Mars has always been a beautiful world to those with the senses to appreciate it. Raw, windswept data sweeps across the ravaged red sands of the plundered world with tidal force. Ancient scrap-code and echoed binharic cants swirl and dance like breakers beaten to foam against the vaults and firewalls of impregnable Martian forges and saviour stacks. Man returned life to Mars only to savage it for its mineral worth and render untold glories down to fine red dust once again, but in those echoes whispers the knowledge that such things were once possible, and must therefore be possible again for the mind with grit enough to sift the shifting dunes of scattered nonsense floating through the noosphere for a glimpse of meaning.
Beautiful, yes, but maddening in turn. Ask the ocean how to build a world and see what it tells you. To the Priests of the Cult Mechanicus, failure means only that they lack the means, and if the Adeptus Mechanicus knows one thing with absolute certainty, it is this: Given sufficient time, the statistical likelihood of attaining insight to overcome a barrier approaches certainty. When a mind isn't linked to such temporal concerns as ageing, it allows the Tech-Magii to be extraordinarily patient...
In the closing years of M37, a small and distant world far from the light of the Astronomicon was discovered by augurs of an Exploratory Fleet dispatched centuries hence from the Red Planet. Fact-grabbers and data-miners expertly flensed useful information from the worldwide data network that the descendents of long-forgotten Terran colonists had developed. Crudely effective, it confirmed to the lurking Martian fleet the vast resources of this distant world; the Magos commanding the fleet designated the planet Sigma Iotia II, promptly dismissed the irrelevant cultural garbage flooding the primitive communication network, and fell upon it with the cold, calculated hunger of an apex predator. Organized resistance against the Skitarii cohorts sent to pacify the populace ended in days. The planet was deemed compliant within a standard month. Magos Dominus Okmyx-β made planetfall and declared it his sovereign territory. Forge World Sigma Iotia was logged dutifully by accompanying cartographic scryers and the information dispatched to Mars.
While the fleet's colossal spaceborne factories and generators descended to the surface, medicae units attached to the Skitarii began assessing the remnants of the local population for suitability as servitors and labourers in the grist mills of their new overlords. Oxmyx's acquisition was not without a curious, lingering blight on his attention, however. While the rapacious engines of the Mechanicus set about converting a moving world to the iron-blooded machine it could be, Okmyx became plagued by a nagging subroutine in an emotional capacitor he had set aside to excise and parse human reaction to sensory inload - namely, worry. Concerned that he had overstepped his bounds as an Explorator by having laid claim to the world without permitting rights of first refusal to his few superiors on Mars, he set himself on the path of righteousness with a fervour only a machine could sustain and a piety reserved for those few in the Mechanicus that allowed for a soul, and through it the possibility of damnation...
Sigma Iotia quickly became a Forge World in its own right, but one utterly devoted to the Martian ideal. Part manufactory, part shrine, every momentary fragment of data and every possible scrap of stray thought from lower level functionaries of his will was flash-cloned and saved by Okmyx's scribes and backup artisans. Sigma Iotia became a world steeped in repetition and rote, capable only of hoarding and collecting information rather than even the slightest hint of innovation or drive to discover. As a result, the information networks and noospheric capabilities of this relatively young Forge World are second to none, and its ceasless hunt for further information to stuff its librariums has lead to remarkable discoveries on the fringes of known space.
Some hold that Okmyx has lost his edge and that he serves merely as a glorified scribe servitor on an outpost of Mars, but those that have witnessed firsthand the pinpoint precision of the Iotian Skitarii and the skill with which his recovery clades pick through the rubble of civilizations judged extraneous to requirements know that Magos Okmyx-β still possesses the burning thirst to drag the Mechanicus out of the benighted Age of Waning and return it to the heights of its former power...
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