====
=====Mercantile Noble House Herrera, Septiim=====
The Septiim system offers endless opportunity for a freighter captain out to make some money. Of all the systems of the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, it has the largest number of inhabited bodies, with three rocky planets, three gas giants with inhabited moons, a Forge Moon, and multiple Lagrange stations. It was natural for such a system to develop a large merchant and freight business, and so House Herrera has grown to fill the gap.

The House started as a fairly unimpressive shipping concern until the Glasian Migrations began. Suddenly, the House was inundated with business as people moved off Septiim to other worlds in the hopes of avoiding Glasian attention. The House quickly began exploring other shipping contracts, such as the movement of food and textile materials from Agri-worlds and Paradise Worlds to Thimble, and moving outside Septiim proper to ship materiel for the Navy if dedicated haulers weren’t available.

Those efforts may have moved Herrera from a regional player to a large one, but it didn’t become the dominant shipping concern in Cloudburst until they scored the coup contract to become the exclusive transportation agent for the huge supply barges carrying finished goods from Coriolis and Combine to their shipping partners. Being the exclusive shipping agency for the largest military base in the Galactic North and the most productive Agri-world in Cloudburst catapulted them ahead of their competition.

Success has gone to their heads, however. Several members of the House’s senior leadership have recently been arrested by the Inquisition for transporting illegal gene-mod technology. The secretive nature of the Inquisition means that the rest of the House may never know precisely what was being transported, and the shameful lack of documentation for the products in question means that the Inquisition was able to seal the incident up, probably forever.

The House may have been diminished by that scandal, but it is not broken. Already, the House is recouping its losses and attempting to expand its fleet to operate outside the Sector proper. However, it has so far constrained its efforts to the Exo-zone and Circuit exploratory outposts, not into the Drumnos Sector. The Drumnos Sector mercantile concerns are far wealthier than Herrera can ever realistically hope to be, and could easily out-bid them.

=====Mercantile Noble House O’Neill, Thimble=====
Thimble is the beating heart of industry in the Cloudburst Sector, as a Hive World generally is. The vast population capacity of the city allows for the planet to create and design products no other world in the Sector except possibly Cognomen could produce, or need in such volume.

Naturally, in the money-driven and aristocracy-choked hell of the Imperium, the noble houses that best sponsor the enormous manufacturing concerns are often able to become great profit ventures themselves, until there is no difference between the manufacturing company and its noble patrons. House O’Neill of Thimble already had extensive patronages of manufacturing companies in their Hive, as did several other noble houses, but the O’Neills were ambitious. In time, the O’Neill family expanded their interests to consume several of the supply companies that fed their factories, the shipping companies that moved those supplies, and even the production firms that refined the raw goods.

The O’Neill strategy was a patient one, not exactly original. Vertical Control has been a part of manufacturing technique since M2. However, the O’Neills mastered it, and did so with a combination of business acumen and legal finagling that has allowed them to reap ludicrous profits. So far, House O’Neill and House Zhong have worked together to manufacture starships of such quality that the Navy could scarcely do better, and even the Mechanicus finds it distantly impressive.

However, the true triumph and core business of House O’Neill doesn’t lie in space. The unique history of Thimble in the Sector allows it to serve as both the undisputed non-Mechanicus manufacturing hub of the region and a grossly underutilized one. Thimble has both a complete manufacturing hegemony on non-Cognomen goods and a nearly exclusive monopsony on several refined minerals that few other worlds need. As a result, the only competitors in scale for House O’Neill goods are the Mechanicus and out-of-Sector businesses.

House O’Neill’s founders and strategists realized early that that meant that the Houses that managed to be the ‘competition’ for Mechanicus products and lock down those markets would effectively run totally unopposed in pricing and quality for those who couldn’t afford Martian perfection. Aircars, clothing, construction tools, chemicals, synthetic rubber, household goods, and other products that Cognomen makes are exquisite in their production standards, but unreachably expensive for people on many worlds that lack Thimble or Celeste’s robust economy.

Therefore, House O’Neill manufactures the best knockoffs of those Cognomen products that they can, sells them on as many worlds as possible, and aggressively researches ever more ways to build and store them without sacrificing much quality or stepping on the Cognomen Magos’ Council’s toes. The O’Neill stamp of quality can be found on all but two of the worlds in the Sector and has spread beyond. Although the Mechanicus is somewhat exasperated by this, there is little they can do about it. To share their own advanced designs and engineering with the House would be to elevate those uninitiated in the ways of the Sacred Machine to their own level, which their pride cannot allow. To let the O’Neills simply research new techniques without inhibition would be sinful, and to stamp them out would be a gross impeachment of their Treaty of Mars.

So, for now, Cognomen and House O’Neill exist in a simmering state of rivalry which only the Cognomen contingent seem to care about, and House O’Neil never acknowledges. As far as House O’Neill is concerned, as long as their customers are usually happy and they themselves are grotesquely rich, they couldn’t care less what the Techpriests think.

Outside of their extensive manufacturing concerns, House O’Neill is a noted patron of arts and education, having sponsored great art schools on several planets, including Coriolis and Celeste. This is not because of some great philanthropic worldview on the part of the O’Neills, but rather an effect of having so much money that there is little else on which they can legally spend it.

However, several scions of the family have perished in the use of alien weapons in the blood-sport so common among the Thimble idle rich, and have thus come under rising scrutiny from the Ordo Xenos, especially in the last hundred years. The current Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst is herself a former Ordo Xenos Inquisitor of immense skill, and prosecuted the opposition to the Cold Trade in alien technology for two hundred years before rising in rank. She knows perfectly well how much the Thimble Highborn love to collect alien gadgetry, and has her subordinates watching them like hawks. House O’Neill is hurriedly performing internal review to ferret out which of its scions is responsible for the huge upswing in alien artifacts making their way into the Household before it is too late.

=====Mercantile Noble House Zhong, Thimble=====
The building of ships in the Imperium is an undertaking like few others, with the costs rising far above what any one non-governmental force could afford in most cases. House Zhong is a rare exception. It is the only entity outside the Mechanicus and Navy authorized to manufacture Warpcraft in the entire Cloudburst region.

Zhong holds one other distinction of note: it is the oldest surviving House in the Sector. It can accurately trace the core of its gene-line back to the original Levitna Colony Group, well over twenty thousand years before, and its origin to a long-dead Terran noble family from the age of the Terran Federation. Zhong survived the Age of Strife and the long darkness between the Heresy and the coming of the Imperium to the region by essentially claiming the least desirable hive on Levitna’s radiation-scarred surface for itself and killing all comers. It wisely bowed to the Imperium when it arrived, and was rewarded with the honor of being the only noble house elevated in its native hive. They were passed over for the privilege of becoming the Planetary Ruling Clan, but has prospered anyway, thanks to being able to do something no other hive can: total industrial devotion.

