Iron Hands

Iron Hands armorial with Legion iconography.

Iron Hands Battle-Brother Kateph Atrumal following his Legion's 'transcendence'.

## Space Marine Legion

### Allegiance

*Traitoris Perdita* (Classified as Renegades)/
Imperium of Man (Actuality)

### Cognomen (Prior)

None officially recognised. The "*Iron Tenth*" (Informal).
{Note that the cognomen "*Storm Walkers*" was gradually gaining de-facto use immediately prior to contact with their Primarch, but was quicly extinguished in favour of the "*Iron Hands*".}

### Observed Strategic Tendencies

Armoured and High-Intensity Warfare, Line Breaker Attacks, Planetary Pacificaiton and Suppresion Campaigns, Anti-Matériel Operations

### Homeworld

N/A; Fleet-Based
Medusa (Formerly)

### Noteworthy Domains

Sixteen other systems held in tributary fiefdom at the closure of the Great Crusade, numerous independently operated outpost way-stations and holdfasts established - full number and position remains unknown.

### Warcry

The Iron Hands attack in silence, but for the static and crackle of jammed vox-nets that precedes their arrival. (Currently)
"The Flesh is Weak!" (Formerly)

### Colours

Black and Gunmetal Gray

"*Rest? We were not made to rest; we go on, unflinching, unstoppable, unending in our strength. The Emperor did not make us for such mortal concerns as hearth and home, vanity or contemplation; we are his engines of war, his hammers, beating out the fabric of existence into a vessel fit for Mankind to inhabit.*"
— Ferrus Manus, as quoted in *Shadow of the Gorgon* by the Remembrancer Czel Atternus
The **Iron Hands** are a formerly Loyalist First Founding Space Marine Legion, renknowned for their pride, cold-hearted brutality and remorselessness in battle, the Xth Legion was counted amongst the most powerful and famed Space Marine Legions of the Great Cruade. Throughout their history, the Iron Hands have striven to strengthen humanity by purging the weak, knowing that it is the only way for mankind as a race to survive. On learning of the enormity of the threat posed by the Ruinous Powers, and the insidiously corrupting effect it had upon the body and mind, the Iron Hands Primarch Ferrus Manus decreed that only through mechanization could Chaos be defeated. His aim was to create cold, logical intelligences, shorn of the emotions which stirred up the Warp, and housed inside bodies of unyielding metal. The Iron Hands have clung to this ideal even at the expense of being classed as traitors and renegades, but now, after ten thousand years of hiding, their preparations to ascend the human race beyond the frailties of the flesh are nearly complete.

## Legion History

### The Hammer and the Storm

"*The dimension of mercy is above the warrior's thoughts and has no place in them; only cruel necessity and the solaces of victory constitute the warrior's philosphy, whole and entire.*"
— Ruth'vann Magnar, Warlord of Albia, M.29
The martial history of the Xth Legion is a relatively well-documented one, about which a great deal still survives on record in the present era (in marked contrast with some of the others). Alongside the other proto-Legions created by the Emperor of Mankind during the latter days of the Unification Wars on Ancient Terra in the late 30th Millennium, they were prepared and armed in preparation for the great work ahead, and their initial outfitting and organisation followed closely to the standard patterns set for the Legiones Astartes at the start of the Great Crusade.

Their recruitment base is noted as being relatively widespread, with elements drawn from all over Ancient Terra, both from areas of the Qavitine Plate cities, and from former enemy blocs such as the Solus Stellax.

In particular, the warlike culture and renowned brutality of the population of Old Albia, which supplied substantial numbers of recruits for the Xth Legion, had a great deal to do with the Legion's early character (as it also did for the XIVth Legion), lending them a fierce pride in a warrior ancestry that predated the Legion's Founding.

Utilised as part of larger Legion taskforces in the closing stages of the battles on Ancient Terra itself, its first individual battle honours are recorded in the wider Sol System against the mutant "Scythers" of the deep-orbiting Mican Aggregation and in the extermination of the xenos Lyasx enclave hidden beneath the ice of Oberath.

In both of these prior engagements, the Xth Legion had proved itself a remorseless and fiercely disciplined attacking force, fully capable of operating with remarkable coordination and tightly focused wrath to achieve tactical and strategic aims.

