A Proof of Possibility

  A Clumsy Handful of Stars, Volume 1

  Yolande Kleinn

  Published by Yolande Kleinn, 2022.

  Copyright 2022 Yolande Kleinn

  ISBN 978-1-946316-24-0

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  A Proof of Possibility

  Cover Design

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  About the Author

  A Proof of Possibility

  by Yolande Kleinn

  Aida de Luca is not supposed to be down here.

  At least, she's not supposed to be down here alone. The science team will be furious if they find out she's descended farther into the cave system unsupervised. Not for fear of her safety—though some of them would probably worry—but because she might easily interfere with discoveries waiting to be made. It's not often they find a site like this, so full of strange readings and mysterious contradictions. Even if Aida doesn't touch anything, they'll accuse her of fucking things up for the survey team.

  But that's only if she gets caught. And Aida doesn't intend to get caught.

  A brief twinge of guilt touches her when she imagines the disapproval on her captain's face. Jamila Warwick is more scientist than ship's captain, though she does a damn good job of both. Captain Warwick would disapprove of any member of her crew putting themself in harm's way. And while Aida would never call her out on it—isn't even sure it's a thing Warwick is consciously aware of—she would be all the more troubled that Aida is the one doing such a reckless and ridiculous thing.

  Aida doesn't know why she's so certain she won't find danger in these winding and endless tunnels. It's not as though a career as linguist and translator aboard a science vessel has given her special insight into the perils of exploring abandoned worlds.

  But there's a certainty thrumming beneath her skin, and never mind how foolish she is being. Aida won't stop.

  The path has been slanting more steeply downward for the past half hour, but the shifting angle isn't enough to interfere with her footing. Aida carries spelunking and escape equipment in her pack, right below the emergency signal beacon. So far she hasn't needed any of it—strongly suspects she won't need it—because there's been no sign at all of the obstacles she should be finding. No uneven terrain beneath her feet, no low-hanging juts of stony shelf, no toothy lines of stalactites or inconvenient columns of rock impeding her progress.

  There have been only vast unbroken walls and improbably smooth ground, all of it looking slightly golden in the warm beam of Aida's light.

  Nothing about this place feels like a normal cave.

  What it feels like, beneath the hum of curiosity overriding Aida's better sense, is architecture. Elegant and deliberate, not carved out of the stone so much as grown this way naturally, though Aida can't imagine technology capable of such a feat. Natural rock formations can't be coaxed into convenient shapes. But the proof of possibility is all around her, in a jut of smooth flowstone almost like a safety railing to her right, in the perfectly even surface of the path beneath her feet. Above, the ceiling stretches so high and narrow that the beam of her torch can't illuminate the farthest fissure of shadow. Everything is cool and wet, and in the distance, a rhythmic dripping settles in alongside her stubborn calm, urging her onward.

  Aida keeps moving, veering left when a split in the path forces a choice between two tunnels. Both have lower ceilings than the seemingly endless canyon behind her, but the openings are more than tall enough to accommodate a human of average height. Despite the near identical taper of branching pathways, Aida chooses easily.

  Her lack of hesitation confirms something she's suspected since she first began her descent: this is not simple exploration.

  Something tugs at the edges of her awareness, summoning her forward, almost as though a thread of invitation is calling to her through the receiver implant at the base of her brain stem. It's nothing strong enough to categorize as a signal—more like a faint subterranean hum of hopeful static—but it guides her just the same. She gave herself over to it long before she became consciously aware of the soft presence, probably all the way back at the entrance of the cave, and she has no desire to turn around now.

  Aida passes steadily through more caverns and tunnels and open spaces. A waterfall briefly catches her attention in one enormous room, cascading with such brilliance that she turns off her guiding beam of light. She sucks in a shaky breath when the falling water continues to glitter with incongruous illumination, caught by some hidden light source. It's powerful enough to stain the walls a strange, shivering blue through the otherwise pitch darkness, and for a time Aida stands perfectly still to absorb the sight.

  Eventually, she turns her torch back on and continues. She feels compelled to motion, desperate to learn what other wonders wait below. Aida may still have no idea what she's looking for, but she has a destination to reach. It isn't far now, either. Just a short distance ahead, crackling louder at the edges of her awareness with every passing heartbeat.

  Aida resists the urge to hurry her pace. The path angles more steeply than ever now, and there's no call for carelessness. She's nearly two hours from base camp at the mouth of the cave. If she injures herself, her comm signal will allow her to summon help—hell, even if she's unconscious, the crew can find her once they realize she's missing—but it will take time to retrace her steps, and more time to extract her to the surface.

  When she reaches the end of the path, for a moment Aida is simply confused. The cavern before her rises round and enormous, with a level dais elevated at the center of the space. The walls on all sides form a perfect sphere. But they are blank and smooth as flowstone. Just like the floor, now that Aida has stepped forward off the path that led her here.

  There is no visual sign to suggest this room is special, beyond the jarringly perfect symmetry.

