Sometimes, solving one mystery only meant touching upon an even bigger one. Knowing some truths only meant facing more fog. Finding some evidence only led to discovering that it could only prove another hypothesis you had never considered—just as we had thought the Imperial warship that crashed on Mars would tell us where Viska's fleet had gone after losing contact with its leader. Yet the only intelligence we obtained was that at least one warship in that fleet had ultimately become the nest of a group of uninvited guests.
We should have been grateful for the distributed shipboard Database and twenty-two-tier synchronized "Final Recorder" used by Eternal-class starships. This technology allowed a mothership to retain as much intelligence as possible from before its destruction even after being torn to pieces. The scattered reactors and communication systems that could continue operating at low power after the warship had been shattered also allowed its broken wreckage to share a Database within a one-light-year range. Thus, as long as one could find a usable Data Terminal on any piece of wreckage, one could extract its Sailing Log—provided the warship itself had not been wiped out by its self-destruct system.
This undoubtedly made it far easier for later explorers like us to uncover the truth behind an accident.
Viska tried to download the logs from the Database, but she found that all the equipment's energy supply was in an extremely unstable state. The Power Core's psionic output fluctuated so wildly that the Database could not be operated safely. So she decisively removed all the storage units from the control core and ordered the engineers and technicians outside to head to the second impact crater several dozen kilometers away, where they removed the Database's main body from another wreck. They finally salvaged the data before