Chapter Text
Maybe Lister was just getting soft in his middle age, but these days he found he far preferred the long stretches of nothing aboard Red Dwarf - telly, curries, winding up Rimmer, endless games of Risk and Planet Catan and Mineopoly - to the occasional mortal peril they’d find themselves in.
First there was that unspeakable business with the three black holes, and then the swarm of GELFs that had breached the rouge one’s exterior wall and scoffed their way through a solid half of the food supplies, and now this. Smeg it, he’d take losing at Mineopoly any day.
A rogue Simulant (it always was, wasn’t it?) had snuck into the breached ship before their rather pathetic repair attempts could secure it. It had been hiding out aboard for quite some time and was in bad shape, but Kryten had insisted they all leave the ship to be safe while he dealt with it androido a androido.
Cat had simply slunk off to one of his many hiding spots. Rimmer, ever the Queen of Panic, had insisted they take Starbug and get the hell out of Dodge. And so, they did.
From Kryten’s newest message, they were seemingly in the clear, so they were just circling back to head for Red Dwarf when something ahead of them caught Lister’s interest. A shipwreck, relatively intact.
“The Echo 12. It’s an old supply vessel,” Rimmer surmised from the scanner. “Seemed to have been transporting products between deep space ships. Food, parts, that sort of thing. That was millennia ago, though. Seems like it’s been embedded in that S2 planetoid for a while. God knows why it crashed, but whatever caused it could still be aboard,”
Lister perked up with the selective hearing of a dog that just caught its favourite word “Food? You mean…?”
“You’re not going in there.”
“Curry, man! They could have curry!”
“You eat curry. Every night.”
“Rimmer,” Lister shot him a withering look “Curry, a real curry, should not look like the mold that used to grow in my shower. Kryten must think I’m nose-blind, taste-blind and eyes-blind. I’m not dumb. I know we’re low on supplies. I refuse to eat any more weevil and moss vindaloo if there’s any choice in it. What does the readout say?”
“Well, the stock lists haven’t been updated in a good few ice ages, and who knows what was destroyed in the crash.”
“But did it have curry?”
“Before it crashed, yes.”
“I’m going in.”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go poncing in there by yourself. We should go back to Red Dwarf first and get the others.”
“I’m going in,” Lister repeated, insistent. Sure, he yearned for a return to his normal - his curry, his telly, his crap magazines, his curry - but it was more than that. A little, brave, twenty-five-year-old Lister instinct flared in his gut. It wanted to go somewhere stupid, bazookoid blazing. More importantly, it wanted to defy Rimmer.
“Well, I’m not coming with you,” Rimmer sniffed.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t ask you to, then, isn’t it?” said Lister. “And what are you gonna do about it, ya coward?” challenged that little, internal, twenty-five-year-old provocateur, but his contribution went unspoken.
“I’m really not.”
“Fine by me, Rimmer.”
“And know that it will bring me no pleasure when you die, Lister. When a parasitic alien worm burrows through your spacesuit and nestles into parts of you I wouldn’t touch through three pairs of rubber gloves, I won’t be happy. I really won’t. I won’t feel even a trace of smugness when a rogue, raving, space-crazed Simulant leaps out from behind and blasts your face into meaty smithereens before you can even say ‘Got any poppadoms?’”
Lister felt it was a sure sign of his current maturity that he managed not to roll his eyes once during that diatribe.
“Are you finished?”
“No, actually. I-“
“Good,” Lister interrupted. Rimmer’s jaw clicked shut “You know the drill, keep your eyes peeled for life signs on the scanner. And, Rimmer, while I’m out there. One last thing I’d like you to do.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
Lister grinned and suited up. As he stepped out and onto the derelict, he was satisfied to catch the scowl on Rimmer’s face before the doors to Starbug shut him out of view.
Alone, he felt an odd sinking in his stomach. The little spark of a younger, more adventurous Lister fizzled out as fast as it had appeared. Inexplicably, he felt as if he wasn’t coming back, not for a long time.
Absolute nonsense, said a little Rimmer-esque voice in his head, probably indigestion from scarfing down too much of Kryten’s nauseating Space Weevil Curry Surprise as of late. Right. That was why he was trawling around this ship to begin with.
As he focused back on the mission at hand, real-Rimmer’s tinny voice piped up on his helmet comms.
“Dead yet?”
“Afraid not. Any genetically-modified space worms coming to wriggle up me keks yet?”
“No. But I am getting some strange energy readings from Section Twelve, I think you’d better stick to the other side of the wreck.”
Lister considered this as he read the writing on the wall in front of him. Section Twelve, Freeze-Dried Food Storage.
“But that’s where they keep all the food, it says so on the signs. I’ll be careful.”
“Lister, don’t be stupid. Would you really rather die here, on a random, clapped-out exploration ship in deep space than eat another weevil curry?”
“You know I would,” Lister deadpanned.
There was a pause, followed by a nervous little Rimmer noise, a funny kind of breathy gulp, before he spoke again “Okay, your funeral. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Lister chuckled “What, so do nothing except run, hide, and tremble?”
“Exactly,” said Rimmer, with what could’ve been a returning smile in his voice.
Lister rolled his eyes and kept on going the way he was going. As he’d always said; better dead than Madras Weevil. Well, maybe he hadn’t said that exact line before, but he was definitely saying it now.
He thought it over and over like a mantra as he shimmied in through the opening of a long-since-stuck, once-sliding door. God, maybe Rimmer was right when he nagged him about getting a gut. Though he loathed to admit it, all this trawling around derelicts did feel a great deal less punishing back when he was but a spritely young adult and all the lager hadn’t gone to his midsection yet.
He thought of him again as he routed around the first crates of freeze-dried silver bags and stumbled upon a particular food. Mashed potatoes, Rimmer’s favourite. The jammy git couldn’t say it wasn’t worth the risk now, eh?
Lister tried a few more crates, and was still in search of anything resembling curry when it happened. At first, everything tilted to the left by about five degrees. Then, a much more worrying forty degrees. He lost his footing and slid, arse first, across the floor until his back hit the wall with a sturdy, painful clunk.
Then, just as he regained his footing, everything started to vibrate. Suddenly, there was no ceiling above him nor a floor beneath his feet. He fell into the darkness.
Smeg.