RD fic: "Machine in the Ghost" 2/8 (R)
“Machine in the Ghost”
Rated: R for language, slashy sexytimes, talk of torture
Chars: Lister/Rimmer, Kochanski, Cat, Kryten, Hol, original characters
Disclaimer: Property of Grant Naylor. I don't get to keep these characters, I just get to take them home for the night on occasion.
Summary: The crew gets more than they bargain for when they find a derelict in deep space. Can be read as a standalone, or as the continuation of Urgent, which itself juts out of a short earlier series I wrote. (In other words, do what you want, LOL.)
Spoilers: The entire TV series, some borrowed elements from the novels.
Part 1 can be found back here.
When last we left our heroes ...
A scream, both unearthly and unjupiterly, ricocheted shrilly through the cargo bay, making both men grab at one another in reflex. “What the SMEG was that?” Rimmer screeched.
“Ow - ow, man, let go.” The words were muffled into the side of Rimmer’s neck. “Seriously; too hard. Squeezing. ARN. CRUSHING.” It came out sounding more like, “Srshy arf. Eesing. RRR. RUSHMFF.” Lister managed to pry himself away from the hologram’s stronger grip, but kept his hands on him - the noise had unnerved him, as well. “Where’d it come from?”
“How the devil should I know?” Lister gave him a look, and Rimmer cleared the whine out of his throat, yanking his inner Ace to the fore. “We’ll go find out,” he amended, pulling his trousers up and his shirt down.
For some reason, the corridors were darker than they remembered, which was a feat, considering they’d walked these hallways less than ninety minutes earlier. “Holly?” Lister called out around them; he didn’t see any monitors along where they were, but even the disembodied East London accent over a speaker would be welcome if the computer consciousness had managed to work his way through the ship’s comm system by now.
Up front, Rimmer pointed around a small palm-light that he’d unclipped from the wide nylon utility belt he’d refastened around his hips. He heard Lister call to Holly a second time, and stopped only long enough to reach back absently with a touch for his attention. “Shhh,” he advised, trying to extend his normal hearing range around them.
“You hear something?” Lister stage-whispered. Rimmer nodded. “What?”
“YOU!” he hissed over his shoulder, then dropped his voice. “Let me concentrate.” All he could hear were the normal groans inside any old structure - mild settling creaks, a steady drip of water, the scritch of his own fingernails nervously working the grain of his velour trousers, the brush-and-squeak of Lister’s nearly new leather jacket as he moved sideways behind Rimmer in order to keep an eye on their backs-
Wait - running water? Neither he nor Kryten had turned on any faucets. “Did you or the moggy fiddle with any sinks or toilets, or showers on your walk-through?” he asked Lister, quietly.
“Don’t think so. Cat licked his hands a few times to pat down his hair, but I don’t remember any water.” Lister frowned. “You hear running water? But the tanks would be empty.”
“Yes, I know.” Rimmer patiently gritted his teeth, then relaxed. He didn’t need to show off anymore, and Lister had been figuring things out as well or better than he did for many years. “Unless there was someone-”
“-else aboard not that long ago, besides us,” Lister finished. “Holy smeg. And maybe it’s still on here, with us. Maybe we should head back and get a couple of rifles.” What Rimmer’s ship lacked in habitable space, it made up in a sizable boot filled with an impressive array of artillery.
“Let’s just go see where it’s coming from right now,” Rimmer suggested, moving forward quietly; he had a small gun hidden if needed. Besides, he’d searched scores of abandoned vessels alone, trained for combat and taken on far bigger opponents - even so, having Lister at his back made him feel safer. “Could be our booting up the computer caused some sort of maintenance reaction, making a pipe leak.”
They were largely silent as they moved along one wall, then down another corridor and along that wall. The dripping grew louder, until even Lister murmured, “Yeah, I hear it now.” Rimmer stopped outside a door and bounced the light across it - a boring gunmetal gray decorated only with the universal stick-person man/woman symbols. “Looks like a loo.”
The door gave easily enough, and Rimmer stepped in, spotting the faucet responsible for the noise before sticking his head in each of two stalls. “All clear,” he told Lister, who was moving into the small room. “Wait, don’t let the door-” He was cut off by the echoing SLAM! of the heavy metal door. “Shut.”
