The Spaces in Between

  A Clumsy Handful of Stars, Volume 2

  Yolande Kleinn

  Published by Yolande Kleinn, 2024.

  Copyright 2024 Yolande Kleinn

  ISBN 978-1-946316-43-1

  License Notes

  Thank you for purchasing this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Spaces in Between

  Cover Design

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  Further Reading: An Intimate Charade

  Also By Yolande Kleinn

  About the Author

  The Spaces in Between

  by Yolande Kleinn

  The ship they've discovered is even stranger on the inside.

  Jamila Warwick has been captaining science vessels for well over a decade—nearly as long as she spent in her previous life as a chemist confined to lab work—but the handful of times she's wondered if perhaps she's seen everything, the universe has challenged her hubris by throwing dizzying new mysteries in her path. She navigates uncanny corridors now, still disconcerting even after having traversed the entire ship from stem to stern. It will be a relief when it's finally time to turn her footsteps back toward the place her own ship is docked against the outer hull.

  Apart from her own people, the ship they've discovered is empty. Warwick's footsteps carry her along a path she does not need to think about, leaving her mind free to take in the odd contours of the corridor.

  If she tried very, very hard—and if she didn't touch anything—she might be able to pretend she's walking through a claustrophobic cave, and not a living system of muscle and mass. A glow of bioluminescence runs along the rounded edges of the corridor, sometimes near the smooth ground, sometimes embedded within the rougher texture directly overhead, bright and steady enough to illuminate Warwick's stride. The gravity, the mechanism for which her team has yet to figure out, holds her down at slightly less than Mars standard. Even the air smells clean, if heavier and more humid than anything Warwick is accustomed to.

  But the ship is alive. Someone built—grew?—created a spacefaring vessel out of biological impulses and living matter. The ship is alive, and complicated, and so wildly unfamiliar that it took the Obershaw's entire onboard contingent of scientists nearly fourteen hours to resolve that it was a ship. Then another six to find a way to dock with the mystery vessel, two more to board following rigorous safety protocols, and a full day to confirm that the inner chambers contain an atmosphere safe for humans to breathe.

  Since then, Warwick has grudgingly and cautiously given her crew full run of the place, to gather and analyze every scrap of confusing information. They will eventually need to find a way to transport this biological innovation back to settled space for further study. So far, after four days orbiting an asteroid with their impossible find, the Obershaw and her crew have already made discoveries that will keep biologists and shipwrights busy for decades.

  It's enough to make Warwick wish, if only fleetingly, that she hadn't allowed herself to be shunted away from pure science and into command. She's intimately familiar with the wistful tug of wishing she were coordinating a research team's deep dive into a new puzzle, or even better, studying the lab results herself.

  But no discovery has ever made her feel that longing regret quite as acutely as this.

  Yes, she has access to research data from every single department. She oversees every aspect of the Obershaw's operation, coordinates every mission, compiles and sends the reports back to headquarters. But those are broad strokes. Big picture. It's not the same as being able to immerse herself in the minutia of research, so focused that the rest of the universe falls away.

  These thoughts fold grudgingly aside when she nears her destination. She slips back into the present moment as she approaches the end of the corridor, and she finds herself taken aback all over again by the way living flesh has been cultivated into something so clearly intended to accommodate travel between worlds. The interior walls look nothing like the smooth exterior of the ship. A shingled pattern covers walls and ceiling alike, uneven and unpredictable, like shards of dark shale overlapping along every surface except the ground. The edges look sharp, but Warwick knows better—and when she reaches out to touch it, the soft, spongy material gives way beneath her fingers—only to expand back into its original shape when she withdraws.

  She takes one more step forward, but even knowing precisely what she's looking for, the hatch is nearly invisible. The line where the two sides meet hides easily amid the rough shadows and textures of the wall.

  After a moment, the seam splits automatically open, musculature within the walls contracting to offer up a portal for entry into the room beyond. The gap is big enough that Jamila Warwick, with her broad shoulders and intimidating height, can pass comfortably through without having to duck beneath the edge of the aperture.

  "You don't need me for this, Aida." Doctor Gima Natsuki's words sound almost like a shout, and Warwick wonders why the head of her science team is raising her voice, for precisely the length of time it takes her to realize the room's other occupant is buried beneath a rounded protrusion that rises and extends into the center of the open space. It could be a console, or an engine component, or hell, even a dining table for all that Warwick can tell looking at the shape. It seems to have grown directly up from the floor, out from the wall, despite possessing the smoothness of membrane rather than the rough texture of the walls themselves.

  "Of course I need you." Aida de Luca's voice comes muffled from her hiding place, but she still manages to sound indignant. All Warwick can see of her are a pair of scuffed gray boots and the rolled-up cuffs of a set of standard-issue coveralls.

  None of the crew, save the captain herself, has bothered with the crisp uniform of their station. On a mission like this, the trappings of rank matter far less than comfort and practicality.

  "There's not room for both of us down there," Doctor Gima points out placidly, from her perch on a nearby bench formed of the same disconcerting material as the console.

