Backwards Read online

  TWELVE

  Twelve-fifteen.

  Kryten should have been concentrating on meeting the flight window deadline, which wasn't exactly midnight, but close enough not to matter a spit. If they weren't airborne before ten to... well, the alternative didn't bear thinking about.

  Trouble was, Kryten wasn't thinking about it.

  He was standing on an elevated platform, holding the part-corroded engine in position, while Lister's laser torch sprayed showers of dancing sparks over him and everything else in the vicinity.

  Rimmer was pacing nervously beneath them, barking pointless and panicky commands. The Cat stood on the bottom step of the mini-crane, shouting equally pointless and panicky commands, only forwards.

  And Kryten didn't even notice them. Nor did he share their panic.

  He was thinking about murder.

  Murr. Derr.

  Such a pleasant, soft word, really.

  Like murmur.

  Purring and delicate.

  Hiding behind its gentle, furry exterior the foulest, vilest offence humankind had ever devised against nature.

  Murder.

  Kryten was a murderer.

  And he couldn't live with it.

  By the time Kryten had been created, all Artificial Intelligence life forms were programmed to protect human life. There had been some earlier mistakes — most notably the part-organic agonoids, who had been designed as super warriors and then got a few ideas of their own about obeying orders and almost rid an entire planet of its human occupants — before the designers wised up and started programming a version of Asimov's robotic laws into the core of every computer mind.

  Kryten had broken those laws, and his urge to self-destruct was almost unbearable.

  And so he'd decided that, once the engine was fixed into place, and the take-off prepared, he would slip quietly down the ramp and disappear into the cave.

  He was incapable of thinking clearly, and had no idea how he might commit suicide on a planet where time was running in reverse. All he knew was that he was unfit to share the company of humans. If that meant spending an eternity alone in the dark recesses of inaccessible caverns, with only his guilt and his pain for company, then so be it.

  He'd discharge this final duty, and be gone.

  Suddenly, he was aware of silence.

  Lister flicked off his torch, unhooked his safety harness and climbed down on to Kryten's platform.

  Rimmer yelled, 'Is that it? All systems go?'

  Lister raised his welding mask and looked up at the awkwardly angled landing jet. 'It's not perfect. Should be good enough to give us a shot.' He tugged off his gloves and started climbing down the mini-crane steps towards the Cat's anxious stare.

  It had been a tricky job, trying to attach the jet using a cutting tool, and Kryten had been precious little help. Lister had no idea how long it would hold, if at all. He'd been alarmed by his close examination of Starbug's underside. A lot of the plates seemed to have been recently welded into place, and there appeared to be a dangerous level of corrosion under the fresh metal sheets.

  Still, with less than five minutes to go, he decided not to share his fears with the others. Either Starbug would get off the ground, or it wouldn't. No point in complicating matters now.

  As the Cat hurriedly loaded the mini-crane back inside, Rimmer pointlessly urging him on with backwards barked commands, Lister discreetly shone the work lamp over the walls of the cave.

  As he'd suspected, the walls were latticed with ruts, some fresh with scorch marks, others filmed over with grime.

  Some part of him probably knew the truth, then. But it wasn't about to go and blurt it out to the rest of him. Hope was the fuel that fed Lister's engine, and there was no point in squandering it over maybes and like-as-nots. There could be dozens of explanations for the presence of those marks. None of them feasible or likely, but all of them better than the probable truth.

  A wisp of undispersing smoke wafted across the beam. He sniffed the air. The familiar fumes of part-burned jet fuel were starting to build up. He took a last look around the cave and then pounded up the landing ramp.

  He was inside the cockpit before the ramp had fully retracted. Rimmer was seated towards the rear of the cockpit, running checks over the NaviComp. The Cat was in the pilot seat, which took Lister somewhat by surprise, but on reflection, it made sense. That Cat had faster reactions and better directional sense than the rest of them put together. True, he was also stupider and vainer than the rest of them put together, but in a pinch, the best choice for the job. Lister was about to slip into the co-pilot's seat beside him, when he realized that Kryten's computer station was unmanned.

