Chapter Five: Baptism
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor make money writing about them. Darn it.
As soon as she walks onto the bridge, Nyota sees Lt. Hannity standing up and vacating the primary communications console with practiced ease. For the past six months they have worked overlapping shifts with the same off-duty day. If they aren't fast friends, they are at least comfortable companions who find their time on duty pleasant enough to occasionally seek each other out for a meal or a conversation when they are free.
Sliding into her seat, Nyota toggles open the dedicated connection to Starfleet and sends the message that John Harrison has been apprehended and confined. To her surprise, she gets no response, not even an automated acknowledgement. Is the signal jammed? She sends the message again. This time the receptor pings. Still, odd that no one sends a verbal reply, though increased security in the aftermath of the attack on Daystrom could be gumming up the pipeline.
From the corner of her eye she notices Hannity giving her a questioning look.
"What?"
"A shower?"
"Oh!" With a start, Nyota realizes that her clothes smell strongly of fuel and dust—and likely are infused with contaminants from the planet. What had Spock told her? That the Ketha Province of Qo'noS had been abandoned because of a plague?
Standing up quickly, she says, "I'll be back soon," as she heads to her quarters.
On the way through the corridors she keeps an eye out for Spock or the captain. Their first task would have been to make sure the prisoner was safely in the brig, but by now they should be on the way back, either to the bridge or doing what she is going to do, shower and change clothes.
Although the corridors are busy—almost crowded in places—she sees neither one. As she palms open the door of her quarters, she has a moment of hoping that Spock is here. The room, however, is dark and silent.
Stripping out of her clothes, she sees scratches and nicks that missed her notice until now. The cut on her forehead is the most tender, but one deep jab on the back of her thigh—probably from the tip of a Klingon bat'leth—will need a stitch or two.
Hesitating only a moment, she adjusts the shower from the usual sonic configuration to water, a luxury she rarely affords herself. She tips her face into the spray as the warm water cascades over her.
The last time she had permitted herself to use an extra ration of water this way Spock had been with her—her idea, some silly romantic notion that sex in a shower would be a salve for the rough patch they have traveled through lately. Not just lately, but the entire shakedown cruise—Spock surprisingly guarded even in their private moments, Nyota alternately patient and confused and then alarmed by what in a human would certainly be tagged post-traumatic stress disorder.
That shower had been a disaster. Rather than being aroused, Spock had shivered in the water that was both too cool for his comfort and almost too hot for her to bear. When it became clear that no posture, no gel, no sly or slippery touches were going to make Spock less wet-cat miserable, Nyota turned off the water and fought hard not to let her disappointment and frank irritation show.
Still, as she soaps up and rinses away the acrid smell of Qo'noS, she listens out for the telltale sound of the door lock override. He has to clean up somewhere. Surely he recognizes the layers of meaning in the kiss, knows that whatever lingering anger she had with him has melted away, that she is both offering and asking for forgiveness.
Knows how her willingness to sacrifice herself by approaching the Klingons has shifted her view of what he did in the volcano. How placing himself in harm's way has not been some reckless, thoughtless rush to annihilation but his attempt to serve the common good. How if part of him is so guilt-ridden after the loss of Vulcan, the loss of his mother, that he welcomes death, another part fears it and rejects it—rejects it so completely that he refuses to feel anything about it at all.
His words in the K'Normian shuttle had brought her up short, had called her to task for misunderstanding him.
You mistake my choice not to feel as a reflection of not caring, while I assure you the truth is precisely the opposite.
As abashed as she felt hearing him, she hasn't had time until now to let the tumblers of her mind click into place—to hear what he is telling her about being in pain.
What do you need? she asked him once, though she sees now that she has been deaf to his answer.
She steps out of the shower and begins toweling the water out of her hair, pinning it away from her face and then slipping on a clean uniform. If Spock were to show up now what would she say? That something changed on the Klingon homeworld? That while she may not comprehend the depth of his despair, she has a better idea—one borne from her own moment of facing the abyss, struggling to call up the proper Klingon phrases, the appropriate tone, the correct attitude to buy them all some time?
The instant that the Klingon warrior had reached out and grasped her—the terror and then the conscious tamping down of her fear—she gets that now, sees how someone could choose to ignore their emotions.
Not not feel them, perhaps like Spock can, but move forward despite them.
