Askellon Sector - Cyclopia Bush Wars: Less than a standard year after the tragedy at Aventine, Imperial commanders across the Cyclopia Sub-Sector reported a heavy upsurge in Ork activity, each on a world that had come under attack by these barbarous aliens within the last standard century or so. In each of these original instances, the Ork attacks had been repulsed, but only at a high cost in lives to the Imperium and only after very heavy fighting indeed. With the vast bulk of planetary defence units redeployed to Vaxi (and now destroyed), only second line defence forces remained, and these were woefully understrength and outnumbered by the Ork invaders. Over the course of the next solar month, a vicious bush war developed across a dozen worlds in the sub-sector.The threat was rarely so great as to threaten the complete collapse of any single warzone, but ever grave enough that Imperial forces were constantly on the defensive and never allowed to muster a credible counter-attack. The enemy was of a type referred to by Astra Militarum tacticae adepts as "Feral Orks" -- Greenskins that for whatever reason were not possessed of the usual range of ramshackle yet highly destructive weapons, vehicles, and other strange equipment often encountered in their hands. Instead, these Orks wielded primitive, pre-industrial weaponry, along with what items they could scavenge from the battlefields of previous generations or from defeated enemies. Where these invaders came from or how they had reached the worlds in question, none of the commanders on the ground knew, a critical weakness that ultimately led to their doom.Had the Askellon Sector's military command been in any fit state, formalised procedures would have been set in motion to eradicate the Ork presence rising across the sector. Experienced commanders with sufficient clearance would have known or been able to ascertain that the Orks were the result of the bizarre manner in which their species spreads across the galaxy. Each time the Orks fight, their bodies shed microscopic spores which lodge upon the ground and much later develop into subsequent Orkoid generations.In areas where the Greenskins have won dominance, these creatures are integrated into the pre-existing Ork "kultur." Where they appear upon ground where the Orks have been defeated, they carry on the war, ignorant of the earlier defeats of their forebears but still driven by a deep-rooted biological imperative to avenge them. The only way to avert such an infestation in the aftermath of an Ork invasion is to set the ground to fire with constant eradication sweeps, a duty innocently neglected by the second-line defenders left on to hold their worlds.Inevitably, the defenders were overwhelmed. Across each of the affected worlds the beastly Orks rose up as one, having reached a critical mass of numbers and raw, savage bloodthirst. The worlds fell in an orgy of death, a million and more defence force troops slaughtered by the primitive savages. It would be over a solar decade before the sector was able to mount an effective campaign of reconquest after having restored something of its previous strength, but by then those worlds had very little worth reclaiming, and the effort of scouring the soil of the Greenskins' spores meant that any such campaign was judged highly unlikely to succeed.