The mining ship Red Dwarf is in orbit around Saturnian moon Titan, and the bulk of the crew is heading down for their shore leave plans: A strangely reluctant hen party; a relaxing cheaty golfing break; a terminally-boring cultural Odessey; a marathon drinking and fighting binge; a stomach-challenging culinary beanfeast and an invigoratingly violent tour of Shore Patrol . . .
Menial chicken soup machine repairmen Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer have slightly less noble ambitions. Rimmer is in search of some illicit exam-cheating tech, to land a much-lusted-for promotion, and Lister plans to acquire a cat to smuggle back on board as part of a nefarious scheme to return to Earth. Mainly they just want to get as far away from each other as possible. However, their objectives are scuppered when they receive a cryptic message . . . from the future.
The two feuding crewmen are catapulted into a breakneck race to save not only this, but every other Reality. Along the way, they'll find themselves united again, for the first time, with some new, but somehow old friends, as they embark on a labyrinthian quest through the seediest, most dangerous underbelly of humankind's furthest outpost, where lurk bizarre off-worldly dangers and one mysterious hidden nemesis with an obscure, yet clearly lethal agenda.
So strap yourself into your Holly Hop Drive, and set your bazookoids to "thrill" - the Dwarfers are taking on TITAN.
'Don't tell my mother I died with my arm up a gorilla's bottom.' 'But sir - it will be on the death certificate.'
Publisher:
Orion
Print pages:
416
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Titan, moon of Saturn. The domed spaceport of Xanadu – humankind’s most far-flung outpost. Uptown. Asterope tower, the Pleiades Hotel. Penthouse suite.
The croissant had unexpectedly led to her certain death.
He was there. The Big Cheese. The Groot Kaas himself. He shouldn’t have been in his room at that time. He was never in his room before 8.03. Never. That was the arrangement.
This always gave her ample time to set the croissant inside the linen napkin which had been folded into a swan – the hotel monogram on its beak – activate his cambuchana percolator, place one yellow tulip in the slender crystal bud vase, and skedaddle. Ample time.
She was already well into the room before she was aware of his presence. His back was to her, and if she’d only kept her head down …
But she’d been shocked, and had inadvertently glanced up. For the merest instant, she’d caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. She’d dropped her head immediately and covered it up well, she thought. She flipped on the percolator and turned to the door. She walked normally, she reckoned. Normal speed. Nothing to see here. I didn’t see your face, honestly.
She swept her right palm across the door sensor. Nothing happened. Her palm was too sweaty. She surreptitiously wiped it on her apron. Sweaty. Sweaty. Don’t be sweating. She waved again, fixing her eyes on the small tattoo of Newton’s Second Law of Motion on the back of her hand to distract her from the panic threatening to turn her bowels into the bagpipes of the Black Watch.
And she was in the corridor. She was alive, and in the corridor.
Don’t panic, he hadn’t realised she’d seen him.
Had he?
She pushed the hover trolley towards the lift.
She was suddenly aware she was going faster and faster.
Of course he’d seen her.
For the briefest zeptosecond, one sextillionth of a second, their eyes had met!
He’d seen her see him, and now she was dead. Or worse. She’d heard rumours of much, much worse.
The bagpipes had now been replaced by a giant, deadly squid trying to escape though her windpipe.
She swept the elevector sensor plate with the palm of her sweaty hand. Zilch. She wiped and swept again, all the while resisting the gnawing impulse to glance back down the corridor.
Why wasn’t the elevector coming? Was it already too late? Would it even be safe? Cameras everywhere. He could surely override the controls. He could do anything.
Themis Du Plessis wrenched open the door to the emergency stairs and started racing down.
Why was this happening? And why now?
She’d been maddeningly close to achieving her dream. Just another fifty-two Earth days in this rotten, soul-destroying service job, and she’d have been free. She’d always known she was working for a Very Bad Man – that’s why the pay was so juicy – but his notorious obsession with anonymity had been supposed to protect her.
What a waste her life appeared now! A life locked in relentless study, with but one aim. And now that would never happen. Now she’d never be able to take applied mathematics to the culture-starved mushroom shovellers in the caves of Hermippe. They would never know the pure poetry of integral calculus …
She realised, after thirteen lung-burning flights, she was still pointlessly pushing the hover trolley. She stopped to gather her wits.
