by Mack Maloney
The smelly man got even closer.
"Your plan is this: you sent ahead one ship of the twelve you were using to hide in… in…" It was clear he could not speak the word, but it didn't matter. "This one ship comes out — lays the land, so to speak — for the others to follow exactly seven days later. How do you know on the other side that seven days have passed? Because you have people back there counting, wasting their time and energy, but ticking off the seconds one by one. Then they, too, will break through to the other side. And when they do, we will be waiting for them — and we will destroy them. And then the clash of pure good against pure evil that must take place every million years or so will happen again — and our side will win. And we will rule until the next battle in another million years."
Zarex was stunned. He was sure that it showed on his battered face. The man hadn't been bluffing.
He knew their plans exactly.
"But how?" was all he could say.
The man laughed again; others in the background did, too.
"How?" he asked. 'Take a look around you. Does this appear to be an Empire ship to you? Do we appear to be simple Solar Guards?"
Zarex was hit by the whip again.
"Foolish questions asked by a fool!" the smelly man said. "But at least now you know our purposes for keeping you here. It is simply to make you feel more pain, more distress. And to know that all history aside, we will finish the job on your friends that we should have done the first time. When they emerge at Zero Point, we will destroy them so completely, they will not be able to go to either place, up or down. They will be fated to stay in the middle, the worst place of all."
Zarex was speechless. Evil wanting nothing more than more evil? There was so much sickness in that it was hard to fathom. Whatever happened to these SG soldiers, whatever turned them red, it was clear that depravity only made them stronger. And Zarex had no doubts that they would follow through on their boast to destroy the UPF fleet.
Worst of all, there was no way anyone could warn his friends in Paradise that disaster would be waiting for them as soon as they emerged from the other side of the Vanex Door.
Unless…
Zarex suddenly conjured up the strength to break through his invisible bonds. He reached out and grabbed the smelly SG man by the neck and crushed his throat. The man went down to the deck, bleeding tremendously. Zarex then lashed out with his mighty left hand and hit another SG soldier so hard, he fractured the man's skull. He, too, dropped to the floor. Zarex was quickly off the chair, grabbing a third soldier and throwing him across the room — he hit with a splat! — but not before Zarex was able to take his blaster pistol from his belt.
The rest of the torture squad drew their weapons now, and a massive firefight broke out. Zarex was blasting away at anything that moved, though it seemed as if there were three times as many individuals in the dark room as before. He was hitting targets; he could hear bones breaking and skin sizzling, typical results of being pummeled by full-power blaster beams.
He, too, was being hit. In fact, it looked like a storm of green and red bolts coming his way. Instinct alone had him ducking this way and that, but many of the discharges found their marks and even the glancing blows were very painful.
This isn't working, he thought.
So he stopped firing, stood straight up, ready to take the barrage of full-power blasts head-on. But his tormentors stopped firing, too. Suddenly everything in the room was quiet again. Then something very disturbing happened.
The first man he had attacked, the smelly man with the horribly crushed throat, slowly got to his feet.
He was still bleeding profusely, and his larynx was now just a knot of bones and gristle, but he was still very much alive. No sooner had he risen, when the man who'd suffered the fractured skull from Zarex's fist also got up off the floor. His wound was much more grisly; in fact, he should have been killed instantly. But he was grinning madly at Zarex, even as the gore slid down his cracked skull. Now the blasted and bloody bodies began rising all over the dark control room. Laughs and shrieks suddenly filled Zarex's ears.
He was horrified. The madness was more overwhelming now than the smell of this place. The message was clear, though: these characters couldn't be killed, and they certainly didn't want to kill him.
They really did want nothing more than to torture him endlessly What to do…
Zarex suddenly began speaking. About Paradise. About all the beautiful things he'd seen there. About the people and the emerald grass and the blue sky and the golden sun and the spectacular twilights.
About how everything was good and pure and clean there.
Yes, he was new at this game, but that didn't mean he couldn't learn, and learn quickly.
His strategy had the desired effect. The smelly men could not stand it. They began whipping him harder and harder, but he did not stop talking about Heaven. They began striking him with electric swords, horribly painful, but he continued on about the mountains and the sea and the rivers than ran with nectar. It went on for a very long time, but eventually, the smelly ones began wailing. They couldn't take it anymore.
Suddenly, one of the smaller figures was in front of him. Still nothing more than a shadow, it drew out a long, shiny needle and plunged it right into Zarex's chest. He felt it go through his heart. Pain beyond description, but it was exactly what Zarex wanted his tormentors to do.
He died a moment later.
16
How fast was fast?
When flying in Supertime, Starcrashers could travel two light-years a minute. Small scout ships called Swipers could reach 2.5 light-years a minute for short periods of time.
Hunter's F-Machine cruised at two light-years a second at a setting he'd dubbed "Ultra Overdrive."
But the name was misleading. It wasn't really "ultra" anything. It was just the throttle position he'd selected when he first started zipping around the Galaxy; the speed at which the few controls he had on his panel seemed to work best, the speed it took him to complete the Earth Race in almost no time at all.
