Chapter 39: Reliant
Personal Log, Captain Dawn Summers, Acting First Officer, Chief Medical Officer. U.S.S. Reliant reporting. On orbital approach to Ceti Alpha VI, continuing our search for a planet to serve as a test site for the Genesis experiment. This will be the sixteenth world we have visited; so far, our attempts to fulfill all the requirements for the test site have met with failure. On a side note I talked with Buffy this morning; she took the Kobayashi Maru. She got high marks from Jim; I expect the next time the two of us accept a position on a ship she will likely sit at the helm. Sadly, though she said she passed up on commanding the Enterprise, she had recommended that Spock be given the position instead. I have been wondering if it's a result of when we were still in Sunnydale and my betrayal.
Dawn looked up at her commanding officer, Clark Terrell who leaned back in his seat. "Is the probe data for Ceti Alpha on-line?"
"Aye, sir," Dawn keyed the data to the viewscreen so that Captain Terrell could display it if he chose. For now, the screen showed Ceti Alpha VI.
Dawn had expected when she had accepted the promotion and position on the Reliant for it to be short and easy. How wrong she was. She had been away from Buffy now for several months. They had been searching for lifeless worlds of the right size, orbiting the proper sort of star, within the star's biosphere, in a star system otherwise uninhabited: such planets were not so easy to discover. They had inspected fifteen promisingly barren worlds, but each in its turn had somehow violated the experimental conditions' strict parameters.
Terrell displayed the probe data as a corner overlay on the viewscreen, and added a companion block of the information they had collected on the way in.
"I see what you mean about the discrepancies, Dawn," he said. He considered the screen and stroked the short black hair of his curly beard.
The probe data showed twenty planets: fourteen small, rocky inner ones, three gas giants, three outer eccentrics. But what Reliant saw on approach was nineteen planets, only thirteen of them inner ones.
"I've been working on that," Dawn said, "and there are two possibilities. Ceti Alpha was surveyed by one of the earliest probes: their data wasn't always completely reliable, and some of the archival preservation has been pretty sloppy. It's also possible that the system's gone through some alteration since the probe's visit."
"Doesn't sound too likely."
"Probe error is fairly common," Dawn said.
Terrell glanced back and grinned. "You mean maybe we think we're headed for a ball of rock, and we'll find a garden spot instead?"
"I hope not," Dawn said. "I'm ready to get home to Buffy."
"She took the Kobayashi Maru, didn't she?" he asked.
"She did," Dawn replied. "She said Jim had nothing but praise for her." She looked at her station and then back to Terrel as she returned to the topic at hand. "Scans confirm the originals on the planet itself. Rock, sand, corrosive atmosphere."
"Three cheers for the corrosive atmosphere," Mr. Beach said, and everybody on the bridge laughed.
"I agree one hundred percent, Mr. Beach," Terrell said. "Take us in."
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
"Standard orbit, Mr. Beach," Captain Terrell said a couple hours later.
"Standard orbit, sir," the helm officer replied.
"What do we have on the surface scan?"
"No change, Captain," Dawn said. "Except..."
"Oh, no," somebody groaned.
Every crew member on the bridge turned to stare at Dawn with one degree or another of disbelief, irritation, or animosity. On the other side of the upper bridge, the communications officer muttered a horrible curse.
Terrell hunched his shoulders, then forced himself to relax. "Don't tell me you've got something," he said. He rose and came up the stairs to look at Dawn's data.
"One scanner has picked up on something biological," Dawn admitted.
"What are the chances that the scanner's out of adjustment?" Terrell said.
"I just checked it out," Dawn said. "Twice."
"Maybe it's pre-biotic," Beach said.
Terrell chuckled. "Come on, Stoney. That's something we've been through before, too. Of all the things Marcus won't go for, tampering with pre-biotics is probably top of the list."
"Maybe it's pre-pre-biotic," Beach said wryly.