She had to think this through. She had a beautiful, logical, mathematical brain. It was time to use it.
Just running away was clearly futile – he could track precisely where she was at all times, anywhere in the settlement, through her Domer’s Implant chip. Her, and every other Domer in Xanadu.
The solution was nauseatingly inevitable.
She tugged open the trolley’s steel drawers and clattered through the breakfast cutlery selection.
It wasn’t easy digging out the implant in her palm with a croissant knife, but no point in bleating. It was that or the jam spoon.
She twisted a swan napkin around her clumsily lacerated hand, dropped the bloody implant into the drawer, and set the hover trolley racing off down the rest of the stairs. Assuming forty-five more flights at ten metres per flight, and taking into account increasingly violent collisions with the walls, it would ultimately achieve approximately 76.5 miles per hour. If his goons were waiting for her at the bottom, they’d get a hurtling steel box full of baked goods in the teeth for their troubles.
Now what? Now she was a non-person. No ID, no money, no passport. She had less substance than a hologram.
She heard the clang of a door from above and some heavy feet on the stairs.
Up was out and down was out. It had to be sideways.
She burst back out into the corridor. To her right, there was a large triangular picture window looking out to the hotel spires beyond.
Frantically, she calculated the index of the proto-glass, and the tensile strength of the sheet, and thus where its weakest point would be.
Then she battered it with a fire extinguisher till it smashed.
A refreshing blast of cold air ruffled her bangs as she peered out and down.
She had fifteen seconds before the proto-glass began to self-repair.
She stepped onto the sill.
Four hundred and twenty metres to the ground. At a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, she would hit the floor at 202 mph. But what if she turned her gravity compensators off? That reduced the acceleration to 1.3 m/s2, and the speed to 73.9 mph. She would still come out like raspberry jelly. There was one slim hope. At the 400-metre level, just below her, swarms of taxi cabs jetted between the wonders of Uptown.
If she could jump and land on one of those, the 16 mph impact would be painful, but survivable.
If.
She glanced back. The proto-glass was now solid again behind her. No other way.
She picked out a cab, calculated its distance and velocity, snapped off her boots’ G-comps, took a deep breath …
… and jumped.
She fixed her eyes on the taxi rushing towards her. It was open top – good, but there was a passenger – very bad.
Suddenly, the sky darkened, and the taxi was in shadow.
Alarmed, she glanced up to glimpse the gargantuan silhouette of a Jupiter Mining Corporation behemoth high above. A monstrous, crimson leviathan of a vessel was almost blocking out the sun.
She looked back towards the taxi, her eyes adjusting.
As she hit it with a bone-jarring crash.
Jansen Van Vuuren was having a very bad morning. It was a near-death experience cab ride, and he couldn’t even distract himself by engaging in a trivial conversation with the taxi driver, because the driver was a brainless, grunting ape. Literally, a chimpanzee.
Most sky cabs in Xanadu were ‘piloted’ by various simians, hooked as liveware into the vehicle’s piloting system via electrodes in their frontal lobes concealed under their peaked caps. This was regarded as being preferable to the disastrous self-driving tech that had taken so many innocent, unsuspecting lives in the previous century. The apes were, essentially, biological robots, adding their eyes and ears and, most importantly, their compulsion to stay alive, to the safety of the passengers.
Unfortunately, most monkeys, apes, and especially this chimp, were really, really bad drivers. With really, really, really bad tempers.
This whole journey had been a screeching nightmare, with cabbie chimp narrowly avoiding a deadly sky-rage incident with a moody baboon in a Skoda.
Luckily, only some faeces had been thrown. Unluckily, it was an open-top cab, and Jansen was now wearing a polka-dot shirt. And face.
Tragically, he would later look back on this as not the worst part of his morning.
He fought the urge to look at his watch again. He was going to be cutting it fine, especially now he needed an extra five minutes to clean up, but he didn’t want to risk aggravating the cabbie by asking him to please stop masturbating and keep his eyes on the traffic.
