The alarm didn't scream. It whispered. A soft, persistent beep that most people at Station Theta-7 had learned to ignore. Haroon Dwelight heard it from three corridors away, through reinforced steel walls and the hum of life support systems, but he didn't quicken his pace. His cyan-colored astronaut suit caught the dim overhead lighting as he walked, the unusual color making him stand out against the grays and whites of the station's sterile interior. The suit wasn't bulky like the old models. It moved with him, almost like a second skin, advanced enough that it didn't hinder movement but substantial enough that everyone knew what he was: station personnel, someone who worked in the deep sections where exposure was a risk.
He turned the corner into the engineering bay where Dennis Knowles was already waiting, sweat beading on his forehead despite the climate control keeping the temperature at a steady twenty-one degrees Celsius. Dennis—most people called him Dion—was good at his job. He could rewire a power conduit in under ten minutes and had once prevented a core meltdown by manually rerouting coolant flow while standing in waist-deep freezing water. He was competent, experienced, and respected. Right now, he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
"Haroon," Dennis said, his voice carefully neutral. "Glad you're here. We've got a situation in Sector 9. Pressure's dropping, and the automated systems aren't responding. Could be a microfracture in the hull, could be a valve malfunction. Either way, we need someone to check it out." He paused, then added quickly, "I can handle it if you're busy with something else."
Haroon stopped in front of the diagnostic panel, his gloved fingers moving across the holographic display with practiced ease. The readouts showed exactly what Dennis had described: Sector 9's atmospheric pressure had dropped by three percent in the last twenty minutes, a slow leak that would become critical in another hour if left unchecked. The affected area was a storage section, mostly empty cargo containers and spare equipment. No personnel inside, which was fortunate. Less fortunate was the fact that Sector 9 shared a bulkhead with the medical bay, and if the breach spread, they'd have bigger problems than lost storage space.
"I'll handle it," Haroon said. His voice was quiet, almost monotone, the kind of voice that didn't waste energy on inflection or emotion. He didn't look at Dennis as he spoke, his eyes still scanning the diagnostics, but he could feel the other man's relief like a physical thing, a tension releasing from the air between them.
"Right. Good. Yeah." Dennis was already backing toward the exit. "I'll monitor from here. Let me know if you need anything." He was gone before Haroon could respond, the door hissing shut behind him with more force than necessary.
Haroon didn't mind. He preferred working alone anyway.
The walk to Sector 9 took four minutes. The station wasn't massive by deep-space standards—it housed about two hundred permanent personnel and could accommodate another hundred in the residential modules if needed—but it was spread out, designed with redundancy in mind. Multiple life support systems, duplicate power grids, sealed sections that could be isolated in case of emergency. Station Theta-7 had been built to survive. It had been built to endure scenarios that would cripple lesser outposts. Haroon had read the specifications when he'd first arrived three years ago. The station could theoretically survive a direct meteor impact, a solar flare, even a catastrophic reactor failure. Theoretically.
He reached the sealed door to Sector 9 and swiped his access card. The panel blinked red. Lockdown protocol. The system had automatically sealed the sector when the pressure drop was detected, a safety measure to prevent atmospheric loss from spreading to adjacent areas. Standard procedure. Haroon placed his palm flat against the panel, waited for the biometric scan to complete, then entered his override code. The panel blinked green, and the door slid open with a hydraulic hiss.
The temperature inside Sector 9 was noticeably colder. Not freezing, not yet, but enough that his breath would have been visible if he hadn't been wearing the suit. The lighting was dimmer here, emergency strips along the floor providing just enough illumination to navigate by. Cargo containers were stacked in neat rows, magnetic clamps keeping them secured to the deck plating. Everything looked normal. Orderly. Exactly as it should be.
Haroon walked deeper into the sector, his boots making soft metallic sounds against the deck. He didn't need to check a scanner or follow a trail of evidence. He knew where the breach was. He'd known the moment Dennis had mentioned Sector 9, known with a certainty that had nothing to do with the diagnostic readouts or station schematics. The breach was in the far corner, behind a stack of containers marked with biohazard warnings—outdated medical waste that was scheduled for disposal but hadn't been processed yet due to some bureaucratic delay. The fracture was barely visible, a hairline crack in the reinforced alloy that made up the station's outer hull. Small. Almost insignificant. But in space, small things became big problems very quickly.
He stood in front of the crack and tilted his head slightly, studying it the way someone might study an interesting insect. The metal around the fracture showed signs of stress, microscopic deformations that suggested the damage had been progressive, building up over weeks or months before finally giving way. Poor maintenance, probably. Or just age. Station Theta-7 had been operational for thirty-seven years. Things broke. Things wore out. That was the nature of existence in the void.
Haroon raised his right hand, fingers spreading slightly, and the crack sealed. There was no flash of light, no dramatic surge of energy, no sound except for the faint groan of metal settling back into its proper configuration. One moment the breach existed, a fatal flaw in the station's armor. The next moment it didn't. The hull was whole again, seamless, as if the damage had never occurred. The atmospheric pressure began to stabilize immediately, the numbers on his suit's heads-up display ticking back toward normal.
He lowered his hand and turned away, already walking back toward the exit. The entire repair had taken less than ten seconds. He didn't think about it. Didn't analyze what he'd done or how he'd done it. It was like breathing. Automatic. Necessary. Unremarkable.
The door to Sector 9 was still open when he reached it. He stepped through, and it sealed behind him with a solid thunk. The lockdown would lift automatically once the system confirmed pressure had returned to safe levels. Dennis would see the readouts, confirm the repair was complete, and file a report. Tomorrow someone would inspect the hull, run diagnostic tests, and find nothing wrong. The crack would be gone. Erased. As if it had been a false alarm all along.
