82: Chapter 82: The Allied Forces Decipher Deep Space Signals; the Signal Itself Was a Sentence Repeated for Millions of Years.

Heinrich's reconnaissance fleet established a forward observation post on the periphery of the asteroid belt. Two Strike Cruisers deployed in a defensive formation centered around the broadcast station, their Void Shields maintained at alert thresholds. On the bridge of the Shield of the Emperor, Heinrich von Strauheim held a freshly refilled coffee cup, staring with his mechanical bionic eye at the tactical projection of the spherical broadcast station encased in ancient composite materials. It continued to transmit the same set of signals at fixed intervals; after each broadcast, it paused for a moment before starting over, its rhythm as precise as an ancient pendulum that had yet to break. He set his coffee cup on the edge of the command console and told his first officer that in his life, he had heard the howls of the Tyranid Hive Mind, the psionic screams of Chaos, and the Blackstone Resonance of The Swarm, but he had never seen a signal transmitted for tens of millions of years just to repeat a single sentence.

The task force from the Alliance Technical Committee arrived at the edge of the asteroid belt shortly after he sent his reconnaissance report. An Aeldari wraith cruiser carried Iyanden's Seer Council and wraithbone deciphering equipment. Canoptek-7 remotely accessed the Eternal Echo's quantum-state deciphering array via the Psionic Void Network, while the Brood Queen set out from Metallis with two Blackstone Cerebrates and a group of Drones. When she landed on the broadcast station's outer shell, the Drones spread a paper-thin layer of creep around her. The Blackstone Resonance Chambers on her adamantium-chitin carapace calibrated with the passive scanning array of the Void Throat. She then manipulated the translator with her forelimbs, informing the War Council that the on-site deciphering environment was ready. The signal was not encrypted, had no quantum entanglement protection layer, and lacked the homologous verification locks common in Old One protocols; it was simply encased in an extremely ancient composite shell, leaking continuously into the void.

The Blackstone Cerebrates were the first to undo the first layer of the broadcast station's seal. It wasn't an Old One seal, nor Necron Dynasty quantum encryption, nor Aeldari Web of Prophecy masking, nor any technology humans had ever seen. As the seal disintegrated, it left behind only a very short creator signature. When compared against The Swarm's genetic code cross-reference table, the semantic meaning was highly similar to a single word—"Feeders." Canoptek-7 paused for a moment in the remote link before reporting its conclusion: the Necron Dynasty had encountered a fragment of this signature at the end of the War in Heaven. At the time, they had designated the Creator Civilization as "Feeder Zero," but this civilization had already ceased to exist before the War in Heaven broke out. Earlier than the Old Ones, earlier than the Necron Dynasty—it was one of the earliest known interstellar civilizations in the galaxy.

The Iyanden Farseer gently pressed his Wraithbone Staff against the deciphering interface. The civilization of "Feeder Zero" had never appeared within the Web of Prophecy, but while deciphering the second layer of the shell, he discovered an extremely ancient shadow marked by the Skein as "The Forgotten of the Forgotten." The most senior seers in the Aeldari Seer Council had once hypothesized that before the birth of the Aeldari and the rise of the Old Ones, a "First-Generation Interstellar Civilization" had existed in the galaxy. They had never been confirmed, existing only as indirect traces in certain ancient ruins. The Farseer said that this broadcast station might be the last legacy they left behind.

The deep broadcast logs of the station were gently opened by the Drones' creep probes shortly after deciphering began. The Brood Queen pulled up the complete log index and projected it onto the Alliance's shared interface. Starting from a day tens of millions of years ago, the station recorded a total war that broke out on the edge of the Ultima Segmentum between the Creator Civilization and a dark purple biomass fleet from beyond the galaxy. The logs recorded the progress of the war, covering fleet assembly, orbital defense, and ground attrition; many of the specialized terms used had their signals repeatedly measured during the Alliance's engagements with the Tyranid Main Fleet. The Brood Queen extracted several waveforms for cross-comparison, and the results were a perfect match—the data characteristics of the dark purple fleet that had fought this broadcast station, including its gene-consumption patterns, command neural layer psionic structure, and creep expansion speed, were identical to those of the Tyranid Hive Fleet Leviathan that the Alliance had just repelled in the Battle of the Star of Judgment.

