Detail Zeta-Kappa-Niner

[yewtree]

We were stripping down the old space-hulk when we found it. It was the red-eye shift in the middle of the night - the time when accidents start to happen, because everyone is dog-tired. Detail Zeta-Kappa-Niner - the old hands - had been assigned to this old hulk, because we were the ones who had tried to organise the jail-break. It's difficult to escape from a prison asteroid in orbit around a star that's several light-years away from the nearest Gate, but we would have succeeded if it wasn't for Humbert's obsession with Atilol, the governor's daughter. He told her the plans, and naturally she passed them on to Papa, dutiful daughter that she is.

Anyway, so here we were back on the red-eye shift and the dirtiest job on the station, and Joey was cutting apart the lower section of the hull with a laser cutter, when all this stuff just fell out. There was shiny cups, and a big old jewel shaped like a tree - weird kind of tree, very abstract - and a big box. Joey called to the rest of us to take a look. He figured that that stuff might be valuable, if we could smuggle it out and sell it on the blackmarket without the governor getting wind of it.

"What is it?" asked Humbert.
"That is a genuine 29th-century priest-hole," said Zaeed - he was the intellectual on the crew.

[telesilla]

"A priest-hole?" Joey snorted. Joey was the sort of man who snorts at anything he's never heard of; since his main love in life was his offsphere wagering account, he didn't really have time for historical knowledge. He frowned, doubting the value of anything as old as C29th.

Zaeed ducked and entered the cavity in the wall, clearly entranced. "A real priest-hole. Most of them were found back in the 30th-, 31st-centuries - I'm amazed this one was left undisturbed for so long," his muffled voice exclaimed.

"What were they for?" Tri-Melody asked, hanging back. Her fingers crossed her chest in the sign of the Eye. A superstitious woman who refused to rise from her bunk if she had dreamed of a green-eyed man, she wasn't very happy about our little find, valuable or otherwise.

"Oh, you know," Zaeed's voice explained - we could view his torso through the hole but not his head as he straightened up - "Hiding artifacts. Hiding priests. Or, in this case, priestesses..."

He ducked out, something gleaming white in his hands. It had been tucked into the uppermost corner of the hole, which was low enough to hit a tall man's head, and about as wide as two narrow-shouldered people standing back to back. I gasped as I saw it; it was:

[yewtree]

... the zamilor crystal that is the main component of a teleport. This time we had a chance of escape, and it was going to work.

All we needed to do was co-opt Ghymble, the mad quantum physicist, into our scheme. This was problematic, as his mind was often in orbit around a completely different planet than the one we were currently in orbit around. He had stared into too many quantum potentiality generators. Or perhaps it was too many late-night triple slit experiments. At any rate, he was as mad as a box of Therumanian night-frogs.