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the previously reclaimed planets, Staxx and his men had found the jungle war against the homegrown bandits a slow, draining, and costly affair. After nearly half a year of trying, they were being relieved.
    Star Commander Zap Multx was here to finish the job.
    Hunter had been put into a small compartment in a section of the BonoVox known as the Lowers.
    This place had a hovering bunk, a food tube, and a supply of “brain rings” for amusement, though Hunter didn’t have the slightest idea how to work the things.
    He’d seen nothing else of the ship, having been beamed directly to this windowless billet after being “drafted.” Erx and Berx sent him a new set of clothes, including a plain gray spacesuit and a pair of boots. In an accompanying holo-message, they told him what Multx had told them: that Hunter had to be “processed” at a military facility planet “nearer to Earth.” The BonoVox had to make another stop first.
    All that was fine with Hunter. It wasn’t what he imagined military life would be, but he had no complaints about his accommodations. His bunk was soft, and the food tube offered a bewildering array of fare.
    And while he felt bad about leaving his flying machine behind, he didn’t miss life on Fools 6 at all. After spending so much time kicking around one of the Galaxy’s most dead-end planets, anything was an improvement.
    Still, there was no getting around the fact that he was confined to a jail cell of sorts. The door to his compartment was sealed, and there was no unlocking mechanism on the inside. Why? He had a sense that he was being kept under wraps for some reason. As Erx and Berx explained it to him in their message, whenever the huge starship was about to enter a combat situation, all nonessential personnel had to be locked down in their berths, lest they see any of the Empire’s many secret weapons in action.
    “But how can any individual be ‘nonessential?’ ” Hunter had asked their holo-images, knowing full well they couldn’t respond. “I thought we were all supposed to be part of the same thing…”
    The most spectacular part of the flight was when the BonoVox actually went through a star.
    How was this possible? As with just about everything else related to travel in Supertime, no one on board was really sure. The explorers’ holo-message to him included one of the starship’s flight engineers explaining it this way: “Much of what appears to be present in the other known dimensions does not appear to be present in the seventh dimension. Therefore, why would we have a problem going through something that is not there?”
    At the incredible speed of Supertime, going through stars that weren’t there was easier than going around them; star-crashing was simply a function of efficient transport. But the event was hardly routine.
    Whenever the massive vessel crashed a star, everything and everybody aboard the ship would glow with an intense golden aura. This luminescence lasted for just 0.0002501 second—the amount of time it took the ship to pass through the star’s other-dimensional position in space. Then everything went back to normal again. It was superquick, but there was never any doubt whenever it happened. Even before the golden haze faded away, applause and cheering could be heard throughout the ship anytime the BonoVox made a crash.
    It was early in the third day of the voyage when Klaxons began blaring throughout the massive starship.
    The noise woke up Hunter immediately. He instinctively went to his compartment’s door. It was still sealed. But on the other side he could hear the unmistakable sound of many people moving at once.
    Boots thudding along the passageway. Voices shouting through the pipes. The dark music of weapons and equipment clanging together.
    Hunter had heard such sounds before…
    He found himself wishing the door would open and allow him to see what was going on outside. An instant later, that’s exactly that happened. One moment