Adjacent territories

Neighboring Space
The sprawl of radioactive gasses, stones, and debris that delineates the Cloudburst region is cut up by arbitrary boundaries, as is often the case in early Imperial mapmaking.  The boundaries of later Imperial maps were better-informed.  The nearby regions of Imperial territory are far more heavily populated than Cloudburst is, and their problems don’t recur every hundred years: they are constant.
The nearest two populated areas of Imperial space are the Naxos Sector and the Drumnos Sector.  These two Sectors are thousands of years older then Imperial claims to the Cloudburst region.  Their gross populations are correspondingly greater as well, and both Sectors have entire networks of ancient Hive and Forge Worlds to provide goods and services on scales that dwarf the total output of Thimble and Cognomen in Cloudburst.  However, both Sectors are under concerted assault by the enemies of Terra around the clock, rather than being only intermittently troubled by hostiles as Cloudburst usually is.
The Naxos Sector is directly to the spinward of Cloudburst, and is a much larger Sector by both physical volume and total population.  The Drumnos Sector is coreward of Cloudburst, and has even larger population counts, but is only ten cubic lightyears larger in total thanks to the completely uninhabitable Ruinwall Warp Storm that borders it on the trailing side and brutal pirate fleets that have stymied its growth to rimward and spinward.
Naxos
In the Naxos Sector, the foe of greatest import is Chaos, the Primordial Annihilator.  The Naxos Sector has at its heart an enormous ring of dense, radioactive gas, the remnants of a colossal supernova over eighty million years ago.  This ring of gas is curiously flat, deviating from the equatorial plane by only fifteen degrees, which may have been caused by the unusual alignment of the stars at its center.  The ring of gas circles a trio of enormous White-sequential stars, among the largest the Imperium has ever detected that have not already collapsed into black holes.  Their gravity pulls at each other, and their rotation around a laGrange point that contains a cluster of uninhabitable, gravity-torn planets spins the disc of gas around them.  The entire region is bathed in Warp energy, of such intensity that natural Warp Rifts have formed here over time, and slowly close absent effort by Warp-dwelling beings.  The region is known as the Pox Ring, and serves as a hub and home for the forces of the Primordial Annihilator.

Regional Threats
The predominant foe to the people of Naxos at the moment is the Dark God Nurgle.  The Grandfather of Disease has staked an iron claim on the place, and will not relinquish it, ever, unless the Imperium can overcome all of his servants through sheer force.  Nurgle has been sending cultists, daemons, dark dreams, diseases, warfleets, even the Terminus Est and Typhus himself.  However, the Warp Rifts that allow his servants to come and go from his territories in the Warp are tumulutuous, unreliable, and frequently unstable, not unlike his human cults.  Therefore, although he has been able to reap hundreds of billions of souls from the nearby regions, he has never been able to wrest the core worlds of the Sector from the grip of the Throne.

Nurgle is not the only foe of Man in the Naxos Sector.  Thanks to a network of closely-linked Webway gates in the region, the Dark Eldar and Mandrakes have always been a problem in the region.  However, unlike in the Cloudburst Sector, the Imperial Navy has had some success in finding these Webway gates, and has destroyed several, thanks to the Archon given control of them at the time of their activation having been quite sloppy, and accidentally revealing their locations through hasty action.  Some have been relocated, an expensive action even with the resources of Commorragh, while others have been abandoned, and more yet destroyed by either the Imperium or the Dark Eldar themselves.

To a lesser scale than the Dark Eldar or the forces of Chaos, there are Orkish problems in Naxos, as there are Orkish problems in all places in these dying days.  However, there are no known Orkholds in the region that even distantly approach the scale and potential threat of Gorkypark in Cloudburst.  Rather, there are populations of Feral Orks on several worlds, lendig further credence to the idea that the Northern Fringe was subject to a fast-moving Waaagh! in the distant past.  It is probable that the human colonies of the Terran Federation were assaulted by a Waaagh! after the collapse of the Terran government, by an Ork fleet looking for easy targets, and the Ferals that pollute the Naxos, Cloudburst, and norther Drumnos Sectors are the footprint of that tide of filth.  No fewer than forty Feral Ork populations have been detected by Imperial scouts and colonists in the region, with as many as fifteen more having been found destroyed by other Orks or by Eldar military forces on the border of the Clouburst Circuit.

Piracy is less of a problem in the region than might be expected, given the routine disruptions of Imperial patrols by Nurglite incursions.  However, most pirates are smart enough to understand that if Nurgle takes the heart of Naxos and pushes to Trailing to conquer Cloudburst, there won’t be anybody left to steal from, and Nurgle won’t hesitate one second to spread his ‘gifts’ to any pirates he encounters – a fate worse than death for a pirate.
Thus, the pirate flotillas that infest the northern Naxos Sector are opportunistic, cautious, and quick to retreat.  They have had some success raiding the freighters that haul goods from the Cloudburst Sector’s many Agri-worlds to Naxos’ beleaguered defenders, but are little threat to the overall prosperity of the region.

