96: Chapter 96 The Ancient Saint's Backup Passage is Summoned in the Void

The technical negotiations on the legal definition of The Swarm lasted for several days at the Griffin IV anchorage. Marcus Aurelian and the Brood Queen finalized, clause by clause, the recognition of the Hive Mind's legal personality, the contracting authority of Brood Queen nodes, the legal boundaries of gene-devouring sequences, and the ownership of intellectual property for the Living Psionic Network. The draft of the Void Throat joint custody clauses had even reached the supplementary provisions. Heinrich sent fleet rotation reports from the Gravity Reef Channel every day, prompting them to speed up the process along the way—he said the quartermaster of the Shield of the Emperor was already using the Departmento Munitorum procurement serial numbers for the coalition's Universal Armor Plates to fill out requisition forms, and if the legal definition was not finalized, the legal status of that batch of armor plates would still be audited as "xenos technological material."

"Voting weight." The Brood Queen crouched on the other side of the conference table, the Blackstone Resonance Chambers on her adamantium-chitin carapace pulsing slightly in cold green light patterns. Her translator continued to push the agenda, "The Overmind requests that, under the framework of the new agreement's interpretation clauses, the equivalence between The Swarm's voting weight in the War Council and the number of contracting parties be clarified. The current contracting parties of the coalition are the Imperium of Man, the Iyanden Craftworld, the Solemmnace Dynasty, and the Zerg Swarm. The Swarm holds a one-quarter voting right. The veto dispute has been resolved through a compulsory arbitration mechanism. Now, the voting weight algorithm needs to be written into the main body of the legal definition."

Marcus placed his coffee cup on the table and projected three algorithm models for The Swarm's voting weight onto the holographic display. Sebastian sent a suggestion from the base ship's hangar, pointing out that the decision-making efficiency of The Swarm's Hive Mind was far higher than that of human council discussions; if no cap was set on the voting weight, The Swarm might complete its internal vote while other contracting parties were still debating. Bern added that the Grey Knights had observed Brood Queen nodes handling tactical command and strategic decision-making simultaneously in multiple campaigns, and this multi-threaded decision-making capability must have a corresponding decision-making time limit clause in the coalition's legal definition. The Brood Queen replied that the Overmind agreed to include a decision-making time limit clause in the legal definition, specifying that The Swarm's voting would be completed within a limited time after the War Council's voting began, with timeouts treated as abstentions, aligning the decision-making time with the average voting cycle of humans and other contracting parties.

Heinrich uncharacteristically did not chime in to urge them, only sending a text note from the fleet channel: the coalition emblem on the bow of the Shield of the Emperor had resumed its cold green shimmer as the new agreement took effect. He said whether the emblem was cold green or dark gray no longer mattered to him; what mattered was that once the coalition's legal definition was completed, this emblem would be officially printed in the Imperial Navy's uniform regulations.

By the fourth day of the legal definition negotiations, the Brood Queen no longer proposed amendments to the final detail of the voting weight. Marcus immediately announced that a consensus draft of all technical clauses had been completed, officially incorporating the draft of The Swarm's legal definition into the appendix of the coalition charter, while simultaneously copying it to the Adeptus Arbites on Terra. Hasseldorf sent a brief acknowledgment of receipt from Terra: "Received. The reserved chapters in the codex have been formatted. I will personally write the preface."

Around the same time the consensus draft was finalized, the Void Throat Defense Command received a report from Canoptek-7. He stated that the quantum-state monitoring array had captured an extremely faint tremor deep within the Talasta Void Gate. The tremor's waveform matched the original master frequency of the Old Ones' activation protocol; it was neither a trigger signal for a new evaluation cycle nor a restart of the self-destruct countdown, but rather some backup passage of the Old Ones, never recorded in the coalition's tactical manuals, being called upon from the inside.

The Brood Queen looked up almost at the exact same instant. Her translator projected a brief confirmation from the Overmind onto the main screen—the tremor of the Void Gate came from the direction of an extragalactic source, the signal continuing at an extremely low frequency, and an ancient interface of the Old Ones' protocol compatibility layer was being remotely awakened. "Once the coalition's legal definition is complete, the War Council will need to address the backup passage incident immediately. The Overmind says this is no coincidence—the Old Ones always set the next exam right after the coalition finishes signing documents."