While everyone else was busy focusing on the Homeland World and when the ancestral relics could be deciphered, one person still had her eyes on other matters—Tawell. This Glasses Older Sister, whose number of threads had already reached an unscientific level, suddenly reported on the day after the ancestral ark was brought back—this was the name we had given that wreckage, while Sandora believed it should have been a migrant ark—that she had found traces of the fallen emperor Harlan.
Of course, as a scientist, she had not found Harlan's fleet, which had mysteriously vanished into the depths of the void. The trace she found had come from a broken metal plate: the armor fragment Little Crow Mediva had picked up on our way here.
Sandora, the others, and I hurried to the analysis room where the armor fragment was stored. Three Tawells were busy inside, along with more than a dozen assistant technicians helping out. The battered armor plate had been placed above a zero-gravity platform and divided into dozens of neat little pieces, which spun and drifted through the platform's beams of light.
One of the Tawells came forward to meet us, while the other two went to activate the equipment and direct their large group of assistants.
"Was this thing left behind by Harlan's fleet?" Sandora frowned as she stared at the scattered armor fragments.
It had been some time since Harlan and his remaining forces had mysteriously vanished into the depths of the void. The spy teams sent to scout the Fallen Apostle border had never found any trace of that fleet, and we had also used the Garden of Departure's void-scanning function to illuminate the direction in which Harlan's remnants had disappeared for seventy-two straight hours. But that force had moved swiftly during its retreat