-Chapter Two-
Anthea woke from her post-coital nap with a start, momentarily alarmed to find the bed beside her empty.
She'd had her husband back for nearly a year, but he'd been gone almost two, and she didn't know how long it would take before she got over the long nights alone, waking up reaching for a man she wasn't even sure was still alive.
But she wasn't in her London house, even if it was the same bed. This was her home on Sitara, the one they'd had for almost the entire length of her pregnancy.
It took her a bit to get out of bed. Khan, she saw, had picked up her discarded clothes and left them on the foot of the bed, which was very thoughtful of him, since she couldn't bend over. She hadn't seen her feet without contortions in months.
She was just pulling her leggings back on, everything else in place, when a knock sounded at the door. It sounded like her mum. "It's open," she called.
Martha cautiously pushed the door open and stuck her head in. "Khan said you were resting."
"... For a bit." Anthea cleared her throat. "What's up, Mum?"
"Your dad and that husband of yours are neck deep in discussing technical things, so I thought I'd come back up to the house and see how you are."
Anthea eyed her mother. Martha looked vaguely irritated, which meant that she and Khan had had one of their ridiculous exchanges and her husband had won. Anthea found the whole thing silly but got the feeling her strong-willed and opinionated mother, and her equally stubborn and exacting husband, actually enjoyed the petty sniping at each other. Otherwise, one of them would have complained to her by now about the other, and they hadn't.
"Tired. But I'm good."
"You didn't go on your walk this morning. You need to keep your exercise up."
She snorted. "Mum. I'm fine. And Khan helped me with some stretches."
"Oh, is that what we're calling it?" Martha asked archly.
Anthea rolled her eyes. "Mum. I'm thirty-one, married, and have a child with another on the way. If you haven't figured out by now that Khan and I fuck, I don't know what to tell you."
She was being unnecessarily crude, she knew, but she was tired of her mother's attitude towards Khan. Not giving Martha a chance to protest the profanity, she continued, "I know you're angry about everything that happened back on Earth, but I've forgiven him. It would really help me out if you could at least consider doing the same, Mum. We're all going to be here together a very long time and I need you two to get along."
Her mother sighed. "I'm just so mad that he lied to you, sweetheart."
"He has his reasons and I've accepted them. He doesn't keep things from me anymore. The man he was protecting me from is dead, and I'm … better equipped to handle things now, anyway."
Anthea stood, searching blindly for the slip on shoes she'd kicked off earlier. Her mother helped her with them, then handed her the kaftan.
"You know, when I bought this for you," the older woman mused, "I'd no idea you were going to marry a man who once ruled India."
"If you'd asked me when I started at Starfleet where I saw myself in ten years," her daughter replied, "this would not have been anywhere near the list, let alone on it."
"But you're happy," Martha said, half question, half statement.
"I would be happier if I had remembered to bring chocolate with me, but yeah, Mum. I'm really happy. Are you? I know coming here was…"
Her mother took her hand and clasped it in both of hers. "Anthea, darling, I won't lie and say it's been easy. It was all quite a shock. But you're what's important to us. You and Nolan and soon to be little Sarina. Those months without you, after you left, were terrible."
"I'm sorry I had to leave the way I did. I just couldn't tell you. If I had told you what I was doing, you would have tried to stop me and I would have been putting you in danger. They couldn't hold you for anything if you didn't know anything."
Martha pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed. "An Admiral Brody came to the house, a bit before Christmas, and asked about you. I told her we had no idea where you were. She didn't say much but we had some men following us for a while."
"Brody is the current head of Section 31," Anthea said. "The division I worked for when I was…"
"A spy?" It was asked wryly. "I did get that impression, yes. I suppose I can't be angry at Khan for protecting you from them, when you did the same for us. I just don't like seeing you hurt."
"I know, Mum. But Khan… He won't hurt me, not like that, not ever again. And if anyone thinks to take him from me, I'll tear them limb from limb." And she probably could do it, too.
She headed in her semi-waddle to the front door. There were many advantages that being an augmented human brought, she'd learned, but it still didn't do much about the loosened ligaments or her shifted centre of gravity from being approximately thirty-six weeks pregnant. There was a dull ache that had settled into her sacroiliac joints that probably wouldn't go away until some weeks after she'd had the baby, if Nolan's birth was anything to go by.
"Where are you going?" her mother asked.
"Work. Sort of. When I told Yves that I'd managed a lab doing genetic research for Starfleet, he wanted me to help him with this project he's got going."
Her mother looked confused. "Genetic research?"
