Disclaimer: all characters belong to Grant Naylor Productions and the BBC.
Author's Notes:
1) Although only two skutters were seen on the show, I'm assuming there must have been lots more that were active.
2) Also assuming that Kryten can understand and translate the 'speech' of the non-verbal droids.
Kryten looks newly confused as Lister bangs his head against the wall. "Excuse me, sir, but are you attempting self-repair? I wasn't aware that humans had such an inbuilt function."
With a final thump, Lister drops onto Rimmer's bunk with a groan. "Why the smegging smeg did I smegging do it?"
"'Cause you're an idiot," the Cat supplies, helpfully.
"Because, Listy," Rimmer clarifies through his hands, which his face is currently buried in, "my attempts to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion around here and to ensure that Red Dwarf is permanently ready to repel whatever threats it might encounter were, as usual, considered to be superfluous compared to your need to recover from a weekend bender."
"Granted, sir, the odds of us being boarded by rogue simulants who would take Holly offline and imprison the four of us in your and Mr Rimmer's quarters to await certain death, while they stripped and looted the ship prior to wiring it to self-destruct, would seem miniscule at best. However, these odds could have been further reduced had you not disabled the red alert warning the night before on the grounds that you wanted a lie-in."
"We keep going to red alert for such stupid smegging things! Like last week, when we had one at midnight because one of the bogs needed cleaning."
Rimmer looks up. "I couldn't believe that even you could have produced what was coming out of there. I thought we'd had a shipwide air purification system failure and you and the Cat were about to be exposed to lethal toxins."
"Or on Tuesday, when we went to red alert because Cat couldn't find any hairspray?"
"Listen, buddy, if I can't tame my mane to the perfection that it deserves, that's a DEFCON one situation!"
Kryten coughs, politely. "Nevertheless, a red alert in the wee small hours of this morning would have provided us with some forewarning of what was happening, and we could perhaps have taken earlier action."
"Correction," Rimmer puts in, "you could have taken earlier action. As senior officer, I'd have been safely ensconced, directing the battle."
Lister looks at him. "Against a couple of dozen heavily armed, nearly indestructible simulants?"
"I have absolute confidence in your fighting ability, Lister, and I'm sure you'd have come out on top before losing every single one of your limbs."
Lister groans again. Getting to his feet, he crosses the room and aims a vicious, frustrated kick at the door. "Is there any way at all that we can override this?"
"Unlikely, sir. The crew quarters have been locked down centrally, and the security systems can only be accessed directly from the drive or science rooms."
"So all we can do is sit here," Rimmer asks, with an undercurrent of something resembling tightly controlled hysteria, "waiting to be turned into finely chopped mince or medium rare, whichever ends up tickling our guests' fancy?"
"Or in the case of you and I, sir, the tin after the Sunday roast."
"Why don't we just use Collectible Eraser Head to break down the doors again?" the Cat demands.
"It seems that the doors of the quarters on Red Dwarf were built to triple thickness and strength in order that the bulk of the crew could be sealed temporarily in safe havens while a fire or gas leakage was taken care of. My head would suffer considerably more damage than the door."
"So we got nothing to lose by trying!"
Lister growls in the direction of the corridor outside. He turns on his heel. "We're not going down here without a fight! There's got to be something we can do! If Holly's down, can we access the JMC mainframe?"
"From here, sir, locked out."
"Smeg!"
"What about the navicomp?" Rimmer suggests. "If we could change the ship's course suddenly, it might fool them into thinking there are more crew members on board."
"Locked out."
The Cat glances around the bunkroom. "Things ain't looking pretty, and I don't access some styling tongs in the next thirty minutes, that's going to include me!"
"Also locked out, I think you may find."
"This is getting damn serious."
The to and fro of the default fish on the viewscreen, lazy and unconcerned in contrast to the four organic and inorganic hamster-wheel brains spinning beneath them, is suddenly interrupted by a chirping coming from the vicinity of Kryten's chest monitor. Rimmer's eye flicks sharply to it.
"What's that?"
Kryten concentrates for a moment. Pleased surprise moulds the contours of his face. "It's one of the skutters, sir!"
Lister frowns in confusion, leaning to hear better. "The skutters?"
Kryten beams at the opportunity to switch to slightly-smug-bastard mode. "All computer and mechanoid personnel on Red Dwarf have access to an emergency service channel through which they can maintain radio communication in the event of a generalized systems failure. It looks as though it may not have been taken down by the simulants."
