1.01-Machines of Calradia

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]It’s hard to forget the thin turquoise atmosphere there.  It was so thin the stars would wink bleary eyed in the daylight. Or what passed for it in that place. All the oxygen on the Calradia moons has been used by the wandering factories on the surface. Large machinaliths plow the rusty soil leaving entrenchments twenty kilometers wide across the lunar surface. Unmoving white metal bones claw out from beneath the burnished clay, the skeletal sisters of the roaming behemoths who pass by those graves, grinding, clattering, leaving.From a distance I would watch them against the setting lights of the neutron star, the system’s only claim to a sun. Ether-Shrikes would camp in the hovels of those giant remains. I feel sorry for those immortal bastards. One was a survivor of the Gashian Plague judging from the scars on her face, but that was long before my time. Not enough O2 for a fire so we huddled around a pit of exothermic acid during the frosty 16 hour nights. The Shrikes would tell stories. One said Calradia was a marvelous planet in the previous age.  In the distance, whatever powered those escarpments exhausted itself. It fell, like a man into his grave. Thirty leagues away, my teeth shook in my skull, and a haboob of blood red sand writhed out from under the collapsing titan. You can see those dust clouds from orbit along with the craters that pocket the surface, massive and symmetrical. The mountains have beveled edges, the valleys machined grooves. Hollow shadows drag after the escarpments as they trawl the surface below. Millions of them. Dust and echoes in pale steel sunset.I once went back out of curiosity years later. The Moon was gone. Nothing more than a wrought ball of cold iron no bigger than two fists. What little had held those roaming machine-scapes to the ground had at last given them up to the stars. In the centuries since, I’ve never found any of them out in the void. I keep the iron ball on my ship. Not sure why. Maybe because I know it doesn’t really belong to me. Maybe I’m holding onto it because someday, somewhere out there, I can give it.