Rob Grant - Red Dwarf - Backwards

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 doppelgnger , 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.

There 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 -'