Badab Primaris - The Fall of Badab Primaris: By early 913.M41 the Badab Sector was firmly under Loyalist control as the Badab War reached its climax and Badab Primaris soon found itself under siege. The final battle of the Badab War took place at the Palace of Thorns, Huron's seat of power, where the Loyalist Star Phantoms spearheaded the assault. As the edifice was almost impregnable to ground assault, the Star Phantoms instead attacked the Palace of Thorns via Drop Pods and Thunderhawk gunships, under the cover of a colossal orbital bombardment. A bitter struggle soon erupted between the remaining Astral Claws and the Star Phantoms as they vied for control of the palace while the battle fleet in orbit above Badab Primaris continued to trade punishing volleys of fire with the defensive guns of Huron's stronghold.Assigned by Lord High Commander Carab Culln of the Red Scorpions the task of attacking the planet's infrastructure and preventing an organised defence from taking root, the Carcharodons took matters into their own hands to bring about the end of the Tyrant's reign and devised their own plan for doing so. They despatched strike teams deep into the sub-surface caverns deep beneath Badab Primaris' hive cities. There the savage Astartes sabotaged the extensive subterranean network of ancient atomic and geo-thermal reactors which powered the hives and fed Badab Primaris' hungry planetary defence batteries with energy.Across Badab Primaris the power failed or suddenly spiked, which added to the chaos of the final assault, while the hives began to quake and the once soaring towers of Badab toppled like felled trees. As the reactors began to detonate, they ripped apart Badab's continental landmasses, triggering massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, hurling millions of tonnes of radioactive fallout and debris into the atmosphere.Meanwhile, the Star Phantoms gradually began to press forwards to the Secessionists' inner defence line. While fighting their way through the sewer network beneath the Palace of Thorns the Star Phantoms finally reached the defence batteries that powered Badab Primaris's formidable defences. The Star Phantoms destroyed the power generators that supplied the defence grid, finally silencing the big guns so that a full-scale Loyalist ground assault could commence.As the battle swung against the Secessionists for the final time, Captain Zhrukal Androcles of the Star Phantoms' 9th Devastator Reserve Company ambushed Lufgt Huron and his elite bodyguard as the Secessionists struggled to fight their way to their landing craft to effect their escape. The swift and bloody battle that followed wiped out the entire Star Phantoms detachment, but not before the dying Androcles managed to unleash a Melta-blast at point blank range into the Tyrant of Badab, dealing him a mortal blow, although his body was borne away by his closest followers and he would return to plague the Imperium once more as the piratical Chaos Lord Huron Blackheart, the master of the warband of vicious Chaos Space Marines called the Red Corsairs.Beneath the hives of Badab Primaris, the cascading destruction of the subterranean reactor cores took their toll. Tectonic shocks and volcanic eruptions increased at an exponential rate and entire hive city sectors collapsed into gaping maws that opened in the ground beneath them to be replaced by seas of churning lava. The Loyalist campaign of purgation and conquest on Badab quickly devolved into an anarchic retreat and many Astartes were caught in the path of destruction. In the anarchy and ruin that followed the fall of the hive cities, the air was filled with toxic ash and fallout, and the majority of the planet's population are estimated to have been exterminated within only a few solar days.Confusion reigned in the wreckage-strewn Badab System as both Loyalists and Secessionist starships were fired upon. It was later determined that at least one small Warp-capable privateer vessel managed to escape the Badab System into the Warp. Later intelligence reports suggest that less than two hundred Astral Claws survivors were on board, led by their Master of the Forge Armenneus Valthex and carrying with them their master's broken yet still living body. The Badab War was over, but the Emperor's judgement upon treacherous Badab had been delivered. Badab Primaris was nothing more than a ruined, radioactive cinder and effectively became a Dead World, haunted only by the dead and the memory of its lost Tyrant.