Iron Warriors - The Fall of the Black Judges: The first major engagement of the IVth Legion under the direct command of their Primarch was the attack against a foe who would sorely test the Legion's mettle and open the campaign to bring the Meratara Cluster into Imperial Compliance.Taking his newly constituted Expeditionary Fleet, Perturabo drove straight for the heart of the cluster and the hostile power he knew resided there. On Olympia the enemy Perturabo sought had been little more than legend, but the last time their shadow had fallen on that world, their coming had led to the slaughter and enslavement of tens of thousands before their demanded tribute was paid.They were the self-styled "Black Judges" -- self-appointed arbiters of human purity, life and death. Twisted and withered creatures that had once been human in ages past, they had extended their lifespans into Terran millennia with the help of technology as ancient as it was dark. Now their shrivelled and time-ravaged forms were encased in mechanised war machines controlled by cybernetic implants.In order to continue to live, they required regular infusions of fresh human genetic material acquired by an agonisingly fatal extraction process, and from their base upon a barren, ravine-hollowed moon known as the "Rock of Judgement," they held sway over a dozen nearby human-inhabited worlds through terror, offering a devil's bargain of protection from xenos assault in return for a regular tribute of the young and healthy.The IVth Legion, reeling from its punishment at its new master's hands, was shamed into a desperate desire to prove itself to its Primarch, and it was to be the Black Judges that were to suffer its pent-up hatred and wrath.The orbital assault on the Rock of Judgement was a direct and brutal affair. Well-defended by defence laser batteries and swarms of drone-fighter craft and the Black Judges' own Warp-capable battleships, it had withstood marauders and vengeful enemies for millennia, but against the fury of the IVth Legion it could not prevail.Smashing through the blockade line of warships heedless of the losses they incurred, with a score of Legion Strike Cruisers and a dozen Battle Barges burned from stem-to-stern, the Legion grappled their foe at close-quarters, launching crippling boarding actions and barrages of Melta warhead torpedoes at point-blank range. With the line broken, the IVth Legion fleet pushed through, using the armoured prows of their largest capital ships and the bulwark Void Shields of siege frigates to weather the storm of ground fire and force a landing.Although their true technology carried with it much of the strength of Mankind's mastery over the stars before the Age of Strife, the Black Judges were few in number, even accounting for the tens of thousands of sable-robed Accusators and functionaries gene-bred to serve them, and so relied heavily upon static defences and automated sentry guns for protection.Spearheaded by Land Raider phalanxes and Shadowsword companies, the IVth Legion surged forward, methodically eliminating all resistance in a storm of energy blasts, while behind them came wave after wave of mobile siege guns and artillery whose pulverising shellfire shattered and brought down mountain-faces, burying gun-bastions below in choking rubble. Such was the apocalyptic firepower of this rolling advance that it obliterated the Black Judges' vaunted defences metre by metre, erasing them from existence.It was when the Space Marines smashed their way into the lightless inner sanctums of the Night Courts at the heart of the towering citadels of obsidian that the bitterest fighting took place. Swept by batteries of lethal neutron rays and assailed by suicidal mobs of Accusators armed with powered chain-hammers able to split even Legiones Astartes battle-plate, the casualties mounted, but the IVth Legion did not falter.Once the fanatics had been slaughtered, the leading elements of the assault wave forced their way bloodily on through abyssal chambers of nightmarish surgical theatres and abhorrent instruments of the "justice" these debased oppressors enacted, to their final confrontation with the Black Judges themselves.Sustained by their dark sciences, each of the Black Judges' armoured life support frames were all but impervious to Bolter fire, while their razor scourges and ray cannon made each the equal of a Legiones Astartes Dreadnought in firepower -- and there were hundreds of them. Against these mechanoid killers the warriors of the IVth Legion would not give ground, although the Legionaries themselves fell in droves, cut into bloody hunks of meat or incinerated in the molten coffins of their Power Armour.The darkness soon became a storm of muzzle flash and thunder, pierced by the screams of the dying and the high-pitched screeching of diseased minds that had lived far beyond human sanity for centuries. As the battle raged on, the Legionaries took to using mounds of their own dead as cover from the sweeping hellish directed energy rays, and rallied again and again to charge the blackly glittering judgement engines, suffering the Black Judges' murderous fury to plant Krak Grenades or discharge point-blank Melta blasts to bring their enemies down.For an age, the battle hovered on a knife edge; in the confines of the vaults and corridors, the Black Judges had the advantage, and for every one of them that fell, a dozen or more Astartes also fell to pay the price. It was then that Perturabo struck.Having observed the unfolding battle, his superhuman intellect had discerned patterns and vulnerability amid the chaos and din of war, and had calculated the precise point at which to attack to the greatest effect. The Primarch himself struck the ranks of the Black Judges like a thunderbolt, throwing them into disarray. Like a vengeful god he ploughed into the heart of them, blasting and burning them, ripping their machine-frames apart and tearing out the withered bodies from within with his own gauntleted hands.As the Black Judges reeled in shock and sought to realign their counterattack against this new and terrible threat, the gears of Perturabo's plan turned and the elite heavy weapons support units of the IVth Legion, already known by the informal title of "Havocs", advanced in precisely coordinated attack patterns that predicted their foes' response with preternatural accuracy. Isolating and blindsiding the Black Judges, the Havocs advanced implacably and ended their baleful rule, pronouncing sentence of their own with crossfire storms of Autocannon shells and plasma bolts.By Perturabo's design the enemy was crushed without mercy and their domains were stripped of every valuable resource and technology; wreckage and weapons flowed to Olympia and the Black Judges' long-guarded secrets fell also to the newly renamed Iron Warriors and their master, who shared them with the Mechanicum in return for their aid.With the world stripped of its resources, the orbital shipyards of the Rock of Judgement, themselves relics of the lost human age of interstellar conquest, were finally set in orbit afresh around Olympia and set to work fashioning a new generation of warships under Perturabo's seal.