Backwards Read online

  He saw another burst from Kryten's jet pack, which meant that the mechanoid had reached the outer fringes of the sprawling debris.

  His helmet intercom fizzed: 'I am on the periphery of. the device, sir.'

  Lister thumbed his transmitter. 'Almost with you.'

  Lister looked down at his jet-pack controls. He'd lied to the others that he'd made dozens of space walks, when, in fact, he'd made none. Still, the controls seemed straightforward enough: two buttons, one for forward thrust, and one for reverse. Child's play.

  It was only when he looked up again to see a huge metal box growing in front of him with alarming rapidity that he began to have doubts about his own sanity.

  With no friction, and no landmarks to gauge against, Lister had badly misjudged his speed. His fingers fumbled at the controls and a huge flame spurted from his chest jet, not only stopping his forward motion, but sending him blasting backwards at almost twice the velocity. He tried to move his hand towards the controls again, but it had become tangled in his own umbilical cord. He craned his neck around to see if he could free himself, and saw Starbug looming towards him with sickening speed. If he impacted at this rate, his body would thump a cartoonesque hole in the hull.

  He strained his hand, but could only reach the chest jet button, which would merely accelerate his demise. He was aware of some panicky babble in his ears, which he assumed was coming from Kryten, but turned out to be his own fearful ranting.

  Then, when it seemed things couldn't possibly get worse, they did.

  A snaking loop of his umbilical cord whipped around the neck of his helmet and yanked him upside down.

  Now he was cartwheeling through space towards an extremely messy death, and he was beginning to get very worried indeed.

  He wiggled his gloved finger above the chest jet button.

  If he timed it exactly right, maybe, just maybe, he could fire a burst just as he was facing the Bug, and slow down.

  The problem was, spinning end over end in a gravity-free environment was proving a little disorienting, and Lister had no idea which way was up, down, backwards or forwards in relation to Starbug. And if he fired the jet at the wrong time, they'd be scraping his body off the hull with a windscreen wiper and carrying him to his funeral in a slop bucket.

  Starbug span into view at the top of his visor, and then whipped across and disappeared at the bottom. Lister counted. One little second, two little seconds, three lit---... and Starbug popped up again.

  He estimated he would impact in three or four more turns.

  One little second, two little seconds, three...

  Starbug whipped across his vision again.

  One little second, two little seconds... Lister closed his eyes, screamed and jabbed the button.

  When he opened his eyes, he was looking at stars. Just as he began inhaling, Starbug span in and out of view again. His heart took an express elevator up his windpipe.

  Then, just as the second of his lifetimes was flashing through his mind, the Bug span back into sight.

  And it wasn't any bigger.

  He was still tumbling end over end, but his forward motion had ceased.

  He started breathing again, and made a personal vow never to take any more unnecessary risks, and to eschew henceforward the boastful bravado and lack of humility his puberty seemed to promote.

  Kryten's helmeted pink face, warped with concern span into his view. 'Are you all right, sir?'

  Lister grinned. 'Are you joking? I meant to do that. Played for and got.'

  Rimmer, Lister and the Cat stared at the -snarl of wires coiled all over the engine-room floor, all trying desperately to think how some good might come out of this.

  If these jumbled cables, terminals and circuit boards had once constituted a part of Holly, what did that mean for Red Dwarf?

  Suddenly, there was a clank, the lights dipped to emergency level and the machinery roar of the engine room dulled to a gentle throb. Kryten clopped down the stairwell. 'There. We've shut down all non-vital systems and reduced the rest to minimum consumption.' He looked up sheepishly. 'Except for Rimmer was aware the others were looking at him. 'Except for what?' He asked, genuinely stumped.

  'Well, sir, yours is the largest demand on our entire energy supply.'

  'You have to be joshing me.' Rimmer's eyebrows did a passable impression of a hamburger chain logo. 'I'm already down to quarter power.

