The lift doors slid open with a deep clang, revealing three silhouetted figures. Armed with their bazookoids, Lister and the Cat stepped out first followed by Kryten and his psi-scan, and with a nod of the head from Lister, the trio followed the snaking corridor that led to the Cargo Bay.
The barrel of Lister's bazookoid edged around the corner followed cautiously by Lister himself. The corridor leading to the Cargo Bay doors was silent and empty.
Lister took a steadying breath. "The doors are still open," he said worriedly. "Rimmer hasn't left."
Walking as quietly and carefully as they could, the trio entered the Cargo Bay. The cold, damp air hung in silence, punctuated by the rippling of the water tanks and the underlying bass hum of the ship's engines.
"Rimmer?" Lister hissed softly. He hoped the smegger had still retained his ability to find good hiding places. "Rimmer?"
The Cat stopped suddenly, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air instinctively. "He's here somewhere," he said distantly, "but I can smell something else. Something new." He cocked his bazookoid.
Lister quickly followed suit. "Kryten, you getting anything?"
The psi-scan in the mechanoid's hand began to bleep more rapidly, his plastic features dropping slowly in realisation. He turned to Lister slowly, a terrified squeak emanating involuntarily from his vocal units.
"Simulants?" Lister mouthed.
Kryten nodded.
Lister's quivering finger kept tight against the trigger. "Where?" he mouthed again.
There was a flurry of clicks behind them.
"Ah."
The trio grouped together as the simulants slowly began to creep out of the shadows, gradually surrounding them like a pack of lions. Their shaking bazookoids snapped quickly from one snarling simulant to the next, as they desperately tried to keep them at bay.
"Looking for someone?" called a voice from across the dank expanse of the Cargo Bay, edged with electronic feedback. A tall, foreboding simulant strode up towards them, his face split with a metallic-toothed grin.
Lister's lip curled involuntarily at the simulant's skin that had burned and peeled away from his face, revealing the charred, yet gleaming metal of his skull. The grip on his bazookoid tightened.
"Where is he?" he asked simply.
Pizzak shook his head, disappointed. "Oh, and here's me thinking you sorry lot had come down here to save us the trouble of hunting you down."
Behind him, M'Aiden dragged out a dishevelled looking Rimmer by the scruff of his shirt, hands shackled behind his back. Startled, Lister's hold on his bazookoid relaxed as he immediately moved forward to help, stopped quickly by Chi'Panastee growling threateningly in his path.
"Rimmer, man! Are you ok?" he called out to him.
Rimmer's head lolled, his heavy eyelids blinking slowly. Lister's eyes narrowed suspiciously. He looked far too calm and relaxed as opposed to his usual flapping, panicky self. He'd most likely been drugged.
Riled, Lister aimed his bazookoid towards Pizzak, the Cat quickly copying him. "Alright, ya ugly smegger," he growled. "If you don't let him go right now and smeg off back to wherever the hell you came from, we're gonna fill you with more holes than a colander."
Amused, Pizzak waved off the circle of snarling simulants. "With those boys toys?" he grinned, nodding to the bazookoids. He began his slow, purposeful approach, gradually closing the gap between them. "I'd like to see you try."
With a mutual nod, Lister and the Cat fired a volley of rounds at the simulant as he strode towards them, hitting him repeatedly in the head and chest. Pizzak blinked in mild annoyance, as if he were being plagued by gnats that he couldn't be bothered to swat at. As he stood silently, barely a foot away from Lister, he pursed his lips at the series of hollow clicks that signalled he was out of options.
Pizzak seized Lister tightly by the throat and hauled him up to face height. Immediately dropping the bazookoid, Lister grabbed onto the simulant's impossibly strong forearm, his boots kicking wildly in thin air as he struggled to breathe.
"I love the ones that fight back," Pizzak enthused as Lister slowly turned purple. He raised his head to address the Cat without diverting his eyes at the delicious sight of the human squirming helplessly in his grasp. "You better drop your weapon rather swiftly if you don't wish your friend here to suffocate," he chided.
