*_*_*_*_*_*_*
The hatch opened on the stasis pod, letting in a rush of air. Kochanski stepped forward and looked for where Todhunter had been standing just a few seconds ago. Nothing but dark grey corridor.
What the hell was going on? Why were only half the lights on? There was something else that was setting her nerves on edge but she couldn't work out what it was.
"Good morning, Kristine. It is now safe for you to emerge from stasis. Please proceed to the Drive Room for debriefing."
"Thank you, Holly"
She started to make her way along the corridor before a thought hit her. Even down here where the stasis booths were housed there were always people and skutters charging around on maintenance or security details or trying to sneak supplies or contraband in one of the thousands of hiding places a five-mile long ship can hold. There was none of the bustle that should have been here, endemic across the whole ship because of too many people in too small a space with nowhere to go
"Holly, where is everybody?"
"Oh, they're dead."
"Who's dead Holly?"
"Everybody."
"Everybody?"
"Yes, everybody is dead Kristine."
Kochanski stopped, standing alone in the dull gray corridor, thinking furiously.
"How?"
*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Kochanski never made it as far as the Drive Room. Holly had explained how the drive plate was inefficiently repaired and how a chain reaction followed, the fail-safes simultaneously failing and letting a massive neutron explosion rip apart anything organic on the habitation levels. Her brain tuned out the sound of his voice as he began to explain how he had turned the ship away from anywhere remotely habitable and headed out into deep space. She turned and ran.
It was a mad rush, darting along empty corridors filled only with the clanging of her boots on the decking. She rushed headlong to the rooms of all her friends, all of the people she had known and lived and worked alongside for the last few months looking for God knows what. Somewhere along the line, her common sense disappeared and she started calling out, looking for people part of her knew wouldn't hear and could never answer.
Holly appeared at screens, projected onto corridor walls, following her wherever she ran. She saw his lips move but he could have been speaking Ancient Greek. Well, not that because Kochanski had done one of her many Classical History dissertations on the use of the verb forms in Platonic discourses in the original Republic. All of the words he was saying might well have been in an obscure foreign language that Kochanski didn't know. Within the flow of incomprehensible spiel, she did catch a snippet.
"Sorry Holly, what was that last bit?"
"I've put everything perishable into storage but some of the supplies have still deteriorated somehow. I didn't think you'd get-"
"I mean that bit about how long I've been in Stasis."
"Ah yes, that was three million years."
"Right, got you"
Kochanski hadn't at all and just kept running.
*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Kochanski awoke exhausted, a fist-sized knot of pain in her back from lying on the bare metal of the bunk.
Anything vaguely perishable or organic had been put into storage thousands of millennia ago. This included fabric, paper, and a lot of the plastic. Most of the air had even been allowed to escape, an effort to preserve the integrity of the ship by keeping it in a vacuum, anything Holly could think of to get the ship and its contents to survive. A craft that should have been serviced every five years if it travelled within designated speeds needed all the help it could get if it was going to miss out on 600,000 odd MOT appointments and spend a lot of that time accelerating. Holly had a funny feeling that there was something intrinsically wrong with the speed they were going but he thought maybe if he ignored it and kept up the commands he had given himself before the degeneration of his circuits that it would all pan out alright eventually.
Holly had got the last few skutters who had any working parts at all to repair the others, and this battered army of barely functioning robots had prepared a small corner of the habitation level of the ship for Kochanski to occupy. Holly hadn't counted on her running around in a mad panic as soon as she was out of her pod and ending up on the wrong sleeping level. Any reminders that she needed to move because he had prepared a room for her that didn't have too much radioactive corpse-dust had just brought on floods of tears, so he had been forced to leave her to it.
Which is why Kochanski was in a bare metal room with bare metal furnishings, a screwed up back, no idea of the time and ravenous enough to eat one of Lister's curries.
Lister. She hadn't thought about him for a long time. She had no idea how long she had been weeping. After the rush of energy, she had collapsed in a heap in one of the sleeping quarters and couldn't stop sobbing. Her usual ways of snapping herself out of a good blub didn't work, there was no one to see or hear her and there was no one to hold her and tell her it would be all ok. There was no one. Anywhere. Eventually she had just run out of whatever it was that had been keeping her going and fallen into a sleep filled with nightmares of falling down dark wells.
