Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Techpriesthood (section)

==Cloudburst Tech-Adepts==

Cognomen Skitarii are loyal to Mars first and Cognomen second.  Their postings take them all over the world, in small offices, massive barracks, and rapid response call bunkers.  Though the initial contingent was a mere eighty thousand, the size and importance of Cognomen have increased immensely, and so has the Skitarii.  Onager Dunecrawlers and Ironstriders patrol the dying savannas, marching legions of metal-legged soldiers circuit the factories and construction sites, and elite red and black robed guards keep vigil over the Containment Vaults and Iron Armory.  Cognomen’s desire to stay on Mars’s good side expresses itself in the Skitarii it arms being given the very best weapons the expanding Forge World can afford to build.  The Skitarii of Cognomen, however, take the exact opposite approach to warfare as the dour and gloomy Titanshields.  They have no fixation on penance or purging mistakes.  Skitarii of Cognomen fight to see the Imperium – through its alliance with Mars – expand and grow.  The Skitarii use weapons like the mighty Galvanic Rifle, the Transuranic Rifle, and the Eradication Beamer in their formations.  Of course, these weapons do leave some impact on the world around them, but it is transitory at worst, not the crawling horror of Phosphex or permanent irradiation of Radium Blasters.

The Solstice Techpriesthood concerns itself with the Quest for Knowledge as all Tech-priests do, but their relative newness and lack of established infrastructure limits their ability to project much firepower through the Electro-Priesthood.  They do have a Legio Cybernetica contingent on their Forge Moon, which even Cognomen lacks, but their presence in the greater Sector is presently too small to weigh heavily on the future of Cloudburst.

The Techpriesthood of Cloudburst fills many of the roles they fill elsewhere in the Imperium.  In addition to administrating and maintaining the various manufacturing facilities of worlds in the Sector and Circuit, they also keep a weather eye out for any scraps of archaeotech that may yet linger among the bones of the ancient human Federation.

This is more likely to be effective in this sector than in many others.  Unlike the core sectors of old Imperial space like Ultramar or Cadia, the Cloudburst Sector has both had very few Imperial colonization attempts by proportion to its size, and recent ones at that.  Also unlike most regions of space with constant piratical activity or extensive Imperial trade shipping, there is little traffic in the Cloudburst Sector’s history, and none before M39.  This means that archaeotech caches in the region are more likely to have never been touched since their abandonment when the Imperium finds them, and that makes the likelihood of finding them intact much higher.

Of course, the odds of any STC surviving the fifteen thousand years since the last known building of one are slim, but the Mechanicus never gives up.  The vastness of the Sector and Circuit have not stopped yielding treasures to loot and worlds to settle, not once since their mapping has begun, and neither the Explorators nor the Basilikon have ever ended their search.

The Mechanicus also maintains the crucial defenses of the Sector, especially the many surface-to-space guns that its worlds need now to defend themselves from the mad Glasians.  The Mechanicus has built and installed hundreds of silos, Defense Lasers, and satellite weapons across Cloudburst, and demand is only increasing.  The Cognomen Techpriesthood considers these weapons to be sacred implements of the Omnissiah and Machine God, and the brilliant discharge of their arms to be the roaring hate of the Motive Force.  Each gun or silo, regardless of locale, serves as a local temple to the Cult Mechanicus.  Whole armies of Skitarii and even Cohort Solstice Robots have fielded in defense of these guns on the eve of Glasian Migrations or pirate raids.  Cognomen itself sports fully forty batteries of these Defense Lasers, and four dozen silos.

Solstice itself is a quickly expanding cornerstone of the Mechanicus operations in the Sector.  They lack Cognomen’s obsession with the power of names, and unlike Cognomen, they build Robots.  These differences, so small in the overall scheme of things, are a cause of some dogmatic disagreements and even acrimony between the two allied Forges.  Of course, there is nothing the leaders of Cognomen would like more than for Solstice to swear allegiance to Cognomen, but there is no real chance that that will happen.  Solstice manufactures vast amounts of material for its size, but it is rather small.  So far, it has taken on the burden of manufacturing the supplies of the Blue Daggers that they do not either build for themselves or subcontract out to Flaxweave Foundry or Cognomen.  Of course, Mars does not yet quite trust them with the designs of the absurdly-rare variants of the ancient Legionary equipment or even the Centurion, but they have given Solstice the designs to the Land Raider and Storm Eagle.

Among its duties to proselytize, defend, and explore, the Mechanicus also runs the non-Astartes arms factories of the Sector.  After the disastrous loss of Chlorit, Brotherhood, and Scalding, the Imperial Sector Command finally admitted that the traditional Imperial system of having interconnected industry between the worlds of Cloudburst was too dangerous to continue while the Glasian attacks worsen.  The vast space between the habitable clusters of stars in Cloudburst makes the odds of relief forces being able to respond to sudden assaults against Imperial worlds slim, and Cognomen’s strapped resources mean it is not able to supply all industrial goods to the Sector.

Consequently, much of the Mechanicus’s duties outside exploration, religion, and war revolve around building and operating factories and smithies in the cities and outposts of the Imperium in Cloudburst.  Cloudburst’s major population centers – Septiim, Nauphry, Coriolis, Thimble, and Hapster – tend to be either fresh Imperial colonies in places of colossal resources, or ancient human worlds the Imperium has reclaimed.  Thus, these worlds usually have both a large resource and infrastructural base to manufacture goods and an insatiable need for them.

The Adeptus Mechanicus operates many of these facilities, and the prevailing view among the Machine God’s adherents in the Sector is that the production of these goods is second to the importance of maintaining their mechanical charges in perfect working order.  That they are paid to do this and that people enjoy their products is nice, but the working order of factory machines is paramount and all-encompassing.  The few remaining archaeotechnological factories in the Sector are heavily-guarded relics, protected at all times by solemn Tech-Guard and chanting Priests, who wave incense burners and iron cogwheels in supplication of presses and assembly lines.

The Mechanicus has one final duty, one that is both expensive and onerous.  The Techpriesthood of Solstice and Maskos especially find themselves burdened by the responsibility of disposing of the gigatons of Chaos-tainted remains after each Glasian Migration.  They include wrecked ships, destroyed vehicles, and millions of corpses.  Although the Mechanicus accepts this duty as a necessary one, faced with the alternative of widespread Xenotech-Heresy or mass contamination, it is an unproductive and dangerous responsibility that some Techpriests regard as punishment detail, fairly or not.