Directorate of the Unified Municiple Blocs and Federated Unions of Crunater and Kidameous

> "***"Ensure that they hold to their contracts."***
>
>
> "And if they don't?"
>
>
> "Well they'll sort themselves out eventually."'*.*"
>
>
>
> ― Standard Ixaniad Nobility conversation
>
>

The **Directorate of the Unified Municipal Blocs and Federated Unions of Crunater and Kidameous**, often shortened to **The Navigator Directorate** is the main source of spacefaring navigation among the countless myriad of long ranging ships of the Ixaniad Sector, much to the chagrin of those who must engage with the bewildering organization.

The body politic of the navigators cannot be truthfully named as a household, for its traditions are ill-maintained save for the deepest and most ingrained procedures and rituals and no continuous bloodline has ever been able to take firm root. For internal strife is the name of the Directorate as the organization descends into civil war every few decades or so.

## History

The original history of the Directorate is fragmentary at best. Any history of the Directorate not maintained in the records upon the guarded infovaults of Lordrium or are equally fragmentary. As are any records of recent transactions going back further than fifty years or so. What is known is that the Directorate first appeared in the sector in the year 6.393.282.M33 by the best reckoning of the Mechanicum Holy Orders and initially served as a model of any typical spacefaring navigator house.

Tentative models of their history are sometimes cross referenced by Imperial Historians with Segmentum Solar central archives, and the earliest records detail a household exiled from their holdings in the galactic core. Conflicting accounts detail several possible reasons for this punishment. Some say that the house was too willing to engage in political espionage for the liking of their fellow Navigators. Others postulate that methods of assassination eventually led to assassinating the wrong political rival at the wrong time. The least imaginative or most straightforward suggest that perhaps maybe nobody liked them.

Their arrival to the sector was initially held as a good omen by the human worlds of the sector. Navigator compacts, obligations, and partnerships were formed with the Mechanicum of Hephaestia, the Space Marines of the Knights of Steel, and the sector nobility. These compacts remain tentatively in place to this day under penalty of extreme retaliation.

As far as records go, the household maintained compacts well. Until some event took place in mid Millennium Thirty-Four when the leader of the household suddenly perished by being sucked out of an airlock while in warp transit. Upon return to realspace and news returned to the household, the household slowly descended into chaos. Successive leaders perished, or abdicated, or otherwise vanished. And the command structure of the house slowly dissolved over the decades until the renowned Navigator Kus'narius the Master rose to take control of the household and direct it into a new direction and rebuild the fortunes and slipping sector wide control. Kus'narius used the influence of the navigators to build up a new and independent scientific base to better arm and utilize their own ships and combat the rising political influence of the Hephaestian Adeptus Mechanicus in the sector politics.

The political contest between the two factions came to a boiling point as Kus'narius pushed his reach to the limit and brought to the nobility of the sector new psychic technologies and systems for the navigation of ships, bringing the house closer and closer to the ideals of knowledge and the notion of gods of knowledge. And soon after, Kus'narius fell in kind, along with any bloodline who could truly bring unity to the organization. Some whisper by internal foes and some whisper rivals from without. A series of weaker and weaker leaders took charge and over time, lesser bloodlines rose up to replace them until eventually, no bloodlines with any right to claim the house throne were left and any organization collapsed into anarchy as any navigator with the slightest claim reached for power. Paranoia became the byword of the navigator class as each one feared for their positions at any level; on individual ships, on bases or space stations. Any warp capable vessel or location outside their bunker palaces was a place for potential betrayal and assassination in the struggle for dominance.

As the political influence of the navigators waned, the influence of sector nobility and independent merchants and rogue traders grew tremendously, and as the house fractured into disparate factions, various political blocs courted favour from the sectors major players. The Hephaestian Mechanicum quickly swept away as much mention of any navigators promulgating scientific work beyond their control, their holdings seized and the valuable psykers vanishing. The various rogue trader households allied closely with the larger bodies remaining that could deal. The sector nobility did much the same as the navigators squirmed back to power over time as they inevitably do.

In time, the Angevin Crusade would sweep through the sector in the wake of the Age of Apostasy and the disparate navigator holdings seized power once more. In the wake of such a massive crusade, the need for their services skyrocketed, and out of that sector wide renaissance of activity the Directorate was born. And a mighty figure hailed as Sur'nash the Golden, who Gone was the old household and splinter houses and born was the union of navigators, all trying to equal each other out, all keeping the balance. And broadly failing, as each time new solid direction could rise, the leaders seem to vanish as ships turn to personal purposes and captains are bent over backwards to serve the whims of too-important navigators. It takes the threat of violance from their contract holders to keep those contracts intact between each unstable director to scheming director to weak leader.