Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Lord Fabricator Lister Beraxos, Lord of Cognomen and Liege of ABX202020==
{{Topquote|The Machine God inspires us. The Omnissiah directs us. The Motive Force propels us. There is power in knowledge. We’ve all heard the words. How many people stop to think about them? I mean really think about them? What they mean, why they’re so important? Nobody. Nobody but those of us who will get everybody we know killed if we misinterpret them.|Lister Beraxos}}

The Lord Fabricator of [[Setting:Cloudburst/Cognomen|Cognomen]], the Archmagos Executor of the [[Setting:Tri-Sector|Cloudburst]] Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and Northern Oldlight Exo-zone, the Liege of ABX202020, and the Fief-Lord of Foraldshold, Lord Lister Beraxos could make a fair claim to being the most powerful man in the Sector. From his indestructible archaeotech labyrinth in the darkest dungeon of the Castle of the Forges, Beraxos sits at the center of the spider’s web of Techpriests and Tech-adepts that are all that keep the Sector from sliding into anarchy.

He does not give this impression. Unlike Lerica, Quintus, Drake, Maynard, or even Arden, Beraxos is a believer in the lack of need for ostentation. Beraxos eschews any flashy garb or raiment. For an average citizen on the streets of any planet he doesn’t rule, Beraxos looks incongruously like an ordinary Techpriest, albeit an old one. He wears his face unadorned by gadgetry, his robes are oil-stained and loose, and he only has four visible mechadendrites.

Beneath this unremarkable exterior lies the mind of a genius. Lister Beraxos is one of the most intelligent, ambitious, and dangerous men in Cloudburst history. He does not look like a tank because he does not want to. He does not dress like a fop because he likes it when Drake underestimates him. He has so few visible augmentations because his augmentations are designed specifically to look like human flesh, and he has the bare-skinned face of a junior Techpriest because the pseudoflesh mounted on his state-of-the-art facial augmetics is a work of art itself.

Beraxos is more than an administrator, a director, or a priest. He is a master manipulator, and has more connections in random places across the Sector than most of its resident Inquisitors. His responsibilities are heavy and getting heavier, but he would rather die than let his stress show visibly. He is determined to shoulder the burdens of ruling over the Cloudburst network of Forge Satraps and outposts, by himself if at all possible.

Somewhat similar to Quintus, Beraxos is the first man in his family to ascend to a position of high rank. Unlike Quintus, Beraxos loves it. Lister Beraxos is a name that history shall have etched into its metal pages, he confidently believes. He is loyal to Mars, unshakably so, but to his subordinates, that looks more changeable than it really is. He likes to keep his options open, or appear to, and that makes him hard to predict.

In these times of Ending, when the Imperium teeters on the brink of wholesale societal collapse, the Mechanicus benefits from men like him whether it can bear admitting that or not. Beraxos has done more to preserve and expand Cognomen than any Lord Fabricator it has had since the day it was founded. By his order, whole fleets of Explorator vessels ply the hot gas of the Circuit, collecting knowledge and power for his hoard. The laboratories of Cognomen churn daily, producing data and results. Even if some are retreading ground that Mars laid down millennia ago, that does not discourage or redirect him.

Mars rarely reflects the loyalty of its subjects. This is a sad but true state of affairs that has persisted across the breadth of post-Isstvan history, when trust in the Imperium died forever. Even the most loyal and pious Forge Worlds, Lucius and Voss Prime, rarely enjoy the full support of the entire Martian catalogue of ancient blueprints and STC data.

Of course, Mars doesn’t have all of the ancient blueprints and STC data, but even that which it does possess is rarely doled out generously. Some Forge Worlds older than the Unification Wars don’t have the means to build the [[Baneblade]], a twenty-one thousand-year-old tank. Time and again, Beraxos and his predecessors and subordinates have begged for blueprints, designs, artifacts, anything to alleviate the burdens of defending and providing for the people of Cloudburst, and with the notable exception of their permission to make the Legion Congelatio, silence has been their reply.

Beraxos has had enough of silence. By his order, the Forge World has begun building a Knight World satrap, ABX202020, in the nearby system of [[Setting:Cloudburst/ABX2|ABX2]]. Beraxos has authorized the creation of weapons based on recovered archaeodata from the Cloudburst Circuit without waiting for a reply from Mars, and has even begun ordering his Explorators to begin conquering pirate bases in the Cloudburst Circuit and the dense nebulae between Cloudburst and Drumnos, in anticipation of needing more defenses in the region later.

The acquisition of knowledge, firepower, and bases is hardly in opposition to Martian doctrine, naturally, so there is little question as to whether Mars or the Inquisition would complain too much if he were in contact with his superiors, but Beraxos knows full well, as all Techpriests do, about the importance of ritual and protocol. He is simply not going to wait any more for a yea or nay on building a force of Knights, he is not going to wait for approval to enslave the pirates he captures and work them to death in his mines, and he has stopped caring to pause for a Solar response before producing non-standard Dreadnought designs for the Blue Daggers.

