To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (19 page)

“That’s enough,” the woman ordered. She took a moment to inspect her surroundings, scowling as her gaze lighted on the sarcophagus and its sentimental inscription. From her expression, and from the curious glances of her associates, Kirk guessed that their captors had never entered the crypt before. In fact, he would have been willing to bet good money that none of these strangers had even known the hidden grotto was here.

Were these people the reason Khan had disguised the entrance in the first place?

Like the woman, the other invaders were young, blond, and distinctly feral in appearance. Their golden tresses were wild and unshorn, while their sunbaked faces were smudged with dirt and soot. Their ragged clothing, such as it was, seemed to have been cobbled together from a motley assortment of scraps and debris, including old rags, blankets, upholstery, and broken lengths of electrical cable. Cannibalized circuit boards and transtators served as jewelry of a sort, along with various rings and bangles carved out of bone and ivory.

They looked, in other words, much the way Khan and his followers had looked, right after their escape from Ceti Alpha V.
I don’t understand,
Kirk thought.
I thought all of Khan’s people died aboard the
Reliant
, during that final battle in the Mutara Nebula?

He did not recognize any of the strangers from Khan’s short stay aboard the
Enterprise
. Judging from their ages, he guessed that these were all second-generation superhumans, conceived during Khan’s exile on this planet. But why hadn’t they left Ceti Alpha V with the others?

The woman seemed equally puzzled by the presence of the three Starfleet officers. “Who are you?” she demanded. Her voice had a faintly Scandinavian accent. The tusk of a long-dead sabertooth dangled on a cord around her neck. “What are you doing here?”

Kirk welcomed the chance to explain. “My name is James T. Kirk.” Habit almost caused him to add, “Captain of the
Starship Enterprise
,” until he remembered that his starship was still in spacedock, many light-years away. Still, there was no reason to advertise that fact just yet. “We’re here on a peaceful miss—”

But his name alone provoked an immediate reaction, interrupting his attempt to put his captors’ minds at ease. “Kirk!” one of the young savages blurted, casting a shocked look at the woman with the crossbow. “Did you hear, Astrid? It’s he, the Abandoner!”

Kirk kicked himself mentally.
I should have realized that I’d be pretty infamous among this crew. After all, I’m the one who exiled their parents here
. As inconspicuously as possible, he tucked Khan’s journal beneath his arm.
The Abandoner? Is that how these people remember me?

“I heard, Cesare,” the woman, whose name was apparently Astrid, replied. She eyed Kirk dubiously, as though he had just claimed to be Kahless or Zefram Cochrane. “I’m simply not sure I believe it.” She cast a worried glance at the doorway, perhaps aware that it was the only way in or out of the grotto. “There may be others. We should leave, as soon as I take care of one more thing.”

She extended an open hand toward one of her followers, who immediately surrendered his captured phaser to Astrid, who briskly examined the weapon. “Exquisite,” she pronounced, before taking aim at the marble sarcophagus.
“A phaser, correct? I wonder if this weapon is half as powerful as we’ve been told?”

Realizing her intention, McCoy reacted in horror. “Wait!” That’s a woman’s tomb!” Kirk placed a restraining hand upon the doctor’s arm, to keep McCoy from lunging forward and provoking the guards. “You can’t just vandalize it!”

Astrid sneered at the doctor’s protests. “Not just any woman,” she replied. “Khan’s human whore.” She gestured contemptuously at the magnificent sarcophagus. “She deserves no such tribute.”

Kirk, too, was sickened by what he realized was about to happen, but there was nothing he could do.
I can’t risk our lives for a relic, no matter how beautifully crafted
.

The woman fired the phaser. The crimson beam struck Marla’s marble portrait, turning Khan’s flawless recreation of his wife’s beauty into a charred ruin. Polished stone cracked and crumbled to ash before Kirk’s eyes. He couldn’t help feeling as though McGivers were dying a second time.

I’m sorry, Marla,
he thought.

The phaser was not set to disintegrate the sarcophagus, but it made a wreck of the memorial regardless. Hours of loving effort were undone in seconds, rendering the sculpture completely unrecognizable. For good riddance, Astrid turned the beam on the engraved inscription as well, eradicating the last vestige of Marla’s identity as thoroughly as that of a disgraced Egyptian queen.