In the other hives of Thimble, the hives are all fairly inter- and intra-dependent in their manufacturing needs, as could be expected from the great vertical cities. The Zhong hive, however, which they named after themselves, is not. It is a resource hog in every way, being unable to even develop most household goods. The Zhong hive is dedicated solely to the manufacture of starship components, and to their elevation to space for use in the great orbiting shipyards. Lacking an Orbital Spire, they make do with very high-elevation launch pads.

As most shipbuilding concerns do, the House yards began as simply making the components of naval ships, and not performing any assembly. Gradually, however, economies of scale allowed Zhong to do more and more of the preparatory steps, including some circuit fabrication and assembly. The Navy was pleased by this since they had to do less work and didn’t have to rely on the Adeptus Mechanicus as much. Over time, Zhong shipbuilding took over more of the House’s time, until they became less a noble family and more a corporate Board of Directors, although they are still accorded a title in the Thimblan peerage. The components they made were initially no different than those of any other shipbuilding corporation, but over time, Zhong made more of a conscious effort to diversify their offerings to lure in the cheaper Chartist Captains and Rogue Traders. Eventually, the inevitable shift occurred, and Zhong bought their own shipyard in orbit over the Mining World of Delving.

The Delving yard was a metaphorical goldmine for the House Zhong. Here, with direct access to the refined minerals from the planet below, the House was able to produce ships of nearly Navy quality without any interference from the Thimble authorities, and to meet contracts from Rogue Traders. Unlike some of their Great House contemporaries, however, Zhong never compromises on quality. A shoddy toaster or clock may be a minor inconvenience, but a shoddy starship engine can kill hundreds of thousands of people. Thus, and to the Mechanicus’s approval, the breakaway from the stifling leadership of the Thimble government did not yield a reduction in appreciable quality from the Zhong industrial output.

Zhong yards today work around the clock in the great orbitals of Delving and Thimble, manufacturing vessels for Rogue Trader and Departmento Astrocartigraphicae mapping voyages. They have patronized the Grand Anchor yards more than once, buying shipwrecks and scrapping them for parts, and have even played a role in the disassembly of Space Hulks that managed to achieve stable orbits in Cloudburst systems. Zhong merchants ply their wares of spare parts and upgrade kits at every private shipyard in the Sector and even some in the Naxos Sector beyond.

However, the House Zhong does have its limits. They know better than to try to break into the territories of the far older and wealthier merchant combines in the Drumnos and Naxos Sectors. Drumnos has far busier space lanes, but has its own Houses to supply it, and the Naxos Sector is a crumbling warzone, too dangerous to insure properly thanks to the Nurglite pirates ripping it apart.

Likewise, the House subcontracts uncomplainingly to the Mechanicus in two critical ways. The psionic Thrones Navis used by Navigators to pilot ships through the Warp, and the actual Warp Drive Cores used to propel them, are the exclusive remit of the Cognomen Orbital Yards, and the House Zhong has no intention to try to break into that market. Only Adeptus Mechanicus Techpriests of Forge World certification are permitted anywhere near the blessed components when they are purchased in bulk from the forges of Cognomen and Solstice, and the House pays their prices without complaint. The Warp is simply too dangerous to risk tampering with.

=====Mercantile Noble House Carvan, Celeste=====
From the impossibly abundant fields of Combine to the endless latifundae of Cassie’s World, the breadbaskets of Cloudburst do business at every turn with House Carvan. This young and expanding mercantile concern has sprawled over the Sector like an indolent cat, and has a partial or fully vested ownership in a third of the farms on the technologically advanced worlds of the Sector.

Unlike some of the other manufacturing Houses of the Sector, however, Carvan rarely administrates most of their holdings directly. They prefer a less centralized approach to business that has served them well in the slow-acting field of agriculture. The science of agriculture is also more challenging than most interstellar trades, thanks to the combination of the slowness of Warp travel and the fact that no two planets have seasons of the same length (and may not have seasons at all). As a result, the work that Carvan does has to be customized to their target markets, and can’t be applied uniformly, thanks to the sheer variety of their vendors. This includes great deep-space hydroponic floater ranches where animals breed, live, and die in zero gravity so as to have less burdensome bones, seabed sponge farms, great herds of grox and cattle on the plains of wind-swept worlds, and slaughterhouses that fill whole cities. Attempting any degree of uniformity in most regards would be nothing better than a waste of time.

Thus, House Carvan prefers to rely on local oversight and supervision for their partner and subsidiary food vendors. The House has override and veto authority on most crucial decisions, but only employs it when needed and never without review, and always works their hardest to comply with the relevant Sector and Imperial laws. These laws concern things like tolerable bacterial and synthetic molecule load, expiration dates, and shipping regulation, as well as things like supplying ships that travel outside Imperial jurisdiction.

This does not mean Carvan is lax in its scrutiny of its foods, of course. The Carvan name can be found from the undercrofts of Gorum’s Folly castles to the gourmand kitchens of the highest Celeste society, and everywhere in between. Carvan’s most prestigious contracts are generally awarded by members of other Imperial noble families and Houses, including the Quintus family itself. The House also does not force itself to comply with a single brand identity, and has created thousands to apply to every conceivable market. Their most profitable is the ‘Clear Suns spacer foods’ brand, sold by the gigaton to ship crews, and often containing the most preservative-filled but guiltily delicious foods a low-ranked crewer can look forward to eating between the stars. For crews of very small ships, or ships that take decades to travel to between destinations, Carvan offers the ‘Solitas Meals’ brand, consisting of far higher-quality foods that stay good so long as specific storage and preparation requirements are met, since nothing drives an overstressed crew stuck in the Warp mad faster than lousy food.

Of course, the nobles of the Sector wouldn’t be caught dead eating such things unless they were slumming it, and so Carvan also offers the ‘Nine Star Dining’ courses, which consist of locally-prepared gourmet foods and come with a price tag to match. Most of these foods are actually prepared and eaten on the same planet on which they were grown or butchered, making the ‘Nine Star Dining’ brand ironically the most widely-varying in quality.

However, while Carvan are savvy marketers and regulators, their record of actual quality is less than perfect. Whole lots of megatons of food have had to be recalled by Carvan at catastrophic losses when pieces of metal from broken scoops or agitators were found in boxes of food labelled ‘metal detector certified.’ While alien bacteria are rarely a concern for human illness thanks to humanity’s unique cell membrane and receptor composition, it is a huge concern for food storage since some alien bacteria can digest nearly anything that is dead even if it is harmless to living humans.

