Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient

System
Galactic Position	Cloudburst Sector, Uncategorized Region

Port Maxient

In the purest sense of the word, Maxient is a haven of greed. The lust for wealth, power, fame, glory, and carnal fulfilments permeates the actions and intent of every man and woman who enters its flickering hall. A great spiral construct over forty kilometers wide at the broadest, Port Maxient is a hub of trade, travel, and warfare that sits at the nexus of three barely-explored regions of space.

History

Originally, Port Maxient was no port at all. Established forty years after the Second Gold Rush in the year M39.056, this platform was originally a great supply depot, telescopic observation platform, and cartographic update hub of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The original name of the platform was Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1, and was intended to serve as a great signpost of the Adeptus Mechanicus Astra Explorators. Humiliated by the inattentiveness that allowed for the great treasures of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit to go unclaimed for so long, appalled by the fact that the Imperium would likely have retrieved an intact STC were not for their blindness, and eager to reclaim their public image, the Adeptus Mechanicus built the station. Assembled from pre-fabricated slabs of metal, circuitry, and stone, the station was originally a bog-standard Xerxes III with all of its combat and long-term naval anchorage modules replaced with storage blocks. The Adeptus Mechanicus built the platform quickly, in the hopes that it would be the first in a great chain of such stations that stretched all the way from the Drumnos Sector to the very edge of the Terminus Shock Warp Storms, the physical edge of safe spaceflight.

As had transpired in the past, the Adeptus Mechanicus hoped would transpire here: new exploration would yield safe Warpflight routes. As Mankind has not yet managed to replace the need for the Navis Nobilite in the expansion of their faster-than-light travel capacity despite the Emperor’s best efforts, it is only the Navigators that allow human ships to fly at speeds in the Warp that eclipse those of its natural currents and eddies. Thus, as humanity expands into the areas it once inhabited, guided in the past by the psychic beacon network that no longer exists, the pace of Imperial ships can be quite hasty indeed, when they are guided by a Navigator and traveling well-mapped routes. Other ships, lacking Navigators or flying in places where there are no mapped routes (or both), can but fly slower than the ancient human ships did. It was the dear hope of the Adeptus Mechanicus that as the boundaries of the mapped regions of the newly-renamed Cloudburst Circuit expanded, new Warpflight routes would be found that would allow the ships of the Astra Explorator to fly deeper and deeper into the Oldlight Exo-zone and Cloudburst Circuit.

Thus, the Adeptus Mechanicus built Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1 with high hopes for redemption, and great wealth and discovery to follow. Construction proceeded at lightning speed, as the full deep-space construction capacity of Cognomen and the Mechanicus shipyards at Hapster lent their might to the task.

Almost immediately, however, the Adeptus ran headlong into a problem. Try as they might, none of the psykers of the Navis Nobilite nor the Adeptus Astra Telepathica could find any safe, Astronomican-lit pathways through the Oldlight Exo-zone. Ship after ship of the Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Administratum Departmento Astrocartigraphicae, and Adeptus Mechanicus Astra Explorator came back with empty stores and no fresh finds. Rogue Traders and Free Captains also labored to find new routes to money and power in the void. None could find safe pathways where the Astronomican remained visible except with those rare Navigators whose sight eclipsed all others, which were far too few in number to allow for reliable travel.

By the time the station was completed in M39.066, all involved could tell that there would be no further mass travel to trailing. Still, the Mechanicus maintained their hope to travel safely rimward, out towards the Terminus Shock, and there discover the very edges of space. That, too, proved fruitless. Navigators reported that they could see the Astronomican from the Circuit, but so dimly that travel was barely faster than in the better-explored Drumnos Sector.

In essence, there would be no great chain of deep voids, no massive Adeptus Mechanicus redemption that would undo the scale of their earlier error. Some cynics in the Adeptus even said that the Outpost Cloudburst Maxentius Ext 1 itself had been a complete waste of resources. Others, including the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, insisted that the Adeptus complete and staff the station, so that the investments made thus far were not a waste of time. Eventually, the outpost was staffed, fed, and promptly rendered useless, as Rogue Traders and Explorators took to the snail’s pace exploration of the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone, disregarding the superfluous Deep Void.

