Chapter Text
Despair squids. Joy squids. Terraformed consciousness planets. Garbage worlds. Luck and fuck viruses.
It was all, Lister considered, exhausting. How come they never seemed to come across a nice, normal Earth-like planet with some untainted water and cattle and pretty flowers and cobs of juicy corn and a sweets shop? Why was it almost every place they could land made Euro Disney come off like suburbia? Why was it every surface man had touched in some way left populated with so much frankly useless and self-indulgent shit?
Because it was all done by those what had the money to DO it, and you know how smegged-up ultra-wealthy knobs are, the clinical side of his brain supplied, not to mention narcissistic, usually mad, and paranoid about how everyone sees ‘em. It’s like if Rimmer had no ATM limit.
Lister sighed and logged the inviting blue-green planet as off-limits for future reference. It hadn’t passed the smell test with the long-range scanner, which picked up all sorts of plants and trees and simple animals but no evidence of recent intelligent life. There were structures and cities - things that had been built and ordered by complex brains - but they were coming up as long-abandoned. Carbon emissions were far too low for the type of industrialization needed for the stage of development detected, which meant something or someone had done something to arrest progress long ago.
He heard a slight clanking over his shoulder in the drive room and muttered a noncommittal greeting, still soured. He’d gotten his hopes up for this little world, and felt like a child denied sweets after polishing off his broccoli. “Hello, sir! How are you this afternoon?”
“Hey, Krytes.” He tossed the logbook aside and pushed out a dissatisfied huff. “Bummed. Another useless Class M.”
“Oh, dear. What was on the scanner?”
“Too much, and not enough,” he griped, sagging back into the pilot’s seat. “It picked up radio signals near the beginning of my shift. So I followed it, thinking there’d be people maybe, or at least tinned supplies even if someone just left the telly on before they all kicked it. And sun.” Lister rubbed his face. “But whatever might be there is long spoilt. Has to be.”
“Emissions?”
“Not enough. Looks like no cars or planes or anything.”
“And no methane?” Lister swiveled, puzzled. Kryten put on a small smile. “Digestive gases, sir.”
“We can measure farts this far away?”
“In a manner of speaking. This scanner is calibrated for carbon, fossil fuels, evidence of large-scale industrial usage, that comes in handy when the right type of settlements are detected in conjunction with it. You wouldn’t expect much with adobe huts uniformly scattered, after all.”
“Well … sure,” Lister agreed, sort of getting it.
“But it can be tuned for gross methane emissions-”
“Yeah, no kidding!” Lister laughed.
“Sir. I mean ‘gross’ as in, in totality. Not as in how Mr. Rimmer characterizes your mattress.” Kryten patiently went on. “There is a certain amount of gross methane calculated to be expected from a planet based on its size and disposition toward how much naturally occurring animal life should be there, as we know it. Should it be far in excess of that, it may indicate advanced organic life, both for their own presence and for their artificially high breeding of livestock.”
Lister turned that over in his brain, feeling a sliver of hope. “So how do we scan for THAT?”
A few hours later, he and the others argued around the scanner table while Kryten wobbled in with a tray of tea and plates of 3-D-printed whitefish and curry-soaked chicken from the nearby kitchen. “We should check it out,” Lister said, yet again. “There’s a good chance there could be people, and where there’s people still alive, there’s fresh food and usable water.”
“As well as spears and the odd laser cannon or torch-bearing peasants to keep interlopers like us away from it,” Rimmer countered, not for the first time.
“We can send a scout probe.”
“A fine plan, sir … with only one teensy little, tiny drawback,” Kryten began.
Lister sighed. “We’re out of scout probes?”
“‘Well, it has been approximately twenty-four years with no restocking,” he pointed out, not unkindly.
Lister chewed on a fingernail, trying to think what else might be on board of use, and his eyes settled on Rimmer. “You’re always doing all this inventory; are we really out?”
The hologram blinked. “So NOW you’re interested in the inventory? My cheap-fisted, anal-retentive, boring bean-counter note-taking isn’t so repulsive anymore?” he scoffed in perfect Scouse.
He rolled his eyes, his insults thrown back rolling off like beaded water. “Do we have anything that would qualify as a scout probe, or not?”
“No unless you count the extra-long swab sticks in medi-bay,” Rimmer shot back, still clearly irritated.
