The passenger liner was delayed again.
The computerized monotone updating the news sent weary groans and tired cursing through the cramped dock terminal. It was the fifth time the expected arrival had been pushed back and by now the earlier flares of anger and hot impatience had been slowly burned out by sheer exhaustion.
Anyone who could have afforded to jump ship already had, leaving the lower paying main berth customers to hunker down in uncomfortable standard issue seating or to camp four deep like some kind of interstellar refugees along the cold station walls, clutching their few already weighed and tagged authorized belongings to their resigned persons.
Already the small Rim station's few eating establishments were feeling the heavy dead weight of the unmoving mass and had begun to put quiet limits on the dining replicators to try and mitigate the unexpectedly long supply drain. The other station normal passenger conveniences of refreshing facilities-the heads, showers, laundry-had put hard restrictions in three delays ago and were nervously eyeing the warning data in their system computer feeds and darkly wondering how well another set would be taken. The harried sweating station personnel stared helpless at the gigantic reader screen boards and sent not so silent desperate prayers to any travel deities traditionally held in the local quadrant that someone, anyone, would give them a miracle break.
And trapped in the stinking sullen abjectly miserable crowd, tucked protectively as far into a tight corner as she could physically get, Saavik's fatigued dry black humored calculations estimated a near ninety-four percent chance that if someone here could prove human sacrifices would actually be that break, the station would erupt into blood.
Because twenty-one and a half unending days of this dismaying detaining stalemate was seriously pressing even her rational tolerances.
Saavik sighed.
Unfortunately, she had only herself to blame for her ill luck inclusion in this grimly mind numbing, stiff muscle agonizing, nightmare passenger trap.
Ever since her Academy cadet years, Saavik took even the slightest available opportunity to travel the stars. Destinations had been irrelevant save for carefully considered travel turnaround times to avoid the disciplinary action failure to appear to classes would provoke and ship berths were chosen not for the amenities or the luxuries they offered but for the quality of their astronomical observation decks and the amount of actual extended space time they granted her.
Her quick intelligence, Vulcanoid mixed heritage strength and endurance levels, Hellguard feral swift adaptable learning abilities, and an apparently natural gift for languages had granted her easy temporary hiring on almost any ship in the Federation, so her lack of actual financial funds had not hindered her in the slightest.
Trading work for placement in ships let her at last truly begin to possess the stars she had once so long ago and so wildly brazenly before all the universe claimed as hers as a mostly starved beast child. While most of her safe lives soft Academy peers wrinkled their noses in distain at even the thought of having to work for their passage-and on battered cargo freighters and patched together survey vessels rather than space yachts and recreational cruise ships no less!-Saavik found she truly delighted in the independence it returned to her.
Old memories brought their equally old mischievous amusement at the near myocardial infarction Spock had nearly had when he learned what she was doing.
Their vastly different life experiences had given them just as vastly different concepts of danger and risk, and she truly had found his intense disapproval and anxiety over the subject actually entertaining with its seemingly outrageous silliness to her. One who had known a childhood world of torture, rape, imprisonment, cannibalism, starvation and horrific death simply did not fear the civilized concerns of dark corridor ships, rough foreign ports, or hard eyed strangers. And reassuringly reminding him that she was thoroughly experienced in fighting and killing had only made him oddly-at the time to her-more concerned.
He had come very close to giving her an unwise ultimatum of travel restrictions and it had only been his resigned knowledge of how well that would not work on one who had never experienced even parental governance and his personal wincing memories of her fiercely independent personality that had held it back.
Though it had still gotten her a four hour lecture on additional personal security precautions he expected her to be responsible enough to take and an embedded high level espionage tracking device near her spine unbeknown to her at her next Academy series of travel immunizations.
And that had been an interestingly intensediscussion they had later when she had finally learned of it as a commander in her own ship's sickbay entirely by accident.
After, of course, she had managed to convince her captain to let her out of security detention because he had thought Saavik was an undercover operative for the Empire.
Ironically, now, she actually wished she still had it.
It would have granted her instant overriding berth on any Federation ship and she could have neatly and cleverly avoided this interminable grinding horror of waiting entirely along with the other high paying passengers who had jumped ship when the liner had been delayed the first time and she would actually have been back working stoically through data piles of Starfleet reports at her desk at least twelve days ago.
Saavik shook her dark chestnut haired head at herself, ruefully weary.
Correction, she had only herself to blame twice.
Wanderlust and pride.
Ever her two greatest failings.
But even now, if she was to be entirely unrepentantly honest, she still could not truly regret either, no matter what she told herself of wishing to be now at her desk.
Saavik's tired gaze found the station's dock terminal bank of arching port windows and all the bone eating exhaustion and physical and mental discomfort of the seeming endless delays faded softly, gradually and quietly into the background of her wait worn consciousness.
They were still there.
The infinite cold velvet blackness of space lay before her, mysteriously almost arcane and endlessly mesmerizingly eternal in its beautiful immensity.
The stars burned brilliant hot white and primal.
And deep in her now long civilized woman's heart, she felt that old wild beast child's fierce exulting joy at the very sight of them.
Mine.
At last and for always.
Six days later the passenger liner finally arrived.
And Saavik was the last one to board.