This time nobody laughed.
"All right, get Dr. Marcus on the horn. At least we can suggest transplantation. Again."
Dawn sighed. She had yet to meet the woman, but she knew of her from Jim.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
Dr. Marcus had suggested they beam down to see if it was something that was pre-biotic and possibly if it could be transplanted.
The wind nearly knocked Dawn over as soon as she lost the protection of the transporter beam. It was times like this she wished being Millennial gave her some of Buffy's abilities. She looked around at Ceti Alpha VI it was one of the nastiest, most inhospitable places she had ever been, and that was saying something considering how long she had been alive. Driven by the storm, the sand screamed against her pressure suit.
Captain Terrell materialized beside her, looked around, and opened a channel to Reliant. "Terrell to Reliant."
"Reliant. Beach here, Captain." The transmission wavered. "Pretty poor reception, sir."
"It will do, Stoney. We're down. No evidence of life or anything else."
"I copy, sir."
"Look, I don't want to listen to this static all afternoon. I'll call you, say, every half hour."
"... Aye, sir."
Kyle broke in. "Remember about staying in the open, Captain."
"Don't fuss, Mr. Kyle. Terrell out." He shut down the transmission and turned on his tricorder.
Dawn put her arm on Terrell's chest, she noticed him looking at her as if asking what are you doing. "Precaution," she said as she reminded him of her full file.
"You need contact?" Terrell asked. He hadn't read the entire file yet; it was after all very long as it held a hundred years' worth of service record as well as another two hundred years of personal life.
"Only to draw some energy from you," Dawn said as she removed her hand. "I can store for later use." She then pulled out her tricorder and began scanning.
"You getting anything, Dawn?"
"No, nothing yet."
"You're sure these are the right coordinates?"
"Remember that garden spot you mentioned, Captain? Well, this is it," Dawn joked.
"I can't see a damned thing," Terrell said. He started off toward the slight rise the tricorder indicated. Dawn trudged after him. The wind tried to push him faster than he could comfortably walk in the treacherous sand.
"I'm getting nothing, Captain," Dawn said. "Let's go."
She got no reply. She looked up. At the top of the hillock, Captain Terrell stood staring before her, his form vague and blurry in the sand. He gestured quickly. Dawn struggled up the sand dune, trying to run, sliding on the slick, sharp grains. She reached Terrell's side and stopped, astonished.
The sand dune formed a windbreak for the small hollow before them, a sort of storm's eye of clearer air. Dawn could see perhaps a hundred meters.
In that hundred meters lay a half-buried group of ruined buildings.
"Whatever it is," Clark Terrell said, "it isn't prebiotic." He stepped over the knife-sharp crest of the dune and slid down its concave leeward side.
Dawn didn't answer as she looked at the buildings. She had a bad feeling at the back of her mind, but she wasn't sure why. She followed Terrell down
Terrell passed the first structure. Dawn discarded any hope that they might have come upon some weird formation of violent wind and alien geology. What they had found was buildings constructed by humanoid hands.
"Look, there's the airlock. Let's check it out."
"Captain, I have bad feeling," Dawn said. "I think we should go back to Reliant."
"Is that in your professional opinion as my Number One or as someone who has lived for a few hundred years and has more experience doing this than anyone other than a Vulcan has?" Terrell asked.
"I can't explain it," Dawn admitted. "Something at the back of my mind is screaming at me to get out of here."
"Do you sense anything?"
"I haven't been trying," Dawn admitted. "After all there wasn't supposed to be humanoid life here."
"Well then, come along," Terrell said. "Till we know more we have to assume they are in need of rescue."
Dawn sighed and nodded. He was right she knew. She followed the captain into the airlock.
The inner doors slid open. Dawn had to wait a moment, but after her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw beds and tables, a book, an empty coffee cup: people lived here. The question was, where were they?