Haroon made his way back to the engineering bay, but Dennis wasn't there. The diagnostic panel showed Sector 9's pressure had returned to nominal levels, all systems green. A message blinked on the main screen: "Issue resolved. Thanks. —D.K." Short. Efficient. Exactly what Haroon expected. Dennis didn't want to talk about it. Most people didn't. They saw Haroon fix something impossible, something that should have required hours of work and specialized equipment, and they found reasons to be elsewhere. It was easier that way. Easier not to ask questions. Easier not to think too hard about the man in the cyan suit who made problems disappear.
Haroon logged the repair in the station's maintenance database, noting the time, location, and nature of the issue. He didn't mention how he'd fixed it. The system didn't require detailed explanations for routine repairs, and what he'd done fell comfortably within the parameters of "routine." At least, that's what his reports always said. No one had ever questioned them. No one had ever asked for clarification. The station ran smoothly, incidents were resolved quickly, and that was all that mattered to most people.
He checked the chronometer on his wrist display. Fifteen hundred hours. His shift technically ended at sixteen hundred, but there was never much to do in that last hour. He could head to the cafeteria, grab something that passed for coffee, maybe review tomorrow's maintenance schedule. Or he could stay here, run system checks, make sure nothing else was developing into a problem. Both options held the same appeal, which was to say, very little. But staying busy was better than the alternative. Staying busy meant fewer interactions, fewer moments where people looked at him with that expression he'd learned to recognize over the years. Not fear, exactly. Not hostility. Something in between. Wariness. Unease. The instinctive reaction of a small animal that realizes it's in the presence of a predator but can't quite process what that means.
The cafeteria won. Coffee, even terrible station coffee, was better than nothing.
The walk took him through the central hub, a circular chamber that connected the station's six main sections like spokes on a wheel. The hub was usually busy this time of day, personnel moving between shifts, maintenance crews heading out to their assigned areas, administrative staff shuttling between offices. Today was no different. Haroon counted twenty-three people in the hub as he walked through, and nineteen of them noticed him. He didn't make eye contact with any of them, but he was aware of their reactions. A technician adjusting her toolkit suddenly found something very interesting on the far wall. Two engineers mid-conversation went quiet as he passed, resuming only after he was several meters away. A doctor he'd seen around but never spoken to took a sudden detour down a side corridor, her pace just a bit too quick to be casual.
Only four people didn't react. One was absorbed in a datapad, completely oblivious to his surroundings. Two were arguing loudly about resource allocation and didn't notice anything beyond their own debate. The fourth was Harold Osborne, sitting on a bench near the observation window, staring out at the starfield beyond. Harry—everyone called him Harry—was one of the few people on the station who didn't seem bothered by Haroon's presence. He never went out of his way to interact, but he didn't avoid him either. Right now he was just sitting there, a cup of something steaming in his hands, watching the infinite dark.
Haroon continued toward the cafeteria without stopping. The observation window was a popular spot for personnel who needed a moment away from the enclosed, recycled atmosphere of station life. Haroon had never understood the appeal. The stars didn't change. The darkness didn't offer anything except more darkness. But people seemed to find comfort in it anyway, some reminder that there was something beyond the metal walls and artificial gravity. Something vast. Something that made their problems feel smaller by comparison.
The cafeteria was nearly empty. Two people sat at opposite ends of the room, both absorbed in their meals and personal devices. Haroon went to the dispenser, selected coffee—black, no additives—and waited while the machine produced something that technically qualified as the requested beverage. It emerged in a disposable cup, lukewarm and slightly bitter, exactly as terrible as he'd expected. He took it to a table in the corner, sat down, and drank.
The coffee was bad. He finished it anyway.
His suit's internal systems hummed quietly, a sound only he could hear, a constant reminder of what he wore and what it contained. The cyan material caught the cafeteria's harsh lighting, making it almost glow in the otherwise drab space. He'd never asked why the suit was this color. It had been cyan when he'd first put it on, and it had stayed cyan ever since. Distinctive. Memorable. Impossible to ignore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe someone, somewhere, had decided that the man who wore this suit shouldn't be able to fade into the background, shouldn't be allowed the comfort of anonymity. Or maybe it was random. A design choice made by an engineer who liked the color cyan and never thought about the implications.
Haroon didn't know. Didn't particularly care.
He crushed the empty cup and disposed of it in the recycling chute. Sixteen hundred hours. Shift over. He could return to his quarters, run through his evening routine, sleep, wake up, and do it all again tomorrow. The same corridor. The same tasks. The same careful distance maintained by everyone around him. It was ordinary. It was predictable. It was exactly what he needed it to be.
As he left the cafeteria, he passed Harold Osborne in the corridor, apparently finished with his stargazing. Harry nodded once, a brief acknowledgment that didn't require words. Haroon nodded back. The exchange lasted less than a second, and then they were moving in opposite directions, two people occupying the same space but existing in entirely different worlds.
Haroon returned to his quarters, a small but functional room with a bed, a desk, a storage locker, and little else. He removed the cyan suit carefully, hanging it in the locker where it would remain until tomorrow. Without the suit, he looked ordinary. Average height, unremarkable features, dark hair that needed cutting but never quite got around to it. Just another station worker, indistinguishable from the hundred others who called this place home. He showered, ate a ration pack that tasted like textured protein and regret, and lay down on the bed.
Tomorrow there would be another alarm, another problem, another moment where something broke and needed fixing. Tomorrow he would put on the cyan suit, walk through corridors where people stepped aside without quite knowing why, and make the universe behave the way it was supposed to. Tomorrow would be exactly like today.
Ordinary.
And that was exactly how it needed to be.