At her seventy-first sortie, she hit the wall. It wasn’t subtle. She had closed the hatch to the main body of the ship, closed the seals, and put her helmet onto the environment suit. Before she fixed it into place and started the next five-minute count, her hands dropped to her sides. She hadn’t consciously intended to do that; it had just happened. Alarmed in a vague, distant kind of way, she sat on the deck with her back against the wall and tried moving them. If she’d just become paralyzed or something, that would change the situation. Give her permission to stop. But her hands still flexed; her shoulders still moved. She was just exhausted. Even the effort to swallow seemed heroic. She closed her eyes, wondering if she’d instantly fall asleep, but she was too weary for that. So she sat.

If the suit had a battery, it would probably be cataloging the failures of her body right now. The dehydration headache was worse now, and moving in toward nausea. Her skin felt raw where the unshielded sun had burned her. Though she wasn’t producing as much, she was still coughing. And she figured her blood was probably about equal parts plasma and fatigue poisons by now.

Her two little victories – the thruster, the transmitter – had been the end. Since then, either her efforts had degraded or things had genuinely gotten more complicated, or both. The repeaters that would cause the core to shut down had either been omitted in the build or were tucked someplace that couldn’t be reached from between the hulls. The sensor array that would trigger the bottle failure when a rescue ship got too close would have been a lovely thing to access, but it appeared to be mounted on the exterior where she couldn’t get to it. There were half a dozen places she could have tried tapping into the computer system, but none of them had interfaces, and she didn’t have any she could bring. Other plans and strategies flickered through her mind from time to time like fireflies. Some of them might have been good. She couldn’t keep hold of them long enough to say.

She might have slept or the timeless skipping might just have been how her brain worked now. The voice she heard was just a whisper fainter than her own voice had been, but it snapped her back to herself.

“Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you’re there, I’d appreciate you giving me a sign. I’d sort of like to make sure it’s you before we come over. Your ship’s been acting a mite odd, and we’re a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it’s not Naomi Nagata? I’ve got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me.”