by Doug Naylor
Lister stood in his Kinitawoweese wedding gown, a garland of flowers on his head, as the priest conducted the service. 'Kan kij giu nah tokha, han nah wok arghy.'
Kryten leaned in and spoke in a confidential tone. 'Sir, you have to say, "Kan kij giu nah tokha, han nah wok arghy", which means you will love Khakhakhakkhha-khakkkhakkkkkh until a time when there is no sand in the desert and the sun is as cold as a yak's nipple on a winter's night.
'Kan kij giu... ' Kryten prompted.
'Kan kij giu...'
'Nah tokha...'
'Nah tokha...' said Lister.
'Han nah...'
'Hannah...'
'Wok arghy...'
'Wok arghy...'
'Hannah klahkhet, ' said the priest.
'Now what's he saying?'
'He's saying you may kiss the bride,'
'What, without a bag?'
'Everyone is watching,' said Rimmer through a mouth borrowed from a bad ventriloquist. 'Just gloody well giss her gefore they gegin to realize you're not gosher.'
Lister adjusted his garter and nodded. 'Kryten, man, give me a leg up.' Kryten linked his two hands together and Lister hoisted himself up and kissed his bride. She grabbed him gleefully around his tiny waist and bear-hugged the air out of him. Then she tossed him over her shoulder and started to carry him off to their wedding hut. As he hung down her back, a maiden at the mercy of a Viking on the pillage, Lister called to his crew mates, 'See you soon, guys. Look in any time, don't be strangers!'
They waved their farewells and then Kryten addressed the chief: 'Hanna bekh yekh bhn knj ele njuh yekh.' The chief nodded and handed the mechanoid the vacuum flask containing the two viruses, and some astro-strippers Kryten had taken a shine to. When there was time he intended to repaint the ship.
'Suggest we get the rogue droids aboard Starbug and leave at first light, sirs.'
Rimmer and the Cat nodded.
* * *
The door of the wedding hut creaked open and Lister's bride unceremoniously dumped him on the pile of yak-skin cushions that made up their wedding bed.
'Hegg onnen nikh hakken,' said his bride, and started to take off her wedding gown.
'Well, what a day, darling. Boy, am I pooped. It's straight to sleep for me.'
Her gown dropped on to the straw matting and she started to clamber out of her sexy, honeymoon pantaloons; they could have sailed a forty-foot schooner across the Atlantic and back.
Lister pulled the blanket up around his chin and heehawed nervously. It was hard not to notice that her bikini line would probably have defeated all but the most powerful petrol-powered hedge trimmer. 'You've been looking forward to this, haven't you? You're not going to take no for an answer.'
'Knakhenkh!''
'How about a drink first?' Lister mimed drinking.
Khakhakhakkhhakhakkkhakkkkh nodded and pointed to a clay jug with two goblets on a tray by the side of their bed. Lister filled her goblet up to the brim and took a small amount himself and then proposed a toast: 'To unconsummated wedding nights.'
'Jhyg ge ni juk, ' she replied, and they started to drink.
Lister took a tiny, medicine-sized sip of the stuff and watched her devour hers and pour herself another. He remembered thinking everything was going to plan when suddenly he grimaced; his stomach felt as if there were a skipping pig inside it - a quite common reaction to those unaccustomed to Kinitawowi moonshine. The tent started to rotate like a crazed merry-go-round, while everything in it crash-zoomed in and out of focus and then his eyelids hammered shut like slamming vault doors and he pole-axed backwards on to his wedding bed.
Kinitawowi moonshine was strong. It was rumoured that once you were drunk on it you could stay drunk for weeks, sometimes even months. To Lister's way of thinking, this explained much of his subsequent behaviour over the next few weeks.
* * *
It was not unpleasant, but he couldn't remember what it was called. There was a name for it, it was very popular.
What the hell was it called? He dropped into unconsciousness again. Then that feeling again. If only he could remember what he was doing, everything would make sense. It was something you shouldn't forget. Yes, good, no one should forget this thing he was doing. Why had he forgotten? Because his head wasn't feeling well. That's right, someone or something had knocked him out. Good, very good, he was close now. He was so, so close to knowing what was happening to his body. This feeling that washed through him, that almost made him forget about the tympani bass throb that continued to drone on and on in his skull.