The cab unexpectedly swerved sharply to the left to avoid a sluggardly orangutan towing a caravan. Jansen clutched the delicate Epimethean filigree vase tighter. Why on Io hadn’t he wrapped it in acres of vacuum cavity wrap? The customer expected it to be delivered on time and intact. She was the calibre of customer you did not disappoint. ‘Here’s your priceless vase – some assembly may be required,’ would not cut the mustard.
Abruptly, he was plunged into complete darkness. What escalating excruciation was this? It was far too early for the regular eclipse, and at least six days to the next nightfall. He looked up. Hoving overhead, a small fleet of sonic tugs dragging it towards a static docking orbit, was the famous Red Dwarf.
Suddenly, it was raining women. Or, rather, woman. A woman in a waitress uniform slammed into the seat next to him with an eardrum-busting shriek, as if she’d been shot out of a circus cannon at point-blank range. The chimp screamed and wrestled with the joystick as the cab yawed to the left, then even more violently to the right.
Tipping Jansen over the side.
He swung precariously, his left hand clutching the wing mirror, his right hand holding the rim of the vase, as they hurtled through the morning rush-hour frenzy. Terrified, he scanned the oncoming traffic in the air lane below, just in time to hoist his legs to avoid having them amputated by a gibbon in a speeding pantechnicon.
‘Excuse me,’ he called out weakly to the taxi’s new occupant. ‘I’m afraid this cab is taken.’
But the incoming passenger seemed momentarily dazed. She groaned painfully.
‘I wonder,’ Jansen burbled at a slightly higher pitch than normal, ‘if you might help me back inside?’
A head appeared over the top of the door. ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’
‘Well, not really. My hand is beginning to slip.’
‘Well, why don’t you drop that vase?’
Yes, why hadn’t he dropped the vase? True, it was an almost perfect example of last century Epimethean filigree work. But in the end, it was just a vase. Yet in the white heat of danger, he’d chosen to keep a hand on a frivolous rich woman’s artefact, rather than protect his own life. What did that say about him? You could take professional ethics too far.
‘It’s a rather valuable example of layered azure glaze, embossed with neo-Grecian …’ he began, then stopped. Why was he attempting to initiate a fine art lecture while dangling like Harold Lloyd from the clock? In a moment, he might well plunge to his certain death.
The waitress reached out her hand. ‘Pass it to me, then you’ll have both hands free.’
Jansen hesitated. He was excruciatingly aware his left arm was beginning to cramp, and he was losing feeling in the fingers.
Could he trust her? Her eyes seemed honest, but then again, she was the type of person who hurled herself into other people’s taxis from enormous heights.
Suddenly, the chimp driver screeched and made a skittish swerve that sent Jansen penduluming, repeatedly banging his head against the cab door.
That made up his mind. If he fell, the wretched thing was done for anyway.
He delicately raised the vase towards her outstretched hand.
She took it with reassuring gentleness, and his newly freed hand gratefully grabbed the door handle. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then started to wonder what he was relieved about. He was still suspended hundreds of metres above a very sticky death.
Her face appeared again. ‘Turn off your gravity compensators.’
Yes, actually, that made brilliant sense. If he was almost eight times lighter, it would be less strain on his arms and easier to climb back in. She was clearly a bright one.
He lifted up one leg, then the other and flipped the switches on his brogues. Instantly, he felt almost buoyant. He was beginning to like this waitress.
She smiled encouragingly, holding out her hands. He noticed one was wrapped in a blood-stained napkin, but the other bore the mathematical tattoo F = ma, which he found reassuringly intellectual. He grabbed the inviting hands, first with his left, then his right. He was saved!
The smile unexpectedly froze on her lips. ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ she said.
What?
She appeared to be doing some sort of mental calculation. ‘There’s a refuse vehicle coming up underneath, and it’s your best chance for a soft landing.’
Landing?
Jansen Van Vuuren was still wide-eyed in disbelief as he found himself somersaulting down towards the oncoming garbage truck, piloted by a flabbergasted mandrill.
This. This was definitely the worst part of his morning.
Themis Du Plessis watched him tumble into a pile of rotting fish heads and leaned back in relief.
