Honsou - The Warsmith's Wrath: Though Honsou had emerged as the victor in the brutal conflict between the Iron Warriors Warsmiths, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Most of his forces has been smashed by the two rival Warsmiths and their armies during the internecine war.Despite the losses to his troops and the destruction of the Daemonculaba, Honsou began the task of rebuilding his forces. He accomplished this by inviting those surviving Renegade Space Marines, led by Ardaric Vannes, a former Battle-Brother of the Raven Guard, into his growing army.His personal retinue also changed to include Cadaras Grendal, a particularly murderous Iron Warrior who had previously served under Berossus, and the loathsome but powerful Warp-creature known as the Newborn -- who was genetically cloned from the genetic material of Uriel Ventris by the Daemonculaba before their destruction.The recent destruction of Khalan-Ghol on Medrengard made the Warsmith seethe with rage at the bitter defeat by the hands of Uriel Ventris. Honsou plotted his vengeance against the upstart Ultramarines captain and his Chapter. Honsou knew he would not be satisfied until he had inflicted the most wretched humiliations on the one enemy who had escaped him.Honsou attacked Defence Platform Ultra Nine, an Imperial space station that orbited above Tarsis Ultra, the sight of Captain Ventris's stunning victory over the Tyranids a few short years before. Honsou's warband slaughtered everyone aboard the station and seized control of its deadly missile payload.A salvo of sixteen orbital torpedoes surged from the station's launch bays, followed by another rippling salvo seconds later. Another three salvos launched until all but one of the platform's entire payload of missiles was expended. Each missile dropped away rapidly from the platform in a ballistic trajectory towards the planet's surface. As the missiles reached a predetermined altitude over the planet's surface, each one exploded and spread its viral payload into the air.Vast quantities of the experimental Heraclitus viral strain were released into the atmosphere. All across the planet, a terrible rain fell, wreaking terrible damage as the insidious microbes went to work on Tarsis Ultra's indigenous and xenos vegetation.The world of Tarsis Ultra had suffered the horror of invasion by the monstrous swarms of the Tyranids. Though the invasion had been defeated, the dreadful legacy of the alien invaders remained to taint the planet's ecology forever.From pole to pole, horrific spires of dreadful alien vegetable matter towered over the landscape, slowly choking the life from the natural landscape. The alien flora had subsumed entire continents, a rapacious instinct to devour encoded in every strand of its genetic structure. Nutrients were leeched from the soil and used to create hyper-fertile spore growths that drifted on the heated currents of the air to seed new regions and pollute yet more land.The Heraclitus virus had been developed from a partial fragment of ancient research conducted by the Mechanicus' Magos Heraclitus. The bio-toxins were intended to increase the growth rate of crops on Agri-worlds, and were designed to increase the productivity of such worlds a thousand-fold.Within solar seconds of the Heraclitus strain's release into the atmosphere, the alien growths reacted to its touch, surging upwards and over the planet's terrain. Overwhelmed by mutant growths, poisonous plant life expanded whole kilometres in seconds as the virulent growth strain sent its metabolism into overdrive.Huge amounts of nutrients were sucked from the ground and released as enormous quantities of heat, raising the ambient temperature of the world in a matter of moments. Oxygen was sucked greedily from the atmosphere by horrifyingly massive spore chimneys and the planet's protective atmospheric layers were gradually stripped in an unthinking biological genocide.This was not the rapid death of Exterminatus, but ecological death of global proportions. Panicked messages were hurled out into the Immaterium and only those with the money, influence or cunning escaped on hastily-prepared starships that fled the planet's destruction.In the wake of the attack, billions had been left behind and, solar weeks later, as the last of the planet's atmosphere was stripped from it by the hyper-evolved alien biology, hard stellar radiation swept the surface, killing every living thing and laying waste to all that remained.Solar months after the launch of the Heraclitus missiles, nothing remained alive, the deadly alien vegetation killed by lethal levels of radiation and the frigid cold that gripped the planet without its protective atmosphere. All that now remained of the planet was a dead, lifeless ball of rock, its surface seared and barren, with only the skeletal remains of its blackened cities left as evidence that human beings had once lived upon it.After the death of Tarsis Ultra, Magos Locard of the Adeptus Mechanicus and members of the Skitarii landed upon the dead planet, attempting to investigate what occurred. Following a lone beacon, the Explorator team found a lone battered orbital torpedo.Removing the payload bay of the torpedo, the Magos reached inside and removed its contents -- a cracked helmet, the paint chipped and one eye lens missing. The helmet was a deep blue and bore the badge of the Ultramarines Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. The helmet was meant to send a message to Uriel Ventris -- that you don't walk away from a fight with the Warsmith Honsou without paying a price.