Space station of the sluts

She wondered how long it would have taken them to track it down alone. Consortium techs did good work, you had to give them that. If only they didn’t cost so much…

“There may be a third option.” Shaylan was flicking through data again, his eyes just slightly unfocused and sparkling with rapidly-changing readouts. “Your algae tanks use Consortium strains. The patches are proprietary, but I could temporarily modify them to feed on at least some of the toxic inorganics you’ve got in your air systems. The atmosphere might get a little weird, but it’d clean itself without having to vent whole sections. Call it three, four weeks of funny-smelling air. Fixing the daysuits will take that long anyway, so you wouldn’t be paying me any extra. Just the flat fee for the proprietary strain.”

Megan pursed her lips, pondering that. She wasn’t fond of outsiders on the station in general, especially not Consortium outsiders. But she needed his tech to do the kind of micro-level repair he was talking about anyway, and replacing one Consortium strain of algae with another hardly constituted a corporate takeover.