"We've got a breathable atmosphere," Terrell said. He unfastened his helmet. Dawn glanced at her tricorder. Terrell was right: the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide were all normal, and there was barely a trace of the noxious chemicals that made up the outside air.
"What the hell is all this? Did they crash? And where are they?" Terrell said as he stopped in the entrance to the next chamber, a kitchen.
On the stove, a faint cloud of steam rose from a pot of stew.
Dawn followed Terrell into a laboratory, where Terrell poked around among the equipment. He stopped near a large glass tank full of sand.
"Christ!" Terrell said as he leaped away from the tank.
Dawn raised her hand, waiting, ready, but there was nothing to fire at. "Captain, what?"
"There's something in that damned tank!" He approached it cautiously, his hand on his own phaser.
The sand roiled like water. A long shape cut a stroke across the surface.
"It's all right," Terrell said more to calm his own nerves than Dawn's. He had read enough of her pre-Starfleet files to know some of the stuff she had seen in the early twentieth century. "It's just some kind of animal or-"
The quiet gurgle of a child, talking to itself, playing with sounds, cut him off as effectively as a shout or a scream.
Terrell started toward the sound, motioning Dawn to follow.
Dawn followed, they stepped through a crumpled and deformed passageway and peered into the next chamber.
All alone, in the middle of the room, sitting on the floor- the wall- the baby reached out to them and gurgled and giggled with joy.
Terrell climbed down from the sideways entrance and approached the child tentatively. "Well, kid, hi, didn't your folks even leave a babysitter?"
Dawn looked around the room. On the wall she saw a collection of sharp, shining swords. She recognized few of the titles of the books on a shelf nearby: King Lear, The Bible. She picked up the Bible and looked at it. She recognized it as being a pre-World War III edition. She opened it and confirmed it was written when she was a child in the 1990s.
And then she saw, hanging from the floor-wall, an insignia, and the reason for nagging feeling came at her in a crushing blow.
Botany Bay.
Dawn immediately opened her empathic senses searching for the people she knew all too well. "We have to leave, now."
"Dawn?" Terrell said.
"These people aren't friendly," Dawn said. She grabbed Terrell by the shoulder, and dragged him toward the passageway.
"What is it you sense?" Terrell asked.
"Nothing yet," Dawn admitted. She forcibly pushed the captain through the hatch and climbed after him. She pushed him down the battered companionway, which was too narrow to allow Terrell to put up much struggle.
"Is this something to do with something that I haven't read in your files?" Terrell asked.
"This isn't in my files," Dawn said.
They put on their helmets and fastened them. They plunged into the airlock.
The door opened.
It was at the moment that Dawn finally felt his emotions. Not Terrell's but the man that had at one time tried to steal the Enterprise, Khan Noonien Singh.
Dawn raised her hand as she prepared to fire. She didn't get the chance as from the side a man knocked her hand down and knocked her back into the airlock.
0 – 0 – 0 – 0 – 0
When Captain Terrell tried to explain that he and Dawn had been looking for survivors, that they were, in effect, a rescue party, one of the survivors expressed gratitude by backhanding him with the full weight of body and arm and massive suit glove. Terrell sagged.
Dawn did not try to protest their capture. She knew the attempt would be futile. While she could not die, she knew Terrell could.
She and Terrell still wore their suits, though their helmets and phasers had been taken. Besides the four people holding them, twelve or fifteen others stood in silence around them.
The airlock hummed into a cycle. The guards forced Dawn to attention, pulled Terrell upright, and turned them both to face the doorway.
Khan paused, stepped out of the chamber, and slowly, deliberately, removed his helmet.
"Khan..." Dawn said.
The man had changed: he appeared far more than fifteen years older. Unlike herself Khan had seen the passage of time. His long hair was now white, streaked with iron gray. But the aura of power and self-assurance was undiminished; the changes meant nothing.
