The Wrath of Khan

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  "Everything's as you ordered, my lord," Terrell said. "You have the coordinates of Genesis."

  "I have one other small duty for you, Captain," Khan said. "Kill James Kirk."

  On the ground beside David, Saavik shifted slightly, gathering herself.

  No, Jim thought, no, your instincts were right with David. Don't pull the same stupid stunt he did and get yourself killed for nothing, Lieutenant.

  "Khan Singh—" Terrell said. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve and pressed his free hand against the side of his face. "I can't—" Wincing, he gasped in pain.

  "Kill him!"

  Terrell flung down his communicator. It clattered across stone. Terrell groaned as if he had been struck himself. He gripped the phaser with both hands, shaking so hard he could not aim.

  Pavel Chekov raised his phaser slowly, staring at it with utter absorption. His whole body trembled. He aimed the weapon …

  … at Clark Terrell. He tried to fire.

  He failed.

  Terrell screamed in agony. He forced his phaser around until he had turned it on himself.

  "Clark, my God," McCoy whispered. He reached out toward him.

  Terrell raised his head. Jim felt the intensity of his plea to McCoy in his horrified gaze.

  The only thing the doctor could do for Clark Terrell now was … nothing. McCoy groaned and turned away, his face in his hands.

  "Kill him, Terrell!" Khan said again. The damaged communicator distorted his voice, but still it was all too recognizable. "Fire, now!"

  Terrell obeyed.

  He disappeared.

  Chekov shrieked. His phaser fell from his shaking hands, and he clutched at his temples as his knees buckled. He quivered and convulsed on the hard rock floor.

  McCoy hurried to his side, pulled an injector from his medical pack, dialed it, and stabbed it into Chekov's arm. Chekov struggled a moment more, then went limp.

  "Terrell!" Khan said. "Chekov!"

  "Oh, my God, Jim—" McCoy said in horror.

  Jim hurried to him.

  Blood gushed down the side of Chekov's face.

  Through unconsciousness, he moaned.

  Something—a creature, some thing—probed blindly from inside his ear. It crawled out of him: a snake, a worm, smeared with blood down its long, slimy length. Jim fought against nausea. He scooped up a phaser.

  "Terrell!" Khan's voice was low and hoarse.

  Jim clenched his teeth and shuddered, but he forced himself to wait until the creature flopped on the stone, leaving Chekov free.

  He fired, and the creature disintegrated.

  "Chekov!"

  Jim snatched the communicator from the floor.

  "Khan, you miserable bloodsucker—they're free of you! You'll have to do your own dirty work now. Do you hear me? Do you?"

  After a moment, a terrible sound came from the communicator.

  Khan laughed.

  "Kirk, James Kirk, my old friend, so you are still—still!—alive."

  "And still your 'old friend'? Well, listen, 'old friend,' you've murdered a lot of innocent people. Kirk looked at Pavel Chekov lying at his feet, close to death. "I intend to make you pay."

  Khan laughed again. "I think not. If I was powerful before, I will be invincible soon."

  "He's going to take Genesis!" David rushed toward the next cavern.

  Saavik and Kirk both sprinted after him. As they rounded the corner, a transporter beam enveloped the Genesis torpedo. Jim raised his phaser. If he could at least damage it before it dematerialized—

  David Marcus was directly in his line of fire.

  "David, get down!" Jim yelled.

  Saavik caught up to David. He struggled with her.

  "Let go—I've got to stop him!"

  "Only half of you would get there!"

  "Get down!"

  Saavik dragged David out of Kirk's way.

  Jim fired. The phaser beam passed through the empty space where the torpedo had been, and sizzled against the stone.

  Jim Kirk wanted to scream. He barely restrained himself from smashing his fist against the cave wall in pure frustration. He only had one chance left.

  He found Terrell's communicator.

  "Khan, you have Genesis, but you don't have me! You'll never get me, Khan! You're too frightened to come down here to kill me!"

  "I've done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. I wish to let you savor the hurt for a little time."

