Inside 'Cochran' 2, B'Elanna and Harry have found it.
"It's no use trying to figure out what happened to Tom by looking in or at the shuttle, Harry.
Everything in the computer has been deleted." B'Elanna slammed her fist against the console she'd been manipulating.
"Great! Now what?" Harry exclaimed.
B'Elanna looked questiongly at Harry.
"I mean, what are we going to do now?"
"Calm down, Harry. We'll find him."
"How? We don't know where to look!"
"Did you expect this to be easy? That we'd land and Tom would walk up to us and ask to be
fetched? The hardest thing isn't to 'find' him, it'll be to convince him to 'come back'!"
"I know! But to be able to convince him, we need to 'find' him!"
"We'll just have to think like Tom."
"That's easy." Harry chuckled, already given up.
"What would you do if you were here, if you were Tom Paris?" At least B'Elanna didn't
show any signs of civing up.
"You're just messing everything up, Maquis."
"I'd at least try to get a job, if I was Tom." She ignored Harry's pointless wining.
"We still don't know if Tom would."
"How else would he survive? Like you said; he's smart."
"Okay, okay! What kind of job would you take, if you were Tom Paris?"
"Well, what does he like to do?" She shrugged, suddenly wishing she would have had gone
out with him a couple of times.
"He loves to fly."
"He's smarter than looking for a job as a pilot here, when Voyager still is in this planet's
orbit."
"Yeah." Harry frowned, concentrated. "Hey! Another thing he loves to do is to hand around bars!"
"Harry, you're a genius! He's got a job at a bar!"
Harry laughed t his friend's expression, sheer joy mixed with hope and temperance.
"How can you be so sure?"
"I'm not. I'm just trying to convince myself that I'm right," she said easily and jumped out of the shuttle.
Harry came soon after.
"Well get yourself back down from those clouds you're up in. 'Cause we're going to search
through every little brawn at this planet!"
Now it was B'Elanna's turn to laugh, at Harry's sudden enthusiasm. She had to take him down
from those same clouds she'd been up in just a second ago.
"At least the ones close by. He can't have gotten that far without the shuttle."
***
Two days later, B'Elanna and Harry walked planless around in a small town, they looked for a
bar.
"I'm really tired, Maquis. For the past two days we've visited fifteen different bars."
"And yet no sign of 'Tommy Boy'," she sighed and ran a hand through her rumpled hair.
"Gaunt Gary-talk, huh?"
"I've been to so many bars, and had so much different alcohol that I'm beginning to actually
understand the 'official bartalk'."
"Oh no! Not another one!" Harry shrieked.
Starfleet and Maquis both laughed, B'Elanna looked down at her stumbling feet for a moment
and when she looked up again she saw something. A small, no, a very small bar, almost hidden
next to an alley.
"There." B'Elanna's eyes narrowed to a pin-point.
"What?" Harry couldn't see anything utterly remarkable.
"Another bar."
"Oh no! Not another one!"
"Why not? I surely could use some liquor. And didn't you say those exact words a few steps
away?"
B'Elanna grinned, and they started to laugh again as they stumbled towards the little bar. They
weren't really drunk, just couldn't walk straight over the worse for wear cobblestones.
Stuffy air hit B'Elanna as soon as she walked in, close after Harry. It smelled like alcohol and
smoke. Very much of it.
"How come that they've got two things at almost every planet we visit? Alcohol and stuff to
smoke."
Harry grabbed her upper arm. "There's Tom!" He sounded tense.
"Where?" Now it was B'Elanna's turn to not see what her friend saw.
"The bartender," Harry urged.
"Are you sure?"
"B'Elanna, I might not see very well in this dim light, but it's the only one in here without a
tail."
"Oh."
Harry and B'Elanna zigzagged towards the bardisk, the bartender had his back towards them.
"Hey, bartender!" Harry called and placed a heavy hand on the disk.
"What do you want?" He was occupied, polishing a glass with a cloth.
'It surely sounds like Tom', Harry thought and called again.
"How about a missing Starfleet pilot?"
The bartender turned around, it really was Tom, shocked. He regained control quickly.
