Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Spindle (section)

===Thimble Highborn===

As the only Hive World in the Cloudburst Sector, and therefore the only place with enough people and enough money to generate them, the Highborn Hiver populace live like jealous kings.  The highest families and the relatives of the System Overlord Clan are fully aware of how boring and how inhospitable life would be outside the hives, as indeed several million dirt farmers could attest.  Life for the scavengers who pick over the rusted Ork hulks at the equator have it even worse, since they get all of the harshness of wasteland living without the benefits of not boiling to death if they step outside unshielded.  The lesser noble houses, however, live in carefree oblivion.  These are the houses of the Great Families; they are the familial networks that own the massive clothing foundries of the hives.  Some have spread their wealth to the stars and bought or founded whole trading clans, with fleets of ships and even a few Navigators, plying the stars and delivering goods.  Still, the peculiar noble structure of the Thimble peerage places them below the families that rule the hives directly, and the world itself.

The Thimble Planetary Governor serves as the leader of the Clan that answers to the System Overlord, which is not an arrangement that the Governor’s family always appreciates.  The Overlord of a system is all-powerful within their system under the Cloudburst Administratum, and only death or a unanimous vote from the Subsector Overlords can dislodge him.  The current System Overlord is the Subsector Overlord, and as such, by ancient Segmentum law, can claim the Planetary Governorship of his own homeworld any time they want.  As such, the Planetary Governors of Thimble in the past have not uncommonly drunk themselves into an early grave out of boredom or spite.  Whenever a heresy pops up in the Thimble Subsector, so the joke goes, the Governor started it.

At present, however, this is a minimal concern.  The current Planetary Governor’s Clan is engaged in a far higher degree of work and oversight of Thimble than they would normally be.  This is because the System and Subsector Overlord, Harek abn Alnasr of Clan Ahad, has been working feverishly on the Moon Development Project.  This is an ambitious goal by any measure.  The Project seeks to build extra facilities on the moons of Thimble.  The first, Iocanto, has already been built on once before, that much is obvious.  Harek has toured collapsed Dark Age buildings there, stuffed full of archaeotech and treasure by their builders.  The Overlord would like nothing more than to rebuild this base, and establish a new one on Malvaceae.  So far, nothing more than pilots have arisen, but both are promising.  The stations the Mechanicus has built there, thanks to the urging of the Adeptus Terra Council that Harek leads, will someday serve as the command and control hubs of the entire Subsector, and project their firepower so far away from their surface that they will be able to hull a Glasian Cylinder, Harek boasts.  The somewhat more grounded claims of the Mechanicus put this between ‘Abaddon will repent any day now’ and ‘Guilliman’s just sleeping off a hangover’ in terms of likelihood, but they agree that more defenses can’t hurt.  Beyond serving as an extra layer of defenses, however, Harek has other plans for the moon stations.

Harek’s ultimate goal for the moon bases is to serve as the focal point of a completely new colonization project.  The ambitious Overlord obsessively pours over the reports coming in from Explorators and Rogue Traders in the Oldight Exo-zone and Cloudburst Circuit.  He has read page after page after page of reports about strange aliens, dark tombs, dead planets, and gleaming gems of life and sustenance out in the voids of non-Imperial space.  Harek’s dreams are aflood with schemes and plans to make his system, and it is his system, into the launching point for a wave of thousands of colony and trader ships, to carry Clan Ahad’s descendants out to rule a whole second Subsector in his name.  His relative youth for a Subsector Overlord means he may even live to see it happen.  More likely, though, the inevitable delays in the work of the Administratum and Mechanicus in categorizing and securing these worlds mean he will be long dead by that time.  That doesn’t trouble him, though, for the Hereteks to whom he traded a full underhive’s worth of scavengers promise that the brain-transference machine and personal cloning device in his secret laboratory on Iocanto are working perfectly.

Most families of wealth and power on Thimble have less horrible aims and means, however.  These families rule the great manufacturing combines of the planet, and they couldn’t care less about moon bases, non-hiver scavengers and farmers, or the burdens of rulership.  The self-maintaining factories and companies they own are well-oiled machines, run by Administratum and Mechanicus elites.  The noble owners, from great houses of Cloudburst like O’Neill and Zhong, kick back and explore ever more expensive ways to relieve their boredom.
The headaches this causes the Ordo Xenos cannot be overstated.  There isn’t an Ultima Rogue Trader worth his weight in paper who doesn’t buy their house’s clothing from Thimble.  More than a few Rogue Traders have traded xenotech for particularly nice clothes, and the Imperial Navy increasingly relies on the noble-owned clothing foundries of Thimble for their fireproof vacuum repair suits for their ships.  This means that military-grade Imperial and Xeno weaponry winds up in the hands of Thimble noble scion twits with appalling frequency.  Ordo Xenos investigators have arrived on the scene of massacres in noble estates on reports of small-scale alien invasions, only to find that a single servant pressed a button they shouldn’t have while cleaning the master’s alien grenade collection.