The House Carvan headquarters is technically located on Celeste, but it may as well not be. Almost four sevenths of its production and eighty percent of its corporate staff are located on Combine, where they produce gigatons of food for the Imperium. Because Combine is one of the precious Agri-worlds that is in no danger of soil depletion, the world also takes in some fertilizers from other worlds to replenish the nutrients of the soil in a proportion to the rate it is taken away, instead of the more machine-like Agri-worlds that simply run their soil ragged. Carvan’s presence on the world means that they are able to take a more active role in the oversight of their vendors and farms than they usually are, even heading up the staff on several themselves.

Carvan is one of the few merchant Houses in the Sector that began as a merchant family and only gained a nobility title later, which is the source of some derision from their peers. However, this has served them in one crucial fashion: they are the only Cloudburst Peerage merchant family to have a foothold on the vast space station [[Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient|Port Maxient]]. They established their greenhouses there before receiving titles of aristocracy.

=====Mercantile Noble House Albert, Celeste=====
While some Imperial worlds practice the harsh and draconian law of their own warlords, civilized Imperial worlds prefer to adopt customs that allow for the benefits of Imperial law without the lack of subtlety inherent to the more primitive worlds. This can result in civilized worlds adopting vast and intricate law systems that have a dizzyingly complex array of subcodes and strictures that no layman could ever understand. While the Arbites enforce Imperial law with as close to true neutrality as they can muster, the law of some planets is so convoluted that dedicated experts are needed for consultation on its finer points and applications.

Enter House Albert. This ancient House is the smallest by employee count of all of the intact Great Houses of the Sector, but its wealth and influence could well eclipse most others. The House Albert staffers and barristers are able to aid and advise on nearly any legal matter of the worlds Cloudburst, Celeste, Septiim, Cognomen, Hapster, Nauphry, and Thimble, and their senior council of trial lawyers has worked with the Arbites on twenty worlds more. Albert’s lawyer staff are specifically forbidden by Sector law from participating in the House’s actual duties as members of the Cloudburst peerage, and so the House nobility and barristers can’t be the same people. House Albert’s staff has absorbed several private law firms and sponsors law colleges on Thimble and Celeste, and is always looking for fresh talent. The sheer length of time that some Arbites-led trials can take allow for Albert lawyers to be called in from offworld in many cases.

=====Mercantile Noble House Joun-Lee, Celeste=====
Where the Imperium goes, there is always war. The beautiful countryside and endless beaches of Celeste may not routinely house invading aliens, but much of the rest of the Sector experiences warfare, from the internecine conflicts of local nobles to the private armies of Rogue Traders. House Joun-Lee is the pre-eminent provider of men under arms in the Sector, and has been for over a thousand years.

Thanks to the rather restrictive laws regarding the legality of private militias in Sectors being different from Sector to Sector, there is little chance that House Joun-Lee will expand to other regions of Imperial space. They have a large and competent corps of marketers and salesmen, who have liaised with planetary officials, noble houses, field commanders, and recently Cardinal Drake to provide armed personnel for various tasks.

Despite the unsavory reputation of mercenaries in much of the modern Imperium, the majority of the House Joun-Lee contracts that they have served over the past few hundred years have been security and patrol contracts for prisons, Penal Legion camps, construction sites, and colonial outposts in the Cloudburst Circuit. This is steady work, well-paying, and not very risky, at least not compared to warfare against aliens. The longest contracts the House has served are providing security guards and trainers for the same to the great storage yards on Coriolis, where hundreds of millions of military families cache their larger possessions while their loved ones go on tour among the stars. They also retain the possessions left behind when a family on deployment is killed in action until they can be auctioned. The House Joun-Lee mercenary companies occasionally also work with Rogue Traders, but this isn’t as common among House members as it is among freelance groups, due to the low probability of returns on investment.

The House Joun-Lee is permitted a much larger contingent of soldiers than most Houses on Celeste ever will be, thanks to contracts of exclusivity granted to them by the Sector Overlord many centuries ago. Any noble house that wanted to sponsor a mercenary group now would need to be shrewd and play a lot of catch-up work to overtake Joun-Lee’s enormous investments. Additionally, House Joun-Lee has a significant force of atmospheric transports and fighters, most of them not quite up to Forge World standards or even Naval ones, but more than enough to flatten a small city if need be. These are expensive to transport and even more expensive to refuel and rearm after missions, so they are fielded only for the most exorbitantly pricey contracts.

As with all mercenary work, Joun-Lee’s field is not without its dangers, especially around the times of the Glasian Migrations. Nobles or government officials who want to prioritize the defense of a specific place, instead of the more general work of the PDF or the Astra Militarum, will hire House Joun-Lee forces to provide the extra muscle. The fact that the House has been able to hire troops out to so many places is indicative of their logistical skills, which are often called into service to aid in the transport of PDF troops on those occasions that they work with the House.

The House buys most of their equipment from either House O’Neill or the Mechanicus, although they are also known to manufacture some simple equipment, including uniforms, in the great factories of the city of Civitavecchia. As might be expected for a mercenary company, the House Joun-Lee logistical bottleneck is Warpflight. When a contract is levelled to hire House Joun-Lee troops, the client is generally expected to pay for transport or supply it themselves. When a Rogue Trader is the contractor, this is trivial, but when the contractor is merely some noble or Governor who may not have a fleet of their own, transport is usually provided by sympathetic merchant Captains, who may well appreciate having a massive anti-boarding force at their disposal. When no other option exists, the House Joun-Lee leaders can hire House Lunther logistical ships to transport them. The Household would also very much like to buy a Universe-class Mass Conveyor, but the Inquisition has kindly informed them that that would subject the House Joun-Lee to a far higher level of scrutiny. After all, Lord Primarch Roboute Guilliman specifically divided up the Imperial military to avoid a Horus Heresy on smaller scales in the future, where one charismatic Traitor turned half the Imperial military by subverting eight people. Of course, as a house of the Imperial Peerage that has no actual presence in the Administratum, House Joun-Lee isn’t technically bound by that separation of forces edict, but the Inquisition has enough headaches to deal with, and the House isn’t willing to press their luck any harder on the subject.

At the present time, literally all of the House Joun-Lee forces that are not tasked with pre-existing contracts have been hired indefinitely by Cardinal Lamarr to defend Johdclan’s Paradise. As such, its entire ground contingent has been scrambled to defend the planet except those needed to resupply their long-term postings elsewhere. It is this, above all other hirings made by the paranoid Cardinal, which has driven up the suspicion of the Ordo Hereticus. Retaining a few troops to defend groundside holdings is one thing, but tasking an entire mercenary fleet to feed and transport an army for unclear durations is quite another. House Joun-Lee would not hesitate for one instant to sell out the Cardinal if their continued association with him would get them in hot water with the Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus.