  'Sir — if this machine is indeed Holly, then even if we pumped in Starbug's entire energy supply, it would only represent a tiny portion of his power requirements. If we're to stand any chance at all of achieving communication, we'll have to concentrate everything we've got into one massive surge.'

  'All well and good. The problem is I'm already see-through. If you turn down my juice any more I'll hardly be here at all. One good rump grunt from Lister's curry-fevered backside would blast me out of existence.

  ''Actually, sir...' Kryten scratched at a rust spot on a gantry support stanchion '... I was talking about turning you off completely.'

  'And turn me back on when?'

  Kryten scratched away at the rust. 'We could re-initialize you as soon as we locate Red Dwarf.'

  'You're winding me up, aren't you? Either that or you've crosswired your vocal chords with your effluence evacuation pipe.'

  'Come on, Rimmer,' Lister's adolescent voice found a different octave for each syllable. 'It's our best shot at finding the Dwarf.'

  'I'm our best shot at finding the Dwarf. How long d'you think you'd last without me? What happens next time we hit an asteroid storm, and you two are off in the lavvy, gritting your teeth and squinting at the negligee page of that mail-order catalogue you've got hidden behind the cistern? You think this robotized loo attendant here will handle it? I'm the sole member of this crew with any space qualifications at all. The only letters Captain Bog Bot's entitled to use after his name are WC,'

  'Rimmer,' Lister squeaked, 'you're not exactly John Glenn. The only space qualification you've got is a certificate entitling you to suck out the nozzles on a chicken-soup machine. You failed your astronavigation exam eleven times, for smeg's sake.'

  As soon as the words trilled out of his throat, Lister wanted to suck them back in like smoke rings. An approach less likely to win Rimmer's cooperation would be hard to imagine. What was wrong with him? It was only his body that was going through puberty — why couldn't his mature, adult mind stave off these bouts of adolescent temper and impetuousness?

  Kryten stepped in. 'I beg you to reconsider, sir. Human history is resplendent with examples of such sacrifice. Remember Captain Oates: "I'm going out for a walk, I may be some time"?'

  Rimmer nodded. 'Yes, but the thing you have to remember about Captain Oates: well, Captain Oates was a pratt. If that had been me, I'd have stayed in the tent, whacked Scott over the head with a frozen husky and eaten him.'

  Lister shook his head. 'You would, too, wouldn't you?'

  Rimmer rounded on him. 'History, Lister, is written by the winners. How do we know Oates went out for this legendary walk? From the only surviving document: Scott's diary. And he's hardly going to make the entry: "February the first: bludgeoned Oats to death while he slept, and scoffed him along with the last packet of instant mash. " How's that going to look if he gets rescued? No, much better to write "Oates made the supreme sacrifice" while you're dabbing up his gravy with some crusty bread.'

  'Very well, then.' Kryten attached the power line. 'We'll give it the best we've got.' He straightened and stepped over the cables to the jerry-rigged power switch. Though I must warn you, even if his system is in standby mode, rather than shut down, we'll be lucky to revive him for a couple of minutes at best.'

  Kryten hesitated, his hand on the lever. The energy expended by the power surge would seriously cut into their survival expectancy. If the attempt failed, or if this weren't Holly, they'd be left with less than five months to search out and recover Red Dwarf.

  If Red Dwarf still existed.

&n
bsp; Still, he'd gone over the alternatives, and this seemed their best option. He closed his eyes and threw the lever.

  Neon blue bolts of static cackled along the tangled cables. Rimmer's transparent image wavered in and out of sight. Lister and the Cat's hair sprung upwards as if they were frightened cartoons.

  The dead grey monitor propped up against a stanchion burst into life. Tens of thousands of pixels whirled and whizzed around the screen and then began settling into a shape.

  The shape of a man's disembodied head.

  Holly's head.

  THREE

  Holly blinked, his expression a combination of surprise and guilt, as if he'd just been caught reading an illicit magazine by torchlight under his bedclothes.

