by Greg Cox
Unable to dispute their leader’s prediction, Austin and the rest gathered up their children and belongings. Ericsson himself lifted the bag containing the stolen resequencer, along with with provisions carefully hoarded over the last six months. Karyn, her face pale, took Astrid by the hand and removed a torch from a crack in the wall. “Follow me,” he ordered.
He knew their escape route already: an uncharted tunnel that one of his followers had stumbled onto a year ago. The circuitous passage led eventually to the surface, many kilometers away from the heart of Fatalis. There a desolate future awaited them, assuming they managed to elude Khan’s minions. Surviving on the surface would not be easy, but Ericsson knew that their odds of staying alive in Fatalis were even slimmer. After what they had attempted, they could expect no mercy.
Hurriedly, the conspirators disappeared into the shadowy depths beyond the compost pit. Acid churned in Ericsson’s stomach as the gross injustice of it all galled his soul. Tonight was supposed to have been his moment of glory; instead he found himself scurrying away like a frightened rat. He felt as though he had gone from king to exile in one fell swoop.
Ericsson glanced backward, at the subterranean sanctuary he was now forced to abandon. This isn’t over, Khan, he vowed. Our war is just beginning. Someday I’ll return in triumph to Fatalis—and it will be you who begs for your life!
Joaquin’s departure left Khan alone with Marla’s body. Rising slowly, he lifted her from the blood-soaked carpet and laid her gently on the humble bed they had shared for more than half a decade. Her auburn hair spread out over her pillow.
Khan realized he could not consign such beauty to the compost pit, despite the colony’s need for fresh fertilizer. For Marla, he would make an exception. I shall carve you a tomb, he swore, worthy of an empress.
A glint of silver caught the lamplight, drawing Khan’s gaze to the Starfleet medallion hanging around Marla’s neck. On an impulse, he took hold of the sculpted emblem and yanked it toward him, the slender chain snapping easily. He raised it toward his face, staring grimly at the medallion as it rested in his palm. The polished keepsake was free of tarnish even after all these years; Marla had seen to that. Its graceful design mimicked the golden insignia that had once adorned Marla’s uniform—and Kirk’s.
Kirk.
Khan’s eyes narrowed in thought and a malignant scowl settled onto his features. Ericsson and his allies would be brought to justice. That much was certain. But, deep in his heart, he knew who was truly responsible for Marla’s death.
James T. Kirk.
It was Kirk who banished Marla to this accursed world, rife with deadly cataclysms and bloodthirsty life-forms. It was Kirk who had never once bothered to check on the colony he had condemned to never-ending torment. It was Kirk who had foiled Khan’s plan to conquer the starways, forcing him to accept exile on this planetary death trap instead.
It was Kirk who had left them all to die.
If not for Kirk, I would be ruling over a thriving interstellar empire by now, with Marla reigning beside me as my imperial consort.
Instead, she had met a miserable end in a gloomy hole deep beneath the surface of a dying world.
And it was all because of Kirk.
Wrapping the broken chain around his fist, Khan let the silver emblem dangle before his eyes. “I swear upon this token,” he whispered to his beloved. “James T. Kirk will pay for your death—and for every other tragedy that has afflicted our people over all these doleful years. One way or another, no matter how many years may pass, I will find Kirk again—and, by all I hold sacred, you will be avenged!”
22
ONE PLANETARY YEAR LATER
Bit by bit, Marla emerged from the marble. Khan chipped away at the huge slab of stone, slowly liberating Marla’s face and form from the stubborn marble. His hammer and chisel tapped repeatedly against the slab, which rested atop his late wife’s heavy stone sarcophagus. Marble flakes littered the floor of the crypt. The crude oil lamps lighting the grotto were running low on fuel, an indication of how late into the night Khan had been working. Most of Fatalis had retired to bed hours ago.
But Khan slept only fitfully these days. Most nights he found he prefered working upon Marla’s tomb to tossing fruitlessly in his empty bed, haunted by his memories—and his unfulfilled vow to avenge Marla’s death. “Work is the scythe of time,” Napoleon had said, and Khan’s nights passed very slowly now that his beloved wife was gone.