"Will a Bloody Mary due... Harry? And how about you, B'Elanna? Can I get you some
Raktjino?"
"No, I just want my best friend." Harry answered with a strange, thich voice. It was
probably all the tension letting go.
The female Starfleet officer ogled at Harry Kim and noticed that he had tears in his eyes.
Tom apparently saw it too, because he opened a small door in the corner of the disk.
He motioned to his friends to step in to him on the other side.
When they did, Tom opened another door, which was right behind the bardisk, in between
many shelves full with oddly shaped bottles and jars, and shoved his friends inside a small
office.
Tom closed the door behind them, he used a small knob in the middle.
"All the doors at this place you have to open manually, much similar to 20th century doors."
He explained.
"Then you must be very pleased."
Tom laughed at B'Elanna's comment, when he noticed the other two people staring at his
outfit.
He wore an odd, black hat, a white shirt, black slacks and a scarf lazily draped over his
shoulders, also in the same black color.
Everything was made out of a very light and thin fabric.
"Hey, guys, stop staring like that! This is my uniform!"
Harry giggled. "I can see that. You look like you usually do early mornings at the Bridge."
"Which makes the Captain, 'so' happy."
"It might, but she can't really chew up her own little protégé completely, can she?"
"Thanks, but I've never before had a scarf, and I'm not the Captain's protégé! Now, let's leave
that and talk about more important stuff. Exactly when did Chakotay loose his faith in me and
send you too?"
"Chakotay? The Captain sent us." B'Elanna reluctantly replied.
"The Captain? Does she finally know why I'm here?"
"I told her that I couldn't find you anywhere, and that 'Cochran' 2 was missing. She,
B'Elanna, Doc and I came to the unison conclution that you finally was tired of us and ran
away."
"What? I'm not tired of you! I haven't fled from my ship! Chakotay discovered Sprai-koo's
stealing at Voyager, so he send me to expose their conspiracy. A big organization involving
Voyager and hundreds of other innocent ships. There was no time to contact the Captain!"
Tom sounded desperate, and it soothed his two friends extremely.
"What a relief! I thought it was my fault that you left." B'Elanna exclaimed.
"Awww. Cheer up, Torres!" Tom put a finger under her cheek, pushed it upwards, mildly
forcing her to look up at him.
"It was absolutely not your fault, and I am planning to return again. As long as I manage to
survive long enough to transmit the information Voyager needs to burst this dirty bubble."
"So you didn't need us?"
"Actually, Harry, I was feeling quite lonely. After three days seeing nothing but 'Koo's and
their long, awful tails. This is a planet that doesn't like strangers, as you might've noticed."
Tom laughed, and startled his friends by hugging the both of them. All of B'Elanna's thoughts
about guilt quickly ran off her.
"Besides, I can use you. Harry, you're good at cracking codes of all sorts, especially on time.
You seem to handle stress very well. That I can really need."
Harry almost blushed at the sudden praise.
"And I can't think of one mission when you don't need a big, strong Klingon to knock down
the enemies in your way to the glory of victory!"
"Calm down a bit, I'm not that strong, and definitely not big either, but sure, I'll help you. One
or two I can always handle." She shrugged in an unusual humble manner. The next second she nearly had
an heart attack.
"TIM! I'm going away for a few days!"
The door flung open and a middle-aged, female Sprai-koo appeared in the small doorway.
"More hunans?"
She said, while she scrutinized Torres and Kim. Her wild eyes narrowed.
"Humans. They're tired of Voyager too, and they could use a job each."
"Have you informed them?"
"No, they will not join."
"Good. One hunan is one too many."
Harry felt like his best friend and the unknown female talked above his head, like he and
B'Elanna weren't there. He didn't like that belittle feeling.
"I'm in a hurry so..." The strange woman raked together a few things from a nearby shelf and
forced them down in a pocket.
The female shoved a finger decorated with a long, red-brown nail up in Tom's face.
"You! Go back to whatever you were doing."
She turned and pointed at Harry, her stretched finger shivered with repressed anger.
Apparently she wasn't too thrilled to see the two newcomers.
"You clean up this place! And you..."