The final problem that the militaries of the Naxos Sector faces is that of the cloaked and deadly fleets of the Saim-Hann Craftworld.  Although the Craftworld is nowhere near the region at present, its loyal ships and Wild Guardians still sometimes appear, trailing sightings of the Aspect Warriors of the Craftworld in attacks against Imperial border forts and supply posts.  Precisely why this is the case is not yet known, but it seems that the Saim-Hann are looking for something, perhaps an object or a place, of some great importance to them.  These Eldar invariably retreat if they encounter overwhelming force, and look upon their Commorrite cousins with unhidden contempt and disgust, but they always come back, always searching for something they feel no compunction to enunciate to the Imperium Mon-keigh.

Common Factors
The worlds of Naxos Sector are ancient compared to Cloudburst.  Their Hive and Industrial Worlds are smog-choked mazes of buildings, bestial wildernesses, violent gang territories, toxic Nurglite Contaminant zones, and walled-off compounds of unfathomably rich Highborn merchant and noble families.  The Imperial Guard regiments of Naxos include hundreds of millions of men and women recruited from the great Hive Worlds that dot the region, and not far fewer drawn from the populations of the noxious industrial cities that fuel the Hives and Forges on other worlds.  This is not without benefit, as the Officio Munitorum has been able to use the bonds of gang loyalty between the groups to ensure relatively high retention and low desertion rates among their Hive Scum tithe regiments.  However, it does mean that any of the Naxos Sector regiments do lack any intrinisic advanced technical or motor vehicle skills, which in turn requires extra training and Mechanucus oversight, which are expensive costs in the war-wracked Naxos Sector.
As the large cities of Mankind often accumulate pollution and disease thanks to the immense population density they possess, the taint of Nurgle is never far from the Naxos populace.  The Inquisitions’ Ordo Hereticus is vigilant for any sign of cult activity among either the immense Highborn-packed Hive Spires that decorate the crowns of the vast cities, or signs of other Chaos Gods taking advantage of the cramped living spaces to ferment the strains of sedition.  However, the Ordo Malleus is also present in these places, and focuses more narrowly on ensuring that the huge manpower tithes of the Hives do not contain the seeds of the classic Chaotic infiltration mechanisms, the Warrior Lodges that took the old Legions apart from the inside and spread Warp-taint through the Emperor’s sons.
Of course, the military consignments of the Sector are more than just Hive Scum in nature.  The vast networks of well-travelled worlds around the physical perimeters of the Sector, far from the Pox Ring from which the Nurglite fleets stage, have less risk of Warp taint, but also fewer residents.  These worlds are the Mining and Agri-world hubs that supply Fabique and the Hives with their endless resources.  The planets around the Naxos periphery provide teratons of food, salt, leather, water, timber, cement mix, and other raw goods to the industrial powerhouses of the region, overseen carefully by experienced Adeptus Terra officials to prevent overharvesting or depopulation.  The Space Marines of the Celestial Knights and the small local Deathwatch stage from here, recruiting from selected worlds and hiding their fleets in the maze of resource-dry asteroids that hang around the edge of the supernovae nebula that birthed the neighboring Sectors.  Here they stand vigil, watching keenly for any sign of Tzeentchian incursions from his target to trailing, or for any sign of the vicious aliens of the Cloudburst Circuit seeking fresh prey in the Naxos Sector’s rich worlds.