Exhausted, he paused in his labors. Powdered stone clung to his sweaty skin and garments. Purple shadows lurked in the hollows beneath his red-rimmed eyes. He wiped the perspiration from his brow, then stepped back from the sarcophagus to inspect the sculpture, which remained a work in progress. The nose is not quite right, he appraised, nor is the mouth. Her expression should be more profound, more soulful … more reflective of her tender spirit. Lacking any photos or paintings of his wife, he sculpted Marla’s tomb from memory. This will not do, he resolved. I must keep striving until the likeness is absolutely perfect. Marla deserves nothing less.
The marble for the memorial came from a quarry far to the north. Khan had personally transported the slab from the mountains to Fatalis, albeit with the able assistance of Joaquin, who blamed himself, in part, for what had befallen Marla. It was among the tragic ironies of her loss that Marla’s sacrifice had finally earned her, in death, the body-guard’s unqualified respect.
The image of Marla driving the knife into her chest flashed through his mind once more, stabbing into his own heart just as it always did. Driven by the ghastly memory, he took up his hammer and chisel once more. This accursed world will never forget that you once graced its surface, he promised Marla, even if I have to work my fingers to the bone!
He placed the edge of the chisel against the sculpture’s lower lip, preparing to make a subtle but all-important adjustment to the marble portrait. His bloodshot eyes narrowed in concentration and he raised the hammer above the carefully positioned chisel. One quick tap would do the trick….
Before he could deliver the blow, however, the sound of footsteps violated the sepulchral hush of the grotto. Khan turned angrily to see Zuleika Walker standing in the doorway. The Amazonian superwoman, clad in threadbare rags that scarcely covered her magnificent figure, regarded him nervously from several paces away. “Lord Khan?”
Khan did not wait to hear more. “You dare disturb me here!” he raged. “I have issued explicit instructions that I am to be left alone at such times, unless”—a vengeful gleam appeared in his eyes—“you have come to tell me that Ericsson and his band of traitors have been captured at last?”
Zuleika shook her head. “No, my lord. The renegades remain at large.”
Disappointment stoked Khan’s anger to a fever pitch. He hurled his tools at the floor in fury, causing Zuleika to flinch in alarm. Of course they are still at large! he thought vehemently. For perhaps the one-millionth time, Khan regretted letting Ericsson and the others slip through his grasp the night Marla died. I should have seen to their capture myself, despite the enormity of my grief.
Thought of that grief brought him back to Zuleika’s unwelcome intrusion. “Then what brings you here?” he demanded.
“Concern for you, Lord Khan.” Steeling her nerve, she stepped further into the tomb, her bare feet disturbing the stone shavings strewn upon the ground. Her braided hair was draped over her shoulders. “This is not healthy, my lord,” she insisted, gesturing at the forlorn crypt. “You are here most every night, working until dawn and beyond.” Pained eyes entreated him. “You don’t sleep, you don’t rest … Marla would not have wanted this.”
“Do not presume to tell me my wife’s desires,” Khan upbraided Zuleika, bristling at the mention of Marla’s name. “Nor to criticize the expression of my grief.”
“I lost my love, too,” she reminded him. “But life goes on, even here on this wretched dirtball of a planet.” She stepped closer to Khan, until her supple form was only centimeters away from h
im. “You have to take care of yourself—for all of our sakes. The entire colony is depending on you.” She swallowed hard. “I’m depending on you.”
Memory of Keith Talbot’s death in that sandstorm years ago took the edge off Khan’s anger at being interrupted. Zuleika had indeed suffered as well. “I appreciate your concern,” he told her sincerely, “but there are times when I must be alone with my memories if I am to stay sane.”
“Are you quite certain of that, my lord?” Zuleika purred, pressing her taut body against his side. Her hand caressed his chest and he could feel the warmth radiating from her. “There’s no reason you have to sleep alone tonight, or ever again. I am always here for you.”
Khan was tempted. It had been many months since he had known the comfort of a woman’s touch. Desire stirred him and he clutched her to him. His lips found her throat and Zuleika moaned in delight. A whiff of odorous perfume tantalized his senses. Then her questing fingers brushed against the silver medallion on his chest.
