A Spot of Trouble - Part 3

Yrenisé is out of her depth, running away with a stranger to save her life after a murder occurs. Secrets emerge that change the entire course of her plan and could put her in even more danger than before...

It was dark and a little damp on the way down from the shop to the bowels of the earth. Running from potential murderers who could maybe want me dead was not going to be pretty, I knew that, but the slime I had touched on the walls of the cave could be from water or were the leavings of some cavern creature.

My guide, Tilo, a handsome Trengese man whose lustrous golden features gleamed in the dim lamplight, seemed to know these tunnels well. How often had he travelled down them? Automatic lamps of this kind were old fashioned but not uncommon. It was strange to see them on Rexis which was famed as a rather extravagant, modern planet. Then again, the owner of the shop we had just exited was an eccentric fellow... or at least he had been.

Until he was murdered.

I was still unclear on the circumstances of that particular murder. From Tilo's version of events, the old man had been blasted with a weapon of his own making - one that completely destroyed him without leaving a trace. I still couldn't bring myself to believe it.

I had read something in a journal I perused in my boredom of caring for an inn, about the Intergalactic Federation developing weapons like that but there were diplomatic issues concerned and blah blah blah... I had lost interest soon after in favour of my boss who yelled at me for wasting precious time reading instead of working.

I never thought I'd get a first-hand account of such a thing though.

The steps went down for a long time, eventually ending at the entrance to an underground cavern. Tilo turned back and grinned at me before heading towards the end of the rock wall. He turned the corner and disappeared. I hesitated for only a moment before following him and stopped short when I saw what sat there.

Glowing rocks dotted around the cavern illuminated a shiny craft, most likely used as an escape pod. Was this the hideout Tilo had mentioned to me before? When he'd sought me out, he had mentioned that his brother and a woman named Dessa, who had been assisting Maren when I met them, were already at the hideout. If so, this was one heck of a hideout...

The door slid up opening into a small circular chamber and a ramp lowered from just below it to meet us where we stood. Tilo stepped onto it and I followed him inside. I was met with gleaming chrome lit with a gentle white light. As soon as the door was shut, the light blinked off then on again. The pressure in the room changed making my ears pop, and then with a whoosh, a rush of disinfected air bathed us. A second whoosh dried us off and the door on the opposite side slid open.

"Welcome," said a pleasant voice. The ship, no doubt.

"Thanks, Ulri," said Tilo. He took my hand and led me down the corridors to what looked like the command bridge where Ridis, Tilo's brother, and Dessa, guiltily jumped apart as soon as the door slid open.

"Ugh... get a room!"

"Make me," retorted Ridis with a wink at Dessa. She blushed then, seemingly just noting my presence, came over to me. She clasped my hands.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're safe. You didn't get hurt, did you?" I shook my head, no. "Great! I'm glad you'll join our hunt!"

"Hunt? What hunt? What are you talking about?"

Tilo looked chagrined as Ridis fixed him with a glare.

"You didn't tell her? I told you. I expressly said, no kidnappings!"

Kidnap? What in the ten moons of Fermoa was going on here?

"Someone needs to give me answers. Now."

"Look, I didn't kidnap her, okay? You know that's not my style... any more. We'll tell her on the way. Buckle up."

Dessa, looking contrite, led me to a seat and helped me get secured. I wasn't on board with whatever was going on but there didn't seem to be time to get out of this situation any time soon.

As soon as Dessa was seated, the ship hummed to life with Tilo and Ridis at the helm. In a moment, we had shot out of the cavern and into the deep red sky of Rexis. I had my arms crossed in something of a sulk mostly because I'd blindly followed someone I hardly knew right onto his ship.

I had somehow managed to kidnap myself.

We broke through the atmosphere a moment later with a bit of a jolt and Ridis set the artificial gravity. We cruised along heading for the Rexis' lavender moon, Thyria. When our destination came into view, I gaped.

There, resting on the dark side of the moon was a large galleon - an Omega Class destroyer by the looks of her. She was huge; large enough to have five hundred crewmen at least! Still in awe of the magnificent military beast before us, I barely noticed Ridis fixing Tilo with a stare before gesturing towards me and setting the ship to cruise towards the ship.

Dessa helpfully unclipped herself from her seat and went over to the pilot's seat muttering an apology to Tilo as he came over towards me. I blinked, turning my attention away from the ship to the traitor I thought even for a moment was a friend.

"Okay, so, explanation," he said. I didn't respond, still seething about him tricking me. "I may have embellished... a bit."

