-Chapter Fourteen-

Sitara

The Enterprise's shuttles landed just outside the settlement proper and disgorged their occupants. Kirk had come down to the surface, wanting to make sure that the Brinthi child was seen to. He didn't doubt Khan, he'd seen the guy with his own kid. It was just . . . the injustice of the whole thing.

Everything was sleepy at this early hour, rather eerily quiet without the sounds of construction. It was only a little past dawn, and Khan wanted to crawl in bed beside his wife. With the Brinthi baby in hand, he walked through the town square, towards Otto and Chin's cabin. As he passed the armaments cache, he noticed that several of the spears they'd fashioned were gone, as were some of the phaser rifles. That meant that some of the men-and likely women-had gone hunting.

He knocked at the door of Otto's cabin, the infant snuffling against his shoulder. There was no answer, even after a second knock. A peek inside told him that both Otto and Chin had likely gone with the hunting party.

Khan sighed and turned, headed towards the Reliance. Anthea, he was sure, would be willing to look after the child until he had a chance to speak to Otto.

He had to pass their under-construction cabin on the way to the ship. The first sign something was amiss was the bright blue strip of material lying on the ground just outside their new house. Khan nudged it with a booted toe, wondering what it was.

It clicked a moment later that it was the "leash" from Nolan's silly harness. It seemed to have been ripped right off.

Khan looked to the door, saw it was slightly ajar. The construction wasn't quite finished yet; Anthea had been talking about measurements for curtains on the windows before he left, and the measuring tape lay just inside the door, bent and crumpled.

Just beyond that, a Klingon lay in a pool of blood, Khan's machete buried in his chest. The corpse looked vaguely surprised.

"Anthea?" he called. "Anthea!"

There was no answer. Heart pounding, he vaulted over the body and hurried searched the other rooms. There were scuff-marks in the construction dust, and Nolan's teddy bear lay facedown on the floor near the Klingon.

He went cold, head to toe, and then hot a second later. Khan snatched the toy off the floor and stormed out of the house, making for the Reliance at a dead run, the new child held tight to his chest. If she was in danger, Anthea would hide aboard the ship, lock herself in with the baby. If she could get there, that was.

Kirk sprinted over from the shuttle as Khan opened the main hatch of the ship. "What's up?"

"Anthea is missing, and there is a dead Klingon in our house," Khan told him. "I need to see if she is aboard the ship, it's the safest place."

He went and pounded on Yves's cabin door, waking the doctor from a sound slumber. After the doctor put the Brinthi baby in the medbay, the three of them searched every nook and cranny of the starship.

Anthea was not there, and neither was Nolan.

Khan stood in the hold, the last place they'd checked, and felt a fear greater than anything he'd ever experienced well up from his gut. When he turned to the Starfleet captain, there was genuine, undisguised anguish in his eyes. "Anthea is gone. And my son. They have taken them, Kirk. They have taken my family."

The hunting party returned not long after, to find the entire village in an uproar. Khan had gone door to door and woken every resident, accounting for everyone and demanding to know when they had last seen his wife and son.

Khan's lieutenant expressed horror and remorse at Anthea's disappearance. "If I had suspected, Kaiser, I would not have left!"

"There was no way to know," Chin pointed out. "Khan, what can we do?"

Their leader shook his head and turned in a circle, taking in the village with a bleak expression. He and his council had gathered, with the Starfleet officers presently in their midst, at the "war table".

Kati had found the Brinthi child in the medbay and unofficially adopted him. She paced near where Khan stood, worry creasing her brow, with the little blonde head against her shoulder.

Khan watched her, thinking that he'd intended the child for Otto and Chin, but if Kati wanted him, he had no argument with it. Part of him wished they'd just left the infant on Brinthini and come straight back here. If they hadn't wasted time, he would have been here, and Anthea and Nolan would not be missing!

The stupidest thing anyone anywhere in the galaxy could do would be to get between Khan Noonien Singh and his family. Admiral Alexander Marcus had learned that the hard way. The Klingons were about to learn an even more devastating lesson, for not only had they dared interfere with his family, they had taken his son. He worried for Anthea, the feeling an uncomfortable but not entirely unfamiliar knot in his gut, but it was the thought of Nolan that drove him into a fury hotter than any he had ever known.

The notion that someone had taken his helpless little boy, could hurt his precious son, made Khan angrier than anything he had ever felt. He had trained Anthea in hand-to-hand combat himself, though he was sure it had been a while since she'd used any of it. Still, she could put up a fight, had obviously done so when she'd slain the Klingon they had dragged out of the house and examined. Nolan could not defend himself.

He didn't even want to contemplate the child Anthea carried.

"It looks to me, Khan, they wait 'til we leave for the hunt," Otto told his deathly-silent leader. "Then they go in and take her, and the boy."

Khan lifted icy blue eyes to his right-hand man. "And no one stayed to guard them?"

"We did not hear a thing," Kati reminded her brother. "How could we know there was danger?"

His sister gently rubbed the baby's back. "She told me last night she intended to get an early start on the measurements, and on making the curtains. She said . . . she wanted to make them herself so that she could put something she made in the house."

Kirk braced his hands on the table. "I wouldn't think Klingons could be very sneaky, but it really wouldn't take more than two or three at most to grab Anthea and the kid. She's not as strong as you guys, and she's pretty small. Skinny. She wouldn't be able to fend off one of those Klingons for long, and . . . Well."

