Hi everyone! Here's another piece of the final act of this story! Sorry I've been taking so very long getting this conclusion written. I really wanted my first post from my brand new computer to be the finale of this story, but with so little time to write lately it was just taking too long to pull it off. So, here's the middle section of the last part before the Epilogue. I hope you enjoy it! :)
Chapter Seventeen
While Rimmer marched dutifully past the mansion's border hedge toward the soaring party tents and expansive marble dais where his parents held court, John and Howard held their weapons close, their eyes scanning the clusters of prominent guests and gossip-hungry reporters for any sign of their quarry.
"They shouldn't be this hard to spot," Howard complained, grabbing a handful of hors d'oeuvres from a passing droid's tray. "A ratty group of space bums like that would never blend into this crowd. Maybe they're still in the house?"
John reached over and plucked the miniature quiche and sausage rolls from his brother's hand, absently popping them in his own mouth before Howard could think to protest.
"Harris and the general have gone to monitor the security system," John spoke around his mouthful. "If those saboteurs are anywhere inside, they'll spot them." He swallowed. "Still, though we may have superior tech on our side, we shouldn't forget what mother says."
"What does she say?"
"'Even apes use tools,'" John quoted. "Translation: those Nehbees can be pretty cunning when they want to be. Ah—!" He pointed toward the marble dais with his blaster. "And there they are…"
"I still say these disguises just ain't gonna work!" the Cat protested, pulling irritably at the high, starched collar of the white pastry chef's coat that (mostly) concealed his own flashy ensemble.
"It won't if you keep taking off your chef hat!" Lister said, snatching the tall, pleated baker's toque from Cat's hands and shoving it down over his meticulously styled pompadour.
The Cat hissed and ducked away.
"Hey, monkey, watch the hair!"
"Keep it down," Kochanski snapped from behind them. "If anything gives us away, it'll be your puerile bickering, not these outfits!"
"Easy for you to say, bud," the Cat said. "Look at me! I look like Dr. Frankenstein's assistant in this thing!"
"Give it a break, man," Lister grunted. "Rimmer's gotta confront his parents, an' we've gotta be there for him when he does. That's what this entire trip's been about!"
Cat snorted.
"The whole idea is crazy," Cat protested. "Goalpost Head ain't even here. An', just look at this guy!" He pointed his thumb at Frank, who was doing his best to keep the majority of his gorilla-esque bulk behind the multi-tiered, elaborately decorated anniversary cake he and Kryten were wheeling toward his parents' table. "He looks like a furry marshmallow that's been melting under a car seat all summer."
Lister had to admit the Cat had a point. It had taken a lot to force that chef's coat around Frank's warped frame back in the kitchen and, now that he was moving, the seams seemed about ready to burst. Buttons strained dangerously across his wide chest, long, hairy wrists stuck way out from too-tight sleeves, and his bulging gut protruded awkwardly over his slacks.
"OK, maybe the coats the kitchen droids gave us are a touch too small," he allowed. "But, don't forget: General Head-Case and Rimmer's brothers are looking for a GELF, not a chef."
"Think of it as camouflage," Kochanski offered. "It's human nature that people see what they expect to see, given a certain context. Case in point: if they see people in white coats wheeling out a fancy cake like this, it follows they must be bakers. Not spies or mad scientists."
"Oh yeah?" the Cat countered, his sharp eyes fixed on the crowd. "Then, if these camouflage disguises are so great, how do you explain those guys?"
"Which guys—?" Kochanski started.
Lister blinked, and swore.
"Smeg – get down!" he cried, Jupiter's filtered light glinting off the barrel of Howard's blaster as he fired.
The Cat ducked low with the speed and grace of a lion in long grass; Kochanski, Kryten and Lister stumbled back…
Frank never saw it coming.
Just a glimpse of polished marble rising up to meet his face as a tall, rather lanky man in a gray uniform made a dramatic, running leap onto the marble dais, using his momentum to shove the GELF aside—
And catch the laser bolt with his own chest.
The man stumbled backwards into the cake as a second bolt followed the first, exploding the elaborate confection into a showering fountain of fondant, filling, and crumbs.
