Disclaimer: I own nothing Star Trek-related…though I might consider the idea of beaming Kirk, Spock, Khan, and the actors who play them to my house, once I manage to construct my own transporter. Until then, nothing is mine except original characters.

AN: I am so sorry about not posting earlier; we had a power outage, which sadly meant no computer access. (image of sad face here) But, here I am today, with a fresh new chapter! Please enjoy, and don't forget to review!

Chapter 5: Subtle Hostilities:

The crew knew about the baby –Khan had told me as much, and he'd said that they had accepted it. Still, it was nerve-wracking, walking down the hallway with most of them looking at me as though I were the plague.

On the flipside of the coin, others seemed to think I was carrying the future of their people inside me. In a way, that was true, but that seemed to be all of the acknowledgement I was going to get from Khan's followers: either complete disgust and hatred, or a semblance of deference and respect as I passed by. Some appeared to be caught between the two parties, as though they couldn't decide how to treat me, so they simply got out of my way and kept their hostilities hidden.

Those walks down the corridors of the ship were now the longest minutes of my life. Even the time I spent in my quarters was preferable to wondering whether or not someone was going to pull out a phaser and shoot me right then and there.

Unfortunately, my lessons with Khan were now deemed a necessity. With the crew uneasy about me, I had to be able to defend myself from anything that might come my way. I didn't think that I'd ever be a great fighter, but hopefully I'd have enough skills to keep myself alive in a tough situation.

However, as the days passed, slowly turning into weeks and months, the Doctor decided that fighting lessons weren't going to stay an option for me. "You'll need exercise for sure, but that kind of activity won't be good for you, or the baby."

Khan, of course, disagreed. Rather than cancel my lessons completely, he selected fight methods that I could do, even with my growing stomach. I knew it was mostly to keep the baby safe, but I really wanted to believe there was the chance that he wanted me to stay safe, too. Talk about wishful thinking on my part.

The other downside of my pregnancy: as my stomach grew, so did my visits to sickbay, the center of my misery –aside from Khan, that is.

Sitting there getting physical examinations twice a week was excessive, in my opinion, but no one wanted to take the chance that something bad might happen to the baby. So, every few days, I was led to sickbay by Khan himself, who insisted on hearing every little detail of my exams from the Doctor as it was being given to me.

I'd have thought that with my new abilities, I wouldn't have to worry so much about things going wrong. Now that I had a heightened healing factor, plus an increase in strength and near perfect health, I didn't see the need to have the Doctor hovering over me more than a few times a month. The fact that he wanted to see me twice a week had to mean that they were worried about how things would turn out, or fearful of my possibly causing myself to 'lose' the baby.

As it was, I'd been tempted to punch the Doctor or his nurse in the face during each exam –but with Khan standing there, an impassive and stern look in his face as he looked at me, I knew it would be a bad idea. Pregnant I may be, but Khan wouldn't think it funny if I hurt one of his most loyal crewmembers, and I feared what he might do in retaliation.

Looking out of the corner of my eye, I kept my ears open and the rest of my senses on high alert as Doctor Richards gave a report on his most recent findings. "The child appears to be in perfect health, sir," he said, handing a data pad to his leader. "At this point, we're able to identify the gender. Would you like to know the sex of the child?"

Khan's eyes lit up in a way I'd never expected to see. "Tell me!" he demanded, eyes eager.

The Doctor smiled. "It's a boy."

I swore I heard an intake of breath, as though he couldn't believe what the Doctor had said. I watched in amazement as, for a brief second, Khan looked like any other expected father: excitement, hope, joy, and wonder all flashed across his normally impassive face.

Then I blinked, and it was gone, replaced by the serious, level-headed leader that he always was.

"Excellent," he coolly commented. "Ria, I will take you back to your room."

Hoping off the bed, I followed him to my quarters, my head spinning with the news.

As it turned out, even having a boy made no difference when it came to soothing the ruffled feathers of Khan's people. The crew seemed to resent me more, actually, if the angry glares that followed me everywhere were any indication of their feelings.

I didn't understand why the guys hated me, but I guessed that the women didn't like Khan choosing me to be the mother of his "heir." I kind of saw where they were coming from, but to me, it was still rather silly (and a bit scary).

