Editing Vasenica sector (section)

====Hrud Infestation====

'''Cordesancti'''
Ex-capital of the sector.

Cordesancti is a carrion waste of rubble and ash. An entire world entombed in its own ruins. What few remnants of imperial authority survive the planet's great downfall have turned on each other even as they face annihilation from the xenos hordes, that came not from the void, but from the depths of the world itself.
It was not always so. 

Once the hive world of Cordesancti, birthplace of seven saints and a hundred hallowed dynasties, was the undisputed capital of Vasenica. 
It was among the eldest of the Imperium's hive worlds, and the entirety of its surface sprawled with gothic spires of continental scale and immeasurable majesty. Beneath the palaces and cathedrals toiled a vast slave population in excess of a trillion souls. Cordesancti's factorums fuelled a thousand wars across a dozen sectors, while its Imperial Guard was the mightiest of the sector. Every spire bristled with defence lasers, macro-batteries, and missile silos, each stratum shielded by impenetrable fortress-catacombs garrisoned by the sector's finest troops. When war came to Vasenica others quaked in fear, but the Lords of Cordesancti rejoiced at their coming victories.

Pride came before the fall.

So cataclysmic was their fall, that the sector itself has never recovered. For Cordesancti harboured a vast hrud infestation, a xenos swarm that had been multiplying in the forgotten depths of the underhive since the 35th millennium. The most damnable property of that vile parasitic race is the entropic field biologically generated by their alien bodies. When their population finally reached a critical mass, their powers of decay were so strong, that the very foundations of the world-city crumbled.

The Hives were torn asunder, spires that had stood since the age of the Emperor crashing down and pulverising the billions below, crushing level after level as the screeching ruins bored their way to the ancient surface
Cordesancti was prepared to face any enemy from without. It was not prepared for the enemy within. It's vast armies lay buried under the ruined wastes that were all that remained of the world, and what survivors remained were easy prey for the hrud, the alien's entropic fields withering away their very bodies. 

Without Cordesancti's million factorums and inexhaustible manpower, the Imperium was forced to abandon the entire sector. So the fall of one world consigned dozens to the mercy of heretics, rebels and alien empires.
Fifty years have passed, and an imperial crusade has returned to retake the sector. Cordesancti still lies in utter ruin, overrun ever since by slavering hordes of hrud. It can never be rebuilt - but it is valuable still, as a vast treasure trove to be looted.

Uncovered by the collapse of the hives are untold technological wonders, relics of elder science from before the coming of the Emperor. The forces of the crusade, the Adeptus Mechanicus, and indeed every world of the sector clamours for these treasures, but they are just as coveted by Ork freebooters, pirates, renegades, and the hrud themselves, who ruthlessly defend their domain of desolation. 
The expatriate noble houses that fled the world half a century ago have long appealed to the governors of the Imperium, calling for expeditions to recover these long-buried secrets. But they have long been shunned and ignored for their perceived responsibility for the sector’s fall. Only now with the coming of the crusade are their words considered with great interest.

'''Koltyr''' 

A small world far from the light of it’s dying sun, Koltyr has always been cold and bleak and lifeless, inhabited solely for the vast mineral wealth under it’s frozen crust. The great majority of its population consists of servitors, who toil in its endless mines without thought or feeling until their cogitators burn out or their circuits die. Even most of Koltyr’s Overseers have converted themselves into servitors, quite willingly, to escape the crushing monotony and loneliness of their lives. 

In fact Koltyr’s entire un-lobotomised population can fit inside the small chapel of the Port Arbus Control Tower, where indeed they spend most of their time praying to the Emperor to be reincarnated somewhere, anywhere else upon their suicide.

Historically used as a dumping ground for the excess population from Cordesancti, before that world’s catastrophic fall, the transport ships brought with them Cordesancti’s virulent hrud infestation. The dark mines of Koltyr proved the perfect habitat for these vile nocturnal xenos, and the fact that the planet was populated almost entirely by automatons meant that they could never be properly rooted out.

When the sector fell and anarchy reigned throughout, the mindless slaves of Koltyr kept on digging, piling up their hauls of ore in vast stockpiles that would never be collected by the tithe-fleets. They kept on digging, even as they were whittled away by the predations of the multiplying hrud, even as the aliens' entropic properties caused the tunnels to cave in and their augmented bodies to rust and decay.

Now the crusade has arrived to reclaim the sector, and on Koltyr there isn’t much to reclaim. Most of the slave-miners are dead, and most of the mines have collapsed in on themselves or become foul warrens for the hrud. But in Port Arbus, the world’s capital, where a few thousand servitors still drone about their long-meaningless duties and fifteen un-lobotomised overseers pray for the Emperor’s mercy, the vast stockpiles of ore and gas harvested over the preceding century still sit.

It is a vast motherlode of resources vital to the Imperial war effort, and should the secessionists of the Heraclian Confederacy, or the damnable Tau-sworn traitor worlds claim it, the crusade may face far stronger foes.