Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Septiim (section)

====Solstice====

With the arrival of the Glasians, and the uniformly dire predictions of the Tarot, Septiim’s future looked grim.  After the Second Glasian Conclave, the powers of Septiim decided that in order to prevent the vulnerable system from being overrun, new assets would be needed to fight off the xeno scum.  However, the Cognomen Forges were already straining at maximum production, and the Naxos industrial base was busy with its various problems.  Drumnos Sector Mechanicus representatives came up with a solution: a miniature Forge World.  The large and resource-rich moon Solstice was the natural choice for this ambitious project.  The Forge Worlds of Syracuse in Drumnos, Fabique in Naxos, and Cognomen in Cloudburst would share responsibility for getting the project off the ground, rather than any one bearing the cost unfairly.  Raw labor was not hard to come by in the expanding Cloudburst.  Armies of laborers, mostly Servitors, convicts, and those displaced by the Glasians descended on Solstice, clad in void suits and armed with electric diggers and shovels.  Cognomen and Maskos provided the great mining machines and tunnelers that would take over once the foundations were dug.  Fabique provided the orbiting logistical assets and defenses.  Syracuse provided its deadly Robots to guard the site.  Manual labor gave way to tunnelers as Cognomen’s gifts arrived.  As the snake-like tunneling units dug deep down below, Techpriests and Adepts erected oxygen shields and pressure walls over the huge hole that would someday lead to their future.  Artificial gravity plates came next, and oxygen separators.  Carbon filters and power plants popped up on tunnel walls like fungi as a whole world appeared inside the rocky moon.

For four hundred years, the machines and people of Solstice labored, building habs, factories, temples, great hydroponic and protein recycling chambers, power sources, and places of strictly regulated leisure and retirement.  As the underground world grew and grew, far faster than Drimmerzole or even Maskos’s subterranean networks ever had, the Legio Cybernetica Robots from Syracuse settled into their charging and maintenance cradles, to await their defense of the world.

The armies of Solstice are a force of shifting power in the Septiim system.  Armed with the same collection of eclectic and potent technoarcana as any other force of the Cult Mechanicus, Solstice’s forces are as capable as most Mechanicus forces when it comes to combat.  The issue they face is size.  Solstice is but a Forge Moon, not a Forge World, and therefore has serious scale problems compared to mighty Cognomen or ancient Mars.  Solstice Skitarii are fiercely loyal to Mars, not Solstice, though of course the armies of Solstice would be foolish not to treat their allies well.  Solstice is currently far too small to support a Titan legion, though they would dearly like one.  Given the logistical demands of the Blue Daggers and the local Arbites and Sororitas, Solstice can divert little of its resources to equipping its own, native forces.  These forces mostly take the form of Cult Mechanicus armies, and a small Legio Cybernetica force.  It is the Cybernetica in which Solstice takes the most pride, as even Cognomen does not field Robots.  Solstice also plays home to large Marauder Bomber factories, well below the surface, and can stage a fleet of these craft in defense of the system if needed.

Solstice is beginning to develop its own cultural identity.  The world’s maze of tunnels and steel-walled hab buildings don’t support much non-work activity, but the barren moonscape outside has found its way into some of the hull art of Solstice craft.  Its defense fleet, the Basilikon Astra Solstice, consists of six Sword frigates and a Cobra Missile Destroyer; the Solstice leadership plans to make a new shipyard capable of a four-kilometer-long beam as soon as they can get the money together.  Leaders of all three of its sponsor Forge Worlds meet regularly in its internal meeting chambers to prioritize the expansions, and eventually elect a leader.  If the political contention grows any louder, Mars may send a single Magos to become the new Lord Fabricator, and so all three are presently keeping their dispute quiet.  Nobody wants to become the one who complained loudly enough for Mars to feel the need to step in, least of all Lister Beraxos, who has his own reasons for wanting to avoid Martian scrutiny.
The Solstice military initially consisted of the security crews from Syracuse, Cognomen, and Fabique, but since then, its Skitarii have formed into their own distinct formation, with their own camouflage and uniform codes.  They make heavy use of Rangers, and are far less dependent on scorched-earth weapons than their Cognomen brethren; they also stand more lightly on the general Skitarii disdain for transports for infantry.  After all, their homeworld is a barren wasteland with no atmospheric pressure, so there is a need for them to use transports in daily life if they visit the surface.  Lacking Titans, they have no Corpus Secutarii, but the Solstice Robotic Legion is a clenched fist of steel and Ceramite, and their attendant Electropriests and Cybernetica Dominus warriors are fanatical in their devotion to the Machine.  In fact, this is a source of some derision from Cognomen, which could field a Cybernetica unit but chooses not to.  The most popular Cognomen philosophical mindset has little place in it for Robots, even Imperial ones, and views them as being a shade too close to true Abominable Intelligence.

Solstice makes use of convict labor, and sometimes employs bomb collars to keep the convicts in line.  Of course, there is no way off the moon that isn’t under the control of the Mechanicus, so this may not always be needed, but it does come up from time to time.

The world has a few small Lagrange stations between itself and Equinox, and between itself and Tertius.  They consist of various asteroid redirection facilities, which can collect space rocks and debris, which is then either melted on site or redirected to Solstice proper.  This serves to clear the remains of Glasian ships after their assaults on Septiim, at a small scale.  Heavier defense stations and small orbital docks allow for limited manufacture and protection over Solstice’s surface, but the subterranean work takes priority, and is far more productive.

The system of Septiim is a precious jewel in the galaxy’s outer fringes.  The presence of fully three non-terraformed and shirtsleeves-habitable worlds in one system, with three gravity-anchor gas giants in the outer system, is extraordinarily rare.  That humans and Eldar alike would have missed it for colonization beggars belief.  Nevertheless, no alien has yet laid claim to the Septiim system, and it has remained a human colony of the Imperium for well over two thousand years of relative stability, despite everything.  Referred to colloquially as a Pasture Gate system, both for the tendency of such systems to support immense agriculture and the general need for those systems to hold massive defenses, these systems are treasures beyond price for the Administratum.