Reconstruction after the war had been difficult, but it had been approached with a renewed rigor among the lassaiz faire policies following the outbreak of peace.
Reconstruction of the ISL's Golem, on the other hand, was not.
Calvin had been working on the project for quite some time, and figured he had seen it all: The Alliance's indifference to the project had left it massively underfunded and, consequently, understaffed. The Golem's AI core was unresponsive to even the most skilled psychotronic engineers. Only about a fifth of the original superstructure of the Golem had been recovered, and they only had enough resources to run one dilapidated salvage ship on shot-in-the-dark missions into the Void, where the war-ending cataclysm had occurred. The nature of the recovery missions meant that extensive shoreside leave on Terra was required for each crew sent out, and this did not please the bean counters.
After some time in this state, that lone salvage crew had crawled back into the Niffleheim system, barely towing a sizeable chunk of the Golem back. While the loadmasters were identifying and inspecting the prize, Calvin asked the lucky vessel's captain what had happened:
"Well, as per standard operating procedure," the captain grimaced, since such words were only used as a nod to the Senate, "we used the ship's reactor's radioactivity to generate a set of random jump coordinates constrained by the expected target space and known stellar obstructions. When our Drive popped us through, we found ourselves heading into orbit around one of the Darkened Suns." The captain paused, waiting for Calvin to urge him on. Those suns had been extinguished in the Golem's contrapuntal feedback event, and physics didn't quite work right around them.
Acknowledging the captain's obvious dismay at this detail, he urged him on. "We were sixteen AUs or so out, so we started the regular ten-light-minute scans, and stepped them up to full system scans. Something in the far hemisphere interfered with the Oort cloud's return of the FTL probe, so we cautiously microhopped over to see what it was..." The captain droned on about the routine details of crossing the star system. Heh. Microhopping was basically the least cautious approach that could have been used...it set off tachyon flares visible for about a lightyear. "...and when the Golem architecturalist on the crew identified it as a fragment, we started dragging it in. It's about four times a massive as it should be, but, with some ingenuity on our engine man's part, we got it here."
"Did you run much more than the simple architecture analytics on it?" Calvin probed.
The captain narrowed his eyes. "Are you not telling me something about my cargo? After fifteen of these missions, jumping blindly into who knows where, we find something, and all you can ask is whether I ran a few extra ********* scans?! Of course we didn't, sir, we were worried enough about getting it back here without a catastrophic drive failure of our own!"
That...was not what he had expected. He guessed that more unexpected things would follow quickly enough... "Captain Morris, you know everything I know. I just had a hunch and wanted to know if you had any small details that might be useful later. We both know it was a drive-related explosion, so I was just worried about contamination from that. The repair crews aren't daft; they know too and they'll be careful."
After a few more questions about the return trip, the captain left, still somewhat frazzled, and Calvin began pacing his office.
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