Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maskos (section)

===Maskos Inquisitorial Palace===

Maskos has another honor, in that it is the host of the Cloudburst Inquisitorial Palace.  Sticking up from the planet’s crust, nearly six hundred miles from the nearest city, near the northern polar ice cap, the Inquisitorial Palace lurks.  Its defenses are stealth and the difficulty of approach, plus various concealed weapons.  Under normal circumstances, the number of Inquisitors in the Palace is stable, or even growing, as more worlds become a part of Cloudburst.  Recently, in anticipation of the Glasian Migration and the uptick in Ork and pirate activity, the halls of the Palace are emptying.  Ordo Xenos Inquisitors especially have been busy lately, as their tireless consultations of the Tarot have revealed which systems shall next be hit by the Glasians, and are scrambling their assets to counter them.  The Palace proper is a structure that its neighbors fear and respect, and its architecture drives home the point.  The structure is the center of a small community, which consists exclusively of the menials and Adepts that work within its black walls.  Tall slabs of stone and metal circle the top of the building like a crown, and hide the radomes, antennae, and telescopes on its rooftop.  The building looms over the nearby town, by enforced law; no building in the nameless town may come within one hundred feet of its walls, or come within eighty feet of its principal height.  A single spire of grey metal juts from the top of the building by another two hundred feet.  The spire contains the apartments, equipment, and choir chamber of the Palace’s Astropaths.  Currently, there are nine Astropaths in residence, led by Adept Choirmaster Emilie Rastimos.

Armies of Servitors and mind-wiped volunteer Maskos Warriors protect the facility, though in practice, it has never been attacked on such a scale as to require Guard defense.  The nearby town appears on no official maps of the planet, and its presence on Imperially-produced holo-globe navigation devices is conspicuously blurry.  The Palace draws its power from a geothermal plant in its basement, solar panels on its roof, and a huge plasma reactor in the nearby mountain, connected to the Palace by underground cables.  In the event of a catastrophic loss of power in the Palace, the building can also siphon energy from the nearby town, or the wind turbines erected nearby to power the small farms that feed the area.

The nameless town also contains a local Psychic Relay station, where psychics are rounded up and sent to Terra for sanctioning.  Given the long distance and slow travel between Maskos and Terra, as much as seven months’ time may pass between a psychic entering a Black Ship in orbit over Maskos and arriving at the Throneworld.

Over two hundred Inquisitors call Cloudburst home, far more than a Sector so lightly populated would traditionally demand.  However, the Conclave Cloudburst is not solely concerned with Cloudburst.  As the largest Inquisitorial Palace by far for over one hundred light years in most directions (and anywhere near the Cloudburst Circuit or the north half of the Oldlight Exo-zone), whole flotillas of Inquisitorial vessels may stage here before proceeding out into the darkness beyond the Emperor’s sight.  It is not even rare for small Space Marine groups to congregate here if tasked with the assistance of an Inquisitor in pacifying an alien empire in the Circuit, the Halo, or the Oldlight Exo-zone.

The sprawling Palace contains nearly everything an Inquisitorial warband or Throne Agent crew could need, from comfortable lodgings to torture chambers.  The sound- and radiation- damped rooms in the heart of the building allow for the interrogation of species that communicate by means humans cannot directly interpret.  The Ordo Malleus even maintains a small psy-shielded vault in the basement of the power plant, conveniently in the place that will be vaporized first if something were to escape containment and necessitate local annihilation.

One thing the Palace does not permit, ever, is the disposal of corrupted Glasian relics, or storage, or use.  Their disposal is instead carried out in Cognomen’s satellite structures of the Holy Ordos; in a true emergency, any black hole or star will do.  The Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, venerable Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Lerica, enforces this policy with an iron fist and Gamma-level psychic power, and so far, even the rogue Inquisitor Rothschilde has not dared defy her on this point.

The super-active Rogue Traders and Explorators of the region provide ample opportunities for an Inquisitor to pursue the foes of man.  Although the rate of discovery of new goods, old technology, and worlds to annex has obviously decreased significantly since the initial Fabique gold rush, there are still whole wedges of nominally Imperial space, some many light-years in dimension, well outside the Imperium’s control.  Of course, the Oldlight and Circuit regions also hang heavy with mystery.  This creates innumerable headaches for the Inquisition; regardless of political ideology, no Inquisitor likes having no control.  Lady Inquisitrix Lerica maintains careful neutrality in the squabbles and debates of protocol and procedure that fill the Palace, though she is not always present to do so.  She also serves as the Inquisitor of the Chamber at the great Watch Fortress Dascomb, and only spends approximately half her time in the Palace.  Her personal ship, the astonishingly heavily upgraded Fast Clipper ''Hornet’s Nest'', can make the trip from Dascomb to Maskos in fewer than four days, and does so many times per year.

Maskos’s Inquisitorial Palace has been the site of disruptions in the past.  Built as it was sometime after the world was colonized, the site on which it was built was home to a small community of natives, which was displaced by the construction.  Politically, Cloudburst and Celeste have always resented that the Palace was built so far from the seat of sector power, and for reasons that the Inquisition doesn’t care to explain.  Of course, that also makes them harder to spy on.  As far as they know.

The proximity of four major Deathwatch Watch Fortresses ensures that the Ordo Xenos always has forces available for emergency missions or strategic target removal.  The small but very well-trained forces of Adeptus Sororitas in the sector are the loyal servants of the Ordo Hereticus.  Malleus has trouble with manpower.  Though the Grey Knights Chapter is both far larger than a standard Chapter and possessing of high-tech, fast, precognitive-guided ships, they can’t be everywhere at once.  The power of the Ordo Malleus is somewhat blunted by this.  However, the Ordo does have a large all-volunteer force of Maskos Warriors ready to serve as its shock troops stationed in the nearby town; the many Scions of Cloudburst’s Schola Progenum can also serve as direct reinforcement for the Ordo Malleus if needed.  Cognomen builds the Holy Ordos their ships locally.  They are not, of course, up to the standards of the ancient Jovian War Yards, the Titan Shipbuilders of the Grey Knights, the Martian Ring of Iron, or the nearly thirty-thousand-year-old Saturnyne Shipyard, but they are of Forge World quality, and ancient compacts ensure their Navigators are discreet and skilled.