  'All right, dudes.' His familiar, slow, London twang sounded as good to Lister as angels singing a heavy-metal anthem. 'What's happening out there in Groove Town?'

  'Holly, man, the question is: what happened to you?'

  Holly looked around at the snarled confusion of circuity spread over the engine-room deck. His eyes widened like someone had attached a hydraulic jack to his lids. 'My God!' he whined. 'Where's the rest of me?!'

  Kryten stooped towards the monitor. 'Pardon my lack of appropriate politeness protocols, but there's very little time. We found you floating in deep space. Can you remember what occurred?'

  'Hang on. Hang about.' His eyes flitted from side to side. 'I'm not all here, mate.'

  Rimmer smiled grimly. 'Nothing new there.'

  Kryten clucked with frustration. Expensive seconds were ticking away. 'We're stranded in Starbug. We couldn't fit you all on board. We dragged in what we could, but over ninety per cent of your circuitry's still out there. Can you try and concentrate? We need to know what happened to Red Dwarf:

  'Red Dwarf?' Holly repeated distractedly.

  'You remember Red Dwarf, 'Rimmer said in his patronizing-deaf-old-biddies-in-crocheted-hats voice. 'The big, red spaceship you've been living in for the last three million years.'

  'Red Dwarf?' Holly repeated again.

  Rimmer flung up his transparent hands. 'This is useless. He's in shock. We're not going to get anything out of the computer senile bastard until he's had some hot, sweet tea, a dose of morphine and five years of dismemberment counselling.'

  'Mr Rimmer, sir,' Kryten hissed, 'you're not helping.' He turned back to Holly. 'You must try and remember what happened to you. Our lives may depend on it.'

  'I remember...' Holly's eyes glazed over.

  'Yes?' Kryten urged.

  'I remember... something about onions.'

  'Onions?'

  'I take it all back,' Rimmer beamed. 'He's still the giant intellect he always was.'

  'There was some problem about onions,' Holly nodded encouragement to himself. 'And then... then they came aboard...'

  'They?' Lister leaned forward. 'Who's "they"?'

  'They came aboard...' Holly's image began to flicker. '... took over the ship... I tried to reason with them, but it just cheesed them off. They were bad news hombres for sure, dudes. They started ripping me out...'

  'Who's "they"?' Lister repeated.

  'Sir,' Kryten held up his hand to calm Lister. 'What's more important is when. How long ago did this happen?'

  Holly's image was fading now. There were only a few seconds of the power surge left. 'Let's see... what time is it now? Half-past three... about ten months ago.'

  Kryten rocked back on his haunches.

  Holly's image began to recede towards the centre of the screen.

  Lister leaned closer. 'Holly, you're going, man. Who the smeg is "they"?'

  Holly's face shrank rapidly to postage-stamp size, and then blipped off completely.

  As the cables' hum diminished, Holly's voice issued weakly from the monitor speaker. He said just one word. 'Agonoids.'

  FOUR

  And humankind built agonoids in its own image.

  Agonoids were designed to be perfect exponents of the favourite human sport: killing.

  Mechanical warriors without any of the ucky bits that prevented humans from wiping out all life on the planet, such as pity, mercy or morality.

  And because their bodies didn't contain any of the squishy or crunchy bits that made humans fairly easy to kill, they were virtually indestructible.

  They were programmed, of course, to obey orders. But they were also programmed to survive. And when humans started recalling the agonoid population for decommissioning after a short but -satisfying war, the survival instinct kicked in.

  Strangely, the agonoids' creators were surprised when their creation turned on them. It wouldn't surprise you or me, but it surprised them. Blew them away, in fact.

  For a short while, the rest of the planet heaved a mighty sigh of relief as humankind concentrated its talent for slaughter on the agonoid population.

  Unfortunately for the planet, there were a lot more humans than agonoids, and the humans eventually won.

  Not all the agonoids were accounted for at the end of the skirmish. A few thousand of them escaped and headed out of the solar system.

  The survivors had just one item on their agenda.

  Revenge.

