by Doug Naylor
'I thought you could read my mind.'
'Sometimes. Other times I have to guess and I am wrong.'
'Guess anyway.'
'You lie because you care.'
'You think?'
'Yes. But when you don't lie does that mean you don't care?'
'You know what I'm thinking now?'
Reketrebn nodded. 'You're thinking, "Shut up, Reketrebn, you're really beginning to get on my pecks. "'
'You got it.'
As Reketrebn made to reply a noise of landing retros cut across him and the clay ceiling of the cave started to crumble. It was almost as if a spacecraft was trying to land on top of them.
Lister rushed outside on to the precipice overlooking the canyon and looked up at the roof. Tilting at a ridiculous angle was a small green craft lodged precariously in the foliage of the mountainside. The hatch door hinged open and a girl with lagoon-blue eyes and a pinball smile strode down the landing ramp.
A smile sawed Lister's face in half. 'Hey!'
'Hey!' She threw herself off the cave roof and landed on top of him. They hit the ground hard and rolled over and over in the dirt. They kissed: small and big. They devoured one another, they hugged, they laughed, they cried, they hugged some more, then they just looked at one another, holding hands and grinning like puppies. After that, to the distress of everyone watching, they started all over again from the top. Many minutes later, far more than it's interesting to recount, they emerged with kiss-smudged faces, grinning and breathless.
The Starbug crew stood in a horseshoe alongside Reketrebn, McGruder and the assortment of Gelfs. Lister grabbed its hand. 'Come on, you've got to meet the posse.'
Reketrebn stood in its neutral form. 'This is Reketrebn, it's a symbi-morph, saved my life at least ten times, this is Mike McGruder.' McGruder smiled amiably and shook Kochanski's hand.
Then Lister remembered. 'Where is he?' He gazed around, looking for Rimmer. 'Man, come here, there's someone you've got to meet.' He beckoned him forward. 'Rim- uh, I mean, uh, Arn- uh, sir, uh. Over here.'
Rimmer stepped through the pack. Lister brought the two men together. 'I want you to meet Lieutenant-Colonel Michael R. McGruder.'
'Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant-Colonel,' Rimmer smiled courteously.
'And, Mike,' said Lister, pulling McGruder closer, 'this is Arnold J. Rimmer.' McGruder blinked twice, smiled sweetly, then six foot two inches of solid marine hit the dirt in a dead faint.
Rimmer smirked down at the pole-axed figure. 'Supposed to be a marine and he's fainted like a bloody girl guide. Who did you say he was?'
'His name is Michael McGruder. He's your son.'
'Pardon me?'
'I said, he's your son.'
'My son?'
'Yes.'
'My son?'
'Yes.'
'My son???'
'Yes.'
Rimmer cleared his throat and kicked some dirt about with his right foot. Then looked up again. 'Who is he?'
'He's your son, Rimmer.'
Rimmer looked at Lister, his head angled in bemusement. 'My son?'
'Yes.'
'That man there. The one who just fainted?'
'The one who's your son, yes. That one. He's your son.'
'Wait. It's terribly important that I get this clear in my head. Let me tell you what I think you're saying.' Rimmer tried to cough away a dry throat. 'You're saying that this man, this man, here, who is my son, is in fact, my son.'
There was a cloud of dust and Rimmer joined McGruder, belly up in the dirt.
CHAPTER 16
Rimmer watched Lister's face as his mouth opened and closed, garbling his version of what had happened.
He heard hardly a thing he said.
He was a father.
Him.
It was too bizarre for words. His son was almost the same age as he was; he'd had his ageing gene removed and appeared just a couple of years younger.
He had a son.
He hadn't even known he existed. He could have spent his whole life in ignorance.
He was lobotomized with shock. Yvonne McGruder had decided to have his child. If it hadn't been for the radiation leak and Red Dwarf having to be jettisoned off into the wastes of space, perhaps she might have tried to contact him. Maybe they would even have got together again.
Yvonne McGruder. She was really together and attractive and she'd had his son.
