by Greg Cox
The fields outside the camp, which only weeks ago had burgeoned with ripening wheat, corn, and rice, had been completely destroyed, burned by the fires and later buried beneath centimeters of ash and mud. And even if they had somehow miraculously survived the disaster, he realized, this unnatural winter would have murdered the surviving crops as surely as any deadly lightning bolts or lava bombardment.
“Oh, Khan,” Marla murmured, sharing his grief and horror at the sight before him. “All that work, all our hopes…”
She did not need to complete the sentence. Khan knew they were all thinking the same thing. Glancing backward to check on his people, he saw strong men and women sobbing openly. Ericsson let loose a stream of Norwegian obscenity. Ling kept repeating, “No, no, no,” over and over again. Huang stared vaguely. Even the stoic Joaquin allowed his brawny shoulders to droop in despair.
Let them grieve, Khan thought grimly. He lacked the heart to fault them for any show of weakness. Not even superhumans could be expected to endure defeat after defeat without complaint. No chromosome, he mused, no matter how cleverly engineered, can fully prepare a soul for purgatory.
But the worst was yet to come.
Looking past the decimated fields, he allowed himself to gaze upon what once had been their home.
New Chandigarh was a memory. Its fences and huts were no more, buried beneath the sodden residue of the disaster. Shards of shattered thermoconcrete jutted from the sludge. Only a handful of durable cargo bays had survived, and even they had been tossed about like a handful of dice, landing at odd angles and locations throughout the ruins of the colony. Khan’s weary muscles ached at the prospect of turning the massive cargo carriers upright once more. He could only hope that some of the supplies inside the steel crates remained intact.
“At least some small shelter remains,” he observed to Marla, wanting sorely to offer her some small morsel of consolation. “We may be able to escape the deluge within the cargo bays.”
“Of course,” she responded. She seemed as eager as he to cast a positive light on matters, and Khan was grateful for her support. More and more, they seemed to be of one mind, complementing each other perfectly. I chose well, he thought.
Perversely, the rain chose that moment to let up, although the clouds above remained as black and impenetrable as ever. Khan shook the mud from his long black mane, and turned to address his people. It was vital, he knew, to present a brave face to all assembled, despite his own crushing heartache.
“My friends,” he said gravely, “I know how discouraged you must feel for, in truth, I share your sadness at what has become of our former home. It is as though a vengeful Fate has singled us out for torment and persecution.” He shook his head mournfully before raising his chin proudly and thrusting his unscarred left fist at the lightless sky. “But I defy whatever power conspires against us. We shall come through this trial, just as we have triumphed over all that has tested us before, both on Earth and beyond.”
His dark eyes searched the faces of the crowd, looking for some sign that his words were taking root in their hearts. Ericsson scowled through his beard, but wisely held his tongue. Zuleika wiped a tear from her eye and stiffened her spine accordingly. Marla held out her tricorder, recording Khan’s speech. Huang stumbled forward to the front of the crowd, seemingly drawn by Khan’s stirring oratory. He nodded solemnly, hanging on his commander’s every word. “Yes, Your Excellency,” he murmured. “As you command.”
Suzette Ling, on the other hand, appeared bereft of hope, despite Khan’s rhetoric. “But how can we begin again?” she asked him despairingly. “We’ve lost our homes, our food, our friends!”
Joaquin moved to silence his distraught wife, but Khan gestured for him to let her be. Unlike Ericsson’s persistent challenges, there was no malice or insubordination in Ling’s desperate queries. She spoke from pain, and no doubt fear for her unborn child. She deserved an answer.
“We have no other choice,” he told her gently. “We must rebuild, rise up from these ashes, or all that we have accomplished so far will have been in vain.” He raised his voice, knowing Ling’s doubts surely lurked within the hearts and minds of the others. “What would you have us do?” he asked the crowd dramatically. “Lie down and die?”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” Huang answered unexpectedly. Before Khan’s startled eyes, the veteran soldier lay down in the muddy field and closed his eyes. He crossed his arms atop his chest and sank limply into the mucky ash and silt. His jaw dropped open and his breathing slowed, presenting an eerily effective impersonation of a corpse.
