“M’kalva-Nar, you have been found guilty. You are sentenced to 3 years existence on the Planet of Fire.” The spokesman of the trio of Supreme Judges finished his sentence by slamming a metal gavel down on the desk before him. He and his two counterparts sat in great shining metal pulpits towering over the chamber of justice. Before them, his hands chained to both each other, and to the floor, stood a man. M’kalva-Nar’s expression was impassive; he showed no sign of anger, remorse or fear at his sentence.

      Three guards entered the chamber through soft hissing doors. They removed the bonds that held their captive to the floor, and pulled him out of the chamber. M’kalva-Nar’s eyes stayed locked upon the judges until he was pushed out of the room.

He was walked down corridors of light; paths of steel whose walls were made of faintly glowing energy. On the other side of the force walls, hundreds of people gathered, their faces twisted into expressions of hate and cruel delight at the prisoner’s sentence. Some tried to throw things at him, others spat, their attempts were thwarted as the glistening energy walls vaporised everything that touched them.

At the far end of the corridor there was a great ramp leading up into a great passenger-carrying starship. This great transport would carry M’kalva-Nar to where his sentence would be carried out. Yells of protest could be heard coming from the inside, as already seated prisoners screamed their innocence and protest at their sentence.

A man stood by the entrance ramp. As the captive approached, he turned to the medical trolley beside him, and began loading a gun-like device with a glass cylinder filled with green fluid. The guards grabbed M’kalva-Nar’s head and twisted it, exposing his neck to the waiting man. The gun contained a specially concocted genetic-modification plasmid. Once introduced to a human’s bloodstream it would slightly alter its makeup. In the case of prisoners sentenced to the Planet of Fire, it would alter their existing abilities of skin regeneration and improve their tolerance to heat, without which, anyone setting foot on the planet would be incinerated within seconds, while adding to them a reptilian ability to transform heat into energy, meaning that M’kalva-Nar would never have to eat while on the burning world. The gun hissed and the plasmid was administered, M’kalva-Nar’s expression remained impassive as his skin was pierced by not much more than a high-pressure stream of fluid.

He was pushed up the ramp into the spaceship, inside was row upon row of seats. Most were already occupied by other convicted criminals, almost all of those were screaming, demanding their release, protesting their innocence, begging for mercy. Even a few hours on the Planet of Fire was enough to strike deadly fear into the hearts of most. Some of these people would have been sentenced to days, weeks even months of existence on that hellish world. M’kalva-Nar was lead to his seat, pushed into it and strapped in. He did not resist, nor protest.

He sat there for several hours while more prisoners, sentenced to the Planet of Fire, were loaded. Eventually the ship was filled, the entrance ramp was withdrawn and the ships door slid closed with the hissing of a vacuum seal. Not long after, the whole ship shook as the boosters fired and the ship began its unmanned journey, hurtling up through the atmosphere and up into space. The pink-orange sunset-touched sky slowly darkened to be replaced with purest black, later pockmarked with pinprick stars. The roaring engines were silenced, preludeing the switch to Hypertravel. A low hum began to build, becoming louder and louder eventually reaching a crescendo where it was ended by a deafening bang and the ship shot into the blackness of space as though just released by a gigantic slingshot.

The Planet of Fire, a world existing on the fringes of a dieing sun. It’s makeup unique among the known worlds. It was still a solid world, where others in its predicament would have broken down into base gasses by now. Every part of the planet’s surface was wreathed in the towering flames that gave the world its name. The ship floated in orbit around the strange world for a few seconds, before altering its course and beginning to descend. The ship was deigned for single use. Upon landing it all but disintegrated. It’s great hull splitting across its roof and spreading apart, the exposed engines quickly melting due to the great heat of the planet. In the passenger compartment, the prisoners bonds released as the ship fell apart around them.

The flames engulfed everything. Prisoners ran screaming, clad now only in flame, rolling on the floor, writhing in pain, their genetically transformed bodies absorbing the heat and turning it into fuel to power their frantic screams, while their skin charred and flaked off, only to be replaced by new, skin with itself burnt within seconds. Most of the prisoners would die. Only a few survived even a few days on the Planet of Fire, for most, it was as much a death sentence as a bullet through the brain.

M’kalva-Nar’s now bare feet crunched across the near-molten floor of the planet. He looked up through the flames that covered his eyes. Occasionally, he caught a glimpse of the sky, and in that he could see the great space station that would effect any survivors’ removal from the planets surface. Standing, staring up at the sky, M’kalva-Nar waited. Eventually he would be released, and then he would find the people who had sent him here. The hell to which they had sent him would be nothing compared to the hell he would take them.