“Dammit, Jim,” McCoy muttered in disgust. “This is obscene.” He glared at the mysterious woman. “She didn’t have to do this!”

“Wanton destruction is seldom logical,” Spock commented. A tinge of regret colored his voice. “More’s the pity.”

Astrid apparently disagreed. “That’s better,” she said finally, releasing the trigger. She eyed the disfigured sarcophagus with obvious satisfaction before turning her attention back to Kirk and the others. “Time to go,” she declared.

At her direction, the barbaric youths escorted Kirk and his comrades out of the desecrated tomb. Additional castaways, all armed with spears and bows, waited outside the grotto, including a muscular youth who withdrew his arms from the punctured cavern wall. Kirk counted half a dozen young superhumans in all. Flickering torches, fueled by moss and dried dung, cast ominous shadows on the walls of the catacombs. Kirk watched with concern as a pair of castaways toyed with the captured phasers; he couldn’t help remembering that the weapons were set on Kill.

A powerful hand shoved Kirk from behind, propelling him down a winding tunnel, which proved to be the first of many as their mysterious captors led the three friends through a bewildering maze of caverns and corridors, transporting them ever deeper into the hidden sanctuary beneath the planet’s surface. Kirk tried to keep track of the various twists and turns, but soon doubted his ability to retrace their steps back to the abandoned cargo carriers. He could only hope that Spock’s computerlike mind was coping better with the devious labyrinth.

The temperature dropped several degrees as they descended into the lower depths of the cave system, and Kirk was grateful for the multiple layers of insulation provided by his environmental suit. His eyes and ears kept busy as he marched, searching for possible avenues of escape, as well as for hints of the castaways’ lives down here. At one
point he thought he smelled some sort of organic fertilizer, and caught a glimpse of an underground garden in one of the adjacent chambers. Polished obsidian mirrors reflected and focused the light provided by a pair of old-fashioned high-intensity plasma lights that Kirk vaguely remembered including in the colonists’ supplies many years ago. He heard a portable generator sputtering somewhere nearby, and was impressed that Khan and his people had managed to keep the aging mechanism running for more than eighteen Earth-years.

Looks like Spock was right about the survivors growing their food underground,
Kirk thought.
With a working protein resequencer, they might even be able to convert the raw organic crops into a viable diet
.

Other chambers appeared to have been converted into barracks, storerooms, and even an armory stocked with primitive weapons: swords, spears, and crossbow bolts.
For defense against wild animals,
he speculated,
or some other threat?
In theory, all of the planet’s larger predators were now extinct.

Finally, after a long and exhausting hike, they arrived at some sort of meeting hall. Stone benches, carved from preexisting limestone formations, surrounded a firepit stacked with lumpy fragments of coal. Kirk guessed that, since the cataclysm, timber had become too precious to use for fuel. A wispy gray tendril of smoke rose from the burning embers, disappearing into a jagged shaft in the ceiling. Overlapping sheets of flowstone curtained the walls.

“Up against the wall,” Astrid ordered, and her cohorts lined the three men up against a hardened tapestry of rock, as though preparing them to face a firing squad. “Remove your armor.”

Damn,
Kirk thought, as he reluctantly began to shed his environmental suit. Without the protective outfits, there was no way they could escape back to the planet’s surface. He wondered if Sulu was already searching for them. If so, his efforts were doubtless in vain; they were clearly too far underground to be detected by the
Yakima
’s sensors.

Summoned by the exciting shouts of their captors, more men and women came running into the torchlit hall. The new arrivals were obviously of the same breed and generation as Astrid and the others; in their patchwork attire, they reminded Kirk of J. M. Barrie’s Lost Boys, not to mention the feral “onlies” of Miri’s planet. He estimated that there were at least twenty adults, along with a smattering of children and toddlers.

Kirk had to set down Khan’s journal in order to remove the outer layer of his environmental suit. Beneath the protective shells, each man wore a tight-fitting black bodysuit equipped with microprocessors to monitor his life signs. Kirk could not help noticing how much cooler the cavern felt now that he had lost a layer of insulation.

To his dismay, the exiles confiscated Khan’s journal, along with Spock’s tricorder and data disks. He was tempted to protest, but thought better of it. Uncovering Khan’s past was no longer his top priority.
If I’m not careful,
he realized,
we could end up history ourselves
.

