The assembly droid moved the bit of wreckage into place, its manipulator arms making minute adjustments to the small metal fragment. How the droid knew where to place the piece in the overall puzzle being assembled, or the original purpose of any given chunk of wreckage—that was a task for an advanced computational motivator circuit, and beyond what Elzar Mann could easily understand. To him, one ragged piece of durasteel looked very much like the next.

The process seemed to be working, though. Inside a large rectangular area of space, illuminated by huge floodlights, the outline of the ship that was once the Legacy Run was clearly visible. About a dozen of the assembly droids were working to pull pieces of wreckage from the open bay doors of a huge cargo freighter parked just outside the range of the lights. One by one, the droids pushed bits of metal and plastoid into place in the reconstruction zone, some as large as full compartments, and some as small as a single wire. It was as if they were trying to rebuild the starship out of pieces of junk they had found here and there.

That was more or less the task, actually. Wreckage from the initial disaster in Hetzal had been collected after it dropped out of hyperspace, tracked by a huge network of satellites and monitoring stations and telescopes. The system had been bashed together during the disaster by an apparently brilliant local named Keven Tarr—a pale, quiet young man who was at this very moment standing a meter or so to Elzar’s left. He wasn’t alone, either. A whole group had gathered to bear witness to the destroyed starship, staring silently at the wreckage through a viewing panel on the Third Horizon’s observation deck.

Not much was left. The assembly droids were doing their best, but many pieces of the Legacy Run were destroyed on their impact with objects in the Hetzal system, or had simply whipped through the system and vanished before they could be collected. Some had appeared in other systems via the Emergences, of which there had been eighteen to date. Those pieces had been brought here as well, when possible. But still more might be in hyperspace, waiting to Emerge in their own right and wreak devastation in some other part of the Outer Rim. That was the point of trying to pull the wreckage together: to estimate how much still remained to be found.

To see how bad it could really get.

Elzar noticed that one of the smaller pieces of wreckage was drifting out of true, possibly disturbed by one of the assembly droids jetting away, or just moved by a gust of stellar wind. He lifted his hand and made a subtle gesture. The piece moved back into place, as if guided by an invisible touch.