Sometimes, these artifacts serve a darker, more purposeful role.  The Ordo Xenos is aware that the general public is not conscious of the role Tzeentch plays in the Glasian Migrations, but is conscious that their technology is sinful and must be destroyed.  This has never, ever prevented enterprising humans from trading and buying things, not once in mankind’s history.  As a result, the Cold Trade of proscribed Glasian hardware into Thimble noble houses is brisk and competitive.  Aristocrats with no other occupation in their minds pay outrageous sums to own real Glasian Ruin Guns or Corkscrew Rifles.  Sometimes these are more than conversation pieces or emergency personal defense weapons.

The Inquisition is alarmed at how easily this technology seems to be filtering into the population of Thimble.  An interdiction of arms freighters is simply not possible, given that Thimble is the number one supplier of manpower to the Imperial military in Cloudburst.  As such, all the Inquisition can do to stop this Cold Trade is publicly execute all participants they capture, and pray that if the forces of Chaos are planning something, the Arbites will catch it in time to stop it, as they did on Maskos fourteen centuries before.

The Clans and Houses of the Highborn families of Thimble are dizzyingly complex compared to those of Celeste and Septiim.  Part of the reason for this is that many, if not most, maintained the ties of breeding, politics, allegiance, and territory that predated Imperial integration, unlike the vast majority of Cloudburst planets.  The ancient families of old Levitna had genealogical records that trailed back over twenty thousand years, many of which were themselves families of Old Terra.  Families band together in inter-related and autonomous bodies called Clans, each of which could have hundreds of thousands of descendents on Thimble.  The ruling Clan is that of Ahad, which contains the families of the System, Subsector, and Planetary leadership among its members and vassals.

Wealthier Clans contain individual Houses, which are interrelated families of nobles and mechants who control off-world and domestic trade.  Well over 75% of all commercial activity in the Spindle system passes through the Houses of Thimble in some capacity, with much of the rest being that of House Carvan’s agricultural work.  However, the Houses, being only a few thousand strong, can’t possibly oversee the tens of millions of Thimblans in any granularity.  Deeper in the hives, where the massive manufacturing structures are not working around the clock, untold millions of humans and mutants labor and live far from the sight of the lofty Houses.  There are exceptions.  House Lienzo, for instance, dabbles often in the lower classes for sport.

Ahad does not have the huge mercantile connections of the Houses Zhong and O’Neill.  Its focus instead is on politics, and its power is immense.  Houses Zhong and O’Neill are both members of the Clan Vorbach, but that Clan has been so utterly consumed by the skyrocketing wealth of those Houses that it exists as a mere vestige on paper, with but a single other family that represents the Houses to the planetary government.
Other Clans are vassals of the wealthier Clan Ahad and its loftier rivals, those who own the massive factories on Thimble that feed the tithe requirements of Spindle.  Thanks to the bored and destructive lower nobility of Thimble giving the planet such a bad name for its frequent role in the illegal trade of xenos artifacts, these Clans are frequently the subject of intense Inquisitorial scrutiny.  Even the wealthiest Clans on Thimble are not immune to the brutal invasiveness of Inquisitorial investigations.


It is a sore point for the people of Thimble that the system does not have a Cardinal.  Surely, its population is large enough to merit one, given that far smaller worlds in other Sectors have them.  In fact, the delay in the appointment of new Cardinals has nothing to do with the people of Thimble; the delay stems from the ineptitude of the Synod Ultima, which has yet to find a qualified candidate among the Hive Archbishops of Thimble despite ample time in which to do so.  Once a Cardinal of Thimble emerges, they would join the Synod Cloudburst on Celeste posthaste.  There are also rumors among the Deacons and Priests of Thimble that a small Convent of Sanguine Soul sisters may open on the planet soon, though this remains unsubstantiated for now.

