I will say that there is no internal editing, however.
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Paulette Kilgore should have been grounded by Flight Control. For that matter, she should damned well have grounded herself, and she knew it. Tired pilots made mistakes; exhausted pilots made catastrophic ones.
Screw it, she thought drunkenly. There’s nobody aboard but me and John, and he’d be even more pissed off than me if somebody did try to yank us.
“Got something at zero-three-eight,” Sergeant Debnam said, as if her thought had summoned the announcement.
“Like what?” Kilgore asked, automatically swinging the nose to the indicated bearing. The question came out slurred by fatigue, she realized, but Debnam appeared not to notice.
“Dunno,” he said. “Could just be another chunk of debris — God knows there’s enough of that,” he added bitterly.
Got that right, John, she thought with equal bitterness. Four of the last five radar targets they’d intercepted had been just that: debris. The fifth had been a life pod, its transponder as dead as the young woman aboard it. Kilgore didn’t like to think about how that young woman had died, alone in a dead pod, slowly bleeding to death from her internal injuries. But Debnam had gone EVA to bring her aboard and Kilgore had left her flight couch to help him stow her, gently and reverently, in the passenger compartment beside the two skinsuited corpses they’d already recovered.
“Got no transponder, but it’s about the right size,” Debnam continued. “Range . . . forty-three-point-six thousand klicks. We’ve got an opening velocity of about two hundred KPS.”
“What’s that make our intercept time?”
The question was a dead giveaway of her exhaustion. That was the kind of solution she did in her head every day.
“’Bout . . . fifty seconds to match velocity at four hundred gravs, then three-point-eight minutes to actually catch it,” Debnam replied.
“Well, let’s go find out if somebody got a little luckier this time around,” Kilgore said, and goosed the impellers.