=====Mercantile Noble House Senai, Coriolis=====
When it comes to the beauty of the natural world, the artificial society, and their blending at the seams, there are few groups in the whole Cloudburst Sector that have quite captured the art of it all like House Senai. The Coriolis-based House of military nobles are high-standing members of the Sector Peerage, and had ruled an entire Fortress-citadel on Coriolis for over two thousand years. Their indulgence in high art is a more recent phenomenon, and of all of the House patronages in the Sector so far, the relationship between the nobles of the House and the group they patronize is most distant in Senai’s case. Very few of the Senai family members are actual artists, as opposed to House Joun-Lee, which has several of its youths as actual midshipmen in their command vessel, or House Albert’s many family lawyers.

As is the case in many of Coriolis’s noble families, the roots of the House Senai are planted deep in the Imperial Navy. The Holy Fleet of the Imperium is a refuge for the untalented youngest children of many Imperial peer families, of course, and has been since after the Scouring ten thousand five hundred years before, but for House Senai, it is a point of pride.

The House Senai origins are all tied up in the ancient remit of the Imperial Navy to supply transport and air combat roles for the Imperial Guard. As was imposed by the Lord Regent Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, over ten thousand years ago, the Imperial Guard may no longer maintain a fleet of its own, and no armed air nor space craft. Instead, those were to be provided by the Imperial Navy or Adeptus Mechanicus, so that no one faction of the Imperium may amass both enough ground and space firepower and transport capability to conquer any territory. House Senai was originally a household of lifer Imperial Navy officers, many thousands of years ago, who were responsible for transporting the many millions of Segmentum Solar and Ultima soldiers and colonists who built the first wave of Cloudburst colonies. Eventually, the House settled down, then nothing more than a very wealthy family with a very small noble title, in the leadership of a refurbished Navigator fortress on Coriolis.

Eventually, the House expanded their remit over the surrounding land, using their money to create efficient and clean irrigation systems, surveillance networks, and galleries of entertainment and sport for the people who lived around their fortress. When Coriolis was formally declared a Fortress World of the Officio Munitorum, the Senai family was elevated to a proper title of Earldom, and given a high posting in the newly established Coriolis aristocracy.

As with all noble families that received their title through hard work, the Senai family lorded their position over their rivals, and immediately began flaunting their power. Keeping up the tradition of sending their youngest off to serve in the Navy with commissions, deserved or no, the House Senai family never quite lost sight of their roots in service, but have taken to the Coriolis nobility like a Terran Highborn. The family eventually lost the position of fortress administration with the shifting tides of economy and politics on the planet, but by that point, they had diversified their holdings to include far greater varieties of money-making businesses. The House had then moved into direct patronage of many of Coriolis’s artists and universities.

As a part of their patronage of the many art colleges of the planet Coriolis, the House Senai funds many up and coming painters, sculptors, and photographers in their journey through their mediums. Many of the House itself are not involved in the process at all, and simply spend a bit of money to enjoy the outcome. However, the House Senai elders have hired many vendors and curators to dispense and sell the artwork of their patronages to galleries and museums across the Sector and beyond. As can be expected, the Ordo Hereticus and Ecclesiarchy have covertly examined the artworks the House distributes for signs of Slaaneshi corruptions.

Senai-affiliated merchants also salt the works of their patronages through the great auction halls and guild offices of the greater Sector, as much for exposure as money. After all, Senai isn’t the wealthiest noble house around, but there’s no harm to be found in good publicity.

Artworks that the House has taken possession of directly are stored in huge, pressure- and moisture-controlled vaults. These vaults have expensive cogitator-controlled thermostats and light level controls purchased from the Cognomen factories, to prevent the natural damage that artworks can suffer when improperly exposed to the environment. When a piece is bought, it is loaded by House technicians into simple grav-sleds and lifted into waiting shuttles for delivery to the happy customer. All Senai facilities are guarded by House Joun-Lee mercenaries, despite that being something of an overkill gesture on the most heavily defended planet in the Sector.

=====Mercantile Noble House Lunther, Hapster=====
One of the key advantages of the complex and interdependent economy of Hapster is that its lines of patronage and commerce are very well defined. Laws that govern noble patronage are clear and unambiguous. There are thousands of years of precedent behind every decision, and the Imperial government has ample knowledge of all the local rules and protocols by dint of their tremendous age. There are noble families on Hapster that predate much of the Terran aristocracy.

As a natural result, some of the ancient lines of patronage between the Hapster aristocracy and the guilds, laborers, and artists they patronize are so ironclad in their age and circumstance that they have become economic fixtures of their own. The House Lunther, by far the wealthiest in the Subsector by two orders of magnitude, is one such fixture and the largest. House Lunther has one colossal advantage over the younger noble families of the Sector. Its ancient ties to the Navigator House True allow them to be the only noble House in the Sector to have a staff of Navigators on retainer. As such, House Lunther’s ships are faster than any other in the Sector save possibly the Daggers and Astra Explorator. Their ships, lacking the massive armor and weapons of a warship to slow them, can speed along Warp paths that fly narrower routes and longer distances than most others. The speed of their ships allows them to serve in a niche that no other House in the Sector could fill: logistics. The House Lunther fleet carries all manner of supplies, information, and passengers across the Sector, for a price.

House True is nominally based on Terra, of course, as most Navis Nobilite Houses in good standing are. However, House True once felt a distant tie of kin to the Hapster Subsector, seeing as that is the rough region of space in which they took shelter during the ancient purges of the mutant populations of Terra. Today, of course, most ties between True and Hapster are purely commercial. Given how few psychics in general and Navigators specifically there are in the Cloudburst Sector, however, it is well worth the investment for True to send some of their younger scions out to the hot reaches of Cloudburst for work with the House Lunther fleet. They have the market utterly cornered, with only official Imperial Adeptus Administratum and Officio Munitorum vessels having more ready access to the skills of Navigators there (beyond the Inquisition’s dark fleets, of course).

House Lunther is active in the politics of Hapster, too, but thanks to the highly stratified and procedure-driven laws of Hapster they can exert little direct influence over the governing or legislating of the Subsector. Lunther flotillas occasionally contract with House Joun-Lee mercenaries for transport services. Their most frequent subcontractor is House Ritria, for whom House Lunther often transports supplies.