  "So much for all your oaths and promises, so much for your vow—to your wife!"

  "You should not speak of my wife, James Kirk. She never wanted me to take my revenge. So now I will grant her wish. I will not kill you."

  "You're a coward, Khan!"

  "I will leave you, as you left me. But no one will ever find you. You are buried alive, marooned in the middle of a dead planet. Forever."

  "Khan—"

  "As for your ship, it is powerless. In a moment, I shall blow it out of the heavens."

  "Khan!"

  "Good-bye, 'Admiral.'"

  On board Reliant, Khan Singh shut off communications to Regulus I and stretched back in his chair. Not quite what he had foreseen, but a most satisfying climax, nonetheless.

  Joachim came onto the bridge.

  "Well, Joachim?"

  "The Genesis torpedo is safely stowed, my lord. The warp drive is still inoperative, but all other systems will be restored within the hour."

  "Excellent."

  "Sir?"

  "What?"

  "May I plot a course away from Regulus I?"

  "Not yet. Kirk is finished, but I promised him that I would deal with his ship."

  "Khan, my lord—"

  Khan frowned at his old friend and aide. Joachim had been with him from the beginning, but he had been acting most strangely since they escaped from Alpha Ceti V.

  "You are with me, or you are against me. Which do you choose?"

  Joachim looked down. "I am with you, my lord." He turned away. "I have not changed."

  Carol Marcus sat on the floor of the cavern staring at the empty spot where Genesis had been. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. She could not believe that Jedda, too, was gone. Vance, and Del, and Zinaida, and Yoshi and Jan, all dead. All she had left was David.

  She could not help being grateful that it was David who survived. Yet at times she had felt like mother to everyone on the station. She had always been the sort of person people told their troubles to.

  She grieved for Vance particularly, missing his gentleness, his steadiness. She covered her face.

  Despite the pressure of her hands, tears squeezed from beneath her eyelids. She dashed the drops away angrily, forcing back her grief by willpower alone. She could not collapse into the despair she felt: there had to be some way to stop what was happening.

  She glanced across the cavern toward Jim. She had sworn to herself never to tell him about David, or tell David about him, but telling them the truth had been the only way to keep them both alive. She needed to talk to Jim—to David, too—but since Genesis disappeared they had all three been revolving around each other like satellites, pulled together by her revelation and pushed apart by time and old pain and lack of trust.

  "Saavik to Enterprise," the young Vulcan—Vulcan?

  Carol wondered; maybe not Vulcan—lieutenant said into her communicator for about the twentieth time in as many minutes. "Come in, please."

  Carol knew how efficient the other ship was at jamming communications. She doubted Saavik would be able to get through.

  She heard a soft moan and glanced across to where Dr. McCoy worked over Chekov, who he had feared might die.

  "Jim—" McCoy said.

  Jim went to his side.

  "Pavel's alive," McCoy said. "It'll be rocky for a while, but I think he's going to be all right."

  "Pavel?" Jim said gently.

  Chekov tried to get up.

  "It's okay, Pavel," McCoy said. "You're going to be fine. Just try to r
est now."

  "Admiral," Lieutenant Saavik said, "I am sorry, I cannot get through to the Enterprise. Reliant is still jamming all channels."

  "I'm sure you did your best, Lieutenant," Jim said.

  "It wouldn't make any difference," McCoy said. "If Spock obeyed orders, the Enterprise is long since gone. If Spock couldn't obey, the ship's finished."

  "So are we, it looks like," David said.

  Carol stood up. "Jim," she said, "I don't understand. Why did this happen? Who's responsible for it? Who is Khan?"

  "It's a long story, Carol."

  "We've got plenty of time," David said angrily.

  "You and your daddy," Dr. McCoy said, "can catch each other up on things."

  "Maybe he is my biological father," David said. "But he sure as hell is not my 'daddy.' Jedda's dead because of him—"

  "Because of you, boy!" McCoy snapped. "Because you tried to rush a phaser set on kill. And it isn't one dead, it's two, in case you've lost count."