Anthea paused before carefully descending the short set of steps down from the wide porch. When her mother took her arm, she didn't protest. "Yeah. It was just one of the projects, but part of what the scientists I managed were doing was cataloguing base normal DNA for Federation member species and then known mutations, like how humans have Trisomy 21 or Klinefelter Syndrome, and from there, other researchers could do… whatever it is they do. I mostly just kept them all on task but I learned a lot."
And now that her brain worked so much faster, she actually understood a good deal of what her staff had been talking about.
"So Yves had this idea, since virtually none of Khan's people knew more than one parent, if they did at all, to catalogue everyone's DNA profiles before anyone starts reproducing, in case there are any, uh… commonalities."
"You mean, in case anyone's actually a sibling with someone else?"
Anthea nodded. "We got the idea from, well… Khan's mum, Sarina Kaur, was an early geneticist, as you know. She combined her DNA with an unknown male donor. All we know about him is that he was Northern European, likely Swedish or Norwegian, and we only know that because of the database of Earth-based human DNA, which they started doing in the 2010s. Though it was really rough and unreliable back then. Anyway, I lifted the whole database before we left Earth. So we've been sorting everyone out and…" Realising she'd been headed off on a tangent, Anthea backtracked. "Oh. Yes, where we got the idea, sorry. Khan's mum was so pleased with how her work on him turned out, she wanted to make a female version of him. But it was the early 1970s."
"And I take it that the process wasn't as refined as it would be now?"
She gestured out at the village. "These people are exactly the reason why this stuff is illegal now. I mean literally why. But back then… Doctor Kaur decided to try to… clone him, sort of. So she used her DNA, again, and his, and… she created Kati. We're not sure how, precisely, since they were only four and two when she died, in an explosion that destroyed her lab almost completely. So Khan is her brother and her father, sort of. It caused a few issues we resolved a while back. We'd like to avoid similar issues, going forward. We're still eventually going to need to bring in more people, since the men outnumber the women, but…"
Martha nodded. "Expand the gene pool."
"We've got Marla. But I don't know if she's going to… She was dating one of the men, pretty seriously though they were only together about a month or so. I can't judge because I married Khan six weeks after he first kissed me. But Barton died on Elora. That's where we were returning from when we found you'd arrived here."
"I remember that. You seemed so different, I almost thought it wasn't you."
Anthea hadn't told her mother about the augmentation. She was going to have to, she realised. "I am different. I… I kept a journal, letters to you though I didn't think you'd ever see them. You can read it all. But, um… a few weeks before you got here, Nolan and I were taken by Klingons to one of their colony worlds. It's a really long story, and I'm fine now, but I was injured and I had a bleed in my brain that nearly killed me. Khan had to…"
She stopped in her tracks, sighing, and squinted at her mother in the late morning sun. "Khan is the smartest man on this planet, quite possibly one of the smartest men in existence. And Yves isn't far behind him. They'd worked out how to rewrite Kati's DNA as an adult, to get rid of the genetic issue that caused her epilepsy. The advances Khan worked out for Starfleet in the eleven months they had him indentured pushed us forward well over a century in development we probably would have taken otherwise. And that was from a man who'd started life almost three hundred years ago and was asleep for most of it. My husband's brain is astonishing. But I was dying. So he and Yves… It took a few weeks to go through, because I was starting out so far behind, but they had to… rewrite me, too."
Martha's mouth opened, then closed, without a sound coming out.
"Yeah. I know. I'm an Augment now, too. I couldn't begin to tell you how it works or anything, but I am."
Clearly disturbed by what Anthea had told her, Martha left her at the Reliance and went to spend some time with Nolan. Anthea boarded the ship via the crew hatch under the port nacelle, patting the matte blue, black, and grey patterned hull as she did. She was long-since used to its dark hull and sharp lines. The main ship was blocky, rather than round and smooth. It sported two nacelles on "wings", that hung over the bulk of the ship, aft of the small bridge. It was basically an enormously scaled down version of the USS Vengeance, only with the saucer cut off, not quite a hundred metres in length. It had been one of the reasons they'd chosen this site to settle: the lake and river, the relatively even ground, enough space to land a nearly three hundred foot spaceship. They'd had to clear some trees with the ship's weapons, but they'd used the lumber to build cabins, so it had sped up the process considerably.
For as big as it was, there wasn't a whole lot of room on board, not with most of it taken up with engineering and the weapons systems. The former took up a third of the ship, running along the upper half of the two levels. The lower level of the ship was divided between the weapons systems and the cargo hold.
