When the first piece of wreckage had been brought in, the scientists had started their work immediately.
Visual inspection showed that it contained a large fragment of the AI's core as well as a swath of the surrounding support equipment, probably from the emotive and generative subsystems.
Luckily, the salvage crews had learned from the original recovery: they all wore radiation instrumentation and shielding when they began exploring the new fragment's maintenance shafts. It had saved most of them from the sudden appearance of heavy gamma emitters in one of them. I'm not looking forward to writing the letters to the casualties' families...
After that, the comp techneers had decided to try to use the built-in failsafes to flush the contaminants out. This involved sending one man in, connecting up a few hundred tiny wires with a nanoscope, and then interfacing with the systems from a remote, safe location.
Sadly, the tech didn't quite make it out before another random surge rendered his escape moot, but the job had been done, the uplink installed, and remote exploration begun. Another letter, and another expert lost...
Further discoveries awaited the technologists. The AI core was still looping in a pre-Collapse state, and all of the adaptable logic was configured to use Nar'ara protocols -- hence the defensive radiation floods. Still, section appeared to house some extremely important functions, so the crew started trying to repurpose it -- after cracking the security and reprogramming a few small modules, the whole system would reset to its old config, snap the connection, and then start trying to convert the remote console into a Nar'ara control system.
After avoiding a few catastrophes from internal system reversion, the wreckage was catalogued, tidied up a bit, and moved into a parking orbit near the reassembly site.
After hearing about this, the admiralty quietly sent two more salvage ships with better-trained crews, fresh supplies, and a hand-written note:
"Keep looking."
