Chapter Text
“You’re used to flash, Hurse. The only flash you get on Red Dwarf is the taillights of overtaking ships.”
Paul Humphries takes the ciggie out from between his aged lips, his ruddy fingers shaking despite his near-iron-clad constitution. Red Dwarf’s chief engineering officer fixes his cold, grey eyes on her and nods once. His West Country accent drawls out this modicum of wisdom to her in even, phlegmatic tones, as if an old fisherman passing comment on the turning tides.
He shoves the cigarette back into his mouth and turns away, back to his baskets and nets made of old DV consoles, Ram-scope plates, and CT-6 (CT-6!) interface modules. She can almost hear his thoughts. Young whippersnappers and their fancy CT-12 interfaces and Type 3 Modules. She returns to monitoring the output of the "ramsco" she sits at, watching the peaks and troughs in its analogue punch-up.
Two months ago, this had been a great source of entertainment and awe for her. An analogue readout. How quaint! Computational operations aboard Red Dwarf are conducted entirely in analogue, where results and astronavigation computation are spat out on little sheets of paper by humming, buzzing instruments and ran to the correct officers. The old, boxy CRT display screens stutter out information in neon green while officers hunch over their screens, stewing in a miasma of cigarette smoke.
To an engineer who’d been reared by touch screens and virtual interfaces, Red Dwarf is a fascination, a floating museum packed to the rafters with decades-old technology. A suitable analogy her younger self would’ve appreciated is that it would be like seeing an old WWII tanker still out on manoeuvres in the South Pacific in the mid-twenty-first century.
The only exception to the ship’s rustic, submarine-like ergonomics is the onboard “tenth-generation” AI. With an IQ of 6000, Holly looms above them all, a floating, bald head watching on like an omniscient god. Except, rather than bring brimstone and fire, this god chirps out cheery good mornings and answers any prayer or question you have for him. “Ask me anything. Go on. Real good at pub trivia, I am. Not to blow me own horn or anything.”
She’d once had the pleasure of crawling through Holly’s guts—the Computing Core houses Holly’s central processors, and she’d spent an afternoon wallowing in wires and cables like a pig in mud. Operations found a neural-link fault in one of Holly’s secondary backup systems, and she’d volunteered to go take a squiz. And it was gripping to see how Holly’s mainframe had been jury-rigged into Red Dwarf’s overarching computing architecture.
Holly was a much later addition to Red Dwarf, installed twenty years ago by the JMC to replace the previous computer. His processors were far in advance of the hardware he was being squished into, so the Computing Core is a jumble of state-of-the-art hardware and software, shoehorned into old, tired circuits from a previous century. The original onboard AI boasted a paltry IQ of only 3000 and went by the name Norm. As she’d crawled around inside his guts, Holly filled her in on the fate of his predecessor. “Retired to Hawaii, last I heard. Spends his days in the sun, ocean waves lapping at his caterpillar tracks. Married his sweetheart, you know. A nice Sinclair Unit—smashing girl. June was her name, yeah.”
She’d smiled, patting a thick B-N1 data cable beside her head. “Something to look forward to, hmm?”
“One day, yeah. For now, though, I’m quite enjoying this gig.”
Her smile went from amused to beaming. “That’s the spirit. Now, tell me where your ventral sub-port-systems interface is located. I need to access your neural processors.”
“Sure thing, Urs.”
It’s one thing she and Holly have in common, she supposes: they are both replacements for retirees. Except, the retiree she’s to replace isn’t posted on Red Dwarf. Rather, he’s posted twenty-five trillion miles from the edge of the Solar System. Old Grant Naylor is a Space Corps and Academy legend—a giant in engineering and metaphysical philosophy. She’d studied his theories on Anti-Quasars and White Holes while at the Academy, but never had the privilege to hear him speak in person. He was too busy consulting on the construction of a research facility in a different star system to lecture anymore.
Crying shame.
However, out of the blue, he’d recently retired. He mustn’t have given much of a warning because there was a mad scramble to find a suitable replacement. In the interim, his hologram is a placeholder—unorthodox (for a living person to have his hologram activated) but necessary at that distance. No one mind is enough to replace the monster that Grant Naylor is, so the Space Corps has assembled a team of engineers to replace him. And, somehow, Ursula Hurse’s name popped up in the list of candidates.
It's a junior position, and she was only selected on the recommendation of her old Academy professor and supervisor, but Ursula all but leapt at the opportunity. Twenty-five trillion miles is a long way to commute for a job, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
…The red tape had been a nightmare to cut through, mostly because she didn’t quite fit the brief. The problem wasn’t her lack of experience (she’s the baby on a team of seasoned Space Corps engineers and scientists with twenty-plus years of service). Nor was there any issue with her qualifications. Rather, the issue was her marriage status. Or, rather, lack thereof. Because Alpha Centauri is twenty-five trillion miles away from Earth, the Corps sought married candidates.
“It’ll get lonely out there, Hurse. You got a boy—or girl—you could bring along? Officer perks will provide for them.”
Wonderful plan. Just one minor drawback: there was no one she could think to ask. Maybe if Derek Jones (her old Academy boyfriend) wasn’t happily chairing the foreign office on Io, she’d have dropped him a line.
