Backwards Page 7

  'What stinking luck,' the commander grinned. 'That one's mine as well.'

  Billy-Joe was smiling, not out of bravado, but because his face didn't know what else to do with itself. Was this officer trying to pick a fight?

  Mamie stepped over and asked Billy-Joe, 'What'll it be?'

  'I was here first, old love,' the commander smiled pleasantly.

  'No you weren't.' Mamie returned the smile.

  The commander's hand shot out rattlesnake fast and grabbed Mamie's wrist. 'Let's not have any backchat, old love.' His smile remained even and calm.

  Mamie didn't make a sound, but Billy-Joe could see she was hurting. He cleared his throat. 'I think you've probably had a couple too many drinks, sir.' He tried to make it sound as uncontentious as possible: 'Maybe you probably should think about possibly not manhandling the lady that way, you reckon?'

  The officer's smile broadened. He dropped Marie's wrist.'You feel possibly, perhaps, you're maybe man enough to probably stop me, you reckon?' he parodied.

  'Suh, sir...' Billy-Joe stuttered.

  'Oh, let's forget about rank, here, laddie.' The officer slipped off his jacket, its medals clanking musically as he laid it carefully on the barstool. 'Let's forget I'm your superior officer. Let's forget my gold bars, my medals, and my unarmed combat training officer badge. And let's just do it.'

  Billy-Joe's face was still wearing the same smile it came in with, and his ears felt like they were about to burst into flames, as he watched the officer calmly rolling up his shirt sleeves. 'There really is no nee...'

  It was only a one-syllable word, but Billy-Joe started it perpendicularly and ended it horizontally.

  '... eed.' He had no idea where the blow had hit him, but his whole face hurt. He looked up. The officer was already rolling his sleeves back down, as if that one blow would be enough to put Billy-Joe Epstein down and keep him there.

  Something about that made Billy-Joe mad. Mad enough to make him ignore his instinct to stay down and play dead.

  Mad enough to make him get to his feet and square up to the man.

  He felt ridiculous. He didn't know how to fight. He didn't even know how to stand for a fight. He tried hunching up and making small, tight circles with his bunched fists, but he felt like he was in Tom Brown's schooldays or something. All his life he'd avoided fights and now here he was, picking his first one with a multi-decorated officer who specialized in unarmed combat, and could probably kill him eight different ways with each of his fingers.

  The officer raised his eyebrows in delight. 'You're game, sonny.' He glinted. 'Splendiferous stuff. Needed something to get the old circulation going in the fisteroonies.'

  Billy-Joe actually saw the second blow. He didn't see it quite quickly enough to avoid it, but it was definitely an improvement, he felt, as it landed on his left ear, hard enough to rattle his brain against his skull like a caged budgerigar in an earthquake.

  Although he felt it was probably futile even to try, he launched a punch of his own. His vision wasn't exactly clear, but he aimed roughly at the centre of the vibrating image of the officer, and was surprised when his knuckles made contact with flesh and bone.

  The officer drew his hand across his lip and looked oddly at the smear of blood, as if it weren't real, couldn't be happening.

  Billy-Joe hit him again. The officer staggered back. He shook his head. His composure was gone. Anger sprang to his face, and snarling, he leapt at Billy-Joe like a rabid wolf.

  Billy-Joe twisted to one side, using the man's momentum against him and helped him tidily over the bar, where he crashed spectacularly into a stack of bottles promoting Clearhead alcohol-free vodka.

  Billy-Joe stood where he was, making his Tom Brown circles with his fists, until it became obvious that the officer wasn't going to get up again.

  Then Billy-Joe grabbed the commanders jacket — he was astonished how heavy the clattering medals were — and dumped it over the bar on his opponent's groaning body. 'Maybe you should think about leaving now. Sir.'

  The officer grunted, staggered to his feet and crunched over the broken glass and out of the bar without looking back.

  'You wanted a drink?'

  Billy-Joe turned from the door. Mamie was smiling at him.

  At him!

  He shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

  'On the house?'

  'No, thanks. I've got a big flight exam in a couple of days. I should keep a clear head.'

  'Well,' she smiled again. 'Anytime.'

  'That's right kind.' He flicked her a salute and turned to go.