  And so it was that M'Aiden Ty-One, several hundreds of centuries old, came to be propping up the counter at the newly built Scatter bar, on the recently captured Red Dwarf, ordering his third plug-in scramble card, which would cleverly re-route the signal paths of his electronic mindscape to produce a temporary, contained alteration of identity.

  He was getting robot-drunk.

  The agonoid race had started out looking like humans, but over the centuries their organic outer skin had lost its colour and texture, tightening all their faces into a permanent, grey leer. They were all, now, bald, and their tooth enamel had worn away, leaving only rows of razor-sharp metal to smile with. M'Aiden, however, was not smiling, as he scanned the other occupants of the bar twice. The first pass was to check out any personnel who might present a potential threat, the second to spot any weakness in them he might exploit.

  He'd have to do something about another eye, no way round it.

  While an agonoid had no specific built-in life span, its parts would wear down sooner or later. Not all parts were manufacturable, since humans had not been so stupid as to programme an agonoid with the ability to duplicate itself, and eyes were in extremely short supply.

  The only way for an agonoid to replace a defective part, therefore, was to take it from another agonoid.

  This had led to two things, one of which was extremely good for the rest of the universe, the other, extremely bad.

  The extremely good thing was that it had ferociously diminished the surviving agonoid population.

  The extremely bad thing was that a species which had been designed for its ruthlessness was being naturally selected for exceptional ruthlessness.

  M'Aiden had personally dispatched, mangled and cannibalized seventy-four of his own crewmates. He had felt nothing but contempt for their weakness as he destroyed them, which was as it should be. Less than a month before, he had been the proud owner of two eyes, but a one-eyed agonoid had jumped him while he'd been under the influence, and M'Aiden had barely escaped with his life. An agonoid could survive with only one eye, but not for long.

  He spotted a likely target at the end of the bar: an agonoid he recognized as Chi'Panastee, who looked well along the way to becoming utterly scatterbrained, with no less than seven cards plugged into his head. Better still, he had only one ear and a missing hand.

  The service droid slipped the scramble card he'd ordered on to the bar, and M'Aiden nodded towards Chi. 'That's for my friend over there.'

  The dwindling number of the agonoid population meant that everyone was more or less familiar with everyone else, but for agonoids there was no such concept as friendship. A friend was just someone you hadn't killed yet.

  The droid picked up the card and scurried over to the end of the bar. Chi accepted it, waved it at M'Aiden by way of thanks, and s
lotted it into his brain.

  M'Aiden stood and strode towards the stool next to Chi, carefully angling his head to conceal his missing eye, which would have alerted even the most scramble-headed agonoid to the extreme danger he was now in.

  M'Aiden didn't have to search hard for a topic to open up the conversation. There had been only one thing worth discussing for months. 'They say the human is in the belt.' He grinned.

  Chi'Panastee grinned right back, and his eyes misted over at the prospect.

  Centuries ago, long-range astronomic probes fired off by the agonoid fleet had reported the Earth had vanished out of the solar system, and no evidence had ever been found that the human race still existed.

  Driven by monomaniacal lust for vengeance, the rag-bag caravan of captured vessels had roamed the universe in search of survivors.

  And they had found nothing for aeons.

  Until now.

  They had boarded the orbiting Red Dwarf and ripped it apart from bow to stern looking for cowering humans on which to slake their bloodlust, but the ship had been deserted. Furious with frustration, they had interrogated the ship's simple-minded computer, and discovered to their unutterable delight that there was a human still living.

  Just one.

  One single human on which to expend all that pent-up hatred.

  Each and every one of the few dozen remaining agonoids wanted to be the one to deal the death blow.

  So much demand, such short supply. There was only one way to cope with it. The agonoids would compete for the right to slaughter.

  And so they baited a trap.

  And while they waited for the trap to be sprung, they all dreamed of being The One. Of having their maker begging for mercy at their feet. Of pitilessly applying the coup de grace, and watching the wretch's life drain away.