She approached B'Elanna, who was ready to knock her pronounced cheekbones in. The
Klingon genes didn't have to take control, since the approacher's voice changed and she
suddenly looked very mild, gentle and friendly.
"You are in charge when I'm gone."
"Me? But I just got here--" B'Elanna was taken aback.
"See that these two do their jobs! One thing all three of you should know, is that I have only
one rule. Do not develop deep feeling for any customer."
"Oh, poor me! I've been watching that dirty drunk hunk sitting in there."
B'Elanna's voice dripped with sarcasm, she had definitely not any thought on falling in love
with one of those people.
"Well, there'll be nothing with that! You hear me? Nothing!"
And she was gone.
"Who was that?" Harry whispered as soon as her footsteps were completely faded. He had no
desire to get a finger like that between his eyes again.
"Shiral. She's the owner, as you might have figured out. My 'contact' here to the
Organization."
"Why did she call you 'Tim' and us 'hunans'?"
"The Sprai-koo people have a very hard time remembering names, you can really confuse
them," he chuckled.
"Why did she leave me in charge? You've been here three days now, right? You should be
much more qualified. Doesn't she have anyone else working here?" B'Elanna frowned, and
waved her hands in disbelief.
"No, it'll be just the three of us. I reckon she can go to a grand meeting tonight, thanks to me.
If I hadn't been here 'working', she couldn't leave without closing the bar. Which would be a
plain bad idea, since these drunkards would break in anyway as soon as she'd left."
"But why 'me' in charge?"
"Ah. At this planet the women's got the upper hand. Men are looked at as replaceable trash.
That's why this race utterly seldom marries."
"And how about Earth?" B'Elanna asked sweetly.
"Earth? There it's equal between men and women."
"Oh, really? How come Janeway is the first female Captain in Starfleet history then?"
She said, with a slight tone of triumph hidden in her voice.
Tom and Harry both found themselves speechless. Something very unusual in Tom's case.
B'Elanna smiled while she opened the door which Shiral had slammed close where she left.
B'Elanna took a step backwards, and stepped at something. A broken bottle. 'Shiral has strong
arms,' she thought.
"Come on, thrash boys! We've got a bar to run!"
***
"It's no use trying to figure out what happened to Tom by looking in or at the shuttle, Harry.
Everything in the computer has been deleted." B'Elanna slammed her fist against the console she'd been manipulating.
"Great! Now what?" Harry exclaimed.
B'Elanna looked questiongly at Harry.
"I mean, what are we going to do now?"
"Calm down, Harry. We'll find him."
"How? We don't know where to look!"
"Did you expect this to be easy? That we'd land and Tom would walk up to us and ask to be
fetched? The hardest thing isn't to 'find' him, it'll be to convince him to 'come back'!"
"I know! But to be able to convince him, we need to 'find' him!"
"We'll just have to think like Tom."
"That's easy." Harry chuckled, already given up.
"What would you do if you were here, if you were Tom Paris?" At least B'Elanna didn't
show any signs of civing up.
"You're just messing everything up, Maquis."
"I'd at least try to get a job, if I was Tom." She ignored Harry's pointless wining.
"We still don't know if Tom would."
"How else would he survive? Like you said; he's smart."
"Okay, okay! What kind of job would you take, if you were Tom Paris?"
"Well, what does he like to do?" She shrugged, suddenly wishing she would have had gone
out with him a couple of times.
"He loves to fly."
"He's smarter than looking for a job as a pilot here, when Voyager still is in this planet's
orbit."
"Yeah." Harry frowned, concentrated. "Hey! Another thing he loves to do is to hand around bars!"
"Harry, you're a genius! He's got a job at a bar!"
Harry laughed t his friend's expression, sheer joy mixed with hope and temperance.
"How can you be so sure?"
"I'm not. I'm just trying to convince myself that I'm right," she said easily and jumped out of the shuttle.
Harry came soon after.
"Well get yourself back down from those clouds you're up in. 'Cause we're going to search
through every little brawn at this planet!"
Now it was B'Elanna's turn to laugh, at Harry's sudden enthusiasm. She had to take him down
from those same clouds she'd been up in just a second ago.
"At least the ones close by. He can't have gotten that far without the shuttle."