The Cat hissed, baring his gleaming white fangs before dropping his bazookoid, which Chi'Panastee immediately snatched out of his reach. True to his word, Pizzak reluctantly dropped Lister into a crumpled heap by his feet, smirking as he wheezed painfully before scrabbling backwards to join the others.
Pizzak's one remaining grey eye narrowed, the other still gleaming red. "We have been naughty, haven't we?" he tutted. "Not only do you give us a less than friendly welcome, and have the front to hide the Jadestone from us –"
With a tilt of the head, he gestured behind him to M'Aiden who dragged Rimmer over and shoved him forward. Still woozy, he immediately lost his balance and unable to break his fall, landed hard face-first beside Pizzak's feet.
" – you seem to think that it's acceptable to harbour a wanted criminal," the simulant snarled.
Lister scowled at Pizzak. The man was hardly a criminal. He hadn't so much as returned a library book late.
"I'm not a patient droid as I'm sure this pathetic excuse for a hero will testify," Pizzak growled as Rimmer moaned softly into the floor. "Seeing as you humans seem to have the IQ of a plantpot, I'll make this simple enough for you to understand." He shifted into a tone usually associated with speaking to children or tourists. "Either you tell us where you're hiding the Jadestone, or," a dangerous smile inched across Pizzak's face, "we'll extract the information we require the hard way."
"Lister, be careful," Rimmer mumbled, his tongue still fuzzy. He was damn sure that the others wouldn't be overly enamoured with experiencing the 'interview methods' of these dangerously unstable droids. "You don't know what they're capable of."
Lister stared back hard at Pizzak's leer. "I know all too well what simulants are capable of," he replied tightly, furious that even after most likely killing the rest of the Red Dwarf crew in cold blood, he could still carry a smile on his face. "They're murderous, underhanded, and have a worse reputation for honesty than an American politician."
Rimmer was stunned. Why was he always the last to know these bloody things? Here they were, face to face with cybernautic killing machines, and Lister seemed completely unflustered. Were they on each other's Christmas card lists or something?
Pizzak grinned coyishly. "You give me far too much credit, human." His eyes dropped to Rimmer wheezing on the floor by his feet. "Your friend Ace here doesn't seem to appreciate our efforts."
Lister's eyes widened. Ace? He snatched a look at Rimmer, whose face contorted from confusion to dreaded realisation.
"Look man, you've clearly got the wrong dimension," Lister reasoned evenly, his arm extended outwards whilst keeping perfectly still, as if addressing a rattlesnake he'd just disturbed whilst on the job. "First off, we don't know what the hell this Jadestone thingamy is – "
Jadestone. The word tugged at the dark recesses of Rimmer's mind, attempting to dislodge a long-forgotten memory that somehow wouldn't shift.
"And secondly, that man is definitely not Ace." Lister's eyes flitted back to Rimmer, who returned his gaze with an unreadable expression.
Pizzak blinked in surprise, exchanging glances with the other simulants before returning to Lister in a flash of inspiration. "Ah, but you referred to this human as 'Rimmer'," he replied triumphantly. He grabbed Rimmer by the dark brown curls of his hair and hauled him up to his knees, proffering him to Lister for inspection. "His face is identical to our records. This man is Ace Rimmer."
Lister regarded Rimmer sadly. His usually immaculate khaki uniform was rucked and crumpled, his tie was undone, and his earlier fall had given him a rather nasty split lip. Rimmer stared back hard, trying to keep his wincing to a minimum as the stimulant tugged roughly at his hair.
He shook his head mournfully. "No he's not," he said quietly. "He's not Ace."
Normally, Rimmer would have been more than happy for Lister to counter any form of mistaken identity, especially if it prevented some rather painful repercussions. Yet something in Lister's words hurt harder than any session with M'Aiden and his instruments of torturous delight could ever inflict.
