"Arnold Rimmer"

It whispered again,

"Do not react. If you do, I will destroy you where you stand"

Rimmer's heart was beating so hard and fast he was surprised the rest of the crew didn't hear it. He wondered if his light bee was malfunctioning.

"If you move as much as an inch…"

"Rimmer man, check yer screen!" Lister called from his seat.

Rimmer had only turned to look when a blinding pain seared through his head and then coursed through the rest of his body.

"I said DO NOT move!"

"It's fine," Rimmer quivered faintly, "Nothing…"

Lister turned his attention back to the others, noting that Rimmer looked even paler than usual, but putting it down to their current situation.

"I can hear them but they can't hear me, how fun this is too see…"

The voice did not sound all together sane. In fact, it didn't sound sane at all. It laughed; it was a piercing sound like shattering glass.

"We are holograms just like you; do you want to see what we can do?"

At that moment, the cockpit doors slammed shut behind Rimmer and he cowered in the corner.

"What the smeg?" Lister hurried over to the doors, "Wha? They won't open!"

"Try a manual override Sir!" Kryten called.

Lister began to punch a code in.

"No, no, no, no, no,"

The voice tutted,

"He's spoiling my fun, stupid human. You, stop him now."

Rimmer mutely shook his head, heart still hammering in his chest.

"Such a shame you won't obey, if that's the case you can learn the hard way…"

Another pain, even worse than the one before, surged through his body like an electrical charge.

"Lister! Stop!"

"What?" Lister hesitated, "Rimmer, you okay?"

"You're fine."

"I- I'm fine…" The hard-light stuttered.

"You'll do it."

"I- I'll do it…"

"Leave it."

"Cheers man," Lister sat in the Cat's seat and took the controls. Kryten was trying to figure out why Holly had mysteriously disappeared from the screen, and the Cat was stalking around the room.

The voice laughed again,

"What a stupid human. We wouldn't want anything terribly hideous to happen to him would we? No…"

Somehow, Rimmer knew what it was about to do, "Lister! Get away from there!"

"Wha?" Just as Lister moved away, the control panel exploded in a brilliant flash of sparks, "Smeg!"

"How dare you!"

The voice shrieked,

This time, the pain made Rimmer cry out and clutch his head, and the room began to spin.

"Leave me alone!" he shouted, staggering forward and clutching the nearby console.

The red alert siren was wailing and the cockpit descended into turmoil; doors slammed, panels exploded, things flew across the room and electrics sparked.

"I think our only hope's Ghost Busters!" Cat yowled.

"Stop it!" Rimmer yelled.

Lister was standing in the middle of it all, not knowing what the smeg to do, "Rimmer man, what's wrong?"

"Stop smegging hurting me!" the hard-light cried.

"Sirs!" Kryten exclaimed. He had managed to get an outside view on one of the screens, "It a holoship!"

An enormous, shimmering black ship was looming over Starbug.

"Smeg…" Lister murmured, in awe.

Cat dodged sparks and grabbed the controls, "We're logged out and changing course!"

And then suddenly, everything

Stopped.

Things flying about crashed to the floor, and the consoles spat out their last feeble sparks.

Rimmer swayed and sank to the floor, but Lister half caught him and helped him into his seat.

"Hey, you okay Rimsy?" he put a leather-gloved hand on his bunkmate's shoulder.

Rimmer closed his eyes faintly.

"Mr Rimmer, what happened?" Kryten asked.

Rimmer shook his head slowly.

Lister gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, "S'okay…"

Rimmer didn't think he'd ever been so terrified in his life, but being Rimmer, he probably had. He put his head down on the console in front of him.

"Oh, eh?" Lister wasn't exactly too sure how to reassure him, "…Yer alright now man…"

"I still can't get control!" Cat called, "We're gonna be headin' straight for them!"

The Boys from the Dwarf didn't know quite what to do first.

In the end, it resulted in Kryten continuing to try and bring Holly back online, Cat wrestling with the controls and Lister trying to find out what was wrong with Rimmer.

"This is crazy!" Cat snarled, "It's like we're being pulled in!"

"Almost done now Sirs!" Kryten told them, shoving a cable back into the socket, "We may be able to get away with Holly's help!"

"Why am I not reassured?" Cat grumbled.

Lister could be heard talking to Rimmer in the background:

"An' whot did ya hear? Oh, eh... I dunno meself…"

"Ah-ha!" If they had been in a less dicey situation, Kryten would have launched smug-mode, "Welcome back online Holly!"

Holly was bemused and blinking, "What happened there then?"

Lister said something else to Rimmer and then took his seat at the front, "Hol, can ya sort out the controls and get us away from here?"

"Might be able to, 'ang about," Holly replied, as if this sort of thing was run-of-the-mill for them, and so were such queries.

"Arnold…"

Rimmer froze.

"What was our little agreement? No moving? You can't run away from us…"

Rimmer wanted nothing more than to scuttle away into a corner like a space-weevil and hide. Instead, he went to stand closer to the others, as if the voice wouldn't be able to get to him.

"What part of 'no moving' did your neurotic mess of a brain not understand?"

The voice hissed with its hint of insanity.

Rimmer swayed and grabbed Lister and the Cat's shoulders as he almost fell forwards into the control panel.

"Wha-?" the Scouser frowned, taken by surprise.

"What the hell are you doing Goalpost Head?" Cat's defined eyebrows shot into an angry frown.

Lister sighed, "If we can jus' get away for a minute even, we can think…"

"Here we are dudes," Holy said, "Try and move her away,"

"I wouldn't do that Arnold, bad idea…"

"Plottin' a course," Lister said, trying to make out what he could from the damaged screens.