Khan was seldom at a loss for words, but found himself momentarily dumbfounded by Huang’s bizarre behavior. What is the meaning of this? he thought in bewilderment. Has the man gone completely mad?
“Enough!” he shouted finally. Frustration won out over confusion in his voice. “Stand up at once.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.” Calmly, without apparent embarrassment, Huang lifted himself from the ground and stood before Khan. The back of his scalp and jumpsuit were completely caked with mud. Slurries of discolored water streamed down his clothes. “As you command.”
“Do you mock me?” Khan asked savagely. He advanced on Huang until his angry face was only centimeters away from the soldier’s. “Do you dare?”
Huang flinched in the face of Khan’s obvious displeasure. “No, Lord Khan,” he insisted. “I only did you as you instructed.” He raised a hand to his temple and winced in pain. His right cheek began to twitch uncontrollably. “For-give me, Your Excellency.”
Khan’s anger was not yet appeased. “Explain yourself!”
“I’m trying, Lord Khan!” Huang said anxiously. “I obeyed all your commands!” He seemed to have trouble speaking. “P-P-Please tell me what you want!”
Khan seized the man’s throat, determined to choke a coherent answer from the babbling soldier, but Marla ran forward to intervene. “Khan, wait!” she cried out. “There’s something wrong with him. I think he may be sick. Remember that bull at our wedding!”
Khan froze. He suddenly remembered seeing Huang dig his finger into his ear back by the downed axebreakers. The soldier started acting peculiarly right after that, Khan realized.
Another, older memory flashed through his brain: a slime-covered eel wriggling out of the ear of the insane bison. The bull’s autopsy, revealing the parasitic nature of its relationship with the eel larva, had been distasteful, but Khan had never suspected that an eel could infest a human’s brain as well!
He let go of Huang, who dropped slackly onto his knees. Glassy eyes stared at a muddy puddle in front of him. His jaw sagged open and a trickle of saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. Khan found it hard to believe that this same man had once single-handedly repelled a team of Russian commandos. Had an alien larva succeeded where the Russians had failed?
It seemed that another danger, besides starvation, now lurked in the ruins of Ceti Alpha V.
16
ONE PLANETARY YEAR LATER
Khan stood upon the riverbank, contemplating his domain.
The omnipresent clouds of ash had thinned at last, although it was difficult to tell given the sheer amount of dust and grit blown about by the constant winds. As they had discovered in the long months since the cataclysm, Ceti Alpha V’s very orbit and rotation had shifted, bringing both shorter days and perpetual gales. The latter scoured the devastated landscape day and night, hastening the rapid deterioration of the ecosystem.
Is the entire planet dying, Khan could not help wondering, or just this particular region?
The once-mighty Kaur was now a dying stream, which seemed to grow smaller and shallower each time Khan and his people came in search of water. Sparse vegetation grew along the edges of the stream, sprouting up through the crumbling skeleton of a dead supercrocodile. Khan could see the formerly fertile valley turning into a desert before his very eyes. “Regions of sorrow, doleful shades,” he mused, after Milton, “where peace and rest can never
dwell….”
Such was Ceti Alpha V becoming.
Beneath him, in the deepening gorge, a party of colonists secured fresh supplies of water. Empty turtle shells, left behind by their possibly extinct former owners, served as convenient containers. Like Khan himself, the water-bearers were swathed in overlapping layers of heavy fabric, so that they resembled desert bedouins. Every square centimeter of their skin was carefully covered, and the ends of his head-cloth, or kaffiyeh, were wrapped tightly around his face and neck. Makeshift visors, composed of volcanic obsidian, painstakingly polished by hand, hid their eyes.
How cruelly ironic, Khan reflected. Back on Earth, in the final days of his reign, he had attempted to destroy the planet’s ozone layer in a pyrrhic act of revenge against a world that had spitefully rejected his benevolent rule. In the end, he had ultimately opted to spare Earth, choosing exile in the Botany Bay instead, but it seemed that his intended sins had come back to haunt him nonetheless. Since Ceti Alpha VI exploded, it had become evident that the disaster had shredded its sister planet’s ozone layer, exposing at least this portion of the planet to fierce ultraviolet rays that further ravaged what life remained. Khan and the other castaways had been forced to shield themselves from the sun in order to avoid the cancer and blindness that had already afflicted some of their companions.