  'Good luck with the test, Billy-Joe.'

  He almost froze in the door, but he managed to keep walking.

  She knew his name!

  Maybe he'd pluck up the courage to ask her out, after all. Maybe he was less of a coward than he thought. He might even have the love spuds to make that low-level flight.

  He made a deal with himself: if he could do that, he could ask Mamie to the passing-out ball.

  He caught a glimpse of something glimmering in his right hand. He opened his palm. A St Christopher medal. He must have grabbed it during the fight.

  He slipped it into his pocket, and forgot about it.

  And that simple act would save quite a few lives.

  TWO

  Admiral Peter Tranter had several names, most of which he knew and approved of, and a few he didn't know and certainly wouldn't have enjoyed.

  To his peers, he was known as 'Bungo', though no one could really recall why. To the rank and file, he was known, predictably, as 'the Admiral' or 'the Old Man'. To his valet, Kevin, he was 'Himself' or, in the dark recesses of the R & R club, after a bout of intense bad humour and several gimlets, 'Skunk Foot' and 'Vinegar Drawers'. His mistress called him 'Bun-bun' to his face. Behind his back, she called him 'Cheese'.

  Right now, Vinegar Drawers was doing his best to destroy the pile on his absurdly luxurious carpet in his ridiculously large office, as he paced distractedly around his obscenely huge desk.

  He wasn't much of an admiral; just one-star job. He commanded the Space Corps Research and Development Program, which, despite its impressive title and its even more impressive budget, was the smallest base in the corps, and his post was generally regarded as the least demanding in the admiralty.

  Which was why, of course, he'd commandeered such an unfeasibly spacious office, ordered the disproportionately massive desk and padded around in his legendarily stinky footwear on a carpet so thick that golf balls could, and did, get lost in it.

  It was his way of bestowing rank upon himself.

  He'd been a high-flier, once. One of the youngest officers ever to achieve the command star. Then, inexplicably, the proud, purring engine of his career had phuttered and stopped. He'd received a series of increasingly obvious 'sideways' postings, until this one: the ultimate dead-end gig. There was no 'sideways' from RD. Only up or...

  ... out.

  He'd spent many long hours wondering about the why of it. He'd let it affect his work, his alcohol consumption, his personal hygiene and, worst of all, unless you were his valet, he'd let it affect his marriage.

  He tormented himself with increasingly paranoiac explanations. Was there some kind of plot among the faceless pen-pushers of Space Corps administration to keep the best men down and promote only fools and dickwits? Had it been something he'd said, offhand at some luncheon somewhere, which had so offended some superior that the only fitting revenge had been to keep Tranter in permanent lustreless mediocrity?

  He'd almost resigned himself to a doldrumatic career, where he never had to make a serious decision, contribute to policy planning, or achieve anything more significant or earth-shattering than shagging his mistress from the multitudinous angles offered by his overly humungous and otherwise redundant desk, when Project Wildfire came along.

  Project Wildfire. Bun-bun's ticket up and out of here.

  The problem with space-travel research was that humankind seemed to have reache
d the upper limits of its capabilities. The last significant advance in the field (demi-light speed drives) had been achieved before Bungo had been born. Of course, there were always minor improvements, tweaks to make engines more efficient, new formulae for cleaner, cheaper fuel. But nothing major. A few years back, Cheese had become quite excited about the prospects for Matter Transference devices, but after endless months of loading various rodents into the sending stations and scraping out gerbil molecular mulch from the remote receivers, even the most fervent advocates of MT had stopped bugging him for more budget.

  Project Wildfire was different.

  Project Wildfire was the code-name for a prototype craft that, theoretically, could break the big one.

  Could break the speed limit of the Universe.

  The light barrier.

  And it worked.

  Sort of.

  It promised new horizons for the human race. Virtually instantaneous travel. The exploration of hitherto unexplorable star systems. And, most magnificent of all, another pip for Admiral Skunk Foot.

  And now, just days before the inaugural test flight, disaster.

  The test ship had returned.

  It had returned approximately three days before it set off.

