Carol awoke on the floor, tangled in sheets, the force of the impact resounding in her bones. Her right shoulder ached, but she doubted she had anything broken. She staggered to her feet and shed the bed clothes wrapped around her body. The ship was still tilting but not perilously so. She ran a hand through her hair and sprinted towards the bridge, still barefoot and in her night-gown. The vessel shifted again, threatening her balance once she arrived there, but other than that she succeeded in making her way to the copilot's seat without any incidents.

"What happened?" she asked Khan who was pouring over the settings of the command console.

"Plasma storm," he replied in a clipped tone.

She tapped at her own console to discover they had narrowly avoided the eye of it, but not before being thrown off course. Again. She assisted him in the maneuvers to wrench their fragile ship away from danger and place themselves in the orbit of a nearby moon with as little hurdling as possible. Only when they were safe she allowed herself to sigh. They would have to redo the calculations of their route and hope they hadn't somehow ended deeper into the Badlands. Either way, their uncertain journey to the Cardassian border had just become longer.

"You can go back to your rest." His deep baritone startled her out of her bleak musings. "You have only been slept for two hours."

She rubbed at her eyes, but she wasn't tired anymore, still riding the adrenaline high. They had been on their way for five days now and they managed not to interact more than strictly necessary to keep their vehicle in space and moving. He had wordlessly made the medbay his own, leaving the actual living quarters to her. Since it had the only replicator on board, he actually made the effort of asking for access each time in a tone placed on that knife-edge between condescension and real request. So far they had avoided another crisis. But the balance was delicate, the air rife between them with tension.

"We'll have to wait out the worst of the storm," she concluded after a cursory look over the sensor reading. Another delay. If they were lucky, it would only be a matter of hours. If they weren't, it could be days.

"I know," he said flatly. He only then turned his head to glance at her, his expression as serene and contained as ever. As if they had not just survived another close call. "The inertial dampers didn't respond properly, when I pulled the ship away from the storm. Did you hurt yourself?" he asked, his eyes darkening slightly. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the light.

"No," she answered.

Her shoulder would bruise, but it was nothing a dermal regenerator could not fix. A second later she realized she was still wearing her tiny slip of a nightie with a very low cut. Normally she wouldn't have thought twice of it. She was, after all, still a Starfleet officer trained to solve the problems first and worry about one's state of undress later. Besides, she had been living within collective arrangements since she had left for boarding school at the age of eleven, during which times her main concern had been not offending the modesty of alien species. But now her lack of clothes made her feel somehow even more vulnerable, which was something she sought to avoid in front of him at all costs. As he seemed satisfied with her reply and had turned his eyes to the console, she stood intent on going to change.

"Where are they?" he asked, voice even deeper than usual, a hit of something like beseeching coloring it. His eyes were still trained on the view screen, which displayed the might of a plasma storm at its peak, golden torrents of swirling particles coalescing against the darkness of space. The phenomenon resembled him, as both they were fearsome, enigmatic and implacable. And she was caught between them.

She knew of whom he was inquiring. He was probably trying to manipulate her, now that he had become aware that she would not respond to threats. "I will tell you, once we've got the ship repaired. If I do it now, what guarantees do I have that you won't kill me immediately after?"

He turned to her and got to his feet as well. "I may be able to hear the beat of your heart in close proximity, but it's still not enough of an indication of whether you're telling me the truth or not. I won't know for certain, until I find them. So you see I depend on what you know, just as much as you depend on me to survive these Badlands."

It was like playing chess with a viper, never knowing when the snake would reach over and bite. "You don't have the best track-record with cooperating with people who depend on you."

He winced, briefly squeezing his eyes shut. "Kirk shot first... literally."

"Oh, someone double-crossed you, before you could do it to them. I imagine that must sting."

He scowled, a shadow passing over his face. For some reason her blow had landed. The hair on the back of her neck stood on an end, as every one of her instincts warned her not to provoke him further.

"My crew was on the Enterprise, in the hands of members of the organization that had already killed eleven of them," he bit out, his voice raising a little. "Do you think I would have taken any action that might have endangered them? I factored taking over the Vengeance as a possibility, but if it had freed my family, I would have given your captain his pound of flesh."

She scoffed. "You expect me to believe that?"

"Why not? You believe that your precious Federation is a paradise of equal rights and justice, yet it only takes one hint of a threat for you to shed your civilized veneer. Your forefathers even wrote a legal alibi into your revered Charter. So I should rather think you'd believe anything."

"You're the one to talk?"

His mouth quirked in a sneer. "Yes, Lieutenant Marcus, I am exactly the one to talk." He took step closer, his next words coming out laden with venom. "Your shadow of heaven comes with a price and you need the lie to preserve the illusion. Just like you need the fantasy that the Eugenic Wars and everything that preceded them were exclusively our doing, because superior ability breeds superior ambition. Do you know who said that?"

