Setting:Cloudburst/Thunderhead

System
Galactic Position	Cloudburst Sector, Hapster Subsector

Thunderhead Station is more than a template-copied Imperial Navy way station. Though externally identical to so many of its kind, Thunderhead is also the nexus of several crucial civilian merchant routes, and the closest naval platform to Drimmerzole, Triplicate, and Coriolis. Therefore, it is not only responsible for hosting the huge Imperial Creed missionary population needed to convert and tend to the two Feudal Worlds, but also sending supply ships and troop barques to the vast fortresses of Coriolis. As a result, although its external defenses are no larger nor heavier than those of an upgraded Battlecruiser, its internal spaces have been given over almost entirely to personnel and food storage.

The station’s external guns include several Weapons Batteries, a trio of Grand Cruiser-strength Lance Batteries, and several Attack Craft bays. As with all Xerxes IVs, it also contains a variety of small refit bays, for vessels of Endurance class or smaller. Internally, nearly everything that doesn’t serve the purpose of moving absurdly large amounts of people and cargo is gone. Medical bays and recreation halls replaced luxury suites; barracks replaced fighter hangars, and even some of Thunderhead’s ammunition storage made way for refrigerated victual chambers. To compensate for the slight loss in defensive capability, a larger-than-average number of Defense Monitors and a trio of Vipers were assigned to the station’s perimeter patrols, more than enough to bolster its protection.

Inside, the station is a warren of cabins, bays, and corridors. Air recyclers chug and protein re-solidifiers churn, and the business of housing tens of thousands of visitors goes on. The Navy provosts and enlisted men who crew the huge station dislike the fact that the Guard and Ecclesiarchy have control over as much of the station as they do. The vast metal construction is theoretically under total Navy control; however, the Navy ceded the Ecclesiarchy authority over one deck to serve as a community chapel of sorts. Whole kilometer-long compartments ring with hymns and bellowed preaching. Alms cups sit side by side for hundreds of meters, all ignored by the thousands of peasant pilgrims, Frateris Militia, and Ecclesiarchal Missionaries on their way to places far distant. Adeptus Arbites watch over the whole procession, staring from under their identical masks, ready for any sign of lawbreaking.

At the theoretical peak of the capacity of the station, Thunderhead could support three million temporary passengers. In practice, there are never more than eight hundred thousand at the most, and more commonly four hundred thousand. Whole decks occasionally sit empty. In the least-used decks, permanent residences have popped up like fungi. These little slabs of metal and polymer are simple affairs, and house all sorts of indigent or runaway Imperial citizens. Some may be people tithed up to fight for the Imperium’s wars and then abandoned after wars ended; others are members of the Ecclesiarchy who were summoned to serve as Missionaries to tribes that were wiped out in the interim. Some are less wholesome, like smugglers or tithe evaders. The most common, however, are what local Arbites refer to with disgust as ‘dropouts.’ These sad souls, from over two dozen worlds and stations at least, number in the low thousands. They are peasants and pressedmen, convicts and pilgrims, but each has two things in common: they cannot leave the station, and they would like nothing more than to leave at once and never come back.

The first dropouts were members of the crew of the Gaunt Lights, an Ecclesiarchy pilgrim ship from Hapster. According to them, they had nothing in common at first, but all awoke one morning to find that they had been exposed to knockout gas, then rounded up to serve as crew for an Ecclesiarchy vessel. This, as most of them knew, was both flagrantly illegal in the spirit of the Decree Ecclesiarch Passive, and crippling to Hapster’s economy, which is so tightly bound to its population and industry. When the pressed citizens demanded that they be returned to their homes at once, the Archbishop of the Gaunt Lights calmly informed them that they were already in the Warp, and their alternatives were either to serve the Emperor or walk back home on foot.

