Humans confirmed the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life beyond earth when they discovered a statue of a bipedal alien on Iapetus, a moon of Saturn.

The science team had expected to have more-or-less unlimited time to complete their scientific discoveries before a massive terraforming project was initiated on the planet.

The remnants of Quraquan civilization would be destroyed by terraforming process, which was funded by a wealthy, politically powerful corporation called Kozmik.

This process includes sequential detonation of multiple nuclear bombs to rapidly melt the polar icecaps and induce volcanic activity.

Ultimately, the result would be a greenhouse effect that warmed the planet to human-tolerable levels and released sufficient liquid water to form rivers and oceans.

Just before Hutch was scheduled to leave Earth, the Quraquan science team, led by the Henry Jacobi, made a significant discovery: they discovered a carving that bore an uncanny resemblance to the statue on Iapetus, which was presumed to depict one of the Monument-Makers.

However, a leading expert on the Monument-Makers, Richard Wald, joined Hutch on the voyage to Quraqua, so he could lend his expertise to the dig during the little time they had remaining.

Many scientists, including Richard, did not think that Oz was built by the Monument-Makers: all other known Monuments were elegant and many were floating in space, and this faux-city seemed crude and unwieldy by comparison.

The science team was now excavating "The Temple of Winds," a sprawling complex that served many different functions over its thousands of years of history.

Consequently, the team was based in an underwater dome structure, and excavation of the site required dealing with unusual obstacles, including removal of shifting mud and silt.

Given the short time remaining before all Quraquan structures on the planet would be lost, the scientists' focus was to obtain more examples of "Linear C," the language of the mysterious inscription on Oz.

The team's exophilologist, Maggie Tufu, was convinced that she could decode the message, if they could just find additional examples of text to add to their limited library.

Although Hutch had begun shuttling the artifacts to the "Wink," the Kozmik terraforming team was increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of evacuation.

Although the personnel had enough warning to shelter themselves from this "unfortunate error," the wave caused the room holding the printing press to collapse before excavation could be completed.

Using the out-of-place cylindrical towers on Oz as waypoint markers, Hutch and Frank Carson (the second-in-command of the Quraqua expedition) were able to make a list of potential stars to which the passage might refer.

Using a powerful radio telescope, they surveyed all the candidate stars and found one that was broadcasting a faint artificial transmission – Beta Pacifica.

At the last minute, they received orders from the government to halt their mission – apparently, the idea of charging into the potential heart of an unknown space-faring civilization was something they didn't trust to an Academy scout ship – but the crew willfully ignored the instruction and leaped into hyperspace on their weeks-long journey to Beta Pacifica.

At first, Truscott was unwilling to stay in the Beta Pacifica system for any reason, because she was anxious to complete her mission to return employees to Earth.

She quickly changed her mind after a rapid series of tantalizing discoveries made it clear that this star system was of major importance.

First, they determined that the object that the "Winckelmann" (Hutch's ship) ran into was a vast dish-shaped telescope, and that the alien radio transmission emanated from its center.

The telescope array was not currently pointed at any particular object in the sky, but they determined that roughly 10,000 years ago, the network would have been observing the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Besides the dish array, the star system had one terrestrial planet that bore a startling resemblance to Earth in terms of physical characteristics.

What they discovered was very unsettling: dozens of alien corpses, apparently the same race as the Monument-Makers, who had all committed suicide by strapping themselves to their chairs and venting the atmosphere of the station.

Luckily, in order to date the station, they discovered a photograph of the planet's four moons in perfect alignment, and extrapolated how long ago such a configuration would have happened.

Sadly, tragedy again befell the Academy crew when they were attacked by a mysteriously unrelenting horde of predatory crab-like creatures with razor sharp claws and mandibles.

When she included the dates of the Discontinuities of Quraqua and Nok with the final days of the primitive Beta Pacifica space station, she discovered a repeating pattern of sweeping devastation that spread outward, going from one planet to the next.

If her theory was correct, she could extrapolate the current position of this destructive wave in space: they could plot a course and go see what had caused numerous disasters across multiple inhabited planets.

At first they found nothing unusual, and decided to make their OWN monument – a set of giant cubic structures, in an attempt to recreate the environment of the other disasters.

They attempted to save the populations of the planets in question by luring the clouds away from the right-angles and regular structures of their buildings and roads by putting geometric shapes in other locations.

The clouds had even hit the Monument-Makers themselves, throwing their society into a technological dark age – the space station and ruined buildings at Beta Pacifica were the remnants of their second, lesser civilization, which itself was nearly annihilated when the cycle repeated on its 8,000-year timescale.