Disclaimer: I do not own Red Dwarf or any of the characters. Please don't sue me or steal my story. Thanks!
NOTE: I previously put this story up for April Fool's Day, then took it down a couple weeks later when the total lack of response it received strongly suggested the need for serious tweaking. It's an AU story and somewhat dark, but I hope you like this revised version!
Cassandra's Revenge
By Rowena Zahnrei
It had happened before, and he could make it happen again. It wouldn't take much. A hand-held blowtorch and a small hammer to damage the drive plate—not so it was noticeable, just enough to keep it from closing properly. A few tweaks to the control board's wiring to make sure the radiation warning signal would fail to light. A quick scramble into one of the stasis booths. And that was it. He'd be home free. Back to square one, with all the events of the past three years erased—if not from memory, then at least from existence.
Security had become rather lax on Red Dwarf since the crew had settled into the understanding that they were alone, separated from their home system by three million years of space and time. Dressed in his new second technician jumpsuit and carrying his box of tools, it was a simple matter for reformed convict and vending machine maintenance operative David Lister to slip past the two engineers on night shift duty and sidle up to the main reactor.
Over the nearly three and a half years since their resurrection by a swarm of nanobots, the thousand-plus ship's compliment had become less a professional team, and more a community: a huge metal city cruising through deep space. The Captain was like the mayor, his staff the government officials, and the crew were the citizens, working their nine-to-five jobs then spending their evenings at the ship's discos and pubs and shopping centers, just as they would have done back home. Without a company to answer to or a profit margin to maintain, the non-fraternization guidelines that had long governed relations between officers and enlisted crew broke down, leaving them free to get to know each other as people, rather than superiors and subordinates. Relationships started up, even a few marriages were celebrated.
It was one of those marriages that had brought Lister down to the engine room, intent on his mission of sabotage. He really had no choice. The marriage was wrong, a fluke the universe should never have allowed to happen. It was up to him to sponge it away, to cleanse its cancerous presence from the timeline before it could metastasize.
He still couldn't get over the fact that he hadn't seen it coming. How could he not have seen it? The entire relationship had developed right under his nose, yet he'd remained as ignorant of the situation as a salamander in a rapidly drying pond. The Cat, Kryten, Holly—even the skutters had known about it before he did. And he'd managed to maintain his ignorance until that day, exactly one year ago. The day the whole sordid affair had been shoved in his face like a rancid cream pie.
It was April Fool's Day, and Rimmer had been sorting through the mail…
To Be Continued...