The patient Smith Ship, constructor of fleets, terraformer of worlds, engineer of star bases, heads back to its cradle in a steller nursery nebula, Glass Forge, to gather up materials not easily obtained in its normal wanderings.

Its makers are long gone, having ventured off toward Andromeda millenia before the younger starfaring races discovered fire. Those cultures it comes into contact with the Smith leaves alone, recording and analyzing the system and its inhabitants briefly before journeying on to the next objective in its ever expanding network.

Not without defenses, the Smith has ruined many a would be pirate's day, obliterated entire interstellar navies intending to board and capture it, and pockmarked the surface of hostile planets it needed to pass with perfectly hemispherical disintegration divots at all of its defensive installations.

Smarter starfaring civilizations respect the Smith's privacy, colonizing worlds in its path well before it arrives in order to 'reserve' the planet for their people, or waiting for it to finish its work and leave before poking about the strange automated installations and idiot robotic systems it leaves behind.

Glass Forge is a known stellar anomaly, but off in a limb of the galaxy far from explored space.