Carol had an unhappy, pinched look about her. She took a few cautious steps in his direction, the sand crunching under her feet. Her whole body tension screamed tension. Instinctively he drew himself taller, every muscle in his body cording in anticipation of a fight.
"You were right," she began grimly. "I think I know where Section 31 might be keeping your people."
It was as though breath had been punched out of his body. His vision blurred and for a few moments he no longer had her before him but the coveted cryotubes. Relief and hope flared within him so strongly that it hurt. Her next words almost didn't register. Conditions... . She would tell him under certain conditions. Conditions... always conditions. Just like her father. Fury broke through joy, snuffing any consideration he might have spared her before. He had to physically restrain himself from grabbing for her.
"Your word," she went on. "Nobody else dies. I'll help you get them and then you go somewhere you won't run into Starfleet ever again." She was pleading, though her voice didn't waver, as she braved through, and her heart-beat spiked indicating anxiety. "It's a big galaxy and it's by no means lacking in empty, habitable planets." She paused to draw breath and it came out as a stuttered sigh. "If you're thinking about torturing the information out of me, you should know that no amount of pain will make me give it up."
He took one step closer, deliberately towering over her. She didn't back away.
"You believe yourself in the position to dictate terms?" he groused.
She glared at him defiantly. "I know I am," she said with a calm he was certain she did not feel, if her uneven heart-rhythm was anything to go by.
He decided to up the ante. "No, you are not. I can hear your heart-beat, Carol." His gaze slid to the pulse point in her throat before lifting to her face again. "And right now it's racing with fear."
His words did have the intended effect. She looked momentarily rattled before quickly recovering again, her facade shifting in place. "Good," she said in a low voice that had him instantly worried. "So you'll know that I'm telling the truth, when I say that I tampered with the warp core and if you want me to reset it so you could get off this planet, even limping on auxiliary power, you'd give me that measly assurance I asked for."
He did not think or hesitate before he tackled her, pushing her to the ground and trapping her small body under his weight. His fingers pressed into her temples without the force to dislodge the bones, but just enough to be a warning. She didn't try to resist, merely flinched, her face scrunching in pain. Her eyes clouded over and her breathing sped up so fast it very nearly reached the point of hyperventilation. Her heart-beat climbed to paroxystic levels. Her response sobered him. He had not meant to injure or kill merely remind her of what he could do. He needed her alive to tell him what she had done to the ship's engine.
Khan got off her and dragged her up with him, planting her on her feet with ease. She was blinking rapidly, visibly struggling to get herself under control. Her reaction made no sense. So far she had made a startlingly good job at masking her fear. It had to be something besides the proximity of death that had set her off. Then he realized: shock. He had inadvertently triggered a panic-laced memory of what had had happened aboard the Vengeance. He stepped back, opting to err on the side of caution. It would not do to either antagonize her completely or give her a heart-attack.
It did not take her long to look at him again and when she did, her face bore an expression of devastation, anger burning in her red-rimmed eyes. "Go ahead," she yelled, a hysterical edge making her voice shrill. "Do it. Kill me." She shoved at him chest. "Monster! Murderer!" Tears began to stream down her face but she ignored them. "What are you waiting for?" Her left hook caught him across his jaw.
He didn't retaliate. It wasn't as if she could do real damage and much like in Kirk's case on that fateful day on Kronos, he waited for her to get it out of her system so they could later talk rationally.
"You took him from me... . You killed thousands... . I should have left you there, to be Section 31's pin cushion."
She rubbed her tear-streaked cheeks with the back of her hands, looking hopelessly lost. Then she turned on a heel to leave but stumbled and almost keeled over. She seemed to be favoring her left leg, which she had definitely not done before. It was the same one he had once broken in his haste to get to her father. He recalled how vulnerable she had seemed in her sleep. She was even more so now, the suffering he had inflicted upon her in the past incurring her body's betrayal. The knowledge that he could easily snap her into two suddenly sat less than comfortably with him.
From a dark corner of his self, one the door to which he had thought forever sealed shut, pity reared its ugly head. It fluttered to life like a fragile, newly-emerged butterfly attempting to stretch its wings into flight. It was something he did not remember experiencing since the night he and his people had made their escape from his burning capital and he had looked back on the crumbling remains of his empire. It was true that she had never been an intended target; she had not wronged him. He had even less of a quibble with her than he did with Kirk, who had shot him in the back, after he had saved his life in the debris field between the Enterprise and the Vengeance.
He inched himself closer to her but wisely refrained for touching her again. "Come inside," he said in as neutral a tone as he could make it. "Prolonged exposure to this planet's atmosphere cannot be good for your lungs."
She said nothing but did hobble back to the ship. He kept a safe distance behind her. She went all the way to the engine room, where she slumped to a sitting position on the floor, back against the wall. She appeared more collected now, but what he could hear of her vitals told a different story. He moved to sit on the opposite side of the tiny, encased space, putting the warp core between them, its faint blue light throwing gleaming shades on the surrounding metal. The silence stretched heavy and cloying with only her uneasy breathing disturbing it.