Other forces under arms in the region stage from these slightly safer worlds, including a number of small Knight Houses.  Most of these Houses are those that survived the Old Night by hunkering down in the timber-producing worlds of the Rosids Cluster, a network of fifteen systems containing habitable worlds.  These systems are rich in iron, cobalt, nickel, uranium, bauxite, and other useful industrial metals, and the high concentrations of silicon, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in the nebular gasses from which their crusts coalesced ensure that their soils are rich and fertile.  This means that these planets were seized for rapid colonization by the Eldar and Humans who colonized the region tens of thousands of years ago.  Several of the worlds are still inhabited by Knights and their vassals and peasants, or Eldar Exodites who have turned their sprawling frontiers into veritable mazes of fortification and concealment that make rooting them out in the face of imminent Nurglite apocalypse a somewhat low priority.
Institutions
The Adeptus Mechanicus of Naxos maintains its local command from the ancient and wealthy Forge World of Fabique.  As is typically the case with old Forge Worlds, the planet has a speciality.  For Fabique, that is vacuum construction.  Its orbitals are not mere space stiations, they are vast chains of connected asteroids and drydocks, each connected by huge, flexible tubes lined internally with insulation and electric tracks.  On these tracks, the Adeptus Mechanicus runs vast trains, unencumbered by gravity and friction, that haul around megatons of metal ingots, finished parts, electronic assembly modules, Warp Cores, and huge sheafs of data-wafer.  The trains drive from asteroid to asteroid, some connected to the planet below on massive carbon-fiber and ceramite Orbital Spires at the equator, delivering goods and personnel to the hollow rocks that provide better shielding from outside attack than a dozen Void Shields.  Inside the asteroids, mining and manufacturing centers hum with energy, collecting natural resources from the stone and then using their hollow shells to create zero-gravity warship assembly cradles.  In this way, Fabique increases its manufacturing capability even as it increases its income, a clever system that Fabique expects other Forge Worlds to adopt within a few thousand years.
Fabique holds these asteroid chains in detachable blocks called ‘distretto,’ which can be broken away from Fabique and loaded into Universe Mass Conveyors to be brought whole to other systems, and serve as a sort of starter culture for their own orbital work.  Hundreds of these asteroids and their attendant train lines have sprouted from the Fabique web over the years.  Several are chained together in orbit around a small moon elsewhere in the Sector, wherein the asteroids are used to assemble the armored vehicles of the Celestial Knights Chapter of the Unforgiven, and some are used as warfleet staging points in orbit around the Sector capital Fortress World of Asklepian.
Fabique has other noteworthy features, including its enormous polar Void Fortress, called the Star Gilt.  This orbital coaching house and pleasure palace is the regional hub of over a hundred freelance cartographers and Rogue Trader flotillas, belonging to around fifty Rogue Trader Houses of this and neighboring Sectors, who use its vast auction house and casino to sell their discoveries and blow off steam.  The main chambers can be reconfigured to serve as fighting pits, opera halls, gambling dens, or any of a dozen other entertainment venues with the flick of a few consecrated switches in the operations chamber of the huge space station, and it even offers a variety of secured, lightless, refrigerated, or other custom storage chambers to those Traders who are willing to pay for them.

The Adeptus Administratum and Estate Imperium stage and operation primarily from the sprawling equatorial fortress of Inkwell on the Sector Capital planet of Asklepian.  The planet, named as much in defiance of Nurgle as in reference to its unique contents, is a massive Fortress of the Adeptus Terra, with multiple full Army Groups of the Officio Munitorum just on its visible surface.  Subterranean and orbital staging areas further increase the world’s defensive capacity, while its sub-oceanic network of seabed power plants, hydroponic gardens, and residential areas could allow for a few thousand people to ride out even light Exterminatus events.  The planet plays host to the largest medical center in the Galactic North, which contains a surprising number of non-Inquisitorial medical research facilities and even common medical practicitioner offices, all of which serve to make Asklepian one of the healthiest places in the North of the Imperium even sitting as it does within sight of a vast holding of the Plaguefather.  Some Inquisitors wonder if this is tempting fate, but others point out that that doesn’t mean much.  If a Dark God personally and vengefully targets a world, they cynically mutter, there isn’t much a frontier sector like Naxos can do to defend it that they haven’t already done.

Of course, where goes the proletariat, so goes the faith.  The Adeptus Ministorum of Naxos is the polar opposite of their Cloudburst colleagues.  The Naxos Ecclesiarchy is a beliver of penance through poverty.  They encourage their members and parishioners to undertake lives of deprivation and contemplation, as opposed to the Cloudburst practice of “spend if you feel bad.”  It is from Naxos that the most striden opposition to the Cloudburst Ecclesiarchy’s profligacy stems, and has led to a near-complete breakdown of friendly relations between the two clerical bodies.
The Ecclesiarchy of Naxos does take in tithes, of course, but they spend it gainfully instead of on ostentation or mercenary armies.  The Naxos Ministorum spends their wealth on the alms-halls of their great cathedrals, where the hundreds of millions of refugees from Nurgle’s endless wars or the other conflicts of the Galactic North pass through on their way to new lives.  Many of these unfortunates end up dead, or in the Imperial Guard (which in Naxos is not a healthy place to be anyway).  Others become settlers to colonize worlds in the Cloudburst Circuit or the farther Oldlight Exo-zone, while others yet are inducted into the Schola Progenium of the Adeptus.  Some, however, remain on Naxos worlds as guards for their cathedral-fortresses, or even join the Ecclesiarchy as prelate-inductees, and eventually become licensed Missionaries of the God-Emperor on Terra.  Others remain on the worlds to which they flee, and become part of the civic work forces of those planets, which helps bring fresh education and manpower into the tithe-strapped industrial worlds of the region.
Of course, the Ministorum also must tend to their actual jobs, and so every months, hundreds of thousands of monks, Priests, Confessors, Preacher-Converters, Missionaries, Flagellants, and other officials of the faith take to the streets in great parades of penance, faith, duty, and public declaration, whereupon they demand of the weary people of the Sector the names of mutant neighbors, Warp-Worshippers, tithe-skippers, and other drains on society.  Of course, the Ministorum is no more authorized to act on these tips in Naxos than they are in any other Sector, but there are always a few Enforcers or even full Arbites on wealthier worlds who tag along and dutifully collect these leads.
Other Ecclesiarchial duties in Naxos consume the rest of the Ecclesiarchy’s local money.  The worlds of Naxos are beset by heretics, hundreds of billions of them, some who just don’t stay dead.  The cult of Nurgle is pervasive and persuasive, and the greatest gift of Chaos is immortality.  Once in a while, the infamous Hell-Barges of Chaos, the very same that once threatened the homeworlds of the Salamanders and Imperial Fists, burst forth from the rupturing Warp-Veils of the Pox Ring, and disgorge untold millions of Nurglite cultists and soldiers on the systems of Man.  Of course, the most dangerous heretics are the ones who don’t feel the need to introduce themselves with a shotgun, and so the Ecclesiarchy must work closely with other Imperial institutions of the Sector to survey potential vectors of Nurglite contaminations of the mind and flesh of its citizens.  Part of the reason that the Sector does have such a self-deprived lifestyle is because it needs its resources to undertake these massive domestic campaigns against the toxin of the soul that is heresy.  Luckily, the fact that its alms-halls are so well-funded, welcoming, and well-defended does help keep the hundreds of thousands of indigents that pass through it from being too sympathetic to the whispers of Chaos.
The Ecclesiarchy also takes a very active role in the mergers and marriages of the thousands of Naxos Noble Clans, including those who are empowered by the Estate Imperium, Ordo Famulous, and Adeptus Terra to directly command the Hive Worlds that provide most of the Sector’s income.  These families have reigned for thousands of years, and sometimes more than that if they are one of the lucky ones that were able to maintain their genealogical records of the Age of Strife or even beyond.  These famililes must be careful to avoid inbreeding or giving in to the impulse to increase their power at the cost of their worlds’ productivity.  A Highborn family that hides mutant relatives or skims off the top, especially in a place under yearly attack by Chaos itself, is a Highborn family that finds certain popular family members waking up in minesweeper teams in penal legions with inescapable certainty.