  "It's more than that, Doctor," Carol said. "In case you've lost count. Most of them were our friends. Jim, I think you owe us at least the courtesy of an explanation."

  He looked up, and she could see that he felt as hurt and confused as she did. "I'll trade you," he said.

  Carol closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.

  "Yes," she said. "You're right. Jim, Dr. McCoy …

  we may be down here for a while—"

  "We may be down here forever," McCoy said sourly.

  "—so can we please call a truce?" Carol asked.

  "I just watched an old friend commit suicide!" McCoy said. "I stood by and I let him do it!" He turned away. "You'll have to forgive—" anger and grief cut through the sarcasm; his voice broke, "—my bad humor. . . ."

  "Believe me, Doctor, please, I know how you feel."

  "Yes," he said slowly. "Of course. I'm sorry."

  When he had composed himself, he returned to the group. They sat in a small circle, and Jim tried to explain.

  Carol wished he could give her some reason to hope, but when Jim finished, the implications of Genesis in the hands of Khan Singh left her only despair.

  "Is there anything to eat down here?" Jim said suddenly. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm starved."

  "How can you think of food at a time like this?" McCoy said.

  "What I think is that our first order of business is survival."

  "There's plenty of food in the Genesis cave," Carol said absently. She shook her head in surprise at herself—she should have led them all there long ago, instead of staying in these cold and ugly chambers. Everything that had happened had affected her far more than she was willing to admit: the clarity of her thought, and her ability to trust. . . . She got up. "There's enough to last a lifetime, if it comes to that."

  "We thought this was Genesis!" McCoy said.

  Carol looked around her, at the dark rough caves piled messily with equipment and records and personal gear. The series of caves had taken the Starfleet corps of engineers ten months in spacesuits to tunnel out: the second stage of Genesis had taken a single day. Carol laughed, but stopped abruptly when she heard her own hysteria.

  "This? No, this isn't Genesis. David—will you show Dr. McCoy and Lieutenant Saavik our idea of food?"

  "Mother—there's a lunatic out there with the torpedo, and you want me to give a guided tour?"

  "Yes."

  "But we've got to—We can't just do nothing!"

  "Yes we can," Jim said. He casually removed a bit of equipment from his belt pouch and unfolded it. It was not till he fitted its lenses in front of his eyes that Carol recognized a pair of reading glasses—one of her professors in graduate school had worn the same things: apparently, as far as Carol had ever been able to tell, to enhance his reputation as an eccentric. Jim Kirk wearing glasses?

  He looked at his chronometer, took the glasses off again, and put them away.

  "Is there really some food down here?" he said.

  David scowled.

  "David, please," Carol said.

  He glared at Kirk. "Keep the underlings busy, huh?" He shrugged. "What the hell." He gestured abruptly to Saavik and McCoy. "Come on."

  Saavik hesitated. "Admiral—?"

  "As your teacher Mr. Spock is fond of saying: No event is devoid of possibilities."

  McCoy followed David out of the cavern. Saavik stood gazing at the floor in thought, then abruptly turned and left with them.

  Pavel Chekov lay sleeping or unconscious on a pile of blankets.

  Jim and Carol were alone.

  Carol sat on her heels beside him.

  "David's right, isn't he? It's just to keep us busy."

  He raised his head. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Carol Marcus had had twenty years to think about how to answer that question, and she had never decided what the answer should be.

  "Jim … why didn't you ask?"

  He frowned. "What?"

  "You've known for a long time that I have a son. You know his age, or you could have found out without any trouble. And," she added with an attempt at humor, "I don't believe they take you into the Starfleet Academy unless you can count." The humor fell flat. She did not feel very much like laughing now, anyway. The possibility that Jim Kirk might ask her about David had always existed in her mind; it was one of those possibilities that in the strange and inexplicable way of the human psyche Carol had both dreaded and, on a level she was aware of but never would have admitted to anyone but herself, wished for.

  But it had never happened.