"Now, hold on just a minute." Rimmer lifts a hand indignantly. "I must count as computerized personnel! Why haven't I ever heard about this channel? I ought to be able to use it too!"
Kryten looks slightly abashed. "With all due respect, sir, Holly may not have granted you access when you were switched on. The channel is sometimes used to gossip about the crew."
Lister elbows him. "Oh, yeah? Bet those guys could tell some stories about what they used to see around the ship on the late shift, eh?"
"Well, apparently there was that one incident outside the Officers' Club when -"
"Look, what does Speedy Skutterez want?" Rimmer interrupts. "If he wants to share something juicy he heard from the condom machine on G Deck, tell him to call back later. That's if we haven't all been blown wider by then than Lister's reputation after his first Saturday night on the ship."
"They're looking for us, sir! The simulants are ransacking Red Dwarf, but they aren't paying much attention to the skutters. They seem to consider them low in intelligence and therefore irrelevant."
The Cat uncurls from his perch on the table and slips to the floor, bending down to the monitor. "Can they get us out of here, that's all I want to know!"
More squeaks are audible over the channel, and Kryten shakes his head. "Negative. The corridor outside the science room is being guarded."
"Wonderful," Rimmer says, sourly. He brushes past Lister, who's scratching his head.
"Can we see them, Krytes? Is there any way we can watch what's going on around the ship?"
"The security cameras may also still be live, sir." Kryten fiddles a bit with some controls situated awkwardly close to his groin. "Just one moment... ah!" A black and white view of one of the corridors flickers in and out on the monitor, then stabilizes. "Audio and visual links active!"
"That looks like floor 178. I know that vending machine there."
"Mr Lister, may I say how moving it is that you recognize all of the little quirks and subtleties that make each dispenser an individual. Few humans are capable of such things. It brings a drop of oil to the old ocular motors, if I may say so."
"No, it's still got a massive dent there in the front where Rimmer kicked it once after it squirted minestrone soup all over his trousers."
"Ugly bio-metal dude alert!" the Cat hisses, as a simulant carrying a weapon bigger than should have any right to exist enters the frame from the left. A skutter suddenly enters from the right, rolling in the opposite direction. It stops short as it evidently spots the simulant, checks, and attempts to give it a wide berth. The simulant detours a couple of steps and gives the skutter a heavy kick that sends it screeching and skidding across the corridor to crash noisily into the wall.
Lister recoils. "What a complete bastard!"
"It's only a skutter, Lister," Rimmer points out.
"I don't care! That's total droid abuse, man!"
"You weren't bothered about the soup machine's feelings."
"Yeah, well, the skutters are different! They're mates, aren't they? They should be fitted with - I dunno - lasers, or something! So they can defend themselves."
The Cat exchanges a look with Rimmer. "Well, I ain't facing down a laser-armed skutter the next time the drain of the shower I'm grooming in clogs up with hair. You can bring the damn plunger instead!"
Lister has turned back to Kryten's monitor and is looking excited. "Listen, me and Rimmer know our way round loads of the floors on this ship. If we can track down the simulants, maybe we can get the skutters to take 'em down."
Rimmer blinks. "I'm sorry, are we talking about the same skutters here? The skutters I know resemble the love-child of a Flymo and an Anglepoise lamp and take orders so literally that if you ask them to arrange your books in alphabetical order, everything ends up under 'B'. You saw what that simulant in the corridor did with one."
Kryten taps the side of his nose. "If you'll pardon my interrupting, speaking as a fellow droid, I believe the skutters have a trick or two up their circuits. Mr Lister may be on to something."
"Speaking as a guy with a great ass that he wants to all stay in one location," the Cat offers, "I'm willing to try anything."
"Rock and roll!" Lister rubs his hands together, gleefully. Retrieving a chair, he trundles it across the room and settles down in front of the monitor. "Krytes, is that skutter you were talking to still on the line?"
"Please identify yourself!" Kryten orders, and a long series of chirrups and squeaks emanate from his lower speakers. "Skutter two-zero-six-eight, sector three-zero-five-dash-six-A." The degrees by which Lister's face falls lead him to take pity on the human, and he leans forward confidentially. "Phil. Works in garbage disposal."