The station might have gone the route of so many before it that had been left behind on the tides of the Imperium’s fortunes, had not the Imperial Navy stepped in. The Deep Void Xerxes III had been built so far from any habitable word that it did not realistically serve in the immediate defense of any human world. Despite the bullheadedness of the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, the station was totally useless for providing as a great logistics hub for rimward expeditions thanks to its location. However, it was smack in the middle of the trailing edge of the newly-charted Cloudburst Sector, and while humanity is unable to safely and quickly traverse the Exo-zone, other races are not. The station, the Imperial Navy pointed out to the Adeptus Mechanicus, was totally useless to them, but potentially quite valuable to the Holy Fleet.

The Adeptus Mechanicus, in their wounded pride, did not simply consent to handing the platform over to the Navy. They insisted that the sheer cost of building it would need to be offset. The Imperial Navy countered that only the Adeptus had insisted on building it, and that they should have calculated its cost and potential use before undertaking the project. The Mechanicus shot back that if the Navy thought there would be a chance that the station would be useful to them, they could have contributed to its construction at any time.

Eventually, with much exasperation, the Adeptus Arbites stepped in. Determined to resolve the affair in their courts before it terminally delayed the blistering pace of expansion into the new Cloudburst Sector, the Arbites insisted that the claim be broached before them, and a fair outcome determined. With much begrudging acceptance, the Navy and the Mechanicus sent representatives to the Lex Imperialis Court on the Star Gilt in neighboring Naxos Sector for a resolution.

For months, the Imperial Navy made offers and suggestions for transferring the platform to the control of their forces, while the Adeptus Mechanicus made claims and counteroffers of differing value. Charts of space, sums of money, listings of value and precedent crossed desk after desk as the Judges sat and watched it all. After nearly half a year of intense legal wrangling, the Arbites reached a verdict.

They ruled that the Imperial Navy had not been obligated to make an offer, and that the Mechanicus was in no way obligated to turn over the station. However, both had been well within their rights to do so, and if the Mechanicus was truly responsible in full for the station’s construction, as they had insisted, and if it truly had become useless in its current form, as they had reluctantly admitted, then they were potentially liable for spending so many resources on the project that could have been better spent on the Imperium’s safety and expansion.

Therefore, the Adeptus Mechanicus, while not legally liable for not selling the platform, should have seen that it was in the best interest of the Adeptus to do so, and that the entire affair, from day one, had been a massive waste of time and resources.

Duly chastened, but still quite unwilling to part with a whole Xerses III without good reason and just recompense, the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen petitioned the Lord Fabricator of Fabique for aid. Utterly disinterested, the Lord Fabricator signaled back that Cognomen should have just sold the blasted platform and moved on. Out of allies and stung by the Judges’ words, the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen finally buckled and reached a compromise with the Imperial Navy. The station would be ceded to them in exchange for the help of the Navy in the station’s upkeep, and for the Mechanicus to maintain occupancy rights and resupply permits for half of it. The Navy would hold overall command, and would also be entitled to freely enforce ship’s law on their half, and be allowed to use the station’s external docking and internal storage bays for whatever they wished.

The Navy agreed at once, leaving the Lord Fabricator of Cognomen wondering if he could have gotten a better deal. The two fleets returned to the station to find its skeleton crew bored out of their skulls and sitting on a stockpile of rations that had almost entirely spoiled.

One hundred years later, the station was cleaned, repainted, restaffed, and emptied of spoiled goods. The station, now under Imperial Navy control, began adding additional defensive modules to its hull, to better serve its new role as a border station to protect the Imperium from xenos attacks from the Oldlight Exo-zone. Now named Port Maxentius, which language drift has changed to Maxient over time to the distress of its Cognomen-trained Techpriests, the station began slowly expanding.

