To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (8 page)

Khan nodded. Rao’s vague description had the ring of plausibility; the boundless veldt would be the ideal habitat for such a creature. He stepped closer to the ring of thorns that had failed to preserve Blasko’s life. Droplets of blood glistened upon the top of the spiky brambles. More of the chemist’s blood, or had the beast scratched itself as well?

“Be careful, Your Excellency!” a gruff voice called out from behind him. Khan was not surprised by Joaquin’s rapid arrival upon the scene. “The beast might still be near!”

Khan raised his phaser. “Quite true, my friend,” he agreed. “I shall be on my guard.”

He peered past the wall into the primeval night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster. The starlight, along with the glow of Ceti Alpha VI, provided only meager illumination, however, and even Khan’s superior vision could not completely penetrate the darkness, let alone the concealing grass and brush. There could have been dozens, even hundreds, of stealthy carnivores stalking the savanna and he would not have seen them.

“Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

“In the forests of the night…”

For an instant, he thought he glimpsed two glowing amber eyes staring back at him from the shadows beneath a cluster of palm trees. His finger tightened on the trigger of the phaser, but he was reluctant to waste the weapon’s precious energy unless he was certain of his shot. “Joaquin!” he called out softly. “Come see this!”

But by the time the giant Israeli reached Khan’s side, the luminous orbs had disappeared, dropping beneath a rise in the terrain. “What is it, Lord Khan?” his bodyguard asked.

“Never mind,” Khan said, shaking his head. “Perhaps it was nothing.” He stepped away from the fence, convinced that tracking the beast would have to wait until morning. In the meantime, stronger precautions had to be made against the possibility of another attack. “Build up the fires and double the watch,” he instructed Rao. “Use up all our firewood if necessary. We can gather more tomorrow.”

His eyes probed the camp, searching for safer territory within the enclosure. “Tell everyone to move their blankets closer to the center of the camp, away from the fence. We need to put more distance between—”

Terrified shrieks, coming from the other side of the camp, interrupted Khan in midsentence.
Marla!
he thought in alarm, before realizing that the screams came from a slightly different direction. Snatching up a burning branch from the fire, Khan raced toward the site of the new attack, leaping over the scattered campfires and dodging panicked colonists running in the opposite direction. Khan felt like a salmon fighting its way upstream, but he arrived at the northwest corner of the camp just in time to glimpse a huge, shaggy form partially illuminated by the reddish glow of a dying fire. A helpless human form thrashed
wildly within the creature’s immense jaws. The scent of freshly spilled blood polluted the air.

The monster sprang into the air, its powerful hind legs propelling it over the briar fence.
No!
Khan thought vengefully.
You’ll not escape again!
With lightning-fast reflexes, he fired his phaser at the beast. An incandescent beam of crimson energy sliced through the darkness, striking the creature’s right flank and causing it to emit a tremendous roar of pain and fury.

Momentum carried the wounded monster over the wall into the surrounding brush. For a second, Khan heard it thrash and hiss in the high grass, but the violent noises ceased almost immediately.
Is it dead,
Khan wondered,
or merely lying low?

He was tempted to go out and search for the creature’s body, but common sense dictated that he wait until dawn, especially since there might well be other predators lurking just beyond the briar barrier. Besides, he had other matters to attend to now, like identifying the dead.

“Who?” he asked a pair of bystanders, who had been drawn back to the site by the lethal brilliance of Khan’s phaser beam. Daniel and Amy Katzel were siblings, their genetic profiles differing by only a single chromosome.

“Gorinksy,” Daniel answered.

“And Lutjen,” Amy added.

Two?
Khan’s heart dropped at the news. He had seen only one victim carried off. “Both?” he asked incredulously.

The Katzels nodded in unison. “There were two attacks,” Amy said, “one after another.” She shuddered at the memory.

“Gorinsky was standing guard,” Daniel stated, “but the creature grabbed him before he could fire a single shot.” A
fallen rifle, lying atop the bloodstained earth, verified the man’s story. “Then the second animal came over the fence and pounced on Lutjen….”

So,
Khan thought,
the animals hunt in groups
. A useful piece of data, although purchased at far too dear a cost.
Two men and one woman,
he counted, numbering the casualties. New Chandigarh’s population was shrinking by the moment.

