-Chapter Ten-
When Anthea carried Nolan into the medbay, she had to suppress a momentary flashback to earlier. Catching Khan's eye, she saw him smirk briefly. Damn the man. How did he always know what she was thinking?
Kati trailed behind her. She'd been experimenting with dyes made from local plants, and had made herself a brightly-patterned sari, wearing it over the utilitarian clothes Anthea had managed to acquire from Starfleet. She and Khan didn't subscribe to any particular religion or social traditions; she just liked the look, she'd told Anthea, and it reminded her of home.
Nolan tried to leap from his mother's arms, chanting, "Dadadadadada!" Khan plucked him up, before he could tumble to the floor. Holding the squirmy child with one arm, he said to McCoy, "My sister, Khatri Kaur. Kati, this is Doctor Leonard McCoy."
McCoy glanced up from the microscope, then did a double-take. He quicly scrambled to his feet and held out a hand. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Kaur."
Kati shot a smirk at Anthea, then shook the doctor's hand. "Please, call me Kati. You are with Starfleet?"
"I am, yeah. I'm the chief medical officer on the USS Enterprise. Please, have a seat so I can get a look at you, see if we can do something about this problem of yours."
"Certainly, Doctor McCoy." Kati boosted herself up onto one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap, smiling at the doctor.
Behind McCoy, Khan raised both brows. He turned an astonished look at his wife. Beside him, Yves looked thunderous.
Anthea sidled up to Khan and murmured, "I think Kati has a fan."
To Yves, she said under her breath, "As an American classmate of mine at the Academy was fond of saying, 'You snooze, you lose'."
Since McCoy was occupied with Kati, Anthea took the opportunity to extract a blood sample from Nolan, while Khan held their son. She took as little as possible, hating it the whole time. When she was done, even though it was a painless procedure, she kissed Nolan's little arm.
"All done, sweetheart," she murmured. "Shall I take him, or do you still need him?"
Khan handed Nolan over. "You can take him. If we need him for anything, I'll find you."
"Okay." She gave his forearm a squeeze, winked at Kati, and left the medbay.
Anthea dragged Nolan's playpen in from his room and set it up by her work station, plopping him down in it with his bunny. He rolled to his back and hugged the fuzzy green toy to his chest.
Pulling up her log on the computer, she started a new entry.
Dear Mum and Dad,
I've lost count of what day it is for the colony. We've
finished all but the last cabin now. Khan was working on it
until the ship from Starfleet showed up.
I had hoped that they would never find us, but I figured
they would eventually. I never expected it to be so soon, or
for it to be the USS Enterprise. In all honesty, the inevitable
confrontation between Khan and Captain Jim Kirk went a
lot better than I anticipated, meaning that Kirk was able
to walk away from it.
Kirk wants to take Khan and his people back into custody. I
don't know how we're going to dissuade him otherwise. I can't
go through losing Khan again. I will personally kill Kirk if
I have to, to keep my husband here. I'm pregnant again, and
a repeat of two years ago would destroy me, I think.
Doctor Leonard McCoy is here, working with Khan and Yves to
find a solution to Kati's illness. I like Dr McCoy. He's a bit of a
curmudgeon, but Kati seems to have charmed him. I think she
may be flirting with him to make Yves jealous, but I don't
know. It's nice of him to help us, considering that Khan
attempted to destroy the Enterprise and, by extension,
kill Dr McCoy.
I want Starfleet to just go and leave us alone, but I can't
think of a way to get Kirk to-
The chime at her door sounded. Anthea saved and closed the file before she went to answer it. Yves was there, looking distraught.
"He is flirting with her!" he burst out. "And she with him!"
Stifling a sigh, Anthea stepped aside to let him in. She hoped the Starfleet incursion ended soon, because the drama they'd caused was quickly going to be unbearable.
The early morning was taken up with running scans on Kati's brain functions, and with readying a serum that McCoy had apparently been up all night fiddling with. Khan had been there with him for most of it, so Anthea hadn't slept well as a result. She never did sleep well without her husband beside her.
Her morning sickness wasn't helping matters. She didn't always throw up, but the frequent nausea and the fatigue made her feel vile. Only Khan's request that she be there for the testing of the serum had her up and in the medbay.
She sat off to the side, watching quietly, as they ran the scans and established current baselines for her brainwaves. Kati looked nervous, so Anthea moved over to stand beside her, holding her sister-in-law's hand as McCoy administered the serum.