"Give me the camera on that," Lister says, and a string of angles from around the ship flash past in quick succession before stopping on a birds' eye view of one of the corridors on floor 602. The simultant has his back to the camera, but the small form of the skutter is plainly visible over his shoulder, and, beyond them both, the blockish hulks of two of the garbage droids. The setup's nearly enough to make Lister's mouth water. It's like the most perfect smegging follow shot ever, just waiting to be taken. One black, and straight in the pocket.
"Phil, this is Dave Lister. Get the simulant to come after you. You've got to lead him to the garbies!"
"Interpreting you loud and clear, sir." Kryten delivers a few more speedy instructions, and several lights flash in sequence on the garbies as the square droids whirr subtly into life. The skutter, in turn, appears to think for a moment, then raises two claw fingers to the simulant.
"Well, that should do it," Rimmer says, under his breath.
The simulant visibly reacts, then cocks his weapon and starts to stalk the skutter, which slowly reverses away, arm still held defiantly aloft. "Go between them!" Lister urges. "Get him between them, then come out the other side!"
Either the simulant's never seen garbies before, or has no concept of the risks of getting even accidentally in their way. Nor has he any concept of how fast, despite their ungainly form, they can move into top gear when the need arises. As the skutter shoots out on the far side of the garbies, the heavy wheeled droids press in. A pool of something that might possibly be the organic elements of a crushed simulant starts to spread across the floor on the silent camera.
"You're either on the style bus or you ain't," comments the Cat, "and, buddy, he wasn't even waiting at the right stop."
Lister grins. "Nothing to it!"
They use two more skutters to lure a pair of simulants across one of the supply decks and draw their fire to a crate of explosives which takes out the badly-advised marauders in the blast it causes. Lister catches Bob and Madge on camera stretching a wire across another corridor, tripping a simulant and sending him crashing headfirst into an airlock. He turns to Rimmer in delight.
"They're communicating, man! It's like, the rise of the skutters!"
"As long as they don't rise too far," Rimmer responds. "You don't want them going all high and mighty on you the next time you need one of them to take your empty pizza boxes away." He looks rather pleased, though. He directs a skutter who Kryten reliably informs him is called Gary in creating a decoy with its squeaks, which leads two simulants to end up mistakenly shooting each other. Their weapons are apparently a lot more powerful than Red Dwarf's bazookoids, given the damage that it causes to a fair section of the corridor around shaft 36.
The skutters seem to get into the spirit of things, and the cameras start to pick up random attacks and acts of sabotage around the ship. Kryten rapidly processes a relay of messages.
"They've found the bomb! The simulants have crudely wired the main engine core!"
"You better be kidding me! Brown does not co-ordinate with this suit!"
Kryten raises a placating hand. "The skutters have it under control, sir! Even as we speak, some of them are creating a cunning distraction so that they can obtain access to the area and disable the device."
Over the speakers comes the sound of toy guns being fired off. Hologrammatic sweat breaks out on Rimmer's forehead.
"This can't be happening. Please tell me that our continuing existence isn't completely dependent on the deep space branch of the True Grit Appreciation Society."
"Well, I've got total, total, total confidence in them!" I tell you, man, when this is all over, I'm putting them in to the JMC mainframe for promotion."
On the monitor, a skutter has just put a tape recorder down on the floor in front of a simulant. The simulant drops the gun it's been brandishing and appears to grind slowly to a halt before exploding messily a minute later, covering both skutter and recorder with debris.
"What the smeg was that he used? Some kind of sonic weapon?"
"I'm informed that it was a recording of Mr Rimmer's 'Pylons: the Early Years' lecture last month. It succeeded in killing the enemy with boredom."
The monitor switches camera, and a giant skutter can be seen rolling past, flanked by a group of normal-sized companions. The Cat points at the screen.
"What the hell is that? I ain't seen one of those things that size before!"
"That would be Big John. He usually does heavy work around the Diesel Decks. They must be planning a final push against the remaining simulants."
Lister looks up. "Can we do anything? Can we help them?"
"You may already be doing so, sir."
"How d'you mean?"
"They're driving the simulants down into the bowels of the ship by playing them your self-recordings of your guitar practise."
"Won't that cause heavy damage to the skutters as well?" Rimmer asks, with genuine concern.
"Sir, no skutter with a sense of self-preservation would expose himself to any performance by Mr Lister without taking adequate precautions!"
Lister squints more closely at the camera shot. "Kryten, they're all wearing little industrial ear defenders!"