  "Come on, Natsuki." Aida's boots dig into the soft floor as she pushes just a little further forward. "Your expertise is invaluable."

  "My expertise has better things to do than watch you crawl around under something that may or may not be a nav console."

  Still standing unnoticed in the open portal, Warwick feels her chest warm with a familiar contradiction of possessive fondness and wry exasperation. Her comms chief has been aboard this vessel for less than an hour, and already the woman is pushing her luck. Aida de Luca is persistent to a fault. Warwick absolutely should not want to indulge her stubbornness. Even more, she should not respond to this familiar show of impatience with a dangerous pulse in the vicinity of her heart.

  With the skill of long practice, Warwick tucks the inconvenient affection away, and steps fully across the threshold, putting a little extra space between herself and the corridor.

  The portal constricts and closes behind her, drawing Gima's attention. The look they exchange is exasperated, but when Gima rolls her eyes, there's only humor in the gesture. A wordless shorthand made simple by the long years they've worked together.

  Another moment and Aida retorts, "Maybe I just want to avoid having my wrist slapped later if you decide I exceeded my mandate."

  "Are you planning to exceed your mandate?" Despite being pitched to carry through a bulwark of muscle and cartilage, Gima's voice manages to encompass all the times Aida has done precisely that. While the Obershaw is not a military vessel, there is still a chain of command, and Aida has no authority for anything that hasn't been approved by either captain or chief scientist.

  "No," Aida says, but even muffled beneath the console, the word holds a suspicious lack of resolve.

  "Then you've got nothing to worry about." Gima's tone carries a warning, even as she proclaims, "I'm leaving now."

  The room—the primary navigation module, as Gima's initial survey team categorized it, though Warwick has the sense this is a vast oversimplification—isn't large, but it still takes Gima several steps to traverse the distance and join Warwick near the sealed hatch.

  "Doctor Gima." Warwick nods in greeting. "Why is my comms chief under the navigation array?" This terminology also feels woefully lacking, but it's the best they have to work with.

  "She insists there's a signal pattern coming from down there somewhere. Says finding the input mechanism should help her decipher the control panel somehow." Gima shrugs and offers a wry half-smile. Not quite the shortest member of the crew, but close, Gima has to tip her head back to meet Warwick's eyes. Her round face and sharp chin don't lend themselves to stern expressions in any case—not even with her hair locked into a tight bun at the back of her head—but she looks especially indulgent now. "To be honest, her reasoning seems thin. I think she just wants to see the components for herself, before anyone else has a chance to call dibs."

  Warwick is inclined to trust Gima's assessment of the situation—and equally inclined to trust her apparent willingness to let Aida continue whatever it is she's doing down there. Aida may be an impulsive young woman prone to sticking her nose into all manner of quandaries outside the scope of her commission, but rarely does this tendency result in disaster. Hell, a couple of times it's actually brought new discoveries and insights to the puzzle at hand.

  Still. "You're certain she can't get herself into any peril under there?" Warwick hopes her dry tone will conceal the more personal edge of concern. Yes, she is protective of her entire crew. But when it comes to harboring a powerful unspoken attachment to one crew member in particular, she tries not to show her hand.

  "Certain?" Gima seems to give the question serious consideration before answering. "No. We still have no idea how any of these systems work. I can't guess which components might pose a risk, when we don't even know what most of them do."

  Warwick scowls. "That does not reassure me, Doctor."

  "Sorry. I can't give you 'certain'. But I am reasonably confident. We haven't come across any dormant security protocols or obvious malfunctions. So far, the most dangerous thing anyone's encountered is a containment bubble full of something like stomach acid on the engineering deck."

  Well. There's an image Warwick did not need.

  "Okay," she says, not entirely convinced but willing to extend a little trust. If the scientist who discovered the stomach acid had been hurt, Warwick would know about it.

  "If you've finished doing your rounds, you could stay with Aida yourself," Gima suggests, and Warwick doesn't like the glint of something too knowing in her tone. "Make sure she stays out of trouble."

  Warwick narrows her eyes at the head of her science team. "Is my presence in any way necessary?"

  Gima shrugs again, and does not look the slightest bit apologetic. "Perhaps not. But I have other duties to manage, and I'd feel better knowing someone's here to stop Aida from wandering alone down ten miles of cave I haven't cleared for inspection."

  Warwick snorts and arches an eyebrow. "It was significantly less than ten miles."

  Still, it's a fair observation and reminder. A scant couple of months have passed since they put that particular planet behind them, with its unfathomable geology, and technology that felt more like magic than science. Aida's unauthorized jaunt was not entirely her own fault. Warwick can only imagine how disorienting it must've been, receiving such a persuasive and subliminal signal that no one else on the Obershaw's crew could detect. A subdermal implant offers many advantages for someone in Aida's position, but having comm signals routed straight through a human brainstem seems...

  Complicated does not even begin to describe it, and Warwick honestly can't imagine volunteering to host such an intrusive technology.

