The jump to lightspeed felt wrong. Ayli was not an astounding pilot but she knew how the Goldrunner felt when it launched itself into hyperspace and this time the moment of transition had felt noticeably different. Almost worrisomely so some might say.

“Uh, Nix, what did you do?” The image of plowing through the gravity shadow of a stellar mass at ten thousand times the speed of light had never really bothered Ayli. It seemed like a painless end and an unlikely one. Almost as unlikely as meeting a beautiful mechanic who was coincidentally in need of a new home and ship to work on.

“It worked!” Nix’s delight was not muffled by the ship’s comm at all.

“What worked Nix? I’m seeing…I don’t know what I’m seeing on these readings.”

“We’re not being pursued anymore,” Nix said.

“I get that,” Ayli said, searching for any readout on the Goldrunner’s control panel that would give her a sense of which button she needed to press to avoid becoming a gravity pancake. “Not quite what I’m worried about now though.”

“Worried?” Nix asked. “Oh! Yeah, don’t be. We’ll be…”

Space lurched again and the stars which had been swirling outside returned to being their normal, sedate little points-of-light selves.

“Fine!’ Nix said. “See. No problem at all. Well, aside from us needing some new deflector shields.”

Ayli massaged her temples and forehead. 

She’d married a maniac.

Not a surprise really. Anyone who’d marry her would have to be a maniac. This one though? 

Nix bounced onto the bridge with her dimply smile and bright cheerful eyes and for a moment Ayli lost her train of thought.

“Don’t worry about the deflector arrays,” Nix said. “Or do. I mean, it’s never good to be at less than a fully working compliment of those, but if we can find a dock – any dock – I can redo the connections on the remaining ones and we’ll be at least twice as protected as we were a few minutes ago.”

“Nix, slow down just a moment please. What happened, what did you do?”

“Oh, right,” Nix deflated a bit and folded in on herself as she sat down at the engineer’s station. Ayli glance over a the co-pilot’s seat, indicating with a glance that Nix was free to join her there, but Nix was already looking away.

“I saw that the larboard deflector array had been damaged – it wasn’t installed right – but it still had power so I turned it into a bomb.”

Ayli wasn’t sure why Nix seemed to expect her to be mad about that. 

“You did all that in a minute? That’s wonderful. Please tell me it blew Darsus’s whole squadron to space dust!” 

“Probably not,” Nix said without lifting her gaze from the deck. “They were still pretty far off so it would have missed one or two of them. The good news is that they’ll think we blew up, so they should give up looking for you.” Nix finally glanced up, searching for Ayli’s gaze and approval.

“One or two? Talk about the perfect honeymoon present! Oh you are the best wife ever!” Ayli said cackling internally at the idea of Darsus having met such a well deserved end. “Is that what messed up the jump to lightspeed?”

“Not exactly?” Nix said. “There’s a lot of weird math involved, but the basic idea is I used the field the hyperdrive produces to shred the deflectors and shoot them out at something like 99.999% the speed of light. Sorta. Lightspeed physics is weird. The jump to lightspeed felt off because the I’d routed around the primary safety constraints on the drive to allow that to happen and so that we could jump without a finished route calculation.”

Ayli could feel the anxiety lurking in Nix. A wrong word here wouldn’t break Nix, she was too ready for that, too braced for it. It would damage something though. Some connection they’d managed to form in the short time they’d been together.

That gave Ayli a moment’s pause. She didn’t know quite what she’d found with Nix, but she was already starting to value it. Their whole arrangement was doomed to fail of course. No one jumped into a partnership, much less a marriage, with as little knowledge of each other as she and Nix had. Doomed things could still be worthwhile though, and there was a persistent and annoying voice in the back of Ayli’s head that kept asking “what if?” as though her subconscious had made some decisions which it hadn’t bothered to share with the rest of her yet.

“For the record,” she said, not sure if what she was about to say was wise, but it at least felt right, “I don’t make a habit of second guessing experts who are working under tight deadlines. You’re the Ship’s Mechanic, and if you needed to disable a safety system, I’m going to assume you knew what you were doing. I’ve met a whole lot of you engineer types and you don’t tend to turn stuff like that off for kicks and fun.”

Nix melted in her seat, the warmth of her delight returning to her eyes.

“Yeah, the one who disregard safety systems you don’t tend to meet for fairly obvious reasons,” Nix said. “In this case, I knew it was okay to take the primary safety lock offline because  the Goldrunner’s got secondary and tertiary systems. With the primary down we were able to jump to light speed to avoid the blast, but the secondary put the brakes on almost instantly and then killed the jump entirely when it parsed to the end of the computed path and saw it wasn’t finished.”

Ayli blinked. She’d had it drilled into her so deeply that you had to have a properly computed hyperspace route or you’d absolutely die that it had never occurred to her there might be workarounds or cheats you could pull.

“Is that something all ship engineer’s know?” she asked, wondering if she’d have to throttle a few of the ones she’d worked with over the years for not proposing it when they’d been in tight spots.

“Um, no, I kind of invented it? Or not really invented, I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of other people who’ve thought of it too. It’s just when you listen to the drives, there’s these specific changes they go through as the safety systems cycle through their checks and if you’ve read up on the drive specs it’s easy to see how the timing works out between the primary and the secondary,” Nix said. “Also I don’t think many people do it because, well, it does leave you a bit lost.”

“Lost?” Ayli turned to her console and saw then, yes indeed, the navigation and positioning system was having a minor panic attack over dropping out of hyperspace at a ‘random point in the galaxy’ according to the read out.

That, in turn, gave her a moment of mild panic, but she forced herself to breathe and turn back to Nix, who she somehow knew would have this eventuality covered.