The Adeptus Ministorum, for all of its local power, is nothing compared to the power of the Inquisition, however.  Between the powerful Ecclesiarchy and all-present Inquisition, the Adepta Sororitas are a force to be feared and respected in the Naxos Sector, and have the numbers, firepower, experience, and scale of logistics to bring down an entire Adeptus Astartes Chapter if they had to.  These masked Valkyries of the Emperor have descended on wings of fire and adamantine to crush entire cities without warning if the taint of Chaos is deemed present, and will certainly do so again.  The Sororitas serve as Chamber Militant to the Ordo Hereticus here as in many Sectors, and their leaders are the Lords Hereticus who command the chamber of the Inquisitorial Palace on Asklepian’s White Island Superfortress.  Here the Ordos debate, plot, and scheme, and periodically emerge to pronounce doom on those whose worship of the Emperor seems lacking or disingenuous.  The Inquisition of this Sector concerns itself rather more with direct oversight of the military than in most Sectors, which is a burden it begrudges, but it has saved regiments of Guardsmen from falling to Chaos in the past, and probably will again.

The Adeptus Arbites a constant presence in the huge cities of the Naxos Hive Worlds, but they are also present in smaller numbers elsewhere in the broad Sector.  Their role is identical here to what it is in every other Sector, but the number of Judges they need to perform their roles means that they absorb a disproportionate number of the orphans in the Scholae.

Drumnos
The Drumnos Sector is a bustling place of commerce, travel, trade, and military activity, and is one of those valuable Sectors that sends more total resources to Terra than it receives in payment from the Throne.  Its large and successful commercial systems can’t quite cover up the rot that has spread through its high society, but its standards of living are higher on average than they are in either of the two adjacent Sectors.  The entire Sector is beset by pirates, crime syndicates, Orks, and the sin of pride, which poses at least as much a threat as the other three.

Regional Threats
As a major economic wellspring for the local Imperium and a net exporter of goods and wealth, the Drumnos Sector has a correspondingly powerful Chartist Captains presence.  Their Warp-freighters and cargo-hauling starships are ubiquitious in the rich Sector, flying goods and passengers across the breadth of the asteroid-heavy region.  Although even the Administratum can’t be quite certain exactly how many Warp-capable ships there are in the region at any given time, the number is well in excess of four thousand, and over six hundred of those have Navigators.  Unlike the Cloudburst and Naxos Sectors, Drumnos has no Adeptus Astartes Chapter in residence.  Also unlike those, it doesn’t particulary need one.  Its threats are not the unrelenting violence of Nurgle, or the cyclic blitzkriegs of the Glasians.  Its predominant threats are more mundane and less centralized, and seek wealth instead of territory in the main.
There are other smaller risks to Imperial life in the region, of course.  Any place that accumulates money and business the way Drumnos does eventually must come under scrutiny for the perfidious presence of Slaneesh, or the less dangerous and far more common problem of major organized crime.  The Orks are also a problem in the Drumnos Sector, naturally enough.  Magi Biologis of the Adeptus Mechanicus suspect that the entire Galactic Northern Fringe was visited by Orks on a broad-scale Waaagh at some time immediately after the collapse of the Terran Federation but before the Fall of the Eldar, and was then revisited by the Orks that scattered from the collapse of the Rampage of the Beast.  This would explain the pervasiveness of extremely low-tech but nigh-omnipresent Feral Orks in an area five Sectors in volume.  The Terran Federation and the Eldar Empire at their peaks were more than capable of destroying a Waaagh with which the Imperium would presently struggle, but they were in no position to do so after the destruction of the previously safe methods of faster than light travel.