=====Mercantile Noble House Ritria, Oglith=====
In the Cloudburst Sector, the supply lines of the overstressed Adeptus Mechanicus often prevent the timely installation of resources needed for large-scale construction. Full colony ventures are usually spared this, but land development can be time-consuming and costly on those worlds that lack an industrial base. House Ritria is a collection of nobles, related by marriage, that have stepped into the gap. The House pools its resources and funds construction firms, most originally based on Oglith, and buys them mass transit with their equipment to worlds that need them.

House Ritria is a far looser House than most. Oglith has very little aristocracy, thanks to its origins as a fairly high-tech Frontier World. As a result, its Houses are more like extended Clans, of the Thimblan sort, than a traditional Imperial peerage. The House Ritria concerns were not originally trans-stellar at all, but confined to the Rampart system. Eventually, however, the construction firms that the House patronized grew so wealthy that they were able to pay back all of the House’s investments. Rather than cut the firms loose, the House used their new glut of money to buy passage on a freighter to Hangonne, where they were able to corner several construction niches immediately with their great wealth and experience.

Ever since then, Ritria has been an odd duck among the many noble Houses that sponsor industrial or service corporations in the Cloudburst Sector. They stay well out of the way of Sector politics, preferring to spend as little time politicking as possible to get the job done and stay profitable. They work well with the other Noble Houses, and spend their money promptly, rather than hoarding it forever. The House has also been able to score lucrative construction contracts with those planetary governments that are uninterested in playing ball with the Mechanicus for metalwork and masonry.

House Ritria is the only authorized user of Maskos machines outside of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Maskos government not under Administratum control. Officially, the House does not use slaves. Unofficially, their lower-level employees could well be called slaves for how little money they make. The construction firms that House Ritria employs often make use of teams of indentured servants and people working off debts that the company purchased from their creditors.

====Territorial Houses and Turf Gangs====
The nature of the few worlds in the Cloudburst Sector to have large cities means that relatively small numbers of places in the Sector are plagued by gang warfare. However, the few that do have endured vicious and destructive conflicts that have claimed hundreds of lives and millions of Thrones’ worth of property. While some of the gangs are purely local concerns, such as the piratical turf-trading thugs of Soak, others are gigantic crime syndicates or mercenary armies with thousands of troops. The largest are the massive noble-sponsored gangs on Thimble, which serve as proxy armies for the Thimblan nobility in their endless fights for prestige, manufacturing contracts, publicity, and wealth.

None of the organizations listed here have even a fraction of the power and wealth of the Cloudburst Mercantile Noble Houses. Any attempt by these lesser organizations to enter into direct warfare against House O’Neill or House Zhong, for instance, would end with the upstart organization butchered to the last with the full consent of the local law enforcement. However, to those denizens of the Spindle system who are not incalculably wealthy, some of these organizations are insurmountable forces of corruption and violence.

Because the population of Thimble is so much smaller than the population of the vast and ancient Hive Worlds of the Segmentum Solar, most of the populace of Thimble has managed to avoid being dragged directly dragged into the gang wars. However, the larger gangs are still thousands-strong, and some even control entire structures inside the hives. The lines between Noble and Hive Gang Houses on Thimble can blur when the nobles themselves partake of the gang warfare, for sport or to prove themselves.

=====Noble House Lienzo, Thimble=====
Lienzo is a prime example of how the aspirations of the poorer noble houses of Cloudburst are never enough to carry them to supremacy. Among the ruling gangs of the world Levitna before it was renamed to Thimble, the house was in prime position to rise to a position of rulership in the new Imperial order. However, they failed to kowtow to the new Adeptus Administratum reconstruction and integration officers as the ruling houses did. Now, Clan Ahad and Houses Zhong and O’Neill rule supreme over the Spindle system, with colossal wealth and power, while their former rivals scrabble about in their leavings for scraps of money.

So the embittered and weary leaders of House Lienzo imagine, at the least. In practice, the industrial and political power they wield here would amount to many times the amounts needed to become unassailable powers on worlds like Clegran, Obelisk II, or even bipolar Nauphry IV. Lienzo’s leadership are simply so engrossed in their tiny affairs that they can’t see the opportunities that knock upon their doors. They fund billions of Thrones’ worth of industrial activity in their home hives, their scions have helmed ships in the Imperial Navy, and their Clan-mates rule whole corporations of vast wealth. All of that pales beside the power of the Clans Ahad and Vorbach, which could crush Lienzo like insects at a whim. That, and that alone, is the subject of the musings and bitterness of House Lienzo.

This bitterness crops up at inconvenient times. While they are far subtler than most in this regard, the House Lienzo youth are often practitioners of the Cold Trade of proscribed xenos artifacts. Between that and their boredom, the House is directly responsible for some of the harder-to-explain reports of xenos weapon discharges in the underhives of Thimble. Much of the Ordo Xenos attention paid to the world stems to the volatile alien artifacts of the upper Highborn going out of control, or being used in petty squabbles. The House Lienzo use of alien weapons is more insidious and crueller. Bored scions of the family have thrown their lots in with the street gangs populated by the children of the House Lienzo factory workers. Startled Enforcer and Judge reports have reached the Arbites and Inquisition, concerning apparent battles between Craftworld Eldar and human forces in the underhives, fought entirely by weapons carried by Lienzo troublemakers.

As a result of this alien dabbling, the House Lienzo gangs are a force to be reckoned with in the underhive wars. The rank-and-file of these gangs are the commoners of the hives themselves, given a taste of the power of a Clanless House. Rising to become a member of the noble house itself is impossible, thanks to specific breeding requirements for membership. However, those commoners who acquit themselves well in battle in the service of the spoiled offspring of the House Lienzo can expect rewards bestowed on their families, perhaps in the form of shortened shifts in the Lienzo factories.

Lienzo is no so flush with alien artifacts that they can afford to arm themselves with xenotech exclusively. House Vost are generous sellers of xenotech, but Lienzo doesn’t get much of a discount. The House equips its scions with alien weapons on missions for the House, but on expeditions of pure boredom, few House members would dare arm themselves so. The rank-and-file hivers equip themselves with shotguns and rifles in the main, with a few lasguns in the hands of those who earn them. Given the rising Ordo Xenos scrutiny levelled against the planet Thimble of late, the House’s internal security might start to crack down on obvious uses of xenotech.

The leader of the House is the decrepit, withered old banker Gareth al-Lienzo, who is so far gone in his old age that he can barely move. The battles to succeed him have ended, and his youngest son Saïd shall inherit his father’s throne.

