Havion had been a major trading post and now it was a giant cloud 
in space. It's funny how beautiful it was at a distance, but from 
within it's more or less a haze of debris.
Their geothermal engineering had reached deep into the planet's 
core when they made a fatal discovery.
Havion wasn't a planet, it was an egg, and they hatched it; or at 
least that's the way I interpreted it. Maybe it was a clutch of 
eggs or some kaiju from another dimension, it doesn't matter now, 
whatever it was is gone and so is Havion.

The monolith we had picked up was another messenger beacon more or 
less like the first one we found, it decanted the story in bits 
through our nearly-human-shaped Nalmykian friends. I doubt they 
have the grape-vine problem us earthlings do, but maybe they were 
different enough to have something lost in translation. I have no 
idea how long The Protectorate of Nalmyke had been out of contact 
with their progenitors. We hadn't had contact with The 
Revengerists, either - 188 days, maybe 200. I'm not even sure our 
systems are synced with earth-time. Morning is when you wake up and 
night is when you go to sleep and there isn't much more to it than 
that.

The Monolith has a plan, but I guess this sort of nano-tech has no 
means of propulsion to act on it on it's own. There's a nearby 
rogue planet - a planet without a star wandering through space - 
known as The Black Hole. Whoever was there had a dark sense of 
humor, I don't think our alien friends were capable of joking on 
their own. We charted yet another coarse through the cosmos in 
search of more nothingness.

Space seemed so exciting when I was young, but after all this time 
trapped with less than a dozen people I was tired of the "final 
frontier." At least back home we had Greys, Kyptonians, Misstress 
Hammeats and other denizens of the Butter Nebula, and of course 
whatever Dr Tasty was. But out here there was more nothing than 
usual. Just a bread-crumb trail of grey goo scenarios. Hopefully 
this is leading somewhere.