Cymbry Eisenfaust

Commodore Eisenfaust is an NPC in Rogue Trader: After the Gold Rush.

Commodore Cymbry Eisenfaust, I.N.

I'm afraid that I cannot, in good conscience, follow these orders my Lord. You see, if we deploy here and here as you've advised we will surely be overrun and lose many of His Divine Majesty's precious ships. I shouldn't like to be the one who has to explain to the Admiralty why His Holiness has been deprived of so many important assets.

– Commodore Cymbry Eisenfaust

Tall and forbidding with a will like iron and a glance sharp enough to cut the legs from under even the saltiest old voidman, Commodore Eisenfaust was once a highly respected and much lauded officer in Battlefleet Calixis. A veteran of countless engagements in service of His Divine Majesty's Navy, she started her career as a midshipman aboard tiny Cobra-class torpedo boats. Early on she distinguished herself as a brilliant but iconoclastic officer with a keen tactical sense and an unnerving tendency to subtly defy her superiors and ask questions better left unasked. Her rise through the officer ranks was marked by both stunning victories and demotions for insubordination in about equal measure. Despite a list of disciplinary actions and formal complaints that would have gotten her drummed out of the service in other battlefleets, her singular genius at the helm of a warship and the desperate need for fighting officers in the Calixis Sector preserved her career. Despite her reputation as a rabble rouser, she achieved the rank of Lord-Captain and was given command of HDMS Lordly Might, a powerful heavy cruiser.

Once she was promoted and given her command, she gathered around herself a cadre of like-minded officers and set about a severely misguided campaign to reform battlefleet Calixis. She wanted to break the hidebound traditions of the Imperial Navy and introduce what she considered forward-thinking ways of organising task forces and designing effective strategies. She also set out to clean up what she considered undue corruption in the dealings between the Navy and the various shipyards in the Sector. For years she railed against corruption in the dockyards and sent messages to the Admiralty demanding reforms. While chagrined and often embarrassed by what the young captain uncovered in her ceaseless crusade, her superiors could not afford to lose her as long as she kept winning battles and protecting the interests of the Imperial Navy in the Calixis Sector. They decided to play a patient game of waiting for her to make a mistake. They gave her enough rope to hang herself, and eventually she did just that.

After a long chase and savage battle with an Eldar task force, Lordly Might was so badly damaged she was abandoned by Eisenfaust and her crew and scuttled. Seeing their chance, her superiors court-martialed her for the loss of the ship. While a common enough occurrence in the Navy, and while she was eventually cleared of the charges, the loss of as powerful a ship as Lordly Might put a black mark on her service record that proved permanent. She was put ashore on half-pay for nearly five years, shuffled back and forth between shore assignments and generally marginalised as much as her superiors could. Even in her reduced state she pursued her campaign for reforms, although now she did so alone as her accomplices had received loud and clear the message to abandon her. Eventually, tired of her constant tirades and stinging letters and in a desperate bid to rid themselves of her, they gave her command of the ancient cruiser HDMS Precious Icon and sent her to the Koronus Expanse as part of Battlefleet Koronus.

For decades now the Commodore, a rank she has assumed on her own, well aware of the reasons for her reassignment-cum-banishment, has served with distinction in the expanse. Once in the Expanse, she and her fellow captains, all discipline cases of one stripe or another, set about projecting His Divine Majesty's force as well as they could with what little they could muster. Now in command of the Battlefleet and a wiser if no less cross-grained officer, the sting of her court-martial and her long years of exile in the outer reaches of the Expanse have left her bitter and prone to fits of melancholy. This latest billet seems to outside observers to be the disappointing end of what could otherwise have been a very promising career indeed. Despite her disappointment and bitterness, she is still an officer of His Divine Majesty's Navy, and as such strives to uphold the finest traditions of the service in her diligence and zeal in protecting the Koronus Expanse.