Was there merely a hole in the ozone layer above them, such as once formed above Antarctica, or was the whole world similarly undefended? If the latter, Khan feared what the ultraviolet barrage could be doing to the entirety of Ceti Alpha V’s native fauna and flora. Suppose the UV rays killed off the tiny phytoplankton at the base of the marine food chain? The planet’s teeming oceans could soon become a vast aquatic graveyard, just as its land-based plants and animals appeared to be going the way of Earth’s dinosaurs.
Khan was well familiar with doomsday scenarios, having devised more than a few of them himself. But how far beyond the distant horizon did the devastation truly extend?
Soon, he resolved, I must seek answers to these questions.
A cloaked figure trudged up the sandy slope. Khan recognized Joaquin from his stature and lumbering gait, as well by the rifle strapped to his shoulder. The weapon was wrapped in plastic sheeting, in a possibly vain attempt to keep the sand from getting into the precious firearm. “The water canisters are filled, Lord Khan,” he announced.
“Excellent,” Khan stated approvingly. “Let us not linger then. I have seen enough of this wasteland today.”
The trek back to their new home was a long and wearisome one. The original site of New Chandigarh, now cruelly exposed to the elements, had long since been abandoned in favor of the primeval caverns, which provided better protection from the unrelenting wind and radiation. All that survived of their old settlement was the surprisingly durable cargo carriers, which now rested at the bottom of a rocky hollow above a newly carved cave entrance. The bulky metal compartments had been transported, via backbreaking labor, to this new site, which provided (relatively) easy access to the vast warren of tunnels and grottoes beneath the surface.
The colonists called their new home Fatalis, after the sabertooths who had once made it their lair. The name had an appropriately foreboding ring to it.
Khan opened the door to the nearest cargo bay, letting the heavily laden water-bearers enter first, before stepping inside and sealing the door behind him. Along with the others, he shed his protective outerwear, revealing a faded red coverall patched with bits of animal hide, electrical cable, and insulation; as their original clothing slowly disintegrated, the castaways’ attire was increasingly becoming a hodgepodge affair held together by whatever scraps could be salvaged from the ruins of the original colony. With every day, he and his people were looking less like pioneers and more like barbarians.
He kept his right glove on.
Descending a ladder into the caverns below, Khan was greeted by a guardsman bearing grim news. “Welcome back, Your Excellency,” the sentinel said. Cataracts had invaded his left eye, leaving him half blind. “Dr. Hawkins requests your presence at the infirmary.” He shook his head gloomily. “Dumas is in a bad way, I’m afraid.”
No doubt, Khan thought sourly. He expected woeful tidings; it was positive news that came as a surprise these days. Despair and self-pity threatened to unman him. Must I be confronted with fresh tragedy within seconds of my return? Can I not savor a moment’s surcease from sorrow? Responsibility overcame exhaustion, however, and he nodded in acknowledgment. “Very well. I shall seek out the doctor at once.”
He would have preferred to reunite with Marla first, but apparently that was not to be. Accompanied by Joaquin, he headed straight for the subterranean infirmary, where he found Hawkins kneeling at the side of Marcel Dumas, the latest victim of the dreaded Ceti eel.
Khan saw at once that Dumas was in the final stages of dementia. The former speechwriter and propagandist thrashed wildly upon the floor of the cavern, his arms and limbs tightly bound by leather straps skinned from the hide of a dead bison. Insanity contorted the Frenchman’s once-handsome features into a grotesque mask. Foam spewed from the man’s twisted lips. Bloody veins inflamed maniacal eyes. Inarticulate grunts and moans echoed off the cavern walls.
Sadly, Khan had seen such symptoms many times before. As the bison had vanished into extinction, the eels had swiftly sought out new hosts for their young—namely the hard-pressed colonists. Somewhere deep inside Dumas’s brain, Khan knew, a growing eel was coiled around the man’s cerebral cortex, exerting an ever-increasing pressure. “I take it, Doctor, your treatments have proven unsuccessful once again.”