Khan clenched his fist. Rage and frustration gnawed at his soul. He had not brought his people across the galaxy, and three centuries into the future, just to satisfy the blood-thirsty appetites of some ravenous beasts. He snatched up the abandoned rifle and tossed it to Joaquin, who, along with Dr. Hawkins, had lost no time in being at Khan’s side once more.

“Join the others in the center of the camp,” he instructed the Katzels, who eyed Khan’s phaser pistol as though it was their best and only hope. “Joaquin and I will stand watch.”

Khan stood like a statue behind the bloodstained brambles, every one of his superhuman senses focused on the menacing shadows surrounding the camp.
When and where,
he wondered,
will the demons strike again?

He would sleep no more tonight.

Neither, he suspected, would anyone else.

They found the remains of Eric Lutjen less than three meters away from the camp. All that remained of the ill-fated superman was grisly morsels of flesh and bones, including a skull from which every trace of skin had been stripped away. Dried blood splashed the long grass around the ghastly sight. Winged condor-like scavengers of prehistoric proportions had already descended on the creature’s leavings, and the loud report of a rifle shot was required to disperse the enormous birds before Khan could take possession of the bones.

“Gather the remains,” he commanded his party, which had emerged from the camp after sunrise. Noon was still hours away, but the suffocating heat was already reminiscent of Calcutta in March. The sunbaked dirt around the campsite had yielded no useful tracks, but it had been easy enough to follow Lutjen’s blood through the brush to the site of his killer’s feast. “No follower of mine shall be left as carrion, not while it is within my power to prevent.”

He looked in vain for the carcass of the wounded beast itself. Had the creature fed on Lutjen despite its injury, or
had another predator stumbled onto the colonist’s defenseless body? Despite his words, he wondered if he would find the remains of Blasko and Gorinsky as well, or had they been dragged too far into the veldt to be recovered?

It was an inauspicious beginning to their first full day on Ceti Alpha V.

“Oh my God, Khan,” Marla exclaimed, averting her eyes from their gruesome discovery. Her alabaster skin grew paler still, and Khan feared she might vomit. “It’s horrible!”

No doubt such butchery was a rarity in the pristine world of the twenty-third century. Khan came from a different, more violent era, however, and he looked on the bloody spectacle without flinching. “You must learn to be stronger,” he counseled her, not unkindly. “Ours is a raw and primeval world now, with nature red in tooth and claw.”

“I know,” she said a trifle queasily. With obvious effort, she regained her composure, fighting back the nausea through sheer strength of will. She forced herself to watch intently as Parvati Rao collected the scattered pieces. “I’ll try,” she promised Khan.

He smiled, proud of her recovery. He had originally questioned the wisdom of bringing her along on this expedition, but, given the incident with Zuleika Walker, he understood why she hadn’t wanted to be left behind at the camp.
It is well,
he thought,
that she has not proven a liability
.

“Are you quite certain, Lord Khan, that you hit the beast?”

Harulf Ericsson craned his neck and made a show of searching fruitlessly for the wounded monster. A mocking undercurrent in his voice belied the innocuous wording of his query. “Perhaps, in the dark and confusion, your beam went astray?”

As with Marla, Khan had been reluctant to leave Ericsson back at the camp, but for completely different reasons. Better to have the smirking Norseman nearby than give him an opportunity to stir up trouble and sedition in Khan’s absence.
Keep your friends close,
as the saying went,
but your enemies closer
.

“My aim was true,” Khan asserted. There had been no further attacks after he’d shot the escaping beast in midspring, which implied that, if nothing else, the unleashed phaser beam had scared away the pack of predators for the night. Khan found it hard to believe that any mortal beast, however fearsome, could have traveled too far from the camp after being blasted by a phaser set on Kill.

“So where then, Your Excellency, is the animal’s body?” Ericsson asked sardonically, earning him a murderous glare from Joaquin, who hefted his rifle ominously. Khan gestured for Joaquin to back down; for the moment, there were more pressing dangers than Ericsson’s mocking tone.

Where was the body indeed?

“Khan, look!”