"You awake?"
Holly's voice broke the gloomy train of her thoughts.
"What time is it Holly?"
There was a pause as Holly considered the question. "Ummm, I've sort of lost track. I think it's a Thursday. March? Or May? Those M's, I could never really decide between-"
"What time in the day, Holly?"
"Oh, call it 2ish? I can get a skutter to bring you some lunch if you want..."
Kochanski tuned out the sound of Holly talking about skutters, lunch and anything else and rolled over to stare at the wall. She had been surrounded by people her entire life, a privileged upbringing followed by a successful career living in cities across the solar system and on space ships forging their way across space. Now she was quite probably the last person alive anywhere and all she had to look forward to was an eternity on a massive, ugly ship barely holding together with a crew of broken robots and a computer who previously had an IQ of 6000 but now had forgotten what month it was.
There was the sound of someone clearing their throat. Kochanski ignored it, lost in her gloom. And then the last voice she ever expected to hear again spoke.
"Um, hi. Long time no see."
Kochanski rolled over to see a short dreadlocked man, his ship issue blue technician's uniform already untucked and as creased if it had been kept screwed up at the bottom of a damp laundry bin for about three months. He looked lost and tired but incredibly happy as she sat up and smiled.
"Dave, what the hell is going on?"
He tapped the two-inch high metallic looking "H" decorating his forehead.
"Holly has told me that I copped it. Guess I don't need to worry about all me credit card bills anymore."
Kochanski winced at the terrible joke and stood, looking him up and down. The silence dragged on as they both just looked at each other.
"So you're dead then? What is it like? Oh God, that was so insensitive. I'm so sorry, are you-"
Lister laughed, the first happy sound Kochanski had heard in what felt like days.
"Its fine Krissie, its just weird is all. I'm pretty sure I'm just like normal, only…"
Lister raised his hand and tried to brush a bit of hair out of Kochanski's eyes. She flinched as his hand passed through her face.
"See? Sorry, didn't mean to scare ya. I can't touch nothin. Are you cold?"
Kochanski tucked the stray hair behind her ear and looked puzzled.
"Well, if it is I can't feel it" said Lister, "Tell you what though, I could murder a fag."
Kochanski nervous laugh was interrupted by the appearance of Holly on the mirror.
"Sorry to gooseberry in dudes, but there's a life form wandering around on deck 457. I think it might be worth a butcher's."
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Kochanski and Lister entered the corridor as stealthily as possible, Lister actually making no noise and Kochanski using her experience of creeping between dorms in Cyberschool.
You always got caught doing anything against the rules at Cyberschool. After all, it was populated by unsleeping perfect computer generated teachers who always knew when you were out of bed or sneaking across the fields. However, they all had preset parameters as to when they actually detected and punished you for the transgressions of the school rules. The creators and clients for the Cyberschool programme knew that a certain amount of flexibility of the rules built character in the same way that freezing showers, birchings and P.E lessons in horizontal sleet built character. So along with Ancient Greek, Latin and Netball was learning to sneak to other girl's dorms and have pillow fights.
Ahead of them, Kochanski and Lister could hear a clattering sound. It was coming from the sleeping quarters that Holly had set aside in an uncontaminated part of the ship.
Kochanski forced down the fear that was gripping her. Typical. Half an hour ago she thought she was the last living thing in several thousand light years if not the universe. Now she was sneaking down a corridor with her dead Liverpudlian ex-boyfriend moving towards a large, unknown life form that was at this moment most likely going through her things.
They both reached the doorway of the room and peered around.
The room was empty. In the middle of the room, the metal table held an opened storage crate, the clothes it must have contained on the table and chairs. Maybe they had caught the maintenance robots on a break but then again, the skutters wouldn't have bothered folding the shirts up.
Kochanski was furiously planning the best way to approach when Lister strode into the room. Before she had a chance to grab him back and pound some sense into him, he wandered up to the table and was looking in the box.