Still, their hostility didn't stop me from trying to figure out two things: how to protect myself and my boy, and what in the universe I was going to name him. Obviously there was no way I was going to let Khan have total control of my son, and one surefire way of getting the upper hand was choosing a name for the baby. Names, after all, had power behind them, and that was one bit of power I fully intended to deprive Khan of.

Since I had several months to decide on a name, I decided to try and focus on something else –namely taking advantage of being Khan's new favorite.

As soon as he found out the baby was a boy, Khan decided to make things a little more comfortable for me. I was given a larger set of quarters, with the rules placed on my new replicator very much relaxed. I was allowed to have whatever I wanted to eat, no matter how strange, and my data pad was loaded with much more interesting and informative things for me to read and go through.

That was how I was able to link up with the information center of the ship.

I'd learned in the Academy that each ship had a huge amount of data stored in its systems –as long as the information was public knowledge, it was in the ship's system, and accessible anytime, anywhere. Thanks to Starfleet protocol, and to my being part of Starfleet, I could get access to a few things that the members of Khan's crew couldn't.

Using the pass code that I had been assigned aboard the Enterprise, I used a few computer tips that had been taught to me at the Academy, and by Uhura. Those little side lessons allowed me to slip quietly by the modern version of firewalls, my mind focused on finding a layout of the interior of the ship.

While I had the map up, I studied it intensely and used my pen and journal (both of which I'd managed to slip past my guards) to sketch them out. It took hours, but then, I had the time –I tended to wake early, so I had plenty of time to draw before my appointment with the good Doctor. My afternoons weren't my own, but after my mandatory dinner with Khan, I had some private time before bed to continue my efforts.

And since I knew that they were probably keeping tabs on who accessed what information on the ship, I closed out of the file and erased much of my trail whenever possible.

As my pregnancy progressed, Khan decided to cut back on my lessons with him, so I had more time to myself before dinner –and as of this particular day, I had managed to get a majority of the drawings done, but there were a few more details that had to be worked on.

So far, I was starting to get a grasp as to the layout of the ship, and several plans of escape were forming in my head. Any attempt I made at getting out of here was bound to be nearly impossible, but I very much hoped that, with a great deal of careful planning, it could happen.

Instinctively, I knew that no one dared harm me while I was pregnant. The crew feared and respected Khan far too much to go against him, and since I was part of his grand view of the future for his people, they knew that if anything happened to me, Khan wouldn't hesitate to kill them.

That wouldn't, however, prevent them from turning me in if they caught me -and I hated to think about the tortures that Khan might bestow upon me after I delivered the baby.

Not that I intended to be on Khan's vessel to deliver my son. Once I gave birth, I knew that I would lose any chance of being a major factor and presence in my baby's life, and there was no way I was going to let Khan be the primary influence on my son.

Taking a deep breath, I turned my attention back towards my drawings. Time was running out.

Miranda knew that Khan's latest acquisition had been snooping. She knew that the woman had accessed the ship's computer, and had chosen a specific file, one that was an obvious indication that she meant to escape.

According to protocol, she should have mentioned this immediately to her uncle, who would have taken it directly to the Commander. After that, it was out of Miranda's hands, until Khan decided whether to reward her, or punish her for causing trouble for his chosen mate.

But as things stood, Miranda didn't like having the Drake woman aboard –not only was she not one of them, she had been educated at that Academy that the current inhabitants of Earth thought so highly of. When had Earth decided to become a member of a soppy committee of planets? If they had stayed strong, they would most likely be a great power in this part of the galaxy, not a planet that answered to the leaders of other worlds when they did something that displeased the other planets.

Instead, Earth had capitulated and decided to go for peace, rather than power. The entire planet was one big happy place, where everyone had everything they could want -poverty was gone, which meant that the power structure had been nearly obliterated. So far as Miranda could tell, the only ones who had any real kind of authority were the ones in Starfleet, which was a mixture of defense, peacekeeping, exploration, and aid to the planets in the Federation.

She nearly gagged at the thought of how happy a place Earth was now. Give her a good fight any day! Oh, she had no doubt that Starfleet had their own mix-ups with hostile races, but those were held in the coldness of space. For her, the only good kind of fight was on a planet, where she could meet up with the enemy and put them down with her own mind and honed skills. That was how a battle was supposed to be!