"Where's Maren?" I asked, a hint of accusation creeping in my voice.

"I... I didn't lie about that. Aside from being a tinkerer, Maren had other... pursuits that made him a walking target. The most famous, I think, is The Drifter."

I gawped.

"Surely not the Drifter? Dread pirate wandering from system to system sowing chaos and mayhem?"

"That's the one," he said with a chuckle. "Some of the crew didn't like the way he ran things, so they took his weapon and used it against him. I happened to be there when it happened."

"Oh..." I didn't really know what else to say. "But all of that aside, why come for me then?"

"Well, this is the bit that gets complicated," he replied on a sigh. "You see, Maren was after something - something big that he only ever let his first mate know... let me know. Have you heard of the Chronologer's Tomb?"

I had not.

"Maren found evidence of a tomb hidden somewhere in the far reaches of the cosmos. At first, it was just a story we heard in passing about a Chronologer who hid a great treasure within his tomb. Maren, being the adventurous vagabond he is, started looking for it. It would have stayed just a story if we hadn't met a market seller on Doveris VII who deals specifically in time-pieces and mentioned a rumour about a time device. They were banned, for obvious reasons so he was quite secretive but did tell us about a journal detailing the means to create such a device.

"He wouldn't say more but did also let slip that there was only one crucial piece of the device that the government did not allow into the mass market. Without it, the device couldn't function. And that was what he decided to specialise in. If anyone was going to look for a nano warp enhancer, he was going to know exactly what it was for."

"And then I walked in," I muttered, still trying to wrap my head around the whole affair.

"Exactly. We were trying to figure out how to get you to come with us, to help us out. That's when... you know."

We spent a few minutes in silence, my mind whirling from one thought to the next. Treasure. Actual pirates. Time devices. I needed, more than anything, to stop thinking about it all.

"First mate, huh?" I said with a grin. Tilo chuckled and I saw the tension slip off his shoulders.

"Captain, now. We managed to save the ship at least. Ulri has been with us for as long as I can remember," he added.

"Ulri?"

"Ulrinessa Phantom VX-T, Omega Class II, Omicron 8 Destroyer. Or Ulri, for short."

"How... how exactly will the time device help you find this tomb?" I asked, genuinely curious. Surely anything I had built couldn't be as important as all that.

"It's unclear. Do you have the journal? It seems the clue would be in there." I reached for my pack and hesitated again. What if this was another trick and I was being played by space pirates again? I wasn't too keen on that version of events.

"How do I know I can trust you?" I narrowed my eyes at him and he gave me a surprised laugh.

"The simple answer is that you can't, and you'd probably be smart not to. But, first mate of The Drifter isn't a title one just gets, is it? If I wanted you dead, Yrenisé, it wouldn't have been too hard."

That made me hug my pack even tighter as he just smiled sweetly at me with his stupid handsome face. I couldn't help sticking my tongue out at him and that made him laugh louder earning us a look from both Dessa and Ridis.

"You are an amusing one. I knew it from the moment I saw you. Maren thought so too."

I looked away from him unable to help myself from blushing at his words.

"But, as for the main business, we would like you to join us. The Chonologer was a tinkerer, like you and Maren. If anyone was going to find it, it would have to be someone who thinks like a tinkerer."

I weighed my options. I needed a ride home. They needed a tinkerer. I needed to utilise the time device I'd built and they needed it. I had the upper hand here. I could help them out, get home and maybe even get a piece of the treasure while I was at it.

"I have terms."

"Let's hear them."

"When this is over, you will take me back home."

"Done."

"And I want a part of the treasure as... a service charge."

Tilo laughed again but agreed to the terms. With that done, he walked back to his seat and turned on the comms relaying instructions for our docking. Before long, I was settled in a room of my own with a work desk and plenty of tools to keep me busy.

I had already identified a partially hidden code in the journal that I hadn't bothered to decipher. It already looked like there was a secret here so all I had to do was find it.

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

I hadn't had a whole lot of experience with codebreaking although those lessons I had picked up from my parents were certainly coming in handy. There was an interesting pattern in the text and in a few hidden sections of some of the pages. I had a message and coordinates together after a few weeks of checking, deciphering, trying and not a few caffeine chews.

I may have developed an addiction to the sweet shot of adrenaline.

I popped another one in my mouth as I finished up the last of the messages. Tilo strolled in a few moments later casually leaning over my shoulder to look at my work.

