"Captain, it's... it can't be! It must be a Reptid."
"Whoever he is, we won't know anything if he dies. Blowhard to medbay."
"Taylor here," answered a female voice over the intracom.
"We have a casualty, serious gunshot wound, we're bringing him over, please stand by."
"Yes, Captain."
"Thank you, nurse."
"I'd rather you called me 'Doctor', thank you," replied Taylor in an irked tone, and signed off. Perhaps Striker had been playing a reversed game of doctors and nurses.
Blowhard became aware of a supremely annoying noise that sounded like a yodeller's sped-up rendition of The Lion Sleeps Tonight. She'd never keep a clear head if it carried on. "Blowhard to bridge. The situation is under control. I'll update you soon, but you gotta turn off that intruder alarm."
"Right away, Captain," replied... Vilma? She turned up in the oddest places. Then again, aboard the Nemesis, it was hard not to. The alarm was muted and Blowhard gave a small nod of approval.
"Do you mind? I was listening to that," grumbled Daphne.
"You two," Blowhard addressed Sally and Christian, "help me with the... with him." With an engineer at each leg and the captain at the shoulders, they lifted the investigator and carried him out into the corridor. There they met Wu Oof, still resplendent in her overalls. Offering to help, she took an arm and joined the stagger towards the medbay.
A silence fell upon the group that was even more awkward than their movement. Sally was grimacing; Wu Oof was focussed; Christian was trying not to look at either of them and he felt sick. The captain thought back to the battle before the timeslip, when her first officer fell dead before her eyes. Aside from the bad timing, and the years of little-plastic-rod-pulling expertise he took with him, she couldn't have cared less. She literally couldn't. But now it looked like she might see another death on board her ship - and see it with emotions. How different would it be? It didn't bear thinking about. She decided to distract herself with small talk.
"So, Wu Oof, how's the work going? Bet you feel like you've been doing it your whole life!"
"I have."
"Ha, that's the spirit!"
"And it has always been my honour to serve." Despite the odd circumstances, Wu Oof was flattered by the captain's interest in her. "Ever since I was awarded a position on the Nemesis as your maintenance correctional facilitator engineer, I-"
"You're really getting into character, Wu Oof," remarked Sally admiringly. If she wanted one person other than Cropper to notice her, to respect her, it was Wu Oof. "At this rate you'll be giving up your security chief role!"
"I don't know what you mean. I did dream of being a chief of security, once upon a time, but the Admiralty saw a different purpose for me."
Blowhard frowned. Wu Oof wasn't joking around: she believed what she was saying. Had the bleach gone to her head? The Admiral, the man whose lookalike she was holding, had handpicked her. It was on record. I can't have a delusional security chief on top of everything else, thought Blowhard. Time to settle this.
"Computer. Access the vid of Admiral Lenovo recommending Wu Oof as chief of security, relay to my gauntlet and play."
There was a pause before Daphne replied, "I have no record of that file. What shall I search for next? Commander Cropper's oath of celibacy?"
The group crossed a corridor junction. "Don't be a smart-ass," snapped Blowhard, "just play the file."
"I prefer the term 'genius backside', and I really don't have that file. I've never had that file. Cross my hard drive, Belinda."
The captain sighed, not believing a word of it. Not wanting to believe a word of it. But something made her want to persist. She needed to see that face. "Do you have the vid of the Admiral authorising our mission?"
"Of course I do."
Good. This was a priority file, edit-proof and deletion-proof. This should put at least some of the day's nonsense to rest. "Then play it please."
Blowhard angled her wrist as her gauntlet's display sprouted into life like an instant digital sunrise. She prepared herself for the Admiral's words, the words that had marked the start of this whole crazy adventure.
"The Nemesis is authorised to travel back in time to locate and destroy the Reptids' mothership before they can execute their plans to destroy Earth."
But the man saying them, light-skinned and balding in a particularly Picardesque sort of way, was not the Admiral.
"Stop playback. What the hell is this?"
"It is Admiral Pin," replied Daphne, "giving the Nemesis its mission authorisation. You were there. I'm sure you remember, unless all that chocolate has turned your brain into an Easter egg."
The captain realised. And Sally realised. And Christian realised. And they were worried as hell. They stopped moving. Belinda turned to Wu Oof.
"Wu Oof, that'll be all. You can return to your duties."
"Have I failed you, Captain?"
"No no, you've done sterling body-schlepping work tonight. But I need to review the situation with Sally and Christian. Thank you."
"I know my place," sighed Wu Oof, and passing Blowhard the arm she'd been holding, she trudged off. Once the corridor was clear, Blowhard spoke.
"So just to get things straight... since it does get kind of insane round here... are you guys thinking what I'm thinking?"
"That Admiral Lenovo never lived, because this is his ancestor here and he's about to die?" responded Sally. "And that this is bad?"
"We know this, all three of us, but Wu Oof didn't and Daphne didn't," commented Christian. "We're -" He turned his face towards Sally. "- special. But why?"
Belinda had worked it out. "That-that shower of particles, the danijons. It hit Sally and me, then we brushed some onto you in the molyport room..."
"...And then the man came on board, shot himself and changed the timeline, but we're protected from the changes," finished Sally. What she didn't understand was how the loss of any one admiral be of much consequence, when everyone knew that the Admiralty operated under the guidance of the positronic mainframes on Earth.
"All the big decisions are made by the Admiralty as a whole, like our timeslip, which is why losing Admiral Lenovo hasn't undone that," explained Blowhard. "No single individual in the Admiralty would be given that much power. But Lenovo has an exceptional analytical mind and the Admiralty's trusted him with more freedom than any officer who's gone before. A lot of what makes our ship and crew what it is... what it was... is down to him."
"Like Wu Oof getting picked as our security chief."
"That's right." Belinda looked down at the unconscious face of her lost future. It needed to be found again. "We've got to fix this. We came back in time to stop things being changed, and that's what we're going to do. An innocent man's dying here. Come on."
And soon they reached the medical bay, entrusting the investigator to the care of Nurse Beach, Doctor Taylor and Doctor Striker. If they could save his life, they would rescue a timeline.
