"You've got to be kidding!" Garek exclaimed. "Me and you?!? Together?!? That's nuts! That's laughable!" And to prove it, he laughed. Carter had gone over the unlikely sequence of events that had led up to the current state of events, and all the while Garek's facial expression had become more and more incredulous.
"Yeah, laughable..." repeated Carter. "Ha ha..." She tried to laugh the whole thing off too, but her ha-ha's came out sounding a little forced. Knowing that, she quickly changed the subject, hoping Garek hadn't noticed. "Listen, it's not your fault," she said. "You know how she is." She looked in the direction in which Kim had left the bay. "I just don't know how I'm going to talk her down. I'll go after her--"
"Hold up, Commander," said Garek. "I think it'll be best if I talk to her first. Chances are, she won't want to believe a word you say."
Carter sighed, and eventually agreed. "Alright. I'll check in with you later." Lee turned, and left Engineering.
Garek turned the corner into the main corridor of one of the lower Engineering decks after Lee left. He saw Kim leaning up against the corridor wall, her head in her hands. His heart went out to her. "Kim, we need to talk," he ventured hesitantly yet hopefully, taking a few steps toward her.
"I've got nothing to say to you, pig!" she replied, angry disdain distorting her voice.
"I know what you're thinking. You think I'm lying to you. You think I'm involved with Lee. You think Lee's been lying to you this entire time about her and my supposive relationship, and you're also asking yourself 'What does Garek see in her? I look much better in a bikini than she does.' Well, you're right-- you do!" Garek smiled, trying to get closer to her, hoping his attempt at humor would pave the way.
"Bastard!" Kim pushed Garek away with one arm, and wiped away some tears with the uniform sleeve of the other. "All men are bastards!"
Then, visibly forcing herself to calm down, she sniffled once, and then brought her eyes up to meet his. Garek was deeply troubled by what he saw in there. "I don't know if I can believe you," she said, her voice suddenly deadly composed. "I don't know if I can trust Lee either." She turned, and rushed down the corridor towards the turbolift.
"Kim, wait!" Garek called out, but it was no use. The turbolift doors were closed, and Kim was gone.
Kim ran without conscious direction through the empty, clanging corridors of Starbase 901 away from Garek and all other bastards as fast as her legs would carry her. Her brain was all awhirl; feelings of anger, confusion, hurt, as well as her more tender feeling toward Garek were all mixed together in a hopeless tangle. They came and went so quickly in an endless circular procession that Kim hardly knew how she felt.
Finally her fleeing feet slowed and her rasping breath calmed enough for her to look around. She'd never been in this part of the station before, and wasn't really sure exactly where she was. By the slightly dingy look of things and the complete absence of any other people, it was one of the lesser-used areas, and judging by the massive double doors spaced at regular intervals down the extra-wide corridor, it was a bulk storage sector somewhere way down on the lower decks.
She heaved a ragged sigh and slumped against a wall. The adrenaline rush was wearing off now, leaving her physically and emotionally drained. Gravity dragged heavily at her limbs, and pulled her unresisting slowly to the deck, leaving a trail down the side of the wall where the back of her uniform wiped away a layer of dust.
Alone, crouching on the floor, lost, she hugged her legs tightly to her chest and let her forehead come to rest on her knees. Then the tears began to flow.
Eventually, she woke from her stupor and spent a few puzzled moments looking around at the strange surroundings, wondering where she was and how she got there.
Then she remembered. All the hurt and bad feeling came rushing back to her, threatening to crash over her and drag her helpless and unstruggling out to sea again. "The big dumb jerk," she muttered sadly to the empty corridor.
To Kim's surprise, the corridor answered back! "He really must be a big dumb jerk to leave someone as pretty as you all alone down here."
Kim caught her breath and spun on her heals, and came face-to-face with a tall man. Somehow he had managed to come up right behind her without her noticing. Her Starfleet training automatically kicked in and she quickly sized him up.
He was tall and lean, rangy actually, and the muscles in his arms could be seen rippling under his shabby clothes when he moved. His hair was dark, turning gray at the temples, and was close-shorn, and he wore a ragged goatee. It was his eyes that struck Kim especially though -- there was something compelling about them. They hinted at some deep secret of his soul -- some terrible ordeal suffered in his past was lurking just below the surface. But for all that, they were kind, gentle eyes, and matched the reassuring smile he wore.
--It took Kim several seconds to realize she'd been staring at the stranger's eyes, but the man's comment about Garek being a big dumb jerk reasserted itself and shook Kim back to reality and prompted an automatic response: "Well, he's not--" but then she remembered she was mad at Garek and stopped short in her defense of him.
Suddenly remembering her duty and the fact she was a Starfleet officer, she tried to stand a little straighter and look as "official" as she could under the circumstances. Clearing her throat, she asked, "Who are you? What are you doing down here? This area is off-limits to civilians, you know." A sudden nagging feeling struck her just then, causing her to look at the stranger carefully for a few moments, then ask, "--and why do you look so familiar?"
The tall stranger raised his hands before him to ward off the onslaught of questions. He laughed charmingly and said. "Whoa. Slow down, miss." Now it was his turn to size up Kimmie. She felt a little self-conscious under his scrutiny, but strangely excited by it at the same time. His mind was quickly made up about her apparently, because he lowered his voice and whispered conspiratorially, "Can I trust you?"
Kim knew immediately that she was heading for trouble, but for some reason she didn't really care right now. If she had been in her right mind, she would have realized that she wasn't in her right mind... "Yes," she found herself answering this mysterious, yet somehow familiar-looking stranger.
