Carol met Darren in hydroponics again, this time taking an interest in the vegetables. Carol had always had a soft spot for cherry tomatoes, and they tasted best right off the plant. "Carol, I told you to stay out of this!" he said. "What part of that didn't you understand? Or do you just ignore everything I say?"

"You do realize that Admiral Marcus is risking more than just our lives by blackmailing and maltreating the head of the Augments?"

"Yes, but there isn't a damn thing you or I can do about it that won't make the situation even worse."

"Alone, maybe, but between us and Khan... he nearly got all of them out before with no help at all." I think he would have managed it if I hadn't pulled the alarm on him.

"You want to help him. Carol, are you insane?"

"Which is more dangerous; a not-angry with us Khan and his people somewhere else in the galaxy, or a desperate Khan right here with access to the Federation's most advanced weaponry?"

"Carol..."

"Admiral Marcus is being a fool. According to you he's already killed people over this. What exactly happened?"

Darren stood silent, fiddling with a lettuce leaf.

"It was two of Khan's people, wasn't it? Were they still in cryotubes or had they gotten out somehow?"

"Still in the tubes," said Darren very quietly. "Khan kept pleading with Admiral Marcus to stop, but he didn't until Khan got down on his knees and begged. Then Marcus made Khan swear an oath not to try to escape again nor to rescue his people - Khan calls them his family, by the way."

"I know. I've heard him." Carol blanched suddenly. "You saw him kill them didn't you?"

"Yes. I couldn't do anything. Just another faceless guard."

Carol groaned. "Technically, by not speaking up you're probably an accessory to murder."

"Better an accessory than an extra victim."

"That's why I said 'technically'. Then and there, I doubt very much you could have stopped it. But we can do something now."

"I still don't like the idea of helping Khan. The man's a menace - letting him loose would be like leaving those stupid torpedoes lying about. Those are where he hid his crew, by the way."

Carol nodded. "Helping Khan is a risk. But I believe it is a lesser risk than leaving the situation as it is. And maybe we don't have to let him loose entirely. What if we turned him and his crew over to the Federation judiciary for a proper trial?"

"How the heck can we do that without Marcus clamping down, and slapping secrecy orders on everything?" Darren shook his head. "Even if we could do it, a scandal of this size right now... the Klingons would be laughing their heads off at us while the Federation flounders politically. It's suicidal!"

"I think you might have the relative size of the threats wrong. Maybe neither Khan nor the Klingons are the biggest threat to the Federation here. It could be Admiral Marcus - at least if we value any of the freedoms we currently have. They made us both take history at the Academy, remember? When a secret service starts performing summary executions and planning a preventive war it rarely ends well."

"So instead we get conquered by the Klingons and have to deal with their idea of how to rule a conquered people. That's worse."

"Neither of us know for sure what is going to happen when the war with the Klingon empire comes. A military dictatorship seems an awfully high price to pay to prevent something we don't know for certain will happen.

"I can't believe you just called the Federation a military dictatorship."

"I didn't! I'm saying that the methods Section 31 uses and the amount of power in Admiral Marcus' hands exceeds what ought to be happening in a democracy and opens the possibility of us winning a war with the Klingons only to lose what makes the Federation worth fighting for!" She frowned.

"Why did you join Section 31 then, if you're so dead-set against it?"

"I wanted to help prevent another Nero and make sure that we win any future war with the Klingons!" She lowered her voice back down to a whisper, remembering that all the white noise in the world wouldn't help if she started yelling.

"You do realize that we could do a full dictatorship turn and still lose the war? Repression invites resistance, and the federation is a conglomeration of different peoples with different laws and governmental systems. If Starfleet and Earth start swinging their weight around too much, some of the other peoples will probably walk out on us. After the destruction of Vulcan, we can afford that less than ever."

"And if we provoke a scandal, they'll just walk sooner."

"There are political scandals all the time. The vast majority of them don't rock the Federation to pieces. The longer this goes on, the worse the eventual reveal and the worse the backlash."

"So you want to introduce Khan to the media."

"Yes, but before that to Admiral Pike. And we're not just talking retrieving Khan here - any of his people left in Admiral Marcus' custody are likely to be killed out of hand."

"You think Admiral Pike will help?"

"Pike is already sniffing around Khan's attempted escape and I think he already has Jo or at least knows where he is. He also has a very strong sense of honor. Yes, I think he'll help."

Darren sighed. "And this way we don't get tried for treason. We hope. At least if I get myself killed over this I won't have to remember that I stood by and did nothing while you got yourself killed doing something both noble and idiotic."

The next hurdle was talking to Khan. They could hardly haul him down to hydroponics for a frank discussion without it looking really suspicious, and they had to assume that Khan was being watched like a hawk whether or not they were under surveillance themselves.

So there were more fake conversations using PADDs as props. It's amazing how inane some of the verbal conversations ended up being, though. Describing doughnuts as edible toruses with sugar on... Maria gave them a really weird look when she walked in on that one. They didn't get to discuss everything they really needed to.

Meanwhile, Khan hadn't been spending his time doing nothing. He'd given Carol the codes and information he'd been able to figure out before Marcus caught him. Unfortunately, much of it was now likely known to Marcus and would be either blocked or red-flagged if it was used again, and his new PADD really did have too many safeguards for him to get past them in a reasonable time frame. It also slowed down his work and made him a more inefficient asset for Marcus, but apparently Marcus figured it was a reasonable price to pay.

Khan also figured out a way to disable that vile collar. Granted, with Darren apparently on their side that might not be needed, but better safe than sorry if Darren turned out to be more loyal to Admiral Marcus than to Carol Marcus. Hopefully it worked. It wasn't as if he could test it without involving Darren, and he did not trust the man that far.

Khan found it hard to really accept Darren's turn to their side. After all, the man had stood by and done nothing while Admiral Marcus had killed two of his people. So either he did not think of Augments as people, or his conscience was torturing him. His voice and body language suggested the latter, but Khan had met some very convincing liars before and had more than passing skill with lies himself. He'd use the man, but he'd not trust Darren until this project had cost Darren everything he had.