“What? We got in okay,” Lister pointed out. “What twonk’d install a loo door on a ship that can’t be unlocked from the inside?” He shook his head and twisted both knobs to see which would shut off the sink, but since they went the opposite direction of what he expected, the spigot spat out a full-blast stream of cold water. Cursing, he twisted the knobs the other way, or tried to; they seemed stuck.
He was trying for the third time when Rimmer came over. “Nice job, Listy!” he was saying loudly, over the water, which was apparently taxing the ancient pipes, judging by all the banging and squeaking going on. Echoes banged around the tiny room like tap dancers on speed. “Tear up the bathroom! It’s like blowing out the front tires before you even haggle over the price of the car!”
“Just turn it off!” Rimmer attempted to do just this, to no avail. “Quit screwin’ around!” Lister gestured at the water now overflowing the small basin.
“I’m not ‘screwing,’ you git; you should know what that look like! It won’t shut off!” He twisted harder, and Lister reached for the backs of his hands to stop him, shaking his head. “What’re you doing? I’ve almost got it-” Rimmer put some superhuman strength into his fingers, and both knobs abruptly broke off, one cracking in half. “Well, shit.”
He was still frowning thunderously at them when Lister smacked his arm and pointed at the ceiling over the sinks. “Give me a boost up there! I might be able to turn off the pipes!”
“With what?” Rimmer watched Lister pat himself down for tools, and shook his head as he tossed aside the useless knobs. “Unless you remembered to stash a wrench in your shorts, we’re going to have to get out of here and find one first!”
The door, however, appeared to suffer from the same malady that had afflicted the sink knobs. Neither was able to turn the knob, which appeared to be locked. “You want to run your theory by me again about interior doorknobs?” Rimmer yelled, though he managed to sound calmer than Lister about it.
“This doesn’t make any sense!” Lister argued, shaking his head as he uselessly twisted the knob - which didn’t even have a lock button on it, or a keyhole. “Something’s wrong, Rimmer!”
“Yes - you!”
“Go soak your smeggin’ head! You know I’m right!”
“You first!” When Lister turned, his boots splashed up some water; he followed Rimmer’s hand gestures down to see a small pool already forming on the floor. The door didn’t show a gap at the bottom, instead tacked with a thin rubber strip down there. Rimmer looked around them, a curious expression on his pointed features. “Does it strike you this little sink sure puts out a hell of a lot of water?” he called over the gurgling of the spitting faucet - which, incredibly, seemed to have gotten louder since the knobs broke off.
Lister looked again to the ceiling; it had access panels, but who knew what kind of room there really was up there? He remembered crawling around Starbug’s duct work, and swallowed, rethinking his earlier plan. Nothing else for it, though. “I think that’s our only way out!” he pointed upward.
If Lister looked as green as he felt, Rimmer apparently didn’t notice. The hologram put his head back to look around, circling slowly, then went into a stall and climbed up on the toilet. He balanced a booted foot on the pipe above the back of it, gave it a little bouncing test a few times, and threw an arm toward the ceiling - after the third try, he knocked the grated panel up with the heel of his hand; a few more tries, and he managed to push it aside. Hooking both hands around the crossbars on which the grating had rested, Rimmer gripped it and swung his foot up onto the partition between stalls. In a feat of limber strength, the man levered himself with his foot at the same time he pulled on the crossbeams, until he was precariously perched lengthways on his back atop the slender metal partition, which rocked a little with the weight. What’s he balanced on, his smegging spine? Lister wondered. He splashed into the stall, the water now above his ankles, and reached up to put his hands on Rimmer’s closest thigh and side. “You’re gonna fall off of there!” he called over the pipes, now groaning the more water they pumped out.
Ignoring him, Rimmer extended his arms up into the open ceiling, apparently found something to grab, and pulled his torso up while sliding carefully back along the top of the partition, putting one foot flat to balance himself as he let the other fall off. He sat up, balanced in a seated position on the metal wall now, and made quick work of climbing the rest of the way into the ceiling from here. A couple of minutes after his legs had disappeared, he stuck his head back down through. “Get up here!” he called, extending a hand.
Lister climbed up on the toilet, trying not to lose his footing, and stretched hard to get his fingers around the metal crossbeams. He pulled hard, lifting himself a little, and he felt the hand on his back, scrabbling. Eventually, those long fingers found the back of his trousers and seized, pulling. Between the two of them, he managed to finally crawl into the ceiling, grabbing at bits of Rimmer’s clothing along his back to pull his way along, and finally collapsed mostly on top of the man, his cheek against the back of a soft-clad knee. Lister rubbed his face on the cloth experimentally for comfort before rolling carefully onto his side and waiting for Rimmer to roll to his back and sit up. It wasn’t tall in the duct tunnel, and the hologram hit his head as he did so. “Ouch,” he muttered, rubbing the spot briefly. “Better be finding those pipes.”
