Calibration Drift
The nitrogen gauge is trembling, and everyone on Pendor Station is about to die in their sleep. Chen Wu-Patel notices the drift first, a half-percent deviation in the station's atmospheric recalibration that the automated systems log as acceptable. It shouldn't be acceptable. The nitrogen reserves have been bleeding for eleven days, and the maintenance bay hums with the low groan of a ventilation hub running on fumes and old coffee grounds. When Vex-9 cross-references the calibration logs against Inspector Tova Burrman's sealed audit file, the picture that emerges isn't mechanical failure. It's a slow, deliberate siphoning. Someone is redirecting the station's life support to feed a process no one on Pendor is supposed to know exists. Mira, the station's youngest engineer, can read the hidden routing in the recalibration equipment wedged into her palm, but reading it won't save anyone if the protocols keeping the lie intact are the same protocols keeping the oxygen scrubbers online. Liss-4 knows which maintenance cycles to break and when. Old Salt knows what Pendor Station looked like before the drift started, and what it will look like when the nitrogen hits zero. The choice isn't between fixing the gauge and ignoring it. It's between trusting the systems that are lying, and tearing the station open with no backup, no reroute, and no guarantee the air will still be breathable on the other side. Burrman's file has one more page. No one has read it yet. And the person who did the reading may already be the one holding the gauge steady.