On both occasions, the Legion had defeated a powerful foe with relatively few losses despite very heavy resistance and while operating in environmentally hazardous conditions. Because of the constraints of these two battle environments - the first being a human-made Space Hulk, and the second, the airless and frozen caverns of a Dead World - these victories, while notable, did not serve to distinguish them yet in the particular style of warfare to which they would later become most famed.

Instead it would take the Legion's third large-scale engagements -- the invasion of the planet designated 02-34 (or the "Battle of Rust" as it would be commonly known to Imperial military historians) -- to show the Xth Legion's particular martial gifts for what they were, and would do so with empathic force. The task of taking the strategic world of Rust and the liberation of the enslaved human population there (thought to number almost a billion by some estimates) was entrusted to the Xth Legion, supported by two secondary battle groups, one comprised of the Urshan Velites of the Imperial Army and one comprising the Halgentine Covenant of the Legio Cybernetica.

Having already measured themselves against the savage threat of the Ork race in lesser battles previously, the massed forces of the Xth Legion, under the generalship of their Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine, formulated a plan of attack which owed much to the feared and pitiless battlecraft of Old Albia; a tactic known as the Hammer and the Storm. On and on the Orks came to fight and to die. In response, the Xth Legion re-armed and re-formed, meeting them in open counterattack, unleashing their pent-up bloodlust and rage on the enemy until the wasteland plain was choked with bodies and broken war machines.

After solar days of near-continuous fighting, the waves of alien assault grew fewer and fewer between, until they guttered and stopped at last. The Orks of Rust had not lost the will to fight, but had simply run out of blood and machinery to spend. At the end of the battle, the Xth Legion had suffered less than a fifth of its number in fatalities; a far lower figure than might have been expected if it had been forced to attack the ancient warren-tunnelled cityscapes and take them one-by-one in gruelling attrition.

The Urshan had also suffered heavy losses in the battle's opening stages, but afterwards they had been employed principally only in guarding the landing zones and supply lines while the Xth Legion fought, and many had ultimately been spared, leading to Rust being hailed as a great triumph also on account of how little had been sacrificed to attain it.

Very quickly, with its victories and developing tactics, the Xth Legion was forging an identity for itself in battle, and the name "the Storm Walkers" or "Stormwalkers" had been coined for them by the Urshan who had come to view them with an almost superstitious awe. But what might have come of this independent progression, however, will never be known, as in a short span of years after the sundering of the Krooked Klaw empire, news came that the Xth Legion's Primarch had been found on a cold, merciless world named Medusa.

### Hour of the Gorgon

Knowing that only the greatest of warriors would be equal to the task of commanding His legions in the Great Crusade, the Emperor used all of His skill to create twenty Primarchs - beings of unparalleled potency. Before His sons could even be born from their metal wombs, they were stolen away by the Ruinous Powers and scattered across the length and breadth of the galaxy. The one containing the Primarch of the Tenth Legion of Astartes fell to earth upon the death world of Medusa, a planet plagued by constant tectonic activity and an atmosphere wreathed in choking ash. Medusa bred a hardy and unsentimental people, who banded into clans which were constantly on the move, and clashed on occasion to claim what little food was available. For them every day was a new trial, and any weakness a luxury they simply could not afford.

In the decades after arriving on Medusa, the young Primarch wandered the world. On his travels he sought out the clans, accompanying them briefly to exchange knowledge or to defeat a predator, but never formally joining any of them. Given his abilities and the esteem in which he was held, he could easily have unified the clans under his leadership. Instead he remained a distant figure, subtly guiding their actions, but never taking sides in their skirmishes, or even trying to prevent them, recognizing as he did the important role this played in winnowing out the weaker elements.

According to legend, he was drawn to a nightmarish area of the planet known as the Land of Shadows, a place haunted by monsters and the spirits of the dead. There, he hunted down a terrible creature known variously as the Great Silver Wyrm, or Asirnoth the Dragonshard, which had preyed upon the clans for as long as anyone could remember. After an epic battle he was finally victorious, though his hands were forever stained with the silver blood of the beast, gaining him the name of Ferrus Manus – He of the Iron Hands.

The arrival of the Emperor and His armies upon Medusa caused great fear and suspicion amongst the clans, but Ferrus Manus was unafraid. He strode out alone to face the newcomer, and challenged Him to trials of strength and skill to prove His worth. Over the coming days of evenly matched contests, a great bond of familial love and respect was forged, and Manus accepted wholeheartedly his destined role within the Great Crusade. Command of the Tenth Legion of the Adeptus Astartes was bestowed upon him, and with it the planetary governorship of Medusa. Though he had up until then resisted all such leadership roles, Manus grasped its importance, and approached this challenge in the same way he had every other in his life; with fortitude and cold logic.

