Today was his day off and Rodion had run as thorough a background check as he could on the crew-list. It involved mostly cross checking different social media profiles, job board profiles, and whatever other publicly available information he had access to that wasn’t hidden behind a Martian information block. Like Killian had said, the list of those with a criminal record was longer than those without.

He recorded another message to Dima. After all, it was still possible he’d only forgotten to call Georgi back all he needed was a little reminder. Or maybe something had happened, and Dima was afraid to burden his spouse with it. He might well be more open to speaking with someone ‘less involved’. Rodion almost didn’t send it. It felt awkward stepping into someone else’s relationship like this.

Rodion also recorded a second, more official-sounding message. This time to the man listed as the captain of the Anna Karenina. He kept it short.

“Hello Captain…” he scrolled back up to the officer’s list, “Conolly. My name’s Safronov. Rodion Nikolaevich. A family member of mine is working on your ship and we are afraid that something has happened to him. His name is Dmitri, his id number is…”, he read it off from a note near his desk, “Listed as a mechanic’s supervisor. I don’t want to ask too much of you, sir, but my family would really appreciate confirmation that he’s still on the ship and that he’s unhurt. His family’s very worried, could you have someone let him know we’d like for him to call? Thanks in advance, captain”.

He shut down the call. If he did the math right, the Anna could be 30-40 light minutes away. It would be reasonable to expect another half hour to an hour before the captain got around to answering a civilian’s request. It would take time for him to check in with Dima, and any response Rodion could expect would take another 30-40 minutes to arrive here in Moscow.

If the captain didn’t care, he’d have to go through the whole thing again. It would be hours before he could expect an answer either way.

He spent the rest of the day taking care of various errands that he hadn’t had time for during the work week. Every time he received a message notification, he expected to find a message back from Conolly or Dima. Instead, he received a message from Killian while he was busy scrubbing down his tiny kitchen.

CAPT. KILLIAN: Did a little more digging on your case, found something weird. Can we meet up?

RODION S: Sounds good, where?

CAPT. KILLIAN: Your place? I’m in the area right now.

Rodion looked around his apartment. Killian had been here before, but that was when he was still new there and had treated the space with respect. He’d kept things clean and orderly then.

Now it was a mess of scattered papers, books, and old coffee mugs. Some of his clothes had been scattered across the living room between loads of laundry. He was only scrubbing the kitchen down because he’d found a trail of ants venturing too far onto the only empty food prep surface.

RODION S: How far out are you?

CAPT. KILLIAN: 10 minutes.

Rodion could only smile. Of course, she was only ten minutes away. She must’ve been planning to see him since their dinner. Did she miss him as much as he’d missed her? He sprang into action, triaging the clutter around him, focusing specifically on the worst of the mess. Before he got too far into it, he sent a reply to Killian. He spent a few seconds trying to come up with something that sounded casual but not too distant. An exclamation point would be casual, but would it come off as desperate? A period made it a statement, but would she find the message begrudging? He could soften it with an emoji, but that felt juvenile. He hit send on what he had written anyway.

RODION S: You know where to find me

He returned to cleaning, or rather hiding, as much of the clutter in his apartment as he could. Exactly 9 minutes from his last text, he heard a knock on the door. Killian was always early; you could count on that. He shoved a stack of papers underneath the cushion of an old living room chair, then opened the door to see Killian waiting. She smiled slightly when she saw him, so he smiled back as she stepped inside the apartment.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been here…”, she trailed of while glancing around the tiny space.

Her expression was focused, like she was evaluating the still-too-messy space for clues into how Rodion was living now. If that was the case, she wasn’t getting a great picture of his life.

“Would you like some tea?” Rodion offered, if only to get her to stop reading between the lines of his living situation.

She turned and nodded, so he stepped into the kitchen and found to his dismay that his only tea kettle was long overdue for a wash. He washed it just enough to where it looked acceptable, then chucked some tea inside and poured in some water. He set it to heat up, then joined Killian in the living room.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Not bad, and yours?” She didn’t seem willing to go into the details.

