Finally, the Anna Karenina’s engines began to power down.

Her massive drive had fired sending a shudder through the aging ship as she slowed her forward progress until she reached a relative stop. A single, tiny, dot of void where the stars didn’t shine through. As then engines powered down, the weight of acceleration-induced gravity began to lessen and her crew breathed an almost simultaneous sigh of relief in their various quarters. They’d only had a short 10-minute respite while the massive ship had flipped a full 180 in order to begin the deceleration period. Sirius took a deep breath, his whole body ached from the extra weight and the poorly padded flight chair. He would probably find some pressure bruises on his back and legs later.

He fished around in one of his uniform pockets and found a small bag of painkillers. Sirius took one and chewed it, a familiar bitter taste spreading through his mouth. While waiting for it to work he watched his workspace screen light up as his crewmates started scanning the area for the lost Karamazov. With any luck, she’d pop up pretty quick, they’d find out why she went dark, then head on back to Deimos, and he’d sign up for another job on another ship with less drama. But not after a nice long shore leave where he’d get the new arm fitted. Sirius was holding the captain to his payment regardless what happened. Then spend most of his paycheck in the cheapest hole he could find to rent with plenty of cheap drugs and booze to keep him feeling good until his restlessness motivated him to find a new job.

With this in mind, and the painkillers setting in, Sirius actually felt pretty good for once. He waited for a tone from the computer saying that the Karamazov had been identified. And he waited. And waited. A few minutes later, they received call from the captain’s desk. He watched his crewmates look increasingly agitated as they tried to explain what they weren’t seeing. The Karamazov wasn’t there – it just wasn’t. They ran a few more scans, this time widening the search to capture everything in the area. What turned up was disappointing.

Instead of a massive supply ship filled to bursting with both legitimate and illegitimate goods, there was a debris field that spanned many, many kilometers in all directions. There was nothing left of its source to identify it, it had been turned into dust.

“Wow”, Sirius muttered as he saw the scope of the destruction. Nothing was left that was bigger than a few meters in diameter and it would take them months to sort through all the pieces of the wreckage to determine what ship it came from. For all they knew some random tanker had blown and the Karamazov was halfway across the galaxy, none the wiser. We’re really gonna have to sort through all this shit. “Fuck”.

But where are the rescue boats?

He thought as he evaluated the on-screen data. All large ships were required to have a small fleet of emergency boats. It was one of the few requirements universally followed by even the least safety-conscious of organizations because emergency boats were ridiculously cheap. They also made for good hiding places for contraband since no one bothered to check them during searches.

They have beacons, why aren’t any of them going off?

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Even if the boats were damaged, the beacons were designed to keep shouting their location no matter what. They were built tough and had their own power supplies. Even in a mess like this, the beacons would still be going until someone turned them off, manually.

Except they aren’t, which means they didn’t have enough time to turn them on. Or maybe, the boats got picked up by someone else who turned them off. That would be reported.

He checked the logged flights for the area and checked if any had submitted rescue reports. None were recent. A few mercantile barges ran through last month, and nobody had reported running across a fleet of lifeboats. He checked recently logged flight plans, and their intended trajectories and berths. None would pass through here for a long time. The Anna Karenina was the only one here and would be the only one for what looked like months.

Something still felt off, never mind the destroyed ship.

As Sirius looked at the registered flight plans, he felt uneasy. He stared at the list, then selected all of them, and placed them on the same map. The solid lines were completed flights, the dotted ones showing the trajectories of ongoing ones. They all seemed regular enough. He placed a marker at the Anna’s location.

Then it hit him.

All the planned flights paths curved around the Anna Karenina’s location, leaving a literal dead zone for thousands of kilometers between them. He called up older flights, within the last year and placed them on the map as well. Literally hundreds of flights through this area and there was still a gap of space that everything changed course to avoid. The Anna, and the Karamazov’s last locations were dead center of this empty zone.

But why not this spot? Why would they go around here?

Since space was mostly empty, there was no reason to make flight plans all that complicated, just point the front of the ship at the destination, burn to get up to speed, flip, then burn again to slow down - simple. But each of the ships whose trajectories would have taken them through this spot had diverted course, at roughly the same distance from the epicenter of this phenomenon – all except for the Karamazov and the Anna Karenina.

Almost as if they had been warned off from here. The captain’s gotta know, this looks bad.He thought whas he eva

He sent a message request to the captain’s desk, flagged it as urgent. The first mate popped up on the video feed.

“Cap’s busy, and I’m busy too, so if this is going to help us out here, you better talk fast, otherwise, save this for later”.

“Take a look at this data”, he sent the map with the data points he was looking at and waited for the first mate to check it out.

“What am I seeing here, techie? Why was this flagged as urgent?”

“This place, the shipping routes are actively avoiding it, no one’s been here since, I dunno, a few months - aside from both us and the Karamazov. I don’t want to be assuming anything, but I think we need to get out of here. Or we might end up like the Karamazov”, Sirius said.

“That’s a pretty bold claim there, kid, but the data checks out. I’ll let the captain know once I can”, the first mate said, his tone somewhat dismissive.

“No, tell him now”, Sirius insisted, “this is too suspicious to wait on, we don’t know what kinda timeline the Karamazov was dealing with – we can’t afford to wait”.

“Now”, the first mate said, looking a bit miffed, “just because the captain trusts you for his ‘secret mission’ doesn’t mean you can start giving orders on this ship. You’re still the lowest guy on the totem pole, and I could have you put even lower for that remark”.

“Fuck you, get the goddam captain, or I’m coming up there myself”, the high from the painkillers was making him a little more assertive than usual.

The first mate’s response was to close the connection.