***
Two days later, B'Elanna and Harry walked planless around in a small town, they looked for a
bar.
"I'm really tired, Maquis. For the past two days we've visited fifteen different bars."
"And yet no sign of 'Tommy Boy'," she sighed and ran a hand through her rumpled hair.
"Gaunt Gary-talk, huh?"
"I've been to so many bars, and had so much different alcohol that I'm beginning to actually
understand the 'official bartalk'."
"Oh no! Not another one!" Harry shrieked.
Starfleet and Maquis both laughed, B'Elanna looked down at her stumbling feet for a moment
and when she looked up again she saw something. A small, no, a very small bar, almost hidden
next to an alley.
"There." B'Elanna's eyes narrowed to a pin-point.
"What?" Harry couldn't see anything utterly remarkable.
"Another bar."
"Oh no! Not another one!"
"Why not? I surely could use some liquor. And didn't you say those exact words a few steps
away?"
B'Elanna grinned, and they started to laugh again as they stumbled towards the little bar. They
weren't really drunk, just couldn't walk straight over the worse for wear cobblestones.
Stuffy air hit B'Elanna as soon as she walked in, close after Harry. It smelled like alcohol and
smoke. Very much of it.
"How come that they've got two things at almost every planet we visit? Alcohol and stuff to
smoke."
Harry grabbed her upper arm. "There's Tom!" He sounded tense.
"Where?" Now it was B'Elanna's turn to not see what her friend saw.
"The bartender," Harry urged.
"Are you sure?"
"B'Elanna, I might not see very well in this dim light, but it's the only one in here without a
tail."
"Oh."
Harry and B'Elanna zigzagged towards the bardisk, the bartender had his back towards them.
"Hey, bartender!" Harry called and placed a heavy hand on the disk.
"What do you want?" He was occupied, polishing a glass with a cloth.
'It surely sounds like Tom', Harry thought and called again.
"How about a missing Starfleet pilot?"
The bartender turned around, it really was Tom, shocked. He regained control quickly.
"Will a Bloody Mary due... Harry? And how about you, B'Elanna? Can I get you some
Raktjino?"
"No, I just want my best friend." Harry answered with a strange, thich voice. It was
probably all the tension letting go.
The female Starfleet officer ogled at Harry Kim and noticed that he had tears in his eyes.
Tom apparently saw it too, because he opened a small door in the corner of the disk.
He motioned to his friends to step in to him on the other side.
When they did, Tom opened another door, which was right behind the bardisk, in between
many shelves full with oddly shaped bottles and jars, and shoved his friends inside a small
office.
Tom closed the door behind them, he used a small knob in the middle.
"All the doors at this place you have to open manually, much similar to 20th century doors."
He explained.
"Then you must be very pleased."
Tom laughed at B'Elanna's comment, when he noticed the other two people staring at his
outfit.
He wore an odd, black hat, a white shirt, black slacks and a scarf lazily draped over his
shoulders, also in the same black color.
Everything was made out of a very light and thin fabric.
"Hey, guys, stop staring like that! This is my uniform!"
Harry giggled. "I can see that. You look like you usually do early mornings at the Bridge."
"Which makes the Captain, 'so' happy."
"It might, but she can't really chew up her own little protégé completely, can she?"
"Thanks, but I've never before had a scarf, and I'm not the Captain's protégé! Now, let's leave
that and talk about more important stuff. Exactly when did Chakotay loose his faith in me and
send you too?"
"Chakotay? The Captain sent us." B'Elanna reluctantly replied.
"The Captain? Does she finally know why I'm here?"
"I told her that I couldn't find you anywhere, and that 'Cochran' 2 was missing. She,
B'Elanna, Doc and I came to the unison conclution that you finally was tired of us and ran
away."
"What? I'm not tired of you! I haven't fled from my ship! Chakotay discovered Sprai-koo's
stealing at Voyager, so he send me to expose their conspiracy. A big organization involving
Voyager and hundreds of other innocent ships. There was no time to contact the Captain!"
Tom sounded desperate, and it soothed his two friends extremely.
"What a relief! I thought it was my fault that you left." B'Elanna exclaimed.
