A/N: reviews keep the muse happy! :)
# # #
Cartwright leaned back in his chair staring at her in disbelief. "I beg you pardon?"
Carol slammed her hands down on his desk, meeting his gaze head on. "I think we both know, Commodore, why you're trying to recruit me. It isn't because of my parentage or my weapons expertise. You want eyes and ears on the Enterprise to make sure no one on the command team asks any questions you don't want to. So if you want me to spy on people who trust me for Section 31, here's my price: I want to look that son of a bitch in the eye and tell him he'll spend the rest of his sorry life trapped inside his body, while we bleed him dry of the last usable antibody in it."
The pain in her leg had dulled to a decreasing ache, and her high-running adrenaline counterbalanced that nicely. Ashamed as she was of it herself, she had to admit that her visible pleasure at Khan's suffering actually worked to her advantage, giving her a better chance of convincing Cartwright that she was being truthful.
The commodore studied her in silence, his eyes boring into her skull. Carol did not budge, biding her time until he inclined his head in acknowledgement. "One minute. Not a second longer."
"It'll do," she said coolly.
# # #
Carol kept her eyes on Khan's medical readings, watching as his vital signs slowly accelerated. On the other side of the biobed, the doctor nodded in her general direction. She forced herself to shift her gaze from the holographic monitor to the augment. She was alone with the medic in the cell, but Cartwright waited with the armed guards on the other side of the forcefield.
Khan's purplish eyelids trembled briefly, before they peeled off his orbs, which were clouded and unfocused. A muscle in her jaw ticked nervously. At least, her leg no longer hurt. She leaned closer to him, silencing the inner voice warning her that this was closer to treason than falsifying transfer orders on a name other than hers to sneak aboard the Enterprise to investigate the head of Starfleet.
"We don't have long so whatever you're already planning, don't," she snapped and before she could change her mind, she grabbed a tranquilizer hypo from the nearby tray and shoved it into the doctor's neck. With her free hand, she retrieved a single-use transporter from a concealed pocket of the Andorian jumpsuit she was wearing and slammed it onto Khan's chest. His eyes widened, an unnamed emotion swirling into the iridescent depths, and his mouth fell open, as he sucked in deep breath.
Cartwright yelled at her from the other side of the forcefield and she knew she had only seconds, before the guards lifted the forcefield and burst in. Fortunately, their own paranoia regarding Khan, justified as it was, worked in her favor. She had noted before that field could not be deactivated through voice command like on ship brigs, but through an extensive and presumably personalized security code, which gave her precious time to disable Khan's restraints. Normal biobeds had no such features, but while she had been working with her father at Starfleet HQ, a special prototype for extreme cases had been in the development and she had seen its specs.
As soon as the cuffs fell off the augment, she grabbed the doctor's communicator and hailed the frequency of her borrowed Denobulan ship's computer. "Two to beam up," she ordered the alien mainframe. The last thing she glimpsed before her surroundings changed was the forcefield dropping and the guards aiming phasers. But by then it was too late.
"Computer, retract all moors," she ordered, once on her ship. "Navigational systems online. Full power to warp engines."
She heard a body hit hard the floor behind her, as she pounced on the command console and set a course deeper into Federation territory at maximum speed. There was no doubt in her mind that Khan could not stand on his own with a potent cocktail of tranquilizers still running through his veins and weakened by the tests performed on him, but she couldn't be bothered with him until they weren't within a safe distance. She had observed an unmarked Antares-type ship and small freighter attached to the station, when she had come in, and though her own was light enough and enjoying the best of current Denobulan technology, the Antares vessel could still outrun it.
Charging into the thick of Federation star traffic had been a calculated risk. Given the fact that Section 31 was keen on keeping its secret, they could not enlist any other ships they might control in their pursuit, nor would they find it easy to invent a pretext to trick anyone else into firing upon an innocuous Denobulan vessel. Not if they wanted to keep their low profile intact, anyway. Still the Antares gained up on her enough to give her shields a run for their money, before she could shake them off among routes well-traveled and carrying an elevated risk of exposure. To her luck, her cargo was too valuable for Cartwright's operatives to blow her up. They also tried hailing her, no doubt to entice her to give up, but she ignored them.
Her destination was a dangerous one, but she needed someplace isolated where she could regroup and decide what to do next. She had followed an impulse rooted in the timid voice of her conscience she refused to let her resentment towards Khan drawn, but her next steps would have to be precisely calculated. As of now, her main concern was making it where Section 31 would not come after her and she focused on the task at hand, doing her best not to think of the man on the floor right behind her chair. Khan could attack her the second he succeeded in standing on his two feet, but those were the drawbacks when one locked herself in a cage with a tiger.
# # #
A month ago the Enterprise had been entangled in a cat-and-mouse game with a Romulan bird-of-prey that had dragged the Federation starship into a region of space of space along the border with the distant Cardassian Union. The crisis had not allowed them to properly map the area, but from what they had seen, it would not make for a place auspicious for interstellar traffic because of the violent plasma storms and many anomalies. Doctor McCoy had insisted they dub it the Badlands after their namesake in South Dakota. Going there was about as prudent as entering quick sand, but she could be certain it was somewhere nobody would dare or wish to follow her.