  'Where's Kryten?'

  The Cat shrugged. Rimmer didn't take his eyes off the NaviComp. He said, 'He's running some checks in the engine-rooms.'

  Lister punched up the security cameras and scanned the engine-rooms. Deserted. He turned and headed for the mid-section.

  The Cat yelled after him 'Dubh, stinnimuh oot', and carried on flicking switches, in between sly glances at his reflection in the computer screen and occasional touch-ups of his perfect pompadour.

  Lister managed to decipher the Cats yell as 'Two minutes, bud,' as he hurled himself down the steps to the midsection. Empty. He ran straight for the spiral stairs and launched himself up to the rest quarters,

  Kryten was not on board.

  Lister crashed back down the stairs and flung himself up the steps back to the cockpit. 'He's gone! Kryten's not here!'

  His eyes still on the NaviComp display, Rimmer said, 'Ninety seconds and counting.'

  'Woah!' Lister formed his hands into a capital T. 'Time out, guys. Kryten's still out there.'

  'Lister, we are about to perform what is probably the most complicated reverse-landing take-off procedure ever attempted in the history of aviation, with a single landing jet which is rustier than Elizabeth the First's chastity belt. Furthermore, the pilot and I do not even speak the same language in the same direction, and even if we did, we wouldn't agree. We do not need any more complications.'

  'Complications?! Kryten's not on board! We can't leave without him!'

  'Wrong. We can't leave with him. If we abort now, we miss the flight window.'

  'Then we miss it. We're not abandoning Kryten.'

  'Sixty seconds and counting.' Rimmer flicked his eyes up from the screen. 'He knows what he's doing. He's made his choice. The flight path's been logged in and we can make it without him.'

  'What do you mean, "He's made his choice"? You mean he told you he wasn't coming with us?'

  'What he actually said was: "I'm going for a walk. I may be some time. "'

  'And you let him go?'

  Rimmer looked down at the screen again. 'Forty-five seconds.'

  Lister jumped back down to the mid-section and raced to the airlock. As he slid his palm over the security scanner, the engines began to whine. The scanner read-out flashed red, and a warning panel blinked the words: 'Airlock inaccessible until Landing Procedure complete.'

  Lister thumped the scanner with his forehead and charged back to the cockpit.

  Starbug began to shake as the engine whine built. Lister staggered to the co-pilot station and yelled to the Cat: 'Troh-bah! Trohbah!'

  The Cat looked up at him confused, and then over at Rimmer, who shook his head and said, 'Zero.'

  Starbug juddered as the engines crescendoed and Lister was flung into the co-pilot seat. 'No!' he screamed. 'Nooo!'

  He flicked on the external cameras. The cave outside was almost completely obscured by the fog banks of thick black-brown smoke that the single landing jet was labouring to inhale.

  Just for an instant, he thought he caught a glimpse of Kryten's too-pink face craning to see them through the acrid fog.

  The cockpit was juddering wildly, now. A jumble of flight manuals leapt from the floor around Kryten's deserted station and arranged themselves neatly on a shelf.

  And they were airborne.


  THIRTEEN

  The combination of retros roaring, the landing jet screaming and the jittering vibration rocking the cabin made communication virtually impossible.

  Lister lunged forward and flicked at the abort switches on the co-pilots control panel — useless, unless the pilot initiated the abort sequence, too. He looked over at the Cat, hoping he would copy the manoeuvre. The Cat ignored him.

  Lister lurched out of his seat and reached over for the pilot abort controls, but Starbug pitched again suddenly and his hand crashed into the wrong bank of switches.

  The Cat screeched 'Dhub, hgniood hooy hrah klehk huthh twhah!?' and tugged at the collective, desperately trying to correct the crafts yawing. But with the single landing jet, and the reverse physics of backward Earth, manoeuvrability was almost zero.

  Starbug began to spin. Inside the cockpit, the alert lights started flashing wildly and the siren's sucked-in agoowa wail added to the Bedlamic confusion.

  In blind panic, the Cat began to hit switches at random with one hand, while his other wrestled with the collective stick between his legs.