Eventually, she skirted past that prerequisite on the proviso that she wouldn’t be occupying a permanent position. So, when the next supply ship comes to Alpha Centauri, Ursula Hurse will hitch a ride back to ye Ol’ Blighty Solar System. This gives her a good five years aboard the station. Perfect. With the travel time spent in suspended animation, she’ll complete the tour at a spry thirty-three.
Currently, however, she isn’t in suspended animation. She is aboard Red Dwarf, a mining ship, nowhere near a stasis booth, up and about, moving around and fully ambulant.
When the job offer came through, she was stationed on Mimas, working in the Corps’ Test Flight Facility. Once she’d accepted and limboed her way under the red tape, the only ship headed her way was Red Dwarf, an old hulk-of-a-ship in orbit around Mimas at the time. She’s to thumb a lift out to the edge of the Solar System where she’ll transfer to an interstellar ship.
However, the interim of eight months isn't to be wasted—she’s been put to good use aboard Red Dwarf, acting as a consultant to the Engineering and Operations departments. Really, it’s just a fancy way of saying she’s the general errand girl, coming and going at the whim of Commanders Humphries, Todhunter, or Brown.
“Not every day we get the upcoming cream of the Space Corps aboard this old heifer,” Paul Humphries told her on her first duty shift. “Show us what you know, Lieutenant.”
She’s not complaining. It’s been an experience so far. Her last ship before her posting on Mimas was the sister ship to the Corps’ flagship. It’d been crammed to the gills with the latest instruments, gadgets, and technological innovations the Corps could boast—flash, in other words. Then, Mimas had been a slight downgrade, but still jammed with everything an engineer could desire to tinker on.
In comparison to her two previous postings, Red Dwarf is an old hulk that’s slowly starting to lose its novelty.
“You’re used to flash, Hurse. The only flash you get on Red Dwarf is the taillights of overtaking ships.”
True. However, she’d also like to add to that list the flash of halogen bulbs in the disco halls, the scutters spontaneously combusting, Todhunter’s teeth and hair, and the Red Alert Bulb whenever an incoming dust storm or asteroid fancies the cut of their jib.
The other thing that flashes is the polish on his boots.
She’s tried to approach him before now…she really has. She’d noticed him not a week after she transferred onto the ship. The first time, she’d been clomping down Corridor 57 and had to do a double take at a passing face—too late, he was already gone. As the crowd swept her along, she’d entertained the thought no further, simply chalking it up to something in the stranger’s face summoning a ghost from childhood.
However, a week later, she stood on C Deck in a small platoon of engineers, working with Commander Todhunter as they traced a malfunctioning subroutine. It was here, shoulder to shoulder with Todhunter and during Christopher’s impromptu lecture into her ear, that she found her focus drifting. It’d drifted right to the pair of technicians across the hall fixing a food dispenser. One crouched before the thing, his back to her. He vigorously pumped a nozzle…until the nozzle gave way, and whatever clogged it spilt out. Bouncing back and to his feet (rather athletically, she noted at the time), he turned. What smelt like chicken soup slopped down his trousers, and the poor technician wore the most illustrative look of repugnance she’d ever seen on a man.
Christopher quietly chuckled beside her but pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and excused himself. She didn’t watch the exchange because the circuitry she was elbow-deep in chirped at his departure. She soothed it while Christopher went to offer help.
Circuitry lulled, she turned around again. Todhunter strode back toward her, down a hanky but wearing a smile. He shook his head like a father mildly amused by a child’s self-inflicted misadventures.
Over his shoulder, the technician was red, but he’d managed to regain some of his composure. His dignity, however, was fighting an uphill battle against the large wet patch on the front of his trousers. His shift partner was suggesting (around a steaming mince pie) that he ought to take his jacket off and wear it like a chef’s apron around his middle. “Against regulations,” the taller one responded, standing stiffly and bearing his cross.
“Alright then, let people think you wet yourself, then. Let them think you urinate chicken soup.”
Ursula thought that was cruel to say to a man who’d just been glooped by chicken soup, but she quickly became distracted. The chicken-soup-glooped technician raised his chin as if stoically waiting for his thirty-nine lashes…before he furrowed his brows and strode off. But in that frown…something in the petulant turn of his lips, mouse-like ears, and gelled hair saw her stop dead—my god.
Christopher sighed in her ear. “Sorry about that, Hurse. I don’t suppose you’ve met—”
“Arnold Rimmer,” she’d gasped.
“Oh, you do know him?” Christopher genially asked as he leaned beside her. He watched the technicians roll off down the corridor, the shorter suggesting that the taller best push the trolley to hide his shame.
“I think that dispenser fancies ya!” he bellowed, his Scouse accent thick.
“…I—” she blinked, then looked up at Todhunter, who grinned down at her. He lost the grin fast at the almost deer-in-headlights look on her face.
“Hurse, you alright, old girl? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Ursula shook her head. “Sorry, Christopher. Tickety-boo. Now—” She took them back to the circuitry, but her mind was abuzz with disbelief…and worry. Her heart stopped beating double-time. In fact, it slowed to a crawl.
…Because it bit her, the realisation that Arn was only a second technician. He’s a year older than her. If he’d joined the Space Corps when she did…
Within two minutes of spotting the long-lost Clyde to her eight-year-old Bonnie, she’d realised something had gone wrong.