Setting:Cloudburst/Techpriesthood

Among the stars of Cloudburst, there is no institution older than the Adeptus Mechanicus is. Their growing Forge Worlds of Cognomen and Solstice hang in the darkness of the spacious Sector, aglow with the fires of industry. The expanding Sector has an unquenchable need for resources, ships, and machines, and the Techpriests are there to meet it.

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.

Activities

Dozens of worlds began feeding tithes to Cognomen’s vast forges. Orbital cradles, manufactorae, synth-presses, STC-series constructors, and assembly lines rose from what used to be grassland, and girdled the slowly dying world with industry. Temples to the Omnissiah and Arbites precinct-houses took their place alongside ancient warehouses and server farms. Hundreds of thousands of vast apartment towers for the rapidly rising population of the world and over fifty military bases sprouted from the ground. After several further attempts to gain clarity on their permission to build Knights, Cognomen gave up, and decided to build them anyway, though they edged away from building Cybernetica robots just yet. One forested world set aside for agriculture was quietly earmarked for use as a Knight World, and that fact conveniently forgotten when it came time for Cognomen to next report to Mars.

The fleets of the Cognomen and Solstice Basilikon Astra and Explorator ply every route between every cluster in the young Sector. Rogue Traders and Inquisitors who comb the Cloudburst Circuit for secrets and wealth often welcome Explorators flying the proud banner of MacDonald’s Finest, knowing that the Explorators of Cognomen have a desperate need to prove themselves, to Terra and Mars.

The Explorators of the Cloudburst Sector, regardless of their Forge World allegiance, seek archaeotech caches and habitable worlds for the Imperium. The fact that Cognomen was sitting in the middle of a habitable star cluster and never noticed for many thousands of years is a huge embarrassment to them. The other fact that their glorious predecessor, Archmagos Explorator Justin MacDonald, was able to find over a dozen habitable systems in under a decade of searching, is a point of pride to them, and the third fact that he found them within visible distance is a huge shame to them. Now, driven by the need to make up for past laxity, for the extra scrutiny of Mars, and the need to find fresh resources to take the fight to the Glasians and Orks, the Explorators of Cloudburst scramble across the Circuit to hunt down the vaguest hints of treasure and technology. Unlike in some other Segmentum Ultima border zones, Rogue Traders and Explorators in Cloudburst work together readily and voluntarily. Fleets of them, working in tandem, have dragged Space Hulks to Cognomen or Grand Anchor to be ripped apart, seen off alien invasions before the Administratum even learned about them, and discovered whole networks of lost human colonies to loot and plunder.

Fleet

The Basilikon Astra of Solstice and Cognomen is both less numerous and far better equipped than the Imperial Navy. Their warships patrol the Warp routes between Cognomen and Septiim, and Cognomen and its satrap worlds, with ceaseless vigilance and the best weapons money can buy. Although their ancient flagship, the Archetype, is long gone, the fleets of Cognomen are still formidable. The Cognomen yards are enormous and growing, and although it will be another thousand years before they catch up to the current size of the great Fabique Forge Yards, they are already large enough to manufacture every model of common Imperial ship.

As is usually the case, the Mechanicus reserves its best ships for itself. The cruisers that form the backbone of its flotillas are the most heavily armed for their tonnage in the Sector. Its heavier warships, including the fourteen-kilometer-long Ark Mechanicus Comprehension, are the toughest ships in their weight class in the entire Sector by far. Its Basilikon Astra has better relations with Rogue Traders than its Council of Magi does, and sometimes works alongside them, the Navy, or the Daggers on complex missions, or projects of technotheological consequence.

Ground and Air Forces

Among the military forces of the Sector, however, the mightiest is the Legio Congelatio. Although the Frostbite Army is minuscule compared to some older Legions, its short and bloody history has earned it infamy among other Imperial institutions.

The battle in which the destruction of the Legio occurred was a savage affair, with the Legio Congelatio squaring off against a Traitor Guard force of far greater size during the War for the Corumbino Nebula. The war engines of the Legio were able to drive off the scout and forward armor elements of the Traitor force without too much trouble, but the pressure applied by the Chaos force was relentless. The Corpus Secutarii forces protecting the Titans encountered rough terrain as the Titans advanced, and the Titan crews were left with a choice: abandon their escorts, or allow themselves to be slowed. The Legio chose the latter, and endured a punishing Manticore barrage from the Traitors. The final problem was that of a Chaos Titan force that accompanied the Traitors, from a Legio that remains unidentified. The Titan force consisted of four engines, accompanied by a pair of Chaos Shadowswords. As soon as they came within range, the Congelatio Titans engaged with the super-long-range energy weapons that were the hallmark of the Legio, and managed to destroy a Ravager before it could return fire. However, just as the Chaos force and the Loyalist force entered direct battle with each other, a third party entered the fray.

