Beyond his overt mission to answer the call for aid and help the Emperor's Children Legion stabilize the situation, Hercules carried a direct and secret order from his Primarch, Lorgar.
He was to establish contact with a human realm known as "Intres."
Lorgar clearly understood Intres's potential importance on the galactic chessboard. Its value might far exceed the xenos threat on a remote Death Planet.
He therefore chose not to wait for the situation to become entirely clear or for the slow response of the Imperial apparatus. Instead, he made his move in advance, sending Hercules, his most trusted agent, to this star cluster that had only just been swept by war.
Murder Star, a world provisionally given the name "Murder" after devouring the Blood Angels fleet, was far more than the site of a simple xenos invasion or an unknown catastrophe.
In older records and certain forgotten archives, it had once been—or still was—a "prison" used by the human realm called Intres to confine and isolate the terrifying Giant Spider Xenos before them.
The arrival of the Imperial Fleet, the destruction of the Blood Angels, and even the fierce fighting that followed were, in a sense, merely a fatal intrusion, a tragedy born of straying into a fortified exclusion zone.
According to some predetermined "script" still unknown to the Imperium, after a "riot" and outside incursion of such magnitude at the prison, Intres should have dispatched forces to investigate, suppress the disturbance, and repair the barriers.
Hercules and the Word Bearers forces were here precisely so that, at that critical moment, they could contact representatives of Intres in the dual roles of "quellers of rebellion" and "potential partners in dialogue," laying a secret diplomatic channel for Lorgar, for the Word Bearers, and even for a far grander vision.