A sudden yowl of joy from the Cat instantly claims all the attention for itself. "Hey! The doors work! They do the open and close thing again!"
Rimmer crosses the room in about three strides. "The skutters must have managed to break into the security systems."
Lister pumps a fist in triumph. "Now we get the brass knuckles out in the science room and sucker punch this scum off Red Dwarf!"
"We're right behind you, sir!" Kryten declares.
"Yeah!" the Cat agrees, enthusiastically. "That way, if we run into one of them, it'll kill you first and we can escape!"
They grab a couple of bazookoids on the way, more for comfort than because they'll actually inflict any serious damage if they do meet a simulant. Rimmer maintains that the rear is a very important position to hold, until Lister reminds him how in the films it's always the bloke at the back who gets whacked, after which he generously gives it up to Kryten. The Cat insists he can smell simulants in every lift and corridor.
"The nose knows, and it may be part organic, but it ain't cat or monkey organic, just bad meat like rotting space weevils!"
"Are you sure that isn't Lister's feet you can smell?"
"Rimmer, if you can't say anything positive, then just don't say anything, yeah?"
"Look, I want this slime off the ship as badly as you do. I'm just worried that the skutters are going to cock something up! They're only service droids. A lifetime of changing light bulbs and scraping chewing gum off the desks is hardly basic training for repelling crazed mechanoids, is it?"
"There's no better time to find out." Kryten indicates the science room up ahead. Bazookoids cocked, looking over their shoulders, they approach. The door is jammed about six inches open. Lister and Kryten lever, shove and shoulder it wide enough that they can all just about squeeze through.
"Well, somebody thought it was party time in here!" the Cat comments. All over the room, consoles have been smashed in and wiring torn out. Some of the surviving screens are flashing 'ERROR' and 'OFFLINE' messages. Lister dumps his bazookoid and hunts around the central column. Finding an undamaged console, he bashes through a few key sequences.
"I can't even log in, man! They wanted to make sure none of us could fix things even if we escaped."
"Allow me. I'll try to bypass the protocols." Kryten types rapidly for a minute. Reams of system code begin scrolling up the screen at dizzying speeds. "External communications - offline. Combustion engines - offline. Damage control - offline. Waste disposal -"
"Yes, alright, Kryten!" barks Rimmer. "I think we get the general picture!"
"It's going to take smegging days to sort this out!"
"Correction, Lister - it's going to take smegging days if the ninja skutters out there have managed to disarm the bomb."
Lister thumps the console. "We've got to get creative here, guys! Krytes, give me a run-down of everything we've got access to!"
"The cameras and the doors, sir."
Lister hesitates. "That's it?"
"Pretty much."
The Cat brightens. "So if we see a dead meat breath outside knocking, we just don't answer!"
"Give us another look at your monitor, Krytes. If there're any simulants on this floor, I want to know about it. They're not going to stand there and let us slam the door in their faces, y'know. They're warped, deranged nutcases with one goal in mind, not Jehovah's Witnesses!"
"I'm sorry, my auditory processing appears to have developed a slight blip. I thought I heard you repeat the first part of your sentence twice."
"Wait a minute! Stop on that camera!" Rimmer suddenly jabs a finger at the picture. Disbelief crawls slowly over his face like an army of termites. "Oh, my God. It's the charge of the Seventh Cavalry!"
Into Hangar Bay Three are trundling what looks like almost every single skutter on the ship, in a tight formation, the front line all bearing tape recorders. Before them stagger the simulants, hands clamped so tightly to their heads that they appear to be trying to crush their brains rather than listen to any more. Their bodies twitch and writhe in obvious pain. Further and further into the bay they go. They twist frantically from side to side as they search for an escape from the torturous soundwaves, but the skutter army presses relentlessly on.
"I was never that smegging bad!" Lister protests.
"Madge informs me, that they intended to use your renditions of Jimi Hendrix classics, but at the required volume, there was a risk of destabilizing the bulkheads of the ship, so it was decided to go with a series of your tune-up exercises instead."
"Have any of the cameras got sound?"
The Cat looks dangerous. "Turn on that sound, Freak Face, and you're getting recycled into kitty food tins."
Rimmer's still watching. "The skutters have got them cornered. There's no other way out of that shuttle bay."
"Except one. Krytes, you listening?"
"Do snack dispensers rust in the woods, sir?"
"Tell the skutters to reverse, really slowly. Start backing up, but don't let the simulants get too close."