He pulled the grate back into place, checked it for weight-bearing, and turned toward the sink wall. Rimmer began crawling toward it until he realized he was alone. “What’re you doing back there? C’mon, I know smeg-all about plumbing. You’re the handyman.” He glared impatiently. “Lister-”
“Give me a minute.” He was trying to remember how to breathe; the walls of the tiny space were closing around him, he could swear it, intent on vacuum-sealing him like a bag of Ziplocked chops.
“Every minute you wait, the tank loses more- Really, Lister, what’re you playing at?” Rimmer turned all six-something feet of himself around and scuttled back; Lister could make out his eyes as he got closer, so he knew the guy could see him, too. “Dave?” he asked, less imperious and more worried. “What’s wrong?”
“I - small spaces.” He shook his head. “I said, give me a minute.”
He felt a hand reach for both of his, occupied each gripping a forearm across his chest. Rimmer pulled one away and squeezed it. “You’re claustrophobic.” This was said soothingly. “Come on, Dave - come over here to me. It isn’t that far. We’ll get you there, and then out of here as soon as we can.” He tugged at Lister’s hand. “You’re braver than this, I know. It’s just a duct - nothing to be scared of. I wouldn’t be up here with you if it was scary, would I? I’d be halfway to the Crab Nebula by now.” Lister chuckled nervously. “Dave …”
Taking a deep breath, Lister nodded and gestured for Rimmer to go ahead, then followed, grateful for the leather and denim he wore on his palms and knees.
Neither had been keeping time, so they didn’t know how much later it was when they finally pushed out a vent panel into what turned out to be a somewhat spacious crew quarters. Rimmer went through first, reaching for a metal overhead beam as Lister held his legs to keep him from falling - he twisted his body, pulled himself out backwards, and dropped into a graceful crouch on the floor. The rafter was a bit high for Lister to do the same, plus he had nobody to hold his feet while he stretched; he looked down at the smooth wall below him, sighing. “Where’s a towel rack when you need to do a fancy Olympic flip?”
They ended up simply having Rimmer grab at him as he slithered out head-first, and it mostly worked - that is, they both ended up on the floor, but Lister’s landing was largely cushioned. Rimmer winced, sitting up slowly as Lister leaned back on his haunches. “Glad you lost some weight,” the hologram muttered, rubbing his lower back, “or that might’ve HURT.”
Lister ignored his bitching; Rimmer’s bee was more or less indestructible, which meant even a fat Scouser would’ve been hard pressed to so much as dent it. “Those pipes were awfully easy to turn off,” he observed as he got up. “Considering we didn’t have a wrench or pliers.” He offered Rimmer a hand up. “But why would the computer have been messing with those pipes? Or anyone else who might’ve been here?”
Rimmer shrugged. “One way to find out.” He looked around for the monitor, then crossed the room to it. “Holly?” he said to it; when the face didn’t appear, he called sharper, “HOLLY!” Still nothing. “He should’ve really been able to find a comm channel by now,” Rimmer said.
Lister shrugged out of his sodden coat and mopped his forehead with his shirt sleeve; normally a little chilly aboard ship, he was roasting and soaking from being packed into such a tight space high up. He checked the closet, yanked out a few trousers to hold them up for examination, and put all but a couple back before heading for what looked like the washroom. “I smell like a damn goat,” he told Rimmer. “Quick shower.”
“Two in one day?” The man’s eyebrows shot up along his mile-high forehead. “My God in heaven.” Lister gave him the middle finger; the last thing he heard as he shut the bathroom door was, “I’m going to hold you to that promise, Lister.”
*****
It wasn’t until he was slipping into REM sleep a little over an hour later that Lister realized they never had found the source of the scream.
*****
A scratching sound woke Lister in the wee hours of the morning; at least he figured it was, since the mood light denoting the time of day in the nearly-black room was still a dirty indigo, edging very slightly toward a dirty orange sunrise. It stopped once his eyes were open; he yawned and tried to go back to sleep, his head still tucked under the side of Rimmer’s chin. But a few minutes later, it started up again. He held his breath, keeping his eyes closed; it sounded larger and more rhythmic than a rat or similar small creature might produce.