Khan glanced toward Dawn. He approached and looked them over. The unrelenting inspection shocked Terrell fully back to consciousness, but Khan dismissed him with a shrug. "I don't know you," he said. He turned toward Dawn.
"But you," he said softly, gently, "I remember you, Dawn. A woman from my own time. I never hoped to see you again."
"Dawn, who is this man?" Terrell tried vainly to reassert some authority.
"Khan Noonien Singh," Dawn said. "He's from my time. When I was but a child, he was one of the men who seized control of parts of Asia during the Eugenics Wars."
Khan's only reaction to Dawn's statement was a slow smile.
"What's the meaning of this treatment?" Terrell said angrily. "I demand-"
"You, sir, are in a position to demand nothing." Khan's voice was very mild. "I, on the other hand, am in a position to grant nothing." He gestured to the people, to the surroundings. "You see here all that remains of the crew of my ship, Botany Bay, marooned here fifteen years ago by Captain James T. Kirk. I can grant nothing, for we have nothing."
Terrell appealed to Khan's ragtag group of men and women. "Listen to me, you people-"
"Save your strength, Captain," Khan said. "They have been sworn to me, and I to them, since two hundred years before you were born. We owe each other our lives." He glanced kindly at Dawn. "My dear Dawn, do you mean you never told him the tale?" He returned his attention to Terrell. "Do you mean James Kirk never amused you by telling the story of how he 'rescued' my ship and its company from the cryogenic prison of deep space? He never made sport of us in public? Captain, I'm touched."
"I don't even know Admiral Kirk!" Terrell said.
"Admiral Kirk? Ah, so he gained a reward for his brave deeds and his acts of chivalry- for exiling seventy people to a barren heap of sand!"
"That is not why he was promoted," Dawn said. "And we didn't maroon you here. We left you on a world that was filled with life."
"Yes," Khan said, in a rough whisper. "Ceti Alpha V was that, for a while."
Dawn knew why the nagging feeling had been in the back of her mind, the memory had been trying to shake itself loose. Now she remembered that they had left Khan and his people to start over on Ceti Alpha V.
"Dawn," Khan said, his tone hurt, "did you forget? Did you forget where you left me? You did, I see... I would have expected you to remember. After all you are not one of the ordinaries."
"How did you manage to get here?" Dawn asked. "You should still have been on Ceti Alpha V."
"This is Ceti Alpha V!" Khan cried. " Ceti Alpha VI, our beautiful moon, you did not survey that, did you, Dawn? You never bothered to note its tectonic instability. It exploded, Dawn. It exploded! It laid waste to our planet. I enabled us to survive, I, with nothing to work with but what you see around you."
"Captain Kirk was your host-" Dawn said.
"And he never appreciated the honor fate offered him. I was a prince on Earth; I stood before millions and led them. He could not bear the thought that I might return to power. He could only conquer me by playing at being a god. His Zeus to my Prometheus: he put me here, in adamantine chains, to guard a barren rock!"
"You tried to steal the Enterprise -"
Khan bent down and looked straight into Dawn's eyes. "Are you his eagle, Dawn? Did you come to finish the job you started?" He turned away, and gazed at Clark Terrell. "What of you, Captain? Perhaps you are my Chiron. Did you come to take my place in purgatory?"
"I... I don't know what you mean," Terrell said.
"No, you do not! You know nothing of sacrifice. Not you, not James T. Kirk-" he snarled the name, "- no one but the courageous Lieutenant McGiver, who defied your precious admiral, who gave up everything to join me in exile."
Dawn could sense Khan's emotions at the mention of McGiver. "What happened to her?" she asked.
Khan didn't answer as he swung around on them again. His eyes were bright with tears, but his self-control had returned. The horrifying gentleness of his voice warned of anger under so much pressure it must, inevitably, erupt.
"You did not come seeking me," he said. "You believed this was Ceti Alpha VI. Why would you choose to visit a barren world? Why are you here?"
Dawn said nothing.
