The star which the Centurions called Romulus was the brightest star in known space, an O-class hypergiant nearly four million times brighter than Ge’s G-class sun Helios and five times hotter on the surface. It was so active that the outward pressure of its radiation sometimes overcame its own gravity, and the resulting huge clouds of hot plasma made it difficult to get spectral readings on the star itself at any distance.

The flat, discoid space station that orbited Romulus was aptly named Gehenna in Albionic (or Ge Hinnom in Adamic). Its sole purpose was the trial and punishment of those guilty of capital crimes. Once found guilty, criminals were fired into the “lake of fire” that was the nearby star, using a sort of “gravity gun”. Edwin Bitterroot was being held there, and there the Centurious would deal with him.

In building Gehenna, the Centurions pushed their own high-tech (including state-of-the art applications of metallurgy and ceramics) and Manikin n-crystal hyper-tech to their limits, enabling the station to be placed very close indeed to the ravenous star it orbited. In fact, it was closer to the star than the nearest refractory planet, which world was very nearly the closest thing to an orbiting cinder that Chris Alan had ever heard about.

Chris Alan knew quite a bit about the Centurions, but Autumn did not, so she had Amber Bdellium her Guardian pull up the basic files on that people. What she learned impressed her. In basic appearance, the Centurions only differed from the Adamim in the naturally pale color of their skin and their natural bleach-blond hair. The military uniforms both men and women wore were made of gold-plated armor; gold and many other metals were easy enough to find in the asteroids of the systems they ruled. They were a large, big-boned people with a healing factor that gave them a legendary stamina. Even a typical Lightchild preferred not to battle a Centurion, for short of stabbing with a lit Starblade you just couldn’t keep one down, ever. You could cut off both legs and the Centurion would crawl with their hands after you, just to kill you. It was a good thing that the Centurion Hegemony was a Treaty Power and not a Hostile Power.

“Raphael, docking procedures, please,” Chris Alan asked.