"Awww. Cheer up, Torres!" Tom put a finger under her cheek, pushed it upwards, mildly
forcing her to look up at him.
"It was absolutely not your fault, and I am planning to return again. As long as I manage to
survive long enough to transmit the information Voyager needs to burst this dirty bubble."
"So you didn't need us?"
"Actually, Harry, I was feeling quite lonely. After three days seeing nothing but 'Koo's and
their long, awful tails. This is a planet that doesn't like strangers, as you might've noticed."
Tom laughed, and startled his friends by hugging the both of them. All of B'Elanna's thoughts
about guilt quickly ran off her.
"Besides, I can use you. Harry, you're good at cracking codes of all sorts, especially on time.
You seem to handle stress very well. That I can really need."
Harry almost blushed at the sudden praise.
"And I can't think of one mission when you don't need a big, strong Klingon to knock down
the enemies in your way to the glory of victory!"
"Calm down a bit, I'm not that strong, and definitely not big either, but sure, I'll help you. One
or two I can always handle." She shrugged in an unusual humble manner. The next second she nearly had
an heart attack.
"TIM! I'm going away for a few days!"
The door flung open and a middle-aged, female Sprai-koo appeared in the small doorway.
"More hunans?"
She said, while she scrutinized Torres and Kim. Her wild eyes narrowed.
"Humans. They're tired of Voyager too, and they could use a job each."
"Have you informed them?"
"No, they will not join."
"Good. One hunan is one too many."
Harry felt like his best friend and the unknown female talked above his head, like he and
B'Elanna weren't there. He didn't like that belittle feeling.
"I'm in a hurry so..." The strange woman raked together a few things from a nearby shelf and
forced them down in a pocket.
The female shoved a finger decorated with a long, red-brown nail up in Tom's face.
"You! Go back to whatever you were doing."
She turned and pointed at Harry, her stretched finger shivered with repressed anger.
Apparently she wasn't too thrilled to see the two newcomers.
"You clean up this place! And you..."
She approached B'Elanna, who was ready to knock her pronounced cheekbones in. The
Klingon genes didn't have to take control, since the approacher's voice changed and she
suddenly looked very mild, gentle and friendly.
"You are in charge when I'm gone."
"Me? But I just got here--" B'Elanna was taken aback.
"See that these two do their jobs! One thing all three of you should know, is that I have only
one rule. Do not develop deep feeling for any customer."
"Oh, poor me! I've been watching that dirty drunk hunk sitting in there."
B'Elanna's voice dripped with sarcasm, she had definitely not any thought on falling in love
with one of those people.
"Well, there'll be nothing with that! You hear me? Nothing!"
And she was gone.
"Who was that?" Harry whispered as soon as her footsteps were completely faded. He had no
desire to get a finger like that between his eyes again.
"Shiral. She's the owner, as you might have figured out. My 'contact' here to the
Organization."
"Why did she call you 'Tim' and us 'hunans'?"
"The Sprai-koo people have a very hard time remembering names, you can really confuse
them," he chuckled.
"Why did she leave me in charge? You've been here three days now, right? You should be
much more qualified. Doesn't she have anyone else working here?" B'Elanna frowned, and
waved her hands in disbelief.
"No, it'll be just the three of us. I reckon she can go to a grand meeting tonight, thanks to me.
If I hadn't been here 'working', she couldn't leave without closing the bar. Which would be a
plain bad idea, since these drunkards would break in anyway as soon as she'd left."
"But why 'me' in charge?"
"Ah. At this planet the women's got the upper hand. Men are looked at as replaceable trash.
That's why this race utterly seldom marries."
"And how about Earth?" B'Elanna asked sweetly.
"Earth? There it's equal between men and women."
"Oh, really? How come Janeway is the first female Captain in Starfleet history then?"
She said, with a slight tone of triumph hidden in her voice.
Tom and Harry both found themselves speechless. Something very unusual in Tom's case.
B'Elanna smiled while she opened the door which Shiral had slammed close where she left.
B'Elanna took a step backwards, and stepped at something. A broken bottle. 'Shiral has strong
arms,' she thought.
"Come on, thrash boys! We've got a bar to run!"
***