On the underside of the ship, there were two different weapons systems, including a railgun both port and starboard, and phasers. It had a small reserve of photon torpedoes, actually functional versions of the ones she and Khan had designed—her contributions had been mostly aesthetic—but limited to a mere six. They'd never get more, so they were emergency-use-only. Nestled in front of the nacelle struts were two phaser balls. Anthea knew that Khan had gotten the idea for the detachable weapons from the training remotes used in Star Wars and couldn't help grinning every time she saw them.
The rest was the small bridge, a medbay and laboratory, a galley, crew quarters, and a few other nooks and crannies. It could run, like the Vengeance, with a minimal crew, though just one or two were possible. She knew because she and Khan had flown this very ship to Betazed, where they'd gotten married. It didn't have enough room for all of their people to live, but it had held their cryotubes and everything else she could smuggle off Earth. She and Khan had lived aboard the ship for a few months while the village was under construction, as had Yves.
He still did, so that he could be in the medbay at a moment's notice. The lab was actually a bit bigger than the medbay, which made sense since the ship had supposedly been designed as a private research and reconnaissance vessel for Section 31 and would under optimal circumstances have a crew of about twenty. It had never been used for that, though. Anthea had stolen it.
She found Yves in the lab beyond the medbay, leaning over his equipment. Besides having spent time with Leonard McCoy, the chief medical officer aboard the USS Enterprise, Yves had made great use of all of the current medical and technical information Anthea had been able to copy from Starfleet. It had taken her months to copy everything she thought might be remotely relevant, not even sure if there was anyone in her husband's crew who could make use of it, besides Khan. When she'd really looked at the equipment he'd set up in what had once been her study, Anthea had realised quickly that Khan Noonien Singh's mind was so far beyond hers, he must have been dumbing down so much in their work, for all that her IQ was just a few points shy of "genius". Gifted, she thought the term was.
She didn't apply it, though, she knew. Fat lot of good it did her; science wasn't her area of interest. But she was willing to learn, if it helped their people. Still, she'd never be as smart as Khan or Yves. That was just a fact.
"Bonjour!" Yves greeted when he noticed her arrival. "And how are we this morning?"
"Everyone keeps asking that," she grumbled. "I'm ready to pop, that's how I am. I'm half-tempted to beg you to induce me."
The doctor chuckled. "I think it's best to let the bébé continue baking as long as possible, but I understand."
"No one understands. I've got a superbaby kicking me in the liver all day."
"I can't speak to that," Yves admitted. "But I'm sure that you will have the child soon. You did with Nolan, after all."
"We still don't know if that was his being half-Augment or just me," she pointed out. "Since none of the others have had a baby yet, it's difficult to tell. We won't know until others go through pregnancy and other children are born."
"This is true. But I appreciate you letting me document your pregnancy all the same."
She sat down at her station. "I'm rather used to being your guinea pig at this point."
They spent the next two hours working. Yves was in charge of the actual running of the DNA samples, Anthea data entry and running for matches in the system. It reminded her of her time at Section 31 in London, working with John Harrison in their basement office. The feeling was only made stronger when Khan entered and spoke to Yves, then pulled up a seat beside her computer station and sat.
"How are things progressing?" he asked.
"We've got a little over half of the samples processed and catalogued," she told him. "I'm running a search for matches in the background but there haven't been any hits yet."
As if to prove her wrong, the computer chimed an alert. Curious, Anthea changed screens, looking to see who the match involved.
"Ronja Jonsdöttir," Anthea read, " and…"
She turned to look at her husband. "Khan Noonien Singh."
Khan blinked. "What?"
Yves came over. He leaned over the pair of them and read from the screen. "It says that she shares approximately twenty-five percent DNA with you. But not with Kati. Which would mean -"
Khan's blue-green eyes fixed on the screen as he read the report. "It means that she's my half-sister through our father."
Later that evening, after dinner—never anything fancy given the food available to the colony—and after Nolan had been put to bed, Anthea readied for her own bedtime, feeling utterly exhausted despite not having done much that day. She might have been an Augmented human now but that didn't change the fact that she was heavily pregnant and nearing her due date. And it only looked to get worse after delivery. At least Khan was here this time around and she wasn't doing so much alone.
"Are you going to tell Ronja?" she asked Khan as she undressed, intent on changing into her softest nightgown. It wasn't sexy but she was more interested in comfort than anything else right then and didn't care if he was disappointed. Not that he seemed to be paying any attention, staring at his PADD.
It was almost bewildering in its domesticity, the two of them preparing for bed like this. They'd never really had anything approaching a routine back on Earth, since their entire relationship had been clandestine and he hadn't even lived with her until their last week together before everything had gone to hell. But now, here they were, she and the former dictator, turning in a little after 2100 hours, after putting their toddler to bed. Just as they'd done nearly every night for months.