But how fast was fast? His Ultra Overdrive setting was barely one-third of what he believed was his total available power. He'd never opened his aircraft to full speed; he knew serious consequences could result. He had gone up to 50 percent power a few times, and he'd traveled so fast on those occasions that he was literally able to get ahead of himself in time and thus become invisible. Great for spying on the bad guys, but the side effect was a real whammy on his mind and body. A sort of psychic hangover. Not a pleasant experience.
Now he was faced with a very long distance to travel in a very short amount of time. The clock was ticking down to when the rest of the UPF fleet would emerge from the Vanex Door. He really had no way to contact those who came over in the Resonance 133 and was operating on the assumption that they made it and that the other eleven ships would, too. But in any case, time was running out, and he had no idea what would be waiting for him once he reached his goal. So getting there had to be done as quickly as humanly possible.
He'd crossed over from Paradise to find himself on the Four Arm, that piece of space where Joxx had taken to wandering. Now he knew he had to get to the Seven Arm. The problem was, it couldn't have been farther away. Because of the way the Milky Way was shaped, the Four Arm was at the exact opposite end of the Galaxy as the Seven Arm. This was a trip of nearly 95,000 light-years. The Galaxy itself was about 100,000 light-years across. A typical Starcrasher, traveling in Supertime, would take more than a month to complete such a trip. For this not to be a complete fool's errand, Hunter had to make it there much quicker.
So it was a question of him finding out just how fast fast was.
Once he'd left the ShadoVox, he pushed his throttle up to normal cruising speed, two ly a second. As soon as he was certain that all of his vital systems had survived the trans-dimensional jump from the Twenty 'n Six (and they sometimes didn't), he began pushing the throttle ahead even further, though bit by bit. He had to g
et to the other side of the Milky Way, so navigating wasn't a concern. He simply plugged his quadtrol directly into his flight bubbler and told it to lead the way. The route spat out by the quadtrol actually had him skirting the top of the Ball, the terminally pacific center of both the Galaxy and the Empire. So far in his travels in the seventy-third century, Hunter had come nowhere near this place.
Once his flight plan was set, he inched the throttles up a bit more. At 50 percent power, he watched the controls on his panel slowly begin to go backward. As before at this setting, he was getting ahead of himself in time. He nudged the throttle ahead a bit further, to about 60 percent power, unknown territory for him now. His panel indicators began flying backward now; meanwhile, the stars outside were beginning to blur. Another push forward; his eyes began to water. He touched his face and felt his beard — several weeks old now — start to retreat back into his skin. The hair on his head began getting shorter, too.
/ hope nothing else starts to shrink, he thought.
Another push forward. Seventy percent power. The atomic paint on his nose cone began getting wet and ripping off. Why? Because it was getting younger very quickly. And as a drying process was always ongoing, it was reversing itself. Or at least that's the only theory he could think up at the moment.
A push up to 80 percent. Now he was really into a bizarro situation. He was going so fast in space and time that his speed indicators actually showed him in the negative. He had no idea just how fast his velocity was, or even if velocity was the right word at this point. Whenever he would hit the quadtrol to ask this question, it would reply so strangely, he had to assume it was answering questions he had yet to ask it but would do so in the near future. At one point it read: " Saturn 5." At another, " F-4 Phantoms"
popped up. These things were vaguely familiar to him but disturbingly so. And what if he saw a readout that said: " Catastrophic flight termination," quadtrolese for " Blown to bitsT At this point, with all that was going on, he really preferred the cause of his demise to,come as a surprise.
So he stopped asking the quadtrol any more questions.
He pushed the throttle to 90 percent and suddenly found the control panel just a few millimeters from his nose. He wasn't leaning forward; actually, he was moving so fast, the atoms in his cockpit were stretching out, distorting themselves, trying to catch up with themselves. His cockpit glass became a mirror; he caught his reflection in it. It was frightening; he, too, was distorted: huge head, his helmet looking gigantic, while the rest of his frame was shrinking down to infinity. Whenever he moved his hands, it looked like he was stretching out for a mile or more, even though the real distance was just a couple feet at the most.
One final nudge — up to 95 percent. A glimpse at his reflection now showed a fantastic distortion; he didn't even seem real anymore. He was no longer flesh and blood; he looked more like an animated character, a drawing, in vivid reds, yellows, and blues, and absolutely two-dimensional, as if he were suddenly existing flat on a page. Even the strange voice in his ear was speechless on this new development. Three words somehow popped into his head though; he thought they might have come from somewhere way back in his childhood: comic book character.
That's what he looked like. At close to total power, that's what he'd become.
The Ball went by him in a blur.
Again, he'd never been anywhere near the center of the Galaxy before. And even though he was just skirting it, not going any closer than 200 light-years to what was considered its outer border, what he saw on his long-range scanners was fascinating in a strangely sad way. There were billions of star systems in there, but many of them were remarkably alike. Either one or two stars, all of approximately the same size, all with six to eight planets revolving in perfect orbits. He saw none of the celestial exotica one could find very readily out on the Fringe. No wild nebulas, no titanic multicolored gas clouds, no really weird things like triple-ringed planets or ocean worlds, or planets that were entirely sand or snow or jungle or metal. It was odd, because even though the vast majority of the Empire's citizens lived on the planets within the Ball, the place lacked any kind of character or personality. There was no sense of discovery here. No sense of wanting to see other things, other places, other people.
