Alala (Raven, Smart Pet)

The notification had gone to the Commissioner's office on Secondday. By Fourthday it had reached the dock crews, in the way written things reach dock crews: as a rumour with a reference number. By the time Alala came up the ring the first time, banded and obvious, half of Eden's dock shift had already heard there would be a raven, and the other half found out by pointing.

That lasted, by her own count, ninety seconds. It always did. A raven overhead is an event; a raven still overhead is weather. By her third circuit she had stopped being information and become part of the ceiling, which was the whole of the technique, and not one she had invented. Nobody hides. Nobody needs to. People do the forgetting themselves, on schedule, and the notification stays filed downstairs meaning every word it says.

Berth 60-Low held the thing the paper described: a maintenance drone, CM-4471 by its registry plate, powered down, drawing keep-alive current. She held station above it through two full shifts and let her subsystem keep the tallies, because tallies were what it was for.

The tallies were wrong in a quiet, accumulating way. A working drone wears where it works — scorch at the manipulator housings, scuffing along the docking collar, the thousand small insults of a machine that earns its berth. This hull had none of them. It had dust. It had, more precisely, undisturbed dust, a fine even film of the kind a dock lays down on anything that holds still long enough, and no machine on a maintenance rotation holds still long enough. The keep-alive draw never varied. The drone never left. The drone, she was increasingly certain, never could leave.

A shell, then. A hull with a registry plate, parked in a ledger's blind spot, holding a berth the way a coat holds a seat.

She filed the observation upward with the two photographs that mattered — dust, and the absence of scorch — and added the one operational note the Commander would want: the recertification inspection for this berth block fell in nine days, and a shell that could not power up could not pass it. Whoever kept this seat would have to swap the real CM-4471 back in before then.

Which meant that for one transfer window, both of them would be in the same place, and so would she.