  Not a terrible result, if you chose to look at the up side: they now had two Wildfire ships for the price of one — no small beer, considering the cost of the damn thing — and, as a rather pleasant side-effect, they appeared to have devised some form of time travel. On the down side, however, there were clearly some flaws in the design, evidenced by the fact that the returning craft had been damaged beyond repair, and its pilot charred dead and almost unidentifiable.

  Almost.

  So this was Tranter's dilemma; this was why he paced with nervous fury around his prop-from-the-Land-of-the-Giants desk: did he call off the mission, and risk his one great shot at personal advancement, or did he send his best and most respected pilot to a certain and unspeakable death?

  Of course, he'd already made the decision, though he couldn't acknowledge it. What he was really agonizing over was his justification for it. Surely, since the craft had already returned, he was duty-bound to send it off. In fact, did he really have a decision to make? Wasn't it inevitable? Causality and all that. Didn't he owe it to History to embark on this, the next stage of humankind's technical evolution?

  Didn't he really, really, need that extra pip?

  THREE

  It was a curious feeling, no question, staring at the blackened remnants of your own grinning skull. Hard not to shudder, though Ace fought off the impulse.

  He peered into the sightless sockets of his charred doppelgänger, as if he expected some glimmer of recognition to flicker back at him from the dull dead darkness. The technical boys were off checking and re-checking the DNA profile, but Commander Rimmer didn't need any chemical verification. It was his skull, all right, tautened into the familiar obscene leer of a sudden heat death. There was the gold tooth, a trophy from the Academy boxing finals in his second year. There was the small nick to the right of his forehead, from the childhood game of Cowboys and Indians, when his brothers had cast him as General Custer while they played the Sioux nation, and Howard had got carried away and slung a real tomahawk at him.

  He tightened his mouth in a grim parody of a smile, and slid his gaze down to the flight suit, remarkably intact considering the temperatures it must have endured. Ace made a mental note to write to the manufacturers and commend them for their workmanship. He paused, momentarily, on the tortured metal of his badge of rank, and then tried, once again, to study the wrecked control panel, an exploding mess of wires and screens jutting out of the twisted fascia of the cockpit.

  There was something out of kilter here. Something that shouldn't have been. Something important.

  He called down to the shower of sparks spattering from under the scorched nose-cone, 'Spanners, old love?'

  The spark spray stopped, as the hot rasp of the oxyacetylene died. 'Yeah?'

  'You say you've checked out the dash?'

  'A dozen times, what's left of it.'

  'And it all seems tick tock?'

  'I dunno. There's something about it that bugs me.' The wheels on the trolley of his inspection board squealed against the hangar's rough tarmac as Lister slid out from under the craft and tugged up his welding mask. 'Can't put my finger on it.' He stared up into the glare of the skylight and studied the paradox of Commander Rimmer's silhouette inspecting itself. Lister's facial muscles yanked his lower lip a quarter of an inch higher. In hanger 101, good-quality smiles were in short supply this particular day. 'You're not going, you know.'

  'How's that, matey?' Ace prodded at the buckled temperature gauge, which was partially obscured by the melted mess of his St Christopher medallion.

  'Not unless we work out what went wrong.'

  'Don't you start going soft on me, Spanners. You heard what the Old Man said. This match kicks off at oh-six hundred in the a. m., and I'm the Centre Forward.'

  'I heard what he actually said was: "It's up to you. "'

  'That's the way a gentleman orders another gentleman on a suicide mission, Spanners. It's just good form.'

  'Good form? Good form? You're going to get barbecued up there, and you're talking like it's another topping adventure for the Famous Five?'

  Ace lowered his shades and hopped the fifteen feet down from the cockpit and landed on the tarmac with the easy grace of a pre-pubescent Russian gymnast. 'Look' — he took out a spotless handkerchief and wiped the sooty grime from his perfectly manicured fingers — 'come what may, I'm going to this party, Spanners. It's the chance of a lifetime.

  Every test jock dreams of getting just a single shot at cracking one away over the boundary: this is mine. And I wouldn't miss it for all the bouillabaisse in Provence.'

  Lister forked his hand through the thick wire brush of his regulation crop. 'I could stop you, you know.'

  Ace tilted his head, though his eyebrows stayed parallel with the ground. 'I don't think I quite caught that, old chum.'