Centuries passed in routine aboard the station. The Navy, quick to enforce its discipline on its crewers this far from the Emperor’s light, did make some small allowances for the needs of the people. Crewers posted here in the long term were permitted to move their families there, as were officers stationed there for decades at a time. Beyond that, some recreation areas blossomed in decks and quarters unused for the task of defense. The original storage modules for supplies, which were several times the needed space for simple border defense, hung empty at first, before slowly filling with new occupants. Generally, these occupants were non-military family of crewers, desperately seeking entertainment, and taking to building things to alleviate their boredom. The original Xerxes III was able to accommodate six of these massive modules, and since then, all six have filled with new contents.

Millennia have passed since the construction of Maxient ended. Over time, no culture can remain static, and so too has Maxient’s populace grown more diverse. So too has its appearance, as it is now many, many times the size of a standard Xerxes III.

The defenses of the station have been tested more than once. Since its original construction, the platform has come under substantial xenos assault on five separate occasions.

1. The first came seventy years after primary construction, in M39.136. A flotilla of pirates from the Drumnos Sector’s many criminal fleets assaulted the station with the intent of robbing its vast storage of munitions and dried food. The pirate fleet consisted of four frigates and a light cruiser, all of Imperial make. The local defenses, including the trio of corvettes stationed there at the time, succeeded in fighting them off, only to learn from the wreckage that the pirates had been alien hijackers of Imperial ships.

1. The second was a brutal boarding attack by Orks in M39.968. Fifteen Ork ships, ranging in size from a few ramships to a Battle-Krooza, flew in and began mass boarding of them station. This was a total disaster for the Imperial military, who evaded capture of the station only after two consecutive years of savage fighting that saw over eighty percent of its residents butchered. Rescue came in the form of the Deathwatch and a contingent of Battlefleet Cloudburst ships, which managed to dock with the Ork ships still attached to the station and pincer the Orks inside the embattled portions of the station. Repairs of Maxient took over seventy years to complete, and a few scars from the invasion can still be found on the emergency bulkheads of some interior compartments.

1. The third was another wave of assorted, mongrel aliens, this time with humans in the crew. This attack came in from the darkness beyond the border of the Exo-zone, and resulted in a protracted ship battle. In M41.313, the forces of Battlefleet Cloudburst, local defense ships, nine Rogue Trader fleets, and a few mercenaries hired by the Sector Overlord, engaged and battled the swarm of over two hundred small alien vessels that had besieged Port Maxient. The aliens had not successfully landed vessels on the huge station, but upon the arrival of sufficient Imperial assets to repulse them, the alien fleet commander locked out the controls of his subordinates’ ships, directed them to ram the station, and made his escape. The station was nearly destroyed, but tireless repair efforts by the Adeptus Mechanicus managed to stave off utter catastrophe.

1. The fourth was a teeming horde of Ork Freebootaz. This attack, alone of the five, was one for which the Imperium had had some warning before it occurred, in M41.898 An Ordo Xenos Inquisitor in the Inquisitorial Palace of Maskos had foretold the attack using a pack of psi-crystal Tarot cards. After taking care to decipher the message, the Inquisitor directed a fleet of Inquisitorial ships to reinforce the startled Port Maxient flotilla. It was nearly not enough. When the aliens came, they slammed into the station’s defenses with the force of a storm. This fleet was five times the size of the one that had nearly conquered the station before. As Imperial and Mechanicus ships trickled in to reinforce, the balance of power slowly tipped in the favor of the human combatants, but it was by no means a sure thing. The fighting continued for over seven months of nnon-stop space combat. The war came to a sudden end when the Imperial Battlecruiser Aquillian Gold managed a fluke bridge hit on the Ork command ship OrdgargZak, which rammed the station after the Warboss leading the attack suddenly died in the explosion. The surviving Ork ships broke and ran, pursued by weary Adeptus Mechanicus Basilikon Astra vessels.