A wing of eighty-five Dark Eldar aircraft armed with Void Lances appeared at the edge of the engagement. Raking the assembled Titans with their dark energy beams, the Titans withered under the unimaginable technosorcery of the evil xenos. Chaos and Imperial Titans alike fell, destroyed or crippled, as the Chaos artillery kept up its savage barrage. When the Black Winter Warlord Titan of Cognomen’s force detonated from a lucky reactor kill, the chain reaction that ensued destroyed all of the Titans left in the fight, which had been forced together by the bad terrain.

The stunned Chaotic and Imperial forces outside the blast radius fell back. The loss of their Titan cover meant that the Chaos artillery could no longer operate so far from their caches, and they turned tail and ran. The Imperium noticed this and pursued, eventually driving the Chaos force off-world.

Since that time, Cognomen has been hastily expanding their Titan force. Although only one Reaver engine could be salvaged from the disaster that destroyed the Legion, Cognomen has since built ten Battle Titans and fifteen Scout Titans. A Warlord never leaves Cognomen, to ensure that the disaster of Corumbino never recurs. Another Warlord was lost in the duel with the Ork Supa-Gargant Bloodcrunch in M41.962, leaving the effective strength of the Legion at two dozen Engines. That is pathetic compared to Anvilus, Mars, Voss, or even the Lathes, but it is more than enough to have driven off the Third Glasian Migration unaided when the aliens foolishly attempted to conquer the Forge World in M41.600. When the Legion’s numbers rise to reach a new maniple number, or a number divisible by five, the new engines bud off from their existing maniple to form their own, and begin housing the next engines until their number reaches ten, then the maniple splits, and the newer one hosts the next few engines, and so on.

Contemporarily, Cognomen has begun to further expand its Titan Legion and its Corpus Secutarii. The Secutarii of all Titan Legions, of course, answer to the leadership of the Legion itself, not its attendant priests or Skitarii. However, the savage beatings the Legio Congelatio has endured over the years have hammered a sense of fatalistic and even remorseful pride into the Secutarii of Cognomen. The prevailing belief among the Titanshields – as the local Secutarii dub themselves – is that the world is not at fault for any of the troubles that have befallen the Legion. Rather, the very sector itself, the untamed wilderness of Imperial space beyond, or even the nature of the galaxy are siding against them. Secutarii of the Corpus Congelatio paint their armor black with green highlights, and are the most enthusiastic wielders of phosphor and irrad weapons in the Sector. Though this is understandably a huge liability in the largely defensive wars of the Sector, the Titanshields demand the right to wield the ancient hate of Mars.

Naturally, this is why the Titanshields are so often rebuked by other Imperial Commanders who do not share their passion for uninhabitable wastelands. The Titanshields therefore, often reluctantly, field Arc Weapons, Hellguns, and Galvanic weapons when they are fighting on Imperial worlds. The Axiarchs of the Titanshields are also sometimes seen adorning their armor with pieces of the destroyed six engines that started the Legio, as a mark of their shame and their determination to prevent it from happening again. This is a devotional effort, as no living Axiarch was present for the Corumbino campaign.

Legio Congelatio Composition

Legio Congelatio Composition (circa M41.999)

1. ([Command Variant] Warlord) Gold Blood
2. (Warlord) Punitive Spirits
3. (Warlord) Victrix Mechanicus
4. (Warlord) All Sights of the Machine
5. (Reaver) Scoured Alloys
6. (Warlord) Steed of Gods
7. (Reaver) Glory of Doom
8. (Reaver) Predator of Mars
9. (Reaver) Free Radical
10. (Warhound) Speeding Victory Along
11. (Warhound) Holy Motor
12. (Warhound) Speak Ye Faithful
13. (Warhound) Hound of Knowledge
14. (Warhound) Bulwark Mechanicus
15. (Warhound) Foe of the Faithless
16. (Warhound) Pack Leader
17. (Reaver) Ion Storms
18. (Warlord) Battlewrought
19. (Warhound) Cognomen Victorious
20. (Warhound) Crushing Blow
21. (Warhound) Canis Argentum
22. (Warhound) Unsubtle Arrival
23. (Warhound) Data Shielded
24. (Reaver) Oil of Conquest
25. (Warlord) Omnissiah’s Servant

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.