=====Noble House Vost=====
Of all the houses and gangs of Thimble that do not control sprawling, interstellar merchant empires, the House Vost is the wealthiest. There is one reason for this. They are the source that feeds the hundreds of xenotechnological artifacts into the rest of the Thimblan combatants.

House Vost has spent centuries ingratiating themselves into the networks of Rogue Traders and Techpriests who ‘dispose’ of xenotech by selling them to others. While this is hardly a new trait for the Rogue Traders of the galaxy, the Cloudburst Sector’s long focus on corralling the Cold Trade has left those Traders with few options. The Inquisition’s best efforts can’t entirely overcome the natural proclivity of Rogue Traders to seek wealth by ignoring the Emperor’s strictures on alien science.

Originally, House Vost spent their fortunes as many lesser nobles on Thimble did at the time: buying up derelict buildings on the surface and in the hives, so that when the Imperium ordered them brought back online and operational, the nobles would profit. House Vost focused their efforts on buying buildings around the perimeters of hive footprints, where they could control entry and exit from the huge city towers. However, the exterior of Thimble is a very low priority for the Adeptus Mechanicus’s restoration teams. Even now that the planet’s hives are almost entirely back online, the outside wilderness remains almost uninhabitable. While roving gangs of hivers and scavengers do exist outside the glittering silver walls of the hives, most of the open world of Thimble is devoid of people. Thus, most of the buildings that House Vost spent their money on turned out to be worth little beyond their insulative capacity. Many were stuffed full of Adeptus Mechanicus life support and maintenance equipment, and little-used beyond that. There are external gateways to the hives that have not been opened in thousands of years.

That meant that House Vost, at the end of the initial surge of Levitna’s rebirth as Thimble, owned substantial amounts of access to something next to useless. While the house did manage to recoup some of their losses by turning derelict buildings into residential towers and landing assemblies for freighters and cargo ships, most of the holdings of House Vost have turned out to be almost useless.

However, in recent centuries, two positive developments have arisen from these early purchases. The first is that Thimble’s massive population increase has led to a squeeze on housing. That has helped to ensure that the space in the long-uninhabited outer shells of buildings has risen in demand. The second is that as more Rogue Traders have come to Thimble to sell xenotech they can’t turn a profit on elsewhere, House Vost is uniquely suited to accommodating discreet meetings and exchanges.

The House has enough experience in such things that they have been able to train appraisers to evaluate the worth of alien technology. Shielding such experts from the Inquisition is a real trick. With the elevation of Lady Inquisitrix Lerica from her previous role to the leadership of the Sector Conclave, Inquisitorial scrutiny has dropped somewhat, allowing House Vost to flood the market – chiefly House Lienzo, their largest customers by far – with alien weapons.

The alliance between House Lienzo and House Vost is a purely financial one. House Lienzo would sell Vost out in a heartbeat, and Vost would do the same. Their gangs have even gone to war against each other in the past, although that is a rare occurrence. The larger threat to both, besides the Ordo Xenos, is the spreading influence of the hiver House Kaung, which would no doubt leave either in tatters if it were to focus its full efforts against one or the other.

Most of House Vost’s fielded gangs are tenants of their buildings, whom they give discounts on for rent in exchange for service. Clan Ahad’s lax oversight of the residential districts of the hives means that they rarely bother to intervene in this technically-illegal arrangement. Vost’s residential gangs are not uniformed, but they can identify each other by the distinct curling geometric shapes of the house’s tattoo design.

Judith Vost is the current leader of the House, and she has ambitions to rise higher yet. Joining one of the ruling Clans of the world would allow the House a measure of immunity from the further attention of the Inquisition, as well as chances to spread their business into areas where they are presently not welcome.

=====Hiver Gang House Kaung=====
The Imperial Creed is one of vicious intolerance. While its interpretations and factional sectarianism have waxed and shifted over time, many things remain constant. To follow the Imperial Creed is to deny the witch, abhor the thinking machine, deny the witch, scourge the demon, slay the mutant, and burn the heretic, in a litany of exclusion and violence that any loyal Imperial citizen knows by heart.

Thus, House Kaung is a true aberrance, in both senses of the word. The House is almost exclusively mutant in composition, and yet the public face of the House is as pious as the Ecclesarchy when it comes to denouncing the flaws in the Imperial hoi polloi and hoi aristoi.

This is not as contradictory as it initially appears. The many byproducts of Imperial industrial activity are highly toxic, and the general disregard for the wellbeing of its citizens that it holds ensures that many are exposed to them. Mutations that stem from exposure to the mutagenic power of Chaos are never, ever tolerated, but there are some small allowances made for mutants whose flesh-twisted forms are the product of their mothers being exposed to the Imperium’s own waste. The mutant members of House Kaung are among them. Technically permitted to live by Adeptus Arbites precedent, mutants on Thimble are forced to register with the government of their hive. Once they have done so, they can apply to attend Adeptus Ministorum-run education facilities, which have a well-deserved reputation for utter brutality.

Thus, the mutant population of Thimble live as second-class citizens in the guts of the hives. The thing that separates the mutants of Thimble from those of nearly every other hive in the Imperium is coordination. House Kaung is no mere rabble of gene-dregs. They are an organized and very public force in the life of Thimble. Their numbers are not clear to Clan Ahad’s authorities, but they might actually eclipse those of every other House that isn’t O’Neill. Members of the house go about in heathered grey tunics, tabards, and boots, with pants in colors that match the official colors of the hive they inhabit. More zealous members of the House don masks of the same material, to hide their faces from the humans they live beside.

The root of this elevated organization is that of a common piety. Since it is clear to the Genetors of the Thimble Mechanicus that the mutations of the populace do not derive from Warp exposure, but are instead a side effect of the Imperium turning the planet’s industrial equipment back on, its mutants are not in violation of the Imperial Creed. The mutants of Thimble may not be identical, but the grudging tolerance of the Ecclesiarchy has let them find a common identity in their second-class status. The leadership of House Kaung are elder mutants and rogue Adeptus Ministorum priests who have united in their desire to turn the mutant population to the Emperor’s light.

Unlike the other Houses of Thimble, House Kaung did not arise from the union of pre-Imperial scavenger Clans into a Noble House. House Kaung only came to be centuries after Levitna became Thimble. This means that the House has no sprawling financial base to turn to, as House Zhong did. However, through sheer force of numbers, the House is a genuine rival to the other Houses of the planet.

Behind its façade of total unity, however, House Kaung is riven by internal dissent. The mutants of the House are quick to show the public their commonality, but the leaders of the House are not of one mind about how best to expand and improve the House’s fortunes. Some of its members are simply grateful to the Emperor for letting them live in an Imperium that detests them and would happily burn them at the stake if given the chance. Others seethe with resentment towards the Imperium, but venerate the Emperor as a perfect and benevolent god, and believe they should destroy the local Imperial government to replace it with one of greater tolerance. Others yet think that holding the Emperor and His Imperium responsible for their status is a waste of time, and simply want to destroy the other Houses for making their lives hell.

