Carol sat in the Denobulan ship's command chair, staring into the dark vastness of space, which in the Badlands was disrupted every now and then by the golden edges of distant plasma storms. As the minutes piled into hours, she knew she should get up and refresh the drugs currently keeping Khan pinned to his medbay bed, but she could not bring herself to move. She was paralyzed, her mind restlessly turning towards thoughts all her therapists had warned her off. She went with a fine comb over every one of her interactions with her father during the year he had Khan prisoner, searching for the smallest indication of unease or of a guilty conscience. She wondered if her father had ordered the cold-blooded murder of eleven people and then gone about his business as usual, perhaps even had dinner with her the very same evening.
Nothing had seemed wrong. That thought rolled like a penny in a brain that refused to register any other. For a year her father had kept a man as a de facto slave of the Starfleet he headed, after having disposed of eleven sentient being in their sleep. She couldn't imagine the amount of hatred and bitterness someone as violent as Khan had gathered drop by drop in all that time, until he had found an outlet for it in the murder of both the guilty and the innocent. Had her father's actions pushed him over the edge and triggered the most gruesome events in United Earth's history since the Xindi attack of 2153? So much blood. At least some of it was on father's hands. On her. She would never be clean from it.
If I'm not in charge, our entire way of life is decimated.
Her father's words to Kirk on the bridge of the Vengeance on that nightmarish day rang in her ears. How could she have missed her father's becoming so misguided that he had come to believe means, any means, no matter how appalling justified a hazy ends of security? Her father had been convinced that he had been doing the right thing, what was necessary for the protection of the Federation, and apparently, that was all it took for their civilized veneer to be discarded and massacres to be justified. She questioned whether Khan had had similar thoughts, when he had embarked on his one-man crusade against Starfleet. That was the most terrifying part of it: the flimsiness of the line separating the likes of Khan from people like her father or Cartwright. She recalled an argument from Dr. McGivers' PhD thesis on Khan, the assertion that his actions in the 20th century had been motivated by his conviction that he was humanity's savior, a bringer of peace and order.
Carol buried her face in her hands at a loss. Behind her the door to the bridge opened with a soft hiss. She lifted her head. "Have you come to kill me?" she asked without turning.
Tension coiled in the pit of her stomach. She was aware that, even in his diminished capacity, she could only fend him off for about a second, but she was determined to go down fighting.
"I've come to make a deal with you," said as impassively as ever.
"I don't know where your crew is," she replied while getting up.
He had put on a white medical shirt he had obviously found around the infirmary. He was leaning on the far wall, so pale that his skin seemed almost translucent, spread unnaturally tight over all too prominent bones. In the sickly-looking face, his eyes burnt like ocean-colored coals. Even with his accelerated recuperating abilities, the months of medically-induced coma were likely still taking their toll on his muscles, even discounting the side-effects of the medical experiments he had been subjected to.
"No, but you might might have an idea so to where your father's underlings could have spirited them," he wheezed out.
She hurried towards him acting on the impulse to help someone in obvious need. "You're even crazier than I thought, if you believe for one second that I'll take you anywhere near an inhabited planet."
"I don't care about the inhabitants of any planet in the universe. All I want is my people. Once I have them, I'll take them as far away from your precious Federation as possible. You'll never have to hear from us ever again."
She stopped short of getting into his personal space, watching him with wary eyes. He looked about to topple over any second now. "And you'll just leave us, inferior being, to our merry ways?" he inquired condescendingly.
His eyes narrowed dangerously. "Any illusions I might have harbored in regards to your kind died long before ancestors were born."
"You're breaking my heart," she sneered. "The people you put into death camps after occupying their countries revolted and overthrew you. How dared they not welcome your tyranny?"
His lips curved in a small, ugly grin. "Is that how your history books justify our extermination after we were defeated. If you truly want to know, I never conducted any massacres or purges. As for the war, I was attacked first so I stroke back. As simple as that."
"I suppose firing on a disabled Enterprise and crashing the Vengeance into San Francisco were acts of self-defense as well," she quipped.
"Destroying the Enterprise was merely a tactical decision. If I had let her be, you would have alerted the fleet, which would have pursued me immediately. But if they had to investigate her demise first and with Section 31 hampering that effort to cover its tracks, I would have had the necessary time to escape. As for San Francisco, my target was Starfleet Headquarters, not the city. If I were to die, I wanted to take with me as much of the institution that I thought had killed my family as possible."
"Reassuring as that might sound, I still won't help you. And there's nothing you can do to make me... and there isn't much you can do, while barely able to stand by yourself."
In an instant everything changed. He struck fast as a cobra, grabbing her wrist in clammy hands that turned into steel manacles, when she tried raising her elbow to hit him across the face, and spun her around to slam her into the wall, trapping her against it with his weight. "You should have killed me when you had the chance," he spat baring his teeth. A dark lock of hair fell over his eyes, which glinted maniacally.
An icy shiver licked at her spine, as her sense of self-preservation reasserted itself in the face of what was most likely certain death. However, she refused to show him fear. "No," she said quietly, comforted by the certainty that she would die doing the right thing. "I really shouldn't have."