He didn’t realize the body beneath him had gone still, too, until he heard a hushed, “Sounds almost like a person doing that.”
“Uh huh,” Lister agreed, straining his ears to try to pick out the source. “Like it’s on wallpaper, not metal or drywall.”
They listened for a couple of more minutes; Lister felt himself drifting off again and let his eyes close, too warm and comfortable to care about solving this mystery right now. That changed abruptly as someone who was neither of them very deliberately and loudly
CLEARED
THEIR
THROAT.
Both men were up faster than a politician’s ratings once her opponent is caught with underage hookers. “Lights!” Rimmer barked; they blinked at one another in the sudden brightness, then around the bedroom.
It occurred to Lister that automatic lights needed an instigator, since Rimmer had had to turn them off manually just a few hours earlier. “Holly!” he called out. A few seconds later, he was rewarded by the hologram’s familiar visage filling the screen on the opposite wall. “Good to see you, man. Who the hell was that?”
Holly regarded them both and pointedly looked up and off to the side. “Good to see parts of you, Dave. Arn.” Lister looked down and realized the sheet had been tossed down to mid-thighs when they sat up. He rolled his eyes as Rimmer yanked it up, and cleared his own throat to get Holly’s attention. The hologrammatic head regarded the pair again and nodded. “How’s it going, dudes?”
“Not so good, actually. Who else is on the ship besides us? Did Kris and the guys get back sometime during the night? Already?”
“Nope. It’s just you two, so far as I know.”
“So far as you know?” Rimmer harrumphed, trying to look officious while blushing and fiddling with the sheet to disguise his morning erection. “What a fabulous security system you are, Hol.”
“If that were my job or this was my ship, I’d be offended, I would.”
The room got quiet, and Lister glanced between the offended-looking monitor and Rimmer still playing Stash The Sausage, before literally throwing up his hands. “Holly, what the bleedin’ SMEG was that clearing its throat awhile ago in here? It wasn’t a rat, and no dog or cat I know sounds like that. Well, not more than one cat.”
“The system isn’t showing any life signs aboard other than the two of you, I’m telling you,” Holly insisted.
“There’s nothing else living at all? Nobody in stasis, even?” Rimmer wondered.
“Negative.”
The two men glanced at each other, shaking their heads. “Unless we both managed to experience the very same hallucination at the very same time in the same manner, Holly, the thought occurs there must be an actual producer of those sounds on board this ship,” Rimmer enunciated with painful patience.
“What sounds?” Lister described them, and Holly furrowed his brow. “You two didn’t leave on a video last night, did you?” They shook their heads. “Right, then. Well, this demands a bit of investigation. I’ll see what I can track down.” And he vanished from the screen.
Lister rubbed at his face as Rimmer fell back against his pillow with a soft sigh. “Something’s out there,” he said, unnecessarily.
To his credit, Rimmer didn’t wiseass back at him. “We need to go check it out,” he said after a long pause, tossing the sheet aside and sitting up on his side of the bed.
“No, I think we should- Really?” Lister looked over in surprise. He still hadn’t gotten used to this particular Ace in action, since he anticipated Rimmer would want to do his usual impression of a dust bunny in the face of potential danger and roll under something. To be fair, there hadn’t been any opportunities in the last six months for Rimmer to prove his mettle in these sorts of situations, other than trying to track down that scream. “You think so?”
Rimmer finished yawning, nodding, and fixed him with sleep-bleary eyes as he rubbed at his stubbly chin. Naked, he padded to the same small closet Lister had raided earlier and pawed briefly through the vacuum-sealed contents before finding something suitable. He came by the bed and tossed the clothes on it, pointed his gaze deliberately at Lister’s own half-erection, and met his eye with a saucy wink and tongue peeking out between his teeth before strolling off suggestively into the bathroom. Lister hesitated, thought of the rest of their group likely returning in a couple of days and crowding around them once again, and rolled his eyes.
“Smeg,” he groused disingenuously two minutes later, schlepping into the already-steaming shower.
Another forty-eight soapy, mind-blowing minutes later, they were dressed, mostly dry, and in a far better combined mood. “We need to swing by the ship for some more firepower,” Rimmer noted. “I only carry a little on me, and you don’t have anything, do you?”
“Not even a colon full of curry today.”