Sniffing disdainfully, she isolated the incident and transferred it to her specific data pad, making her the sole person responsible for dealing with it. Now that it was in her hands, she had a choice to make: to report it, or not?

If she did, Khan might not be happy with her –and if there was one thing a person did not do, it was make him unhappy. This woman, Ria, meant a great deal to him and his plans for their future, and now that she was carrying his son, that would only make things worse for anyone who dared bring charges against her.

But if she didn't, and was found out for not telling, she'd be in trouble. Keeping things hidden from the Commander was never a good idea, unless you were willing and able to come up with a good explanation for why you did it –and even then, there was no guarantee that Khan would forgive you. She had seen people tortured and killed for being secretive.

Damn it, she hated being in a tough spot like this. She wanted the girl off this ship as much as anyone else did, if only because it was turning Khan soft. No one was stupid enough to suggest that they try and invade Earth, to try and reclaim what they'd lost, but nobody wanted to sink into weakness, either.

Unfortunately, this was an era of peace, with wars few and far-between. Logically, they needed to survive in this new universe that they'd woken up in, but old habits died hard, especially when they'd been encoded in your DNA. They had been created to fight, but now that they couldn't, they had to find another outlet for their energy; this happened to include accepting Khan's plans, which included this Adrianna Drake and the child she carried. And Miranda did want to survive.

So: to tell on the girl, or not?

It had taken a great deal of thought, but in the end, she decided that this might be a situation that required more than just her brain. In fact, if she played this just right, things might change for the better.

In the section designated for her group of engineers and those under her command, Miranda looked at the four people she trusted most.

Her second-in-command, Ferguson, sat to her left, glaring at the table before him. Tall, broad-shouldered, muscled, and bald, one would think he'd be better at security, or anything that required a heavy hand with a weapon. But appearances were deceiving; Ferguson was not only brawn, but his brains were first-rate. In a tense situation, Miranda could count on him to fire a weapon with one hand, while trying to stabilize the ship's core with the other.

Morris was to Ferguson's left, and the other man's opposite. He had a head of flaming red hair that stood out like a target in a fight, but he was thin enough to slip through a crowd unnoticed. Miranda had asked him to get rid of his wild locks, but he rather liked them, if only because there were four women who were chasing after him because of them. Sometimes, his sense of humor was the only things to lighten up her spirits when she badly needed it.

The dark-skinned beside Morris sat back in his chair, arms crossed as he turned his thoughts over in his head. Green was Miranda's 'thinker;' she knew she could count on him to silently consider all possibilities quickly, and give her any and all options she might find useful when asked.

Carlson was the nondescript one in the group, and the man she dubbed her 'spy.' His pale brown hair, light eyes, and commonplace facial features meant that he didn't stand out in a crowd –people quickly forgot about him and anything they'd said in his presence as soon as they looked away from him.

All four had listened to what she'd discovered, and each had their own idea on the matter.

"I say we kill her, then tell the Commander we did it because she was making a break for it," Ferguson growled. "That'll take care of the whole thing."

Morris snorted. "Do you want to be the one to tell Khan that you killed his unborn son? Because I wouldn't want to be on the same ship, much less the same room, when that happens."

Ferguson snarled and slammed his fist down on top of the table, creating a dent in the metal. "Damn it, I hate it when you're right. So what do we do? We can't do nothing."

Miranda looked over at Green. "What do you think? You have all the information; what do you suggest we do?"

Everyone turned to look at the silent man. Frowning slightly, Green leaned back in his chair. "You can't keep this quiet –or at least, not for long. Getting her into trouble will reflect badly on you. So rather than go against her, I think you should help her."

The others stared, wondering if he'd lost his mind. "Help her?" Morris asked, red hair falling into his face as he jerked in his seat. "Are you nuts? Do you know what Khan will do if we help the woman carrying his baby escape?"

Ferguson looked trapped between liking the idea, and agreeing with Morris. "Well, we could always help her in secret. She's the one unpredictable factor in all this –Khan knows how the rest of us think, but this girl is not only from a different time than us, she's got that Starfleet training under her belt. Who knows what they've taught her while she was there?"

