Editing Setting:Cloudburst/ABS00273 (section)

==Description==

ABS000273 is the most recently discovered human world within the bounds of the Cloudburst Sector.  Its discovery was an accident.  A tithe ship carrying its wares to the nearest Sector Fortress for distribution dropped out of the Warp to fix some onboard equipment when the planet happened to be passing between the ship and the nearest star.  The ship’s helmsman dutifully recorded the anomaly for further investigation, and two years later, an Explorator vessel catalogued the planet for exploration.  However, the year was M41.499, and the Cloudburst Sector had far larger concerns.

It was only in the aftermath of the Third Glasian Migration that the Imperium had the resources and time to observe the planet.  The first thing they noticed was that the native human population had long since collapsed.  Most of the archaeotech of the world had eroded away thousands of years before, and the native population had scattered to the winds.  However, the Imperium has not yet begun attempting to civilize the planet, nor has it introduced the Imperial Cult.  The Imperial observers have noticed that the humans of the planet below seem to be connected in some way.  When individuals in one family group suffer injury, others in the group that could not possibly see the incident occur begin reacting in pain, and immediately dispatch aid to the injured individual.  How this could be, the Imperium does not know, but no colony ventures shall occur until the Imperium has established how this is happening.  A small team of Administratum historians and observers are presently orbiting the planet, making observations in anticipation of a later report.

However, the Administratum is unaware of one development on the planet.  A team of Mechanicus Explorators, there to check up on the system and scan the rest of its planets for usable resources, detected an archaeotech cache on the planet of which the Administratum has not been informed.  In M41.948, these Explorators found an underground chamber at the planet’s volcanically-active south pole.  Over the chamber, there is an energy shield, one of unequalled power, more than enough to block Nova Cannon fire.  A Dark Age wonder of power generation fuels the shield, drawing power from local volcanism, solar energy, and wind, and whomever built it was wise enough to hide the generators under the shield.  How the Administratum observers in orbit have not yet seen the huge shield, the Explorators have no idea.  The Mechanicus would be pursing more aggressive methods of entering the shield, were it not for the dormant volcano from which the shield’s generator draws its power.  Bombarding the shield would increase power draw, which could trigger the volcano, ruining the shield and the base, and killing thousands of primitives.  Burrowing under it could have the same effect.

The Adeptus Mechanicus of Cognomen plan to covertly research and possibly slip through the shield to find the chamber below.  Preliminary scans indicate that the chamber contains a large metal object, asymmetric and flat.  The Mechanicus’s best guess is that it is a shipwreck of some kind, but almost seventeen thousand years old.