Her words seemed to snap him out of whatever red daze he had temporarily slipped into, because, though his grip did not loosen, hesitation replaced the angry determination on his features. Then everything shifted again. The ship rocked, throwing them still tangled together halfway across the bridge. The back of her head hit the floor hard, pain exploding in the area of her nape, dizzying her momentarily. She whimpered, as her vision wavered and darkened.
"What's happening?" he asked from somewhere above her.
She reckoned that they hadn't been fired upon, lest the proximity alert would have warned of any approaching ship. "A plasma storm or an anomaly of some kind," she opined, as he grabbed her by her forearm and pulled her up on legs that felt like noodles. "Computer, status," she demanded.
"Main power failing. Navigational and anti-gravitational systems destabilized. Switching to auxiliary power now," the automatic voice replied.
"We're crashing," Khan added.
"Thank you, Captain Obvious," she muttered, as the planet they were orbiting tumbled perilously close into her clearing sight.
He dragged her to the co-pilot's console and dropped her unceremoniously into its respective chair, before taking over the command seat himself.
"What do you think you're doing?" she shouted at her wits' end. She barely knew how to steer the alien ship herself; she had no idea what good he imagined he would do.
To her surprise, he took over the helm with a few efficient moves, switched to manual and stabilized the ship right before impact. He guided the ship through the planet's atmosphere, encountering a few hurdles on the way, but the spacial anomaly that had nearly knocked them out of orbit did not follow them down. She was reluctant to put herself in his hands this way, but she had to admit it was in his best interest as well to preserved the Denobulan vessel intact and keep them from crashing. Given her splitting head-ache, she had to admit to it was probably safer to let him manage the ship, especially since she was drowsy enough to suspect a concussion.
Khan expertly landed them on the planet below on some sort of a cavernous plain, in a spot where they would be shielded from aerial view by a large rock formation. Apparently, the year spent with access to all kinds of Starfleet databases had paid off, where his enhanced intellect was concerned. The subsequent ship-wide diagnostic bore both bad and good news. The war drive and all essential systems were intact, but main power could not be brought online so they would have to rely on the shakier auxiliary one, if they wanted to leave, which in the Badlands could prove a fatal handicap.
"Where did you bring us to, anyway?" he asked irritably, as he was studying the starcharts on his console.
Carol felt the bump on the back of her head, the pain mounting, now that adrenaline rush caused by their near crash began to fade. "A frontier region named the Badlands. It's newly-discovered so it's not on the map yet."
He turned his head to look at her, arching a brow, as he did. "Was the rest of the galaxy temporarily unavailable?"
"History failed to record just how annoying you can be."
He seemed unfazed by her remark. "You've hit your head," he said dryly.
"Are you upset that this latest incident managed to inflict pain, before you could?" She winced wriggling in her seat to get more comfortable. "We should take all systems but life-support offline. Maybe if the reactor cools enough, we'll recover main power."
He said nothing but pressed a few keys on his console. The lights dimmed but did not switch off completely, signaling that he had taken her advice. Then, he stood, staggering ever so slightly as he did. She arched a brow at him and ignored the hand that to her surprise he had extended her. Digging her fingers into the edge of her chair, she dragged herself shakily to her feet and tried to walk towards medbay, but as soon as she had to abandon the support of her seat, her vision blackened again and she nearly fell. An arm reached over and steadied her. Her body moved, but she was not aware of her initiating it. She realized he had scooped her up in his arms, when her temple collided with his chest. Fresh nausea raised in her throat and she swallowed hard to keep it down.
He carried her to the infirmary, where he lay her on her side on the biobed. She winced, when his fingers probed at her nape, but she felt no violent intent behind his gesture, as the touch was rather gentle. With her line of work, this was by no means her first concussion so she knew exactly what to do. Just in case he truly meant her no harm at present, she instructed him how to use the regenerator on the impact area and what medicine to give her, which he did without protesting. Then, wonder of all wonders, he actually covered her with a blanket.
"Thank you," she said earnestly.
He didn't reply just sat on a nearby chair with a long, shuddery breath, since the tiny medbay only had one bed. His posture remained rigid, his back ramrod straight, his fingers splayed on his knees, his penetrating gaze aimed somewhere right above her. His face was hard to read, though he did seem slightly pensive.
She moistened her lips with her tongue trying to gauge where they could go from here. "The pill will take full effect in six hours. In the meantime I'm supposed to lie down . Maybe by then main power would have come back online."
His gaze flickered to her. "All this time my people are the mercy of Section 31." There was an edge of despair in his voice, as though his many failed attempts to recover his crew from Starfleet had pushed him over some internal barrier.
"I know Commodore Cartwright and he's a practical man. He wouldn't dispose of seventy-two people with your genes, just because I go you out." It chafed to refer to anyone as though they were objects, but she had no doubt that Cartwright would think this way so she had told him the truth.
His eyes bore into her skull, a maelstrom of conflicted emotions reflected in them. She had to wonder if this man was indeed the raging psychopath everyone thought him to be or someone who had been pushed over the edge and never found the means to come back.
"There are living quarters down the corridor. You could go lie down and have a real meal in there. You won't be of any help to anyone, while you can barely stand by yourself."
His gaze roved over her face curiously, but he did not budge.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to suffocate you in your sleep," she said pulling the blanket up to her chin. She could use some sleep herself under the circumstances.
A slight smile floated on his smile, irony lighting up his eyes. "No, you're not," he concluded and stood up. "Good night, Carol."
TBC
