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the door was there, the next it wasn’t. It hadn’t slid open; rather it had disappeared, and then reappeared in the door slot.
    That was strange enough. But in the same brief instant, Hunter thought he saw the very faint image of a person standing right next to him. A hand passed through the space where the door had been. A voice whispered: You must see this …
    Then the door just wasn’t there anymore.
    And just as he thought, the hallway outside was filled with soldiers. They were members of Multx’s 23rd Special Operations Corps. Each trooper looked enormous. Their complex dark gray battle suits added about a foot to their height and at least a hundred pounds to their bulk. Each soldier was a self-contained war machine. His suit had plug-ins for various weapons. Each carried a large, tubular ray gun slung from his back, as well as a holster carrying two or three small blaster pistols. Life-support tubes ran up from each man’s breastplate into the oversized bubble-top battle helmet. Two tiny dishes on top of this helmet provided for communications.
    The soldiers trooped past Hunter, paying him no attention, eyes forward, chins up.
    They were real warriors, he thought. Determined. Brave. Smart…
    He had served with men like this before…
    The line of troopers finally disappeared through a hatch at the end of the passageway. The Klaxons were blaring at full peak now. Hunter could hear the sound of more footsteps moving on the decks above and below him. He had no doubt what was happening here. These soldiers were marching off to war.
    He began walking down the empty passageway. The line of troopers had gone through a hatch to the right. Hunter’s instincts told him to keep walking straight. He reached a large doorway, opened the hatch, and stepped through.
    He found himself on a glassed-in balcony; it looked out on an immense chamber deep within the ship.
    What he saw here was unfathomable at first. There were thousands of troopers floating within this chamber. Each one was dressed in the same elaborate battle gear. There were also hundreds of small spacecraft hovering in rows near the top of the vast hall. These craft were long, glassy, and tube-shaped.
    They had six gangling legs hanging off of them, and a huge bubble nose. For some reason, they were known as “bugs.”
    Though it seemed very chaotic at first, Hunter soon came to realize the soldiers were floating up to these craft and climbing aboard. They were all moving very fast, yet no one was bumping into each other, or even coming close. As soon as a small troop shuttle was filled with soldiers, it would shoot off through a huge portal in the chamber wall, passing through an invisible membrane that protected those inside from the dangers of outer space. The whole affair was highly choreographed, highly drilled, well executed. The transports seem to hold about a hundred troops each. They were being spit out at a rate of about one every second.
    Only after all of the transports had left the chamber did the Klaxons finally calm down. Hunter moved farther down the balcony and came upon a huge observation blister; it looked out onto the vastness of space beyond. From here Hunter could see the planet of Vines 67 below. It looked like a huge green ball dotted in a few places with patches of shimmering blue water.
    The BonoVox was in a high orbit above the planet. The troop transports were lined up in columns just below the massive warship, obviously poised to invade this green world. Hunter looked to his left.
    Another starship was parked in an orbit nearby. To his right, another ship came into view. Then another.
    And another. He counted a dozen of the magnificent ships around the planet, and those were just the ones he could see.
    This fleet was made up of Empire units occupying the already liberated planets in the Sileasian System.
    The ships were identical in design to the BonoVox , but they were all about a third smaller in size, leaving no doubt which vessel