reddwarfslash | Double Trouble

Double Trouble – Part 7

“The scouter hasn’t returned any readings of life-signs, Sirs, and the ship’s infrastructure still seems very stable. I think we should be safe to go in and take a look around,” Kryten reported a couple of days later, as Starbug hovered above the remains of the large derelict. “Okay,” Lister nodded to Cat, “Let’s take her in nice and easy, man. We don’t want any nasty surprises.”

“Copy that, Bud,” Cat agreed, firing off a salute. Lister flicked him a sideways glance but said nothing. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Cat had been much warmer and more deferential to him these past couple of days than was usual, and he knew it was the feline’s way of sticking two paws up to the Rimmers. The tension onboard hadn’t gone unnoticed and although Kryten was still making an effort to keep himself uneasily neutral, Cat had taken great pains to ensure no-one was in any doubt as to who’s side he was on; and although Lister appreciated the show of support, it really wasn’t helping the situation.

As they drew alongside the ship, ready to dock, Lister squinted out at the writing painted large down the side. “The SS Richard Branson,” he read out, “I wonder who he was?”

“Don’t you know anything, Lister?” A snide voice behind him piped up. Lister didn’t bother turning to see which of the smegheads it belonged to. “Well, go on then,” he said wearily, “Who was he, seeing as you know so much?”

“Richard Branson was a very powerful and influential 21^st century cult leader. He built up a huge following promoting celibacy. Or something like that.”

“Fascinating,” Lister replied shortly, “I’m sure the two of you would have had lots in common, what with your dedication to the Love Celibates and everything.” Cat sniggered derisively beside him. “Sirs,” Kryten interrupted, clearly desperate to prevent yet another argument, “We should be approaching the docking bay now.”

As Starbug eased its way into the vast chamber and came to a rest, Lister let out a low whistle, “This place is massive. We’re going to need the scan to run off a floor by floor plan of the ship or we’re going to spend all week just trying to find each other.”

“I’m on it now, Sir,” Kryten started keying in the relevant commands.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be splitting up,” Rimmer Mark One complained, “Okay, so there’re no life signs but we don’t know how accurate that thing is. And what if some hideous new kind of non-detectable life-form has sprung up here in the thousands of years this thing’s been rotting away?”

“I think that’s highly unlikely, Rimmer.”

“All I’m saying is that if there’s something here that we’re unprepared for then I don’t want to be the one who has to take it on alone.”

“Really?” Cat interjected, “Because I think most of us would be quite happy to watch you take it on alone.”

“Whatever,” Lister snapped, “We’ll stay together until we’re sure it’s safe. Satisfied?”

There was no reply from Rimmer, which in the current circumstances was the next best thing to an agreement.

They gathered in the mid-section to look over the floor-plan Kryten had printed out. “According to the scans, I think these are the areas we should be targeting,” Kryten’s pink finger traced over the papers, “There are large store-rooms here and here where we can pick up food and fuel supplies. There’s another bay area on the opposite side of the ship where there appears to be transport-craft storage. If any of them are still operational, a small carrier might be a useful thing for us to have on standby. And on level fourteen there’s a science room which might have some bits and pieces worth salvaging. Apparently not all of the electrics are still fully functional onboard so we may have to do a bit of hiking from one end of the ship to another but even so I don’t believe that the whole expedition should take us more than two days.”

“Okay,”Lister nodded and straightened up, “That sounds like a plan. Let’s put on our dancing shoes and get this party started.”

The Branson, as it turned out, had enough supplies aboard to completely re-stock Starbug’s own meagre storage space several times over. The ship was only a third of the size of Red Dwarf, but it was the biggest they’d come across since losing their mother-ship and after months trapped on Starbug every wide empty corridor seemed the size of a football pitch. Once they had teleported the first generous batch of food supplies back to Starbug they went in search of the science room.

Despite the number of electrical faults plaguing the dead ship it was clear that in her heyday the Branson had been state-of-the-art. All around them were the remnants of various pieces of equipment that had obviously been part of everyday life on this ship but bore little or no resemblance to their counterparts on Red Dwarf. The science room itself was a colossal, three-storey construction in the shape of a beehive. A long spiral staircase ran directly up the central shaft of the room, walkways splintering off like spokes on each level. You could have easily fitted Starbug on end in this space. “Where do we even start?” Lister asked, awed.

“This is ridiculous,” Rimmer’s double snapped, “We could spend two whole days just searching through what’s left of this mess. I say we grab ourselves some fuel and get the smeg out of here.”

“Sir, there could still be workable technology salvageable here. Even a most fleeting search could prove to be valuable,” Kryten pleaded.

“He’s right, man. You saw some of the gizmos they had back there. It’s got to be worth a look.”

“In fact,” Kryten craned his neck upwards, “Unless my optical systems have crosswired again, I believe I can see what used to be the hologram projection suite up on the second level. Surely that’s worth investigating, Sir.” The Rimmers exchanged a look, “Well...I suppose there’s no harm in taking a little peekaroonie...”

Sure enough, the hologram suite proved to be a goldmine. There was a whole cabinet full of spare light-bees and Kryten insisted on collecting a dozen ‘Just in Case’. The Rimmers were browsing a rack of discs set into the wall, most of which were back-ups of the Branson’s old crew-members – however another shelf seemed laden with unfamiliar software. Rimmer pulled one disc out and blew dust off the cover. “New Light-Suite Portable,” he read out, “Now you can carry your simulation software with you wherever you go.”

“Extraordinary,” Kryten reached out and pulled another copy from the rack, scanning the blurb.

“What’s the big deal?” Cat yawned, “We already take the Smeg Set wherever we go.”