The two largest factions are polar opposites in their approach to Thimble. One, which calls itself the Projectionists, believe that publicly professing their faith will make it harder for the human citizens of Thimble to curtail them as they take over the underhives of every city on Thimble. The other, dubbed the Revanchists, have no problem with expressive faith, but favors armed confrontation with as many of the other factions of the planet’s hive populations as possible, even if the Ecclesiarchy itself would condemn them for it. The Revanchist goal would undermine the Projectionist one, and thus they come into conflict more often than not.

More than a few of the younger members of the House are unhappy with that status quo. Why, they ask, should the House concern themselves with the Ecclesiarchy at all? Is the Ecclesiarchy itself not the ultimate root of so many of their problems? Is it not the doctrine of the supreme, unaltered human that is used to justify every single purge and oppressive act against the mutant? Older members of the House preach caution, however, as nothing would unite the human population against the mutant population faster than the mutants turning on the Ecclesiarchy. Hives are vast places. The Ecclesiarchy are often the only large body of organized humans that encounter mutants in any significant number on Thimble. If the rest of the population, the part that has no allegiance to the Houses, were to suddenly find a great deal of rowdy mutants on their doorsteps demanding change, would the fact that they aren’t Chaos mutants really stay the hands of the superstitious normals for long?

Thus does the House Kaung exist in an uneasy peace with itself, with much of its internal structure defined by mutually exclusive goals under the cover of united means. The sheer numbers of the House, which continue rising unabated no matter what genetic control measures the hives enact, ensure that even with their low-tech weapons, they could easily throw down any other one non-Merchant House and give any two Noble Houses a run for their money. The fact that the House uses faith, whether genuine or false, as its cover for movement and organization, is part of the reason that Houses Vost and Lienzo strive to hide the sources of their xenotech from the House Kaung leaders. House Kaung despises those two Houses, with a bitter, seething hate. They flout the laws against xenotechnological use openly, and are rarely called to task for it, whereas House Kaung’s members live every waking moment in fear of a lynching by superstitious humans. If the House Kaung leadership committee, which contains several ordained Ministers of the Adeptus, were to capture unequivocal proof of the ties Vost and Lienzo have to xenotech smugglers, the hives would erupt in a war that could cripple them for generations.

Kaung troops make use of repurposed industrial equipment and military weapons in the main, along with ancient hunting weapons and the occasional looted grenade launcher. While the street-level gangs of mutants that the House uses as their muscle are numerous enough for maintaining their turf, the true might of Kaung lies in the overwhelming numbers the House could bring to bear if its own members were roused to battle. This has never actually happened, but if all of House Kaung were to gather in one place, they might outgun an entire hive PDF.

The House has few allies. The only body they can call true partners in survival on Thimble are the nomadic Clan Ironsights, in whom they see a common drive to live and overcome all odds. The fact that their territory doesn’t overlap helps keep the peace between the two. House Nailspitter sees the bond between these two difference Houses as a rising threat, and has taken covert actions in the past to split them apart.

House Kaung has no true leader. Decisions are made collectively by a committee of forty elder mutants, family leaders, and a few Ecclesiarchal advisors.

=====Nomadic Clan Ironsights, Thimble=====
The millions of farmers, scavengers, and nomads who live in the barren, hostile wilderness of the planet Thimble exist in an ugly equilibrium. Some settlements do not need protection from raiders, but many do, and the population of raiders near the south pole is high enough that the PDF sometimes sorties to shield the farms there from roving packs of criminals.

Clan Ironsights may not be a real Clan like Ahad and Vorbach, but to the occupants of the wilderness, that is a minor distinction. There is no middle ground on the opinions of Ironsights among the wastelanders. They are either in awe of it, loathe it, or don’t care at all.

The Clan’s huge crawlers roam about the wastelands, collecting scrap and loose minerals from the wastelands, and taking their fill of the ruins of the hives that were too badly damaged to bother rebuilding. The raider gangs that dwell in the hive ruins fight back often, and have long preyed upon the Clan caravans. The roots of their struggle go unrecorded, but the clashes between them have spanned centuries.

The Clan rarely has reason to engage with the Houses and Clans that dominate the hives, but that may be changing. In the past few years, the raiders that have assaulted Clan Ironsights fuel depots and crawlers have had better weaponry and vehicles. There is no source for this equipment in the wasteland itself, which means that it is coming from the hives. Covert infiltrations of the marketplaces of the hives has revealed to the Clan that the only probably source of this weaponry is House Nailspitter, which has been stockpiling munitions themselves.

The Clan’s forces in the wastelands are hugely diverse, with the numbers and equipment they can deploy being situationally dependent on the climate of their engagement zones. Near the poles, where they face more competition from raiders, they tend to deploy more outriders and foot units. Near the equator, where they alone can operate with impunity, the Clan tends to keep to their huge crawlers. If they get wind of a major find of archaeotech that their crawlers are needed to loot in the hot zones, they dispatch forth, leaving their escorts behind. The crawlers are generally quite safe, but the escorts and outriders need to fend for themselves until the crawler gets back.

The foot soldiers of the Clan generally carry a mishmash of Imperial, pre-Imperial, and kludged weapons as available. Not being in the hives, they have few options for replenishing their stocks of weaponry. With the rising tensions between themselves and House Nailspitter, the Clan has had to spend more and more on modern weapons, with an emphasis on burst-fire rifles that can be fired from mounts. This has led them to charge more for their protection efforts on behalf of the settlers in the wasteland. The conflicts between Clan Ironsights and their enemies have grown large enough that the PDF has taken notice, and has resolved to simply shoot any raiders or Ironsights people sighted near the polar farms until they learn their place.

The Clan doesn’t bother with identifying insignia. Their hyper-white crawler shells are all the identifying markings they need.

The leader of the Clan is elected on a ten-year basis from the Captains of the individual crawlers. The incumbent at the turn of the millennium is Rieka bint Malati of the Silver Turtles caravan, but her term will run out in under a year.

=====Hive Ganger House Nailspitter, Thimble=====
The Nailspitters plan for the long game. Although they are not one of the ancient familial Houses that dominates Thimble, the Nailspitters have risen quickly in firepower and money for the past several centuries, to the point that they are now posing a serious challenge to the territorial domination of House Lienzo.