Unique Items

Any Forge World so far removed from Mars in doctrine and distance will inevitably develop a few quirks. Culturally or technotheologically, worlds like Cognomen go their own way on matters. The other worlds of the Sector have also developed various devices or customs that allow them to survive the absence of Cognomen’s attention, as Cognomen is unable to provide all of the finished goods that the worlds of the Sector need. Some few of these devices are listed below, along with their world of origin.

• The Maskos machine: Always referred to with an improper noun following the name of its host world, this machine is an enigma to the Adeptus Mechanicus. The STC for its manufacture was found on the world Maskos, a mere few years after its formal induction into the Imperium of Man. The Template was stored on an obviously third-party data preservation matrix, not that of the original Standard Template Constructor. The original device is lost to time, as are the associated ancillary files of the STC in question. This includes the optimal material atomic composition, date of invention, principal designer and engineer, and other information that has not been recovered from the Martian databases. The Maskos machines are the ultimate word in subterranean mining, especially that of worlds with low oxygen content in the crust. The devices can be controlled by remote operation, usually that of an Enginseer, at distances of up to half a mile, or more if relays are used. The machines are extremely expensive, and can be made more so by constructing its components out of materials more complex than steel. However, they quite rapidly pay for themselves. Their advanced boring tools do not rely on thermal tunneling beams, instead scooping raw material into itself using a combination of drills and abrading devices. More advanced models are also able to navigate themselves along veins of ore, although this is generally not needed. The machines are roughly seventeen meters wide, and power themselves using internal batteries, or from an external feed connected to them. They deposit materials in containers that the machine then extrudes from itself for collection. Oxygen can then be sprayed from the machine to make the tunnel it leaves behind itself breathable for the comfort of its operator.
• Petals: This unique drug is a product of the Drimmerzole flower fields. It is an antibiotic, called P-n-benzene-triarsenolysitide, which is able to lyse any known gram-positive bacteria’s cell membrane and wall without damaging human cells. However, it is also destructive against some human normal flora, and is thus generally used only in emergencies.
• Harpes: The Harpes are bladed weapons, pioneered by the Chlorit Reapers, and previously exclusive to them. With the destruction of Chlorit, and the removal of all of the world’s residents to Foraldshold, the Harpes has caught on with some of that world’s defenders, including its Tech-Guard. Some of the more inventive Adeptus Mechanicus personnel of the world have even found a way to create a Power Weapon variant of the blade. It is approximately three feet of handle followed by eighteen inches of blade, curved inwards toward the wielder, but edged on the outer edge and serrated on the inner, originally used for harvesting the plants of Chlorit’s farms.
• Razor autorifle: The Razor rifle is visibly descended from an Age of Strife-era hunting weapon. During the madness of Old Night, the Martian nobility (prior to their extermination by the nascent Techpriesthood) would sometimes alleviate their ennui and bloodlust by using their gene-mod labs to create abominable beasts, and unleashing them in the wilderness of Mars. When the climate control machines failed, the atmosphere that allowed this practice to continue ended, but the weapons that were abandoned did not simply cease to exist. Cognomen expatriates collected some of these weapons when they departed to establish their new home, and began exporting them to the Hapster colony in trade shortly after its establishment. Since then, many stockpiles of these weapons have made their way into the arsenals of Cloudburst military formations. The rifle uses the expanding gasses left behind after the explosion of the primer and powder of the cartridge to clear the chamber, like most modern guns. It comes in semi-automatic, automatic, and burst-fire modes. Cognomen spent thousands of years fine-tuning this design, and it is easily the match of the more popular Accatran and Voss patterns.