Canoptek-7's analysis now patched into the Alliance's public channel, pointing out that at the end of the war, the Creator Civilization had built a prototype core of a sealing device—not called the Void Throat at the time—and used it to push the Tyranid Main Fleet back into deep space layer by layer from the edge of the galaxy. The Necron Dynasty later discovered the wreckage of this prototype and used it as a blueprint, adding triple-encrypted seals to create what would become the Void Throat, though the Necrons never cracked the prototype core's self-destruct protocol. Meanwhile, this broadcast station had operated alone for tens of millions of years after the war. During that time, the other side of the galaxy saw the outbreak of the War in Heaven between the Necrons and the Old Ones, the rise and fall of the Aeldari Empire, the rise of humanity, and the Great Crusade of the Imperium, until this very moment.

When the final layer of the station's logs was unlocked by the Drones, the Brood Queen fell silent for a moment. She did not translate it; instead, she transcribed the original text into Swarm genetic code and sent it to the Overmind. Simultaneously, she performed a homologous comparison between the original Old One assessment protocol and a segment of the creators' testament in the logs. The results were translated word-for-word into Imperial High Gothic by the quantum-state translator and projected onto the main screen.

"We awakened the hunger sleeping at the edge of the galaxy. We call it the Tyranid. We did not defeat it; we only pushed it back temporarily. We used our final sealing device to block its teeth as they bit toward the galactic core. Now our stars are fading, our gene pool is exhausted, and in a few cycles, our civilization will completely lose its capacity for interstellar travel. We leave the entire record of the war here. If the seal is eventually activated by those who come after, if the Tyranid returns to this sector—you are not the first civilization to be consumed by it, but you may be the last. Do not be alone. The losers who came before you were once just as terrified as you are."

The moment the words settled on the main screen, no one in the briefing room spoke. Standing on the bridge, Heinrich von Strauheim slowly moved the red light of his mechanical bionic eye away from the projection of the broadcast station and whispered to himself—a civilization from tens of millions of years ago left behind a final message that wasn't a cry for help, but a reminder not to be alone. Then he stood tall, keyed the fleet channel, and ordered the forward observation posts to maintain their vigil and await instructions from Alliance Command. At the Void Gate position, Bern gently rested his Holy Hammer on the ground. He was silent for a while over the comms channel before saying he would copy the full text of this testament to the High Lords of Terra and the Ecclesiarch—this wasn't a technical report; it was a suicide note. The Alliance had just received an epitaph from one of the galaxy's earliest civilizations. He hoped Terra would carve it onto the base of the Astronomican.

The Brood Queen retracted her creep probes from the station's shell and stood up to give a brief announcement over all Alliance channels. After the deciphering was complete, the station's main signal had automatically switched to a silent standby mode, and the shell's sealing layers were now set for long-term preservation by the Alliance. She stated that the Overmind had already recorded all the war logs and sealing prototype data of the Creator Civilization into the Hive Mind and forwarded them to the Psionic Void Network's technical committee. As an additional note, she mentioned that a declaration at the end of the broadcast had written the inheritance certification for the Void Throat's prototype core into the Alliance's activator database—ranking after the Old Ones but before the Necron Dynasty. Marcus slowly closed his dataplate and ordered the broadcast station to be named "Testament Station," with the complete archives of the Creator Civilization integrated into the Alliance's highest shared database. Then, he issued an order to the entire fleet: "The Alliance has just confirmed one thing—we are not the Tyranids' first opponent, but we may be their last. Let Terra know, let all the wavering sectors know: the Alliance is no longer just fighting for the living; we are also fighting for those races who faced the Tyranids long before us but never had the chance to see victory. The Alliance moves forward."