Bursting from the lockers by the door was a red, man-sized blur. Leaping through the startled Lister, he landed, rolled and somehow came up facing the way he had come, a comb pointed at Lister's chest like a rapier.
The man, if you could call him that, was immaculately dressed in a frock coat, lace spilling from the cuffs. His strangeness was in the little details. Quite apart from the fact he was dressed a few hundred years out of date he had pointed fangs that he was now revealing in a snarl.
Lister spread his hands wide in the international gesture of 'I'm unarmed, please for the love of God don't kill me'
"Alright mate, we don't want any trouble..."
The man's comb didn't waver a millimetre as he spoke to himself.
"I see that this man aims to somehow intimidate me, hoping to drive me away from this territory that I have laid claim to. I shall not present him with an opportunity and shall instead seek to scare him off by putting on a show of force."
This curious monologue delivered, the man stretched out, spreading his arms wide and standing on tip-toe, a warning yowling noise building in the back of his throat.
Lister backed off a couple of steps and Kochanski took the opportunity to step in.
"We're sorry to bother you, we can come back later if-"
The man's eyes flicked to hers, his pupils dilating wide leaving only a thin ring of brown. He put down his arms and instead flexed his muscles, preening and showing off his physique. He grinned widely and turned to Lister who was watching this display dumbfounded.
"Good sir, I must insist that you introduce me to the curious young lady. Forgive me my earlier rudeness, I take it you are her chaperone?"
Kochanski stared at the man, trying to work out if she had actually woken up or if this entire afternoon was just a long stasis-related hallucination. She found that in her experience, chatting to dead ex-boyfriends and Regency period gentlemen Vampires screamed "Hallucination!" a mile off.
"Holly? Who the hell is this?"
Holly's face appeared on the mirror.
"Before the accident you hid a pregnant black cat in your room on board where it then escaped into-"
"She was barely a kitten! How was she pregnant?"
Lister did his best to not look as guilty as the man behind the grassy knoll by suddenly checking to see if his nails were clean.
"Lister, what did you do?"
Lister looked up. "What? I mean, I thought she must have been lonely in that little room. I took her down with me when I went on planet leave on Titan. I let her run about in the tap room of the Hacienda for a few hours before they opened proper. How the smeg was I to know that the Landlord had that big bastard of a Tom-"
"I can't believe you Lister, you got my barely legal kitten knocked up by some bloody stray in the back room of an astro's drinking pit?"
"I wouldn't call her barely legal-"
"The cat was safely sealed in the cargo hold when the radiation hit." Holly continued, "She and her descendents evolved over three million years into the creature you see before you here."
The creature in question was currently examining itself in a miniature golden hand mirror. Lister looked at the creature with a mixture of awe and trepidation and extended a hand for it to shake.
"Hello, Cat?"
The Cat went to grab the proffered hand before catching sight of his coat.
"Dear Lord, a crease!"
Pulling out a miniature iron from a pocket in the frock coat he pressed it to his sleeve.
The Cat suitably distracted, Lister turned to Kochanski. "So what now? Shall we head back to Earth?"
Kochanski shook her head. "There's no way we could make it back. I've been thinking about this and I'm shocked that the ship has stayed together as long as it has. We have absolutely no idea where we are, Holly and I wouldn't have the first clue about how to navigate the thousands of light years back. What's a way to put it you would understand? It's like trying to go from New York to Liverpool riding a rusty unicycle over broken glass whilst blindfolded. You're going to have no idea where you're going, how long it would take or even if it's possible to go more than ten metres without falling off and dying."
Lister's face fell. "Well, when you put it like that..."
Kochanski stood silent, lost in thought. Her gaze fell on the stacks of boxes. Her whole life was in there, ready to be unpacked. Was there any point for any of it to be brought out of Stasis in the first place, for her to be out? They had nowhere to go, no mission, nothing to do. She looked at the Cat, trimming his nails with utmost care. Suddenly she smiled.
"Holly, set a course"
Holly and Lister looked puzzled.
"Where to?"
She grinned wider, "Anywhere. Now, lets sort out this mess and we can start to work out - Cat, what the hell are you doing with my bra?"