Dark Winds

M40.201: A Metal Marble – The bizarre and unique world of Underbar is discovered.  Competitions between Mechanicus and merchant assets to best extract the valuable resources of the liquid metal seas is fierce, and nearly escalates to violence before Cognomen steps in and forces a compromise.
M40.247: Winds of Darkness – The formerly isolationist band of pirates known as the Black Wind violently annex two small neighboring pirate groups, and capture several Imperial ships.  Three Chartered freight-carriers of the Drumnos Sector disappear within days within days afterward, so quickly that no messages are sent.
M40.289: An Unexpected Honor – Fifteen regiments of Septiim Guard are demanded of Septiim by the Officio Munitorum for a crusade in the adjacent Drumnos Sector, against the expanding Green Empire of Morkstar Redfangs.  All fifteen regiments are told in advance that they will not be coming back, but will instead gain colonization rights and titles of conquest upon successful resolution of the campaign.  All forty six thousand volunteers are given formal funerals by their families before departing, never to return.  Four months later, the Septiim Regiments return, the Green Empire homeworld having been destroyed by a gamma ray burst.  Some regiments are eventually reassigned to Rogue Trader fleets in the Cloudburst Circuit.
M40.400: The Map Shrinks – Unstable projections in the Astronomican, hard enough to see this far from Terra and blocked by so many Warp Storms, make life challenging for Rogue Traders in the Cloudburst Circuit and Oldlight Exo-zone.  Fifteen Rogue Trader ships vanish in under a year.  Four later turn up as part of the Space Hulk Speeding Death in the Gothic Sector.
M40.470: The Winds Grow – The fleet of the Black Winds capture a Cobra Destroyer from the Lawrencium patrol squad.  The pirates then vanish into the border darkness between Drumnos and Cloudburst.
M40.569: Entropy – The Tovash system, on the border between Drumnos and the Hapster Subsector, drops out of all contact with the greater Imperium.  A Navy patrol squadron arrives to investigate, and detects the planet’s continents flying out into space, the result of an unprecedentedly large Hrud migration loosening the tectonic bonds.  The Ordo Xenos is baffled by this behavior; Hrud often do not care about the state of a planet when they’re done with it, but to destroy it pre-emptively at the cost of their own lives is outside their usual mode of conduct.
M40.610: The Gyronax Crusade Begins – One hundred regiments of Imperial Guard are raised across Drumnos and Cloudburst to participate in the Gyronax Crusade to liberate the Aelthus Cluster, far to the galactic north of Port Maw.  The lack of able defenders in the sector makes repelling pirates and slavers more difficult.
M40.666: A Dark Parallel – A Slaneeshi daemon is found nigh-perfectly recreating Maskos’s techniques, this time to turn the world that bears his name into a Daemon World.  A mission to stop it costs the Arbites a precinct’s worth of men, and ends with the deaths of over two thousand cultists.
M40.798: A flicker in the web of Warp energy in the Hell’s Vortex Warp Storm reveals that the binary stars at its heart are not the same size they were when observation began.
M40.834: Crime and Punishment – Two Task Group-strength forces of Adeptus Arbites storm the pirate asteroid base of Rum-slog, killing the motley band of raiders that commanded the Ork and human fleet of pirates.  Although hundreds of pirates are killed and a thousand more captured, six thousand escape on their vessels to plague the Imperium again.
M40.745: Lightning Strikes – Piracy is an annoying but frequent concern in the border regions of the Imperium.  Ships and forces belonging to criminal groups sometimes successfully assault Imperial holdings, and the most common response from nearby civilians is to batten down the hatches and wait for the Navy to drive them off.  On the planet Lemankonstruert, a massive force of armored pirates, driving Forge World quality tanks, roll into an Imperial warehousing district.  The pirates make off with over one million Gold Gelt Thrones’ worth of trade goods and food, over four hundred prisoners, and eight cargo ships, then vanish without a trace.  Enraged Ordo Hereticus, Ordo Militarum, and Mechanicus investigators demand to know which local Imperial military force could have been so careless as to allow Mars-quality tanks to fall into the hands of pirates.  No Imperial military force is found to be at fault.  Horrified Mechanicus officials realize the truth: the Dark Winds have an STC.