  Outside, in the choking gloom of the cave, Kryten switched his vision to infra-red and watched with mounting horror as Starbug span hopelessly out of control. The cavern around him was just an explosion of jet thunder as unsynchronized blasts from the front retros sucked scorch marks from the cave walls and neatly packed the long deep ruts beneath full of stone.

  He should never have left them. He had no idea what had gone wrong, or what he could have done to correct it even if he'd stayed on board, but that didn't matter.

  What mattered was, they were going to die.

  And Kryten could add three more notches to his murderer's belt.

  Desperate to do something, anything to help them, Kryten ran towards the stricken, spinning craft.

  As a landing leg span overhead towards him, he leapt. His fingertips gripped the landing leg's splayed foot, and he hung on grimly.

  Big mistake. His weight and momentum tilted the vessel even further off kilter, and its spin became wilder and more unstable. It pitched and rolled like a desperate gyroscope without enough force to regain its centre.

  Kryten hung there, not knowing what to do. In his panic, he'd worsened the situation, but if he let go now, Starbug might topple radically over in the opposite direction and smash into the deadly rock. Perhaps even turn over completely.

  What had he been thinking of? Had some part of his guilt-crazed mind thought he could tug the ship safely to the ground? Who did he think he was? An ex-patriot of the planet Krypton?

  He tried to make the best of it by trying to gauge the spin, and swinging his body against it. As he pendulumed gently to and fro underneath the crazily twisting space craft, he tried to persuade himself he was making some small difference, but he wasn't very convincing.

  Inside the cockpit, insanity reigned.

  The Cat's emergency procedure of hitting every button in reach was not contributing massively to the restoration of calm. The seats were all jumping up and down on their hydraulics, computer slugs were pinging across the cabin and popping into their drives, lights were flashing crazily, and military band music was blasting from every speaker in the ship at ear-bleeding volume.

  Lister lurched across the Cat and jabbed wildly at the abort panel. A lucky flick killed the retros, and the spin began to slow. The Cat regained control of the collective, brought the vessel horizontal and closed down the landing jets.

  With the smallest of bumps, Starbug nestled back down on the cave floor.

  The Cat leaned forward, flicked off the band music and grinned at Lister. 'Hthooms,' he said.

  Lister shook his head and checked the external camera. The cave was empty of smoke, but Kryten was nowhere in sight.

  Where the smeg had he gone? Had they landed on him?

  Lister shot out of the cockpit and raced to the airlock. He ran his palm over the scanner again, and once again, it flashed red. What the hell was wrong now? He glanced over at the warning panel, which was blinking: 'Occupied.'

  The inner wheel span and the airlock door clicked open. Kryten was standing in front of him, his plastic face twisted in fear and concern. 'Sir? Are you all right?'

  Lister's relief at seeing Kryten safe instantly gave way to a sense of desperation and failure. He turned away and plonked himself in a chair by the scanner table. 'Yeah,' he mumbled without enthusiasm. 'We're fine, Kryten.'

  The mechanoid stepped in and crooked his head towards the cockpit door. 'All of you?'

  The Cat slinked down from the cockpit and Rimmer followed him.

  Kryten felt so grateful to see them intact, he felt like spontaneously combusting. 'Oh, sirs, this is all my fault...'

  'No. It's Lister's fault,' Rimmer glared. 'He was acting like one of those little Scottish blokes in POW movies who suddenly go stir crazy and make a beeline for the electric fence.'

  'It's nobody's fault, Kryten,' Lister said without looking up. 'It just happened. OK?'

  'Not OK.' Rimmer strode over to him. 'Far from OK.' He leaned his face deep into Lister's personal space. 'OK!? Have you seen the time?'

  Lister nodded. 'Eleven forty-two.'

  'Which means, unless my backwards arithmetic is seriously askew, that we have missed our flight window. Yes?'

  Lister nodded again. 'Believe me, Rimmer, it's the last thing I wanted. I've already been stuck here for thirty-odd years.'

  Rimmer straightened. Blame had been apportioned, and none of it had fallen on him. It was bizarre that such meaninglessness should be important to him, but it was, and he was beginning to feel better already.