Marla’s medallion.
His wife’s martyred visage suddenly filled his mind, and he relived again that nightmarish moment when she plunged the obsidian dagger into her heart.
“No!” He thrust Zuleika away from him. She staggered backward, caught off guard by his abrupt change of heart.
“Khan?” she gasped. Powdery white handprints adorned her flesh. “What’s the matter?”
“Go,” he instructed her hoarsely. Averting his eyes from her inviting curves, he pointed forcefully at the exit. “Go … and never speak of such things again!”
His tone brooked no discussion. A stricken expression on her face, she scooted out of the grotto. Khan listened to her retreating footsteps disappear down the corridor outside.
When the last echoes of her departure faded away, he approached Marla’s sarcophagus in contrition. A gloved hand gently stroked the marble planes of her face.
“Forgive me, dear one,” he whispered. Marla had given her life for him. How could any woman hope to claim his affections after that? There could be no one else in his life, not while Marla’s death remained unavenged.
Wearily, he retrieved his tools and went back to work.
23
FOUR PLANETARY YEARS LATER
Khan moved his queen into place. “Checkmate.”
“Not again!” Joachim exclaimed, leaning forward to examine the board. His intense blue eyes widened as, with laudable speed, the boy discovered the trap Khan had laid for his king. “You always win!”
“Of course,” Khan chuckled, “but not so swiftly as I once did.” His snow-white hair hung to his shoulders, the color contrasting sharply with his thick black eyebrows. A king of shreds and patches, he wore a padded brown vest that bared much of his broad chest. “You are learning, my young friend.”
Joachim sat opposite Khan on a rough limestone bench in Fatalis’s cavernous meeting hall. Curtains of calcified flowstone draped the walls while the central firepit warmed the vast chamber. A makeshift chessboard rested on the bench between Khan and the boy, the pieces made up of miscellaneous nuts and bolts. Not quite as elegant as the polished onyx and turquoise set Khan had owned back on Earth, but sufficient to play with. He had come to enjoy his daily game with Joaquin’s brilliant young son; the bouts provided a welcome relief from the endless ordeal of life upon Ceti Alpha V.
Vaster than empires, and more slow, the years dragged by. Khan had long since ceased trying to calculate how many Earth-years had passed during their stay here, and even Ceti Alpha V’s longer years were becoming more difficult to reckon now that the seasons had blurred into a never-ending storm of heat, wind, and dust. Only the rapid aging of the children, and the gradual extinction of the native life-forms, marked the passage of time.
Although Joachim was still no more than ten years old, he looked at least fifteen, thanks to the accelerated maturity that was among the gifts bestowed by his superlative genetic heritage. He had grown into a slender, flaxen-haired youth, not quite as stocky as his father, but able-bodied and intelligent beyond his years. Khan often thought of Joachim as the son he’d never had.
Bittersweet memories, never far beneath the surface, arose once more as Khan reached out and lifted his queen from the board. Even after all this time, he still felt the loss of his one true queen—as well as an unquenched craving for revenge, against both Ericsson and Kirk. He fingered the tarnished Starfleet medallion resting against his chest. Recycled electrical wire, looped around his neck, held the emblem in place above his heart.
The medallion was a constant reminder of his unfulfilled oath to bring Marla’s killers to justice—a sacred obligation that haunted him day and night. He had spent many a midnight hour these last five years lying awake upon his lonely bed, longing for the day he would finally avenge his martyred wife.
But this is not that day, Khan knew. Returning his queen to the board, he forced his attention back to the present. “I have another book for you to read,” he informed Joachim, picking up a dog-eared volume from where it rested on the floor. “Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville.”
“Another book?” Joachim regarded the tome with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. Like any growing boy, he preferred exploring the caves and tunnels surrounding Fatalis to reading about a planet he had never seen. Khan wondered what Joachim, raised below a desert wasteland, would make of Melville’s epic sea tale.
“A good book,” he admonished the boy, “is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life before life.”