Concentrate.
He would get it this time. What was he doing? It was something he hadn't done a lot of recently. It was... He was... He was having sex.
That's what he was doing. He was having sex, but who with? He opened his eyes and saw her naked silhouette riding on top of him. Wait a minute. Sex? He was having sex? With a grizzly bear?
No, of course he wasn't. Crazy idea. It must be Kriss wearing an old gorilla-gram costume.
Why would she be doing that? Had she ever done anything like that before? Not really. So why now?
Damn his eyes, why couldn't he see properly? He tried to rub them back into focus but her mighty hands pulled them away from his face and placed them back on her large hairy breasts.
Hairy breasts?
Wait a minute.
He was being screwed by Khakhakhakkhhakhak-kkhakkkkkh.
His scream exploded into the cold night air. 'He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-elp. Kryte-e-e-e-e-e-e-n. C-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-at.' She placed a rough paw over his mouth and rode him, even faster. Oh, my God, he was close to climax. She really knew what she was doing. Oh, he was so disgusted. Did he have no self-control? She was descended from hippos, for God's sakes. 'Ooohhhhhh, aaaaaaaaahhhhh, oooohhh. Hel... m'mmmm... elp. Ooooohh, aaaahhh. Hel... aaaa. . .'
* * *
The two elders sat in front of the open fire frying celebratory catangu nuts to bless the wedding of Btrrn-fjhyjhnehgewydn's daughter when the naked figure of the human man dived out of the tent and started to run through the encampment towards the small green transport craft. He opened his mouth and hollered as he moved, 'Change of plan! Le-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-g i-i-i-i-i-i-i-it !!!!!!'
CHAPTER 9
The voice of the Cyberian flight controller crackled out of the com speaker in the midst of a supernova of blinking lights on the Starbug's instrument boards. It repeated its request for the craft's ident number and landing authorization code. For the third time in as many minutes the Cat ignored it. Instead, he yanked back the joystick and braced himself as a tornado twister hit Starbug's underbelly like an upper cut, and sent the ship temporarily out of control.
The voice was unrelenting. 'Kindly state craft ident number and landing authorization code.'
Kryten's eyes swept the scanner looking for signs of life. It didn't make sense. Lotomi 5 was only 500 miles across and they'd swept the planetoid twice, and somehow they still couldn't find Cyberia. Starbug banked along a giant drumlin of sand as he stabbed instructions into the navi-comp computer. 'Still nothing.'
'This is your final warning. Please state craft ident number, together with landing authorization code, otherwise a fleet of Cyberceptors will be launched to engage your craft in combat.'
Lister exchanged a look of frustration with Kochanski, then jabbed a search instruction into the computer. Again it flashed a 'Sorry — nothing found' message. He mashed a styrofoam cup in anger. They had perhaps ten minutes before they would be attacked by the Cyberceptors and they couldn't drop either of the two landing parties until they'd got a fix on the penal colony. He was helpless. Frustrated and helpless. He moved past the group of rogue droids sitting in the mid-section, armed and ready to jump and wandered into the galley, where he started devouring a packet of breakfast cereal. What the hell were they to do if they were engaged in combat? Starbug was a ship-to-surface transport vehicle — the most lethal thing they had onboard was his secret recipe for chilli dogs.
'There. There it is!'
The Cat flashed his famous forty-tooth smile and pointed to the scanner as a blinking yellow cross signalled a large power source. 'The scanners must have missed it through the storm. Hold on, buds and buddesses, I'm taking her down.'
Starbug dropped out of the dust storm and flew low over a meandering desert road that led away from the penal colony before veering off and making a vertical landing in the basin of a clump of dunes. The landing legs concertinaed into themselves and the craft flopped clumsily on to its belly, like a Bactrian camel preparing to lie down for the night. The engines wound down and the retros whinnied into silence.
A hatch opened in the fast-cooling desert evening, and three figures scrambled out of the top of the craft carrying a variety of equipment in backpacks. Once out, they closed the hatch door and started climbing out of the basin, looking for the desert road. As they trudged their way up the dune, Starbug blared off over their heads, in the direction of Cyberia.