“And thank the gods for that,” Rimmer mused. “Let’s go.”
Part 3
Rated: R for language, slashy sexytimes, talk of torture
Chars: Lister/Rimmer, Kochanski, Cat, Kryten, Hol, original characters
Disclaimer: Property of Grant Naylor. I don't get to keep these characters, I just get to take them home for the night on occasion.
Summary: The crew gets more than they bargain for when they find a derelict in deep space. Can be read as a standalone, or as the continuation of Urgent, which itself juts out of a short earlier series I wrote. (In other words, do what you want, LOL.)
Spoilers: The entire TV series, some borrowed elements from the novels.
Part 1 can be found back here.
When last we left our heroes ...
A scream, both unearthly and unjupiterly, ricocheted shrilly through the cargo bay, making both men grab at one another in reflex. “What the SMEG was that?” Rimmer screeched.
“Ow - ow, man, let go.” The words were muffled into the side of Rimmer’s neck. “Seriously; too hard. Squeezing. ARN. CRUSHING.” It came out sounding more like, “Srshy arf. Eesing. RRR. RUSHMFF.” Lister managed to pry himself away from the hologram’s stronger grip, but kept his hands on him - the noise had unnerved him, as well. “Where’d it come from?”
“How the devil should I know?” Lister gave him a look, and Rimmer cleared the whine out of his throat, yanking his inner Ace to the fore. “We’ll go find out,” he amended, pulling his trousers up and his shirt down.
For some reason, the corridors were darker than they remembered, which was a feat, considering they’d walked these hallways less than ninety minutes earlier. “Holly?” Lister called out around them; he didn’t see any monitors along where they were, but even the disembodied East London accent over a speaker would be welcome if the computer consciousness had managed to work his way through the ship’s comm system by now.
Up front, Rimmer pointed around a small palm-light that he’d unclipped from the wide nylon utility belt he’d refastened around his hips. He heard Lister call to Holly a second time, and stopped only long enough to reach back absently with a touch for his attention. “Shhh,” he advised, trying to extend his normal hearing range around them.
“You hear something?” Lister stage-whispered. Rimmer nodded. “What?”
“YOU!” he hissed over his shoulder, then dropped his voice. “Let me concentrate.” All he could hear were the normal groans inside any old structure - mild settling creaks, a steady drip of water, the scritch of his own fingernails nervously working the grain of his velour trousers, the brush-and-squeak of Lister’s nearly new leather jacket as he moved sideways behind Rimmer in order to keep an eye on their backs-
Wait - running water? Neither he nor Kryten had turned on any faucets. “Did you or the moggy fiddle with any sinks or toilets, or showers on your walk-through?” he asked Lister, quietly.
“Don’t think so. Cat licked his hands a few times to pat down his hair, but I don’t remember any water.” Lister frowned. “You hear running water? But the tanks would be empty.”
“Yes, I know.” Rimmer patiently gritted his teeth, then relaxed. He didn’t need to show off anymore, and Lister had been figuring things out as well or better than he did for many years. “Unless there was someone-”
“-else aboard not that long ago, besides us,” Lister finished. “Holy smeg. And maybe it’s still on here, with us. Maybe we should head back and get a couple of rifles.” What Rimmer’s ship lacked in habitable space, it made up in a sizable boot filled with an impressive array of artillery.
“Let’s just go see where it’s coming from right now,” Rimmer suggested, moving forward quietly; he had a small gun hidden if needed. Besides, he’d searched scores of abandoned vessels alone, trained for combat and taken on far bigger opponents - even so, having Lister at his back made him feel safer. “Could be our booting up the computer caused some sort of maintenance reaction, making a pipe leak.”
They were largely silent as they moved along one wall, then down another corridor and along that wall. The dripping grew louder, until even Lister murmured, “Yeah, I hear it now.” Rimmer stopped outside a door and bounced the light across it - a boring gunmetal gray decorated only with the universal stick-person man/woman symbols. “Looks like a loo.”
The door gave easily enough, and Rimmer stepped in, spotting the faucet responsible for the noise before sticking his head in each of two stalls. “All clear,” he told Lister, who was moving into the small room. “Wait, don’t let the door-” He was cut off by the echoing SLAM! of the heavy metal door. “Shut.”
“What? We got in okay,” Lister pointed out. “What twonk’d install a loo door on a ship that can’t be unlocked from the inside?” He shook his head and twisted both knobs to see which would shut off the sink, but since they went the opposite direction of what he expected, the spigot spat out a full-blast stream of cold water. Cursing, he twisted the knobs the other way, or tried to; they seemed stuck.