To his credit, Joachim identified the quotation at once. “Milton?”
“Excellent,” Khan said, pleased that the treasures of his personal library had not been wasted on the youth. He began moving the chess pieces back to their starting positions. “Perhaps another game?”
Before they could begin, however, Joaquin rushed into the chamber. Joachim’s eyes lit up at his father’s arrival, but Khan could tell from the bodyguard’s hasty entrance that something was amiss.
“Your Excellency!” Joaquin exclaimed. His alarmed tone belied his stoic expression. “The Exiles have struck again!”
Khan sprang to his feet, a familiar anger flaring inside his heart. His gloved hand went instinctively to the pistol at his belt. Ericsson and his desert raiders had been harrying Fatalis for years, striking out at the colony’s vulnerable caravans and solar stills, then disappearing back into the rugged badlands that sheltered them.
“Where?” he demanded.
“Azar Gorge,” Joaquin said gruffly. A moment later, two security officers entered the cavern, dragging between them an injured colonist, who bore the unmistakable marks of a grueling trek across the desert sands. His face was cracked and blackened, his eyes nearly swollen shut. Blood stained his badly shredded burnoose. His bare feet looked like gnarled claws. The man’s features were so badly distorted that it took Khan a moment to recognize Vijay Nikore, one of three guards assigned to the gorge, the colony’s primary source of fresh water.
Khan was shocked to hear that the precious hot springs had come under attack. “How could this happen?” he asked harshly, resisting a temptation to strike the haggard survivor, who had already suffered enough. “What of the guards?”
“Forgive us, Lord Khan!” Nikore pleaded through broken teeth. His tongue, swollen from dehydration, made speech difficult, but Khan managed to make out the man’s garbled words. “They came upon us in force, without warning! Spears rained down on us from atop the gorge, killing Rivera and wounding Thomsen. Then they came charging down the ravine like berserkers. Men, women, even children! All armed to the teeth!” The traumatized guard shuddered at the memory. “I was the only survivor….”
I should have posted more guards, Khan thought. But how could I? With these most recent fatalities, the adult population of Fatalis had been reduced to no more than twenty-three men and women. Our security forces are spread too thin already.
The only consolation was that the Exiles must be desp
erate indeed to risk everything in an all-out assault on the gorge. According to his best estimates, Ericsson’s tribe now comprised roughly ten adults, plus an unknown number of off-spring. It pained Khan to realize that the raid on the gorge would help keep the mutinous throng alive a while longer.
“How much water did they steal?” he asked.
“No, Lord Khan, you misunderstand!” Nikore blurted. He flinched in anticipation of his leader’s wrath. “The rebels have taken possession of the gorge. They drove me out into the desert, then barricaded the entrances with boulders.” His charred face grew more agitated. “I believe they hold it still!”
“What!” Khan reacted volcanically to the news, his unleashed fury startling Joachim, who backed away nervously. But Khan barely noticed the youth’s discomfort, transfixed as he was by Nikore’s disturbing report.
The Azar Gorge had long been key to the colony’s survival, and all the more so as several other desert oases and watering holes had gradually dried up over the years. Without the precious water that bubbled up from the gorge’s hot springs, Fatalis would be forced to rely on the meager supplies of morning dew harvested from the various solar stills installed upon the surface. Worse yet, they might be compelled to venture far into the barren wasteland in search of another rare spring—which might or might not exist!
“No,” Khan declared. Ericsson had gone too far. “This shall not stand.” Khan raised his gloved right fist, clenching it before him. “I have tolerated these incursions for too long. The time has come to dispose of Ericsson and his subversive rabble once and for all.”
“We are with you, Your Excellency!” Joaquin said, sounding just as eager to take the battle to their foes. The other officers seconded his support, and even young Joachim looked ready to wage war in Khan’s name. Vijay Nikore struggled to stand upon his deformed feet.
A superior breed, Khan thought proudly, exemplary in strength and spirit! He was touched by these people’s loyalty, even as he wondered mournfully how many of them he would lose in the conflict to come. Our numbers diminish with every year. The eels prey on our young. I can scarce afford to lose a single soul….