He was intrigued to meet the Astartes who had been created from his genetic template, and was satisfied to recognize much of himself in their character, even renaming the legion the Iron Hands to reflect this. From them he continued his education about the wider Imperium, absorbing knowledge at a prodigious rate and demonstrating an innate genius for technical matters which astounded the legion’s techmarines. Just as he learned from the legion, he also instilled within them the Medusan philosophies of stoicism and self-reliance, and the attitude that for a society to flourish, weakness must be unsentimentally and brutally eliminated.

### The Great Crusade

"*You are all my sons, and the fires of the forge burn as hot in your hearts as they do in mine. Chain them, master them, and you shall wield a deadly weapon. But allow them to rule you, and you shall be lost.*"
— Ferrus Manus, address to the Xth Legion before the Garvian Crusade

The Xth Legion's expeditions of conquest spread out from Medusa to bring the scattered human colonies under the Emperor's dominion, and in the main headed into the wild, uncharted expanses of Segmentum Pacificus in the galactic west. For the Iron Hands, especially those born and raised on Medusa, they found that very few planets could match their ethos of self-reliance. Their approach to these worlds was straightforwardly single-minded; any resistance was met with merciless and overwhelming force. Just as they fought clan against clan on Medusa to compete for scarce food and resources, they had no qualms about inflicting horrendous casualties to bring worlds into the light of the Imperium. In the face of these tactics planetary leaders would frequently find their pleas to surrender ignored, only to be tasked with weeding out the weaker elements from their populations themselves before the Iron Hands would call a halt to hostilities. Though many deemed the Iron Hands' methods to be thuggish and barbaric, it was simply their way of ensuring that humanity was strong enough to face the myriad dangers the galaxy held.

Ferrus Manus set the Iron Hands the formidable challenge of bringing every human world within a wide arc of the galaxy into Imperial Compliance, an undertaking they carried out with resolute stoicism. Though it took more than a century of blood, sacrifice and pain, at long last they reached the Halo Stars at the very edge of the galaxy. On a world so distant from Terra that the Astronomicon was but a guttering candle in the night, the Iron Hands reached the furthest extent of their conquests. The planet, appropriately named Terminus by fleet astrocartographers, was a place of dust and sand long-since scoured of life - even its star was old and nearly exhausted. Yet it was a milestone, and the place where the legion’s fate would change forever.

Scans of the planet revealed that deep beneath the surface lay a network of vast caverns clearly not of natural origin. Upon gaining entry they found all manner of seemingly potent, though dormant, machineries of Xenos origin and after only the briefest of examinations, Ferrus Manus bade his legion leave him and return to orbit. Though much vexed by this turn of events, the Iron Hands respected their Primarch’s wishes. When Manus emerged, he was a man transformed, and much saddened by what he had found.

Ferrus Manus explained that he had been able to decipher some of the databanks, which told the history of an advanced race from a time before life on Terra had even emerged from the oceans. Their empire had spanned the galaxy and their power seemed unassailable, little realizing the malevolent threat of Chaos that lived at the heart of the Warp. The Empyrean, they eventually came to learn, was populated not just by the mindless warp-predators which attacked unprotected ships, but by entities of godlike power and unspeakable evil. They had at first welcomed the rise of psychic powers amongst their race, realizing too late that their use weakened the walls protecting reality from this universe of horror, allowing madness and daemonic possession to run rife.

This caused a tide of suspicion, bloodshed and hysteria to sweep the galaxy, which only acted to strengthen the creatures which lived in that shadow-realm; as such powerful emotions were a feast for them. Even their most powerful warriors were not immune to corruption or possession, and they turned their weapons upon any who would not follow them into damnation. As the war raged, the Ancients tried to use their advanced technology to create wholly synthetic bodies for themselves that would be immune to the temptations of the flesh, and the warping powers of Chaos. In scores of hidden bases across the galaxy, of which the caverns of Terminus were but one, they raced desperately to free themselves from the trap of flesh before their entire race was extinguished. They failed. The countless millions of silent metal shells which they found in the depths of the catacombs below were to have been hosts to the race, but instead stood silent and dead as statues.