Will there come a reckoning for Lister Beraxos? Maybe. Until then, he holds his head high, knowing that he is doing more for Cloudburst than Mars ever has. Privately, Beraxos knows he is crossing lines. He does not allow his subordinates, even his planned replacement Archmagos Lucana, know how much he hates defying the letter of the law. His belief in Mars and the Machine are not purely doctrinal; Beraxos is a philosophical man, and he knows how easy it is to allow justification for acts to become excuses for acts. He confides in nobody, but he can feel the weight of his silent defiance pressing on his mind as he sits alone in the Cogitation Chamber of his Castle. It may also be, he has admitted to himself, that Mars has far bigger problems. Perhaps their silence stems from severe distraction, not rudeness.

His other responsibilities sometimes blessedly intrude on his moody introspection. As Lord Fabricator, the process of transforming Cognomen from the isolated patch of grass it used to be to the unthinkable powerhouse of a true Forge World falls under his purview. Beraxos spends fully half of his waking hours on the task of overseeing the expansion of the shipbuilding capacity of the Sector, and much of the rest directing the millions of laborers and Tech-adepts under his authority to improve and multiply the manufactorae and forges of Cloudburst’s few industrialized worlds. Beraxos himself hates fighting, and would rather run and live to run another day than risk himself in battle. He hasn’t been to a world that isn’t Cognomen or Celeste in eighty-four years, and doesn’t intend to unless Solstice needs him to fill in for its leadership in an emergency.

If the Techpriesthood of Stygies were to learn of the secret lab that he and Paris are building to study Glasian technology, they would scramble to aid him, and he has pondered telling them, perhaps in exchange for the Leman Russ Vanquisher cannon blueprints they have hoarded. The problem there is that he would never be able to start building them without other Forge Worlds noticing and asking questions, and he is simply not as enthusiastic about the potential of Glasian tech as Paris is or the Stygies Techpriests would be. He is fully prepared for Watch Station Peacekeeper to be a complete write-off.

Beraxos believes in maintaining positive relations with the subordinate groups of the various Mechanicus military forces. Among the forces of Cognomen Subsector alone, he counts PDF, Guard, Navy, Basilikon Astra, Explorators, Skitarii, Secutarii, Knights, Electro-Priests, Titans, and his own personal bodyguards. The full count of Sector-wide Mechanicus martial assets includes Legio Cybernetica Imperial Robots and the Ordo Reductor, as well. On paper, the conventional Astra Militarum forces answer to the Subsector Overlord, but since the Subsector Overlord essentially answers to him regarding the disposition of his forces’ equipment and transport, Beraxos could quite possibly give them orders. He isn’t stupid enough to try, of course, as that would shake Mars from their distraction faster than anything else could, and if they didn’t kill him, the Inquisition would.

Still, he treats his colleagues in the autonomous or Martian branches of the military with respect and distance. Thanks to the extensive reforms instituted after the Schism of Mars, he can directly command very few forces himself. Ultimately, the future of his interactions with Mars comes down to their reception to the revelation of the existence of House Matraxia. If he were to create his Knights House on Cognomen itself, he could point to Mars and say, correctly, that Mars already has a Knight House – Taranis – so he would hardly be breaking precedent. He chose to put the House on ABX202020 because he can exert control over who comes and goes to the system, and so that they have room to grow and flourish. However, to anybody who sees this, it would look like a guilty party covering up knowing misconduct. Beraxos is between a rock and a hard place, and he lives with it every single day.

Beraxos does not share the distaste that most of Cognomen feels for Robots. On the contrary, he would like for Cognomen to gain a Cybernetic Legion, just as Fabique, Syracuse, and Solstice already have. However, he knows that Cognomen’s rise from a provincial parking lot to the powerhouse of the Galactic North is already moving too quickly for some of his neighbors. There are also a lot of demands on the time and resources of Cognomen, not the least of which being building a Titan Legion and Knight World more or less from scratch. Building a Cybernetica Legion at the same time might require more sanctified Techpriests than he can actually devote to so many tasks concurrently without diminishing his all-important industrial output. Once ABX202020 is up to its full power and the many thousands of factories, hab blocks, seminaries, and nutrient recyclers he is presently ordering built on Cognomen are online, then the number of people the Techpriesthood will induct shall be large enough to focus on Robots. Until then, House Matraxia’s Knights and Legion Congelatio’s Titans will have to be enough.

Beraxos eschews battle and carries no visible armaments, although his augmetic left arm has a hidden Needler inside it, and can split open to disgorge two daggers that are made of a special polymer and do not show up on radar or metal scans.