Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Techpriesthood (section)

==History==


The aftermath of the Horus Heresy left total anarchy on Mars.  The Red Planet was all but destroyed by the bitter in-fighting.  Collapses and fires started in the Librarius Omnis destroyed what few databanks had survived five thousand years of stagnation and decay.  Exabytes of data survived the scrapcode, the war, the ecological exposure, the actual and electronic daemons, and the radiation of the Schism of Mars, but they had destroyed hundreds of yottabytes the Librarius once held.  The surviving Techpriests united in their fiery hatred of the Hereteks, the Chaos-worshippers, for the affronts they had levelled against the Machine God.

However, even the Loyalists were divided.  After the war ended and the next began, that of the Great Scouring, the surviving leaders of the Martian priesthood were dissatisfied with their vengeance against the Heretics.  They were losing autonomy, thanks to the reforms of Guilliman, and though the Treaty of Mars was still intact, the dogmatic trend the newly rebranded Adeptus Mechanicus was showing indicated to the schismatics that their preferences would not be allowed forever.

The schismatic sect of Techpriests believed that the human body was as sacrosanct as the Emperor said, and so were machines.  To fuse them when it was not necessary was an insult to the human form and the machine function, they claimed.

Technically, this was not a violation of Mechanicus doctrine.  Techpriests in the personal employ of the Lord Commander Guilliman himself had preached that exact doctrine; a force of Techpriests who practiced it, also, freed Calth.  The Mechanicus’s numbers had not been so lightly damaged that they could afford to be picky on points of non-Heretek doctrine.  Still, the movement against human-replica augmetics was growing and forceful.

Both for the good of the Mechanicus and for their own sake, the schismatic faction agreed to separate from Mars.  Somewhat surprised by this, the new Fabricator General allowed it, under the strict commandment that the schismatics not create a Titan Legion unless Mars gave them permission.  Disgruntled, but able to smell the changing of the wind, the schismatics agreed.

Taking to ship, the schismatics flew as far as they could from the Red Planet without leaving the Astronomican’s light.  The massive Ark Mechanicus they had chosen as their vessel was a true monster of the Basilikon Astra.  Named the ''Archetype'', a relic from before the Age of Strife had so fully damaged the archives of the Librarius Omnis that much of the knowledge of mega-engineering was gone, the twenty-kilometer Ark had more than enough space and defenses to protect the schismatics, and ferry them to their new home.

Of course, finding one would prove challenging.  The sheer volume of space beyond the reach of the Imperium ensured that the schismatics would find themselves lost more than once.  As the pre-made human-form augmetics they had brought with them ran out, the schismatics were forced to compromise with the naked steel ones they opposed on general principal.  They traveled on, finding world after world that was lost to heresy, destroyed by the Eldar, scorched by the Warp, polluted by Orks, or else under Imperial control.
After nearly twenty years of nonstop flight, the ''Archetype'' finally found the savanna world, covered in recognizably Diaspora-descended plants.  The vast ship discharged its passengers and cargo, and they began the work of settling their new world.

For two hundred years, the schismatics worked around the clock.  Temples, factories, farms, mines, gantries, docks, laboratories, and far more rose from the rock and dirt like metal trees.  Though the new colonists had to be careful to preserve as much of the planet’s ecosystem as possible at first, thanks to their lack of Agri-worlds to feed themselves, the world still became an unpleasant place to visit before long.  Regular psychic and courier communication with Mars established in the Red Planet’s minds that their breakaway cousins were still intact (and still loyal, more importantly).

After two centuries of hard work, Cognomen was declared a Forge World by Mars, and the planet settled in.  Though the original rejection of non-flesh-form augmetics had slackened somewhat by necessity, they remained more popular than the naked steel sort did, and the planet’s people were determined to maintain their adherence to Mechanicus doctrine in all respects, lest Mars think their colony was going rogue.

Isolation treated Cognomen well.  Though they had no satraps or vassals, the world grew regardless, and their sizeable defenses proved to be enough to drive off the occasional opportunistic Ork or pirate who thought to loot the world.
Infrequent interactions with other Imperial worlds allowed for a small-scale trade economy, mostly with worlds in the Hapster Subsector and the Drumnos Sector to the galactic south.  The presence of the massive radioactive clouds present all around the world, and the asteroid clusters and black holes to the trailing direction, meant that Cognomen sponsored little Exploratory and colonization effort in the time between their founding and MacDonald’s excursions.