Lister's voice dragged him from his musings. 'Look, man, listen to me, this bit's important.'
'What bit?'
'Yvonne McGruder — she's been bottle-feeding him warm bull since the day he was born.'
'What do you mean? She's done a fantastic job. He's a space corps marine, an SCM— there isn't a finer soldier.'
'No, I mean about you. She's sort of given him the impression that you're some sort of... hero. He's kind of modelled his life on this father figure who's a mix of Patton, Nelson and Ulysses, all rolled into one. I've played along with it. Seemed no point in telling him. But now you're here. He'll know in two seconds you've got less backbone than custard. I think you've got to come clean with him before he works it out for himself.'
'Why would Yvonne tell him stuff like that?'
'What do you expect her to say? She'd just been let out of the concussion ward and got herself up the duff by a bloke who cleaned out chicken-soup dispensers?'
'She wasn't concussed,' Rimmer said emphatically.
'The point is that she left the ship at Miranda. As far as she knew the ship was lost and who was going to contradict her story?'
Rimmer nodded. He didn't blame Yvonne. Who wanted a father as ordinary as he was? After the ship was lost in Deep Space she could create anything she wanted and there was no one around to tell Michael any different.
For ten minutes Rimmer considered trying to keep up the pretence; perhaps he could pull it off. Arnold J. Rimmer — swashbuckling space adventurer. But the more he thought about it the more he knew it was an absurd idea and someone, if not him, would reveal the truth at some point. He had to face up to his first duty as a father. He had to go and tell his son that he was a worthless piece of crap.
* * *
'Damn it.' Kochanski hit the console with the palm of her hand and tried again. 'Come on, you son of a bitch, start.' She opened up the retros and listened to a sharp metallic clicking sound as the starter motor failed to ignite the engines.
Lister shook his head. 'They're dead. No charge. Same thing happened to the Volunteer ship. Some kind of pulse hit us shortly after we landed and knocked out all the power. It's something to do with the Rage; it's able to detect and neuter large electrical power sources.'
'What about Kryten and Rimmer? They're both part electrical.'
'I suppose their power sources are too small to detect.'
Kochanski tried the engines again, this time trying a mix of words cooed in encouragement before giving in to shouted obscenities. All to no avail.
Lister continued. 'If it's anything like last time, the Rage will make a move any moment. It'll want to total the ship before we're able to salvage too many supplies.'
Kryten stood in the open hatchway and gazed through a pair of unoculars across the plain. 'I believe it's started to make its move already, sir. At present speed it should be here within the hour.'
Lister turned and addressed the Cat and Reketrebn. 'Guys, get the others and start up the mountain with the heavy stuff. We'll catch you up. We'll be twenty minutes behind you, OK?'
The Cat and Reketrebn nodded and disappeared down the landing-ramp carrying a large wooden food crate. Lister and Kochanski started ransacking the galley while Kryten made a start on the obs deck.
No one had worked it out yet, and Kryten was thankful.
It gave him more time to make his preparations undisturbed. He climbed the steps up to the obs deck and got started.
With luck, he'd be far away and unstoppable before anyone even knew what he was up to.
The time had come.
CHAPTER 17
Rimmer found McGruder sitting on a rock staring across the canyon at the out-of-control gravity gales. For some time he just stood there, unsure how to open the conversation. Finally, it was McGruder who detected his presence and turned to face him. 'Beautiful view, isn't it? Or is that sort of thing, beautiful views I mean, not really of much interest to someone like you?'
Rimmer's weight shifted from foot to foot. 'No, it's uh, beautiful, yes.'
'Made a bit of an ass of myself back there. Fainting and what have you. Needed to be alone to sort of try and regain my composure.'
Rimmer studied some dirt on the ground and was lost for something to say.
'Don't suppose you've ever fainted, sir? Not really on, is it, for a man?'
Rimmer changed the subject with a grating of gears. 'Understand you're a SCM.'
'Yes, sir. West Point, sir. Fought on Hyperion in the Saturn war.'