It was weird.
"I should," he murmured. "But I don't know her very well. She wasn't with us long before we left Earth the first time. I don't know how she'll react."
"I can tell you that if it were me, I would want to know. If you'd like, I can talk to her, sound her out on things before you drop an atomic bomb on her."
Anthea had spoken to the other woman a few times in her efforts to get to know Khan's people but couldn't say that she was familiar with Ronja. She was a bit taller, blonde haired and blue eyed, Scandinavian, possibly Swedish, maybe Norwegian. That made sense, given what they knew about Khan's DNA. At the very least, they could find out if Ronja knew who their father was.
"You know, since her last name is Jonsdöttir, it's possible that your father's name is Jon."
Without looking up, he said wryly, "Which would be the height of irony."
"It would, wouldn't it?" She picked up her hair brush and ran it through her brown hair. It was edging closer to dark brown these days, and pregnancy had made it grow faster so that the hair she'd chopped off to her shoulders and kept around that length until Nolan was about a year old had grown nearly down to the bottom of her shoulder blades. She preferred it long but Nolan had been grabby and pulled it. She hoped Sarina wouldn't be the same way.
"I got to thinking today," she said. "When you used your blood to heal Lucille Harewood, it altered her DNA to add yours. Effectively, it rewrote enough to make you a sibling, by allele percentages. But when you and Yves used your blood on me, it didn't do that. I had Yves check. I wonder why?"
"Likely because we used the synthesised serum on you first, and then gave you a transfusion. With Lucille Harewood, I gave her father a vial of platelets and other red blood cells. I don't really know and I'm not in a position to run tests."
She loved her husband, but she also acknowledged that he was just ruthless enough that he'd willingly test it out on a normal human, just to see what happened.
"How did you learn your blood heals?" she asked.
"During my … training," he said, finally putting the PADD down, "I had injuries. Ones that I healed from far faster than my companions did, though I'm sure you've noticed we all heal faster than everyone else. But I'm … above even the others. Faster, stronger, more intelligent. That's why they killed my mother, so she wouldn't be able to create an entire race like me. There were embryos that she'd frozen, I had them for a time, but I lost them when we were driven out of India. There's no telling if they would have been like me, either. Finding surrogates for them wasn't high on my list of priorities. At any rate, I discovered at about ten years old that I healed very quickly, when another … trainee attempted to kill me."
He paused, and something flickered across his face. Anthea realised, without him saying it, that he'd killed the other child. The thought saddened and horrified her, the idea of him at ten years old, having to kill someone.
Khan's voice was a little more business-like when he spoke again. "But I didn't know that I could heal others with my blood until Otto was injured in the explosion that killed his mother and, in a desperate bid to save him, I decided to try it. I cut my hand open with some shrapnel, let my blood pour into his wound, and… watched as he healed almost before my eyes."
"Wow." Anthea finished brushing her hair and tied it back for the night. "So why didn't you try immediately on Kati?"
Khan looked bemused. "I honestly don't know. I think I was afraid. With good reason, it turns out. But I swore Otto to secrecy. The only person we told was Kati. Later, Yves, but no one else. We know now that my blood didn't change his, so perhaps it alters normal humans but not Augments. And we made you an Augment before giving you the transfusion."
"You know what else is ironic?" his wife asked.
"What?"
"That your blood type is the universal donor."
His mouth quirked up in a wry smile. "Yes, that's rather fitting, isn't it?"
She awkwardly crawled into bed and got settled with her multitude of pillows. Khan helped her arrange them, then rose to get ready for bed himself. Anthea watched him change by the light of a lamp powered by the solar panels on the roof. In the fairly dim light, his skin looked gold.
"You're tanner than you used to be," she mused. "Though your arse is still pasty white."
Khan paused in shucking his pants. "No one will believe I'm Indian. When we were young, people who saw me and Kati together assumed one of us was adopted. My skin was fairly dark when we ran around the slums of New Delhi, but never the same as hers. The looks on people's faces in England when I spoke, looking the way I do, made me lose the accent very quickly."
She smiled. "Can you still do the accent?"
He narrowed blue-green eyes at her. "You'll laugh if I do."
"I can't promise I won't," she admitted. "But I would still love to hear it. I'll trade ye a shite Scots accent fer it."
He laughed aloud, something he didn't used to do, and shook his head. Clearing his throat, Khan paused, then said, in a rather beautiful, melodious accent, "Welcome to Kiwk-E-Mart. Thank you, come again."
Anthea cracked up. "What the fuck was that?!" she demanded, amidst gales of laughter.