However, the largest threat to the area is not that of Greenskins or Slaneesh.  Simple human greed has given rise to the largest threat by volume and firepower in the Drumnos Sector: piracy.  Pirate flotillas numbering in the high dozens prowl the immense asteroid chains that crisscross the entire Sector.  The Imperial Navy in Cloudburst is a fraction of the size of their southern bretheren, and wars have erupted in the Naxos Sector that have claimed millions of lives in decades that were smaller than the death counts of Naval clashes of the Battlefleet Drumnos.
Piracy isn’t just a mechanism of living or a pastime in Drumnos.  It is an entire industry.  Whole fleets of criminals, privateers, raiders, slavers, planet looters, buccaneer armies, and other spaceborne ne’er-do-wells trawl the Drumnos Sector, looking for blood, treasure, and sport.
These pirates answer to no one leader, and in fact would be offended at the very idea.  Rather than stemming from a single centralized leadership, as the FCC and other small piracy groups in Clouburst do, the Drumnos pirate fleets answer to individual Commodores and Admirals who style themselves kings of vacuum, and fly about the Drumnos Sector proclaiming their superiority for all to see.  Some favor stealth, and conceal themselves in the asteroids that dot the navigable starlanes of the Sector, waiting to pounce on helpless victims.  Others are more overt, and prefer to use brute firepower to get what they want out of life.  The most dangerous, however, are those who feign legitimacy and even flaunt Imperial Letters of Marque, working for the Imperium when they aren’t assaulting it.  Some of these Letters of Marque are even totally real, and are either gifts from the local Sector Administratum for conquering some minor foe of theirs or were stolen from their legitimate owners.
The true number of pirates in the Sector is impossible to ascertain, as some of them do not even consider themselves true pirates at all.  Some, like the historical Dark Winds pirate gang, are more of a true Insurrectionist movement, complete with uniformed ground militias and manufacturing centers in great industry ships akin to the Factory-Ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus.  These pirates tend to put on airs, not as sometime allies of the Imperium, but their inevitable conquerors, with the panache of swashbuckling action heroes and the delusions of Tau who look at Space Marine Chapters and try to recruit them to the Greater Good.

In fact, this is the only Sector in the region in which the T’au Fire Caste have a presence at all.  The Tau of the Expedition, a flotilla of Tau vessels traveling across the edges of the Second Sphere territories that were sucked into a Warp Flux and thrown halfway across the Segmentum Ultima, are a rising threat in the area.  Their willingness to rip apart human technology and study it horrifies the Adeptus Mechanicus, who dare not be so incautious with the few Tau trinkets they have captured.  These Tau have few auxilia of other species thanks to the age of their force, which by the estimates of the Adeptus Terra are now on their ninth generation separated from Tau Empire territory.  Precisely how they are sustaining their numbers, or from where they are getting their small but apparently inexhaustible resupply shipments, is a complete mystery to baffled Ordo Xenos authorities.  What is known is that they have beached two of their huge Merchantmen on a large iron-silica asteroid in the very outer limits of the Drumnos Sector to trailing.  That is an inconvenience for their attackers, since that is the limit of the Astronomican’s immediate visibility in the region thanks to the interference of several Warp Storms between there and Terra.
The Tau seem interested in converting the local humans and even Orks to the Greater Good, and have had some very small successes, usually in exchange for promises of alliance with small human fleets blown off course in the void.  They have had a noted lack of success compared to their counterparts in the main Tau Empire, however, presumably thanks to the disproportionately small number of Water Caste in their fleet: it is mostly Fire Warriors and Air Caste ship crewers.  Lacking diplomats, they have few means of interacting with the outside worlds in any lasting way save acrimony, and they have given up on trying to turn the Imperium as a whole to their side after one too many ambushes by the Ordo Xenos.  However, even the Tau, with all of their advanced technology and tactics, recognize the huge problems with piracy in the area.  Pirates have far fewer compunctions against using xenotech than the Adeptus Mechanicus or even Inquisition.  Some have even attempted to rob the two beached Tau ships, only to fall apart at the seams after a hailstorm of missile and railer fire from the still very-much-intact Merchantmen.

