Howdy y'all. Welcome to my brand new fic in the 'Ace Chronicles' series. I'll warn you lovely readers now that a) if you haven't read 'Last Human' and b) don't want me to ruin the story for you, then I would not read this fic, as there's spoilers aplenty.
....Have they gone? Ok, right.
For those of you that have read 'Rimmer's Return', you may have been intrigued/curious/infuriated by the cliffhanger nature of the ending. Well, yes. I always felt that Michael's character in 'Last Human' was ever so slightly two-dimensional, and wanted to give him space to grow. You'll notice, dear readers, that this chapter covers his background as detailed in the book. But from that point onwards, I break away from that story and create my own dimension's version of events.
This fic is set two years after 'Only the One' and just under a year before 'Rimmer's Return'.
Here we go, folks. Please read and review. It always brightens my day. Thank you.
Everything's so blurry
And everyone's so fake.
And everybody's empty
And everything is so messed up...
- Puddle of Mudd, Blurry
Lieutenant-Colonel Michael R. McGruder had screwed up.
This wasn't one of those minor errors, like forgetting to take the rubbish out, overcooking a romantic meal, or forgetting your partner's birthday; although these were amongst a catalogue of mistakes that Michael could quite confidently attribute to the downfall of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Mercedes. But that hardly mattered now. That was three million years ago, give or take a century or so. Water under the bridge and all that.
No, this was a cock up of epic proportions.
After thousands of years of abuse and pollution by the human race, it had finally been declared that the sun was dying. In layman's terms, it meant that in 400,000 years time, the Milky Way would be as uninhabitable as an Economy Room at the Travelodge in Grimsby. The mission directive of his ship, the SS. Mayflower, had been to take a collection of genetic experiments and creations - simulants, dingotangs, symbi-morphs, snugiraffes, and a host of bacteria and viruses – and, manned by a human crew of fifteen, find a new galaxy for the human race to call home.
At least, that had been the plan.
Every ten thousand years or so, one of the human crew would awaken from Deep Sleep, run a two-day routine check of the ship, the course, and the sleeping cargo, and then return to stasis once more. It all sounded so simple.
The crew had never thought that an electrical storm could knock out some of the power feeds on the ship. They had never thought that this could inadvertently revive some of the most dangerous beings ever to have been created by man's fair hand. And during McGruder's turn to run the checks, he'd made a simple but fatal mistake. He'd forgotten the rule.
Never trust a symbi-morph.
It wasn't long before they had imprisoned him in the holding chamber, leaving the simulants and dingotangs free to escape. The mutiny against the rest of the crew had raged for three days. Then the ship had fallen eerily silent.
McGruder had eventually been freed; beaten, tortured and humiliated by the dingotang crew who delighted in having a human slave to keep as a pet mascot as they journeyed on aimlessly through unchartered space.
And now as he sat locked in the bitter chill of the hold, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael R. McGruder began to wonder where it had all gone tits up.
Perhaps karma had finally caught up with him? After all, the honour of graduating first in his class at West Point Cadet School was unheard of in a man of his upbringing. Raised by a single mother who scraped together a survival for them both on geomapper's wages, his background was hardly considered to be the proper, kosher beginnings for the makings of a good Space Corps Marine. His mother never had the money to give him the latest video games that his friends had. Cadet uniforms were hand-me-downs, text books second hand. But in terms of love, support and encouragement, he'd never gone without.
He'd never known his father. According to his mother, he'd died before Michael had even been born, killed in one of the most notorious JMC disasters in Space Corps history. But despite the fact his father was dead, for Michael he lived on in his dreams and aspirations; a faceless figure who continually inspired him and spurred him on to do better.
McGruder pulled his tattered leather SCM jacket tighter around his broad shoulders and shivered, blinking slowly as his breath clouded hazily before his eyes. When he was a boy, his mother would tuck him up warm and cozy in bed and regale him with stories of his father's bravery and fortitude. And even at that young age, little Michael had promised himself that he would spend every waking moment striving to be just like him.
He'd just returned from fighting in the Hyperion War when the black box from his father's ship touched down in the Pacific Ocean. The details had been sketchy, but they'd discovered that out of a crew of over a thousand, his father had been selected to be resurrected as a hologram. He could only presume it was for the good of the mission, all down to his heroic endeavours from when he was alive.
Signing up for the Mayflower mission had been nothing but empty bravado, he knew that all too well now. It was a wild, foolhardy attempt at emulating the man he could never hope to live up to, a desperate struggle to follow in his father's footsteps. For years, he'd laboured under the misapprehension that he would somehow find him, or at least feel closer to him amongst the distant, sparkling stars. But as he scanned the small, dingy hold, he felt nothing but mortification for his own naivety. Out here it was nothing but eternal blackness.
He would never be a tenth of the man that his father was.
It had been seven days since the mutiny, and his mind swam dizzy with what the dingotangs would do with him once they grew tired with the entertainment his torture could afford. Whatever the process of his demise, the outcome never reached a conclusion that McGruder was entirely happy with. And he certainly wasn't going to sit back and wait for it to happen.
Reaching behind him, he slid out the wrench that he'd stashed in his belt during his last outing, and glanced up at the grate that covered the opening to the air ducts.
He would find his escape, or die trying.
After all, it's what Arnold J. Rimmer would have done.