  That feeling was not going to last very long.

  'All right, then,' he smiled. 'Let's talk damage limitation.' He turned to Kryten. 'There's absolutely no chance that we can attempt another reverse landing and achieve this flight window?'

  'I'm afraid not, sir.'

  Rimmer flicked his eyes briefly over to Lister, just in case anyone was in any doubt about the Blame Quotient, and then back to Kryten. 'Well, that's too bad, but we're stuck with it, I suppose. The question now is: when is the next flight window?'

  Kryten squirmed. 'Well, I haven't exactly re-checked all of the calculations as yet...'

  Rimmer smiled. 'All we need for the moment, Kryten, is your best guess.'

  'Well, sir, I'd be reluctant to commit myself at this stage to a definite time and date.'

  'Just a ballpark figure, Kryten. Just so we know we have enough time to prepare for the attempt properly.' 'Oh, I should think we'll have time enough for that, sir. Even if...'

  'Kryten. Let me put it another way: just how long are we going to be stuck here on this hell hole, you oversized ugly dildo?'

  'Fuh...' Kryten stammered. 'Fuh... Fuh...'

  'Four hours? Four weeks? Four months?'

  'Fuh... Fuh...' Kryten thumped his head against the airlock door. 'Ten years.'

  PART TWO

  Smoke Me a Kipper, I'll Be Back for Breakfast

  ONE

  Billy-Joe Epstein knew he was a coward, and what's more, he knew everyone else knew it, too. He gave it off, stank of it, somehow. Emanated it, like the stench from a week-dead skunk. And on this Saturday night, he sat hunched over his usual bar space, on his usual bar stool over his usual drink, emanating away, and trying to get drunk enough to help him forget he was a coward, which, as usual, was not going to work.

  Billy-Joe (call sign: the Jewish Cowboy) was nineteen years old and he knew just about all there was to know about piloting state-of-the-art Space Corps craft. He sailed through the written tests, breezed through the oral exams, excelled at the theory. And in two days' time he was going to get thrown out of the Corps. The day after tomorrow he was going to take and fail his final Space Corps examination flight for the third, and therefore last, time. Because when it came to the dangerous stuff, the low-level passes over the high-gravity rock deserts of Miranda, Billy-Joe Epstein would, at the last moment, lose his nerve and veer
away.

  Because, as they said behind his back in the locker-room, Billy-Joe just didn't have the love spuds.

  He looked down into his shot glass and saw his own cowardly reflection staring at him contemptuously in the treacle-coloured liquor, so he drained it, and looked up to order another one.

  She didn't see him, of course. She never seemed to be' looking in his direction, even if he was the only one in the bar, which was not uncommon. But that was fine by Billy-Joe, because it gave him more chance to be looking at her.

  Her name was Mamie, not that Billy-Joe had ever plucked up the courage to call her by her name. She was, well, better than him. She could have her pick of the jocks who jostled the bar to have the honour of flirting with her. And she wouldn't even give them the time of day. She was... special. Her hair, well, you wouldn't say it was brunette, and you couldn't say she was a redhead, either. In between, kind of, depending on the light. And her eyes weren't blue, and they weren't green, but you get the idea. And Billy-Joe didn't converse with her at all, except to order his drinks and keep his manners with please and thank you. Anything else would have been just inconceivable. The thought, even, when it had the temerity to creep into his mind, of actually asking her out on a date, made him feel like someone was twisting his stomach bag at both ends with a high-tension torque wrench.

  While he was waiting for her to notice he wanted serving, Billy-Joe felt a tap on his left shoulder. He turned to stare into a gleaming row of medals.

  'I believe you're in my seat, Sonny.'

  Billy-Joe looked around.

  There was no one else in the bar room.

  There were nine empty stools, count them, nine, ranked along the bar.

  Mamie was looking over, now. He felt his ears begin to glow. He glanced at the jock's armband. A commander.

  'Sure,' Billy-Joe shrugged. 'Sorry.'

  He slipped over to the adjacent seat, as manfully as he could.