Rogue Traders with a military bend, a large army of mercenaries, and fast ships could make a killing in the Drumnos Sector.  There are many pirates to fight, and many, many chances to steal ships.  However, the deadlier pirates of the Sector aren’t rag-tag loners with old vessels and weary crews; they are deadly and regimented fleets of dozens of vessels that fight in formation and accept no pity, surrender, or mercy.  Thus, any Rogue Trader or Senatorial Privateer who wanted to expand their fleets in Drumnos would have to undertake extraordinary care and coordination in their planning, which some Rogue Traders just don’t have time or patience for.  However, Battlefleet Drumnos has had some success with this, by using ships designed specifically for escorting larger vessels to fight in closely to enemy formations and herd enemy Escorts away to be boarded safely.
Common Factors
Many Drumnos Worlds are self-contained stories of transformation.  Of the dozens of inhabited systems and hundreds of inhabited worlds of Drumnos, the majority are either Paradise Worlds or imdustrialized Agri-worlds, which balance vast agriculture and ranching with a few compact, dense, and hugely populated Hives.  These industrial Agri-worlds are able to support themselves and perhaps one other small planet solely with the output of their mines and factories and fields, and can often fuel the economies of their entire home systems.  The other worlds in their systems tend to be more classical Mining, Agri-, or Hive Worlds as could be found anywhere in the Galactic North, and have as broad a variety of ecosystems, economies, and governments as the entire Naxos and Cloudburst Sectors.  Some are Guild-run worlds of trade and learning, others are smog-choked slums, while others are gleaming shrines to the Emperor.  One thing they have in common, at least in the main, is alliance with these industrial Agri-worlds, which are often their secondary or even primary food supply.  Some of these old Agri-worlds have had soil failures or mines running dry, and thus have lived out their days as breadbaskets for the Sector, but the worlds are not abandoned when their have no more means of providing metals and food beyond their own sustenance.  These worn-out worlds often find second lives as resort planets for the Drumnos merchant classes, and the extended families of hundreds of thousands of layabout heirs and heiresses who grow fat off the incomprehensible wealth of their relatives.  These spoiled pseudo-nobles often camp out on these run-dry Agri-worlds, which have inevitable population drops after their resources run out, but are still perfectly habitable.  The semi-depopulated worlds become playgrounds for the Drumnos rich, and their vast mining tunnels, abandoned farms and vineyards, and hardscrabble Hive cities serve as the new foundation for the local kingdoms of Imperial well-to-do.
Of course, these planets may struggle with earning any actual income once their primary residential bloc are idle rich playboys, but not all.  Some retain ties to the very same Chartists and Guildsmen who were responsible for making the controlling families rich in the first place.  Thus, while some of these worlds fall to indolence and hard stratification between the remaining original residents of the world who look out from crumbling hives at distant merchant manors with desperate hate and the frolicking socialites who live in them, others become local hot spots for advanced Guild training, regional exploration efforts, fine manufacturing, or even wildlife preserves, where Chartist Captains collect rare beasts from other worlds and let laughing nobles hunt them from helicopters for sport.

Other planets in the Sector have more mundane origins, and several were former hub worlds for the tiny local fiefdoms of the ancient Terran Federation.  As one would expect with small colonies so far from Terra and Mars, these worlds did not weather the coming of Old Night well.  On these worlds, tech levels vary wildly, sometimes from planet to planet within one system.
This is another distinct point of note in the Drumnos Sector, and separates it from the other Sectors of the region: its preponderance of multi-world systems.  It is actually more likely in this Sector for a system to have multiple inhabited planets than for it not to, which is especially remarkable given that fewer than half a dozen worlds in Cloudburst can say the same despite it being iterally adjacent.  Few of these systems are what the Adeptus Administratum calls true Pasture Gate systems, wherein there are more than two shirtsleeves-habitable worlds naturally present in a system.  The majority have only two worlds, or one naturally habitable one and many terraformed ones.  This includes the capital system, Sardineos, which has an astonishing eighteen planets, every single one of which is either terraformed to human standards, or orbited by a moon that humans can live on.  These in turn enjoy vast orbital rings of space stations, the system is dotted by Void Platforms, and the Lagrange points of its moons hang heavy with defense firepoints and hydroponic shells.  Despite not being a Hive system, the Sardineos system has a mind-boggling one hundred fifteen billion residents.

