Treachery at Port Maw - Triumph and Betrayal: In the void-space around Port Maw sudden, deafening silence cut through the incessant pulse across the Vox and signal network of the Loyalist voidships and in its wake matters immediately became less chaotic and more murderous as battle lines were swiftly drawn between friend and enemy, hails sent and answered, ultimatums and demands for surrender issued and spurned, and command asserted in the face of the crisis.Aboard the titanic Triumph of Reason, the Port Maw Armada flagship -- a huge fleet control vessel re-forged from the twin hulls of two Legatus-class macro-battleships crippled in the earliest years of the Great Crusade -- the attempted assassination of Grand Admiral Ospheus LaBray had been thwarted and an attempted mutiny eradicated with bloody certainty. LaBray was now once more in command of the immense warship and with the malign signal countered, the auguries and strategium-luminator systems of the Triumph -- designed to order and direct an entire Segmentum fleet-of-war if needed -- reasserted tactical control over all Loyalist vessels that would answer its call. LaBray's first order was to the Dictatus-class ram-battleship Kurga, which hung in orbit near the Port Maw station, having just similarly suppressed a mutiny of its own. Awakening to war, it powered towards the now silent Mechanicum Panopticon tower, the six-kilometre-long armatures of the ram-battleship's triple servo-claws extended. The Kurga smashed into the tower, the thirty-metre-long teeth-spikes of its claws piercing its armour and sinking slowly through its guttering power fields, and were joined moments later by scores of rocket-fired Melta-barbed harpoons which speared into the brazen faces of the tower. Its victim secured, the Kurga’s drive burned white hot. The ten-kilometre-tall tower shivered and cracked, resisting defiantly against the unimaginable forces tearing at it, but soon shuddered and gave way as the Kurga’s oversized engines burned like hellfire. The tower broke, a myriad of secondary explosions rippling along its length as it crumbled like rotten wood and was dragged free into the void. The malign signal would not sound again.At the centre of the maelstrom of voidships, Loyalist and Traitor vessels began to break apart, guns firing in fitful bursts, uncertain of friend and enemy. On the outer edges of the vast, slow, vortex of ships, tens of thousands of kilometres from Port Maw itself, the outriders of the great armada were only just recovering. These vessels had not been part of the core fleet at the Maw and comprised dozens of reinforcement squadrons sent to the muster from other systems, along with numerous refugee craft and mass conveyors, around which were small provender and repair vessels that flitted like tiny sea creatures swarming around ocean leviathans. Here, removed from the heart of the treacherous attack, the carnage had been less extreme and the mutinies fewer, but still the anathema signal from Port Maw had blinded and deafened them for a time and now most were bewildered and uncertain of just what the catastrophe unfolding before them meant, uncertain of who was firing on whom, or why.At the outermost edge of the maelstrom of warships, and all but unnoticed in the confusion, one of the great war-arks of Cyclothrathe, which had so far taken neither side in the anarchy, now triggered its manoeuvre jets and came about. The colossal barrel-shaped vessel slowly turned and pointed its prow towards the opposite edge of the spiral arm of outer ships to the still unengaged warships of the Cruiser squadron sent from distant Agathon to answer Port Maw's call. Not one of these vessels bore a Traitor inside and to them the battle yet had no seeming cause and no clear side to choose. The Cyclothrathine war-ark, designated Arithmetic of Violence, silently broke apart, its ten-kilometre-long hull plates separating like the petals of a colossal flower in the storm. Revealed within in place of internal decks were row upon serried row of inert void torpedoes, which, as if lit by a single torch, ignited their plasma drives with a golden blaze of fire. They burned across the void to the Agatheans, smaller ships caught in their path obliterated instantly, and struck home like the obliterating fist of a god. The sudden searing flash of a score of mighty warships dying at once in fire was so bright, that in that instant it burned visible to the naked eye even to the dark edges of the system's Ort-cloud. And there in answer, a gigantic black warship came to life.