Event · M31

Auretian Technocracy War

The Auretian Technocracy War was a campaign at the end of the Great Crusade in which the Sons of Horus of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet, the World Eaters of the 203rd Expeditionary Fleet and a contingent of the Emperor’s Children destroyed the Auretian Technocracy, the government of the human colony of Aureus in a binary cluster designated Drakonis Three Eleven. The Technocracy had built its civilisation on knowledge from at least one, and by one account two, Standard Template Constructs (STCs), ancient templates for technology, which allowed its military, the Brotherhood, to field power armour and bolters comparable with those of the Space Marines and to produce soldiers and equipment in the millions. The war followed Horus’s secret decision, after his wounding and recovery at Davin, to overthrow the Emperor. When the Fabricator Consul Emory Salignac met the Warmaster aboard the Vengeful Spirit and mentioned the Technocracy’s STC, Horus shot him and ordered the consul’s Brotherhood honour guard killed. Official records claimed that the consul’s staff concealed a weapon intended to assassinate the Warmaster; Captain Garviel Loken, who was present, held the claim to be a pretext for war. The STCs were coveted by the Mechanicum, and their capture was intended to secure its support for Horus’s rebellion. The fighting lasted nine or ten months, by differing accounts, and Horus is recorded as using it to identify loyalist elements among his forces. It ended at the Battle of the Iron Citadel, where the Sons of Horus 2nd and 10th Companies, under Tarik Torgaddon and Loken, followed the World Eaters through the breach. An explosive trap buried Angron beneath rubble; as the last defenders mustered to surrender to Hektor Varvarus, commander of the Byzant Janizars of the Imperial Army, Angron broke free and attacked, the Sons of Horus were drawn into a massacre of the remaining Auretians, and Varvarus was killed in the crossfire by a bolter round later judged to have come from a Space Marine’s weapon. The World Eaters killed soldiers and civilians alike, and the Technocracy was destroyed. Loken is recorded as visibly aged by the campaign.

See where Auretian Technocracy War occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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