Institutions
The commercial needs of a Sector with such a large number of human worlds are titanic, and into the void of necessity march the enemies of Invention: the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The Sector is blessed with not one, but three Forge Worlds, with two being subordinate to the enormous hub world of Syracuse.  This is the oldest Forge World in the tri-Sector area, with a population of well over forty billion humans and four times that of Servitors.  The planet is physically enormous, being three times the total volume of Terra, but has a core of irradiated ferrous metals that renders it safe for human habitation despite its slightly low gravity.  Syracuse is the opposite of rapidly-expanding Cognomen and Solstice, or of the fortress Fabique and its huge orbital trains.  Syracuse is a gigantic data core, and although its groundside and vacuum manufacturing capabilities are nothing to take lightly, it delegates much of that work to its subordinate Forges Punic and Monégasque.  Syracuse itself is more than an industrial nexus of an industrial Sector.  It is the repository of knowledge of the entire Drumnos civilization.  Even members of the Adeptus Mechanicus from other wealthy Forge Worlds have looked in genuie awe at the lightning-wreathed sky-scraping towers of brass, stone, and adamantine that ring the single, central Pinnacle Citadel that soars over a mile up into the red-stained atmosphere of Syracuse.  Equally shocking is the architectural miracle of its basement.  The sub-surface layer of the building contains a master data sieve that contains literally all of the Mechanicus blueprints, STC fragments, and data files that any Adeptus Mechancius or Astartes personnel in the entire Sector and many colonies beyond in the Exo-zone possess.  In this endless data vault, hundreds of prospective Magi, those Techpriests who seek advancement in rank or a deeper understanding of the Machine God, pour eagerly over the millions of exabytes of 3D renders, starmaps, manifests, assembly logs, scientific surveys, experimental results, code scraps, information files, and inspiring speeches contained within.  Entire cities on the surface of Syracuse devote themselves wholly to the documenting and glorifying of data, on the Machine and its works.  Of course, glorification in a Sector that is given over entirely to war and trade is glorification best expressed at sword point, and indeed the Skitarii legions of Syracuse are unquestionably the best equipped, best trained, most loyal, and most terrifyingly powerful in the entirety of Imperial Space north of the Gothic Sector.  The millions of gold and grey-clad Skitarii and Guard of the planet work together to drive the pirate fleets and raiders back from the immense treasures of Syracuse.
The Adeptus Mechanicus does not merely field its own armies or supply the armies of its Guard allies, of course.  At the heart of Syracuse’s residential districts sits a massive fortress, incongruously looming over the rows of identical blockhouses and tenements for the menials who slave inside it.  The building is a manufactorum and shrine at once, for it is the building in which new Titans are built, and the nearby military base houses the command office and dispatch hangar of the Legio Syracuse.  This mid-tier Legion is an ancient one, with battle honors dating back to before the public knowledge of the Emperor’s existence, and has six Knight Houses pacted to its name.  The full might of the Legion and its Knights numbers to well in excess of eight hundred bipedal combat walkers, most of them Knights of the Houses White Iron, Glorificus, and Questor Deus Machina.  These Houses pledge from nearby worlds, and only the relatively small House Qilantor stages from Syracuse proper.
The pride of the Legio Colax Imperator, however, is not its wealthy collection of loyal Knight allies, however useful they are.  The pride of the Legion is its brace of Warmonger Titans and their five supporting Nemesis Titans, which represent more firepower in total than any other force under arms in the tri-Sector area can bring to bear under one banner.  Their Fire Support Warmongers are packed with every single plasma weapon their arms and carapaces can mount, but of course their primary weapons are the racks of city-killing rockets they can fire from their backs, safely liquefying whole cities from across a canyon no hovercraft could cross, from beneath the defensive layers of ICBM shields.  These two Warmongers were built during the Great Crusade, when Syracuse fell in under the banner of Mars.  At first, they found merit in the traitorous whispers of Kelbor-Hal, but after bearing witness to the brutal murders of entire systems at the hands of their former bretheren in the World Eaters, Syracuse refused any further partnership with the Red Planet.  After the Scouring, when Lord Regent Primarch Roboute Guilliman tasked the new Fabricators of Mars to begin knitting the newly minted Adeptus Mechanicus together from the remnants of the Mechanicum, Syracuse asked to become a part of the greater whole again.  They were granted this permission, contingent on their dissolution of their sizeable Taghmata.  Reluctantly, the Magi of Syracuse allowed their entire Taghmata to be shipped to Mars to be rebuilt into Skitarii and their attendant vehicles to be retasked to the Ordo Reductor, and since that acrimonious moment, Syracuse has remained perfectly loyal to the edicts of the Red Planet.

Although the Magos of Cognomen do not suspect it, Syracuse Magi have had a hand in both of the unexpected communications from Mars that Cognomen has received.  The Magi of Syracuse saw the increasing power of Cloudburst as something of a relief, since they were no longer responsible for essentially securing the entire Oldlight Proximate Circuit and northern Oldlight Exo-zone by themselves.  Therefore, when Cognomen asked to be given rights to a Legion of Titans of their own, Syracuse Magi urged Mars to grant that request.  However, the Magi of Syracuse are not entirely beyond the petty urges of territorialism despite their loyalty, and so they have covertly pressured Mars not to respond to Lord Fabricator Beraxos’ increasingly urgent requests to build his own Knight House.  They are not aware of ABX202020 yet, and would probably be aghast if they learned of it, despite having several Questor Houses themselves, simply because Beraxos defying Mars but staying loyal is not an outcome their leaders have ever contemplated.
Previously, Syracuse was the major supplier of machinery and sole supplier of Robots to the new Forge Moon of Solstice in Cloudburst, and indeed its current Interim Fabricator is a member in good standing of the upper hierarchy of the Council of Magi of Syracuse itself, a man by the name of Sneth who was a personal friend of the Lord Fabricator Syracuse.