She's back on the bridge, back at her station before she sees him again. When he exits the turbolift he glances up at her, a lingering appreciation for their earlier tender moment showing in his expression. His uniform is neatly pressed, his face calm, his hair unruffled. The only hint that he's been in a recent firefight is a small dermaplast on one finger. So, he's showered and changed at his quarters. Any other time Nyota might have felt let down but not today.
She and Spock are not the same, do not respond the same, do not have the same ideas about what it means to be in a relationship. Or rather, what it means to show affection to someone in a relationship. For her, a shared shower. For him, words carefully chosen and saved for when she felt her lowest, when she believed that her efforts and sacrifice were for nothing.
You risked your life for the needs of the many, he told her. You did not fail, no matter the outcome.
It is the offer that matters. Being willing to live...or to die...in the service of others is proof that he cares. It's what he's been telling her—or what he would tell her if he could.
And now that she knows that, she won't forget it.
X X X
The Enterprise brig is the least private place on the ship. Barely three meters square, one wall of transparent aluminum, the others of triple-reinforced titanium, flanked by surveillance cameras and a manned crew station, it is also more secure than most prisons.
But no prison is impregnable. If and when it suits his purpose, Khan Noonien Singh will find a way to leave it.
For now, however, he waits.
Somewhere on this ship are his crewmates, people who swore to follow him through the dark days of Earth's history almost 300 years ago. Joachim, Jorabeth, Zazreel among them—Augments all, though they rarely use the term to describe themselves, fraught as it is with negative connotations.
Like his genetic heritage, Khan's name is a construction—a symbol of what his creators intended for him—to be a leader like the khans of history. In a world reeling from nuclear border wars and devastating climate change, the geneticists who engineered the Augments believed that only humans who were stronger, faster, smarter could keep humanity from destroying itself.
If Khan knew his birth mother, he dismissed that memory long ago. Instead, he and the other Augments were raised in laboratory colonies, their education extensive, their physical training rigorous.
Stronger, faster, smarter they were. And so ambitious and competitive that by the time he was 12, Khan had witnessed or participated in five murders—not just killings but planned executions carried out for personal gain. Neither the word nor the deed frightened him when it was necessary, though he avoided random, mindless violence, not out of some misguided morality but from simple economics. There were, after all, only so many Augments. Killing one was a loss of a potential lieutenant in his rise to power.
That profitable calculus did not go unnoticed by the other Augments. Some saw Khan's deliberation before action as a sign of weakness and foolishly attacked him. Others applauded his self-control and saw it as evidence of a superior intellect. Those became his corps, people Khan valued for their loyalty even more than for their enhancements.
"We are destined to rule," he told them so often that by the time he was 23, they had collectively established a toehold on the fractured governments in East Asia. By the time he was 30, he dominated a third of the world.
He would have controlled even more if the Eugenics Wars had not begun. Alarmed by the rise of the enhanced humans, the rest of humanity pulled itself together at last and fought their common enemy.
It took three wars spanning a decade to finally defeat them. Sensing the looming loss, Khan spent the last six months of the last war gathering the resources necessary to put together a sleeper ship for his surviving followers. When they launched they had no particular destination—just an unalterable belief that somewhere out there were new worlds to conquer, worlds that needed a strong hand to flourish.
Or if they awoke and found that mankind was, indeed, alone in the universe, they would return to Earth and try again, this time with the lessons of history to guide them.
"We are yours to command," Joachim told him more than once, "wherever you lead us."
Younger than Khan, Joachim was his trusted second. As a toddler he had developed a rare muscle wasting disease, something that cropped up more frequently in the Augments than in the general population. The treatment was prolonged and painful and for several years it left Joachim with a shambling gait that drew unwanted attention. Once when two larger, older boys ganged up on him in the courtyard of their school, Khan intervened, breaking the arm of one and the neck of the other.
"I have been watching you," Khan told him, explaining why he had come to his aid. "I need a good engineer."
Joachim's engineering prowess meant that he oversaw the other 71 Augments as they willingly lay down into their individual cryotubes and submitted to the deepest sleep anyone could know. Then he climbed into his own, nodded once, and left Khan as the last man standing, so to speak, waiting to put himself in stasis until after the sleeper ship was safely out of Earth's orbit and on its way. The last thing Khan remembered was the sharp odor of cinnamon as the lid of his own tube slowly closed, the soporific drugs already making him drowsy.
