You are free to remove them if you manage to do so without removing the meaning. There's a total of 3 places they appear in.
Update: I'm pleased to announce that the main story and the Telemetry chapters are complete! At the moment, I'm doing some minor tweaks now that I have the hindsight of the whole story to work with. Then I'll pass it onwards to some friends of mine to ensure that everything is in the best possible quality before I hand it over to you guys. After that, we can talk through my changes.