In his normal British accent, Khan told her, "There was a cartoon show, an American one, quite popular, called 'The Simpsons'. One of the characters was named Apu. A caricature, voiced by an American, but… It was all that came to mind. Terrible. Kati and I used to make fun of the show all the time. Admittedly, my accent actually wasn't quite that strong, but still."
"You have such hidden depths." She wiped streaming eyes. "I married an utter nerd."
"You see why I got rid of the accent, though. No one would take me seriously, even with my intelligence and skills. It took me half the year I spent in England to perfect this accent, and then I… simply kept it."
"I'm sorry. Holy fuck, it's incongruous." She shook her head. "You know, I was thinking today about John Harrison's history, compared to yours, and I realised that someone messed up in creating it."
"Oh?"
"John Harrison graduated from the academy in 2246. But he also supposedly survived the Tarsus IV massacre the same year. And how was he born in Dover and raised in England but also on Tarsus IV?"
Khan paused, then shrugged. "I hadn't thought about it. It doesn't matter now, but that's quite the mistake. They should have had you come up with it. Then you'd have known who I was the entire time and half of our struggles wouldn't have existed."
"That would have been nice. I would have fallen for you anyway. I think I fell in love with you that first day, just a little, when I saw your ID photo. You looked… sad."
"I was," Khan admitted. "Sad, frightened, angry. Alone. Nothing I was used to. And then… I met you."
He finished readying for bed and slid in beside her. "Comfortable?" he asked.
She grimaced. "Never."
"I wish I could help."
"I know. It will get better after the baby is born. I just need to suffer through until then."
He turned out the light. Then he fitted himself to her back, giving her something to lean against.
Beside him, Anthea shifted restlessly. Khan knew that, with the baby due so soon, his wife was constantly uncomfortable and even in pain, and he hated that he couldn't do anything to help her, not in any significant way. The thought that she'd endured all of this without him, when she'd had Nolan, was a weight he wasn't sure he'd ever be rid of.
"Are you alright?" he asked in a whisper.
"Ugh. Just a bit of pain in my hips. Won't go away til the baby comes."
He slid his hand down her back, to her sacroiliac joints. "Here?"
"Yes, about there."
"Yves says it's common for pregnant women to have lower back pain, from the pressure and from hormones that loosen the ligaments."
"Yes, and Nolan gave me sciatica for the last two weeks before he was born. I don't seem to have it quite that badly this time, but I'm not enjoying things, either."
Khan curved a large hand around her hip and pressed in with his thumb over the area in question, not too hard, and rubbed it in slow circles. "Does this help?"
Judging from the way she inhaled sharply, and then abruptly relaxed against him, it did.
"Yeah," she breathed. "Helping."
"Good." He kissed her shoulder. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"Causing this."
Anthea snorted. "I wanted this baby," she reminded him. "We made this decision together."
"I know. But I can't help feeling responsible."
"Well, if you really want to take that burden," she joked, "you can make it up to me with a foot massage tomorrow."
Chuckling, he finished massaging the base of her spine and shifted his hand to rest on her belly. He wanted to feel the baby kick but knew that Thea would be annoyed if he woke their child.
"Something else is bothering you," he guessed.
"Just… been thinking a lot of things. Nolan has no one to play with. Pandu is too young. Sarina isn't born yet. And with his strength… I'm afraid you'll need to train him to control it. And soon. And I just hate the idea of my little boy needing to learn all of that."
Khan sighed, pulling her close, back against his chest, and buried his face in her hair. "I know. I've been thinking the same. I don't want him, or any of the children that might be born, growing up the way we were raised. But there are things about him, about any children that our people could have, that need special treatment."
"You're going to have to teach our baby to fight, aren't you?"
"Mm. Not this young, not quite. But I'm going to have to teach him what he's capable of so that he knows what will happen if he loses control."
"You mean, teach him how to kill."
"... Unfortunately. Someday. Because if he doesn't know his potential for harm, he might accidentally hurt or even kill someone."
"That's what I'm afraid of, Khan."
He wished he could assure her that their son could remain the sweet, carefree child he currently was, but he couldn't. Nolan was his son, and that came with a heavy burden.
Khan might have been stronger, faster, smarter, but it came with the curse of being deadly, and it was one that he couldn't help passing to his children.
"Back on Earth, before," he said slowly, "I wouldn't have minded. At least, I thought that. But I was younger, and while I had the world at my feet, I was… naive. I didn't know what the reality would be. And now… I don't want to, Thea. I have to, but I hate it."
She twined her fingers with his, where his hand rested just under her breasts. "We'll find a balance. We will."
He could only hope she was right. The alternative was unthinkable.