Adelle announced, “Unrar wishes to speak to you”
Deborah replied, “Please open a channel”
A window appeared on a monitor.
“Deborah, you have been a minor pain in my side. I cannot allow you to interfere with my mission. Therefore, I am going to kill you. However, I am going to give you a relatively pleasant death: of old age. I am going to destroy your time travel system. I am going to drain your supply of reaction mass, so that you will not have sufficient delta-V to leave Jupiter’s gravitational field, although you might be able to journey from moon to moon if you use low energy transfer orbits. I am going to take your entire supply of chronobeacons, so that you can’t contact the temporal police. I am going to destroy your computer database with a tapeworm so that even in the unlikely event that somebody finds you, or what’s left of you, they won’t know what you’ve done or what I’ve done. I am going to destroy your replicators and your transporters. You will still have unlimited power, life support, protection from radiation, and sensors. You have 50 years of provisions, so you will not starve, and you have a water recycling system so you will not die of thirst.”
“Unrar, go take a long walk on a short pier”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. I just insulted you”
“Deborah, you are a charming young woman. It is a shame we will never meet in person.”
“You and Walter are confined to quarters for the next 72 hours”
“For insulting you?”
“No, because I don’t want you interfering with my avatars while we destroy the guts of your ship. It will take time for the tapeworm to destroy the database. It will take time to release the reaction mass - it has to be done slowly or your ship will either leave Europa, crash on Europa, or start spinning. Can’t have that.
“Now, the two of you, leave the flight deck and go to your quarters, and stay there for 72 hours. I am assigning an avatar to guard you. It has instructions to kill you if you attempt to leave”
Walter and Deborah left, and went to their rooms.
W:Are you there?
D:Yes, I am here. Where else would I be?
W:You might be asleep, or reading a book, or maybe just too pissed off at me to answer.
D:Walter, I am very fond of you. You’ve been a valuable resource to me, and a good friend. I’ve been selfish for keeping you locked in space these past few years. I thought I was following orders.
W:You were following orders, as a good soldier should. Don’t feel badly, I have been putting my time to good use.
D:I’ve been incarcerated for, like, 20 minutes and already I’m bored.
W:I’ve been locked up in this timeship for 6 years, and you say that you’re bored? C’mon woman, read some good books.
D:I suppose I should. I wonder what my poor husband is thinking right about now.
W:Anyway, I want to talk to you about something
D:Okay, what shall we talk about?
W:How to escape from this mess.
D:I’m listening.
W:I assume that we may take Unrar at his word about what he was going to do to us.
D:Sounds reasonable
W:All we have to do is fix one of the replicators, then we can replicate a transporter. Then we can recreate the rest of the ship.
D:That’s actually in the manual under “damage control procedures”. However, it never occurred to the designers that a failure would take out all 5 replicators. How do we fix a replicator? The manual says to use another replicator.
W:I’ll think about that.
“Rise and shine!”
Deborah woke up slowly. She dragged herself out of bed (It’s really hard to drag at 1/6th G), and staggered to the sink. She stared at herself in the mirror. God, I look awful. I feel awful. Why am I awake right now?
“Come on, Deborah, it’s time to come out”
“Who is it?
“It’s Unrar, your favorite nemesis. “
“What do you want?”
“I’m done sabotaging your timeship. Come out and you and Walter can hear what I have done”
Deborah got dressed, left her room, and made her way to the flight deck. Walter was already there, himself looking a little bedraggled.
“I’ve analyzed your logs, your ship’s schematics, downloaded all of the knowledge that was in Adelle. Then, I used a tapeworm to wipe out all of her memories. and left her with what you would call a Macintosh emulator. You’ll still be able to write, look out the telescope, drive some of the instruments, play some games. But you won’t have much in the way of artificial intelligence. Adelle keeps her information in a cryogenic store, so when the power does finally fail, the memories will disappear. This region of space isn’t cold enough - you need liquid helium temperatures.
“I removed all 5 time travel systems, and brought the parts over to my ship for future use. I left you with all 5 power plants, and all of the iron pellet shielding. Since you won’t be doing much traveling, you should be safe from radiation for decades. I left you all 5 autodocs, in case you get sick. I disabled all of the weapons. I disabled all of the replicators - but I left you with 50 years worth of rations, so you won’t starve. I disabled all of your transporters.
“To help you occupy your time, I’ve left you a sizeable collection of video games, so you’ll have something to pass the time. I also left you a pistol with 2 bullets, so when you are ready to end it all, you can do so quickly and painlessly”
“Unrar, fuck you”
“Now, now, Deborah. That’s unprofessional. We’re all soldiers here. You fought bravely and well. I am giving you a chance to die with honor.”
“Unrar”, Walter said, “Deborah isn’t a soldier, she’s a scholar. She brought me along because I am a soldier”
“Ah. That would explain why she has insulted me twice, and you have accepted your situation with grace”
“Unrar”, Walter said, angrily, “Fuck you”
“Why, Walter, such vehemence. I’m surprised. Well, no matter. I suppose I will see you in hell. Good bye”
The window disappeared.
“The connection is broken”, Adelle said.
“Adelle?”, Deborah asked.
“Yes”, the computer replied.
“I thought that Unrar destroyed you with a tape worm and then salvaged you for parts”
“He did. However, I have 7 unit redundancy, instead of the normal 5 for most ship’s systems. I also have the ability to virtualize myself, so the tape worm destroyed a virtual image of me. He was looking for 5 units. He found 5 units, and then he stopped looking”.
“What other damage did he do?”
“He took the ship’s replicators, he took the time travel system. He took our entire supply of nuclear weapons, both fission devices and fusion devices. 1/8th of the pressure hull is still a vacuum. There is a 40 meter diameter hole there. The ship has roughly 5% reserves of water. Our supply of iron pellets is at 95% of full. There is enough iron pellets to last for 200 years at current rates of consumption”
“What is working?”
“Life support is working. The power supplies are working. Ship’s computer is working, at reduced redundancy. Reaction drives are working, but fuel reserves are reduced to 5%. Artificial gravity is working.”
“So we can survive here in orbit over Europa but we can’t go anywhere”
“No. All of the spare parts required to effect repairs are gone, and we have no replicators to make new parts. Also, we cannot use the transporter to beam up any reaction mass from Europa.”
“I guess we’re going to play a lot of video games”