Rimmer pulled down his bush hat to protect his eyes from the skin of fine sand the trade winds were peeling off the dunes and trudged down the desert road. The highway, built in a wide arroyo and pocked with potholes, ran the length of the asteroid, from the Gelf's quarters in the south all the way to Cyberia in the north-west. For half a mile the party of three walked in silence, preserving energy.
Rimmer normally enjoyed walking. In fact, he was a bit of a hiker in days gone by, climbing the fells and escarpments of Io, but the knot of tension that was slowly uncoiling in his belly was doing nothing for his current perambulation. Not for the first time, he asked himself why he was even here.
Why him?
He was not cut out for commando raids on enemy installations. He wasn't the macho type. He was someone who had needed a friendly hand to hold whenever he underwent dental surgery, a habit he hadn't kicked until he was twenty-eight. He was someone who had a medically authenticated fear of blood. That's why he had never become a famous brain surgeon. One tiny droplet of the stuff and he was on his back faster than his mother in the presence of a high-ranking officer.
What Rimmer was was a thinker, a plotter, a commander of men, not a fighter; he was someone who sat on top of the hill in the general's tent planning the campaign and drinking fine wines.
A common foot soldier he was not. He was too intelligent to be brave. That was why he never suffered the fool's rush of blood to the head that caused one man to fall across a grenade to save another. He was more likely to pick up a man and throw him over the grenade to protect himself.
He remembered an old girlfriend, Yvonne McGruder. They'd had a torrid fling back in the old days on Red Dwarf — it hadn't lasted much more than one long glorious weekend - but Rimmer thought about her still. She'd summed him up pretty well once. She'd said he was a brave man trapped inside the body of a coward. Rimmer liked that definition of himself.
'How about this?' Kochanski stopped under a telegraph pole positioned on the arc of a tight lefthand bend.
Kryten flipped his visual system on to long range and scanned the desert road. 'Excellent. It's well sheltered, and we can bury the hardware just behind that small hummock of sand.' He pointed to a site thirty feet from the road.
Rimmer watched as Kochanski shimmied up the pole's climbing rungs and Kryten started to strip the canvas covers off the computer and attach leads into the serial ports.
A real officer would not have shimmied up the pole. A real officer would have delegated. A real officer would have screamed, 'Rimmer, stop mooning about and get up that pole. You're a bloody maggot. What are you?' And he would have had to reply, 'I'm a bloody maggot, ma'am, on my way up the pole, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am.' Then she would have been a real officer, and maybe then she would have got a little of his respect.
Suddenly, he was aware that she was talking to him.
... Rimmer... Rimmer?'
'Huh?'
'Are you listening?'
'What?'
'The leads. Hand the leads up.'
'Certainly.' A trompe-lœil smile of affection painted itself across his lips. 'And we're still of the opinion that this is a good plan, are we? No second thoughts or anything?' She disembowelled him with a look and started connecting the leads to the glass fibres of the telegraph line with a Thurston J connector clip. Rimmer continued. 'If I recall my military history correctly, there was a most famous Japanese general called Kamikaze who made a name for himself by his rather original approach to battle. Comforting to know we're treading in the footsteps of one of the truly great military thinkers.'
Kryten clicked the computer on and jabbed a series of commands into its database. He spun the cylinder, took out the pink disk, which glinted slightly against his chest plate, then loaded the disk into the computer's hard drive and waited. After a few seconds a warning trilled across the screen.
You have just loaded the OBLIVION VIRUS into your database. The OBLIVION VIRUS destabilizes the electron/proton relationship of the electric charge as it passes through it. In effect, the OBLIVION VIRUS kills electricity.
Do you have the antidote disk? Press Y/N.
Kryten pressed 'Y' and waited for the next instruction.
Please enter antidote disk.
Kryten entered the antidote disk and received his authorization to enter his pass-code. He typed in Har Megiddo 46758976/Kry, the code number he had been given by the Kinitawowi, and set the alarm. In ten minutes, the oblivion virus would be released into the fibre optics of the telephone wire and would then hurtle on towards Cyberia. Five seconds after that there would be no electricity on Lotomi 5. Just enough time for Lister and the Cat to get into position for their drop into Cyberia.
