Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

=====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.