• Cognomen Siege Dreadnought: The most heavily armed of the Castraferrum variants, this Dreadnought is the preferred close-in combat Dreadnought of the Blue Daggers and Deathwatch. The Castraferrum Dreadnought chassis mounts the typical Siege Drill and integrated Heavy Flamer of the Martian template, with an Inferno Cannon mounted on the other arm. The distinction is a coaxial heavy stubber on the Inferno weapon, as well as a Storm Bolter mounted underslung from the main chassis. Coordinating all of these weapons can be intimidatingly difficult for a newly-interred Battle Brother, especially if the optional searchlight, Fragstorm package, triple Hunter-Killer missile rack, and smoke discharger are equipped as well. However, the sheer amount of room-clearing power the Cognomen Siege Dreadnought allows its occupant to employ at once is telling. More than one bunker of heretics or aliens have thought themselves impervious to the Imperium’s hate, right up until it knocked a wall down and set them on fire. Mars is aware of this development. Cognomen Magi successfully argued that this is not an act of Heretek, the sin of innovation. All they did, they explained, was affix a coaxial gun to a flamer, which some models of Imperial Knights already have, and put a Storm Bolter on something that carries them as a matter of course in other configurations. Since Cognomen has built a grand total of nine (one prototype, six for the Daggers, two for the Deathwatch) and there is no evidence of insanity in the known occupants, Mars suspects that there is no harm in keeping the template active.
• Cognomen-pattern Storm Bolter: Storm bolters are an ancient technology. Cognomen, called upon as it was to make the initial armaments of an entire Space Marine Chapter and the guns of untold billions of Guardsmen, created its own design based loosely on the Martian template to fill those needs. The weapon is bulky, even for a Storm Bolter, but quite versatile. This is because of its variable attachment points. The rear of the weapon has a point whereupon an ammunition feed, a stock, or a remote trigger could be mounted, while there are attachment points in front of and behind the magazine well. As such, the same device can be used as a co-axial mount on a cannon, a pintle mount for a tank, or an infantry weapon. The infantry variant usually uses a stock, a rear grip with trigger, and a forward pistol grip, while the Terminator variant uses a remote trigger and two armor mounts.
• Precision Guidance gloves: These are the other claim to fame in Maskos’s innovation history. These gloves are the design of a brilliant clothier who lived on Maskos shortly after it became a Subsector capital world. The gloves are now made exclusively for the military, and are twice the cost of standard Munitorum gloves. They are designed to allow for the least possible interference in the aim of a held weapon, while also being tightenable with a strap system on the back of the hand, allowing for instant closure of blood vessels by constriction in case of laceration of a blood vessel.
• Glowing Light colony barge: The region that contains the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit is bathed in radiation from ancient supernovae. This is not generally a problem for ships that travel through the Warp, since radiation in one realm of existence does not affect the other. However, for ships that must spend great lengths of time unprotected by a planet’s magnetosphere or outside of the Warp, like colony ships, this can necessitate the addition of military-grade hull shielding, which few civilian ships are outfitted to mount. Enter the starship-smiths of Nauphry. The Nauphry-unique Glowing Light colony barge was designed specifically to travel through the deep, uncharted wastes of the Sector and Circuit, to find and populate worlds. Its power plant and hull were custom-engineered to repel the effect of the ambient radiation of the region, and its powerful engine allows the ship to reach speeds usually reserved for Imperial Navy ships. Of course, this makes it a bit more expensive than most colony ships, but that improvement can pay for itself if the whole colony seed population reaches its destination unhindered by mechanical failure or cancer.
• Ballista Energy Artillery System: An ancient relic of the Terran Federation’s military forces. This weapon system uses a complex array of interleaved magnets, electric coils, and gated accumulator chambers to impart pulses of energy at incredible speeds to a sphere of gaseous metal molecules. The metal molecules are then collapsed into a tight pellet and flung out of the weapon at incredible speeds, using Dark Age technosorcery to keep the pellet as small as possible until impact. Upon impact, the pellet disperses in an instant, discharging vast amounts of electrical and thermal energy into the target. The weapon is extremely expensive and is of limited range, but its power annihilates light infantry and punches through simple walls as if they weren’t even there. Thanks to the high power requirements and delicate ammunition feeds, these weapons can’t be mounted on a moving vehicle, and the fact that only one copy of their STC has ever been found means that only Hapster and specific regiments equipped by Cognomen are ever outfitted with them. They are a favored tool of Septiim Guard and Hapster Bronze Legionnaire artillery regiments, and sometimes also find a home in the arsenals of the Ordo Reductor of Cognomen. Given that these weapons are only slightly more destructive than conventional shell artillery of equivalent tonnage, they are not popular with most regiments, but those that do use them swear by them.