Autek Mor - From The Deeps: Of the Iron Hands Legion, it was known that many had been driven to stark madness by witnessing their father's end and thrown themselves wholesale into the crucible of war as if to absolve their loss in their own deaths. Yet, a substantial number of Iron Hands Legionaries had extricated themselves from the massacre, and while few had made it off the surface, many more had survived the calamitous void ambush of the Legion's fleet, breaking away and scattering across the stars. Some would form isolationist bands, fighting their own private wars against the Traitors, such as the infamous "Red Talons" of Autek Mor.Within a year of the Dropsite Massacre, the greater part of the northern Imperium had fallen to the Traitors. The Loyalist armies were in disarray and prevailing conditions in the Warp had made long range travel and astro-telepathic communications perilous in the extreme. World after world had fallen to the Traitors' inexorable advance on Terra and the Loyalist armies reeled before them, forced into a series of costly fighting withdrawals that at times bordered on a rout. It was from the bloodied void that the Red Talon descended upon the Warmaster's dark empire in a campaign of fire and blade that was the diametric opposite of that being silently waged by the Shattered Legions of Shadrak Meduson, one born of the fearsome mien and bitter anima of Autek Mor. The Age of Darkness has obscured the true accounting of a great many battles, and those fought along the leading edge of the Warmaster's advance on Terra are especially shrouded. It cannot be said for certain when Autek Mor launched the first strike of his campaign, yet certainly the fate met by Gethsamaine Colonus in the Cyclops Cluster must rank as one of the very first such instances.Riding from the depths of the outer darkness of the Grail Abyss, a ragged yet bellicose flotilla of warships led by the Red Talon fell upon the Gethsamaine System. More than a year previously, in 005.M31, the Gethsamaine System had submitted to Horus without resistance and this obeisance had thus far spared them the worst of the war's deprivations. The system's only inhabited world, Gethsamaine Colonus, had been forced to suffer newly imposed overlords in the shape of Tithe Aquistors bearing the serpent's eye of Horus, where once they had the raptor-headed Seal of Terra. Under their directions, the industries of Gethsamaine now laboured, and the planet's vast rain forests were being clear-cut to provide fodder for off-world export, but other than the Aquistors' harsh quotas, little in truth had changed for the people of Gethsamaine. But just as the unexpected arrival of a lone survivor from the Isstvan System in 006.M31 had gone on to herald the dawning of the terrible war that was to follow, so now with fell irony was a second survivor of that great treachery to herald a new wave of conflict.When the ill-starred warp route from the haunted Grail Abyss tore open once more, the vessel that cut into realspace with dreadful purpose was no derelict caparisoned in Emperor's Children amaranth as that first survivor-ship had been, but a jagged and scar-hulled killer in black iron and blood crimson. It was the Red Talon, the ship of the Iron Hands Clan Morragul, and their master, Autek Mor. Gethsamaine had been stripped of much of its void defences in the Traitors' passing and now it stood all but naked before this spectre of the Imperium's grim retribution. The few remaining gun platforms which protected Gethsamaine Colon us were quickly swept away by the attacking grand cruiser, and a ruthless bombardment of the planet from low orbit immediately commenced preparatory to a ground assault. Then came the grim sons of Medusa to enact judgement.Any resistance to the Iron Hands was swiftly obliterated, and an entire cohort of planetary militia and their Horusite overseers crushed beneath the treads of Clan Morragul's armour in less than an hour settled the matter into a general rout for the defenders. Wasting no time, seats of government were blasted to rubble, and those in positions of power that had aided the Traitors or sided with their cause were methodically hunted down and executed, save for a select number of prisoners deemed to have potentially useful information, who were dragged screaming back to the Red Talon's gunships. As the Iron Hands Thunderhawks blasted off from the surface, the bulk of the civilian population, which had fled into hiding during the sudden assault, nervously rejoiced and came forth, little knowing what would come next. In each of the five major cities of Gethsamaine, the Iron Hands had left behind an improvised atomantic device fashioned by the bloody hand of their Iron-Father, each bomb clad in layer upon layer of radioactive material designed to enrich and multiply the fallout generated by its detonation a hundred fold. The Red Talon broke orbit just as the cities bloomed into fire; sentence had been passed on both the Traitors and those who had knelt before them, and notice served that there could be no bystanders in this terrible war, no civilians to be given quarter, only Loyalist and Traitor to the death.Gethsamaine Colonus may have been the first Traitor-controlled world to know the judgement of the Red Talon, but many more would know it by the end. It has been said of Autek Mor and the force he built around the Morragul Clan-Company that he was the last Loyalist out of the Coronid Deeps. In truth, he never abandoned them nor took a single step backwards. Rather, he simply weathered the storm of the Traitors' passing before striking from the rearward, a strategy that, though unacknowledged at the time, is likely to have saved countless Loyalist worlds from the Warmaster's hand.