The Nailspitters started as a turf gang, founded by an ambitious off-worlder named Ralgo. Ralgo, an expatriate of the Naxos Sector capital world of Asklepian, was one of many who moved to Levitna when it was rebuilt as Thimble. He and millions of others were flown in to resettle the planet and help bring the hives online. Unlike most of the expatriates, he had no particular logistical or technical skills. He was chosen by lottery, to escape the menial drudgery of the Naxos Sector’s endless attrition wars.

Upon arriving in Cloudburst, Ralgo began a campaign of subtle intimidation, blackmail, targeted violence, and robbery to impose his will over the people. The hives of Thimble, at that point, were still expanding back into their historical roots, and had far more living space than they had people to fill them. Ralgo exploited the circumstance to stake claims on ideal quarters, and slowly built a gang around himself.

The gang pushed around their neighbors, but also took control of some of the reconstruction and industrial efforts on Thimble, gambling that the ruling Clans would not be interested in the efforts of their social inferiors as long as quotas were met. Sure enough, no ruling clan nor the Arbites felt the need to dislodge them so long as order was kept.

The gang long outlived Ralgo, and probably would have continued to toil in their criminal and industrial workings – so commonly linked on Thimble – were it not for a stroke of fortune. A plague struck the world in M40.234, decapitating dozens of lesser criminal syndicates that did not seek aid for fear of doctors reporting them to local law enforcement. The gang that would one day become House Nailspitter quickly swooped in and took control of them, dectupling their territory without firing a shot.

The gang spread and spread, recruiting thousands of disaffected gangers to do their bidding. The group’s leaders quashed former tribal identities by forcing all of their new troops to submit to the Nailspitter initiation rites and hazing rituals. The gang swelled, and may have been brought low by the Arbites had the gang not shifted their focus.

With their new size ensuring them a measure of safety, the newly-minted House set their sights on stability. The Nailspitters take pains to ensure that those territories they control – usually the mass transit operations that connect the poorer parts of the hives to the outside and each other – are as stable and quiet as can be. They use steel-fisted brutality to ensure this, including against the members of the other Houses. Concurrently, the House uses more covert means to ensure that none of the other Houses attain the level of power that the ruling Clans do. This has extended in the past to outright murder and sabotage against the Clanless noble Houses, even some with formal titles of Imperial aristocracy. They use measures of stealth to ensure that no trace of their sponsorship remains on those they patronize to perform these crimes.

The Nailspitters don’t constrain themselves to just attacking those higher on the Thimble pecking order, however. The House also attacks weaker targets, including independent gangs and even Clan Ironsights. Their aim is to capture any source of wealth, labor, or property that other organizations could use to ape their own success. The Nailspitters, in their long wisdom, know that a group as large as theirs could be brought low with another plague, a Glasian Migration, or some other event entirely outside the planning of their rivals. Thus, they ensure that at all times, a clear line of succession exists for their leadership.

Nailspitter exists on two planes of operations. The first is their public facing, with their own troops and the street gangs they employ maintaining order on their levels of the hives. These are the Nailspitters that the people of Thimble are familiar with, and to whom the locals pay their protection money. They employ a mixture of slug, shot, and las-weapons, and use highly visible insignia on their arms and clothing. The abundance of cheap, quality fabric on Thimble allows them to get quite creative with their gang insignia and costumes.

By contrast, their private forces are quite invisible. Using camouflaged equipment and clothing, hand signals to keep silent, Stormtrooper-quality suppressed weapons, and a mixture of bribery and stealthed aircars, they terrorize and murder those the Nailspitters expect to get in the way of their eventual goal: overthrowing House O’Neill.

Indispensability is the key to the House’s long-term survival. The House managed to avoid being slaughtered by the Arbites and the local Enforcers during their takeover of their rivals by virtue of playing a role in keeping order in the hives during the plague. House O’Neill is playing a super-high-stakes game of chicken with the Adeptus Mechanicus. There is no way the O’Neills, for all their wealth, can win a true tariff war with the Adeptus Mechanicus and its infinite wealth. Thus, to displace the O’Neills, the Nailspitters can either try to bring down their rivals with sabotage, or else stir the Mechanicus to action.

However, the long history of the Adeptae ignoring the day-to-day life of the human race on Thimble has suggested to the Nailspitters that the Mechanicus will not be prompted to take the O’Neills down unless something catastrophic happens to the Mechanicus. The only way that the Nailspitters’ leadership can think of to do that is to start destroying Mechanicus facilities on the planet.  However, to do so would surely cause the planet to collapse into anarchy, since the Mechanicus is the only faction around that can maintain Thimble’s overtaxed life support and terraforming devices. Thus, the Nailspitters have begun a campaign of attack and bribery against the customers of the O’Neills, its family members, and its less-guarded assets, while publicly appearing to be a force of stability for the world. They have even begun arming the enemies of the other Houses on the planet while using their black-ops teams to kill off their own enemies. The Nailspitters know that Clan Ahad doesn’t give a damn who is in charge of the transit stations as long as they work.

Presently, the Chief Nailspitter is Nikkyo Kasumoto, who has led the House with an iron fist and a taste for the finer things. He rose from the private face of the House, and it shows, with his taste for resolving problems with bribery and kidnapping instead of street battles.

=====The Waveriders, Obelisk 2=====
The piratical gangs of Obelisk 2 are the dominant force outside the core of the floating cities. Convoys of cobalt freighters and other tithe-bearing ships sail unmolested thanks to the protection of the military, but pirate attacks and raids on non-tithe assets often claim whole ships. There are hundreds of these gangs, in addition to the sanctioned ones that get deputized as city militia and the PDF.

The Waveriders are a typical, if large, example of these gangs. Most such gangs have a few dozen to a thousand riders, all of whom get around on the oceans using combinations of smaller jet skis and larger boats, with a few submarines here and there and a drone or two. The gangs also typically have a foot contingent as well, either stationed on cities they have conquered or in large boats used for boarding actions. The Waveriders are no exception.

The Waveriders are one of the older gangs, and have maintained their position of relative strength by virtue of being smart enough to extort significant sums of money from the processing and waste management hubs that handle the tithe goods. They don’t interdict the goods directly, but instead bleed those who produce the goods dry, knowing that a little problem like monetary loss will not be an acceptable reason for the tithe-producers to use to explain to the Administratum why they’re behind on production.

The gangs generally operate one of two ways: either democratically electing the four highest officers with each larger vessel captain getting a vote, or through a battle royale of all those who want a shot at the title after the old one dies.

The Master of the Waves is the self-styled Admiral Eiler Gustavsson, who cut his way to the top, in the way of the piratical gangs with no formal democratic structure.