Their isolation worsened with the catastrophic loss of Archmagos Dominus Velcra Osterman and the ''Archetype'' in a joint military exercise with their brethren from Naxos, when the exercise was suddenly assaulted by a vast fleet of Ork Freebooters.  Though Osterman fought with ruthless courage, the Orks were too many.  He was forced to detonate the antimatter/plasmic hybrid power core of his ship in order to prevent the greenskins from stealing it, and the resultant explosion destroyed much of the Ork fleet.  Though the Basilikon Astra was able to mop up the Orks and salvage the materials of all the destroyed ships, the loss of their ancestral home, their war leader, and their best ship led Cognomen to seal themselves off further from the rest of the Imperium.

However, time was not on their side.  The sudden discoveries of their brilliant Magos Explorator Justin MacDonald of several shirtsleeves-habitable worlds within a non-Navigated flight from their homeworld – well within their telescope range – led to an uproar on the Forge World.  How, the people of Cognomen asked angrily, had they managed to miss prizes so obvious?  They could have built their own network of satraps and vassals, if they had only known about those systems.  Their stars were easily visible from Cognomen’s orbit, also, which only raised further questions.

The leadership of Cognomen’s Techpriesthood, sheepish at the depth of their error, publicly admitted to nothing.  However, even the most militantly isolationist Magos of the Cognomen senior leadership could smell the changing of the wind again.  In fewer than ten years, over two hundred Explorators, Rogue Traders, and Departmento Cartigraphicae convoys had departed from nearby Drumnos and Naxos.  By far the most came from the glorious shipbuilding hub Fabique, a Subsector battlefleet anchorage and vast Forge World in the neighboring Naxos Sector.  Systems, shipwrecks, bizarre astral phenomena, a Warp Storm, and far more appeared on maps and charts of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.  Cognomen’s isolation was ending.

MacDonald, of course, was obligated to share the discoveries he was making with the greater Imperium.  If Cognomen wanted their strident objections to claims of Heretek and subversion to be heeded at all, they couldn’t simply keep their discoveries for themselves.  Therefore, when Hapster Subsector Master of the Administratum, Subsector Lord Fisher, contacted Cognomen with a proposal to add Cognomen to the expanding Subsector, the Techpriests listened patiently, considered the offer, and told Fisher to stuff himself.  If the Forge World were going to become part of the larger Imperium, they would do so on the terms of the Mechanicus, not the Administratum.

The High Fabricator contacted Mars himself, using a courier boat.  Aboard the boat, he included all manner of information about the sector, including all of MacDonald’s discoveries, what little they had managed to map before he had gone on his journeys, and lists of known threats.  When the courier boat was lost with all hands in a pirate raid, the Fabricator tried again, and this time, his message got through.

One year later, an Astropathic message returned from Mars, with basic information about what the Senate had decided about the region.  Cognomen learned that the region was to become a new sector, with the capital to be decided, and Cognomen was to become its infrastructural lynchpin.


This was not the idea solution, from Cognomen’s perspective.  The world certainly could expand its facilities enough to allow for such a boost of industrial and military production, but not without destroying its agricultural and mining capacity.  Furthermore, that sort of expansion would necessitate the creation of far larger defenses and offensive projection capacity, simply to defend its off-world resource base.  That would all but demand creation of a Titan Legion, which Mars had specifically outlawed.
When this was tactfully pointed out to Mars by a series of Astropathic messages, Mars replied that the stricture against Titan construction was lifted.  Cognomen was left stunned.  They were free to build their own War God-machines?  Further, the next message imparted, Cognomen would benefit from an entire army of Skitarii, and the right to manufacture all hulls of Imperial vessels and most armored vehicles.  Six Titans were dispatched to serve as the core of the new Legion, led by the Ded Morozko, a Warlord, under Chief Princeps Leminkova.  After their loss, enough wreckage was returned to begin the reassembly of one Reaver.
Things began happening very quickly.  While the leadership of the planet sent requests for clarification to Mars, asking if the stricture against Knights was also lifted, Cognomen sent out a dizzying array of vessels, to begin the creation of Agri-worlds for themselves, and scout vessels to identify proper sites for satrap Forges.  When the wave of colony ships began flying all around them after MacDonald’s successes in the Oldlight Exo-zone, Cognomen was ready.