Hawkins wiped his forehead with the back of his hand while he insert a protective rubber tile between Dumas’s teeth. “I’ve tried herbs, spinal massage, even acupuncture,” he lamented, “but nothing has expelled the parasite or alleviated the symptoms. If I was back on Earth, I could attempt radiation or brain surgery, but under these conditions?” He threw up his hands. “Nothing awaits Dumas but a slow and agonizing death.”
“I understand,” Khan said. Without further discussion, he reached down and placed the palm of his gloved hand over Dumas’s mouth and nostrils. He clamped down firmly, cutting off the flow of air to the man’s lungs. Dumas’s bound body jerked briefly, then fell still.
Khan removed his hand. He rose from the dead man’s side, then waited patiently for Dumas’s killer to flee his cooling corpse. Within minutes, a slime-covered eel emerged from the victim’s ear canal and wriggled onto the floor of the cavern. Khan allowed himself a thin smile as he crushed the vile mollusk beneath the heel of his boot.
There was no need to preserve the creature. Hawkins already had plenty of specimens to study. Counting Huang, the first victim, Khan had lost seven followers to the eels since the disaster a year ago. Another three colonists had succumbed to disease and skin cancer, leaving behind only fifty remaining adults, plus a handful of underfed infants. Khan wondered morbidly where the eels would plant their insidious offspring should the rest of the colony join the bison in oblivion.
The castaways had taken to sleeping with wads of material stuffed in their ears, but still the eels managed to claim a new victim every few months. Dissection of captured eels revealed that they appeared to be subsisting on minute traces of organic matter left behind by the mass extinction, as well as raw nitrates and other substances. Khan suspected that the widespread ash and dirt still contained a few microscopic extremophiles, such as Earth’s near-indestructible tardigrades, that perhaps served as food for the deadly eels, while the colonists themselves provided hosts for the next generation of parasites.
Khan gazed down at the latest fatality. It was Dumas, he recalled, who had drafted the official denials whenever Khan’s political enemies accused him of plotting to conquer mankind. That these denials were utter fabrications did not diminish his service to Khan’s cause.
“Remove his brain for your research,” Khan instructed Hawkins coldly. “Have the rest of him taken to the fert
ilizer pits.”
Alas, he couldn’t even offer Dumas a decent burial or cremation. Like the rest of their dead, his remains would be composted to provide nutrients for Fatalis’s struggling underground gardens. “I will extend my condolences to his widow.”
As always, his mind added darkly. Paying his respects to grieving spouses was another duty he had become far too familiar with. His memory summoned a picture of Dumas’s wife: a military strategist named Savine. I shall visit her shortly, he vowed, but not right away.
First, he would find Marla. He needed to see his own wife again, if only as a relief from the never-ending death and decay. “If that will be all, Doctor,” he informed Hawkins, “I will take my leave.”
Knowing there was nothing more he could do here, Khan left the doctor with his lifeless patient. Joaquin followed him dutifully as he traversed the winding tunnels, which were lit by flickering torches and the occasional patch of phosphorescent mold. Although a few generators and power cell rechargers had survived within the impervious cargo bays, electricity was too precious to waste on mere illumination, except here and there.
As they traveled, Khan heard stone axes and picks chipping away at the surrounding limestone, as a team of workers sweated to expand and improve upon their underground habitat. The smell of unwashed bodies permeated the closely packed catacombs. At times the corridors were so narrow that only a single individual could pass through them at a time. Deferential colonists stepped aside, or backed up entirely, to allow Khan and his bodyguard to proceed unhindered. Joaquin ducked his head to avoid scraping his skull on a low-hanging ceiling.
They passed the armory, where the colony’s dwindlingsupply of guns and ammunition was kept under twenty-four-hour guard. Although though most of the their ammo had been destroyed when New Chandigarh burned to the ground, roughly half a dozen guns and rifles had survived. Khan hoped someday to manufacture fresh ammunition for the weapons, but, for the time being, food and water took priority over munitions.
