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The primary task for the droids and their operators was to inventory the ship’s hangars, which had been located forward of the reactor, and its gun batteries, which ordinarily bristled from every face of the wedge-shaped main hull. But enough of the ship was missing that that task was well ahead of schedule. Both droids were already well aft, in the sections below the Star Destroyer’s superstructure.

Gnisnal’s hull was intact there, and the droids moved through the outer corridors on the port side without difficulty or obstruction. But when they turned down an inner corridor leading to the aft emplacements, alarms began sounding at both consoles.

“Ambient light detected,” DA-1 announced. But it was obvious to both operators without interpretation—the corridor ahead was brightly lit by its own overhead lights.

Immediately, the operator paged the Steadfast’s bridge. “Lieutenant Proi, this is Makki on Number One. Sir, the lights are on in Corridor R, Level Ninety. There’s still power aboard.” The operator’s voice was shadowed by concern.

“Interesting,” said Oolas, glancing at the range marker on the navigation display.

“Redundant systems,” Proi said, frowning, calling a three-view plan of the ship to his display. “That section is served by the Number Four power cell, backed up by the Number Eight. I guess one of them’s still working. Give the Imps credit, they built those babies to last.”

“Should I have the helmsman put a little more distance between us and the wreck?” Oolas’s upper tentacles wrapped themselves protectively around his thin neck as he spoke, showing his nervousness.

“No,” Proi said. He frowned, seemingly lost in thought. “That’s combat lighting, not emergency lighting. You know—as quickly as this ship went bad, there’s a chance they didn’t have time to initiate a purge—Makki, you there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any signs of movement? Any vibration or hot spots in the bulkheads?”

“No, sir.”

“Then I want you to check something for me,” he said. “Send the droid up to Level Ninety-six, Corridor Q.”

“What’s there?” asked Oolas.

Norda Proi shook his head. “Wait. I’m superstitious about wishing out loud.”

With its twin following, SM-1 entered a turbolift shaft and began rising toward Level Ninety-six. Oolas watched anxiously, while Proi watched with silent anticipation. When the first droid had cleared the shaft, they saw an abandoned guardpost by a set of open blast doors. Thousands of jagged, glittery fragments drifted in the air like snow.

“The viewports on this level must have imploded after the explosion,” said Oolas.

“No—too thin. Those are fragments from display screens,” Proi said. “Which tells me we’re in the right place. Makki, turn to starboard. Forward, now. Through the blast doors. Look for an access corridor on the right, about twenty meters ahead.”

The droid’s maneuvering jets stirred the cloud of fragments into frantic motion as it made its way along, finding and turning down the access corridor. Before long, the corridor opened into a large, high-ceilinged room.

More than forty workstations, their displays all shattered, were arrayed in two half-circles. All faced the two-meter-tall metallic cylinder that stood like an unfinished sculpture on a platform against the far wall. Hanging on the wall to either side of the cylinder were digital display panels as wide as blast doors. An ever-changing array of multicolored messages in Basic and binary filled most of the face of the left panel.

“By my mother’s jewels—” Proi said in awe.

“What is it?”

“Our express ticket back to Coruscant,” said Lieutenant Norda Proi. “An intact Imperial memory core.”

The Number 4 memory core from the Star Destroyer Gnisnal stood in a Technical Section laboratory coupled to three heavy-duty power droids in a cascade chain. One droid was sufficient to keep the core’s tiers and channels from collapsing; the others were insurance. The contents of the memory core were too valuable to risk.

Accessing the contents, though, required knowing which of more than a hundred Imperial data sequencing algorithms had been used to