97: Chapter 97: Emergency Meeting of the War Council, the topic of which is "Beyond the River".

When the emergency notification from the Void Throat Defense Command lit up on all Coalition tactical interfaces simultaneously, Marcus Aurelian had just signed and scanned the final page of The Swarm's draft legal definition into the Coalition's shared database. As Canoptek-7's quantum-state monitoring data spread across the main screen, the extremely faint tremor waveform deep within the Talasta Void Gate perfectly matched the original master frequency of the Old Ones' activation protocol. The signal's direction of origin, after multiple cross-calibrations, was confirmed to be from outside the Milky Way. It was not a Warp rift, not Chaos contamination, and not any deep-space anomaly known to the Coalition. A backup route protocol stack sealed by the Old Ones at the base of the Void Gate was awakening on its own at an extremely slow pace, and the activation command had not been issued by the Coalition.

The briefing room door locked shut after the last Terminator guard filed out. All members of the War Council were in place within minutes. Heinrich's hologram had just connected from the fleet channel, and the low-frequency rumble of the Shield of the Emperor's engine room initiating Warp preheating could still be heard on the bridge. Oldenburg sent over the latest combat readiness status sheet of the Third Assault Fleet from the Griffin IV anchorage. Sebastian walked in, a sample of the Universal Armor Plate he hadn't had time to swap out during the legal definition negotiations still hanging on his breastplate. Bern rested his Holy Hammer on the conference table, his Psychic Talisman tucked securely against the inside of his breastplate, its silver light glowing slightly brighter than usual—ever since the Old Ones' backup channel was awakened, the talisman had been continuously responding to a very faint psychic resonance.

The Brood Queen crouched on the other side of the conference table, the cold green light patterns of the replica Photonic Crown atop her head pulsing slowly along the ridges of her carapace. She projected Canoptek-7's complete scan report onto the main screen—"The Old Ones' backup channel protocol stack contains multiple layers of encrypted routes. Its underlying code was written earlier than the Void Throat sealing device, belonging to a part of the Old Ones' intergalactic navigation network during their golden age. The current activation command does not originate from the Origin Facility, but is a reverse call sent from the other end of the channel, from the direction of an extra-galactic galaxy."

The Iyanden Farseer's Wraithbone Staff traced a faint blue arc in midair. The signals captured by the Web of Prophecy from the direction of the backup channel were analyzed, confirming that their nature was not a distress call, but a very ancient route-testing protocol—like a lighthouse resuming the transmission of a positioning beam after being dark for tens of millions of years, asking if the corresponding route on the Milky Way's side was still passable. The Farseer stated that when the Old Ones withdrew from the Milky Way back then, they might have left behind more than just the Void Throat; they had left something else in the extra-galactic void.

Sebastian asked what he meant by that. Nephilak's quantum-state communication patched in at that moment. He said that within the Necron Dynasty's Core Matrix, there was an ancient archive long classified as "unverifiable," recording that near the end of the War in Heaven, the last migration fleet of the Old Ones had crossed the edge of the Milky Way and sailed into deep space, never to be heard from again. A footnote in the archive noted that the fleet carried a sealed bank of life seeds and engineering blueprints, and its heading was perfectly aligned with the direction of the current backup channel's activation signal.

Marcus fell silent for a moment, then stood up and walked to the star map. He projected the coordinates of the backup channel onto the edge of the Ultima Segmentum, and then had Canoptek-7 extend the channel's estimated route into the extra-galactic void. At that moment, the star map zoomed out to a distance the Coalition had never actually observed. It was not Imperial territory, not the ruined domain of the Necron Dynasty, and not within the coverage of the Eldar Craftworld's Web of Prophecy. It was the direction in which the Old Ones had withdrawn from the Milky Way, the direction from which the Tyranids' Leviathan fleet had surged from the depths of the void, and the ancient direction from which the earliest interstellar civilizations had departed at the dawn of the galaxy's creation.

Heinrich suggested that the Coalition send a ship. He had Canoptek-7 transmit the estimated coordinates of the channel's entrance to the navigation console of the Shield of the Emperor, stating that in his lifetime, he had been to Cadia, entered the Eye of Terror, and had his fleet disarmed by The Swarm at Dead Silence-42—the only place left he hadn't been to was beyond the galaxy. If the Coalition needed a ship to go in first and scout the way, the Shield of the Emperor was already warming up its Warp engines.

Marcus turned to the Brood Queen's translator. A moment later, the translator lit up—"The Overmind says that the Void Throat's evaluation protocol did not mention the extra-galactic channel. Last time, the Old Ones tested us on the Living Psionic Network; this time, they might be testing whether the Coalition is willing to collect their remains. The Swarm does not reject an expedition. He asks if humanity is willing to go together." Marcus did not hesitate for long. Standing before the star map, he pressed the fingers of his right hand against the deep-space coordinates of the extra-galactic channel, which had not yet been physically touched by any Coalition sensor, and said that the Old Ones had left three legacies for the Coalition—the Void Throat, the Living Psionic Network, and a gate that we had mistaken for a wall. Now that this gate was knocking from the inside on its own, there was no reason for the Coalition not to open it. He announced that the War Council officially authorized the Coalition's extra-galactic expedition, with Admiral Heinrich serving as the commander-in-chief of the Expeditionary Fleet, the Brood Queen as the technical lead for the route, the Iyanden Farseer in charge of remote monitoring via the Web of Prophecy, and Canoptek-7 responsible for the quantum-state docking between the Void Throat and the backup channel. The Expeditionary Fleet would set sail once the Coalition's legal definition was officially integrated into the imperial codex.