CHAPTER 5Obey and Survive
Admiral Hogarth sat in his office and stared through high windows at his new domain. Stellar was a ‘heavy’ planet with a gravity almost twice that of Earth, but despite the drag he sat as straight as ever, his thin shoulders rigid beneath the thin material of his uniform. Now he no longer wore the proud black and gold of the Terran Fleet, but a simpler uniform of neutral grey against which the scarlet of his insignia showed like splotches of newly shed blood.
A grim place this penal world, more than fifty light years from Earth and blasted by a sun nearly two hundred times as fierce as the Solar Furnace. It was an old world, its seas evaporated and its rotation slowed so that it turned once on its axis each year, and so it kept one face permanently facing the se