As he tore by, moving faster than fast, his mind, working on a strange kind of time delay, started musing about this center of the Empire. Did the people here even know about the UPF's invasion of the Two Arm? Had they ever heard of the mythical Home Planets? Or the lost race called the Americans?
Did the thought ever come to mind that all was not so perfect with the Imperial Court on Earth? What would be the reaction of the people who lived here if they ever found out that the Fourth Empire, like the Second, had been built and based on lies and deceit of, well, galactic proportions? Would it have an effect on them? Would it drive them to protest the Empire? To take up arms against it?
Looking at all those perfect little planets in their perfect little star systems as he flew by at about a billion miles an hour, the answer that came back to him was a distinct No.
He never thought he'd ever admit it, but for once he actually craved being out on the Fringe.
That's when he heard a voice in his ear say, " Remember Hawk, Earth is part of the Fringe, too.…"
Something strange — or strange in a different way — happened about halfway across the Galaxy.
Hunter had his string comm set on wide scan, meaning it would pick up anything within fifty light-years of his location at any given time. As he was flying so fast that location was changing with every microsecond, so he was essentially sweeping a large part of the Milky Way with this long-range communications device. The first few minutes into his dash across the Empire, he heard little more than star songs in his headset — the natural sounds of the stars as they revolved around the center of the Galaxy.
But suddenly, his string comm unit began screaming with trouble calls coming from both near and far.
There was so much of this panicked chatter on his headset, Hunter had a hard time determining who was doing the calling and what was happening to them. He was able to pick up some coherent words here and there. They spoke of horrific things: planets being attacked, ships being blown out of the skies, innocents being slaughtered, both in space and on planets. Some of these calls were coming from the Six and Five Arms; others were coming in from as far away as the Three and Nine Arms. It seemed as if the outer Galaxy was suddenly in the throes of something very wicked and evil. And the perpetrators weren't the usual gang of suspects like space pirates and outlaw meres. Nor were any of these calls linked to the fighting between the SG and SF. That war was still going nonstop, but those hostilities were not related to this. This horror was coming from somewhere else.
He listened to it all for about a minute, the only one link being that those doing the attacking were mysterious, unknown, and in many cases unseen.
Then suddenly it all went away. His headset returned to nothing more than the gentle sounds of the star music and the warm and fuzzy static coming from the Ball. Weird…
Finally, up ahead, Hunter saw the Seven Arm come into view.
He yanked back on the throttles, returning to his slower cruising speed of two light-years a second.
Everything seemed to turn back in on itself again. He caught his reflection in the canopy a second time, and it appeared that he'd returned to his old self. He was three-dimensional again, and all the colors around him had toned back down. He checked all his vital parts, first on his body and then on his spacecraft. All were normal. He'd survived the mad dash, and his machine had survived, too. With the brief burst of horrible Mayday calls still ringing in his head, he finally asked the quadtrol a serious question: How long had it taken him to go from one side of the Galaxy to the other? At his normal cruising speed, it would have taken fourteen precious hours.
Now the answer came back: 14 minutes.
And his F-Machine wasn't even breathing hard.
&
nbsp; Approaching the Seven Arm was not like coming up to the border of the Galaxy's other swirls. In most cases, there was a definable frontier that separated the beginning of an arm from the outer layers of the Ball.
The Seven Arm was different. There was no border, no immediate one, anyway. Here the stars simply petered out into a kind of no-man's-land, a twilight zone that stretched for more than a thousand light-years. No stars, no planets, nothing — just a total void. If one were flying in an ion-ballast ship, it would take a long, very lonely time to pass through here. Even in a Starcrasher, it would make for an uncomfortable nine-hour trip. Hunter pushed his throttle to 45 percent; he was hoping he could get through this in a matter of seconds.
Still, it was very odd. Whenever he had his ship going at faster than cruising speed, the sensation was one of the stars becoming streaks of light that passed all around in a fantastic light show, not unlike the visual while riding aboard a Star-crasher but much more intense. He'd just seen fourteen minutes of this in his sprint across the Milky Way.
Crossing the void, though, there was nothing really to hold on to. Any stars to be seen were very very faint, and the feeling he got was not of traveling through a piece of starless space but of falling into a deep pit of nothingness. With few frames of reference — combined with the effects of nearly double ultra-high speed — it suddenly became difficult to judge up from down, left from right, even though these things did not really exist in space.
The quadtrol had told him previously that there were standing orders for both SF and SG ships to avoid this place, simply because it was unsafe for normal passage. Hunter was beginning to think that maybe this wasn't the only reason the Empire never ventured here. The quadtrol had also told him that many spaceships had been lost in this void at the beginning of the Fourth Empire, and that the place had been considered unlucky or cursed since. As the people of the Galaxy were known to be very superstitious, one hint of any place bearing bad karma would be enough for it to be avoided en masse.