Astrid waited until her people snatched away the discarded segments of the environmental suits, then strode up to confront Kirk and his fellow prisoners. “My name is Astrid Ericsson,” she identified herself proudly. One of the captured phasers now resided in her hand. “I am in command here.”

“Ericsson?” Kirk’s eyes widened in comprehension. “Daughter of Harulf?”

Azure eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do you know my father?”

Kirk hesitated. He didn’t want to call further attention to Khan’s journal, which currently rested at the feet of one of Astrid’s lieutenants; so far, the youthful castaways had been more interested in their captives’ high-tech artifacts—the suits, tricorders, and phasers—than in a musty old book. “I’m James T. Kirk, remember? I met all of the original colonists years ago.”

In truth, Kirk barely remembered Ericsson. Khan had commanded more than seventy superhumans, all of whom had spent most their time in the
Enterprise
’s brig before arriving at Ceti Alpha V. Only Khan had made any sort of an impression on Kirk.

Astrid appeared to accept his explanation, though. “Perhaps you are he,” she said cautiously. Turning her attention to Spock, she scrutinized the Vulcan’s exotic features. “The stories say that the Abandoner had an alien henchman, a humanoid with pointed ears, who looked like Satan.”

Without warning, she grabbed Spock’s arm and savagely bit down on his hand, tearing the skin. Green blood welled up, filling the indentations left behind by her teeth. She spit more emerald droplets onto the ground.

“Good God!” McCoy exclaimed, as shocked as Kirk at the young woman’s savagery. “Are you out of your mind?”

Spock, however, took the incident in stride. “There are less invasive ways to confirm my ancestry,” he observed coolly. “The tricorder, for instance.”

Regardless, the sight of the inhuman green blood appeared to satisfy Astrid. Turning back toward Kirk, she got straight to the point. “Where is Khan?” she demanded.

Kirk was taken aback by the question. “You don’t know?”

“All we know,” she said heatedly, “is that the Tyrant, along with all his minions, vanished sometime in the last year.” She gestured toward the surrounding caverns. “This was his stronghold … at least until our scouts reported it abandoned many weeks ago.”

The Tyrant? Khan?

Kirk struggled to keep up with these unexpected twists. “I’m confused,” he admitted. “If you’re not with Khan, who are you?”

“We are the Exiles,” she declared, raising her chin imperiously. “Sworn foes of the despot, Khan Noonien Singh, and all who serve him. For over a decade, we have lived only to bring his diabolical reign to an end.”

The last of the dissidents,
Kirk realized,
led by the daughter of Khan’s old nemesis
. Kirk recalled from Khan’s journal how divisions within the colony had headed toward a breaking point in the years after the cataclysm.
I guess Khan chose to leave these rebels behind when he made his escape from the planet
.

“Fascinating,” Spock remarked. “It appears that the Eugenics Wars repeated themselves three hundred years later, pitting superhuman against superhuman once more.”

That explains that armory I glimpsed earlier,
Kirk thought.
Khan and the Exiles were fighting a civil war here, right up to the point that Khan hijacked the
Reliant.
Khan probably sealed up Marla’s crypt right before he left the planet, in order to keep the Exiles from desecrating his loving memorial—just as Astrid did, the first chance she got
.

Furthermore, he reasoned, Astrid and the rest of the Exiles must not have realized that Khan was missing until well after
Reliant
’s crew was rescued from the planet. Not
too surprising, given the hostile relations between the two tribes; the Exiles probably kept pretty clear of Khan’s territory until just recently.

“Enough!” Astrid snapped. “You cannot deceive us with such transparent playacting.” She fondled the phaser in her grip and glared venomously at Kirk. “As leader of our tribe, I have sworn a blood oath to bring down the Tyrant. Do not attempt to shield him from our vengeance!”

“But Khan is dead!” McCoy blurted out. “He was blown to atoms nearly a year ago!”

Astrid reeled backward, looking as though she had just been struck by lightning. But she quickly regained her composure—and hostile attitude. “That’s impossible! Do you take me for a fool?”

“He’s telling the truth,” Kirk insisted. “Khan and his people escaped Ceti Alpha V in a stolen starship, but the ship was soon destroyed in battle.” He omitted mentioning the Genesis Device, which would only raise more questions in the woman’s mind. “There were no survivors.”