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A Blue-White Shape in the Dark
The dock district where the Silver Anchor was berthed had fallen unusually quiet that night.
Ledea Mace woke to a dry throat. Two in the morning. The artificial sun had long since set, and the corridor outside ran on emergency lighting — a thin, pale blue.
(...A little cold.)
She pulled a cardigan over her nightgown and stepped quietly into the hallway.
That was when she saw it.
At the edge of her vision, past the bend in the corridor — something drifting. Blue-white. Edges soft and undefined. Moving as though gravity were a suggestion, sliding along the floor toward the dock's outer gate.
"...Huh?"
Ledea stopped walking. She did not believe in unscientific things — this was a rational age, a universe of technology and data. But somewhere in the back of her mind, an old story surfaced: the ghost of a sailor who had died badly, still wandering the frontier stations.
The shape paused. Twitched in a way that nothing should twitch. Drifted on.
"Wh — ...ah — aaaaaah—!!"
The sound that came out of Ledea was not dignified.
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A Knight at Instant Speed, and Very Cold Intent
"Sis—!!"
The scream hadn't finished before the door behind her blew open with the force of a contained explosion.
Shutia emerged in her pajamas, a military-grade electromagnetic baton in her right hand and a night-vision visor raised in her left.
"Sis, get down! Now that I'm here, you are the single safest person in this station — no, in this galaxy—!!"
"Sh — Shutia—! There's a — a ghost — over there—!"
Ledea pointed down the corridor with a trembling hand. Shutia put herself between Ledea and the darkness in one movement, and drove her gaze into the shadows like something that had already decided the outcome.
(...Ghost? No — thermal signature is faint, but something's there. An intruder? Someone trying to watch sis sleep — some wretched stalker creeping around in the dark—?)
(...If so. They will not be leaving this corridor under their own power.)
A particular quality entered Shutia's eyes.
To her, anything that frightened Ledea was simply a bug in need of removal.
"Stay here, sis. ...I'll go tidy up."
"Shutia! It could be dangerous—!"
She was already gone — no sound, no warning, just the absence where she'd been.
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The Thing That Was Haunting the Corridor
Dead end. The maintenance hatch at the far edge of the dock.
The shape had nowhere left to go. It trembled against the wall, producing a low grinding sound — ggrrr... grrr — like something whose motor was losing the argument with its own weight.
"Cornered." Shutia raised the baton. Blue-white sparks crackled along its length. "Are you ready? Frightening my sister badly enough that she'll hesitate to walk to the kitchen at night — that is not a forgivable offense."
She fired the tactical light.
"...Oh."
What the beam revealed was not a transparent specter. It was not a figure in black.
It was a disc-shaped automatic floor-cleaning robot, approximately thirty centimeters across. The kind found anywhere.
With one notable modification.
Bolted to its upper surface — inelegantly, evidently by hand — was a tower of high-precision monitoring cameras, stacked one atop another, lenses pointing in every direction.
"......"
Ledea arrived at a run and stopped. She stared at the object in the beam of light for a long moment.
"...This is," she said, to no one in particular.
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The Bug Called Love
"...Shutia. Explain."
The Silver Anchor's living area, every light on. Ledea sat on the sofa. Across from her: Shutia, seated on the floor in the formal kneeling position she had clearly been directed to take, and beside her, the modified cleaning robot.
Ledea looked from one to the other.
"Well — the thing is, sis — I'd been hearing rumors that security around the dock has been unreliable lately, and I thought while sis was sleeping someone should be keeping the corridor safe—"
"This camera array. It isn't connected to the Silver Anchor's main system." Ledea's voice was level. "It routes directly to your personal terminal. And it's set to track my movements specifically, using motion detection."
Shutia's gaze wandered to the middle distance.
"...Haha. You noticed." A pause. "The thing is, sis sometimes gets up in the middle of the night and walks around, and what if she tripped, or what if something unpleasant got to her — so I built a 24-hour Ledea-protection-and-monitoring droid disguised as a cleaning robot, and—"
"The drifting. Why was it moving like that."
"...The waxing motion, combined with the cameras being too heavy and throwing off the center of gravity — and I tried to apply optical stealth so it wouldn't startle sis, but the output wasn't sufficient and it ended up going semi-transparent and slightly blue instead of invisible—"
So the ghost that had driven Ledea out of the corridor in genuine terror was, in fact, a labor of love — Shutia's nightly patrol, confirming that her sister was safe, and incidentally recording everything.
"Shutia."
Ledea's voice was quiet. It did not require volume.
"Your dedication frightens me considerably more than any ghost would. ...Remove the cameras from that robot immediately. And for one week, your personal terminal is restricted after midnight."
"That's so unfair—! Sis's nighttime behavioral data is my reason for living, it's the oxygen I breathe, it's the foundational truth of the universe—! Please, sis, don't abandon it! I'll reshape the robot to look like a Pom, at least forgive the exterior—!"
"...That is not the issue."
The next morning.
Down the corridor of the dock, the robot moved in its rounds — cameras gone, returned to its original function, somehow diminished.
Behind it, Shutia watched it go, hollow-eyed from lost sleep, full of something that looked like grief.
Ledea looked at her sister's back for a moment. Then she drank her tea.