Sisters of Silence - Cataclysm of Pentacanaes: A largely impoverished but relatively societally stable Sol pattern Hive World, mere solar weeks in distance from Terra by the tides of the Empyrean, Pentacanaes had been both an early and an easily acquired bauble for the Great Crusade.  Struggling to barely maintain an industrial technological base, its only advantage was as a fleet anchorage, and the only resource it offered the Imperium was its vast Human population which ran into the tens of billions of lives.Under an Imperial governorship which displaced a squalid mess of rival competing petty kings and confederations that had held the planet beforehand, Pentacanaes had grown first into a frontier outpost, then into a port-of-call, with hundreds of Imperialis Auxilia regiments temporarily stationed there before mustering and redeployment to the front lines.During this period, many of the native population's ablest and fittest youths also took up the call of the Great Crusade, thus stripping the world of its best and brightest to form departing regiments of its own. The end result was a planet in a steady, slow rot from within. Vice and petty corruption bred in the shadows of the vast landing yards and barracks complexes, while in the hive sinks and deep-core slum falls, bypassed by the wealth that had come to the world's upper castes and bled of hope and prospect, dark beliefs and strange cults began to fester despite the best efforts of locally posted Iterators of the Imperial Truth and enforcement purges to stamp them out.Eventually, intelligence reached the Imperial planetary governor of a particularly dangerous doomsday cult, calling itself the "Final Banquet," having taken root in a desolate slum sector known as the Distempora. The cult violently resisted any attempts to destroy it and it was reliably rumoured to be led by a "holy family" with the power to "work miracles."The League of Blackships was duly informed, and when next one of the tithe vessels arrived in Pentacanaes' orbit, a quintet of heavily armed gun-cutters was dispatched to descend into the Distempora sector carrying a strong Divisio Investigates force to end the cult and seize its leadership, who were judged in absentia doubtlessly to be rogue psykers.  It is not known precisely what happened next, but the gun-cutters and their crews were never heard from again, and within solar hours all of Disternpora was riven with a cataclysm of hideous and unreasoning bloodshed.A state of emergency was declared and units of the Imperialis Auxilia barracked on Pentacanaes were activated and moved to form a cordon around the affected urban sectors, but even they could not hold, and worse, soon many of their own ranks began to succumb to the madness. The Imperial governor of Pentacanaes was also a victim, shot down by his bodyguards as he attempted to end the lives of his own children as the madness took him.Authority now fell to the highest ranking Imperial officer in orbit, the master of the same Black Ship that had triggered the massacre: Captain Gigan D'antès. Elements of the VI Legion -- not yet known as the Space Wolves -- had been alerted and were inbound from Terra, but their arrival would not be for solar days and Gigan D'anres judged that Pentacanaes did not have that long. Even the desperate measure of targeted Lance strikes and orbital barrages could not halt the spread of the anarchy across the world, and wherever Captain D'antes looked, all was in disarray. No force already in combat could hold long against whatever psyker-born madness afflicted that damned world. No force, he noted with surprise, except for one.The "Daughters of the Crow" was what the manifest of the stationed Imperialis Auxilia named them, or more formally the 5th "9-13" Indentured Irregular Infantry Regiment. They were a primarily female-cultural phenotype (techno-barbarian) force from an obscure Feral World in the southern reaches of the Segmentum Solar, so obscure in fact it lacked a proper name in the records, only the designation of "9-13." Recently raised and folded into the Great Crusade, landing only solar weeks previously for muster, the regiment had not yet seen active service, but the sparse records available showed a number of ill-defined complaints raised against the regiment by those who had been barracked alongside it; numerous fractious incidents were logged and discipline masters had been frequently sent out in force to break up trouble between the 9-13'ers and others.Sent in with the rest of the Auxilia as the tide of madness had spread, the small regiment had not only held against the onslaught, it had driven back the afflicted horde, and not one of its fighters had suffered psychic contamination. Not one. To Gigan D'antès, versed in the lore of the Scholastica Psykana, there could only be a single answer; the Daughters of the Crow -- or at least a very significant proportion of them -- were Untouchables. It was unprecedented and doubtless something that needed later investigation, but for now they offered a lifeline to a world besieged by madness.With air support from the orbiting Black Ships, the Daughters of the Crow took the battle to the very heart of the nightmare -- the depths of the Distempora Sector. Here they gave battle to the transfigured horrors that had been unleashed from the gestalt minds of the "holy family" of the cult and slew them. The effect was akin to extinguishing a fire by hurling an explosive into its midst. The spreading stain of psychic madness had been cut off at its source, and now mere anarchy and disaster reigned, where dark purpose had previously ruled all.It would take the VI Legion to bring Pentacanaes back to heel, and in the aftermath a billion dead were accounted for and half a world left a burned-out shell. By then the survivors of the Daughters of the Crow were long gone within the hold of D'antès' Black Ship, while far off across the Segmentum Solar, it is said that scores of other Black Ships appeared in the skies of the obscure planet designated "9-13" and in their passing left a world half-emptied.