"Ace!" Kochanski cried, her voice chorusing with Lister's and Kryten's as Rimmer's image flickered violently, then began to fade. "Rimmer! Mr. Rimmer, sir!"
"Damn," Howard grunted, wincing at the sight of the anniversary cake's scattered remains.
John slapped the back of his brother's head.
"Idiot," he said. "How could you miss a target that huge?"
"Don't blame me," Howard protested. "That hairy mutant would be out for the count if that lunatic hadn't made his swan-dive directly into my shot. Who was that anyway? And, what the smeg was that flickery sort of light after he fell?"
"I'm heading back to the general to check the surveillance video," John said, shooting a wary glance at the chaos erupting on and around the dais. Everywhere, guests were screaming, camera droids were hovering, and reporters were literally keeping up a running commentary as they jogged backwards to stay in the shot. "I don't intend to get caught in Mother's line of fire for your SNAFU move."
"My—! But-but you ordered—" Howard choked, too incensed by his brother's blame-shifting weaseling to come up with a suitable retort. By the time he could speak again, his older brother had already scarpered.
"Typical," he muttered and arched his nostrils, jogging defeatedly after him.
Arnold Rimmer, age nearly eight and a half, stood fidgeting at the edge of the marble dais in front of the main gardens, lined up beside his brothers in order from oldest to youngest. Thanks to the torturous sessions on their father's jury-rigged 'stretching' machine, John and Frank were already as tall as adults, with young Howard and Arnold standing more than a foot shorter…though still awkwardly tall for their age.
"Smegging Space Corps with their smegging minimum height requirements," their diminutive pater could often be heard muttering as he wandered the grounds beneath the dome, squirrel gun in hand. "Reject me, will they? Utter nonsense! Napoleon would never have stood for it, and neither shall I. Hear that, you fluffy-tailed rodent bastard! Those damn recruiters can take their height requirements and shove them. Now, stand still and take your squirrel-shot like a man!"
At this moment, the Rimmer boys' small, balding father stood stiffly beside their much taller mother, the two of them facing their four sons like a pair of drill sergeants inspecting a particularly uninspiring batch of raw recruits. Mrs. Rimmer held a slip of paper in her hand that had the rather ominous shape and slightly green tint of an Io House progress report.
Arnold swallowed hard, already certain it could only be his…
"I've summoned you boys here for a reason," their mother said grimly, fixing each boy in turn with a laser beam glare, pin-point focused through her thick-rimmed glasses. "I have something of vital importance to say to you, and although I've been saying it at least twice a week for the past four years, I fear my words have failed to penetrate through a certain bony head."
None of the boys dared to groan, though Arnold seemed to shrink slightly in his green school uniform.
Their mother slapped the paper against her palm, pacing up and down the line as she continued her speech.
"You boys know quite well that you are counted among the most privileged children in the solar system, never mind the Outer Rim. That privilege implies more than mere material wealth – it means power. Standing. Our voices carry weight few others wield, and we enjoy opportunities open only to the crème of the crème of humanity. But wealth, influence and power are, in themselves, great responsibilities, and your father and I did not engineer you boys to be shirkers."
Arnold shrank even further, his thumbs twiddling awkwardly behind his back as she went on.
"There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything in life: to act, to think, to stand, and yes – even to breathe. You know this. You know that, to be a success, you must always hold yourselves to the highest standards. If you fail to hold up your end, if you fritter away the golden opportunities your father and I have provided for you, you sully not only yourselves, not only your father and me – you sully the Family Name. I've told you often enough that our Family Name is only as good as quality of its members, and I have paid off enormous sums to ensure our gene pool is of the highest quality available. I have spent my entire life carrying you lot to the ziggurat's top. Up ever higher, lickety split. It is now your responsibility to do the same. It is your duty, as a member of the Rimmer Family, to excel. Remember this well, my little Judas..."
She stared directly at Arnold, then thwacked his head with the rolled-up progress report so hard the resulting paper cut scarred his jaw.
"Failure is not an option!"
The little light bee shimmered and twinkled under mounds of chocolate crumbs and frosting.