====Thimble Military====

As a Hive World, Thimble has two things in abundance at all times: industry, and extra people.  The days when Thimble had so much empty living space that colonists had to be imported from other worlds to keep the machinery running have been over for a thousand years.  With the notable exception of Amethyst Hive (which has no underhive because its sublevels are one giant power plant) and Singer Hive (the scav population of which all mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago), all the hives of Thimble have more bodies than beds.  Thimble is also a Subsector Capital, and is thus responsible not only for raising a great domestic army to defend itself, but also a fleet and field army to defend its holdings.  As such, massive tithes of men in fresh uniforms appear in the ledgers of the Officio Munitorum every year.  The people of Thimble take active pride in the quality of their forces, which is ironic in the Munitorum’s eyes; they’re not very good fighters.  For whatever reason, be it diet, lifestyle, mindset, or just simple poor genes, Thimble troops outside their elite Scions seem predisposed to coming in squarely in the middle of Munitorum readiness and fitness exercises.  This does not make them a liability, of course, they are still fine fighters for the Imperium.  They are simply less qualified than the Munitorum traditionally expects hivers to be.
Hiver soldiers of the Imperial military have the reputation of being tough, self-reliant, and good at working in teams; these are all traits that the Navy and Guard prize.  Thimble hivers, however, have few of the gang allegiances that Necromundan or even Terran hivers possess.  All Hive Worlds have crime, and therefore all Hive Worlds have Imperial Guard conscripts ready to go, but Thimble has not (yet) developed the rampant criminal tribalism that leads to so many hiver gangs forming.  This leads to less early-life combat that could drive survival instincts home in childhood.  Perhaps this explains their lack of the stereotypical hiver Guardsman traits, like body tattoos and thuggish language.

Regardless, when Thimblan Argent Swords fight, they do so clad in the very best uniforms and armor money can buy.  Many worlds build their weaponry, also, with Cognomen providing advanced firearms, Maskos providing grenades and flamers, and Cognomen and Solstice splitting the vehicle requirements between them.  Argent Shields work and train in their bases on the planet itself, in walled-off hab blocks and bases on the surface, shielded from the boiling air by Mechanicus technoarcana.  The fact that all wars in Thimble history have occurred inside the hives means that Thimble troops are not well trained to work in concert with artillery or airstrikes.  As urban warfare troops, they are rated third behind Maskos Warriors and the elite Cloudburst Defenders overall in the Cloudburst Sector.  Again, like most hives, Thimble builds as much of its own wargear as it can.  The sheer number of troops it tithes up every year means that Cognomen can’t equip its general infantry with their masterpiece rifles; they have to equip dozens of other worlds, and do not have enough left over for Thimble’s troops too.  Therefore, Cognomen provides the designated marksmen and snipers of the Thimble regiments with their weapons, and the rest are either manufactured locally or shipped in from Fabique or Solstice.

The Thimblan Argent Swords prefer the use of Leman Russ tanks and rarely field anything larger.  The confined interiors of the Thimble hives mean that the Swords do not need to worry about claustrophobia in their deployments, which makes their special operations and urban fighters adaptable to space combat.

The Imperial Navy recruits many of its crews from the Spindle system, and its many thousands of space habs, space stations, void platforms, moon bases, and of course Thimble itself regularly pledges hundreds of thousands of people to the Navy’s crews.  Notably, Thimble does not have much of an officer’s tradition.  Instead, the majority of the Navy’s officers come from Oglith, Nauphry, and Coriolis.

Thimble also controls one other specialist formation, one unique to Thimble.  Beyond the Scions and Commissars provided by its Schola Progenum, Thimble has one military deployment in addition to its Navy and Guard commitments.  In a supposedly abandoned agricultural station in the dead zones near the Ork crash sites, the Mechanicus built a great tunnel, leading down through the rock and dead dirt to a natural cave they expanded with Maskos mining machines.  The Mechanicus dug out more caves and caverns, until nearly two cubic miles of space stretched out under the surface, with food and power provided from the surreptitiously-reactivated agri-station.