She didn’t have time to feel bad. She was in survival mode. This vase, even at black market prices, would buy her a top-of-the-range face change. Hopefully with enough left over for a new counterfeit Domer chip. She’d need that to snag herself a passage off this suddenly lethal prison of a moon.
Somewhere, anywhere, far away from the all-seeing gaze of that face she should never have seen.
She pushed back her twinge of remorse for the plummeted antiques dealer. She would pay him back. One day. When all this horror had vanished into the past, and she was showered with tribute by the joyously grateful, mathematically enlightened mushroom shovellers of Hermippe.
She tapped the chimp driver on the shoulder.
‘Downtown.’
The lights flickered with a low hum, then flashed back on again, indicating Red Dwarf was now connected to sky dock energy.
The ship was abuzz with preparations for shore leave. Crew members rushed from workstation to workstation, locking off their ongoing tasks, while mentally rehearsing quite how excessive their shore leave behaviour was going to be. Skutters – small, motorised, claw-headed maintenance robots – scurried about performing their vital docking duties.
Hologenerating Oracular Lucid Lisptalk YABA (HOLLY), the ship’s ubiquitous BHI (Beyond Human Intelligence) computer, projected his virtual, disembodied head onto all screens, announced that docking protocol had been achieved and those booked for shore leave should start making their way to the transfer tenders, then simultaneously answered 1,790 stupid questions with vaguely passive aggressive comebacks, and reminded everyone that what happens on Titan doesn’t stay on Titan, so wear condoms.
Drill Toolist (4th Class) Olaf Petersen’s alcohol-soaked brain was calculating just how many condoms he might need. Historically speaking, the number was close to zero, but he was ever the optimist. Word was you could get anything Downtown. Anything you could imagine. Unfortunately, the things Petersen could imagine fell more into the realms of science fantasy than science fact. At the very least, he hoped to put the cowering remains of his liver through a jolly good workout. He elected for twelve condoms and a toothbrush as his only luggage. It wasn’t even his toothbrush, which had conceded ignominious defeat to the crumbling medieval battlements that were his teeth some time ago, but needs must …
Dr Harold Godbold was in the medbay, instructing the staff to ready 200 stomach pumps, the entire ship’s complement of limb casts and crutches, and six gross of assorted sutures. What could you do? The crew deserved their fun. After four and a half months on board, they were bound to go mental. He gulped back an insect-based Ganymedean rum so stiff it had rigor mortis. This was going to be a long night. Literally. Thirty-six hours of waiting to discover how many damned crew members he would lose this time. Well, he’d know soon enough. In the meantime, he ransacked the tranquiliser cupboard and stuffed random multi-coloured pills into his Pez dispenser.
Captain Randolph Hollister riffled through his plaid trouser collection and selected the three with the most violently clashing colours, just to spite his absent wife. He was very much looking forward to this particular shore leave. A giant ship like Red Dwarf spewed thousands of spend-happy crewmembers, ripe with accumulated back pay, into the Titan economy, so it was natural the captain of such a vessel would be gifted one of the most luxurious suites, in the most luxurious hotel, for his entire stay – completely on the house. He grabbed his golf clubs and headed to the shuttle, dreaming of bottomless brunches, topless massages and the solar-famous Imperial and Venerable Xanadu Golf Course, with its legendary methane lake trap on the 1.5 mile, par 3, thirteenth.
Second Officer Francis Todhunter was packing reluctantly for shore leave. At the captain’s insistence, he also had to stay in the most expensive hotel Uptown. Though he, of course, had to pay for his own room, which was roughly the size of a rabbit hutch – but not quite as fragrant – with wonderful views of the hotel’s sewage reclamation plant. Not only that, to top it all, the captain would inevitably assume they’d be playing golf together. That was always a difficult one, because Hollister was the most dreadful golfer, and it was often quite difficult to lose to him. Still, that was the second officer’s place in life: to underplay his own talents, while being subjected to the eye-burning sight of the ship’s most wobbly arse wibbling in the solar system’s most dreadful trousers on every single tee.
Corporal (although actually, she thought of herself as ‘Acting Sergeant’, even though nobody else did) Ingrid Jezebel Byle buckled up her Sam Brown and clipped on the industrial class, slightly illegal, taser selection which she had pimped up from videos on the Phantom Web. On board, security was dull and small-time. Shore Patrol was what she lived for. Thousands of irresponsible idiots released into the wild, contravening regulations as if they’d never read all 642 pages. She hoped the morons resisted arrest. It made her hot.
