Dear Vector Prime, is the Decepticon Crown Justices the Uniend version of the Decepticon Justice Division?
Dear Division Decider,
Well spotted! In that reality, the Decepticon Crown Justices did indeed constitute a branch of the Decepticon faction roughly analogous to the Decepticon Justice Division. Much like the organisation you might know, it was headed by a ‘bot who called himself “Tarn”—styling himself as Megatron’s “perfect Decepticon”, he renamed himself after the “model Decepticon city” that Shockwave governed during the opening phases of the war.
Tarn spent most of the war behind friendly lines, where he handled the inner workings of the Decepticon bureaucracy and waged a quiet war on deserters, traitors, and malcontents from the safety of a desk. This is not to say that he was afraid of combat, however—a hulking brute, he carried out most of his executions himself, and his heavy-duty alternate mode, twin fusion cannons, and imposing robot form provoked fear in both allies and enemies. When he himself could not personally oversee an execution, he would simply send one of his handpicked Crown Justices to do the job—a nasty legion of killers and brutes that included Schism, Breakneck, Smash-Gyre, War Rotor, Drive-By, and Mismatch.
Despite his abilities, Tarn was not particularly popular with the other member’s of Megatron’s inner cadre. Unlike most other members of the Decepticons, he hailed from the high-ranking political caste; those ‘bots who had clawed their way up from the dregs of society saw the fussy, perpetually uptight Tarn as a pretender who had only joined their movement to save his own skidplate. ‘Bots like Starscream and Shockwave saw him as a threat to their own power, and did their best to keep him far away from Kaon and out of most of Megatron’s decision-making processes.
But perhaps this distance was what allowed Tarn to realise that his leader was heading down a spiral of self-destructive behaviour, and correctly deduced that his increasing reliance on Dark Energon would only debilitate him further. To this end, he assembled his most loyal Crown Justices, a small group of Decepticon soldiers, and fled Cybertron just before Megatron poisoned the very core of the planet.
Tarn assumed that Megatron would eventually come to his senses and find them—in the meantime, he and his followers settled down on a dead moon in a distant star system and set about strip-mining and rebuilding “New Kaon” into a respectable Decepticon outpost. Tarn waited and waited and waited for any news from Cybertron… but when he finally received a transmission from Megatron, he did not like what he heard. Beyond outraged by the news of his beloved leader's surrender, Tarn promptly martialled his ragtag fleet to attack Cybertron in a suicidal final push. Fortunately, the citizens of Cybertron proved able to repel their attack in time—thanks to the efforts of Team Prime and the Dinobots, they were able to breach Tarn’s antiquated shield system with a well-timed GroundBridge and subdue the Decepticon leader in a brief but brutal fight. Tarn and his loyalists were promptly shipped off to Elba along with other rogues who had refused to surrender; it is quite fortunate that they remained out of Cyclonus’s reach during his brief reign over Cybertron.