"I don't know how fast this'll work," the doctor cautioned. "Or if it will."
"It is worth a try," Kati told him.
He injected her with something to induce a coma, and Kati went limp, eyes closing. Her vital signs dropped, jumped, dropped again, and then stablized.
Khan stood on the other side of Kati's bed, eyes fixed on the readout of her vital signs. His tension sang through the room.
"You see this part here?" McCoy said, indicating the brain map. "This is the damaged part. Every seizure causes damage, increasing the risk of another seizure, and we gotta repair that as well as fix whatever caused the nervous system problem in the first place. Otherwise it'll just start all over again."
The map lit up as the serum found its way through Kati's blood to her brain. The woman on the table hissed and jerked, in spite of her unconscious state.
"See, this is why human cloning and genetics manipulation like you guys is banned," McCoy muttered. "Even now, the results are unpredictable."
"If she dies-" Khan began.
"She won't die. I isolated the gene that made her reject your blood and neutralized it. That's what happening now. I feel like I'm playing God here, you know. Rewriting a woman's DNA."
It took hours. The serum burned its way through Kati's entire body, through every cell fed by her blood, and flipped the switch that kept Khan's blood from fixing her. Then McCoy administered the second serum, the one created from a mixture of Khan's and Nolan's blood. That one specifically targeted her nervous system. Anthea didn't really know how it all worked. She didn't need to know. She was there for moral support for Khan, just in case things went wrong.
Kati's vitals fluctuated, and her muscles tensed and relaxed in erratic spasms. McCoy kept stealing glances at Khan, as if bewildered that the man he knew as a killing machine was so worried over his sister.
At last, the woman on the bed relaxed and her vitals stabilized once more. McCoy lifted one of her eyelids, flashed her with a light.
"I'm gonna keep her in the coma until afternoon," he said at last. "Just so we can watch her. Then I'll bring her out of it and we'll see what effect it's had, but going from her brain map, it seems like it's repaired the seizure damage to her right hemisphere."
Khan finally relaxed. "Thank you, Doctor."
"Just so we're clear, I did it for her, not you."
"I had no delusion otherwise, Doctor McCoy. Nevertheless, you have my thanks."
The Enterprise's shuttle returned shortly before McCoy was scheduled to bring Kati out of her coma. Because Khan was with his sister, Anthea went out to greet it, reluctant as she was.
"You done with our doctor?" Kirk asked, as he left the shuttle.
"Just about. He's in our medbay with my sister-in-law. How did your survey go?"
"Same results as the previous one, which I'm sure you have."
"As a matter of face, I do," she replied sweetly. "Now, about you leaving-"
McCoy appeared, exiting the Reliance. He was followed by Khan.
"She's awake," the doctor said. "Jim, you're back!"
"Who's awake?" Kirk asked.
Khan ignored the captain. "Her vitals are good, and there is no sign of abnormal brainwaves. It seems it worked. You have my heartfelt thanks, Doctor McCoy."
"Again, who?"
"My sister-in-law," Anthea reminded Kirk. "As I just said. Doctor McCoy was kind enough to see if he could assist us with Kati's epilepsy."
"I think it worked, but I'm gonna stick with 'cautiously optimistic'."
Kirk frowned. "Oh . . . kaaaaay."
Khan finally looked at Kirk. "Which brings us to our unresolved problem. What do I need to do, to convince you to leave us here?"
Kirk's jaw clenched. "I-"
"Captain!" Uhura came out of the shuttle, looking upset. "Enterprise just sent us a message; they caught a distress call from a nearby system. They're being attacked by Klingons. At least one raiding party is on the surface."
It all went through Kirk's brain in a flash: Qo'noS, fighting a patrol of Klingons. Their small party nearly dying until a very unlikely rescuer appeared and single-handedly took them out.
Klingons didn't have much of a fighting chance against the Enterprise when it came to space battles, but on the surface . . .
He turned, looked at Khan. The other man's face was impassive, but he clearly understood, had likely realised it seconds before Kirk himself.
"We can't take them on alone," the Starfleet officer said, his voice rough. "And I can't sit back and let those people get killed."
"My people will help on one condition," Khan informed him, somehow managing to keep the gloating out of his voice. Finally, he had the leverage he'd wanted. "You leave us here, to live out our lives in peace, and you do not tell Starfleet where we are."
It wasn't even really a question, in the end. What choice did he have?
"Done," Kirk said.