He was awake. He knew that much. He could not move, though, captive in his own body. He could not even open his eyes, the darkness a constant companion. Darkness and pain. His whole body felt like a raw, pulsing nerve, splintered open, prodded and probed. The silences surrounding him was broken every now and then by hushed whispered of medical talk in English. The voices were discussing him. Experiments were being conducted on him. It should be familiar, but he couldn't be sure. Being a test subject hit too close to home.
He had no idea where he was or even when. Time twisted hazily somewhere beneath his reach. For a while he had believed himself to be still a child, still in the lab that had created him, a piece of property to be refined into the perfect soldier or the perfect carrier for a deadly biological weapon, depending on the proficiency of his immune system. There was something in his blood. Something he could not recall. Enhanced regenerating abilities that were no accident but had been built in slowly, tortuously, by infusion of lethal diseases to which his organism had steadily developed antibodies.
His family had been similarly modified. He remembered that. The shock of an explosion rocking a giant ship permeated his consciousness a while later. His family was gone, burnt to death in their sleep, the notion that at least they had not suffered too small of a consolation. He screamed but his mouth wouldn't open. No sound came out. Locked within himself he yelled his grief with no one to hear.
# # #
Carol had been taught a general course of Earth's history in school, but beyond that, she had never been interested in learning more. Though she had not followed in her mother's footsteps as a molecular biologist, she had shared her love of exact sciences and disinterest in humanities. Hence, she was amazed at the lack of substantial data on the age of the augments. Few documents had survived the devastation of the Eugenic Wars and the subsequent fury of the human victors. Historians still struggled to make sense of remaining sources and sort through waters made even murkier by the enduring stigma against genetic engineering.
What she unearthed on the man who had killed her father, however, did not support Spock's claim of him being a homicidal maniac. The augment was a fairly well-known subject matter in certain academical circles but virtually unknown to the general public keen on forgetting that bloody era of mankind's past. Carol herself struggled with her understanding of it. It was difficult to imagine a human race restricted to the surface of its own planet and ravaged by wars, hunger, inequity and horrible diseases against which a primitive medicine was mostly useless. It didn't surprise her that the scientists of the time had grown so desperate they had resorted to altering the genetic foundation of humanity in hopes of improving their world.
She spent almost all her free time immersed in her research project, devouring book after book, starved for any additional insight. But at the end of the day, the truth was that they lacked sufficient information on the period. In fact, she thought she began to understand why her father had underestimated the augment to such an extent. History all but remembered him fondly: his empire had been the largest and albeit short-lived, the most peaceful. He had acquired it through brutal means, but once in power he had not committed any atrocities or ordered ethnic cleansing like others of his kind. In fact, despite abolishing most civil liberties and seeming set on imposing his own brand of order on his state, he had taken several, most efficient economic measures, supported culture and sought to minimize poverty and social discrepancies. He had had only a mild personality cult and even that had been mostly instigated by people who had tried to suck up to him. As far as historians could tell, he had attempt to instate some sort of authoritarian noocracy with him and his people at the top.
He had not started any wars himself and even sought to avoid them by using shrewd and calculated diplomacy. But it had been a turbulent time and the other augments began fighting with each other, while the humans rebelled, and ultimately he had been attacked as well. The accusations of war crimes and genocide had started with the show trial following his ultimate defeat, but by then he had already disappeared. Experts believed the flight of the Botany Bay to be a myth, a romantic rumor in the vein of the Arthurian legend that his scattered human supporters had spread. Apparently, he had been missed: not all of his monuments had been destroyed and they had been regularly covered in flowers, until the Third World War obliterated all trace of his reign and the dust had finally settled on his epoch.
The thought of him as some sort of once and future king was cringe-worthy, but seemingly he retained his share of passionate defenders. Carol came across a PhD thesis of a young Harvard researcher named Marla McGivers, who had authored a controversial biography, in which he described him as an enlightened leader, tactical genius and open-minded man, who had not necessarily despised humanity or otherwise he would not have gone to great lengths to protect its cultural treasures. Carol wondered how the historian had reached such a conclusion from the scant data available so she sent McGivers a private message inquiring for details.
