Gethsamaine - The Gethsamaine Raid: Just as the unexpected arrival of a lone survivor from the Istvaan III Atrocity in 006.M31 had gone on to herald the dawning of the terrible deeds that were to follow, so the arrival of a second lone ship, this time a survivor of the Istvaan V Massacre would mark the doom to come, for the lone vessel was a warship of the X Legion. When the ill-starred Warp-route from the Grail Abyss tore open once more, the vessel that cut into realspace was no derelict ship as the frigate from the Emperor's Children had been, but a scar-hulled killer, a Grand Cruiser of black iron and crimson blood. The ship's name was the Red Talon and it belonged to the Iron Hands Legion.Its master was the famed and sinister Autek Mor, leader and Iron Father of Clan Morragul which had become the harbour of the most unstable and extreme members of the Iron Tenth. Gethsamaine had been stripped of much of its void-defences by the Traitors, believing the planet secure as it was located far from the front lines of the civil war and the few remaining gun-platforms posed no real threat to the Iron Hands vessel. As soon as these platforms had been silenced, the Red Talon began a heavy and ruthless bombardment of the planet and almost immediately launched a ground assault. Unknown to Gethsamaine's population or the Traitor elements stationed on the planet, the Iron Hands had come with a simple goal in mind: not to liberate or reconquer, but to enact vengeance on those who had betrayed their Emperor.Any resistance was quickly crushed under the iron tracks of Clan Morragul's battle tanks, an entire cohort of planetary defence militia and their Horusite overseer being obliterated in less than a solar hour. The rout of the other militia elements devolved into a bloody massacre in which one of the X Legion Dreadnoughts, the Contemptor Pattern Dreadnought Veneratii Oberas, distinguished himself. The seats of government were blasted into rubble or flattened from orbit by precision bombardment from the Red Talon’s guns; those in positions of power that had sided with the Traitors or helped them were mercilessly and methodically hunted down and executed, except if they were deemed to have potentially useful information, in which case they were dragged screaming and kicking back to the Red Talon’s gunships. The bulk of Gethsamaine's population had fled the warfare and only dared come out of hiding once the Iron Hands Thunderhawks had departed. The Red Talon departed the system as quickly as it had come, continuing its rampage behind the lines of the Traitors' advance.The survivors nervously rejoiced and came forth with praises of the Emperor on their lips, but they were utterly unprepared for what was to come. In each of the five major cities of Gethsamaine, the Iron Hands had left behind improvised atomantic devices fashioned by the bloody hand of their Iron Father. Each bomb was clad in layer upon layer of radioactive material designed to enrich and multiply the fallout generated by their detonation a hundred-fold. As the Red Talon left orbit the bombs exploded; the five cities bloomed into fire, extinguishing the life of millions in a blink of an eye.Sentence had been passed on both the real Traitors and those who had knelt before them instead of fighting and dying for their Emperor. The "Raid on Gethsamaine," as it was called, served as a bloody message to those that would bow to the Warmaster, that they were not safe from Imperial retribution and that when this retribution would come, it would be indiscriminate and far bloodier than everything the Warmaster could threaten them with. In the war to come, there would be no innocent bystanders, no civilians to be given quarter, only Loyalists or Traitors.