And then he woke up.
The onboard computer had been programmed to wake him first if the ship ran into trouble or found a planet with suitable parameters. Opening his eyes and breathing deeply, Khan expected one of those two scenarios.
What he found instead startled him. He was prone and bound on a medical bed, three armed officers surrounding him.
"Don't try to move," an older man's baritone voice said. "Otherwise you're just going to get yourself and your crew killed."
The man was Alexander Marcus, an admiral in an organization called Starfleet—what the armed services had evolved into by the 23rd century. Unlike Khan, who was playing catch up on the changes on Earth in the past 300 years, Admiral Marcus seemed to know all about the Augments.
"You're in the history books," the Admiral told him the second time they spoke. "We've known about the Augment sleeper ships, too. Just didn't know where you were."
With a leap of intuition, Khan realized what the admiral was saying, that he had come looking for them.
"What do you want from me?" Khan asked. Admiral Marcus gave an appreciative nod.
"That's right," he nodded. "I need you. Earth needs you. Or at least what you know how to do."
For several days Khan sat through briefings with the Admiral—always under guard, always with the threat of harm to his crew if he didn't cooperate. He learned first about the history of the Federation, of the importance of first contact with Vulcan in the establishment of that peculiar interstellar institution.
"It will never work," Khan declared when Marcus gave him the details. "If, as you say, Vulcans are pacifists, they can never forge a working alliance with such a violent species as humans."
"It already has," Marcus assured him. "Or it did. The loss of Vulcan has shifted the balance of influence on the Council. Those species that share Earth's commitment to self-defense—the Tellarites, for example, and the Andorians, with a history of violence greater than humanity's—are supportive of what I think we need. Proactive defense against people already sworn to destroy us. The Klingons, for one. Warriors who can only be defeated by warriors just as savage. Warriors like you."
In the end Khan had agreed to help Marcus, not because he believed in his claims about Klingon incursions in Federation territory, and not because he had any interest in helping Earth.
But he spent eight months designing a ship that could be run with a minimal number of crew members—fewer than 80—because at some point in the future it would be his to command.
His and his resurrected crew, as soon as he could ferret them away from Marcus, using retrofitted torpedoes to hide the cryotubes.
But it hadn't happened that way. Intercepted before he could finish, Khan had to flee in a stolen jumpship.
"You might as well return," Marcus told him in his last transmission. "You have nowhere else to go and no one to go to."
So that was that. As he had threatened, the Admiral had destroyed the Augments...or so Khan believed at the time. His reply was swift and furious—the attack on Section 31, the decimation at Headquarters.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Not simplistic revenge but ancient justice codified by several religions. The Admiral could hardly be surprised.
Yet it wasn't the Admiral who came looking for him. Rather than bringing the full force of the dreadnought Khan had designed to hunt him down, this puny ship has been loaded with the torpedoes, the young human captain apparently unaware of the true nature of the cargo.
A puzzle.
As is the Vulcan officer who attends him. When Khan first saw Spock on the surface he directed his question to him, certain that he would not lie.
"How many torpedoes?"
After a beat—waiting for his captain, perhaps?—the Vulcan had said the unbelievable.
"Seventy-two."
What game was Marcus playing?
When Khan rigged the transwarp pad for a series of hops across the quadrant before arriving at Qo'noS, he had been certain Marcus would follow, provoking exactly the war he claimed he wanted.
The Vengeance would do considerable damage. Might even decimate the Klingon fleet.
But the victory would be hollow. No warrior people would let a first strike go unanswered, even if the answer was slow in coming. Eventually the Klingons would attack Earth—and whether or not Khan was there to capitalize on it, he no longer cared. Without his corps, he would be hard pressed to rule.
Now he stands under the running water of the brig's not-so-private shower, sorting through the rapid change in what he knows. Why was the Enterprise sent here, and how does that serve Marcus' plan?
There's only one answer, of course, and turning off the shower and dressing himself in the Starfleet issue laid out for him, he looks around at the transparent aluminum wall, the reinforced titanium, the bank of cameras. Breaking out would not be impossible but it might not be the most efficient way to catch the captain's attention, to convince him that he is a clueless pawn.
Walls can be broached, but breaking down human resistance is far more satisfying.
Now to wait until the captain comes to him. As he will. As he certainly will.
A/N: Thanks for reading! And your reviews keep me going!