Other Imperial institutions and Adepta of the Drumnos Sector include their large and well-supplied flotilla of Adeptus Astra Telepathica Black Ships, which scour the huge population of Drumnos for prospective psykers.  The region suffers from the same proportionately low psyker birthrate problem as Cloudburst, but not to the same extent; this plus its far larger size means that its psyker tithe is over twenty times that of the entire Cloudburst Sector and Circuit combined.  It is also closer to Terra, which makes the harvest faster, and it has no Space Marine Chapter to skim Librarian candidates from the pool.
The Inquisition of Drumnos headquarters from a large complex of office buildings and dungeons on an island on the moon named August, which orbits an Agri-world in the Sardineos system.  The Inquisition here has the Ordo Hereticus as its largest branch, just as in Naxos, and spends much of its time scouring the various grotesquely wealthy Highborn and merchant clans for any sign of the mutant, the secessionist, the heretic, or the witch.  The resources of some of these families are so great that they can actually defy the Inquisition in private and live to tell of it, although there are few stupid enough to try it.  The Ordo Xenos here has many options if they need a force under arms given the raw number of Imperial Navy and Guard forces in the Sector, but they lack a significant Deathwatch presence locally.  There are no Watch Fortresses nearby, and given how far the Watch Fortress Dascomb is from Sardineos, any dispatch order generally comes from that Fortress itself, sending Kill-brothers to pre-emptively aid the Drumnos Inquisition of threats it learned of on its own.
The Adeptus Ministorum here is very much a shadow of the one on Terra itself, with its sprawling cathedrals and huge civil management duties.  The Ecclesiarchy of Drumnos lends aid in eugenic screening to nobles here through its aides in the Adeptus Sororitas, but it also oversees the spiritual wellbeing of worlds in states of decay.  After all, the ‘suck it dry’ model of mining and agriculture in Drumnos leaves few options for safe expression and survival on those worlds that are not privileged enough to become the playgrounds of bored nobles or cheerless Guilds.  The civil upheavals and civil wars that occasionally wrack Drumnos worlds when whole shipments of goods and passengers simply disappear into the pirate-infested voids are sometimes lessened or even halted by the careful application of soothing words from the Priests and Confessors of the Ministorum, or shows of force from the small Convents of Battle Sisters on the Sector’s few Hive Worlds.
The Sector Ministorum is not as self-imposedly poor as the one in Naxos, however, and often aids local Rogue Traders.  These Ministorum personnel design and even help build modular Cathedral Blocks, which are nothing less than entire prefabricated temples that Rogue Traders can affix to their hulls and drop whole on worlds they wish to convert to Emperor-worship.  Obviously, this is somewhat expensive, but these buildings are the ideal headquarters for new forces of Missionaries in the Exo-zone or the distant Circuit.

The fact that the Cloudburst Sector is doing such a bang-up job expanding the grip of the Emperor into the northern wastelands and wildernesses of the region is a huge relief for the Drumnos Officio Munitorum, who previously had to patrol an area over twice the size of the Sector for threats that didn’t need the Astronomican to fly faster than light.  Now that the Cloudburst Sector is active and well-protected (for such a backwater, anyway), the forces of Drumnos are turning their sights inwards.  They have already driven many pirate gangs into the dark spaces on the map before – or Cloudburst if the former proved untenable – and seek to do so again, so that the commerce of the Sector can flow even richer.  Naturally, this requires many men, and the ship-building and anchorage systems of Drumnos often have complex drafts and levees in place to recruit the manpower needed for these expansion and crewing projects.  The Imperial Guard of the Sector is an eclectic mix of regimental types, from the cave-dwelling brutes of Maskur 1 to the high-tech cybersteed dragoons of Klein’s World to the elite Scion Tempestus Shock Troopers of the Sardineos Saber-Teeth.

The Adeptus Arbites in the Sector are nowhere near as involved in the anti-piracy functions of the region as they would like.  The Imperial Navy hogs the glory and the job, they mutter, and they may have a point.  Well-armed the Navy may be, but they are not a law enforcement body, and the Arbites are supposed to have a place in the apprehension and punishment of those who steal military goods or other government property from the Imperium and its worlds.  The Arbites are not idle, however, and their customized patrol ships often trail pirate fleets silently through the void, then spring into action when the pirates enter a Warp-jump formation, picking off a few ships as the rest escape into the Warp.  However, sometimes these pirates fight back, or even attempt a counter-boarding of the Arbites Enforcement-class law cruisers.  When this happens, the Arbites strap on their Syracuse-built Lockshields, heft their master-crafted riot guns, load their corridor-clearing Webbers, and get to the business of cracking heads.