"Whatever you're thinking, Lister, it had better work, or we're going to end up dead, and the skutters are going to resemble the filings on the floor after school metalwork class."
"It'll work, Rimmer. As long as they can move fast enough when they have to." Lister turns to Kryten again. "Keep bringing them back towards the doors into the hangar, but don't make it too obvious. Don't make it look like they're running."
The simulants smell blood, or WD-40. Still swaying on their feet, battling against the music, they pursue the skutters. The wheeled droids lure them as before, the auditory pummelling preventing a sudden charge. "Keep going!" Lister urges. "Get all the skutters back into the main part of the ship!"
"Then get a change of trousers on standby," adds the Cat, "and I don't mean 'cause it's fashion week!"
The lines of skutters are moving back through the hangar bay doors, the simulants about twenty feet ahead. Lister leans forward, biting at his nails. "Come on! Almost there! Almost there!"
"Give me the word, sir."
"Wait for it!" Lister raises his hand. The skutters keep rolling. Finally, just as the tension starts to feel tighter than Rimmer's wallet, the leaders pass through into the corridor. Lister slams his fist down. "Now, Kryten! Shut the doors now!"
The doors slide closed and slam-lock into place in front of the skutters, stranding the simulants alone in the hangar. They lift their weapons, ready to blast their way through, but Lister makes his next move. "Okay - open the airlock!"
The simulants exchange confused, panicky glances as the massive airlock doors of the shuttle bay begin to crack open. Suddenly, they flail desperately as the mighty wind of the vacuum outside sucks deeply into Red Dwarf. It plucks them one by one from the floor like toy soldiers and flings them out into space where they gradually become smaller and smaller until they reach a size at which Holly would have probably mistaken them for a few dirty marks on the scanner scope and asked Kryten to get some Windolene. A beautiful and briefly undisturbable peace fills the lower decks of the ship.
Rimmer gawps. "Smegging hell."
"Whaddya know?" the Cat crows. "The little dudes did it!"
Kryten looks immensely satisfied. "Once again, the best laid plains of mice and simulants have come to naught!"
Lister exchanges a high-five with him. He's grinning widely. "Yeah. Think you could say they were skuttled."
-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-O-o-
The simulant ship had, as Lister puts it, 'legged it', convinced that Red Dwarf must have much stronger security than originally estimated. After the systems are all back running and the damage has been cleaned up to a point where nobody would notice the difference, they throw a bit of a booze-up in Parrot's. The three skutters who deactivated the bomb get carried shoulder-high by some of their colleagues, and even Rimmer exhibits a degree of slightly sozzled respect.
"I never thought I'd be thanking a skutter for doing anything except picking up an empty crisp packet, Listy, but it just goes to show that there are occasions on which even Arnold J Rimmer can get it wrong. We won't be seeing one of those days again any time soon. Treasure it."
Lister watches a line of skutters weaving across the floor in a conga. "I meant it when I said I'd put them in for promotion. Made the recommendations this morning."
"From sanitary to domestic duties. I'm sure they'll be thrilled."
"No. I'm having them take their first technician's exam. Reckon they'll pass with flying colours, don't you?"
"Are you insane? The JMC computer won't let droids be assigned ranks!"
"Holly can fix something up."
"Lister, you do realize that it would mean that both tu, and, more pertinently, moi would be outranked by skutters?"
"That's gonna be 'Mr Skutter' to you!" Over at the jukebox, Bob uses a claw to press the button on the machine, and a particularly loud ska punk's bass line begins to blare. Lister pushes his stool back. "Brutal! Fancy a boogie?"
"I'd rather have a haemorrhoid removal without anaesthetic," Rimmer says, morosely, but he gets up and follows him. Within minutes, they're surrounded by a circle pit of moshing skutters.
Two days later, the JMC mainframe rejects the skutters' promotion on the grounds of them all being hungover on duty. Lister grouches about it to the Cat for hours.
"I dunno, man - one foot wrong, and it gets held against you! Wonder who reported them? I bet you anything it was one of the lifts. I always felt like they had all this pent-up discontentment and jealousy."
When he sees a skutter giving Rimmer a particularly vicious two-finger salute, he shrugs it off. He's probably told them to catalogue his Reggie Dixon recordings or hang new 'NO RUNNING OR SPLASHING' signs in the toilets. He can be a bit of a git, after all.