M40.844: Crippling Loss – Thousands of Dark Eldar, Imperial, and Chaotic ships assault each other and the ground in the savage war for the vast wealth of the Corumbino Nebula and its super-fast Warp routes.  The Dark Eldar find themselves unable to consistently outmaneuver both enemies at once, while the Chaotic forces are conscious of the need to open a foothold on the worlds of the Nebula before the Warp Rift that allows their daemonships to maintain a realspace connection closes.  The Imperials need merely outlast the Chaotic fleet before the closure of the Rift drives them away, and then they can focus all their brute firepower on the Dark Eldar.  The Mechanicus and Naval force from Cognomen is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of their opposition.  The prospects of Imperial victory grow dimmer as the entirety of the newly gifted Legio Congelatio are destroyed in a savage three-way battle between the Mechanicus, Traitor Marines, and a Dark Eldar Archon’s forces.  Though the loss of the Legion enables the Imperial defenders to destroy the Chaotic staging area and blow up their entire ammunition cache, ultimately tipping the ground war in the Imperium’s favor, it is no consolation to Cognomen.  Cognomen relates this defeat to Mars, who reply that Cognomen is on its own if they want more Titans.  With nothing but wreckage with which to rebuild, Cognomen starts the work with heavy hearts – they had insulted Sacred Mars with their losses.
M40.899: Ludovic’s Toxins – The Tzeentchian mage Ludovic the Sorcerer assaults Oglith with his warband of over eighty thousand Chaos-aligned raiders and cultists.  Though the Oglith PDF is eventually able to contain and kill the cultists, Ludovic achieves his goal: destroying the Chaos artifact buried in the planet’s crust, over which an Imperial bank had been built.  Ludovic dies laughing, as do over a third of the planet’s Astropaths.  Over the next fifteen years, a virulent mutagen disease sweeps the world’s water supply, killing hundreds and mutating tens of thousands.  The Ecclesiarchy and Arbites are pressed to the limit killing the mutants, though this also has a constraining effect on the subterranean Ork problem.  Orks are not immune to mutation, not when it permeates their entire food and water supply.
M40.967: A Conclave of Killers – Fifteen Inquisitors and six Assassins converge on the Maskos Inquisitorial Palace, all from Terra, with an assignment they did not want to entrust to the Astropathic Choir.  Lord Inquisitor Cloudburst Aronbel hears them in private, and re-routes them to venerable Deathwatch Watch Fortress Fort Pykman, where the team passes beyond the Cloudburst Inquisition’s sight.
M40.989: A Glorious Occasion – The Ecclesiarchial Mission ship Sacred Voices stumbles across the planet Oromet in the Cloudburst Circuit and hastens to begin proselytizing to the few thousand humans left alive on the storm- and plague-wracked world.  Mechanicus atmosphere control machines begin converting the world to a more tolerable place.
M40.998: Rolling Thunder – The Dark Winds launch brutal raids on multiple Drumnos Sector border forts and listening posts, especially on the galactic north spinward of the Sector.  Alarming reports of entire merchant flotillas disappearing into Dark Winds territory chill local travel; Chartist Captains spend fortunes finding alternate routes for freighters.  As local Ecclesiarchial officials note depressed tithe income thanks to the diverted ships, their complaints reach the ears of the Ordo Hereticus.  However, it is only when two Drumnos Sector vessels independently report sighting newly-built Raiders on the border that a decision is made to put an end to the Dark Winds forever, because now they have a means of building their own warships.  A force of Drumnos Mechanicus and Navy assets begin a grinding war of assault on their own border, slowly pushing back the pirates, who have now existed long enough to have developed their own communities and home worlds with self-sustaining populations.  Two worlds in the Drumnos Sector are found to have whole cities of Dark Winds populations, and are promptly flattened by the vengeful Navy.  The Dark Winds respond by airlifting whole factories into space and resuming production of weapons, while slowly retreating towards the less heavily defended Cloudburst Sector.

M41: End of Two Eras
M41.029: Gas Storms – A vast force of Orks, more than twice the largest ever before recorded in Cloudburst, appears at the edge of the Sector, as foretold by the Tarot.  A covert Ordo Xenos task force assembles to intercept them, when the Orks suddenly veer off course.  The Ordo follows them, and discovers that a binary rocky-gas planet has drawn their attention.  Vast coils of gas spin off of the giant and descend as a liquid to the surface, where a tribe of Orks has set up nothing less than a refueling station for other Orks.  The Ordo identifies the phenomenon as being caused by a Beast-era Graviton Compressor Array, and covertly erects a listening post at the edge of the system, hoping for a chance to steal it.
M41.100: For Terra and Mars – The partially rebuilt Legio Congelatio, alongside one hundred thousand Skitarii, four hundred Ordo Reductor Specialists, and two hundred thousand Imperial Navy and Basilikon Astra sailors, engage the massive Black Winds gang of pirate Renegades at the border of the Drumnos and Cloudburst Sectors.  The group captures over one hundred thousand prisoners and secures two warships for the Drumnos Sector Fleet.  They also seekto regain the favor of Mars.  In the wreckage of the pirate repair foundry, an intact Standard Template Constructor for the Annihilator variant of Leman Russ Tank is found.  Though it is a copy of one Mars already has in abundance, it is sent to Mars in a great Mechanicus Forge Ship, after the plans are meticulously copied.  Though the Fabricator General recognizes that as a transparent attempt to buy favor, he grudgingly gives his thanks.