Senior Karla Wender (Human, piloting and navigation track)

The far staging was quieter than the home one. It had been chosen to be.

She grew the scaffold on the sheet's timings and the station's gradient, with the three going home strapped in behind her and the Star Captain somewhere aft, not on the deck, which was correct. The scaffold reached threshold. The two regions were brought into adjacency, and she flew the band, and the gradient she had come from was gone from under the hull.

The re-sync queue came up. She worked it in the order the department worked it.

The margin was there.

A figure, in the ordinary place, the same figure as the one she had held station on for nineteen days, and she had flown nine years on it without once looking at it. She looked at it now for the length of a breath, which was not in the queue, and then she went back to the queue, because the queue was what could be audited.

She wrote the figure. She did not write anything else.