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 get 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.