fresh juice

M39.015: Unease – Several dozen Rogue Trader and Explorator ships return to the Star Gilt, with words of caution on their tongues.  They spoke of dead worlds, dead ships, and whole systems of utter devastation, out in the void.  Pict-captures and solid remains of wrecked Great Crusade ships, some with Legionary markings, surface in Fabique.  After months of speculation, the Inquisition steps in.  Several more months pass, when the Inquisitors and MacDonald return from the Oldlight Exo-zone, declaring a new age of exploration and exploitation in the Oldlight-Proximate Circuit.
M39.016: Gold Rush Two – The Inquisitorial expedition, minus four ships, and MacDonald return.  A conclave held at Palace Naxos.  Official declaration of Discovery made.  Over one hundred Rogue Trader and Explorator ships depart.
M39.098: Putting Down Roots – Colonization effort begins, with population drawn from leMarkos system in Drumnos Sector.
M39.100 ~ 700: Expanding the Imperium – Massive colony-building effort undertaken by Mechanicus and Administratum.  Fabique contracted to build several hundred colony ships and logistical barges, mostly for the colonization of Thimble and Nauphry, the only two worlds in the new Sector with populations of over twenty million within the first year.
M39.387: Empty Houses – The abandoned Rogue Navigator fortress of Coriolis is discovered by now Archmagos Explorator MacDonald.  The world is promptly claimed by the Astra Militarum, and turned into the regional staging area.
M39.398: Wildfires – The Hapster system is raided by over three full flights of Infidel Raiders.  Though the Defense Monitors of the SDF managed to sink one and slam it into one of Hapster’s two moons, the other nine successfully steal the Rogue Trader cruiser Lucre William, killing its crew, with Rogue Trader Roger Calavna only escaping by hiding in a messenger pod and launching himself to the world below.  Calavna swears undying revenge on the unknown prirates.
M39.519: The Birth of the Cloudburst Sector – With the discovery of the twin worlds of Cloudburst and Celeste, the Administratum declares that enough worlds have been found to justify the establishment of a new sector.  The twin worlds are declared the new capital, though colonization is delayed by jurisdictional squabbling between the Ordo Hereticus, Ecclesiarchy, and Administratum.
M39.628: Haunted soil – Explorator vessel Omnisssiah’s Great Bounty discovers the Oglith system.  Detecting the taint of Chaos on the planet from orbit, the ship requests the Ordo Malleus investigate.  Two years later, the world is found to have been the site of a horrific human sacrifice to or by an unknown daemon, but there is no multicellular life on Oglith at that time.  Cautious plans are drawn up for colonization.  During preliminary efforts, however, a fully subterranean colony of Feral Orks is discovered, apparently unaware of either the current or previous human colony efforts, and the Chaotic interlude.  The decision is reached to colonize the world, then assault the Orks all at once after a colony is well-established.
M39.631: Tearing Up an Oath – Mars formally rescinds the Titan Restriction order placed on Cognomen.  Cognomen begins building new Titans and accepts six as a starter group from Mars.  The new Legion is entitled Legio Congelatio, or Frostbite Army.
M39.648: Under the Rocks – A system is discovered, including its world Drolorium.  After an extensive, decades-long conversion effort by the young Maskos and his Ecclesiarchial allies, the world is made a part of the Imperium, and the Mechanicus examines its treasure trove of STC mining equipment.
M39.839: The Stars Come To KIll – A panicked call for help from the nearby Naxos Sector reaches Cognomen.  A war to drive off Dark Eldar from the Corumbino Nebula has taken a turn for the worst, as a Webway Gate explodes and sends a squadron of Daemonships into the nebula through the resultant Rift.  Though Imperial War-Savants believe the Rift may eventually close on its own, the daemonships deposit over eight thousand Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Mutants on Dynarix 3, the Imperial Navy staging world for the brutal war.  Cognomen agrees to dispatch its fledgling Titan Legion and a small fleet of its limited Basilikon Astra to aid the Imperials.
M39.844: 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 oyutmaneuver 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.  Mars dispatches copies of the three basic Titan blueprints and leaves Cognomen to do the work themselves.
M39.916: Betrayal of Confidence – The Rogue Trader house Jiax is annihilated in the span of five days by the Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus and the Officio Assassinorum.  No explanation is ever given to the other Traders of the region.

M40: Building Strength
M40.003: Bureaucracy Sets In – The Adeptus Terra has, by this point, taken over the administration of the new Sector directly.  Over a hundred new star systems have been added to the Imperium, with several more mapped, several beyond that earmarked for exploration, and two identified as having been so heavily infested by aliens that colonization is not feasible.
M40.093: Ambush – A routine co-operation exercise between the Basilikon Astra Cognomen and Basilikon Astra Fabique ends in total catastrophe when the fleet of Ork Freebooter Commodore Grotwhip assaults the asteroid base around which the joint exercise was conducted.  The Archetype is lost with all hands when its Magos Dominus self-destructs the hybrid core.  The fleet of Cognomen would never fully recover from the loss of their ancient flagship and home, and reserves a special hatred for Orks.
M40.102: Codification – The total number of star systems in the growing Cloudburst Sector demands fresh Subsectors.  Oglith and Maskos, two grand success stories of Imperial expansion, are made Subsector Capitals, as is Cognomen, to nobody’s surprise greater than their own.  Septiim is considered for the honor, but is passed over for Delving since the problem of determining which Septiim world to honor is too fractious to be worth the trouble.
M40.145: The Phlebotomist Rises – A cult of sadistic killers on the planet Hapster rises to the attention of Khorne, who needs do very little to shift their conduct to something more pleasing to him.  The cult goes on a rampage against the local Arbites, killing over a dozen Arbitrators and Judges and over sixty local police before being halted by a sniper team with Enforcer support.  Their leader, a former surgeon named The Phlebotomist, escapes the massacre, and continues a solo killing spree for eighteen years before dying of infection.
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.
M40.289: 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.
M40.569: 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, galactic north of Port Maw.  The lack of able defenders in the sector makes repelling pirates and slavers more difficult.
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.  Though hundreds of pirates are killed and a thousand more captured, six thousand escape on their vessels to plague the Imperium again.
M40.899: Ludovic’s Toxins – The Tzeentchian mage Ludovic the Sorceror assaults Oglith with his warband of over eighty thousand Chaos-aligned raiders and cultists.  Though the Oglith PDF are 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.

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.