Miranda had to agree. "If we can give her just enough help to get her off the ship, that should do it. We all know that most of the crew doesn't want her here, though the baby would be a good addition to the crew –without a planet to settle on, we haven't got the place or resources to settle and produce a new generation of fighters."

Carlson looked at her with his nondescript eyes. "I've heard some of the crew refuse to have a half-breed as Khan's heir, either. Rather than have that poor kid's death on our hands, we should get both her and the babe out of here, together. A clean break is what I suggest. That way, the kid isn't here to serve as a reminder about his mother, which might cause some friction all over again."

The others slowly nodded their agreement. "So, how do we break this to her?" Miranda asked.

That was the question, wasn't it?

When I heard movement in the wall panels, I knew something was going on. There had never been any kind of noise coming from them before, so when I heard it, I searched for a weapon. Of course, since my rooms were kept mostly bare, I came up empty.

Sliding into a defensive position, I got ready, in case the intruder came out fighting. My slightly bulging stomach was going to make me a tad clumsy, but I was going to try my damn hardest to defend myself, and my baby.

I watched as a panel in the wall carefully pushed into the room by a pair of obviously female hands, which gently and quietly put it on the floor. A head of brown hair popped out, and as the woman looked up at me, I stood glaring back at her.

"No, don't scream," she whispered, grey eyes meeting mine. "My name is Miranda, and I'm here to help you."

She must have seen the doubt and fear on my face, because she very slowly crawled out to kneel on both knees. "Please, you must listen," she quietly pleaded. "If you scream, it'll mean my death. You have to know that. I'm alone and unarmed, see? I just want to help you get away from here."

"Why would you want to do that?" I demanded, keeping my voice quiet. "I know that you don't want me aboard, so why not just kill me and get it over with?"

"Because killing you gets those who did it executed," Miranda replied. "The last thing we want is to be tortured before being killed dishonorably at Khan's hands."

"But why help me? That's what I want to know."

She sighed. "Because most of us don't want you here, that's why. You don't belong with our people –you're too much like this peaceful modern world, and that just doesn't sit right with us." She paused. "There is also the matter of your baby."

My hand strayed to my belly as Miranda nodded. "Some will accept your child as Khan's heir and our future leader. But in all likelihood, that baby will cause a civil war between those who will accept him, and those who refuse to let a half-breed be our future."

Miranda saw the anger on my face, because she held up her hands in surrender. "That baby will only be half of our kind –we need someone strong to lead us, and there's no telling how your boy will turn out once he's older. He might be like you, or he might be like his father, but none of us will want someone weak to take Khan's place when the time comes.

"That's why I'm here: to get you away now, while you're still pregnant, so that you can take the baby with you and not have to worry about giving birth to it here. It'll save a lot of problems later, and it'll make sure you and your baby survive."

She had a good point, but I still wasn't sure about this. "What if Khan tries to find me again? He doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who would give up easily."

My question seemed to gain me a bit of approval and respect. "That's true, but the only reason we were able to take you in the first place was because of the element of surprise. Now that the Enterprise –and, no doubt, Starfleet– know that we're out and about, they'll be on heightened alert and likely on the lookout for us. However much he might want you back, Khan wouldn't dare risk us in a fight he knew we couldn't win."

Though she made some good points, I still didn't trust this woman. It might be a trap, for all I knew, and the last thing I wanted was to give Khan a reason to restrain me even further.

"Here," she said, slowly reaching for her belt and removing a device smaller than the palm of my hand. "I'll give you three days to think about this. Use this to contact me when you've made your decision –it's untraceable, so no one will know we're talking."

I took the device, and watched her crawl back into the wall, taking the panel with her. Once I was sure she was gone, I put the device into the little cubby-hole I'd made in the couch, putting it alongside my journal and pen, my mind spinning with what had just happened.

As much as I wanted to believe Miranda (if that was her actual name), I didn't want to risk the chance of getting caught in some kind of trap. My chances of escape were likely one in a million, and I did not want to blow that by putting my fate in the hands of some of Khan's crew.

However, Miranda had helped me already, in a way –she had shown me the crawl space in the wall, and where the entry panel was. If I could find that on the drawings I had looked at, it would be a mark in her favor.

But that would have to wait until after I took a bit of a rest. After that, I'd see what I could think up.

AN: Review? Thanks!