Many years before, when Rimmer's predecessor had been attacked by the polymorph, the creature had done what came naturally to it when feeding from its prey. It had awoken the greatest defining emotion and then drained it. Unlike Lister, it hadn't been fear – fear of being the last human alive in the entire universe, fear he'd never get back home to Earth – but anger. Anger derived from all of the built-up, harnessed repression and cruelty he'd experienced throughout his life. The abuse he'd suffered as a child, the injustice of all the times he'd been passed over for promotion, and of course, the ultimate irony of his untimely death.
The nano Rimmer carried the same pent-up anger as his predecessor. He had all the same memories, all of the same drives, except he'd lived day after day, year after miserable year, with a different, overriding torture. He wasn't even the person he thought he was, but rather a carbon copy of someone long gone. For years, he'd silently existed in a dead man's shadow, and when it came down to the competition to be Arnold J. Rimmer, he'd come second.
And something instinctive deep inside finally snapped.
Rimmer's face hardened. "Yes I am."
"See?" Lister implored. "Even he says he – " Lister's face dropped in realisation. "is?"
Rimmer didn't break his charged stare with Lister. "He was lying to cover for me," he continued, his voice devoid of emotion.
The Cat turned to Kryten, confused. "Did someone just turn over two pages at once?"
Lister shook his head loosely at the simulant, his mouth hanging open. "No, no, he's lying," he cried desperately. If the simulants accepted that he was Ace, they'd take him away and most likely grant him a rather miserable execution. Lister's face regained control, as he spoke pointedly to Rimmer. "You're head's still a bit funny. You don't know what you're saying, right?"
Ignoring Lister's desperate, coded messages, Rimmer swallowed. "And not only that," he said slowly. "I can also give you the Jadestone."
Pizzak's features relaxed as he released his grip on Rimmer's head. "I see you've finally come to your senses, Mr. Rimmer!"
Lister's stomach knotted. If the simulants had wanted something badly enough to cross dimensions to get it, it had to be something of great value, and his Rimmer had probably known it. If this Rimmer was throwing out a bluff, it was one hell of a bluff.
"One condition," Rimmer added quickly. "You've got to promise to let us go once you have it. Deal?"
Pizzak's features chewed over the proposition before his eyes turned directly to Lister. "Deal," he echoed with a distant smile.
Lister's eyes narrowed. There was something deeply unsettling in the simulant's smile that sent a shiver up his spine. He hoped that Rimmer had some fantastically brilliant plan up his sleeve. Either that or the coward was planning on doing a runner.
Pizzak stepped back, satisfied. "We'll wait here until you return. My friend M'Aiden will escort you to the Jadestone's hiding place. Chi, D'Jhun! Guard the door."
M'Aiden gleefully grabbed Rimmer by the scruff of the neck, hauled him to his feet and shoved him towards the Cargo Bay doors. "Lead the way, Mr. Rimmer," he grinned.
Lister watched as Chi'Panastee and D'Jhun Keep followed, locking down the doors behind them. Without Rimmer, they were going nowhere.
**********
Rimmer's mind raced as M'Aiden herded him hurriedly down the never-ending maze of corridors. As his thoughts began to regain clarity as the Propofol drained from his system, he realised that he clearly hadn't thought this through very well. After all, there was nothing to stop these crazed, murderous droids from taking him back to their ship and testing out their shiny new range of scalpels or something equally horrific.
The pair stopped at the service lift and M'Aiden jabbed at the 'call' button. As they waited, the simulant leant into Rimmer's ear, and he flinched visibly.
"Ohh I'm going to have so much fun with you, my friend," he purred in his ear.
Rimmer felt a rush of nausea. He had a sneaking suspicion that his definition of 'fun' was rather different. As the lift arrived at their floor, Rimmer silently cursed why it had arrived so much swifter than it usually did. The lifts on Red Dwarf were usually as speedy as Holly's calculations. The last time they'd asked Holly what the distance was to the next sector, Kryten had to fetch a second round of tea before they had the answer they required.
However, when the doors slid open, his knees almost buckled in shock. He was staring into a face identical to his own. The man's gun was already extended towards M'Aiden's head.
"Howdy," he said to the simulant with a flick of the eyebrow, then pulled the trigger.
