The Spaces in Between: A Clumsy Handful of Stars, #2

By Yolande Kleinn

When it comes to her crew, Captain Jamila Warwick strives to maintain strict separation between the personal and the professional. Commanding a deep space science vessel does not allow for anything in between. But where comms specialist Aida de Luca is concerned, those lines have begun to blur.

An impossible ship, abandoned in an empty asteroid field, should be the discovery of a lifetime. The vessel is like nothing Warwick's team has ever encountered. But when their investigation puts Aida at risk and raises an unforeseen moral dilemma, Warwick faces a decision that could end her career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yolande Kleinn
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781946316431

Yolande Kleinn

Yolande Kleinn may be a shameless dreamer and a stubborn optimist, but she is also a proud purveyor of romance and hijinx. Excitable, fastidious and a little eclectic, she spends every spare moment writing the stories she wants to read. If she can drag other people into the pool along with her, then so much the better.

Book preview

The Spaces in Between

by Yolande Kleinn

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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