Message From The Gods

Mura crouched behind a rusted, broken assembly machine. It was a massive construct left abandoned on a dusty yellow planet, and the ravage of time left its tower slumping to one side. The base of it was taller than her while standing and stacked on top was a platform of spider-like arms used to weld, fabricate, and construct something about the size of an ATV. The machine had been without power for decades, the arms lay curled on the platform surface like a dead insect, some of them broken. But the machine’s bulk made for sufficient cover as Mura and half of her squad hid from the pirates.

They’d only been here for an hour, maybe two, but the yellow dust of this valley had coated her nanotech armor from top to bottom already. It was creeping up the barrel of her Armash and occasionally the nano inside, ejected a puff of it to keep the gun clear. The assembly machine was encrusted with it. A native scrubby brush grew on the abandoned platform looking so much like a bow on top of the present that had come destroyed in the mail.