“You don’t understand, Sir. The software we use on Starbug to generate the Mister Rimmers is a very basic script-runner. It allows us to keep an image projected and run scans to detect any potential errors but that’s about it. Even on Red Dwarf, the combined hardware and software required to power and maintain a hologram took up an area twice this size. With this software we could not only generate their images using much less power but it would be like having access to a fully-equipped hologram suite on Starbug. We could run this from the main-frame, even from a laptop!”

“What does that mean for us?” Rimmer asked impatiently.

“It means, Sir, the two of you would have better error and virus protection, a greater range of preferences for how your projection operates, all kinds of things.”

“Examples, you overgrown steam-iron!” the double snarled.

“Well, I’m not familiar with the technology, Sirs, but at a guess I would imagine that the program offers a range of costume changes, hard-light sensation tuning, memory modification...”

“I don’t think we want anyone mesing around with our memories, thank you,” the two Rimmers turned to glare warningly at Lister who held up his hands innocently. “The feature could come in useful, Sirs,” Kryten pointed out, “If the software is sufficiently sophisticated it would allow you to acquire great amounts of knowledge almost instantaneously. You could learn languages in seconds, master astro-navigation in moments! The applications are almost limitless!” The Rimmers shared another of their trademark looks, then turned back to Kryten. “We’d better take a few copies. Just in case.”

The days salvaging had been such a success that it was agreed that they would spend the night on the Branson and continue their foraging early the next day. After a more substantial supper than any of them had had for a long time they made up a small campsite in the empty refectory, near to the food and water supplies and settled down ready for another long day on the morrow.

Sometime in the night, Lister awoke from his slumber to realise that they had omitted to think about one important factor in choosing the strategic location for their sleepover. The toilets. He needed a whizz and he had absolutely no idea where to find a loo on this leviathan. Fumbling bleary-eyed with his torch, he padded out of the refectory and flashed the light up and down the corridor. There were no obvious signs posted ‘Gents this Way’. He shifted anxiously from one foot to another. The matter was getting urgent and he couldn’t decide which way to go. After a few moments of bladder-testing indecision, he decided that in the circumstances, any empty room was a good enough basis for a makeshift latrine and made for the first visible door to his left.

Once the crisis had been averted, he slipped as quietly as possible out of what he now thought of as his ‘saviour room’ – and walked straight into a Rimmer. The two of them both cried out in alarm as they collided in the darkness. “What are you doing?” a voice hissed poisonously. Lister’s frantically beating heart sank a little more. It was the double-Rimmer. “I was just looking for the little boys’ room!” he protested in a whisper. “Really? Well the sign on that door you’ve just crept out of says ‘Laundry Closet’,” the Rimmer whispered back sharply,

“I didn’t say I found it,” Lister replied defensively.

“Are you spying on me?”

“No! I just needed to take a leak!”

“In the laundry closet?”

“Look, why would I want to spy on you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why you do anything you do.”

This last was said so accusingly that Lister felt the need to retaliate, “Well, what were you doing? It’s not like you need to get up in the night to pee!”

“Oh, that’s nice. Rub the dead man’s face in it. If you must know, I couldn’t sleep so I was taking another look around. I went to investigate the transport vehicles.”

“Thinking of taking a little holiday?” Lister asked sarcastically.

“Maybe,” the double replied darkly, “What’s it to you? You don’t care if I stay or not.”

“Well, if you want to take off then be my guest,” Lister snapped, “You certainly don’t seem that attached to any of us.”

“Is that so?” the double said softly, menacingly.

“You don’t seem that attached to anybody,” Lister continued angrily. A small voice at the back of his brain that dealt with common sense tried to interrupt. Stop talking, Dave, it warned. Stop talking right now. Don’t go where I think you’re going with this. Not here. Not like this. Not without back-up. Lister, as he so frequently did in the heat of the moment, ignored it.

“Do you think I’m so dumb that I haven’t guessed yet what really happened on that ship you came from?” Lister challenged him. Even in the darkness, he saw the man’s eyes narrow. “Tell me, David,” he hissed, “What exactly do you think you know?”

“I know that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a Rimmer floating all alone in space in an escape pod,” Lister retorted, “Your crew-mates didn’t die in some unstoppable accident at all, did they? You left them! Something went wrong, something went bad, and instead of staying and doing whatever you could - even if there was nothing you could do - you jumped ship and left them. You took the escape pod and left them to die while you saved your own despicable weasely skin! Just like he did!” Lister blurted out. “Only in your universe we couldn’t save ourselves. We all died because of you. That’s why you hate us and can’t stand to be around us, isn’t it! Because we remind you of what you did.”

To his surprise, the double started smiling, albeit unpleasantly. “Well, well. I am impressed. Sherlock Listy, you’ve got it all worked out haven’t you? Only with your usual brilliant flair, you’ve worked it all out wrong.”

“What did happen then?” Lister asked, “Because I know that the sob-story you gave us was utter bull. So what’s the beef? Why do you hate us so much if it’s not guilt?”

“Oh, Listy,” the double walked forward and backed Lister up slowly against the wall, “You’ll find out very soon, I promise. You’ll find out more than you ever wanted to know.” He leaned in close as if to kiss him, “And you’re going to find out,” he whispered, “That I’m not nearly as much like him as you seem to think.”

Lister held his gaze, refusing to be intimidated, then barged past, knocking hard into his shoulder as he went. He went back to the refectory and crawled into his sleeping bag, heart pounding. Tomorrow he was going to have a serious talk with his Rimmer and he was going to find out the truth about this asshole. This had gone far enough.

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From:

dauphkantus.livejournal.com

*gets the shivers* Brilliantly creepy dear! I can't wait for the next one... whatever will Rimmer Mark One say? However will they work together? What *is* Rimmer Mark Two going to do that's so horribly threatening? Find out in next time's edition of Double Trouble! ;D