"What is that?" Admiral Rimmer demanded, coldly surveying the cake carnage from inside a protective circle of uniformed body guards and soldiers. They'd popped out of the woodwork like whack-a-moles mere moments after the shots were fired and immediately arrested the rather suspicious-looking group of pastry chefs that had been wheeling the cake toward her table. "You – Sergeant! Dispose of that thing at once. It could be another grenade."
"No-no-no!" the Dwarfers chorused, struggling desperately against their electronic bonds.
"You dare contradict me?"
"As long as you need contradictin', yeah," Lister said, smirking slightly at the familiar way her nostrils arched in outrage. Kochanski hissed in exasperation, but Lister easily ignored her. "We keep tellin' ya, there wasn't any grenade! That there's called a light bee. It projects a solid image made of light. That's all!"
"Of course it is," she said. "And you're all time travelers from the future, brought here by a dimension-hopping space ship to lay waste to a major social event that has been literally years in the making." The admiral's voice was as sharp and cold as ice shards off a frozen pond.
"That wasn't what we meant," Kochanski protested. "Please, if you'll just let us go, we can explain—"
"I'm not interested in your explanations," the admiral snarled. "You have absolutely no—"
"Excuse the interruption, Admiral, but you may want to take a look at this," the sergeant said, rising from the cake's ruins with the frosted light bee in his hand. "Honestly, ma'am, it's like nothing I've ever seen before. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was—"
"Alien?" Rimmer's father asked warily.
The sergeant looked uncomfortable.
"Please, dear, I'm handling this," the admiral scolded, shooing her husband back toward the table. "Do go on, Sergeant. What would you say it is?"
"It's future tech," Lister broke in. "Like Kryten, here. That's why you can't place it. That little light bee won't be invented for millions of years yet."
"Actually, sir, we don't know exactly when Legion invented that device," Kryten said. "It could have been only thousands of years from now, or merely hundreds."
"Either way," Lister said, "it belongs to our friend Ace, and we'd like to have it back."
The admiral's eyes flashed darkly behind her glasses.
"Do you think I'm stupid?"
"Not a chance," Lister said, shuffling closer despite the stinging jolts from his energy shackles. "It's just, you don't know how to handle the thing. The way the sergeant is holding it is completely wrong. If you'll just let me—"
He reached out and pressed the light bee's silvery reset button, and the sergeant jumped back in alarm as the little device rose into the air. A blinding flash forced them all to blink and turn their heads. By the time they could see again, Rimmer was standing in the light bee's place, staring around the cake-splatted dais in bewilderment.
"Smeg, it wasn't a dream," he groaned. "I really am back on Io."
"'Fraid so," Lister said, unable to keep from grinning. "But, are you OK, man? No damage from that blaster fire?"
"Diagnostics say the ol' light bee is tickety-boo," Rimmer said, and Lister actually chuckled.
The startled sergeant reached for his blaster, but the admiral waved him down.
"And just exactly what are you supposed to be...Private Rimmer?" she demanded, glaring down her nose at the name printed on his uniform.
Not long ago, a glare like that would have had the power to send Rimmer into fits of self-loathing fury from eighty paces away. But standing on that dais, seeing the ruined cake, his friends and his mutated brother shackled and surrounded by soldiers and guards…he just wasn't feeling it. Instead of shrinking in intimidation, he found himself staring straight back at her, his expression completely blank.
Slowly, in one smooth, simultaneous motion, he came to attention and raised his arm, circling his wrist several times in front of the confused admiral before bringing it back toward his forehead for a full Rimmer salute.
Only when the salute threatened to go on forever did she realize she was supposed to return it.
"That's Ace Rimmer, ma'am," he said, finishing the salute and snapping his arm back to his side. "Formerly Second Technician Arnold J. Rimmer of the JMC mining vessel Red Dwarf. Current assignment: Commander of the Space Corps DJ prototype Wildfire. Current status: Hologram."
He smiled a very dry little smile as he watched her expression change from anger and befuddlement to something more like horrified nausea.
"No..." she whispered. "But...you can't be—"
"Actually, I can," he said. "Three million years, I've been avoiding this place. But, your little Judas has finally returned to the old home dome."
He smirked.
"Happy anniversary, Mother."
To Be Continued...
Next Time: The GELF confrontation! Stay Tuned, and thank you so much for your reviews! :D