Marla pointed toward the west, where a flock of the giant condors was even now descending on some unseen piece of carrion, which appeared to be sheltered beneath a thicket of shrubs and palm saplings approximately one-point-five kilometers away.
Something
was clearly attracting the scavengers: possibly the beast, its two missing victims, or both.

“An excellent observation,” Khan declared, turning to address the entire search party. “We shall investigate at once.”

“As you command,” Ericsson said with questionable sincerity.

Joaquin led the way, hacking his way through the heavy brush with a three-hundred-year-old machete. It was hard
going, especially with the sun blazing high overhead, and Khan’s red coverall was soon soaked with sweat. There was no question of stopping to rest, however, not while the fate of the wounded carnivore remained unclear. Khan held on tightly to the grip of his phaser, just in case the daylight held its own dangers.

A faint lowing noise caught his attention, and he glanced toward the horizon in time to see a herd of immense, bison-like creatures grazing upon a rolling stretch of savanna.
The natural prey of last night’s intruders?
Khan speculated.
And perhaps suitable game for my people as well
.

The party paused briefly to watch the distant herbivores. “It is curious,” Khan remarked to Marla, who appeared grateful for a short respite. “For an alien world, the flora and fauna here seem strangely familiar. Condors, bison, palm trees, great cats of some variety … I would have expected extraterrestrial life-forms to be more exotic.”

“This sort of parallel evolution is surprisingly common throughout the known galaxy,” Marla informed him. Perspiration bathed her lovely features. “You met Mr. Spock, for example. His people, the Vulcans, are remarkably human in appearance, despite having evolved on a different planet in a distant solar system.”

Her chestnut eyes took in the wild landscape. “From the look of things, I’d guess that the biology of Ceti Alpha V is equivalent to Earth’s own Pleistocene Epoch, complete with a tendency toward gigantism in the larger vertebrates.” She glanced upward, where another enormous condor could be seen soaring through the sky. Khan estimated the bird’s wingspan to be nearly six meters across. “Of course,” Marla added, “it’s too early to be certain of anything.”

“Spoken like a historian,” Khan said with a smile. Marla’s theory appealed to him; better to conquer a world of giants than a planet of pygmies. Prehistoric man had survived and prospered during the Pleistocene. He and his people, supremely gifted as they were, were sure to do even better. “Come,” he instructed the others, impatient to get back to the business of empire-building. “Let us complete our trek.”

Arriving at last at the verdant thicket, they were rewarded with the sight of a large, tawny form stretched out beneath the meager shade of a few palms and sycamores. The hindquarters of the motionless beast were lost beneath the underbrush, but the creature’s feline head and forelimbs were clearly visible. Khan’s wide-eyed gaze was instantly drawn to a pair of huge ivory tusks jutting from the great cat’s upper jaw.

“A sabertooth!” he gasped out loud.

“
Smilodon fatalis,
” Marla confirmed, her hypothesis looking better and better. “Such as prowled the Earth over one million years ago. During the Pleistocene, to be exact.”

The beast was at least a meter long, possibly more, while Khan guessed that the massive carcass had to weigh at least two hundred kilograms. Its huge, serrated canines were the size of daggers and its titanic front legs looked strong enough to bring down an ox, let alone a healthy human being. Brown and golden stripes streaked its shaggy pelt, the better to prowl unseen through the high summer grass.

A scorch mark on the creature’s right side made it clear that was indeed the very beast Khan had blasted with the phaser.

“Is it dead?” Joaquin asked. Machete in hand, he placed himself between Khan and the inert sabertooth, but Khan
stepped out from behind his bodyguard in order to inspect the animal more closely.

It certainly looked lifeless enough. The still and silent smilodon lay flat against the earth, its eyes closed. The megacondors, disturbed by the human’s arrival, had flapped away from the carcass, taking roost in the upper branches of some nearby palms, but Khan saw no evidence that the scavengers had begun feeding on it.

What were they waiting for?

Rao, who had borne the awful duty of carrying Lutjen’s mutilated remains in a canvas bag, was less patient. “God-damned monster!” she cursed at the man-eater, charging forward to jab the carcass with the muzzle of her rifle. “You should be extinct, not Lutjen and Blasko and Gorinsky…!”