  Even in the absence of formal discipline—and Warwick still isn't entirely confident letting her wayward comms chief off the hook was the right call, implant or not—there is no pretending away the fact that on their last planetside exploration, Aida violated protocol and wandered off alone into what could have been a dangerous situation. That it instead brought about a vital discovery is secondary to the violation of standard safety protocols.

  "All right," Warwick says when she realizes Gima is still watching her. Waiting to be dismissed, not due to the strictures of rank and decorum, but in an effort to make sure Warwick's fears have been assuaged. "Go on, then. I'm sure you're desperate to start analyzing those engine clusters."

  The rest of the Obershaw's small survey teams have finally been allowed onboard, and her people have barely begun deciphering which parts of the ship function as engines. Working out whether a biological vessel might be capable of anything beyond sub-light travel will go much faster if Aida can find and translate a direct control mechanism, but Gima must be itching to get her hands on everything regardless.

  Sure enough, she gives Warwick a huge grin, bright and lopsided, and then darts away through the hatch, which dilates for her and then closes just as efficiently once she's through.

  When Warwick returns her attention to the thing that might be a control console, she finds Aida's position has changed. She can see more of Aida's legs now, all the way up to the knees of her coveralls, the material clean but well worn from years of crawling around strange environments, investigating confusing technologies and long dead worlds. Warwick crosses the space carefully, letting her eyes follow the contours of the console. It's as much physically alive as the rest of the ship, a steeply sloping ledge that stretches along fully half the perimeter of the compartment. The wall above it looks smooth and dark, and if it did not fit so perfectly amid the other components of the chamber, Warwick might wonder if a mechanical screen has somehow been embedded amid fleshier elements.

  It is entirely reasonable that Aida wants to figure out how these components—whether biological or mechanical—interact, in order to sort out the linguistic puzzle of how to make the ship function.

  Warwick studies the console as she draws closer. The surface is smoother than the rough, spongy shale texture that covers most of the walls, but there are shallow protrusions at irregular intervals. They have the pale, bulbous look of mushrooms grown at random in the shadows of a forest, and the urge to reach out and touch them is strong, her curiosity an almost overwhelming force. She resists, not wanting to activate anything that might complicate whatever Aida is doing beneath the console, contenting herself with a trace of fingers along the edge instead.

  Her fingertips register a downy texture, softer flesh than the bulkheads and portals. She startles when the bioluminescence brightens around her. She can't tell if it's because she touched so near the controls—perhaps the entire surface is sensitized to control the ship somehow—or if the increased lighting is the result of something Aida has done in her little crawl space.

  Warwick draws her hand away regardless, not wanting to risk interacting with any of the ship's systems, and settles on the bench beside it. The surface is firm, and surprisingly comfortable, and she settles in for an indeterminate wait.

  Several minutes pass in unbroken silence, but Warwick doesn't mind. Her own duties will keep until the team reports start coming in, and in the meantime she's in no hurry.

  Beneath the console, Aida breathes a wordless sound that, despite the muffled tones, carries unmistakable triumph. A brief wriggling, fidgeting moment ensues, as she squirms backwards out from her concealed position. When she pulls herself completely into the open, the gap she emerged from seals itself shut using the same mechanism as the hatch leading back into the corridor.

  Aida sets aside a handful of compact devices—diagnostic tools, scanners, biometric sensors—and sits upright, there on the floor, massaging her neck as though she's been straining at an odd angle throughout her task. Her hair, dark and sweat-damp, is tumbling out of a haphazard braid that ends between her shoulder blades. Her narrow shoulders roll back in a deliberate loosening of tension, and the light brown of her skin looks flushed with heat.

  She startles when she turns her head far enough to catch sight of Warwick sitting on the bench above her. Her eyes, big and dark and expressive, widen and she stares without speaking.

  It's not an unreasonable reaction. Between being startled and the simple fact that the two of them aren't often alone together—especially now that Warwick has begun exerting conscious effort towards maintaining careful decorum—of course Aida is surprised to find her here.

  A science vessel like the Obershaw—compact, efficient, designed to traverse vast sectors as quickly as possible—doesn't offer much by way of solitude. Each crew member has a dedicated bunk, the minuscule but functional quarters a necessary extravagance for a largely civilian population traveling extended missions through deep space. But otherwise, there is little opportunity to be alone, not with twenty-odd people sharing a too-small collection of rooms. Beyond the spaces dedicated to ship function, there's an observation deck, a gym, a cramped mess hall. A lounge that still resembles the converted cargo hold of its earlier life. A narrow expanse of hydroponics bays, tool shops, chemistry labs. And none of it conducive to private conversation.

  After the wordless moment that passed between them the last time they were truly alone together, Warwick has been more careful than ever about putting herself in Aida de Luca's orbit.

  Her fingers twitch with the phantom sensation of Aida taking her hand. Vivid memory conjures Aida's smile, bright and tentative and saying more than either of them can afford to admit aloud. Warwick should have withdrawn from the situation, but she did not, and that understanding feels dangerous in the silence between them now.

 

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