Rimmer shook his head in amiable disbelief. 'A Space Corps Marine. You're the guys who say: "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast, " before embarking on some damn fool mission to save the solar system.'
'It's just space-jock banter, sir.'
'And I understand you were decorated?'
'You've been an inspiration to me, sir. Always gave me something to look up to.'
'Yes, right.' For a second Rimmer was silent. 'Look, there's things we should talk about. Things you've been told which aren't true.'
'Sir?'
'Your mother, uh, she was a woman. A very remarkable woman. It can't have been easy bringing up a boy on geo-mapper's wages, getting you through college and into the Academy. Some people, and I used to count myself among them, believe there's a class system and someone like you — who doesn't have a completely pukka background — would never be admitted into such high-ranking company. That's bullshit. Your mother went out and proved that. She got you through college, she got you through the Star Fleet and now here you are, an SCM. She's a remarkable woman, a truly courageous, remarkable woman.'
'It's you who were my inspiration, sir.'
Rimmer shook his head. 'You owe everything to her. Everything. She really made you into something. Something you should be proud of.' Rimmer looked out over the canyon. 'When I tell you what she had to do, to make you into that something, I don't want to hear you feel let down or resentful.' Rimmer rubbed his eye-socket and continued. 'I'm not going to He to you, uh, do you mind if I call you Michael?'
'I'd be honoured, sir.'
'You can call me, uh, you know, if you want.'
'Sir?'
'Father, or Dad, or whatever.'
'Really, sir?'
'Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, your mother. The thing is, I never really knew your mother. It was...' Rimmer was going to say 'a one-night stand', but suddenly the phrase stuck in his throat, like a second adam's apple. He couldn't say that to his son. 'What I'm saying is, I'm not who you think I am. I'm not special. In fact, you are everything I ever aspired to.' Rimmer looked into his son's clear green eyes. 'I'm nobody, Michael. I could have been, even should have been, but I blamed all my failings and shortcomings on my parents, and that's a well that never runs dry.'
'She always said you were fantastically modest.'
Rimmer shook his head. 'I'm not modest. I'm not an officer, either. It was always my great passion, but I never made it. Not good enough. I'm sorry, but your mother invented a father figure for you — to give you something to live up to. I'm just a technician. I never even managed to pass the astro-engineering exam. Didn't have the right stuff. In fact, coming here today and telling you this is the only gutsy thing I've ever done in my whole life.'
An alloy of emotions passed across McGruder's face, an ugly mixture of disbelief, betrayal and contempt.
'You're a technician?'
'Yes.'
'What class?'
'Third,' Rimmer mumbled quietly.
'That's beverage maintenance.'
Rimmer stood straight-backed. 'Yes.'
McGruder savaged him with a look of utter disparagement and stomped off back to the caves.
* * *
Kryten glanced over his shoulder as he shuffled down the Starbug's storage deck. He was alone. Excellent. He reached the far wall and stood before a multi-coloured facia. He typed an override code on to the keypad and the door to the vault opened with a smoky sigh. Again, he checked he was alone, then he entered the vault.
His olfactory system went into a system-alert mode. He didn't know what was wrong with it just lately. It had constantly been alerting him for no reason at all; possibly he had mechaneumonia. He'd have to replace the whole unit the first chance he got. He opened his chest plate and closed the system down.
The storage vault was a circuit board of tall thin corridors. He followed the alphabetically marked floor-to-ceiling expanse of storage drawers, making numerous lefts and rights before he reached the letter 'O'. A mechanoid bray of triumph breezed out of his voice unit. He pulled the sliding tubular aluminium stepladder underneath the storage box he desired and swiftly climbed the steps. Again he typed in a pass-code. A box zinged out of the wall. He typed in a second pass-code and the box opened silently. He reached in and took hold of a vacuum flask, spun off the top and took out a tiny pink disk. He hurried down the stepladder and made his way to the exit.