"Engaging reheat bud,"

"Don't say you weren't warned."

Rimmer ran from the room and down the corridor.

Lister sighed and the Cat frowned, guiding Starbug away.

That's when they were hit. A powerful smash that sent the Cat and Lister hurtling forwards in their seats and Kryten whacking into the console he sat behind.

The way they felt, the red alert siren may as well have been screaming, 'Panic, panic, panic, panic!'

"S3 Planetoid thirty clicks away Sirs!" Kryten called over the noise, "Fairly normal climate!"

The Cat didn't even have to look at the damaged damage report machine to know they were going down.

The first thing Lister saw when he opened his eyes was Kryten's angular face.

"Oh Sir!" the Mechanoid squealed, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah man course," Lister sat up slowly, "Ya know me; tough as old space boots me,"

"Look at my hair!" Cat wailed, "This is an emergency, I'm never gonna get the tangles out!"

The cockpit looked like a herd of drunken, swashbuckling, mad, rabid, pillaging GELFs had rollerbladed through it. Lister took one look around him and reached for his emergency cigarettes.

"Gordon Bennet," Holly swept his eyes around the remains of the cockpit, "It's absolutely heinous! I won't tell you about the engine room now I've seen this,"

Lister closed his eyes and blew a perfect circle of smoke into the air, "Will someone please explain to me, in layman's terms, what the smeg is goin' on…?"

"I'll do my best Sir," Kryten said, "Although my knowledge chip is a little frazzled myself…" he pondered where to start for a few seconds whilst Lister leaned back and smoked and the Cat desperately brushed his hair.

"What was wrong with Mr Rimmer for a start Sir?" The mechanoid began.

"He was hearin' voices," Lister replied in another puff of smoke. What with the rest of what had gone on, he said it with no bemusement, but it did bring him around to wondering where his bunkmate was.

"So what's new?" Cat raised his eyebrows.

"Okay, I think I've gathered a reasonable explanation for all of this Sirs," Kryten announced, "What with it being a holoship, we received no readings whenever it was near, but Mr Cat's excellent olfactory senses picked it up-"

The Cat grinned under a mane of hair.

"Now," The mechanoid continued, "Being holograms they could have some way of communicating with Mr Rimmer, hence the voices. At present, the worst part is that they are showing signs of abilities not unlike those gained in a holovirus, for example telekinesis, explaining the objects flying around the room, the tracker on the side of Starbug and various machinery breaking, but these seem to be much stronger, which could mean that they are hard-light holograms like Mr Rimmer, as when you are a hard-light hologram your senses and attributes are heightened, which could mean a stronger strain of virus," he smiled.

Cat looked agog, "That was layman's terms?"

"I'm sorry Sir, but I couldn't have made it any simpler without large sheets of paper and crayons or an Expressive Dance group," the mechanoid replied, "Also, if Mr Rimmer has had any sort of contact with the infected holograms, which he has, he could run the risk of contracting the virus himself,"

"I'm gonna go find 'im," Lister jumped up from his seat.

Luckily, Lister's first guess of him being in their sleeping quarters was right.

He walked in to find the hard-light collapsed on the floor, "Rimmer?!" he knelt down beside him, "Come on ya smegger…" he lifted him into a sitting position, supporting him with one arm, "Come on, wakey-wakey eh? Rimsy?"

Rimmer's eyes flickered open for a brief second and he mumbled something incoherent.

"Don' worry, you helped me an' now I'm helpin' you 'kay?" Lister told him, "But you need to geddup so I can help you to the medibay cos unfortunately I can't carry ya like ya did for me eh?" Lister laughed, and he saw Rimmer smile slightly.

With a fair share of difficulty and a side helping of awkwardness, Lister managed to get them both to the medibay where Kryten had prepared a scan.

Once the hologram was lying on the bed, Kryten ran the scan over his body, muttering every now and then.

As he stood close by, Lister realised somewhere in the back of his mind that the ship was looking beyond beyond repair, and he hoped that the damages weren't as bad as they looked.

But then another thought occurred that he found worried him more than the ship; the last time Rimmer had a holovirus they had been aboard Red Dwarf, where there was a lot more access to needed equipment and the hologram projection suite. What if Rimmer needed something they just didn't have?

"Well," He asked the mechanoid, "Is he gonna be okay?"

Kryten stepped back slightly, "Well… he's… getting better, Sir…"

"Gettin' better?" Lister frowned; that hadn't exactly been the ideal diagnoses, seeing as Kryten didn't look too positive.

Later, Lister looked up from his seat beside the bed where Rimmer was sleeping as the Cat appeared in the medibay doorway looking much tidier than earlier.

"Hey bud, are you gonna stay in here with Goalpost Head all day? What about the ship? It looks like a tin of peas that's been crushed by a giant scary thing! And what about the holoship and all the other smeg we have to worry about? What I'm sayin' is why'd you wanna sit with Smeg-For-Brains when there are so many interesting things to do?"

Lister looked at Rimmer and then around the room, "Cos he's me mate, an' I… love all me mates, 'specially if they save me life, an' so they come first,"

The Cat gave him the oddest look in the universe.

It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere,

I'm all alone,

More or less,

Let me fly far away from here,

Fun, fun, fun,

In the sun, sun, sun

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose,

Drinking fresh mango juice,

Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes,

Fun, fun, fun,

In the sun, sun, sun

Fun, fun, fun

In the sun, sun, sun!

Author's Note: Don't forget to review guys, tell me what you think. Hope you enjoyed it! ;D

Nirvanah

Xoxoxoxo