"Those coordinates you gave us look promising, but they lead us through some sort of wormhole... how confident are you in them?"

"Pretty confident. Now, if you'd give me some room here so I can get past..."

He set his arms on either side of me and brought his lips close to my ear, "make me."

I squeezed my eyes shut. He'd been doing this the whole time I was on board, teasing me, hinting at something. Each time, I walked away more unsure of what he was up to and more aware of the fact that I started missing his company after a while.

It was just like a pirate to steal hearts, I supposed. And then chided myself for such a bad joke.

"Tilo..." I said more than a little frustrated. He chuckled and backed off, allowing me to replace the pen I was using. I turned around to face him properly and hand him the last bit of message.

"Is this it?" He raised the page reading through the words over and over. "Wait, does this mean...?"

"I think it does. The way I see it, the tomb is useless in this era. The specific particles that would maintain the structure would have disintegrated it by now so..."

"So we have to go back in time."

"Bingo."

I was just as awed as he was. If the Chronologer was going to dispose of a treasure and make sure that nobody found it, where better to save it but in the past? Even if we made it to the current coordinates, all we would find was the destroyed wreckage of the ship.

There was a worrying page of text about a compound that could be activated that would destroy all matter into dust. I figured that may have been the Chronologer's mechanism for destroying himself and the treasure.

I explained all of this to Tilo and we finally made a plan. We would go to the wreckage together, activate the time device to the exact dates indicated in the journal and recover the treasure before the tomb was set to disintegrate.

From what I had discovered, the Chronologer had sent their tomb, a Transience Shuttle used for the dead, into deep space behind a wormhole, and set it to be destroyed a few minutes later. If we could make it to the coordinates, we would be able to arrive on the shuttle at the exact moment it emerged through the wormhole. A little earlier and the shuttle would ram right through us. A little later and we'd miss it completely.

It was a delicate process - one I was a little scared of taking on but by this point, I was too eager to back down now.

"Yri! You did it!" Before I could react, Tilo had pressed his lips to mine and then turned stridden right back out the door a moment later, leaving me a collapsed heap on the floor. The unconscious smile curving my lips evolved quickly into a deep blush turning my blue Darin skin a telling shade of midnight.

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

The deep expanse of space was a little mesmerising. I glanced around trying to calm my hammering heart. We had already made eight successful jumps - seven made too late to catch the shuttle and one almost way too soon. Tilo gripped my fingers through the spacesuit. I sent him a weak smile. This was too precise a measure. Maybe I'd been too confident before...

"Hey, you got this," came his soothing voice through the comms in the suit helmet. I nodded feeling a little bit of the tension leave... only a little bit. I reset the time device, grabbed his hand and pressed the button. This time, instead of meeting with empty space or a massive shuttle hurtling towards us, we landed heavily on a metallic surface.

I lay there breathing heavily. It was Tilo who got me on my feet. I checked the time we had. A few minutes at best. Should we try to find the treasure first or make the jump again? We made a mutual agreement on the first option.

The shuttle was rather large for the purpose of transience. The rooms were mostly filled with instruments, little trinkets and a few earthly belongings I was sure would have been valuable eventually but that wasn't what we were looking for. Then, there were no more rooms, save the empty room in which the body of the Chronologer sat.

And when I say empty, I mean void of all but the body casket in which the body was engaged - it fit the body exactly - no chance of anything but a corpse being in there.

Tilo pulled me away from it urging me to reset the timer and get us out of there. We'd just been chasing a rumour after all. It wasn't the first time, he said. I was just about to give up and do as he said when I noticed something small flashing through one of the partially open doors.

I walked towards it. It was a lab of a sort without all the active chemicals and all the devices were still save for two. The light was coming from the first, hidden at the back of the room just underneath the desk - so bright I wondered how we had missed it the first time. Maybe the automatic lights had drowned it in our search.

It blinked faster the closer I came and when I reached over to pull out the small box hidden there, the light went off. Letters glowed briefly on the front printed entirely in Old Darin text. I recognised the word from the journal.

Hyridia.

"I think... I think this is it!" I said turning to face Tilo. He, however, was preoccupied with the other device in the room. It was a screen that began flashing slowly on and off, rhythmically, enchantingly, mesmerisingly. Then it blinked on, the screen turned static, and we vanished from the room, the lab and the shuttle altogether.

A hunt for treasure goes awry! Deadly games lie in our heroes' future... find out what happens in the next instalment of A Spot of Trouble!