He was trying for the third time when Rimmer came over. “Nice job, Listy!” he was saying loudly, over the water, which was apparently taxing the ancient pipes, judging by all the banging and squeaking going on. Echoes banged around the tiny room like tap dancers on speed. “Tear up the bathroom! It’s like blowing out the front tires before you even haggle over the price of the car!”
“Just turn it off!” Rimmer attempted to do just this, to no avail. “Quit screwin’ around!” Lister gestured at the water now overflowing the small basin.
“I’m not ‘screwing,’ you git; you should know what that look like! It won’t shut off!” He twisted harder, and Lister reached for the backs of his hands to stop him, shaking his head. “What’re you doing? I’ve almost got it-” Rimmer put some superhuman strength into his fingers, and both knobs abruptly broke off, one cracking in half. “Well, shit.”
He was still frowning thunderously at them when Lister smacked his arm and pointed at the ceiling over the sinks. “Give me a boost up there! I might be able to turn off the pipes!”
“With what?” Rimmer watched Lister pat himself down for tools, and shook his head as he tossed aside the useless knobs. “Unless you remembered to stash a wrench in your shorts, we’re going to have to get out of here and find one first!”
The door, however, appeared to suffer from the same malady that had afflicted the sink knobs. Neither was able to turn the knob, which appeared to be locked. “You want to run your theory by me again about interior doorknobs?” Rimmer yelled, though he managed to sound calmer than Lister about it.
“This doesn’t make any sense!” Lister argued, shaking his head as he uselessly twisted the knob - which didn’t even have a lock button on it, or a keyhole. “Something’s wrong, Rimmer!”
“Yes - you!”
“Go soak your smeggin’ head! You know I’m right!”
“You first!” When Lister turned, his boots splashed up some water; he followed Rimmer’s hand gestures down to see a small pool already forming on the floor. The door didn’t show a gap at the bottom, instead tacked with a thin rubber strip down there. Rimmer looked around them, a curious expression on his pointed features. “Does it strike you this little sink sure puts out a hell of a lot of water?” he called over the gurgling of the spitting faucet - which, incredibly, seemed to have gotten louder since the knobs broke off.
Lister looked again to the ceiling; it had access panels, but who knew what kind of room there really was up there? He remembered crawling around Starbug’s duct work, and swallowed, rethinking his earlier plan. Nothing else for it, though. “I think that’s our only way out!” he pointed upward.
If Lister looked as green as he felt, Rimmer apparently didn’t notice. The hologram put his head back to look around, circling slowly, then went into a stall and climbed up on the toilet. He balanced a booted foot on the pipe above the back of it, gave it a little bouncing test a few times, and threw an arm toward the ceiling - after the third try, he knocked the grated panel up with the heel of his hand; a few more tries, and he managed to push it aside. Hooking both hands around the crossbars on which the grating had rested, Rimmer gripped it and swung his foot up onto the partition between stalls. In a feat of limber strength, the man levered himself with his foot at the same time he pulled on the crossbeams, until he was precariously perched lengthways on his back atop the slender metal partition, which rocked a little with the weight. What’s he balanced on, his smegging spine? Lister wondered. He splashed into the stall, the water now above his ankles, and reached up to put his hands on Rimmer’s closest thigh and side. “You’re gonna fall off of there!” he called over the pipes, now groaning the more water they pumped out.
Ignoring him, Rimmer extended his arms up into the open ceiling, apparently found something to grab, and pulled his torso up while sliding carefully back along the top of the partition, putting one foot flat to balance himself as he let the other fall off. He sat up, balanced in a seated position on the metal wall now, and made quick work of climbing the rest of the way into the ceiling from here. A couple of minutes after his legs had disappeared, he stuck his head back down through. “Get up here!” he called, extending a hand.
Lister climbed up on the toilet, trying not to lose his footing, and stretched hard to get his fingers around the metal crossbeams. He pulled hard, lifting himself a little, and he felt the hand on his back, scrabbling. Eventually, those long fingers found the back of his trousers and seized, pulling. Between the two of them, he managed to finally crawl into the ceiling, grabbing at bits of Rimmer’s clothing along his back to pull his way along, and finally collapsed mostly on top of the man, his cheek against the back of a soft-clad knee. Lister rubbed his face on the cloth experimentally for comfort before rolling carefully onto his side and waiting for Rimmer to roll to his back and sit up. It wasn’t tall in the duct tunnel, and the hologram hit his head as he did so. “Ouch,” he muttered, rubbing the spot briefly. “Better be finding those pipes.”
