Treachery at Port Maw - The Enemy Unlooked For: In accordance with the Coda Navis the invading Space Hulk was designated Red Polyphemus and its unexpected appearance sent the Commonwealth's military scrambling to respond. Space Hulks are immense conglomerations of shattered planetary rock and ancient derelict ships whose navigation is notoriously unpredictable. It was thought at the time that the Hulk had been drawn perhaps to the system's potent Astrotelepathic relay orbiting the system's seventh planet. However, its appearance after a brief but violent storm in the Warp seems too doubtful in hindsight to be considered as mere ill-fortune.While the Orks as a galactic-scale threat within the expansive celestial territory of the Imperium had been subdued by the Great Crusade, on the outer frontier of the Emperor's domains, they still remained a potent if infrequent menace, and the degenerate, half-devolved breed that infested the Red Polyphemus represented the largest concentration of the brutal xenos encountered in the region for nearly thirty standard years. Such a dire menace required the immediate mustering and despatch of an entire battle group from Port Maw to combat, diverting a muster of warships and cohorts intended to deal with the worsening situation in the Cyclops Cluster. By the time the Imperial fleet answered the attack, the Vlorlath Srader Relay was already overrun, and tens of thousands of mutated Orks and gyre-worms had made planetfall on Vlorlath Srader while the Space Hulk itself ploughed madly onwards, forcing the fleet into a dogged and bloody pursuit. In normal circumstances, the aid of a sizable Legiones Astartes force would have been ideally called upon to strike a death blow to the Hulk, but in these darkening times, no such aid was available. This left the Port Maw battlegroup the thankless and dangerous task of attempting to slowly pulverise the gargantuan Red Polyphemus with prolonged, close-range bombardment, rather than board it and destroy it from within -- all the time under attack by the barbaric xenos which infested it like vermin. Without the elite Solar Auxilia Cohorts of the Port Maw Excertus Command, dealing with this catastrophe would simply not have been possible, both in terms of the counter-invasion of the Vlorlath Srader System's colony worlds, and the defence of the taskforce attacking the Ork Hulk, which faced continual suicide attacks and boarding assaults by the savage xenos and their crude but murderous void engines.As the campaign against the xenos dragged on into the closing days of 007.M31, the Hulk finally began to fragment under the bombardment, but the victory's cost had entailed a butcher's bill in lives and voidships lost increasing with every report, while word reached Port Maw and Manachea of the fate that had befallen Lascal -- the destruction of an entire battlegroup of the Port Maw Armada -- and then Dominica Minor, offering a terrible blow to the Commonwealth's morale. The fears of the Commonwealth's defenders now had a name and a shape at last. Calls for military aid were passed on to still-loyal territories to the galactic East in the Coronid Reach -- the only part of the Imperium with which contact could be readily made now that the Astropathic relay of Vlorlath Srader was lost to them. Grudgingly such worlds like Numinal and Agathon gave their accord, well aware that should Port Maw fall, they themselves would have little chance to prevail on their own against this enemy. Orders for general mobilisation were issued, the final stages of emergency plans enacted, defences on the Commonwealth's eastern borders were heavily reinforced and known stable Warp termini to and from the Cyclops Cluster were aggressively laid with Void Mines. Given the ongoing battle within the Vlorlath System occupying a major part of the fleet's strength, the order was given that task forces and patrols were to be recalled where possible from all other posts and rendezvous at Port Maw with the expectation of having to meet head-on what would once have been an unthinkable threat: the direct and massed attack of the Death Guard Legion from the silence of the Cyclops Cluster.It was, unfortunately, all just as Horus had planned.