The words of their Primarch moved the assembled Iron Hands deeply, not least because it voiced for them feeling they had been unable to properly express since the earliest days of the Great Crusade. Despite their pragmatic and rational nature, the legion had seen much which could not be explained, and this gave reason to the irrational. In particular, the proximity of Medusa to the Eye of Terror meant that their Expeditionary forces had faced whole worlds in thrall of psykers, where madness and mutation were rife, and daemonic creatures of nightmare had been all-too real.

It was clear to the Iron Hands that history was even now repeating itself, and that humanity was sleepwalking towards the same fate as the Ancients before them. Unless they acted, mankind would be corrupted, trapped and consumed by the Dark Gods of the Warp. On that day, Ferrus Manus set his Iron Hands the task of examining the technology contained within the scattered tomb-worlds and developing it to the point where it could be used to ascend mankind beyond the frailties of flesh.

### The Hard Road

The undertaking before the Iron Hands was an epic one, made all the more difficult as it had to be carried out alone, and in complete secrecy. They could not risk telling even the Emperor of their plans, concerned either that He might oppose them, or, given the interconnected nature of psychic powers and the Warp, that the Chaos Gods might learn of it. As long as they continued to bring fresh worlds into the Imperium, the legion’s private mission to investigate the tomb-worlds went without notice. While his legion did this, Manus returned to Medusa, and in a rare seismically calm area located at the centre of the Land of Shadows, constructed a vast chamber to house his great work. A steady stream of data and arcane machinery flowed into Medusa from across the galaxy, but it soon became apparent that not all of the equipment they required was to be found on dead worlds. The most important artifact of all was located on a planet that was far from deserted. It was buried beneath the surface of Mars.

Given the jealous way with which the Mechanicum guarded their secrets, the idea that they would allow the Iron Hands to excavate and remove anything from Mars was simply out of the question. Despite the Terran system being the most heavily defended in the Imperium, and Mars being protected by Titan Legions and other potent engines of destruction, plans were drawn up to take the Artifact by subterfuge. These desperate ploys were abandoned when it became clear through the Ancient's machines that the Ruinous Powers were already moving to tear the Imperium apart in civil war. With time so desperately short, Manus formulated an audacious scheme to use these events to his advantage.

Knowing that Rogal Dorn, the chosen pawn of the Ruinous Powers, would attempt to play upon any perceived character flaw, Manus deftly used this to his advantage. He contacted Dorn and spoke of his concerns for the Great Crusade, for the need for strong leadership if the Imperium was not to crumble under its own weight, and of the high-handed way the Mechanicum so jealously guarded their technological treasures. Over the course of that fateful conversation, Manus allowed Dorn to draw him into the conspiracy to depose their father, and was sure to let just a flash of avarice tarnish his modesty when told that the Iron Hands would be the ideal rulers of Mars under the new order.

Fine words alone were not enough to secure Dorn's trust, and the access to Mars they required. The pact had to be sealed with blood and sacrifice at Istvaan V. There they were expected to help ambush and crush three legions that Dorn had been unable to convert to his cause, including their brothers-in–arms, the Emperor's Children. They yearned first to warn them, and later to join them in battle against the traitors, yet knew they must not. It is a testament to the legion’s resolve and trust in their Primarch that not a single Iron Hand faltered in the face of their duty, even when the battle brought the two legions together. They could not be seen to hold back even in the slightest against their former friends, and Fulgrim’s legion attacked their perceived betrayers with incandescent fury. The two Primarchs met, albeit briefly, and although Manus had his brother at his mercy, he faltered. In that instant of hesitation, Fulgrim pressed his attack, grievously wounding Manus and severing his left hand before they were again separated by the tides of battle.

With the three loyalist legions effectively destroyed and their place inside Dorn's rebellion cemented with blood of their brothers, the Iron Hands set course for the Terran system. During the journey, Manus crafted a masterpiece of the bionic art in adamantium to replace the hand he had lost. It was a reminder not just of the price they had all paid at Istvaan, but also of the dire cost of even a moment's sentimentality.