All he had to do now was feed the oblivion virus into his own network and walk across the canyon and meet the Rage. When the gestalt entered him, it too would become contaminated, its energy force would be neutered by the electric-killing virus and, although he would be terminated, the Rage would be slain. That was why his plan had to remain a secret. If he'd suggested it to Lister and the others they would have forbidden it and then his CPU wouldn't have allowed him to carry it out. However, if he didn't tell them he could loophole his way around his programming. This was clearly the only solution to their dilemma; resisting his scheme would simply result in everyone winding up dead; it was his role as the least important member of the crew to make the obvious sacrifice.
He hurried down the aisle and walked into a bank of storage units. A dead end. In his musings he'd missed a turn. He started to retrace his steps. He'd never noticed before how dark it was in the storage vaults, just the low neons casting sober orange fingers over the floors and walls. Left, right, left. Again he walked into a dead end. Did this have something to do with his olfactory system? He decided to turn it back on. He opened his chest plate and flicked it back on-line. The system-alert mode was still engaged. It was telling him there was code 0089/2 in the local vicinity. Kryten searched through his long-term memory banks to discover what a 0089/2 was - he had a feeling it was either the sweet fragrance of a blossoming peach tree or a decomposing body. His long-term memory informed him that he could rule out the blossoming-peach-tree possibility. In a way that made quite a lot of sense to Kryten, in that blossoming peach trees were generally thin on the ground in storage vaults. This left him with the second possibility.
How could it be true? Apart from anything else, there wasn't anyone around who could be dead. Everyone was alive and accounted for.
It must be his olfactory system that was faulty. He made a right and saw two feet sticking out behind a bale of storage drawers. Two feet; whose, it was impossible to tell. What sex or species was also impossible to guess. Kryten began the very long walk up to them. As he walked he started to eliminate all the people those feet couldn't belong to. Long before he reached them he knew whose they were. A stalactite of panic sliced through his being. Then a high-pitched squeaking noise made him spin round. It was the sound of the giant wheel on the reinforced steel doors being spun shut as the storage vault was locked from the outside.
CHAPTER 18
The bottom, sides and top had fallen out of Michael McGruder's world. He sat huddled in front of an unnecessarily chirpy fire and tried to sift through the events of this quite unbelievable day. All his life he'd believed in this God-like father figure: all through his chi
ldhood, all through Cadet school, all through the Star Fleet he'd been plutonium driven to succeed, to live up to the unattainable. Now it turned out his father was nothing more than a chicken-soup-machine maintenance repairman.
A third technician, for God's sake. A zero. A nobody. Images from his past flicked into his mind, like shots from a slide show. Had he ever been more completely betrayed? He saw his girlfriend, Mercedes, still-framed, clutching the corner of the sheet and holding it up against her naked body; his eyes panned right, almost in slow-motion, and there was his best friend, Ben. Their " Star Fleet apartment, their bed. He felt worse now. At least Mercedes and Ben weren't a lifetime of betrayal, not like his father.
He started to choke, dry-retching, gasping for air. He couldn't breathe.
The garrotte flashed over his head and dragged him backwards along the cave floor. He kicked helplessly, vainly trying to get his hands between the thin metal wire and the soft skin of his throat. Suddenly, gaffer tape was wrapped expertly across his mouth and round his head; then he was rolled on to his front and the tape was round his wrists, and then on his back again and he could see his attacker.
It was Lister.
At least, it looked like Lister.
* * *
Rimmer stood in the mouth of the cave and watched bewildered as the two men rolled around in the dirt. Suddenly, the man sitting astride his son turned and saw him.
Lister's other self: he was still alive.
Alive? But how? It wasn't possible. He'd been taken by the Kinitawowis.
Lister's other self regarded him through hooded eyes as a smile as thin as melba toast edged across his lips. 'Hi, there.'
'You.'
Lister's other self sprayed a staccato snigger into the chilling afternoon air. 'You just can't keep a bad guy down.'
A twinkle of gun-metal grey flecked into Rimmer's peripheral vision. Four feet to his right lay Lister's other self's IR pistol. All he had to do was make two strides, bend and pick it up.
This was his moment.