cosmic-backup/gopher/RSS Revenant/1642.txt

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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.