A/N: many thanks to all my readers and reviewers! Your interest keep the muse happy!
The Vengeance flew through Klingon space and back to Theta IX at maximum warp on the course their uneasy neighbor had prescribed for them. Given the ship's minimized functions and the presence of Khan on the bridge to make sure everything was status-quo, the Enterprise officers could celebrate the successful completion of their mission with a much-needed rest. With Jim asleep in the infirmary – or at least, that was the story McCoy was sticking to – Spock, who as a Vulcan required less sleep, had replaced a fatigued Sulu at the helm and dispatched the humans for some downtime in their quarters.
Carol was as exhausted as her colleagues, but her recent confrontation with Khan had left in the throes of emotional upheaval. She couldn't sleep and was currently huddled on the bed with the dull metallic hulk of the Vengeance looming oppressively over her. Her quarters had no window and of all the vistas she could wish to see, she was thinking of the river flowing behind the house she and Khan used to shared on Ceti Alpha V. The house was gone and so was the entire colony next to it. Between her father's trial, her return to Starfleet and her efforts to fit in, she hadn't had a chance to mourn that loss.
She bent and retrieved from the floor the tablet Kati had given her at the end of their conversation in the ship's hydroponic garden. It contained a large variety of holovids and pictures of the new colony. Drawing lessons from the Klingon attack her father had provoked, Khan had moved the colony from the proximity of the Equatorial Range to the Morningstar Mountains up north. Though given the mineral composition of the latter, it was the best strategical decision, the weather and soil conditions were considerably worse. The wind and the torrent storms ravaging the surface of Ceti Alpha V were much more vicious and the average temperature was lower.
Clicking a few commands on the tablet, she browsed the images of the new augment city. It was situated on a narrow plateau surrounded by taupe brown peaks that formed a natural fortress around it. It looked drier and less lush than the old colony, all carmine and yellow lichen covered stone intersected with the exotic yet extremely toxic fungi the planet soil was so fond of producing. The building were small, visibly made of scavenged parts and closely huddled together without any of the wide space between them that she remembered of the former establishment. Even Kati's beloved hydroponic gardens were much reduced.
She hoped their attempts at arranging settlements in order to develop mining activity would be fruitful so they could acquire in exchange the necessary installations to make the colony flourish. The hope came with the not so rare, despite being unwarranted, spike of guilt over what her father had done. There was also the traitorous thought that now more than ever the Augments could use someone with her expertise and that she could again be a part of something unique and temerarious again. She tried to banish it, reminded herself that this was unlike her, but it sounded hollow, and she knew she was lying to herself, just like Starfleet lied about Section 31.
That lie she couldn't stomach, just like she couldn't get over the fact that Command had eschewed any admittance of responsibility or complicity in her father's actions, busy instead to sweep the matter under the rug, silence witnesses and vanish documents. Section 31 was out there. It had always been out there. It was in the Starfleet Charter, the same one that spoke of rights, legality and due process, yet hid between the lines a sanctioned conspiracy that allowed a handful of people unaccountable to anyone to hold discretionary power and trample all over the noble principles only a paragraph away.
Before her arranged marriage to Khan, Carol had led a uncomplicated life, as most Federation citizens were wont to nowadays. She was the only child of like-minded, career-oriented parents. That like-mindedness had proved to be too much for her parents' marriage to survive, but the divorce had had virtually no impact of Carol, since it had happened while she was too young of a child too remember it. In the aftermath, she had been raised in a dynamic and cosmopolitan London by a scientist mother, who had nurtured her aptitudes and carefully guided her education to the best institution the part of United Earth once known as England had to offer. Her outstanding academic achievements had gotten her an easy entrance into Starfleet Academy. Given her much sought-after specialization, she had been retained as a Science Officer by Starfleet Command and her existence in San Francisco had followed the plentiful one she had once had in London.
Until her reinstatement and service aboard the Enterprise, she had had no deep-space experience, but she had traveled plenty outside the Sol system to conferences and for the purposes of exchange programs. Even the conflict with the Klingons had brought very little change, save for an increase in security measures. But life at the heart of the Federation had continued as usual, abundant and cushioned by the advances of technology. The war had seemed far, far away into the recesses of the galaxy. Only with the swinging tide of defeats had anxiety risen in the buildings devoted to Starfleet offices. She had lost a friend or two in battle, had a lot more to worry about and had been constantly concerned about her father's stress levels.
But overall, things had stayed simple: linear and clear, the Charter cut-and-dry in terms of ethics and the Starfleet regulations easy to obey. She had always found comfort in that, in the clarity and perfection of her black-and-white world. It had all come crashing down one sunny San Francisco afternoon, but she had had the protection of the surrealism of the situation for weeks, until one miserable, gray London morning, when denial had become impossible. She had stood before the entrance to what was officially the Kelvin Memorial Archive, shivering slightly in civilian clothes that chafed at her skin, a cold drizzle battering against her upturned face. She had resigned from Starfleet the previous week and set her affairs in San Francisco in order. Her parting with her father the evening before had been tense to the point of confrontational and he had seemed relieved, when she had asked that he not be present at what were to be her wedding.