There was a noise.
Overhead. A thundering, deafening, whooshing sound. Suddenly the sand was stirred into a swarm of tornado twisters. The Cyberceptors swept over the dune in a diamond formation, underbelly floodlights lighting up the desert as they loomed overhead.
'Down.' Kochanski hit Kryten at waist height and bundled him into the sand. They lay there for some moments as the crafts passed overhead.
Kochanski spat out a mouthful of desert. 'You think they saw us?'
'Of course they saw us — they're looking for us. The Kinitawowi have set us up,' said Rimmer, grim-faced.
'The dust storm won't help visibility, sir. I believe there's every good chance they missed us.' Suddenly, the jets rolled right and swept back towards them.
The Cyberceptors landed two hundred metres from where they were lying. Two cargo doors hinged open and ten six-wheeled buggies, with their huge rubber wheels, were lowered to the ground, each containing a squad of eight Cyberian guards. All armed and helmeted, ready for battle. The buggies screamed off in every compass direction.
* * *
Kryten's head appeared at the top of a ridge of sand and squinted down at the ten figures examining the roadway. Ten minutes before virus launch.
'What do we do?' Rimmer's brow wrinkled into an unintelligible signature of anxiety.
Kochanski thought about it. If the Gelfs found the oblivion virus they'd be finished. It was their one and only trump card. She brushed sand from her face. 'We've got to get the oblivion virus before they do and get out of here.'
'What about Mr Lister and the Cat, ma'am?'
'If we lose the oblivion virus we lose everything. We've got no choice.'
'Are you crazy?' said Rimmer. 'We didn't come all the way...'
'You want to end up in Cyberia too?' she shouted. There were five loud clicks behind them.
They turned and stared into the barrels of five clip-loading T 27 electron harpoons. 'Where is your craft?'
Kryten smiled benignly. 'We don't have a craft.'
The Gelf captain stepped forward. Like the other Cyberian guards, it was a Dolochimp. Kochanski shuddered — it possessed the matt-grey bottle-headed snout of the dolphin, the spindly legs of the locust and the arms and upper body parts of the chimp. Slowly it took a holo-whip from its belt. The orange lash of light hovered in the air, like a dancing sn
ake.
'Where is your craft?' it said in a duck-like rasp.
'I promise you, sir, we don't...'
The lash swished through the desert night and sliced through Kryten's right leg as if it were soft ice-cream. Dumbstruck, Kryten watched his leg clang to the ground beside him.
'My God.' Rimmer covered his mouth with his hand.
'Please take us to your craft,' the Dolochimp said softly.
Kochanski picked up Kryten's leg and nodded.
* * *
The terra buggy pitched down the desert road. Kryten sat in the back between Kochanski and Rimmer, clutching his lasered leg. He doubted it was repairable - it would certainly require a massive operation to re-wire all the damaged tendons. He checked his trauma level -still high. He hadn't felt this stressed since his souffle dropped back on the Nova 5. It was his first time in the kitchen and it was for the flight admiral's birthday too. Oh, the shame, the disgrace — it brought him out in over-heat flushes even now. He gazed down at his leg again. Who would want a mechanoid who was physically imperfect? There was no option: he would offer to terminate himself.
He checked his self-esteem level: it was absolute zero. Excellent. At least that was still normal.
Yes, when it was convenient he would wipe his hard drive and close down his programme. It was the only solution.
No. He was being absurd. Idiotic and ridiculous. How could he possibly terminate himself? Who on earth would tidy up his body parts? Terminating himself would just make the place untidy. Logically, therefore, he had to continue living. He couldn't think about this now. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes until the oblivion virus was launched.
Suddenly the vehicle slowed as they approached a tight righthand bend that was all too familiar. The telegraph pole was also familiar. Kryten held his breath. They passed it safely. The buggy changed gear and started to gun up the highway.
'Stop.' The buggy jolted to a halt.
The Gelf captain held up its paw and peered at a line of footsteps coming over the brow of a dune and hugging the roadway. He squinted at the tracks, then craned over his shoulder and peered back in the direction they had come.
