After settling the matter of the refits and the coming hunt, Aurelian finally had a brief stretch of time where no one was asking him a direct question.

That did not mean he was free.

It only meant the work had shifted into a quieter shape.

He returned to his private room, closed the door behind him, and pulled up the Destiny System again.

The clue list had refreshed some time ago, but until now, he had only skimmed the combat-related entries and the route fragment tied to the Mournveil Nebula.

There had been too many immediate things in motion for him to sit down properly with the rest.

Now, with Lysara and Rhoswen adjusting to their new drives and Astercourt holding the administrative side together better than anyone else presently could, he had enough room to think.

He read through the shipgirl clues carefully.

Most were ordinary by the standards of the System. Useful, perhaps, but not urgent. A damaged escort hull in deep storage.

A derelict logistics frame with uncertain awakening potential. One preserved support vessel that might have mattered more if he were willing to lower his standards for long-term fleet development, which he was not.

Then one entry caught his attention and held it.

It was a bundled clue, four together instead of one.

That alone was unusual enough.

He opened it.

Four cruiser-class shipgirl clues, packaged as a group. Condition poor. Located within an unrecovered ruin field. Additional note: early frontier predecessors to the Waywarden line.

Aurelian’s eyes narrowed slightly.

He read the note again, then opened the location marker.

Ten light-years out.

Farther than the Mournveil Nebula, but not impossibly far. The ruin field sat in a direction he had not yet prioritized, partly because it was outside his immediate pressure zone and partly because he simply had not had the spare manpower to go poking at every dead corner of the region on speculation alone.

Now the System had done the poking for him.

His first instinct was caution rather than excitement.

Four cruiser clues together, sold as a bundle, and more expensive than four ordinary clue purchases would have been.

That meant the System considered the site more valuable than the bare ship count suggested.

The note about them being predecessors to the Waywarden line mattered even more. If that detail was accurate, the ruin likely belonged to an old Vhaloric military graveyard, or at least to some kind of abandoned frontier recovery zone tied to the same lineage of ships.

That immediately raised the value of the clue.

It was not only four possible cruisers.

It was four possible cruisers with a relatively clear later development path, one that now mattered far more because Helion Bastion Twelve already held a preserved Tier IV warship of the same broad line.

Even if those four hulls were heavily damaged, and the System description made it very clear that they were, they were still historical warships with old identity, old continuity, and a better chance of awakening properly than a random mass-produced frame ever would.

The problem was not whether the clue was worth buying.

The problem was how he would actually retrieve anything from that site.

Aurelian bought it anyway.

The route marked itself on his star map at once, a narrow chain of coordinates threading through a sector that had not yet drawn much notice from anyone important.

According to the clue’s own attached note, the site had not been discovered by any outside party yet, which meant he had time, but not the kind of time he could lazily waste.

He studied the technical condition report next.

All four hulls were heavily damaged. One had suffered catastrophic structural failure and was broken nearly in half.

Another had burned through multiple internal compartments before whatever killed the site had gone silent.

None of them retained usable propulsion, and towing them back over ten light-years in their current state would be absurd unless he wanted the whole trip to become one long invitation for something to go wrong.

He leaned back slightly and thought it through.

No, towing dead hulls home was not the right answer.

If he wanted those ships, then the sensible solution was to bring repair capability to them, stabilize them on-site, and only then decide how much to bring back at once and how much to leave under guard until later retrieval. That meant an engineering vessel.

And not an ordinary one.

A ruined cruiser could not simply be patched by drones and good intentions. It needed a proper engineering shipgirl if he wanted the work done at a level that justified the effort.

The problem there was one of timing, because his current engineering support still sat partly on the family side of things, and even where he had access to it, travel speed remained an issue.

That brought him to the next thought almost immediately.

If he intended to do this ruin recovery later, then the engineering ship needed a better engine first.

Not a Tier IV pursuit package like the one he had just used on Lysara and Rhoswen. The hull class would not support that cleanly, and forcing it would be stupid.

But the best top-end Tier III engine architecture he could produce or adapt? That was possible.

And if he could do that, then the eventual salvage trip would become much less painful.

Aurelian left the clue screen and called Astercourt.

When she arrived, still carrying three different workslates and looking as though she had not sat down properly in hours, he handed her the new route marker along with the possible location of the military base.

She read it in silence.

"Another recovery site," she said.

"Yes."

Astercourt looked at the damage notes and then at the distance.

"You’ll want the engineering ship prepared before going."

"I will."

"With a better engine."

Aurelian gave a small nod. "Exactly."

She thought for a moment, then said, "A proper Tier IV propulsion package would be a bad fit, but we can probably modify the engineering ship with the best available Tier III engine pattern. Enough to cut the travel time down sharply, not enough to stress the hull into nonsense."