While the Imperial Fists and the Salamanders continued on to Terra, the Iron Hands headed for Mars. They ignored the calls for aid from their supposed Chaos allies and instead made planet-fall close to the area known as the Noctis Labyrinthus. While the region was being secured from attack, Ferrus Manus led the legion’s assembled techmarines through caves deep beneath the red planet, and to the prize they had sacrificed so much to obtain. What they found was a vast cavern that, but for the patina of eons, was all-but identical to the one constructed back on Medusa. Although empty to the naked eye, the chamber gave an indefinable impression of being somehow crowded and oppressive, which Manus explained was a side-effect of the Martian Artifact's extra-dimensional nature. Such was the complexity of the item that Manus ordered all manner of arcane equipment be put in place before it could be moved.

The wilds of Noctis Labyrinthus were far from the most intense clashes between the Mechanicus and their Chaos corrupted brethren, and for more than a week the Iron Hands faced little in the way of attacks. It was, however, simply a matter of time before their presence brought down the full might of the Titan Legions. Before the Iron Hands could test their mettle against this formidable foe, Ferrus Manus called every one of his battle-brothers down to the cavern. There he revealed that the equipment they had installed was designed to transport them, and the Martian Artifact, across the galaxy to Medusa in an instant.

Manus instructed the Iron Hand fleet to break orbit and return to Medusa using the more traditional method to avoid the technological devastation that would result as a side-effect of this device. By the time everything was in place the surface above was subject to a full-scale bombardment which shook the very bedrock with its fury. As Ferrus Manus approached the control panel and raised his hands for silence, even the drums of war seemed to fall silent in anticipation. This was broken by the unearthly howl of pent-up energies seeking release, and a sickening sense of movement. They had returned to Medusa, but before the legion could celebrate their success it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong.

### Ascension Delayed

"*The future wasn't written. There is no fate but what we have made for ourselves.*"
— Iron Hands Battle-Brother Kateph Atrumal
Through some unforeseen mishap the translation process from Mars to Medusa had prematurely triggered the Artifact, with dire consequences for the assembled Iron Hands. The machine had been intended to free humanity from its reliance on flesh and bone and transfer consciousness seamlessly into constructs of unyielding metal, but without the necessary equipment in place it proceeded to drain the life from all those around it. By the time Ferrus Manus was able to stop it, the majority of his legion had been reduced to powder-dry husks inside their suits of power armor, and even those who could be saved were debilitated, their flesh and muscles atrophied.

Worst of all, the Martian Artifact had been so badly damaged that many decades of work, and the full resources of all of the hidden bases, would be required before another attempt at re-activation could be attempted. Their intention had been to start the process of transforming mankind within weeks, ending the threat of Chaos and Dorn’s Heresy at a stroke. Instead, the terribly weakened Iron Hands were viewed by both sides as pariahs; the Imperium classed them as traitors for their actions at Istvaan, and the Chaos Legions cursed them for ignoring their calls for aid during the Siege of Terra. As much as it revolted them, they needed to hide. By the time the Iron Hands’ fleet had arrived back from Mars, the individual great companies, as well as their attendant clans, were ready to relocate to the Ancient’s bases across the galaxy.

What they found on arrival was that the tomb complexes had also been destroyed by the same cataclysm which had afflicted them on Medusa. At precisely the time the Martian Artifact had been triggered, the machineries had activated and built to catastrophic overload. With only the detailed scans taken by the survey teams, and the technological genius of Ferrus Manus, the newly integrated clan companies set to the task of rebuilding not just their depleted numbers, but the machines of the Ancients.

For thousands of years the Iron Hands remained hidden from prying eyes, venturing out only to raid for vital supplies, and even then making certain they did not leave any witnesses or hint of their involvement. To the wider galaxy it was assumed that the Iron Hands had simply been casualties of the Dornian Heresy, their passing unmourned by both sides of the war. However, with each machine they rebuild, more and more advances in technology were revealed. Bionics, powerful Gauss weaponry, space travel without passing through the Warp and phased teleportation were all developed and put to use in improving the legion’s capabilities.

While Astartes had been designed to be long lived, unlike their Primarch they were not ageless. Though able to alleviate the weight of centuries by mechanizing their bodies, had it not been for Iron Father Blantar’s breakthrough of transferring the brain and personality into crystal matrix form then their only option would have been entombment within the support systems of a Dreadnought. The Blantar Process proved once and for all that it was indeed possible to eliminate the weaknesses of the flesh, but so complex and difficult was it that not every Iron Hand, let alone every member of the human race, could be converted in this way.