With no choice, the pressedmen turned to the arduous labor of serving in the massive cathedral-ship, flying to Thunderhead on their way to the Feral and Feudal worlds of the sector. As soon as the vessel docked on Thunderhead, however, they rose up as one, strangling their Ministorum owners and escaping en masse into the depths of the station. When the Arbites, shocked by what appeared to be a simultaneous mass mutiny and mass evacuation, tried to corral the fleeing pressedmen, they were swamped and instantly overrun by the thousands of panicked ship crewers. The Archbishop escaped a bloody death by seconds, leaping into a shuttle and flying directly to the naval controller office of the station. He then demanded that Naval Provosts and Arbitrators round up his wayward flock. The pressedmen, however, had reached the vast staging areas for the Imperial Guard contingent of the station, and hurriedly explained what had happened.
Outraged and appalled by both the remorselessly illegal conduct of the Archbishop and the utter disregard the Archbishop had shown for Hapster, Colonel Regatz of the Celestial Guard 9th Heavy Rifles stormed his entire force into the docking area of the Gaunt Lights. He demanded that the Archbishop present himself for punishment, or face the immediate capture and impoundment of his ship. Meanwhile, the Arbitrator Senioris of the Arbites detachment the pressedmen had overrun on their way to the Guard was howling for blood; he ordered the entire Arbites contingent of the station to gear up for a massacre.

Left with three competing, bloodthirsty groups all demanding that he side with them, Navy Commander William Somerset commanded that the Guard, Ecclesiarchy, and Arbites stand down at once. By sealing all of the vacuum-tight doors near the three groups, he was able to force them to halt their advances. Addressing them over the station’s general public address system, he commanded Colonel Regatz, Arbitrator Senioris Vanamonde, and Archbishop Clement to report to his personal conference room at once, as well as a speaker for the pressedmen.

Once all parties were assembled, glaring daggers at each other over finger food and amasec, Somerset instructed each to tell their story in turn. He listened patiently as Clement described the urgent and all-consuming need to move as many folks as possible to the primitive worlds of the sector, and the need to save the souls of the heathens. Next, he listened to the spokesman of the pressedmen, a construction foreman named Wallace Lornsby, who described his abduction in heart-wrenching terms. Next came Arbitrator Vanamonde, who coldly laid out the penalty for killing an Arbitrator as one panicked pressedman had, and the costs of the various law and military works the stampede had interrupted. Finally, he heard Colonel Regatz point out that the Guard was obligated to protect Imperial citizens from mass abduction by aliens; surely protecting them from criminals wearing Bishop’s hats was not so terribly different?

In the end, Somerset made his decision. To the horror of Lornsby and suppressed delight of Clement and Vanamonde, he began by saying that he agreed with the lawman, saying that the unneeded death of an Arbitrator was tragic and that a demand for justice was totally fair.
He then turned to Regatz, and criticized his own decision. Storming a sovereign ship of the Ecclesiarchy was well beyond his remit. It would have been more appropriate to simply contact him, and notify him of an emergency.
However, he continued, the Archbishop was in violation of the spirit and letter of the Decree Passive, and responsible for both problems arising in the first place. He instructed the Archbishop arrested, and instructed that the pressedmen were to produce the person responsible for killing the Arbitrator for punishment. Until that time, the pressedmen were not to report for service on any vessel.

As the sputtering Archbishop was marched off by Provosts, and Colonel Regatz returned to his regiment, Lornsby pointed out the obvious flaw in the order. Nobody knew which pressedman had been the one who had slain the Arbitrator, since it had happened in a panicked onrush. Somerset, who had had entirely enough of the affair and simply wanted it over and done with, said that that was their problem. No pressedman was to leave the station until a guilty party was identified. The Gaunt Lights was to be given an emergency Navy crew and flown to Jodhclan’s Paradise, until a more law-abiding Archbishop could be found to command it.

Months later, the dropouts, protected by naval law from Arbites brutality, had uncomfortably settled into an unused deck of Thunderhead. Eighty years later, all of the original parties are long dead, but remain bound by the Navy’s ironclad demand for a guilty party to be found. The ranks of the dropouts have swollen with similar escapees from the decadent and untrustworthy Jodhclan Ecclesiarchy, along with thousands of others who have escaped Imperial impressment. That, or they simply do not want to be found. So long as the Arbites maintain a bitter watch over the dropouts’ ranks, there is no leaving the station for them, no matter why they are there or how long they’ve been trapped. There are bounty heads with local contracts, men drummed out of military service but undeserving of execution, descendants of the original pressedmen, and more. These pitiful louts form the core of the station’s long-term population. Commander Somerset has long since perished, and the time may someday come that either the Arbites or the Navy lose patience with the indigents and evict them.