Lister couldn’t help it. “Well, unless they’re two clicks long, they’re about as much use as your inventorying!”
“Sirs!” Kryten broke in. “This is unproductive to the discussion at hand.”
“Monkey see … monkey do,” Cat flatly observed, pointing his fork first at Rimmer, then Lister, before spearing some fish to swirl through the cream sauce on his plate.
“So, Sir Puss, what ideas do you have?” Rimmer put to him.
“Fly on and look more. Print more fish.” He gestured at his plate and gave the OK sign to Kryten, who beamed and replied, “It’s the sauce I’m most proud of. I synthesized it from-”
“Nope. Don’t wanna know. Don’t kill my taste buds with facts,” Cat stopped him. Lister privately agreed.
So did Kryten. “Ah. Well-noted, sir.”
Rimmer butted back in. “My question?” Cat kept eating, ignoring him. Lister saw the opening and put in, “We should stop by. Let’s put it to a vote.”
“Now, hold on; we’re not done!” Rimmer frowned. “The scanner supposedly says there’s more methane than just the animals there would be … putting out, but there’s also all these advanced buildings with no evidence of anything powering their systems for Heaven knows how long? And your first instinct is to swan in and walk around looking for what could be cannibals, for all you know?”
Lister, increasingly annoyed, pointed at him. “That feels racist somehow.”
“No, it’s worst-case scenario,” he shot back. “Do you know how many genuine cannibals I ran across being Ace?”
“Wouldn’t they’ve chewed your feet off?” Cat eyed him. “If you’d run across them.”
Lister smothered a snicker as Rimmer slitted his eyes at their other pilot. “Nobody likes a smart alex.” But it didn’t have much heat behind it.
“And,” Cat barreled on, “there’s radio waves. Like movies and TV and vids. You think they’re sitting around a campfire gnawing on some dude’s leg bone, watching ‘Fawlty Towers’ or whatever?”
“Look, as productive as all this debate is,” Lister said in a tone he clearly meant to convey it was in fact pretty damn useless, “the fact is we don’t know if we don’t go look.”
“Wait.” Rimmer put up a hand but looked to Cat. “I thought you were just saying how we should move on and pass up the planet too?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but you’re for it, and I’ve got an image of cool to maintain.” He jerked a thumb at Lister. “I say let’s go with Gerbil-face’s plan now.”
The hologram screwed up his expression in perfect mental constipation. “You really would do a Greg Louganis into a lake of fire if I told you it would fry you, but Listy said it might merely be a bit toasty, wouldn’t you?”
A telltale chirp stirred from across the corridor, and Lister felt his guts seize up as the tinny voice wafted out. “DID SOMEONE SAY THEY WANTED SOME SCRUMMY BUTTERED TOAST?”
“NOT NOW!” all four yelled back in perfect unison.
In bed later that night, Lister quietly wondered if he was smart to push on with this plan and worked on convincing himself he would do so even without Rimmer’s objections. He wasn’t the hotheaded youth that had once only done things to defy his pompous bunkmate, and he didn’t want to return to that. He considered Kryten and Cat would go along with almost anything to piss off Rimmer, and whether this would put them in unwarranted danger - but the scan hadn’t revealed any sort of unnatural or elevated radiation that indicated ham-fisted intelligent-being stupidity.
“You don’t have to go,” the voice in the bunk below piped up.
He should’ve known his lack of snoring would invite opinions. “I didn’t ask you.”
“Which is insulting and dumb, but let’s put that aside for-“
“Why dumb?”
“I did spend some time out there in dangerous situations. I might know something.”
“Yeah, and so have I. Been abandoned in a couple or ten, too,” Lister retorted.
“I’m telling you, you don’t have to go just because you said you would, you thick goit.”
“I’m aware of what I don’t have to do; I’m not the one hung up on machismo and appearances.”
“You are hung up, though, on not getting those two blown to pieces for following you. Right?” Not for the first time, Lister wondered about telepathy. “Since neither one’s got enough guff to tell you to smeg off and go alone.”
Lister chewed at his thumbnail, not wanting to admit Rimmer was right. “It’ll be fine; we’ll take precautions.”
“Funny, I think that’s what Mother told the gardener right before he got busy trimming her hedge.”