The Martian Artifact had taken a terrible toll upon the Iron Hands, not least upon Ferrus Manus himself. Although it took many millennia, he eventually recovered sufficiently to face a fellow Primarch, and in the process gained a measure of vengeance for the injury done to him on Istvaan. Ferrus Manus was able to phase into the heart of the Emperor’s Children’s flagship and confront Fulgrim alone in his own state room. He defeated his brother in single combat and stripped him down to his component atoms with Gauss blasts, before reclaiming the silver hand taken as a trophy by Fulgrim on Istvaan. With his silver hand restored and his body whole once more, Ferrus Manus returned re-energized to the task ahead.

With the legion resurgent, the Iron Hands were at last able to carry out raids to procure the more difficult items required to reactivate the Martian Artifact. This has involved the legion attacking targets openly, along with the attendant risks of retribution. The largest assault was their campaign to capture the Blackstone Fortresses, in which the entire legion combined to attack strategic locations in the Gothic sector to cripple the Imperium’s ability to stop them from attacking their true targets. The Blackstone Fortresses were orbiting bastions, thought to be of Xenos origin, that the Imperium had crudely fortified with little concept of their true potential. Manus, however, through close study of the archives of the Ancient’s machines, had learned their secrets, and how to turn them against their defenders.

During the opening stages of the campaign they were able to claim three of the Blackstone Fortresses before the arrival of massed Imperial reinforcements. This made matters significantly more difficult, with the Astartes of the Death Guard destroying the fourth at Anvil 206, and the fifth spirited away from Fulvaris by the Aeldari. However, the Iron Hands were able to take advantage of the bitter in-fighting between the Aeldari and the Death Guard to claim the final Blackstone Fortress at Schindlegeist.

Leaving the Gothic Sector, the Iron Hands brought the Blackstone Fortresses to their full potential, and combined the four into a force capable of destroying whole stars. On the orders of Manus they attacked and completely obliterated worlds which were pivotal to the future schemes of the Dark Gods. No visible seed of Chaos was detected on Pavonis in Ultramar Segmentum, a Dyson Sphere hidden beneath the plane of the galaxy, or in any of the half a dozen other systems they destroyed, indicating that the legion had prevented the corruption from spreading any further.

In the dying days of M41, the legion is in the process of claiming the final items for their Primarch, and the caverns beneath the tomb worlds are filled with countless billions of metal shells ready to house the essence of humanity. As though sensing that the end is near, both the forces of Chaos and the Imperium have sought out the Iron Hand’s hidden bases, but nothing can be allowed to interfere with their second, long-delayed attempt to activate the Martian Artifact.

## Legion Homeworld

### Post-Heresy

After their evacuation from Medusa, the clan companies scattered to the forgotten corners of galaxy. There, hidden from prying eyes, they quietly and patiently rebuilt their bodies and worked to bring about their Primarch’s master-plan. These new homeworlds were little more than lifeless lumps of rock, having been scoured of life eons before in the war between the Ancients and the Ruinous Powers. Such barren worlds would have been the death of most settlers, but to the stoic former inhabitants of Medusa this was seen as simply another challenge.

While the Imperium degenerated into confusion and weakness, they lived underground among the ruins, raiding to get what they needed to painstakingly piece the vast machines back together. With the culmination of Manus’ great plan almost at hand, the Iron Hands have had to become ever bolder in their attacks to claim the final, vital items needed to activate the Martian Artifact. This has meant that their enemies, in particular the Aeldari, the Thousand Sons and Sigismund’s Black Legion, search all the more intensively for the location of the Iron Hands. Though their bases are buried far beneath the surface of otherwise dead worlds, and are shielded from even the most determined of scans, it is surely only a matter of time before the hidden weaponry which protects the worlds of the Iron Hands are used in earnest.

## Legion Organisation

### Post-Heresy

In the aftermath of the Medusan Cataclysm the clan companies were desperately few in number, but over the millennia they have steadily rebuilt their ranks so that each now contains many thousands of warriors. Each Iron Hand clan company is resolutely independent, isolated beneath the surface of their own world not just from humanity, but from the rest of the legion. Their insular nature is such that forces from different clan companies rarely fight alongside one another, except upon the orders of Ferrus Manus himself. The Primarch still resolutely commands the scattered legion, and in recent centuries the silver which had before coated his hands has spread to cover his entire body. He moves between the clan companies in a heavily converted Battle-Barge, which contains at its heart the cavern that houses the Martian Artifact. With every visit to a clan company, Manus consults with their leaders, directs their research, collects fresh components, and designates new targets for raids.