  But Aida can feel that this is what she's been searching for. End of the line. It's pinging her comm implant more insistently now, though still in that strange and almost subconscious way that gives her nothing to interact with. She can't respond to a signal that isn't really there.

  She stands motionless and frustrated at the edge of this hollow sphere, glowering at the unbroken wall opposite the gap that granted her entrance.

  "I give up," comes a voice from just behind her, rich and warm and wry. "What am I looking at?"

  Aida tries to conceal her surprise as she turns to face her captain. Warwick still wears full uniform—dusky purple fabric with crisp gold accents—despite the fact that Aida departed on this ridiculous venture in the dead of night. It's difficult to stop looking at Captain Warwick, familiar distraction that she is. If anything, she looks even more striking than usual, dark skin and darker hair lit only indirectly by the reflected glow from Aida's torch beam.

  "Captain," Aida says, trying for an apologetic tone and probably falling short. Fuck. For Warwick to be standing here now, she must have been following Aida for a long damn time.

  Perhaps she's been following from the start. Aida barely resists the urge to ask why Warwick didn't intervene at the outset, but she shouldn't be asking questions. She should be justifying herself and her unannounced venture into the heart of the crew's newest discovery.

  The problem is, Aida has no reasonable explanation for her nocturnal wanderings. There are protocols, after all. This isn't the first dead world their little science vessel has encountered, and it won't be the last one they study.

  None of the other worlds ever spoke to Aida so directly. She's no scientist—and as communications chief, her presence on the planet's surface is purely precautionary—a trained receiver and linguist, for the rare occasion they find more than samples and specimens.

  This place feels like more. But even so, Aida should've turned around to notify the head of the research team—or even Captain Warwick—the second she realized she was being compelled beneath the surface. She sure as hell shouldn't have traipsed down into a complex cave system, alone and without reporting her intentions.

  Somehow, the single dark eyebrow Warwick arches encompasses all these thoughts spinning through Aida's head. The gesture—exaggerated in the stark beam of torchlight—offers wry rebuke without any need to speak the words aloud.

  Aida's face heats with chagrin. She deserves worse than a pointed look. Violating the chain of command so blatantly should earn her an official reprimand, never mind the inherent danger of what she's done. It's only their long years of working together that make her confident this is not what her captain intends.

  The look on Warwick's stern, lovely face isn't angry, which means Aida has the benefit of the doubt—for the moment at least.

  Warwick has a habit of looking the other way for Aida's lapses in deference, when discretion allows. A soft, dangerously fond hint of special treatment, not that anyone has ever noticed or complained. Some days, Aida lets herself wonder if it means something—if her captain's interest runs deeper than protocol—deeper than the complicated friendship they have grown to share.

  Some days she imagines wha t it might be like to simply ask—to find the right combination of foolishness and bravery and demand the information she needs. More than anything, what Aida craves is proof she isn't imagining things. For fuck's sake, she is supposed to be good at this: language, nuance, expression, implication. Her entire professional life hinges on her ability to parse ambiguous information and suss out meaning from limited points of data. Considering how long and how closely she has studied Jamila Warwick, how intimately Aida has learned to read her captain's every tell, it's galling to have no idea if her fascination is returned.

  These are imprudent things to wonder, let alone hope. Aida knows better. Warwick is too much a professional to indulge a romantic attachment to a subordinate. To express more intimate interest would be inappropriate, no matter how desperately Aida might want her to do so.

  With the pained efficiency of long practice, Aida pushes such thoughts out of her head before they can show on her face. "Why didn't you stop me? We've been walking for hours."

  "Thought about it." Warwick's mouth twitches at one corner. "But that seemed a poor way to discover where the hell you were going."

  "I'm sorry." Aida swallows hard. "I should've reported in. I was following... something." Frustration echoes in her voice, because she doesn't want to be this vague. Her words are imprecise because she doesn't know what has called her here. There's still a hum at the edge of her awareness, almost a sound, not quite a frequency she can pick up on her comm receptors.

  Warwick's expression sharpens with interest. "A distress signal?"

  "I don't think so." Aida turns her torch beam out across the circular cavern, pretending to ignore her captain's proximity, body heat noticeable with the rest of the cavern so cold. She swallows hard, grateful for the darkness concealing her face. The last thing she needs is for Warwick to finally catch a clue about Aida de Luca's longtime infatuation.

  The beam of light illuminates only impossibly symmetrical stone walls.

  "It's not exactly a signal," Aida tries to explain when the silence holds. "Even a weak one should feel more intentional than this. But there is something here. I'm picking it up at such a low level that I couldn't even get the science team's equipment to register anything."

  She tried before venturing forward on foot, when the whole thing still felt like a silly hunch. Just because she's a communications expert and not a scientist doesn't mean she can't work the relevant devices. But none of the monitoring frequencies read so much as a blip in the planet's natural energy output.

  "And you're sure?" Warwick presses, sounding so close Aida can't help shivering. "It's centered here? Not somewhere below us?"