She had delayed going in until the last possible moment, fighting a bout of nausea and her nerves. She would never forget the details of that day: the innocuous, period look of the building, the secrets it concealed evident only in the elaborate security protocol she had had to go through in order to get in. She had taken the elevator to an upper level, where she had been led in a small, high-tech conference room. There she had caught her first glimpse of Khan.
He had stood in the far corner of the room, by the tall window, the ashen light streaming from outside surrounding him like a hallow, the frail rays making the silvery material of the tall-collared coat he wore gleam faintly. Carol was an educated woman; she had known who Khan Noonien Singh was and had been aware of the one or two gritty and unclear photographs still preserved of him. After all, very few documents concerning his rise to power and subsequent short reign had survived the destruction of the Eugenics War. Still she had been taken aback by how devastatingly handsome he was: jet black hair, sculptured, alabaster face carved with elegant lines and impossibly high cheekbones, cupid bow lips the color of cherry blossoms and deep, golden-blue eyes.
At first, he hadn't even seemed at all menacing: his expression was shuttered yet serene and his gaze was only assessing. There was a certain air of theatricality about him, but he didn't look like a bloodthirsty dictator from the past, not that she had any idea how one such individual was supposed to look. She had called herself several synonyms for silly in her head and drawing heart from his apparent harmlessness, she had forced a smile to her lips and strode up to him, hand extended, to introduce herself. Then it had happened: his features had rearranged themselves into a mask of icy derision. A haughty eyebrow had gone up, his beautiful mouth curving into a tiny, disparaging smile, as if he had judged her already and found her wanting. That had been the first of his many strengths she had encountered that day: the force of his quiet yet overpowering contempt.
She recalled that in that moment, faced with such utter yet unvoiced scorn from the man who had been at the origin of her predicament, she had felt a tinge of blind, irrational anger towards him. Back then it had taken the entire concentration of her will not to lash out at him verbally, although she had been sure her ire had shown on her face. For a desperate minute or so she had wanted to blame him and only him for everything, ignoring the burden of guilt Starfleet and her own father had shared. She was struggling with the exact same type of fury now. She all but longed to be able to hate him, to pin the whole nightmare of the past three years and her inner turmoil on him.
After all, it wasn't as if he were faultless. He had known her to be innocent of her father's machinations and had seen how she had always sought to treat him and his family like people. Yet he had acted as though she were a pawn in a power-play and an object of his revenge against her parent. It didn't help that she felt culpable as well. If only she had been stronger and had resisted the pull to seek refuge from her solitude and dejection in his arms, begging for scraps of affection, giving him an opening to manipulate her emotionally. She shouldn't have played his game at all, but she had thought she had had nowhere to go and now that she did, she was still drawn to him.
What irked her the most was that his recent admission of caring had sounded, as if he had merely fallen into the trap he had laid for her, as if he had grown fond of her against his will. But still he had realized he had wronged her and she was more furious with herself than with him, because deep down inside she wanted to forgive him and give their relationship another chance. She shouldn't. She knew she shouldn't. Just like she shouldn't want to leave behind everything she had grown up wishing for and build a new world with the Augments.
She had no delusions of grandeur. She just wanted to help. Perhaps with a balancing influence of the gentler ideas of her own world and the lessons of the past almost three centuries the Augments had missed, their new society would be less authoritarian and aggressive. In his time, Khan had been a dictator but even the hostile of contemporary historians admitted that he had not been malevolent and had sought to be fair if strict in his legislating. Beneath that cold arrogance and ferocious superiority beat a heart that didn't lack tender feelings; he was loyal beyond belief in his attachments and he had an unexpectedly strong sense of justice, which indicated that although it was less discriminative than that of most, he did have a conscience.
However, he had seen the absolute worst of two different human civilizations. Made into what he was without his consent, then experimented upon and forced to watch his childhood friends butchered by the same people who were responsible for their existence, he had turned the trauma into thirst for revenge and ambition and built an empire from scratch. Then he had been hardened by a war he had not started and lost in a whirl and bloodbaths and betrayal, only to barely escape what in essence had been the genocide of his kind, as at the end of the Eugenics War, all the Augments had been summarily executed after farce trials had been held to give the proceedings an appearance of legality.
That and her father's actions against his family had bred a steady resentment within him. Carol did not fool herself: Khan was capable of much, much worse. There was a propensity for blind, unchecked rage in him and his passionate nature easily gave into vengeful tendencies that would send an army of Klingons cowering. If properly scorned, there were absolutely no limits to what he would do. But then again, no one, not even in their perfectly polished century, could tell for a fact what they would do, if pushed to the brink. Ironically, what made Khan the most dangerous was what one would call his humanity. But then again the Augments didn't like being called human.
Thoughts, figments of disparaged emotions and conflicting desires swarmed in her head, as she stretched on the bed, seeking to relieve the unwelcome pressure in her back muscles. Staring at the darkened metal around her, she let herself be cradled by a more tranquil memory: lounging on the terrace of their now destroyed house on Ceti Alpha V listening to Khan reading to her from Moby Dick:
"The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air."
# # #
Carol was startled awake by the chiming of her door. She sat up abruptly, momentarily confused.
"Who is it?" she asked hoarsely, rubbing at her grainy eyes.
"Carol," rumbled Khan from the corridor. "May I come in?"
TBC