"Rudolph Heisen, the creator of the first human augmentation project," she answered automatically.

"Human augmentation? They didn't want superhumans, they wanted slaves, soldiers they could send to death without a second thought. And then one day we bit the master's hand."

Carol looked away, unable to stand his heated gaze any longer. A lump formed in her throat, restraining her breathing. She wanted to cry, to scream and to demand explanations. She knew what he meant: nothing had changed. Not truly. Three hundred years, space fairing and technological wonders and they were right where they had always been. Khan had been made in a lab as a slave and her father and through him Starfleet had treated him like one.

"What were their names?" The words scorched her throat, but she forced herself to continue. "Your people, those my father killed... what were their names?"

She slowly turned to look at him again. He was staring at her wide-eyed and crestfallen. His skin was paper-white, the lines on his forehead and around his eyes suddenly very prominent. Three centuries. He was three centuries old and all of the sudden and absurdly so, he seemed to look it.

"Why?" One word, uttered with a depth of pain and anger that for all that she had seen of him, it still shocked her. The sentiment in his voice appeared almost weaponed, each letter delivering the force of a phaser blast.

Worse over, she had no answer for him. Not one that would not add to his grief. She wanted the names, because she needed to assign them sentient beings status in her mind. She didn't want them to remain a footnote nobody would ever register. A bloody, senseless act that never

"Get out," he rasped. "Go!"

She shook her head. She knew they were right on the edge of another disaster but could not make herself pull back. "Then at least tell me why he did it?" she asked and watched a muscle jump in his jaw, fury supplanting the anguish written so plainly on his face. "Please," she insisted.

He tilted his head to the side, apparently considering her plea. "You assume I did something to provoke him."

She shook her head no. "I just want to know why."

His face skewing into a deep, pained frown, his fingers forming fists at his sides. "I refused to cooperate. I told him I didn't care about any Federation and new wars. I demanded my family and for us to be left to go. When he didn't yield, I begged and that was when he understood my weakness." A lone tear slid from his left eye and ran down his cheek.

"I'm sorry," she said, the words rolling off her tongue with surprising ease. If anything, they made breathing less of a chose. "Please, forgive us."

Bewilderment filtered into his expression. His mouth fell open, but he didn't speak. He just stared, the intensity in his multicolored eyes unnerving.

"There is a forbidden planet in the Talos star group," she said at last. "The forth one in the Talosian solar system. I don't know the reason. The file is for Command eyes only. But the third planet is only restricted and it's occupied by a research base established by Starfleet but run by an independent source. It would make the perfect place to keep your people. Now you know. Do what you will."

Mixed feelings swirled on his face, before relief emerged triumphant. "Thank you, Carol."

# # #

Khan did not kill her. In fact, he let her leave the bridge without a word. Once in her quarters she realized her hands were trembling. Her stomach was in knots. Though she did not use to medicate herself in such manner, she began to dig through the place in search of some strong alcohol. She did feel a bit guilty about it, going through Doctor Phlox's things like this, after nearly getting his ship destroyed. But she desperately needed a drink. She also longed for a hot shower, but the vessel only had sonic ones.

She had better luck on the alcohol front, when she found a box that might as well have doubled as a mini-bar, as it was filled with bottles of Risan wine, Finnish vodka from Earth, Saurian brandy, Andorian ale and Draylaxian whiskey. She dressed and camped on the floor with the latter and a tumbler. The beverage was stronger than any of its Terran equivalent, its taste rich and smoky as it burnt down her throat. She relished it and refused to ponder the wisdom of getting drunk under the circumstances. For once she didn't want to think, fear and make hard moral choice. All she wanted was to forget.

She was finishing her second glass, when her door chimed. "Enter," she called out, aware that her reprieve was over.

Khan paused in the door, his eyes sweeping over the room before stopping on the drink in her hand.

"Would like some?" she asked brandishing her newly emptied glass.

He shook his head as he came in. "It would be wasted. My metabolism absorbs alcohol, before it can begin to affect me."

She poured herself some more. "You can't get drunk? Your makers were right bastards."

Her attempt at humor fell flat. She cringed at it herself. It served as a reminder that she should not be drinking on an empty stomach and especially given her being unaccustomed to dawning glass after glass of strong spirits. But she didn't stop herself. Instead, she swallowed another gulp.

Khan moved inside and sat himself on the floor across from her. His gaze was on her, pensive and aloof, reminding her of him sitting on a biobed in the Enterprise's infirmary, analyzing them just as Doctor McCoy had studied his blood, as he had attempted to unlock its secrets. Had he known back then who her father was or had he figured it out, when Kirk had called her the admiral's daughter on the Vengeance?

"Do you still wish to learn about my people?"

She nodded and donned the last of her drink, setting the empty glass down.

TBC