Space station of the sluts

He shrugged his slim shoulders gently. His own daysuit was plain black, apart from the gray lettering on his breast and the triangular Consortium logo just above it. “Clean the station air up and all the symptoms — glitches, really, not symptoms — should go away.”

Megan let out a long breath; realized she’d been holding it for longer than she needed and breathed in hastily, feeling embarrassed. She kept her suit transparent from the collar up to reveal her face, like most stationers, but she could still feel the slightly artificial smoothness of its filters inside her nose. Of course it was safe to breathe. Or no less safe than it had been for the last six weeks, anyway.

“That’s…good,” she said. “It’s not an insane alien virus, at least. We all knew something came in with that meteorite, when so many people started getting sick, but there were so many symptoms that didn’t make sense, and of course my medtech always got us out of the daysuits before she took a look…”

Shaylan laughed. “I’m as glad as you are,” he said. “Every time we get a biologicals call from an isolated station like this one we’re half-convinced it’s going to be the long-awaited First Contact, and the man on the scene is going to end up fighting green-skinned monsters in the corridors. Not that they’d arm a lowly tech for anything short of a confirmed invasion.”