"Foolish, Dawn." As carefully as a father caressing a baby, Khan touched Dawn's cheek. His fingers stroked down to her chin. Then he grabbed Dawn's jaw and brutally forced up her head.
Just as suddenly he spun away, grabbed Terrell by the throat, and jerked him off his feet.
"Why?"
Terrell shook his head. Khan gripped harder.
Choking, Terrell clawed at Khan's gloved hand. Khan watched, a smile on his face, while the captain slowly and painfully lost consciousness.
"It does not please him to answer me," Khan said. His lips curled in a cruelly simple smile. "Well, no matter." He opened his fist, and Terrell's limp body collapsed on the floor.
Terrell curled around himself, coughing.
"You'll tell me willingly soon enough," Khan said. He made a quick motion with his head. His people dragged Dawn and Terrell into the laboratory and dumped them next to the sand tank.
Khan strode past them, picked up a small strainer, and dipped it into the tank. He lifted it and sand showered out, sliding down through the mesh and flung up by the struggling of the creatures he had snared.
"Did you, perhaps, come exploring? Then let me introduce you to the only remaining species native to Ceti Alpha V." He thrust the strainer in front of Dawn. "Ceti eels," Khan said. The last of the sand spilled away. The two long, thin eels writhed together, lashing their tails and snapping their narrow-pointed jaws. They were the sickly yellow of the sand. They had no eyes. "When our world became desert, only a desert creature could survive." Khan took Dawn's helmet from one of his people, an intense blond young man.
"Thank you, Joachim." He tilted the strainer so one of the eels flopped into the helmet.
Joachim spilled the second eel into Terrell's helmet.
"They killed, they slowly and horribly killed, twenty of my people," Khan said. "One of them... was my wife."
Dawn could feel the intense anger that Khan was giving off. "I'm sorry," she said.
"You may blame her death on your Admiral Kirk," Khan said. "Do you want to know how she died?" He swirled Dawn's helmet in circles. "The young eel enters its victim's body, seeks out the brain, and entwines itself around the cerebral cortex. As a side effect, the prey becomes extremely susceptible to suggestion." He came toward Dawn. "The eel grows, my dear Dawn, within the captive's brain. First it causes madness. Then the host becomes paralyzed- unable to move, unable to feel anything but the twisting of the creature within the skull. I learned the progression well. I watched it happen... to my wife."
Dawn looked at the helmet as Khan smiled.
"For you death will be slow, of course," Khan said. "After all you once told me you could not die for several hundred more years. For you, your death will extremely slow and extremely painful lingering death that will last hundreds of years. Before then you will tell me what I want to know. Now you must meet my pet, Dawn. You will find that it is not... quite... domesticated..."
Khan slammed the helmet over Dawn's head and locked it into its fastenings.
The eel tumbled against Dawn's face, lashing her cheek with its tail. Dawn had long seen things worse than what was about to happen to her. So, she stared straight ahead knowing it was inevitable, and this time she knew Buffy was not coming to save her at the last second.
The eel, sensing the heat of a living body, ceased its frantic thrashing and began to crawl, probing purposefully with its sharp little snout. The eel curled its body through her hair, anchoring itself, and continued its relentless search.
It curved down behind her ear, slid beneath the lobe, and glided up again.
It touched her eardrum.
She heard the rush of blood, and its flowing warmth caressed her cheek.
Then she felt the pain and she screamed.
Author's Note: Dawn's substitution on the Reliant is to fix something that CBS/Paramount actually missed with regards to canon. When the TOS episode of Space Seed aired, Walter Koenig who played Chekov had not even joined the cast yet. So, Chekov wasn't even in the episode. Of course, Walter Koenig when he got the script never mentioned he had not joined the show yet when that episode aired. The only time it was ever addressed was in a novel where it said Chekov was part of the night watch during that episode. That said though CBS/Paramount has never addressed in canon why Chekov knew about Khan.