He pulled the grate back into place, checked it for weight-bearing, and turned toward the sink wall. Rimmer began crawling toward it until he realized he was alone. “What’re you doing back there? C’mon, I know smeg-all about plumbing. You’re the handyman.” He glared impatiently. “Lister-”
“Give me a minute.” He was trying to remember how to breathe; the walls of the tiny space were closing around him, he could swear it, intent on vacuum-sealing him like a bag of Ziplocked chops.
“Every minute you wait, the tank loses more- Really, Lister, what’re you playing at?” Rimmer turned all six-something feet of himself around and scuttled back; Lister could make out his eyes as he got closer, so he knew the guy could see him, too. “Dave?” he asked, less imperious and more worried. “What’s wrong?”
“I - small spaces.” He shook his head. “I said, give me a minute.”
He felt a hand reach for both of his, occupied each gripping a forearm across his chest. Rimmer pulled one away and squeezed it. “You’re claustrophobic.” This was said soothingly. “Come on, Dave - come over here to me. It isn’t that far. We’ll get you there, and then out of here as soon as we can.” He tugged at Lister’s hand. “You’re braver than this, I know. It’s just a duct - nothing to be scared of. I wouldn’t be up here with you if it was scary, would I? I’d be halfway to the Crab Nebula by now.” Lister chuckled nervously. “Dave …”
Taking a deep breath, Lister nodded and gestured for Rimmer to go ahead, then followed, grateful for the leather and denim he wore on his palms and knees.
Neither had been keeping time, so they didn’t know how much later it was when they finally pushed out a vent panel into what turned out to be a somewhat spacious crew quarters. Rimmer went through first, reaching for a metal overhead beam as Lister held his legs to keep him from falling - he twisted his body, pulled himself out backwards, and dropped into a graceful crouch on the floor. The rafter was a bit high for Lister to do the same, plus he had nobody to hold his feet while he stretched; he looked down at the smooth wall below him, sighing. “Where’s a towel rack when you need to do a fancy Olympic flip?”
They ended up simply having Rimmer grab at him as he slithered out head-first, and it mostly worked - that is, they both ended up on the floor, but Lister’s landing was largely cushioned. Rimmer winced, sitting up slowly as Lister leaned back on his haunches. “Glad you lost some weight,” the hologram muttered, rubbing his lower back, “or that might’ve HURT.”
Lister ignored his bitching; Rimmer’s bee was more or less indestructible, which meant even a fat Scouser would’ve been hard pressed to so much as dent it. “Those pipes were awfully easy to turn off,” he observed as he got up. “Considering we didn’t have a wrench or pliers.” He offered Rimmer a hand up. “But why would the computer have been messing with those pipes? Or anyone else who might’ve been here?”
Rimmer shrugged. “One way to find out.” He looked around for the monitor, then crossed the room to it. “Holly?” he said to it; when the face didn’t appear, he called sharper, “HOLLY!” Still nothing. “He should’ve really been able to find a comm channel by now,” Rimmer said.
Lister shrugged out of his sodden coat and mopped his forehead with his shirt sleeve; normally a little chilly aboard ship, he was roasting and soaking from being packed into such a tight space high up. He checked the closet, yanked out a few trousers to hold them up for examination, and put all but a couple back before heading for what looked like the washroom. “I smell like a damn goat,” he told Rimmer. “Quick shower.”
“Two in one day?” The man’s eyebrows shot up along his mile-high forehead. “My God in heaven.” Lister gave him the middle finger; the last thing he heard as he shut the bathroom door was, “I’m going to hold you to that promise, Lister.”
*****
It wasn’t until he was slipping into REM sleep a little over an hour later that Lister realized they never had found the source of the scream.
*****
A scratching sound woke Lister in the wee hours of the morning; at least he figured it was, since the mood light denoting the time of day in the nearly-black room was still a dirty indigo, edging very slightly toward a dirty orange sunrise. It stopped once his eyes were open; he yawned and tried to go back to sleep, his head still tucked under the side of Rimmer’s chin. But a few minutes later, it started up again. He held his breath, keeping his eyes closed; it sounded larger and more rhythmic than a rat or similar small creature might produce.
