Red Dwarf characters owned by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and Blackadder characters by Richard Grant and Ben Elton.
With thanks to Cmar for beta reading this for me!
Also thanks to Sunrise over the Tango factory, Cazflibs, Cmar, Radar-fox, Cyborg-Garfield, happyhooligan2001 and Ace Trax for the reviews so far! All very much appreciated! All reviews welcome
Chapter Seven – The Red Adder
Blackadder felt like he was hitting his head against a wall. To be honest, for Blackadder it was a metaphorical wall; for Baldrick it was a real one.
Baldrick rubbed his head and stopped headbutting the wall. "Is that enough, sir?" he said in a weak voice.
"No, carry on." Blackadder sauntered out of the cockpit and back to the main room of the Starbug where the others were waiting. The sound of banging carried on, but getting fainter and fainter. "You're not trying enough!"
"Sorry sir!" The sound of banging carried on but louder this time.
"Right, Kryten, so basically you fouled up."
Kryten nodded.
"In fact it is of a level with the Captain of the Titanic, who said 'let's not go round this iceberg, let's go through it!'"
Kryten nodded again.
"Well, I suppose it's up to me to save the universe then." Blackadder skilfully pressed a few buttons and the Starbug winked into existence next to the Space Station. The station was now so covered in green Starbugs it looked like it had a particularly bad case of acne. "I mean, how difficult can it be to stop Balders? You cretins would be hard pressed to save a house plant, let alone a planet. If you can stay out of trouble for just a short time, I will go and save the universe. God knows why," he muttered to himself, "What's the universe ever done for me except saddle me with a bunch of half witted incompetents who've lost the only brain cell they were sharing?"
They were starting to run out of places to enter the space station so they had to choose the air conditioning.
As this was a space station, and as we all know from films it's a wonder any air travels round at all, since they are chock full of burly heroes in vests with unfeasibly large guns and nasty aliens. Blackadder was unable to carry on along the air conditioning because of a big battle going on between Mary Poppins, for some reason, and an alien (Blackadder had unwittingly wandered into another crossover, this one with Mary Poppins versus the Aliens).
"Spoon full of sugar, my bottom!" said Mary Poppins. "Eat radioactive death, alien!"
Blackadder sighed to himself. This is what happens when writers drink too much caffeine. He had to take a right turn down a garbage chute to avoid this. Now, considering that Blackadder and a sunny disposition are as likely to be seen together as the contents of the Big Brother house and sanity, he was not happy when he finally crawled his way into the station.
There was a tapping sound in the trapdoor in the kitchens and some rather inventive swearing coming from it. After a bit of helpful kicking, the door fell in and a smelly and bedraggled Blackadder saw the light.
In this case, the light was that carried by the security team that was investigating the noise. They had of course split up to do this, and the one security guard who happened to find Blackadder had just decided to ask his girlfriend to marry him just before he left.
Blackadder looked up to see a rather large gun pointing at his head.
"Don't move, pal," said the guard.
"Don't worry, he's with me," said Blackadder, pointing behind him into the blackness of the garbage chute and dusting himself off. Several banana peels and an old pack of Golden Wonder crisps fell off his head.
"Who is?" the guard said, peering into the black hole.
"You wait here for him," said Blackadder, and was just about to stroll off when another guard appeared.
"Who are you? What are you doing crawling out of the rubbish?"
"I'm Commander The Lord Blackadder of the Space Corp, who are you?"
"I'm Sergeant Neville, sir."
"Well, Neville, you should be questioning your colleague, he seems to have gone mad since he's staring into that hole." Blackadder pointed at the other guard who was staring short-sightedly into the garbage hole as he had ordered him to.
There was the sound of several dozen heavy-booted guards running round the corner. Blackadder pointed at the original guard. "Guard him! I don't want him to move!"
"Right, sir."
"You," said Blackadder, pointing at one of the other guards. "Find where Eighty-ninth Level Technician Baldrick is." He looked at his watch (they had to create a whole new subsection of Technician for Baldrick, he ranks just under a used toilet brush). "I need to know now!"
"You're an officer, aren't you sir, can't you find out?"
"I'm undercover."
"You're under rubbish," said the guard, brushing what he hoped was an apple core out of Blackadder's beard. "What's this about, sir?"
"Security check, hop to it!"
Blackadder rubbed his hands together and for once was quite happy. This was how you saved the world; you got other people to do it for you.
"Yes sir, at once, sir."
Blackadder handed him a comlink. "I want this kept top secret as well. You're not to tell anyone. When you find him report back to me on this, not on the ship's com. It is a secure channel to me only."
The security guard gave him a crisp salute. "Yes sir!"
"I'm just off to get tidied up. Carry on, sergeant."
Where would that idiot Baldrick be?
Where would a small, smelly man who was descended from dung beetles be?
Blackadder strolled nonchalantly down the corridor. First of all he needed to clean himself up. The officers' mess, they had a bathroom there! He strolled into the place. Oh no, there's Captain Darling.
"Hello Darling," said Blackadder. "What are you doing here? I thought you would be too busy counting paper clips to be here."
Darling looked at him quizzically. "How did you do that, Blackadder?"
"Do what?"