1. The fifth and final major attack came fifteen years later, in M41.913, from a foe the Imperium has not seen before nor since. The assault came from beyond the border, as the third had. Examinations of the ship hulls encountered in the battle by the Deathwatch against their extensive hull categorization database on Watch Fortress Dascomb have revealed nothing of the origins of this mysterious fleet. Larger than any attack save the fourth, it consisted of well over a hundred small ships and a few larger ones, and attacked the station after emerging from the Warp just inside its sensor range. The full strength of Battlefleet Cloudburst responded, albeit piecemeal, and the aliens were repulsed, but over seven thousand of them managed to board the station before then. Days of bitter fighting between Skitarii and Naval provosts, and the alien attackers, followed. The end result was the destruction of the hideous crab-like aliens and their fleet, but nearly as bad was the friendly fire incidents between Naval provosts and the Skitarii they caught using Radium weapons in Naval sections of the station. Only the direct intervention of the Adeptus Arbites prevented the fighting between the ostensible allies from escalating into a larger shooting battle.

Attributes

It is now nearly impossible to find the core of the Xerxes III from which Maxient arose. While its original shape and size were normal for its classification, the station has since bloated like a tick. Now, the station is a hideous amalgam of great, spiraling lumps of metal, protruding bulges of aftermarket additions, and the thin needles of starship dock spindles. The only piece of the original station still accessible from the outside is the huge Astropathic Temple-spire that juts out from the ventral surface facing, allowing it to be severed and destroyed in case of a daemonic flesh-gate opening among its residents.

As time went on and the station grew older, so did the Cloudburst Sector. The gradual process of finding more routes into the Oldlight Exo-zone, the Cloudburst Circuit, and the growing Cloudburst Sector made Maxient’s position relative to the thrum of Imperial commerce change. While the station itself has not moved from its lonely orbit around the star GHE848, the border of the Sector has pushed past it into the Cloudburst Circuit. The station has grown as much as it has for two reasons: urgent need, followed by bitter envy. At first, when the station was repurposed from being a supply depot into a proper port, it simply lacked the onboard weapon and quartering capacity needed by a proper border fort. Rather than gut the six massive storage modules originally installed, the Navy instead opted to add additional modules to the outside hull and chain them together. This swelled the station in size nearly all the way to that of a Xerxes IV, but the cost was deemed worthwhile by the Imperial Navy, who reasoned that it would be cheaper than meticulously removing the interior storage and replacing it.

Over time, more and more modules appeared on the hull. These were not added because of the need for stronger defense, but instead because the Adeptus Mechanicus found itself unhappy with the reduction of its role in the status quo. With the Navy now in command, the Mechanicus could no longer claim rulership over a platform it had striven and spent to build. The original terms of the agreement forged under the watchful eye of the Adeptus Arbites would be that he Mechanicus would be allowed to retain control over half the station, but the Imperial Navy would have the other half as well as overall control.

The ambiguity of that resolution indirectly caused the slow growth of the station. When the tension over the perceived loss of status that losing overall command of the station reached a boiling point, the Adeptus Mechanicus ordered the conversion of an interior storage bay into a huge temple complex. This was a direct snub to the leadership of the Imperial Navy. When the huge temple was done, welded, and powered up, the Naval Admiral stationed on Port Maxient simply asked the Mechanicus which half of the temple was his. When the Adeptus Mechanicus demanded an explanation, the Admiral simply pointed out that half of the station fell under his command, and therefore half of the new temple was his.

Enraged but unable to deny the logic, the Mechanicus instead reached a compromise: they would add another module to the station and return its content to an even number, thus allowing the Navy to maintain control independent of the temple, which would remain theirs. The Navy found that quite agreeable, and soon enough, the station had a new fighter bay.

This pattern repeated itself again and again over the course of the ensuing millennia, as one faction chose to increase the size of the station, and the other sought to counterbalance the other’s expansion of control. Sometimes this has taken the form of co-owned modules, but most expansions are of the paired sort, built in twos and split between the two. A few specific modules and expansions have been exempted from this petty division, such as secondary reactors to power the ever-greater sprawl, but since only the Adeptus Mechanicus can operate those, the Navy is usually quick to claim other compartments onboard as compensation. Likewise, the ever-growing population of Port Maxentius has necessitated larger and larger facilities for the other Adeptae. In time, Adeptus Administratum tithe offices, Ministorum chapels and pilgrim residences, Arbites courthouses and even a full Precinct-Fortress have emerged from the expanding disc of metal, only to be swallowed up by its slow accretion of more, more, more.