“I can fix that,” Nix said. “The systems get confused by the jump, but it was so short we’re barely out of the system. If we’d been on proper hyperspace route, we’d be much farther out but a blind jump like that one is almost guaranteed to be a slow one.”

“Almost?” Ayli asked out of pure curiosity rather than concern.

“People do find new hyperspace routes from time to time and blind jumps are usually what’s responsible,” Nix said. “Those can do really incredible things to the output of the drives. It seemed like that was a risk worth taking under the circumstances though.”

“Absolutely no argument on that here,” Ayli said. “Will we be okay for another jump without the deflector array or will we need to limp back to Canto at sublight?”

A mischievous smile flitted across Nix’s lips before she spoke.

“It would be tempting to say we should stick to sub-light. I mean I can think of all kinds of things to do with a month or so alone with you, but, as your Ship’s Mechanic, I believe in being honest with my captain, so I must confess that we’re fine for another jump.”

Ayli found that she was oddly disappointed to miss out on the month of sub-light travel. Of course given the rations she had on board, it probably wouldn’t have been as enjoyable a month as she was imagining but still…

“Also, I believe there was talk of ‘treasure that wouldn’t wait’ just laying out there for us to pick up?” Nix said.

It was Ayli’s turn to smile.

“See and this is how I know we’re compatible,” she said.

“You know I don’t think I remember you mentioning what the treasure actually was though?” Nix said.

“Eternal life!” Ayli said. “Or Eternal Youth, the myths do a terrible job of differentiating between the two.”

“Oh, so this is a mythic treasure then?” Nix said. “Do we sell it for mythic money?”

“The Eternal Life part? Yeah. It’s worth all the imaginary money in the world. The temple that was build as a  shrine to the Eternal Spring though? That’s got the kind of real treasure that we can use to buy a few billion more deflector arrays with.”

“This sounds more like a robbery than a treasure hunting expedition? Or, wait, let me guess, the temple’s a myth too?”

“Was a myth. Is still considered a myth. Is not, however, a myth.”

“And you know this how exactly?”

“In addition to being a dashing treasure hunter, I am also a renowned historian,” Ayli said, stretching the truth just slightly.

“I can see how the careers would intersect,” Nix said. “Don’t most historians just write books though?”

“The boring ones do,” Ayli said. “But the boring one’s don’t have this!” 

She pulled the coin she’d been carrying with her for the last three months and held it out to show Nix.

Who leaned away from it warily.

“It’s made from a metal alloy similar to Phrik,” Ayli said, deciding not to comment on Nix’s odd reaction. “No one makes coins out of Phrik. It’s ridiculously hard to work with and make and has a lot of better uses. No one would waste it on coins. No one except Ravas Durla, the not-quite-so-mythical founder of the Temple of Eternal Life or Youth or whatever the right translation should be.”

“What was her story? Was she evil?” Nix asked, still leaning away from coin.

“She ran a Temple that supposedly raked in all sorts of treasures, and hoarded them. That’s not typically what good people do, but history shows us not to judge the people of the past too quickly. Ravas Durla lived in a very different time and since we still know almost nothing about it, or her, I’m not about to pass judgment.”

“That sounds fair,” Nix agreed, relaxing a bit. “How does a coin help us find her temple though?”

“It doesn’t. Not alone. It does give us a point of data though and that’s more than anyone’s had on Ravas Durla’s temple since people started looking for it about a hundred years ago.”

“What happened a hundred years ago?” Nix still wasn’t moving closer to the coin, so Ayli put it back in the case she’d been carrying it in, which seemed to relax Nix even more.

“A weird religious sect popped up. They called themselves ‘The Children of the Storm’, and their leader claimed to be receiving ‘Visions from the Bringer of Eternal Life Ravas Durla’. The Jedi Order apparently sent some people to investigate the group, but by the time they got to there, the whole cult had vanished.”

“And people are still talking about them?”

“The mystery of where they went helps with that, but what’s kept them more relevant is that their leader published a recounting of his visions and there were some actual historical findings discovered from it. Not the Temple of course, but two lost planets turning up as habitable when they were missing from the galactic charts tends to hold people’s imaginations for a while.”

“And neither one had the Temple on it?”

“Nope. The temple was on the third planet mentioned in the ‘Visions’, but that one turned out to be an empty system. No planets. No asteroids. No space stations.”

“So guy who wrote about it lied about where it was?”

“Probably. Either that or someone found a way to hide an entire planet.”

“Which means the questions is, how are we going to find it?”

“Easy,” Ayli said. “One piece at a time.”

“Seems like we’d need a lot of pieces to make up a whole planet.”

“True, but you need surprisingly few to triangulate one’s location.”

“And I take it you know where you can find these additional bits of information?”

“Not me precisely, but I do know a gal,” Ayli said. “She said she’s got a line on another coin from a different dig site.”

“So we get the next coin, or more importantly, we find where it’s from and work out which systems the two places might shared jump routes with to narrow down our search?”

“That and I can do some research about the dig sites that were discovered to look for clues towards other sites that might have more relics to work with.”

“Your friend wouldn’t happen to have a nice shipyard she could loan us a berth in would she?” Nix asked.

“Oh yeah. She sort of a major player on Calerpris. Knows pretty much everyone and has her fingers in about a million different data systems.”

“Calerpris?” Nix asked, trepidation creeping into her voice. “You wouldn’t be talking about Saliandris A’Prezzo would you? The Tyrant Queen of the Dashfin Run? Breaker of the Seige of Bokrund? Scourge of the 5th Begani Legion?”

“Oh! You know Sali too!”

“She’s my ex.”