The xenos Orks are an omnipresent foe across the entire Imperium, and the Askellon Sector is far from immune to their periodic incursions, known in their own debased tongue as “Waaaghs!” No matter where they are to be found, Orks follow a broadly similar pattern of expansion and invasion. Initially divided into primitive warring tribes, Orks spend generation after generation fighting amongst themselves until a leader strong enough to defeat all rivals establishes a single empire. This stage invariably sees the Orks take to the stars upon passing Space Hulks or by the ramshackle warships they somehow contrive to construct despite their evidently primitive minds. When an Ork empire goes on the warpath in this way, it is looking not for territory to expand into, but foes to defeat, for the species is natural selection writ large, the strong growing ever stronger with the defeat of each enemy.
Inevitably, such invasions bring the Orks into Imperial space, triggering calamitous wars indeed. It is only at the expense of countless lives and immeasurable resources that such invasions are defeated, as they have been on numerous occasions throughout the history of the Askellon Sector. Yet the Orks as a species do not fear, or even truly understand, the notion of their own mortality, believing they can never truly be defeated. In this they are correct, for when Orks fight and die in great concentrations, they release many millions of spores, seeds by which future generations are spawned. The spores grow and eventually produce more Orks, and though it may be much later, these continue the war the previous generation began. Thus, once an Ork invasion touches a world, that planet is invariably doomed to incessant war as ever more spores are released, the cycle continuing for all time.
The majority of the Ork invasions that have struck the Askellon Sector over the millennia have emanated from the unexplored Wilderness Space to the Trailing of the sector beyond the Rubicon and Thule Sub-Sectors. It has long been surmised that a substantial Ork empire must lie somewhere in the inter-sector void, for it is from that direction that many invasions have descended, following the very same Warp routes that Port Lockhart was established to protect. The Imperial Navy squadrons of Askellon Station Command have struggled to hold back numerous Ork attacks in their history, from small raids to huge migrations, but when aided by the fleets of the Surena Dynasty, they have just about managed to do so. The smaller attacks are thought to represent individual Ork warleaders flexing their muscles or testing the sector’s defences. It has been suggested that the largest attacks actually represent Orks being displaced or even fleeing some foe that is feeding on them out in the darkness. If true, the scale and nature of that enemy cannot be imagined, and many amongst the Ordo Xenos dismiss such theories out of hand.
While the squadrons based at Port Lokhart have been largely successful in repelling Ork attacks on the verges of the Thule Sub-Sector, in other areas the situation is very different. The Askellon Sector accounts for an enormous volume of space; it is estimated that over the years, several dozen frontier worlds have been entirely lost to Ork invasion. On the world of Myros Kappa in the Stygies Sub-Sector, however, they simply cannot be eradicated. For some reason that no xenos-savant has yet been able to explain, the Orks keep returning to Myros Kappa, intent upon tearing down its defences and claiming it for themselves. Myros Kappa occupies a strategically important Warp juncture and has secondary value in the form of substantial mineral resources, and so the Imperium has fought tooth and nail to retain control of the world, never once ceding defeat even in the face of alien invasion of unprecedented scale. And yet, each time the Orks are eradicated, they return due to their unique method of reproduction, a means known only to the highest levels of the Imperium’s command. Invariably, the first Orks spawned are primitive beasts ignorant of their ancestry, but the surface of Myros Kappa is so strewn with wreckage that they instinctively arm themselves for war with the weapons dropped by their forebears, and the cycle continues anew.
With the slowly worsening strategic situation in the Askellon Sector, the region’s high commanders are now considering something none of their own predecessors dared imagine or propose. Some are considering abandoning Myros Kappa forever, unleashing such utter devastation upon its surface that the Orks can never return again, even if it is rendered useless to humanity in the process. To date, this plan has yet to gain major backing amongst the sector’s general staff, but it has come to the attention of a cell of Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos who hold somewhat Radical faction beliefs. These unnamed lords and ladies support the plan, if it can be timed to coincide with a large external Ork invasion, so that the
newly spawned “feral” Orks can be destroyed along with the external threat. A major issue with this plan, however, is that drawing the external invasion onto Myros Kappa might result in its passing through other, potentially still-valuable systems, which the Astra Militarum would be forced to leave to their fate as part of the wider strategy. It remains to be seen whether these Inquisitors can insinuate their plot into the general staff’s strategy, and whether any rival faction would oppose it.