He smiled that charming smile at her again, and said, "Good. Follow me." Without another word, he walked off down the corridor, with Kim following close behind.
A voice in the back of her head was telling her that this guy shouldn't be here -- that he was up to no good, but another voice told her that she could always call for help if the situation turned ugly. Yet a third voice reassured her that the stranger could be trusted -- he looked 'trustworthy'. A fourth voice sarcastically reminded her that there was no basis for this determination whatsoever. The third voice replied that he looked naggingly familiar somehow, which the fourth voice countered with the observation that the stranger had smoothly but deliberately avoided her questions about his identity.
Meanwhile, unaware of Kim's internal debate, the stranger reached the end of the main corridor, then turned left and proceeded down an even less used gangway. At the end of that, a metal ladder bolted to the wall led even further down, through the floor into the uninhabited bowels of the station. He slid down the ladder with practiced ease, and after a moment's hesitation during which her more cautious voices shouted urgent warnings, Kim followed him down into the darkness below.
They emerged into a vast machinery space. "Where are we?" asked Kim, shivering in the sudden cold. "We must be right next to the outer hull here." The temperature had dropped so much her breath steamed in the air.
"That's right," said the stranger, turning, his own words coming out in puffs of smoke. He had continued forward, and now stopped to beckon Kim to keep following.
Pushing her caution back, silencing the internal voices, she complied, but warily. They walked for a while more, ever deeper into the maze of machinery. Evidently, life support here was kept at a minimum, for the temperature dropped until Kim's teeth chattered, and as she followed this mysterious man deeper into unknown territory, she began wondering if the chattering was because of the cold, or because of fright and nervousness.
The lighting was generally very dim here, with occasional pools of brighter illumination cast by overhead spots on various blocks of machinery. The ceiling was high above -- at least twenty feet over their heads -- to give the massive mechanisms here room, but even so some of them towered almost as high. The irregular walls of the machine blocks were crisscrossed with pipes and conduits and valves of all different sizes, many of which crossed from machine block to machine block high overhead or sometimes underfoot, forcing Kim and the stranger to constantly watch where they stepped. Some of the pipes and valves dribbled and oozed dark fluid, and indeed, most of the surfaces here were gray and grimy, not fit for human habitation. The entire effect was to give this place an eerie, cave-like, or dungeon-like atmosphere.
Her warning-voices were once again clamoring for her to just turn around and run, predicting all manners of grim outcomes from continuing forward after this obviously crazy person. But as they rounded the corner of a particularly massive and convoluted machine block, she saw that there was no trap waiting for her, rather the cheerfully flickering flames of a small campfire. It was carefully built inside a ring of broken concrete bricks burning what looked like pieces of old wooden packing crates as fuel. Overhead, the fire-suppression sensors and nozzles had all been smashed.
The tall stranger had rounded the campfire and hunkered down beside it and began warming his hands. A breath of errant warmness caressed Kim's cheek, and she hurried to join him there and drive the bitter cold of space away.
After a few minutes of vigorous hand rubbing and waiting to see if the tall stranger would answer the questions she'd put to him up in the cargo area, Kim could stand it no longer. The man didn't seem interested in opening up to her, and she wondered why he'd asked her to come down here. He seemed contented to just hunch there before the fire warming himself. Thoughts of danger and of fleeing to safety began resurfacing.
On a crowded, busy space station, the only place that Garek called his own (even more so than his own quarters) was his office in the Engineering department. The clean, mechanical-smelling air cycling through helped relax him. The day had not gone according to plan. The first real love of his life was convinced he was cheating on her with her boss, and the reverse-engineering of the Nausicaan weaponry he'd been working on had hit snag after snag. It was all giving him a headache. He lay down on the ratty old sofa in the rear, closed his eyes, and dozed fitfully off.
Genuine rest eluded Garek though. His thoughts and feelings were too chaotic, and gave him no reprieve. He had to try again to talk to Kim; try and fix things between them. Even though none of this is my fault... he muttered irritably to himself.
Getting up, he stepped over to his work desk. Tapping a control on the desktop, he waited for the small, built-in computer screen to indicate readiness, then said, "Computer, locate Lieutenant Kimberly Tycho."
Lieutenant Kimberly Tycho is in intersection 47-D.
"What? That's impossible. That's just down the corridor!" exclaimed Garek. "Has she just been sitting there all day long?!"
Please restate the inquiry, replied the computer.
Irritated at the aggravating machine, Garek snapped off the control and rushed out of his office, headed for corridor 47-D.
Arriving moments later, he found exactly what he dreaded he'd find: Kim's communicator pin lying on the deck, knocked off or deliberately dropped during her hasty flight. Without the communicator's locator circuitry, there was no way for the station's sensors to find Kim among the thousands of other station residents. He sighed heavily and muttered, "Finding her is going to be harder than I thought..."
Kim was tired of waiting for the stranger to speak. She mustered her nerve and asked him again, this time with a real edge of steel in her voice, "So, just who are you, mister?"
The man continued staring into the fire as if he hadn't heard her for long moments more, then slowly raised his head and turned those volume-speaking eyes toward her. In a calm voice, he said simply, "You can call me Tom."
Kim's jaw dropped and her eyes widened with shock and recognition. She knew she'd seen this person before, and now she remembered! After all these years... No wonder his eyes spoke of secret, unspeakable horrors -- what abominations this man must have witnessed and experienced firsthand! Now he was here, hunched over a campfire not five feet in front of her.
Thomas Riker!
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