Uh oh, external drive used for time machine backups died. What to do?

Running OS Mojave 10.14.6, all systems go...well, sort of. This is a late 2013 iMac. With multiple external drives doing different things, one of these is keeping a bootable CC Clone bootable backup. Another external drive is keeping my TM backups, until 3 hours ago. It did a backup at 7:30 this evening and by 9:30 wasn't being recognized. All measures, i.e., cables/connection, power, etc., have been taken and it appears the external drive is simply dead. Swapping cables, connecting to my wife's iMac, nothing.

The backups began in 2014. Will there be a way to recover any of those backups? Obviously and thankfully, the CC Clone backups are security, but what should I do about Time Machine?

Moving to a new iMac has been in preparation for some time (removing final 32-bit software, file maintenance, etc.) and I'm almost ready...but now I need to resolve this Time Machine issue.

Thanks in advance, Wolf