  'It'd take about five seconds to do a number on the engine that'd put the schedule back months.

  'By God, the acoustics in here are dismal. Otherwise, I might have heard a dear friend of mine suggesting a Court Spatial offence like sabotage, and that would never do, now, would it?'

  'Listen to me. We all accept we're working on the cutting edge of technology, here, and that means there's always going to be a little bit of a risk. But this is different. This isn't a little bit of a risk, Ace. That's you up there, looking like the last spare rib in a Chinese takeaway on a Saturday night. It's you. And from what I could follow of what those tech guys were saying, there's nothing we can do about it. It's already happened. It's inevitable.'

  'I don't believe they're right, Spanners. Nothing's inevitable. No matter how bleak things seem, there's always a way through. That belief, that hope, that's the very thing about us that defines our humanity. I know I sound like a pompous nerd, and I'm sorry I can't be more fashionably cynical, but it's just not in my make-up pouch. Now, what do you say we put a lid on the chin-wagging, roll up our sleeves and comb every inch of this damned crate until we find out what went wrong, and put it right?'

  Lister cracked a warped grin and shrugged with his forehead. 'Your call, Ace. I'm just the grease monkey.'

  'Grease monkey? Ha!' Ace mirrored his grin and slapped him heftily on the back. 'You're the genius who builds the damn things, I'm just the airhead who wiggles the joystick.

  Now, d'you manage to dig the black box out, you old tartlet?'

  Lister handed him the recording device he'd torched out of the cone section. 'It was welded to the heat sink.' He glanced at the peeling metal of the hull. 'I hate to think what kind of temperatures this baby's been through.'

  'Well, maybe we'll find out from this.' Ace jemmied open the seal with an easy twist of the crowbar, while Lister dragged over the portable monitor and plugged in the leads.

  Th
ere was, it seemed to Lister, an unnecessary pause before Ace pressed the play button. Then he realized what the hesitation was about. The poor sod was steeling himself to watch his own death. 'Look, Commander,' he offered. 'Shouldn't we get this off to Tech? They're pretty keen to -'

  'All in good time, Spanners. We've got to see this for ourselves. 'And his elegantly cuticled fingernail flicked 'play'.

  At first the screen displayed the computer read-out of the standard pre-flight instrument checks. Lister scanned the data. Everything seemed discouragingly normal.

  Ace craned closer to the screen. 'Display's a bit dim, isn't it, old sausage?'

  'It might seem a bit less dim,' Lister said, 'if you took off your smegging shades.'

  Ace smiled apologetically. 'Like the preacher says: all is vanity.' And he raised his sunglasses. Lister met his gaze. Commander Rimmer was sporting a black eye. A real shineroonie. A classic. Every tint of purple and blue rippled out from the epicentre of his bloodshot eye towards his cheekbone. Ace's expression said 'Don't ask', so Lister didn't. So it was true. He'd heard it, but he hadn't believed it. Commander Ace Rimmer had been given a tonking by Billy-Joe Epstein. How was that possible?

  Ace tossed his head gently, so the soft wave of his fringe hung over the offending feature, and they both turned their attention back to the screen.

  It was a short recording — the entire trip, launch to blaze, had taken less than fifteen minutes — and when it was over, they still could find no clues as to what had happened, or, unthinkably, what was destined to happen, and how they might go about preventing it.

  There was a clue, though.

  In fact, there were three clues, staring out at them from the screen in every single frame of the recording.

  FOUR

  The contents of Listers stomach lolloped queasily as he sipped at his seventh or eighth mug of disgusting coffee. He glanced at his watch without taking in the read-out. It was night, it was dark, over the quadrangle there was a warm woman asleep in his bed, with a dent in the mattress beside her which he should have been occupying, and that was all he needed to know about the time. He tried to focus once again on the looped recording he'd made of the black-box tape. The original had been commandeered, and was now being pored over by the overpaid research staff in their air-conditioned lab, with a plentiful supply of hot snacks and good fresh coffee to hand, while Lister shivered in the fume-laden yawn of hanger 101, wondering whether to spend the last of his loose change on an oxymoronically named Tastee Noodle Pot from the dispensing machine, or save it for a final mug of the foul coffee.