Once she was confident she had lost her track amid the meanderings of Federation-space traffic, she squared her shoulders against the prospect of interacting with Khan and transferred navigational control to the ship's trusty autopilot. She had her Starfleet-issued phaser on board, but she would have to get to the living quarters to retrieve it. She stood and rapidly whirled around her command chair only to find the augment still on the floor, curled in a near fetal position, eyes closed, face screwed into a pained grimace. Not wasting any time, she stepped past him and out into the corridor.
The Denobulan ship faithfully reflect the personality of its flamboyant owner: a narrow bridge of sorts with two consoles, solid shields yet minimal weaponry, a most generous database and a replicator superior to the ones on most Starfleet vessels, its programming including dishes from all over the Federation, which was fortunate since the cuisine of Phlox's people did not quite agree with human digestive systems. There was also a lavish bedroom decorated with exotic, brightly-colored plants and a fully-stocked medbay with more equipment on hand that she knew what to do with.
Armed with both her weapon and a tricoder she had snatched from the infirmary, she returned to the bridge only to discover that Khan did not seem to have moved. He was dressed only in a pair of loose drawstring pants and though the temperature on the ship was dialed to optimum comfort level for humans, he appeared to be shivering slightly. His ribs poked at the skin of his torso, as he had obviously been fed intravenously just enough for him to survive. Section 31 would not have wished him in top form, should he slipped out of his coma one day. Horror wared with pity inside her. No Federation institution, no matter how clandestine, should allow itself to sink this low in the treatment of someone, who was basically imprisoned without a trial.
She cautiously padded closer to him. "Khan," she called out, the name burning as it fell off her lips.
He twitched but gave no reply. Left without any other alternative, she crouched by his prone body and used the tricorder to run a basic scan, keeping her phaser aimed at him at him in her other hand. Though she had first aid training, she still was no medic, nor had she any idea what calibration to use for him. Either way, the results indicated vital signs that would have been too low for a mere human. He had been given powerful muscle paralytics aside from the sedatives and the neuro-inhibitors, but as far as she could tell, nothing that would cause permanent damage. Again, at least, not in a human. His chances were likely even better.
She contemplated how to go about locking him in the infirmary when he regained full control of his body. She would have to get him on a levitating stretcher and keep him on less toxic cocktail of drugs, while she came up with a long-term plan. Giving him any kind of freedom was tantamount to suicide. He cracked an eye open startling her out of her strategizing. "What do you want?" he asked tiredly.
"I'm going to move you to the medbay," she said, deliberately ignoring his query. "There I'll put you on another paralytic, but unless you give me reason to, I won't knock you out again."
When he didn't reply, she got to her feet and almost left the bridge again, when his voice interrupted her. "Whatever it is, I won't do it." He had shut his eyes again, his expression completely blank.
"You won't do what? Give me reason to knock you unconscious? Given the precedent, you'll excuse me if I don't believe you."
"So this is about revenge then. You kidnapped me so you could take your time torturing me to death without any disturbances."
The accusation stung, though he had certainly not voiced it like one. Instead, he had sounded strangely accepting and resigned. If she hadn't known better, she would say defeated. Still his words had made a dent, not because they were insulting, but because the reminded her of her glee at the thought of him in pain and she would have lied, if she had claimed she wasn't still tempted to make him suffer for what he had done to her.
"Would you stop?" she snapped, some of her anger self-directed. "I'm not going to torture you, for crying out loud."
"You don't sound very certain of that," he remarked in the same low monotone of before. He wasn't even looking at her, his gaze wandering aimlessly somewhere to her right.
A dark suspicion entered her mind, as she questioned just what Section 31 had put him through to make the collected and imperious augment so passive and listless. "The tricorder didn't pick up any signs of physical distress past the effects of the medication you've been pumped full of, but maybe that's because I don't know how to set it to properly read your metabolism so I'll just ask: are you in any kind of pain? Because if you are, I can try to find you something for it."
No reply was forthcoming so she made a dash to medbay returning with a stretcher and a thermal blanket. Covering him while still holding on to her weapon was not easy, but she managed. Rolling him onto the gurney posed a whole other set of logistical problems, however. She was about to tackle the task, when he spoke again.
"A bad cop, good cop scenario then," he offered in the same dully, inflectionless voice. "Whatever you're hoping to obtain, it's pointless. Unlike your father, you have nothing to hold over me anymore."
She looked him over again with an emotion verging on concern. He was still as a statue, not even trembling anymore under the blanket warming him up. The empty stare, though, was the most unnerving. She wondered if he had finally snapped. It wasn't like he had a lot of sanity to lose to begin with. She looked around despondently, for the first time in her life having absolutely no clue as to what to do next. She was trapped aboard a tiny craft with a completely insane genocidal tyrant. She had never felt more alone and had to both literally and metaphorically dig her feels in to keep from contacting the Enterprise, but she had gotten herself into this and she refused to drag down with her more people Khan had already victimized. She was well aware that the best she could hope for in the aftermath of this was her court-martial. The worst would have her killed.
Suddenly fatigued she sat cross-legged on the floor next to Khan, who still wasn't moving or looking at her. Her right hand still clutched her phaser. Just in case.
TBC