To Carol's dismay, McGivers replied with a peeved communique stating that she had been contacted with similar questions by the esteemed Dr. Phlox of all Denobulans two years ago and that the alien had claimed he had needed the information for an interspecies conference on the history of genetic manipulation. Since the conference had never come to pass, the historian was understandably annoyed and less than interested in helping out a Starfleet officer. Alarms went off in Carol's head. McGivers had no reason to lie and unlike the leaders of the Eugenic Wars, Phlox and his fellow crew-mates aboard the Enterprise NX-01 were household names and mandatory reading at the Academy.
Back when Carol had been a science officer with Starfleet HQ and had had unlimited access to her father's special projects, Dr. Phlox, enjoying the long lifespan of a Denobulan, had been chief of staff at a top-secret facility designated Cold Station 12. Beyond that, she had never met Phlox herself, nor had she received more detailed intelligence on the mysterious space station. This latest tidbit, however, did propel to the forefront of her mind a lot of questions she had previously feared looking into. The suspicion that a cover-up had followed the crash of the Vengeance into San Francisco Bay solidified into a certainty Carol was wary of accepting, because if she did, it meant that the cancer of corruption persisted at the heart of Starfleet and that a tragedy that had killed thousands could be repeated at any given time.
She knew she should go to her commanding officers with her doubts, but her investigation into the potential wrongdoing of one Starfleet admiral had brought disaster onto the Enterprise once; she could not do this to these people again. Besides, it wasn't this ship's job to right everything that was wrong within Starfleet. They had JAG and internal inquiries committees for that. It was bad enough that her colleagues on the Enterprise had to live with her as a daily reminder of their captain humiliating himself and begging for all their lives only to be callously dismissed so that the Vengeance could train phaserbanks on them once more. Not all her nightmares were of her father's death; some of them included the Enterprise blowing up into tiny flaming pieces, the sins of her father washed into even more blood.
But was the entire conspiracy surrounding Khan's awakening and the building of the Vengeance solely her father's sin or had there been something larger at play? Something worse perhaps? Her conscience gnawed at her during restless nights, reminder her that it had been her failure to act that had let her father get away with illegal deeds done in the name of Starfleet for over a year. Back then she had not noted any change in his behavior, until it had been too late. Fatally so. But now she knew something was up. She had to act, but whatever she did, she could not drag anyone else in the consequences of it.
Besides, her heart ached at the thought of delivering a fresh blow to Jim Kirk's restored faith in Starfleet, his hopeful words at the dedication of the San Francisco memorial ringing in her ears each time she considered her options. Kirk was much more idealistic than he seemed and selfless to a fault. He had proved it tenfold through his willingness to die for his crew. Carol would not soon forget glimpsing his still body in sickbay or McCoy's crestfallen look. There were other images haunting her as well: Jim comforting her after they had been beamed back to the Enterprise from the Vengeance, then supporting her to medbay and Nyota's concern upon seeing her injured. These were good people, loyal colleagues and future friends. They deserved to make history with their five-year mission; they did not deserve to fall victim to more friendly fire.
In the aftermath of a distress call from Deep Space Station K-7, the decision was ripped from her hands.
# # #
Laughter was an unusual sound in his residence during the last days of his reign, just like joy was a rare sight. The war was all but lost, an full-scale assault on his capital imminent, but when Joaquin and Ling had come to him and told him they wanted to wait for a better time to get married, he had counseled them otherwise. They might not win this fight, but he already had an escape plan in place. They would leave and go somewhere where no enemy would reach them, somewhere where they could start anew, just themselves, finally safe.
The memory dimmed and faded into the darkened pits of his consciousness. They were gone. Joaquin and Ling would never laugh again. He would never get to tell them that their exile was over and that their better future had arrived, because he had failed them, his promises now reduced to ashes. He had let his family die.
TBC