fig 62: Steambot, Cronian Mineral Co.

Though outlawed in most populated worlds, coal-fuelled, steam-powered robots were prized for their manual labour uses in the harsher outposts of the solar system. Cheap and dirty, many steambots were used to strip worlds of their natural resources and then left to rust, it making more economic sense to build more robots than to waste precious cargo space. These deserted robots became some of the first to establish their own societies, most notably the great furnace cities of Io. Here we see an early steambot of the Cronian Mineral Company; the huge Dionean crystal it holds being worth many millions of times its own value. The black rockets of the CMC were a familiar sight in the early years of colonisation, usually bringing devastation in their wake.