Event · M41
Siege of Hydra Cordatus
The Siege of Hydra Cordatus was a M41 Iron Warriors assault on Hydra Cordatus, waged to seize hoarded Imperial Fists gene-seed. Hydra Cordatus, a forge world in the Segmentum Obscurus, held one of the Imperium’s few concealed stores of Space Marine gene-seed, drawn from the Imperial Fists Chapter and kept beneath its citadel. The Warsmith Barban Falk brought a Grand Company of the Iron Warriors back to the world, pursuing an apotheosis into daemonhood that he had bargained for since a crone world campaign years earlier. The world had already been fought over once before, during the First Siege of Hydra Cordatus in the Horus Heresy, when the Iron Warriors first broke the Imperial Fists’ hold on the Cadmean Citadel; the M41 siege completed what that earlier campaign had begun. Falk’s Grand Company opened the assault with an orbital bombardment of the Jericho Falls spaceport, then landed troops under the captains Kydomor Forrix, Kroeger, and Honsou, who drove the advance through successive fortress lines toward the citadel and its vault. The Jouran Dragoons and the Imperial Fists garrison holding the position, with officers including Colonel Leonid, died at their posts rather than yield the gene-seed, and Titans of the Legio Ignatum were committed against the Iron Warriors’ war engine before the citadel’s walls were finally breached. Falk took the gene-seed he had come for, stepped through into daemonhood, and abandoned the wreckage and his surviving warriors to whoever still answered to a mortal schedule. Honsou inherited the survivors and the habit of finishing other Warsmiths’ sieges, though the title of Warsmith itself would come to him only later. The Cadmean Citadel’s fall in the Heresy stood as the first chapter of this recurring pattern at Hydra Cordatus, and the M41 siege emptied the vault it had been built to guard.
See where Siege of Hydra Cordatus occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.