the pearl

Hauntings

There are ghosts on the station.

This doesn't really surprise anyone, honestly. It's a big station, there's a lot of people on it, and it seems like someone's dying every day. So there'd be ghosts all over the station, if the stories were true and ghosts are just people who can't find their way around.

But the stories aren't true, and the ghosts that haunt the corridors never died on the station.

Most of them never even died in space, as near as people can tell. Whenever it's brought up, late in the station's daily cycle, in the worst bars on the station, people tell the same stories of the same ghosts. There's a Minbari who walks through the Zocalo, who seems to be just another shopper, until he walks through the last stall. There's an alien — some people think it's a Markab, others a Drazi, and others think it's something else altogether — who runs along Grey Sector, feet stomping on metal. There even seems to be a human, and a vaguely familiar looking one at that, sitting and waving from any seat in the station, before falling backwards.

They don't know who the ghosts are. They don't know where they came from.

But everyone knows when they appeared. They said that soul hunters came onboard the station. And when they left, the ghosts appeared.

This Babylon 5 story was written by Kate Bolin. If you liked it, there's plenty more at http://www.dymphna.net/fanfic/. And you can feedback her at dymphna@dymphna.net.