"I am aware my wife is not combat-trained," Khan snapped. "I have done what I can, but if you will recall, I was frozen for two years."

He turned to Otto. "Surely you left someone in charge while you went hunting?"

"Uh . . . Rodriguez."

His blood went cold. Without a word, Khan turned and stalked through the village, to where Rodriguez worked outside his cabin. Kirk and Otto followed close on his heels.

Khan kicked aside the worktable, hauled Rodriguez up by his collar, and slammed him against the side of the small house.

"You let them take her, didn't you?"

Rodriguez had never been very good at maskin his expressions, and in the space of three heartbeats, went from surprise, to fear, and then to resignation.

"There were too many! I heard her call out, but when I went to see, there were too many. I couldn't fight them all alone!"

"How many?" Khan demanded.

The man hesitated. "Six!"

"Bullshit," Kirk snapped. "Khan here took out a patrol group of thirty Klingons."

"But I am not Khan." Rodriguez kicked his feet, but they weren't anywhere near the ground. "I am not so good a fighter. My training was not complete!"

"So you sat back and did nothing, didn't alert the others?"

"They are women-"

Khan shook Rodriguez and pounded him against the wall. "They are still soldiers!"

Rodriguez held up his hands. "Please, Khan, I did not know what else to do! They told me they wanted her, I . . . showed them where to find her. That is all. I know nothing more!"

His leader's ice-blue eyes fixed on his raised hand. Purple bruises spread across his knuckles, along with bite marks puncturing the skin there. They weren't shaped right for a Klingon, as Klingons had fangs. Most, anyway. Too large to be a child's, too small to be a man's, they could only have belonged to Anthea.

Khan grabbed Rodriguez's hand, lifted it to get a better look. Then he turned his gaze to his crewman. "Would you like to explain these injuries? It looks as if Anthea bit you. Did you strike her?"

The shorter man wouldn't meet his gaze, which was, as far as Khan was concerned, as good as an admission.

"You helped them take her," Khan stated flatly. "You betrayed as and you helped the Klingons take my wife and my children. I told you to stay away from her and stop giving her trouble. I told you what the punishment would be for betrayal. You know what you're forcing me to do, Rodriguez."

"So what if I did? Better this than to live with her as my queen!" Rodriguez snarled. He turned his head and spit, then grinned. "They want the weak, human bitch, they can have her! And her halfbreed child!"

It took every ounce of Khan's control not to rip Rodriguez's head from his shoulders. He lowered the man until his feet touched the ground. Still with a firm grip on the man, he looked to Kirk, Otto, and the gathering crowd, then dragged him out to the "village square". He wanted to tear Rodriguez to pieces, rend him limb from limb while he screamed, but his people had laws, ones he himself had put into place, and as much as it pained him, there was something of a process required.

If he'd known that one day he would be punishing a man who had taken his wife from him, he'd have written in a clause letting him shred the man's skin off with his fingers. He'd amend it later.

"You are witnesses!" Khan shouted. "He has given his confession. He helped the Klingons take Anthea. He attacked her, he hurt her, and he gave her and my son to the enemy!"

A shocked murmur ran through the crowd. Rodriguez had the temerity to smile. Watching him, Kirk wondered if the man was intent on suicide-by-crazy-dictator.

"Wait," the Starfleet captain said. "He may have information."

Khan turned cold eyes to Kirk. "And how do you suggest I extract it?"

"Spock, he's a Vulcan. They can do this mind-meld thing-"

"I am aware," Khan interrupted harshly, remembering when the Vulcan tried on him. "It does not work on us."

"Oh."

Khan dug his fingers into Rodriguez's arm. "Tell me everything you know, and I will make it swift."

"I told you everything," the condemned man replied. "They came, they said they wanted her. I showed them where. When she tried to run, I stopped her. They took her. I do not know where, and I do not care. Kill me if you wish, Khan. I have lived by my ideals."

Unable to hold in his rage, Khan wrenched Rodriguez's arm, dislocating it from the shoulder and shattering radius and ulna in one vicious twist. Rodriguez screamed, legs buckling.

Khan fisted his hand over Rodriguez's short ponytail and shook him, nearly blinded by his fury. "You know what the punishment is for betrayal of our people! You all swore to abide by my laws when you joined me. Those are our laws still, though we do not live on that old world anymore."

Now, all of his people were deathly silent, waiting. They knew, though Kirk did not, what was coming. They'd seen much of what Kirk had only glimpsed.

"We have no hood, Kaiser," Otto told his leader.

"No need. This will be much swifter than he deserves," Khan said, and he turned his prisoner to face him. "Only because I do not have the time to further waste on this bakrichod."

And he snapped Rodriguez's neck.

Kirk was the only one who reacted at the crack of bone and sinew, his stomach lurching. He made a small sound and a furtive motion forward, but it was already done.

Khan let the body fall to the ground.

"Inigo, Joachim, take the body to the quarry. Dismember it and burn it. Burn it to ash. I don't want to run the risk of some genetic fiddling bringing him back to life. Though, if it does, I'll kill him again. Slower this time."

"Yes, Khan," Inigo said, and saluted.

Joachim hurried over, and the two men dragged the corpse away.