“There’s nothing like these in our records,” Thrawn said, gesturing to the three pink bodies. “But the fourth…do you recognize it, Mid Captain?”

“Yes,” Samakro said, stepping close and peering at its stony face. “I don’t know the species, but those temple scars mark him as a Void Guide.”

He looked over at Thalias. “They’re one of the groups who hire themselves out as navigators for long-range travel through the Chaos,” he added.

“I know,” Thalias said. She’d been aboard a warship once that had been escorting a diplomatic mission, and both ships had hired aliens from the Navigators’ Guild to help reinforce the carefully designed illusion that the Chiss had no navigators of their own. She and her caregiver had been kept out of sight in their suite, but she’d seen some vid views of the navigator at his job.

She didn’t remember that navigator looking anything like this dead Void Guide. But then, the guild was made up of a lot of different groups and species.

“Actually, I’d have been surprised if you did know his species,” Thrawn commented. “The Navigators’ Guild goes to great lengths not to identify the species or the systems of its members. At any rate, his presence is a stroke of luck.”

“Why?” Thalias asked.

“Because some of the bridge recordings survived the death of the crew and passengers,” Thrawn said. “Naturally, those records are in the inhabitants’ language.”

“Which I assume we don’t know?” Samakro asked.

“Correct,” Thrawn said. “The analyzers might be able to do something with it, but without a linguistic basis to start from they’re unlikely to make much progress.”

“But they also had to talk to their navigator,” Thalias said as she suddenly saw where Thrawn was going with this. “And unless he could speak their language, they would have used a trade language.”

“Exactly,” Thrawn said, inclining his head toward her. “And because the Void Guides’ main operational area overlaps with ours, there’s a reasonable chance it’ll be a language we know.”

“You said some of the recordings survived,” Samakro said. “Any navigational records among them?”

“An excellent question, Mid Captain,” Thrawn said, his voice going grim. “The answer is no. It appears the navigator was the last to die, and erased as many records as he could before the end. The only reason we have the audio recordings is that they were stored in a different location than the others and he apparently missed them.”

Thalias stared at the Void Guide body, a creepy feeling seeping through her. “He didn’t want anyone to know where they’d come from,” she said. “He was working with their enemies.”

“Or was working to keep their enemies from backtracking them,” Samakro suggested.

“No,” Thrawn said. “If that was the situation, the captain would have deleted the records himself. The timestamp indicates that wasn’t the case.”