Other residents of the station are less criminal in nature. The families of lifer Navy personnel, they tend to be the operators of the various living facilities on the vast station. They serve as maids, janitors, cooks, decorators, and even guides to help people navigate the largely identical galleries and docks of the station. Others are families of long Imperial Navy tradition, who send their children off to earn officer commissions, then return to help run Thunderhead’s operations.

Thunderhead has a history of violence. The station has come under attack four times in the past eight hundred years alone, each time from Ork raiders looking for a quick score after spending their teef at Gorkypark. Time and again, the greenskins sweep in from the rapids of Vasari’s Cruelty and assault the Imperial station, and each time, the brutal creatures inflict savage battle on the Imperial defenders. The concentration of Arbites, Navy, Guard, and Ecclesiarchy personnel present make it a tough target to attack and a harder one to destroy or board, however, and there are always ships ready to fight in its defense. Twice, the Orks actually managed to board the station with their ramshackle boarding craft, and both times, vast groups of Imperial Guard staging there on their way to Coriolis drove them off. Unable to field their vehicles inside a space station, the Guard would instead use the huge vacuum containment and atmospheric control plates the station employs to seal off damaged parts of the station. The huge blast-proofed shields, usually used to block off compartments that had been exposed to vacuum, can be lowered to half-deployment, and used as excellent cover by the Guard. When Orks drew close enough to vault the half-lowered doors and fight in hand-to-hand, the Guard would simply close the doors and vent all atmosphere on the other side, then reset the trap once the pounding stopped.

Only once, over two thousand years ago, was Thunderhead at any real risk of permanent loss to the Imperium. That threat came not from Orks, but the perfidious Dark Eldar. Night-black ships, shaped like needles and as fast as Fury fighters despite being eighty times the size, slid in from above the plane of the system and assaulted the Imperial station with a cold rage that caught the Navy off-guard. Most of the defense ring platforms and ships of the station were too far away to make a difference, while the rest were quickly silenced with precision xeno weaponry. The hull of the station ruptured in a hundred places, spilling thousands of hapless Guardsmen and Naval crew into the void. Tiny ships swooped around, collecting the flailing victims, while hundreds more pierced the hull and landed inside the station. With a speed and total silence that unnerved the defenders, the Dark Eldar invaders ripped their way through bulkheads, capturing thousands of prisoners. A prize team made their way to the control office and shut down internal fire suppression and security systems, while squads of Grotesques tied up the Arbites and Navy garrison response.
After an hour of total chaos, the entire Eldar attack group abruptly retreated, even though the naval reinforcements had been another hour away. The aliens disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving twisted bodies and burning wreckage in their wake.
Though publicly claiming victory, the Navy was baffled. Why had the Dark Eldar even bothered attacking them in the first place? Had they been seeking something other than slaves? For that matter, where had they come from? Two years of frantic rebuilding and exploration followed, but even after Thunderhead was brought up to full readiness, the Inquisition still had no idea why the Dark Eldar had attacked them, and were quite certain that there were no Webway gates nearby. That meant the Dark Eldar either had a completely stealth-cloaked Gate nearby large enough to transport a whole raider fleet, which even the Dark Eldar would find pricy to attack one space station, or that they had arrived in the Materium somewhere else and flown there manually. That seemed even less likely, given the huge risk that all Dark Eldar face while stuck in either realspace or Warp flight. To this day, the Inquisition remains in the dark as to the slavers’ intention.

Thunderhead Station is no longer the largest military installation in the Sector, now that the Gargantuan is complete. Port Maxient has also overtaken it in size and population. However, as Thunderhead is now the last friendly port of call a freighter helmsman can count on when flying out of the Cloudburst Sector, it still sees constant freighter traffic. The station is far enough from a star that ships can exit the Warp fairly close to it, as well. To accommodate the civilian traffic, the station has incorporated several amenities into its interior bays, including a hotel block and a bargain labor emporium. However, the Imperial Navy has never lost sight of the fact that Thunderhead’s primary goal is to secure the transit of millions of people to other worlds. The station boasts four huge half-loops of metal corridors and magnetized load cranes to permit the docking of troopships, colony barques, pilgrim vessels, cruise liners, and other ships with breathing cargo, each of which could comfortably dock a vessel with a four-kilometer beam with room to spare.