“Same, same” he replied, then decided to dive into business, “So, what did you find?”

Killian swiped back a strand of hair, a little tell that Rodion recognized from their time together. It was something she did before giving what she felt was bad news. Now was probably the best time to get the tea. If he waited, it would be cold by the time the conversation came to the next natural pause.

He excused himself and poured the now hot tea into the only clean vessels available, an old ceramic and fake filigree mug inherited from his grandmother and his old army thermos. When he returned to the room, he passed Killian the thermos and set the filigreed mug in front of himself.

“Okay, so tell me what you found”.

“I decided to check if the Anna Karenina was the only ship that went dark in the last few months. I found a few incidents that looked similar and then cross checked over the last four years. Check this list”, she placed her tablet in front of him.

Rodion took it and scrolled through the list. There was the Karamazov most recently, then the Dostoevsky, the Stenka Razin, the Oktyabrsky, the Voronezh, the Niszhni Novgorod, the Irkutsk, the A.S. Pushkin, the Tolstoy, and the Kamchatka. And of course, the Anna. Ten ships. All named in a similar vein. That usually meant they were owned by the same person or organization. From the naming conventions, it wasn’t a stretch to assume that the Anna Karenina also was owned by them.

“That’s a lot of ships… They all disappeared?” Rodion asked her.

“All of them”, Killian answered, “They flew out of different ports but none of them ever made it to their destinations. That’s all old news, though, what I found last night is weird”. She gestured for Rodion to swipe to another page on the tablet. He swiped through and found a graphic made of overlaid flight plans. He immediately noticed the weird part. All ten flight plans intersected over a relatively small sector of space. Of all the trillions of kilometers of available space, why route them all through there?

“What’s in that spot that would be so important to send half a fleet of ships there?” He asked, “And what caused all these ships to disappear? Did any of the crew turn up?”

Killian took the tablet back from him and swiped to another page, “Only one crewmember from all these ships ever popped back up on the radar. Turned out he’d been violently ill and hospitalized the night before his ship, the Stenka Razin, was set to depart. So, though he was listed on the crew roll, he was never on the ship”.

“Sounds like he was lucky as hell, but why hasn’t anyone made the connections before?”

“It’s the dates mostly, look. They all disappeared over several month intervals. Long enough and far apart enough that no one was looking for a pattern. There’s also the criminal factor…”

Rodion hazarded a guess, “Red Sky? All of them?”

“Definitely, though the connections wouldn’t hold up in court. Unfortunately, it means that all the investigations would be bare minimum or less. Station police don’t tend to care much about the disappearance of criminals. As to what’s in that zone, I know as much as you. There’s nothing in public record on Earth or on Mars that occupies that orbit”.

“You sure it’s not anything classified out there?”

“If it’s Earth, not anything I’d have access to”, Killian replied, “but you know I’d have to say that anyways. If it’s Mars, we’ll never find out what’s hidden there”.

Rodion paused while he tried to piece together all the information Killian had just given him. What were the implications in the context of the Anna’s disappearance? What was the timeline from ship out to bitter end? It had only been a few days, was Dima already dead? Had he even had a chance?

“Rodya, I know it looks bad”, Killian’s voice had taken on a softer tone, one he’d rarely heard from her, “Whatever I can do to help, let me know”. She reached out and touched his hand and he let her lace her fingers with his. When was the last time they’d held hands this way? He felt his face warm a bit and prayed he wasn’t visibly blushing and decided not to be the first to break contact.

“Thanks, Killian, I guess the most important thing now is figuring out how to tell my brother that his husband might be dead. I just don’t know how I’m going to tell him”.

He felt Killian give his hand a squeeze, a slight movement that was disproportionately soothing, “Don’t give up on Dmitri yet. Sure, you should tell your brother that something has happened – he deserves to know, but until you know for sure that he’s dead, it’s best not to say anything. We’re going to figure this out. I promise”.

“I hope you’re right”.