Last Emperor: Location: Devil Star
The "Devil Star" has no official name, it exists only as location on a star chart. The secret it hides is neither terrifying nor horrifing, but it hides a secret none the less.
Within the Dragon empire it is known that life produces magic, or at least lets it flow freely. So on all of the worlds where life flourshes, so does a mélange of creatures. And all of these creatures depend upon this flow of magic to survive. Remove them from the influence of a living planet and they wither and die, some more quickly than others. Except for two races; humans and dwarves. Humans like magic, use it to their own ends, and prefer the comforts it brings. So the humans keep to the living worlds. But the Dwarves dislike magic, and in shunning it found another way to defend themselves.
Long ago, during the Dragon wars that preceeding the founding of the Dragon empire, races not part of the Dragons armada's were considered free targets by both sides. Given the choice between fighting and hiding, most choose to fight. But the Dwaves seems to vanish like smoke in a windstorm. While many Dwarves did fight in the Dragon wars, the vast majority were simply never found. And people simply assumed they had dug further into the ground, hiding deeper than anyone thought to look for them.
Because of the nature of the Starcaster drive, many forget just how rare the living worlds within the Dragon Empire really are. The requirements of a proper star, the worlds created with specific conditions, and the attention of the 12 mean for every living world, there are a hundred or a thousand more stars and star systems. Each empty of life, cold lifeless rocks endlessly circiing a slowly dying star.
The Devil Star system is one of these empty, dead systems. The primar star is an ancient red giant star in its last throes of life. It has burned through most of its hydrogen fuel and lacks the mass to go super-nova. So now it pulses. Over a period of a few weeks the giant star collapses, the collpase causing the star to reginite brefly. It flares up casting off a shell of hydrogen, then begins to collapse again. These thin shells of hydrogen glow in the remaining star light, brighting as the star collapses and fading as it expands. The star looks, to everyone who's seen it, like a giant eye, opening and closing, casting a evil ray at the viewer.
In a close orbit around the star is a large nickel-iron asteroid. five miles in diameter. Here is where a large clan of Dwarves have made their home. They came during the Dragon wars, hiding in a place where no one would look for them. After the wars were over, the Dwarves mined the iron, nickel, and other minerals in the asteroid. Trading with nearby worlds for food, parts, magic, and other luxury items. The asteroid remained hidden for many hundreds of years. Until a clever merchant realized that the Dwarven trader were not travelling between two world, but stopping between.
Like most secrets, this could not be kept either. And the system was an excellent stop over between several important worlds in the sector. As more people learned of the "secret" stop over point, the dwarves expanded the starport on the outsystem side of the asteroid, where it could be protected from the star's radiation by the bulk of the asteriod.
Few people venture beyond the confines of the Starport. The dwarves have allowed a number of franchises to set up shop, to sell fast food, cheap trinkets, and mindless entertainment to travelers passing through. Just beyond the security checkpoints, the tunnels into the asteroid diverge, branch, and randomly reconnect. The tunnels are the old mining tunnels, unrestricted by graviy, which loop and twist, crossing and recrossing, with gravity shifting, a three dimensional maze. The dwarves have marked the passages, in runic scripts, but with no references to where you are or may want to go, it is very easy to get lost. Fortuantly, there are any number of very helpful guides, for a nominal fee, whoe will guide lost travelers to their destination and back to the starport.
In the center of the astroid is the living space, a huge cavern more than a half mile across. Gravity sits on the outside of the cavern, and the dwaves have spread across the whole surface. There are houses and farms, it looks like a quiet and pastoral world turned inside out. At the center of the cavern is the "sun" a large globe glowing with concentrated starlight and powered by the star's radiation.
And so the dwarves have a active trading starport in an otherwise dead system. The offical star charts list only the star's location, with no mention of a starport or a dwarven home world. Finding an unofficial listing for the asteriod isn't difficult, a moderate search of local system database would reveal it's presence, and safe jump co-ordinates.
The secret here is what this place implies. From the exterior the astrioid isn't any different than the hundred or so others in the system. There is little sensor data to distinguish it either, and unless you follow the landing beacon even the starport is difficult to land. You could search a lifetime through the thousands of empty star systems and never stumble across another with a dwarven home in it. And even if you did, it may not be possible to find it.
So the Devil Star continues to send out its waves of lethal radiaion, glowing as a warning to all who come close that its death means yours. And the dwarves continue to hide away under the layers of rock and metal, using the radiation to provide themselves with heat, light and life.
