Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

=====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.