"You just walked into the kitchen over there." Darling waved a hand over at the small kitchenette in the corner from which could be heard somebody hitting Baldrick. Or to be more specific, someone who sounded like Blackadder. Or to be precise, it was Blackadder, the past one.
It was his past self! If he bumped into him he could end it all; the universe could implode.
He needed a distraction! He grabbed a wine glass from the side and tripped up, spilling red wine on the carpet in front of Darling. "Clumsy me! I'll just get a cloth! Bye!" Blackadder scooted out of the room quickly.
Seconds later, the past Blackadder walked into the room followed by Baldrick. Captain Darling was looking even more confused than before. "You just spilt wine on the carpet and walked out that door!"
Blackadder looked at Darling quizzically. "Should I talk to the nurse about doubling your pills again?"
"I don't take any pills!"
"Well, it's high time you started."
The tannoy blared out. "Admiral Rimmer has entered the station. He might be inspecting the base. Everywhere must be clean and tidy!"
"Bugger." Blackadder looked down at the red stain on the white carpet. "Sort it out, Balders, I'm off."
"Certainly, sir." Baldrick looked at the carpet. It was only a small red stain, should be easy to sort out. I mean, what's the worst that can happen?
The current Blackadder scampered out of the Officer's Mess. Must hide! Must hide!
He could just see his past self leave the room, so he opened the first door he found. It swished open and swished shut behind him. It is a physical impossibility to ever hide from someone in a film or a book by opening a door and walking into an empty room. If it is a fifties or sixties film it would have a lecture in it for them to try to fake, a seventies film - a porn film in the making, an eighties film - half a dozen terrorists to fight, a nineties film would be empty apart from an egg whisk with which to fight the aliens.
Blackadder looked behind him cautiously to see General Melchett. He was in the command centre of the space station. It was a huge room filled with technicians looking at screens and pressing buttons. Melchett was looking quizzically at a screen that was showing Admiral Rimmer walking onto the base.
Melchett was looking stressed. His moustache was twitching like a mouse on acid. He turned around to look at Blackadder. "Hello Blackadder, wasn't expecting to see you here." He pointed a finger at the screen. "Do you know who this chap is? The only Arnold Rimmer we have on files is currently degunking chicken soup machines on a Space Corp mining vessel."
"Yes, he's a very important Admiral, very important. Indeed. Yes. He's the most importanist man in history," said Blackadder, floundering. A flounder is a small brown fish with goggly eyes, and curiously, Blackadder's face was very similar to this now.
The screen above showing Rimmer dissolved, and a huge disembodied head of a fat man with glasses appeared. "Oi mush," said Pete the Base Computer.
"What?" said Melchett, looking up.
"Yeah mush. You, Faucet or whatever you're called?"
"It's Melchett. You're a computer with an IQ of 12,000, how can you forget what I'm called?" asked Melchett.
"Whatever. My sensors are picking up weirdness."
"What do you mean, weirdness?"
Blackadder was backing out slowly. "Well, I'd best be off to see Admiral Rimmer!" Blackadder pointed at the door. "You know, welcome him aboard sort of thing!"
"Weirdness, you know, something odd, strange, bizarre. I'm detecting duplicate people aboard and some people who shouldn't be aboard at all!"
"What the devil do you mean? This is not one of those jokes, is it? Like that time you told me clothes were banned and I walked into the meeting of the Space Corp Executive totally naked with a sign round my neck saying John Thomas?"
The pixelised man giggled at this. "No, not like that. There are duplicate people about."
"Duplicate people? What do you mean, copies? Who?"
"Like him," said Pete, nodding towards Blackadder who was slinking towards the door. "Beardy sarcastic bloke. Slackdagger or whatever his name is, there's more than one of him. And I've got a few people on the sensors who should be on Red Dwarf, although the Dwarf has just started accelerating as there has been an accident on board, so god knows how they got here. There is also a contingent of guards who should be on the Gelf deck keeping the Gelfs in check and they are guarding a rubbish chute for some reason. They say Commander Blackadder ordered them to do it."
Pete cocked his head to one side whilst he concentrated on something. "The Gelf deck has just been evacuated due to a minor beard-related incident. There is no-one guarding the Gelfs. Slackbladder has just prepared the way for a possible disaster of Earth-eating proportions."
"What do you mean?" asked Melchett.
"If those Gelfs escape, the human race will be looking for a new planet to inhabit."
"Blackadder!" roared Melchett. "You'll get stasis for this!"
"It's always stressful moving house, isn't it?" sighed Pete. "You nearly always forget something important, like a kettle, the keys, or the address you are moving to."
Blackadder scampered out of the control room. I always wondered why I got put into stasis as well as Baldrick, he thought.
Things were not going well. In fact, on the scale of things, with ten being good and one being bad, they would be on minus several million and there would be several dozen mathematicians and about forty super-computers looking for new numbers to tack on the end of the scale.
"Commander Blackadder?" His comlink buzzed.
"Yes?"
"This is the guard contingent. We have found Baldrick, sir."
"Thank god, something is going right today. Keep him there, don't let him get away!"
"Yes sir!"
Klaxons started erupting around the ship as the Gelfs were given their freedom.
"Bugger!"