He didn’t realize the body beneath him had gone still, too, until he heard a hushed, “Sounds almost like a person doing that.”
“Uh huh,” Lister agreed, straining his ears to try to pick out the source. “Like it’s on wallpaper, not metal or drywall.”
They listened for a couple of more minutes; Lister felt himself drifting off again and let his eyes close, too warm and comfortable to care about solving this mystery right now. That changed abruptly as someone who was neither of them very deliberately and loudly
CLEARED
THEIR
THROAT.
Both men were up faster than a politician’s ratings once her opponent is caught with underage hookers. “Lights!” Rimmer barked; they blinked at one another in the sudden brightness, then around the bedroom.
It occurred to Lister that automatic lights needed an instigator, since Rimmer had had to turn them off manually just a few hours earlier. “Holly!” he called out. A few seconds later, he was rewarded by the hologram’s familiar visage filling the screen on the opposite wall. “Good to see you, man. Who the hell was that?”
Holly regarded them both and pointedly looked up and off to the side. “Good to see parts of you, Dave. Arn.” Lister looked down and realized the sheet had been tossed down to mid-thighs when they sat up. He rolled his eyes as Rimmer yanked it up, and cleared his own throat to get Holly’s attention. The hologrammatic head regarded the pair again and nodded. “How’s it going, dudes?”
“Not so good, actually. Who else is on the ship besides us? Did Kris and the guys get back sometime during the night? Already?”
“Nope. It’s just you two, so far as I know.”
“So far as you know?” Rimmer harrumphed, trying to look officious while blushing and fiddling with the sheet to disguise his morning erection. “What a fabulous security system you are, Hol.”
“If that were my job or this was my ship, I’d be offended, I would.”
The room got quiet, and Lister glanced between the offended-looking monitor and Rimmer still playing Stash The Sausage, before literally throwing up his hands. “Holly, what the bleedin’ SMEG was that clearing its throat awhile ago in here? It wasn’t a rat, and no dog or cat I know sounds like that. Well, not more than one cat.”
“The system isn’t showing any life signs aboard other than the two of you, I’m telling you,” Holly insisted.
“There’s nothing else living at all? Nobody in stasis, even?” Rimmer wondered.
“Negative.”
The two men glanced at each other, shaking their heads. “Unless we both managed to experience the very same hallucination at the very same time in the same manner, Holly, the thought occurs there must be an actual producer of those sounds on board this ship,” Rimmer enunciated with painful patience.
“What sounds?” Lister described them, and Holly furrowed his brow. “You two didn’t leave on a video last night, did you?” They shook their heads. “Right, then. Well, this demands a bit of investigation. I’ll see what I can track down.” And he vanished from the screen.
Lister rubbed at his face as Rimmer fell back against his pillow with a soft sigh. “Something’s out there,” he said, unnecessarily.
To his credit, Rimmer didn’t wiseass back at him. “We need to go check it out,” he said after a long pause, tossing the sheet aside and sitting up on his side of the bed.
“No, I think we should- Really?” Lister looked over in surprise. He still hadn’t gotten used to this particular Ace in action, since he anticipated Rimmer would want to do his usual impression of a dust bunny in the face of potential danger and roll under something. To be fair, there hadn’t been any opportunities in the last six months for Rimmer to prove his mettle in these sorts of situations, other than trying to track down that scream. “You think so?”
Rimmer finished yawning, nodding, and fixed him with sleep-bleary eyes as he rubbed at his stubbly chin. Naked, he padded to the same small closet Lister had raided earlier and pawed briefly through the vacuum-sealed contents before finding something suitable. He came by the bed and tossed the clothes on it, pointed his gaze deliberately at Lister’s own half-erection, and met his eye with a saucy wink and tongue peeking out between his teeth before strolling off suggestively into the bathroom. Lister hesitated, thought of the rest of their group likely returning in a couple of days and crowding around them once again, and rolled his eyes.
“Smeg,” he groused disingenuously two minutes later, schlepping into the already-steaming shower.
Another forty-eight soapy, mind-blowing minutes later, they were dressed, mostly dry, and in a far better combined mood. “We need to swing by the ship for some more firepower,” Rimmer noted. “I only carry a little on me, and you don’t have anything, do you?”
“Not even a colon full of curry today.”
“And thank the gods for that,” Rimmer mused. “Let’s go.”
Part 3