The clan companies themselves are led by marines so ancient that most are veterans of the Great Crusade. With such great age comes immense experience and wisdom, which has been rewarded with complete mechanization. So bulky and valuable is the Blantar equipment that fully mechanized marines must enter battle housed inside one of the legion’s suits of Terminator armor. Such is the veneration of these ancients that their presence is used to inspire and lead squads of their younger power armored brethren on particularly critical missions.

While the commanders direct the clan companies in the ways of war, it is the Iron Fathers who lead the research into rebuilding the machineries of the Ancients and applying their secrets to strengthen the legion. Because of this, Iron Fathers hold extremely influential positions, not just within their clan companies, but amongst the wider legion, and are able to move unimpeded between Iron Hand worlds in pursuit of the next technological breakthrough.

## Legion Combat Doctrine

"*He gave us one purpose. To destroy his enemies... Over... and over... and over.*"
— Ulroc Atron, Iron Hands Veteran Legionary.
Always a technologically adept legion, the Iron Hands have used the xenos artifacts and secrets of the dead worlds unlocked by Ferrus Manus to give them access to weapons and abilities far exceeding those of the Imperium. Their phasing technology allows the Iron Hands to appear seemingly from nowhere, catching their opponents unawares. It is also used to instantaneously redeploy forces across the battlefield without the need for transport vehicles, pressing any advantage and allowing them to vanish again like wraiths should the tide of battle turn against them.

The Iron Hands have also applied their technological prowess to their weaponry, producing war-blades capable of shearing through not just the toughest of armor, but of overloading powerfields with ease. The legion has also forsaken their former arsenal of ranged weaponry for those based on the principle of gauss flux projection. This engulfs the target in a coruscating beam of energy which rapidly strips it away layer by layer, be it the flesh of a living being or the adamantium armor of a battle-tank. Every type of Iron Hand weapon uses this principle, from the basic sidearm to the heavy weapons carried by Devastator squads, with even more powerful examples found mounted upon vehicles such as the Predator and Land Raider.

The Iron Hands are coldly logical and methodical in their approach to combat, probing for areas of weakness and suppressing the enemy with ranged fire before their specialized Assault squads phase in to strike the final blow. This is where the Nulls are most commonly to be found. Their mere presence is an anathema to daemons and psykers, and they fill even normal humans with a sense of dread which makes their onslaughts so effective.

## Legion Gene-Seed

The Iron Hands recruit almost exclusively from amongst the attendant clans of the Medusan Diaspora, both due to the need for secrecy and because of the natural superiority of such a hardy breed. The exceptions to this are those staggeringly rare individuals who, through a quirk of genetics, cast no shadow into the Warp. Similar to the Sisters of Silence, the mere presence of these Blanks or Psychic Nulls causes pain and unease amongst psykers and disrupts the use of their unnatural powers. So valuable are these abilities to the Iron Hands that despite their lower rates of successful gene-seed implantation than those recruited from the Medusan clans, the Iron Hands have been known to raid worlds specifically to capture these anomalies.

Those recruits strong enough to bear the stresses of the implantation process gain all the benefits of the Manus gene-line. However, they recognize that even as paragons of the human form they are still vulnerable to the predations of the Warp and the innate frailties of the flesh. To this end, the first act an Iron Hand undertakes upon becoming a full battle-brother is to symbolically have his left hand removed, and replaced by a bionic fist of unyielding metal. This is symbolic both of the sacrifice and loss suffered by their Primarch on Istvaan, and the first step on a path they hope will lead to complete mechanization. Although only the oldest and most senior members of the legion ever attain this lofty ideal, they retain a palpable link to their Primarch even when every last gene-seed implant has been replaced by metal and circuitry.

## Trivia

This article was originally authored by Aurelius Rex over on the Bolter & Chainsword forums. All rights are reserved to him.

## Gallery

Iron Hands armorial with Legion iconography (Great Crusade era).An unknown Iron Hands Praevian-Consul during the Great Crusade.Iron Hands Traitor Legionary Ulroc Atron (post-Heresy) arrayed in highly modified Tartaros pattern Terminator Armour.Iron Hands Fire Support Legionary Tyrororx Kralver (post-Heresy).