The ‘outer’ hull of the station rarely stays as such. When a fighter bay or repair yard, or some other function that can only work when exposed to the exterior, is swallowed up by the growth, it is generally stripped bare, its parts relocated to elsewhere, and the empty space where it had been filled with something else. At times, the station commander will attempt to outpace the metastatic expansion of the station by adding some useful new function on a spur or outgrowth at the end of a long umbilical, or even a dedicated orbital train on an enclosed solid line. Thus, the station looks like nothing more than a virion from a great distance, with blinking lights and open docking cups on long stalks sticking out of an ugly, asymmetric blob of alloy and clashing paint. Over time, the unwieldy expansion of the station gave way to somewhat more organized increases in size, with new modules being added adjacent to each other and expanding outwards in a spiral. Other times, however, the civilian residents of the station began their own expansions after buying permits from the Naval officers overseeing operations. These have included all manner of Rogue Trader and Merchant Noble houses that have wanted to add more storage, sales, and residential structures over time. Thus, there are smaller growths that simply stick out from the hull in random directions.

Other expansions of the station have been less welcome. One of the chunks of discolored metal rammed awkwardly into the lumpen spiral of deliberate construction is the lingering remnant of the Ork Kroozer OrdgargZak, which attempted a suicide ramming attack on the station in M41.898. Over time, scrap and salvage teams have partially dismantled the ship, starting with its horrifyingly unstable Warp core, and broken it down for recycling. This kicked off another jurisdictional battle, since it slammed into a shared part of the station.

The massive station enjoys extensive defenses. Perhaps the only real benefit of the frenzied and competitive expansion of the station is that the Imperial Navy and Basilikon Astra frequently try to out-compete each other to protect the station. The hull of the station bristles with well over a hundred capital-weight weapons, of the fullest range of the Imperial military’s capacity. These include Nova Cannons, macro-cannons, laser weapons, plasma weapons, lance batteries, missile and torpedo tubes, and kinetic kill rocket racks, as well as more esoteric weapons of the Mechanicus. Its primary weapon battery is presently the colossal quadruple-barrel missile battery built into the largest Mechanicus portion of the station, although the Navy is already floating plans to one-up it.

From a distance, the hull looks diseased. Swatches of Mechanicus red and white alternate with Imperial Navy grey, with gigantic Aquilae and Iron Skulls alternating on disjointed architecture. Antennae and racks of huge guns jut from surfaces in every direction, with the irregularly-blinking lights of protruding vox masts and docking spindles interrupting the undulating alloy surface at random.

The interior isn’t much better off, most of the time. The hundreds of Rogue Traders, Free Captains, Chartists, Missionaries, and more public-facing merchants who dwell on or pass through the station tend to stick to the nicer bits of the station, near the core, where the commerce is to be found. The Imperial Navy portions of the station are rigid places of discipline and immaculate cleanliness, perhaps to impress upon the Mechanicus contingent the professionalism of the station’s true masters. Meanwhile, the Mechanicus portions are sprawling religious hubs, with icons of the Omnissiah and Machine God, and sparking shrines to the Motive Force, stuck at random throughout. Meanwhile, the Arbites and Guard stationed there look at the two bickering factions with utter contempt and pity, as the Rogue Traders get rich and the Ecclesiarchy condescends them all.

Beyond the parts of the station controlled by the Adepta and military, Port Maxient has become a riot of activity. Over ten million humans call the huge station home, and those are the ones the Adeptus Administratum cares to count. Nearly six hundred thousand more dwell in the underdecks and forgottonforgotten corners of the inefficient sprawl of a station. Outside the power and life support, the decks that are no longer on the direct path between the busiest Naval and Mechanicus portions of the station, part of the firefighting protocol, or near the munitions lockers are collectively referred to as the Underguts by their morbid residents. Taken together, the Underguts contain a bewildering variety of locations.