Inside the complex, a force of killers trains and waits.  The Thimble Night Slaughter, the premier Inquisitorial black ops force in the Segmentum north of the Maelstrom, hides away from the world.  The Night Slaughter know the real reason that Thimble’s asymptote of average soldier quality isn’t that the world has no gangs or that the Scions take all the good fighters.  The real reason is that they are quietly siphoned away from the conscript yards and enlistment centers, and taken blindfolded to the secret, nameless bunker.
Beneath the planet’s surface, tens of thousands of soldiers wait and train, each hypnoconditioned and commanded by implants to serve.  Every week, there is at least one casualty in the fierce, vicious training the Night Slaughter endures.  Training takes place in teams of ten, with a member cycled out every week to keep the groups fresh and the drills interchangeable.  Under the watchful eye of Lord Commissar Beleph Dour, these killers train to fight in unpredictable circumstances, like the fluctuating gravity of a Space Hulk or the blinding madness of the Warp, or even the twisting halls of the Webway.  The Holy Ordos convened this army of specialists, none of whom are listed as alive or even missing on Astra Militarum records.
The Inquisition knows that one day, perhaps one day soon, the armies of Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Khorne will team up to battle Tzeentch in the streets and skyways of the Cloudburst Sector.  Someday, either Tzeentch’s experiment will end, or the other three Chaos Gods will work together to stop it, and when it does, every heretic, every cultist, every traitor, every uncollected psyker in the Cloudburst Sector will rise up under Tzeentch’s thrall, and the Chaos Civil War in the sector will begin.  When it does, the Night Slaughter will also rise, to battle them.  Consisting of tens of thousands of brainwashed soldiers, or so their leaders think, the Slaughter are trained to the highest standards the human body can endure, even beyond that of the Urgent Response Forces of the Adeptus Arbites.  Genetic enhancement, hypnosis, cybernetic augmentation, even psychic impulse-planting make these soldiers into the absolute peak of human potential.  Night Slaughter troops that age past thirty-six cycle into Inquisitorial Stormtrooper service so that their training does not go to waste.

The Night Slaughter troops think that this is the secret plan of the Ordos; they assume that the Inquisition wants these soldiers to be constantly training in anticipation of the day that they will fall on the surprised Traitors and drive them from the Sector.  What Lord Commissar Dour knows is that the ‘accidents’ that account for the losses the Slaughter endures in their training are nothing of the kind.  Every week, the best soldier in the Slaughter is knocked unconscious and stashed in a great cryo-crypt, even deeper under the surface, and protected by psy-wards and techno-sorcerous barriers of the Dark Age.  Four psychic Inquisitors live in residence in this secret vault, watching over the thousands of frozen killers, looking for even the slightest sign of daemon incursion.  After all, armies are expensive, and while most active members of the gradually expanding Night Slaughter will never see battle against the forces of Chaos, to let their skills go to waste would be downright criminal.  Hundreds of thousands of cryo-crypts sit unfilled beneath the training grounds, with tanks, non-Carapace-linked Power Armor, guns, armored vehicles, combat servitors and Servo-skulls, and even a platoon of Martian Baneblades with full wargear upgrades ready to go.  When Tzeentch drops his charade, the Ordos will be ready.

Of course, the question has arisen in the ever-contentious Ordos about whether the resources spent on them are actually spent properly.  This constitutes an entire army of multiple brigades of elite soldiers, and a platoon of Superheavy Tanks.  Surely, this would be better spent, the doubters argue, in active expansion of the Cloudburst Sector, or the defense of Oglith.  If not, perhaps for the rest of the Imperium.  There are Hive Worlds in the Segmentum Solar with a greater industrial output than the whole Cloudburst Sector; Mars creates more goods for the Imperium than Cloudburst four times over.  Perhaps this elite, loyal, secret, and well-equipped army would be better deployed against the Ork Waaagh! creeping ever closer to Armageddon, or the forces of Khorne rampaging through the Solar/Obscurus border.  Cloudburst may be a vibrant, loyal, and expanding region, but it is not yet indispensable.  Those Inquisitors who have staked a claim on the project, however, believe that the forces of Chaos are gnawing at the seams of the Sector.  The region was only barely Imperial, three thousand years before.  Of course the rest of the galaxy could use an extra elite, secret army.  Surely, though, if the Imperium were to abandon Cloudburst in the face of a quantifiably Chaotic threat, that would signal to its other enemies a weakness, an exploitable weakness.  Necron Dynasties across known space are already staking claims on Imperial worlds and even whole sectors.  Wouldn’t giving up Cloudburst without a fight in the face of a threat greater than the Glasians suggest that they could stake a claim on even more?

Ultimately, this debate rages on in the Palace of Maskos.  As with so many Imperial Inquisition debates, there is no clear, unambiguous answer.  For now, the Night Slaughter awaits in their crypts and their barracks.  In an emergency, they could deploy.  What would constitute such an emergency, none yet know.