Mining Operative (2nd Class) Ed ‘Tex’ Garcia strolled past the cobalt smelting bay, grinning at the poor sad sacks sweating beans over the furnaces, and laughed cruelly to himself. All they could look forward to after fourteen hours busting their asses was chowing down on the ship’s monotonously recycled vittles, while he was going to spend every pennycent he’d accrued in salary gorging himself like a bulimic buzzard on the legendary street food of Downtown Xanadu. He tipped his Stetson at them an ironic salute, tucked his thumbs in his belt and almost line-danced towards the shuttles.
Trainee Assistant Purser Clifford Pear finished shaving and stood back to admire his handiwork. There was no discernible difference. He didn’t really need to shave yet, but the others would rib him if he didn’t. His face turned red at the very thought of more choruses of ‘Here comes Peachy Cheeks!’, ‘Stand back! I think his balls are going to drop!’ and the one that got him yesterday: ‘D’you want a cup of tea, or are you still being breastfed?’ His face turned redder still at the recollection of the word ‘Breast’. He shoved away this thought. This was his first shore leave, and he was determined to make it a cultural and artistic experience. At last, an escape from the relentless emasculation disguised as blokey banter that he suffered on a daily basis. Unaccountably, the word ‘Breast’ slammed into his brain again, and he had to splash his face with cold water.
Navigation Officer Kristine Kochanski opened the box of assorted dildos, attached them to springs and began to glue them to various headbands. She wasn’t terribly enamoured of the effect, but acknowledged, with an eye-closed sigh, that it was traditional. At least she hadn’t got saddled with inflating the giant balloon penises or sewing the flashing LED fairy lights to the underskirts. She double-checked her reservation at the Pleiades Hotel, even though she didn’t really need to. She’d spent months communicating with the hotel via photon transmissions, pruning away at every cost. Even with all the compound discounts she’d managed to wring out of an extremely accommodating events organiser, she’d eaten up the next two months’ salary. Still, if everything Themis had promised her was true, it would probably be worth it.
Deep in the boweliest part of the living quarters, underneath the vast array of the ship’s thumping generators, just within earshot of the clanking chains of the ore transit ducts and the never-repaired, perennially-cascading, stinking water leak from the fish reservoir, in bunk room 4047, two men were less than happy.
Third Technician David Lister had let himself go. He hadn’t bitten his toenails in three weeks. That would have involved taking his socks off, which, by now, might well have resulted in the removal of several layers of skin and setting off the sprinklers.
His heart was broken. More than broken. Shattered into seventy-two billion pieces, crushed underfoot by a twenty-five stone, tap-dancing colossus, wearing lead-lined Doc Martens with segs on, swept into a coffee grinder and reduced to dust, then passed through the digestive system of a dysenteric donkey and evacuated into the void of space. And on top of this perpetual agony, there was another perpetual agony … Rimmer.
He glanced across at his less-than-perfect bunkmate. Even now, with fifteen minutes to go before disembarkation, the wiry-haired, pompous smegwipe had his voluminous nostrils buried deep in one of his ridiculously massive textbooks and was incoherently chittering to himself like a neurotic squirrel who couldn’t find his nuts. As if he was going to actually learn something for a change.
Second Technician Arnold Rimmer was not going to be beaten. He dragged his reluctant eyes back to the top of the page for the seventeenth time and ran his increasingly bleary vision over the text again.
‘At Aphelion, the Earth is farthest from the sun.’ Yes, that seemed quite reasonable.
‘The celestial horizon is analogous to the virtual equator in the perihedral co-ordinate system.’ He nodded with slightly less confidence and told himself that pretty much made sense.
‘Sidereal hour angle is an hour circle of a celestial body as referenced from the mesh Cardinal Point of Aries.’ This made no sense at all. Aries? Where in the name of Benjamin Franklin’s bifocal buttcheeks did Aries come from? This was astronavigation, not Paranormal Pam, the Planetary Prognosticator. . .
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