  "Carol … I don't know if you can believe this. I guess there's no reason why you should. But it never even occurred to me that David might be ours. I didn't even know you'd had a child till I got back with the Enterprise. And after that I had, I don't know, some trouble putting any kind of life back together. It was like coming to an alien world that was just similar enough to the one I remembered that every time I ran into something that had changed, I was surprised, and disoriented. . . ."

  Carol took his hand, cradled his palm, and stroked the backs of his fingers.

  "Stop it, Jim. I'm sorry, dammit, I don't know if I'd even have told you the truth if you had asked. I swore I'd never tell either of you."

  "I don't understand why."

  "How can you say that? Isn't it obvious? We weren't together, and there was no way we were ever going to be! I never had any illusions about it, and to give you your due you never tried to give me any. You have your world, and I have mine. I wanted David in my world." She let go of Jim's hand. She had always admired his hands: they were square and strong. "If he'd decided to go chasing through the universe on his own, I'd have accepted it. But I couldn't have stood having you come along when he was fourteen and say, 'Well, now that you've got him to the age of reason, it's time for him to come along with his father.' His father—someone he'd never known except as a stranger staying overnight? Jim, that was the only possibility, and that's too late to start being a father! Besides, fourteen-year-olds have no business on a starship, anyway."

  He stood up, walked away from her, and pressed his hands and forehead against the wall as if he were trying to soak up the coolness and calmness of the very stone.

  "You don't need to tell me that," he said. His shoulders were slumped, and she thought he was about to cry. She wanted to hold him; yet she did not want to see him cry.

  "David's a lot like you, you know," she said, trying to lighten her own mood as much as Jim's. "There wasn't much I could do about that. He's stubborn, and unpredictable—Of course, he's smarter—that goes without saying. . . ." She stopped; this attempt at humor was falling even flatter than the other.

  "Dammit," she said, "does it matter? We're never going to get out of here."

  Jim did not respond. He knelt down beside Pavel and felt his pulse. He avoided Carol's gaze.

  "Tell me what you're feeling," she said gently. He sounded remote and sad; Carol tried to feel angry a
t him, but could not.

  "There's a man who hasn't seen me for fifteen years who thinks he's killed me," Jim said. "You show me a son who'd be glad to finish the job. Our son. My life that could have been, but wasn't. Carol, I feel old, and worn out, and confused."

  She went to him and stretched out her hand. "Let me show you something. Something that will make you feel young, as young as a new world."

  He glanced at Chekov. Carol was not a medical doctor, but she knew enough about human physiology to be able to see that the young commander was sleeping peacefully.

  "He'll be all right," she said. "Come on. Come with me."

  He took her hand.

  She led him toward Genesis.

  Unwillingly Jim followed Carol deeper into the caverns. The overhead light-plates ended, and they proceeded into darkness. Carol slid her free hand along the cave wall to guide them. Jim soon realized that it was not as completely dark as it should have been, underground and without artificial illumination. He could see Carol. The reflected light glinted off her hair.

  The light grew brighter. With the sensitivity of someone who spent most of his time in artificial light and beneath alien stars, who valued what little he saw of sunlight, Jim knew, without question, that the glow ahead of him was that of a star very like the Sun.

  He glanced at Carol. She smiled, but gave no word of explanation.

  Without meaning to, Jim began to walk faster. As the light intensified, as its quality grew clearer and purer, he found himself running.

  He plunged from the mouth of the cave and stopped. Carol joined him on the edge of a promontory.

  Jim Kirk gasped.

  His eyes were still dark-adapted: the light dazzled him. The warm breeze ruffled his hair, and he smelled fresh earth, flowers, a forest. A rivulet tumbled down the cliff just next to him, casting a rainbow mist across his face.

  A forest stretched into the distance, filling the shell of the lifeless planetoid that had been Regulus I. It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, a storybook forest from children's tales. The gnarled trees showed immense age and mystery. The grass in the meadow at the foot of the cliff was as smooth and soft as green velvet, sprinkled with wildflowers of delicate blue and violent orange. Where the shadow of the forest began, Jim half expected to glimpse a flash of white, a unicorn fleeing his gaze.