"What?" she asked in a soft, toneless voice. "Nothing to say? No lofty words of crushing derision from the mighty Khan Noonien Singh?" She scoffed, when he didn't rise to the bait. "There never will be any justice for all the people you killed... for my Dad, because even if I could drag you back into Federation space to stand trial, neither Starfleet Command or Section 31 would ever allow you in open court, as you know too much. And if I get us stuck on this planet on a permanent basis so you can't hurt anyone anymore, I'd be condemning your crew to a slow, inhumane death." There was a rustle of clothing, as she shuffled around. "Maybe your makers had the right idea all along. Life without a conscience must be so much easier."
Her last phrase stung all the more, since she had not meant it as an insult. She was merely exhausted and at her wits end. The feeling of being trapped with no place to go was unpleasantly familiar.
"So you thought extracting a promise of good behavior was the answer?" he taunted, his anger directed at his own reaction to her statement rather than at her. "What makes you so certain I won't strike against Starfleet for what they did to me and my people?"
"Enough!" she snapped with more energy than he thought she could muster in her state. "You destroyed Section 31's London base, you killed countless Starfleet officers and the man directly responsible for what was done to you and you drove a massive ship into downtown San Francisco. Don't you think you've spilled enough blood? Then 31 put you through hell all over again. Where does it end?"
"Here." He stood and rounded the core to meet up with her again. "You have a deal." He stopped in front of her and extended his hand. "And my word."
She looked at him with mistrustful eyes but still put her hand into his, allowing him to pull her up before slipping her fingers free of his light grip. "I decoupled the warp field generator," she said inclining her head in the direction of the engine.
"I don't suppose you also know how to restore main power?"
She narrowed her eyes. "Destroying is much more easier than repairing, as I'm certain you're well aware."
He tilted his head to the side, scowling, as he fought down the urge to justify himself to her. But she was not waiting for an answer. She turned on a heel and strolled to a panel on the wall. "The space anomaly that hit us destabilized the computer's interface with the reactor. Even if I knew how to fix it, we don't have the necessary tools here," she explained while fiddling with the controls and wires on the panel. "Without main power, we have no shields, no weapons such as they were, restricted maneuvering capability and limited sensors range. If so much as an asteroid comes our way, we won't see it until it's too late."
He told her of his plan to get to the Cardassian border. She finished with the panel and the warp core flared brightly to life as a result. She pivoted back towards him. "That would actually be a good idea," she said wryly.
"But you don't know how to reach Cardassia from here?"
She arched an eye-brow at him. "I wasn't being metaphorical, when I said the Badlands are unchartered territory."
He pondered the problem for a second or two. "Starfleet and the Cardassian Union have so far done an excellent job at ignoring each other, but the Denobulans have had warp capability considerably longer than humans so they might have had much more extensive contact with your silent neighbor."
"So there may be coordinates of border colonies in this ship's database and we could calculate a route there based on them," she concluded, quickly catching onto his idea.
# # #
Carol leaned back in the copilot's chair on the bridge, reaching to rub unconsciously at her still smarting leg. Her mind was frantic, buzzing with triangulations of the location of a small, impoverished Cardassian colony in the Olmerak system. They had managed to pinpoint a more or less precise way to reach it, though, unable as they were to use the ship's warp drive to full capacity, the journey would take them an estimate of up to three weeks, while manually helming the vessel through the menacing unknown of the Badlands. It was much longer than her shore-leave and the Enterprise crew would undoubtedly discover that she had lied about her location and report her missing. It was of no import. She had already written off her career. Under the circumstances, she wasn't even sure that she could continue as a Starfleet officer.
That one was a concern best postponed for later, however. Right now she had worry about surviving a few weeks in the Badlands on minimal power while watching her back, given with whom she shared the crippled Denobulan ship. They depended on each other to survive, until they could get it repaired. But afterwards all bets were off. That was precisely why she had no intention of telling him where she thought his crew was, until she could wriggle her way to a more equal footing. So far he hadn't asked again, most likely concocting some scheme to wear her down in this unexpected time window he had.
"We will need to pilot the ships in shifts," he said with a slight frown while still studying his console. "I can be fully functional without sleep for seventy-two hours so you can take all the time you need to rest in between turns."
She shook her head. "I saw plenty of stimulants in the infirmary. Without proper sensors, we'll need two pair of eyes to make it through this trip."
He lifted his head to stare at her, the look of concentration on his face so intense, it was as though he aimed at reading her mind. He probably did. "Fine," he conceded. "But you'll stop for a break at the first sign of exhaustion." The man had a true talent for sounding both condescending and reasonable at the same time. With a hint of authority.
"No, I look forward to planting us in the middle of a plasma storm," she retorted and paused letting the moment slip. "Ready to go?" she asked gesturing to the controls. There was no point in delaying their departure. The terms of their uneasy armistice had been set and the ship was clearly not going to improve on its own.
Khan's customary mask of impeccable calm did not waver an inch. If he felt any apprehension or even a surreptitious nudge of a sense of self-preservation he had yet to demonstrate, he gave absolutely no indication of it. Even Kirk, who was famous as a dare-devil among Starfleet captains, had his moments of self-doubt, for which he compensated with his cock-sure attitude. Not Khan. The only time she had seen a dent in that steely confidence had been when he had believed his people dead. She briefly wondered if he was truly that unfazed by impossible odds or if his devotion to his family was indeed so fanatical. It had to be staggering and also a bit terrifying to have someone capable of going to such extreme lengths for you.
"Of course," he said firmly and initiated lift-off maneuvers.
TBC