  "Definitely here." It's the only thing she is sure of.

  In Aida's peripheral vision, Captain Warwick gives a tug at the edge of her jacket, an unnecessary movement intended to smooth the already perfect lines of her uniform. Aida recognizes the tug as a gesture of curious impatience—now that Warwick knows the shape of the puzzle, she wants answers as fervently as Aida does.

  If they can't figure it out between them, Aida will concede defeat and summon the primary survey team from among the small army of scientists topside. But doing so will feel like a loss, for all that she can't articulate why.

  Aida closes her eyes for a moment. Listening. Feeling.

  Sometimes taking her visual sense out of the equation makes it easier to focus on difficult comm frequencies—though she's not especially surprised when doing so now doesn't help. The persistent presence remains, but still Aida can't seem to access it.

  She blinks her eyes open again and breathes a soft huff of frustration. She doesn't need to turn her head to know exactly the look Warwick is giving her. Bemused, humoring, maybe with a familiar hint of affection sneaking through. A quirk at the corner of her captain's full lips. On most faces, such a subtle twitch would not constitute a smile, but Aida has glimpsed the expression enough times to know better.

  A hand closes on her shoulder, welcome and warm. The touch carries reassurance and strength, an undercurrent of unspoken affection. Captain Warwick has big, nimble, elegant hands. Thinking about them will not help Aida focus, but she doesn't protest. She doesn't want to risk making the touch withdraw.

  "I can summon Doctor Gima," Captain Warwick says. "Have her bring a small contingent to start with."

  Teamwork is, after all, how they do this. It's why Aida should have gone through appropriate channels in the first place. She violated the crew's charter by coming down here alone—not to mention the mountain of safety procedures she ignored—and by all rights, Warwick should be tearing her a new one.

  "Fine." Aida tries to keep the word free of the petulance she feels. She's already pushed her luck too far. Warwick's suggestion is perfectly reasonable.

  "It will take them three hours to get here with all their equipment," Warwick points out, somehow managing to sound both exasperated and soothing. The woman is a practiced contradiction. No wonder Aida's fascination has been impossible to quell.

  It's this incongruously intimate reassurance that drives Aida forward, out from beneath the weight of her captain's hand. She keeps her movements deliberately steady—even now, she doesn't want Warwick to get the idea that Aida is retreating—and strides toward the raised circle at the center of the empty sphere. The natural dais is only a foot higher than the rest of the floor, and Aida steps onto it. She casts the beam of her torch around the same empty walls and finds them unchanged at this new angle.

  Then she reaches the center of the circle.

  Awareness cuts through her immediately, so sudden she gasps with the bright thrum of energy pulsing beneath her skin. Her nerves rush with a giddy sensation, pleasant and cool and sleek as the hull of a starship. Not just a proper connection for her comm implant to access—finally—but a shiver all through the rest of her. A surge of power as the walls of the spherical cavern light up.

  No, she realizes as she deactivates her torch, peripherally aware of Captain Warwick doing the same behind her. It's not the walls that are alight.

  The glow hovers in the air well within those walls, surrounding the dais and offering different depths along Aida's field of vision. When she looks deliberately at a patch of detailed gridwork at the farthest edge, her comm implant tingles in answer and the glowing lines immediately slide closer within her perception. Clearer. Sharper. Superseding the panels around it—yes, every piece of this shimmering circumference is a separate control panel—and rising to the fore.

  A startled laugh echoes through the chamber, and Aida realizes only belatedly that the sound came from her.

  Unprofessional. Warwick is probably frowning. But for once Aida doesn't care what Captain Jamila Warwick thinks. Because what she's looking at, what she's feeling, is too stunning. She doesn't bother reining in her wild grin as she peruses other panels. Testing, exploring, looking for any symbols that repeat enough to establish a pattern, to provide a handhold toward deciphering the whole.

  She is very, very careful. There's an almost tangible sensation at the base of her skull, a shiver of extra potential in her implant. She could touch these controls with a thought. Not just look at them, but interact with them. Even at her most reckless, Aida would recognize this as unwise without more information. It will take time for Doctor Gima's survey team to identify what this place is physically equipped to do, and longer still for Aida to translate the written language she is perceiving.

  Aida doesn't need to be a scientist to recognize the dangerous folly of activating technology without first understanding what it is capable of. A certain amount of guesswork and chance is inevitable in what they do, but Aida knows better than to deliberately tempt fate.

  She turns a full circle several times, taking in every millimeter of the sphere's intangible, icy blue light. Even directly along the ceiling, there shine nodes of information, impractical for human posture but lovely to behold. She absorbs all of it. Slow, grinning, ecstatic.

  Aida finally halts facing Warwick, and finds she is not frowning after all. The captain's expression is something else entirely. It's sharp and piercing and wide open. Longing, Aida realizes with a whisper-soft inhale, as she stares through the shifting contours of the sphere.

 

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