To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (18 page)

It was their only hope.

“The caves!” he yelled to Joaquin, his voice hoarse from the combined smoke and ash. He cupped a hand over his mouth to protect his lungs. “The den of the sabertooths! We must get the people there!”

Joaquin nodded in understanding, and began herding their party toward the front gate of the compound, now collapsed onto the ground along with the rest of the wire fence. He snatched up a torch from one of the burning huts, to add to the light provided by his wife’s flashlight. The other colonists followed his example before braving the ash-shrouded darkness beyond New Chandigarh.

Khan grabbed on to one fleeing colonist, Daniel Katzel, and ordered him to stay behind and round up any other survivors. “Tell everyone to meet at the cavern on the ridge.” He gestured emphatically toward the east. “We shall be waiting.”

Assuming we make it there alive.

Khan held on to Marla’s hand as they raced out of the
disintegrating compound, their boots trampling over the fallen gate. A wave of despair washed over Khan as he saw fields of ripening crops ablaze, the neatly plowed rows thrown into disarray by the violent contortions of the earth. Before his anguished gaze, lava bombs set fire to acres of wheat, destroying in moments the work of months.

He shook his head once before looking away. They would mourn the crops later, if they survived.
Famine is the least of my concerns,
he thought morosely.

The tremors finally began to subside, at least until the inevitable aftershocks, but gaping chasms and spreading brushfires forced Khan and the others to zigzag through the devastated fields before they reached the open veldt, which also was also being ravaged by the earthquake and volcanoes. Khan gripped his phaser in one hand while holding on to Marla with the other, but, for once, there appeared to be no danger from the sabertooths and other beasts; the planet’s predators were too busy fleeing the ongoing cataclysm to bother with a few, equally panicked humans.

Their torchlit trek through the carnage was like some ghastly fever dream, punctuated by booming explosions and fragmentary glimpses of utter havoc and desolation. Bison, rodents, and other creatures lay dead throughout the sundered plains, their fresh carcasses going ignored by scavengers. A megacondor crashed to the ground, its mighty wings weighed down by a coating of heavy ash. Lush groves of trees were now a collection of jagged stumps and broken timbers; Khan skirted the wrecked copses as much as possible, for fearing of falling tree trunks.

He spotted a live sabertooth pinned beneath the weight
of a toppled palm tree. The great cat thrashed frantically, clawing at the earth with its forepaws and roaring like a demon, but was unable to free itself. In a rare moment of mercy, Khan used his phaser to put the crazed beast out of its misery.

Marla staggered and fell, her merely human endurance unable to keep up with the breakneck pace of Khan and the other colonists. “Go on!” she urged him. Her chest heaved as she gasped for breath, exhausted. “Don’t let me slow you down!”

“Never!” Khan stated emphatically. Her courage and willingness to sacrifice herself provided him with a surge of pride in the midst of the holocaust. “Not while I breathe!”

He scooped her up into his arms and hurried after Joaquin and the others. He kept his eyes fixed on the refugees’ torches, for fear of losing sight of the party. There might still be safety in numbers, despite the overwhelming scale of the disaster.

Finally, after a harrowing journey through the flaming veldt, they arrived at the base of the stony ridge holding the entrance to the smilodons’ onetime lair. Khan was relieved to see that the rugged granite outcropping appeared to be intact, despite the earthshaking tremors. “This way!” Joaquin shouted gruffly at the party, leading the way. Suzette Ling searched the upward path with the beam of her flashlight.

Khan placed Marla back upon the ground, but kept one hand on her shoulder as he helped her climb the steep incline. “No one enter the cave until I give the order!” he called out to the rest of the party, squeezing his way toward the front of the procession. He suspected that any
remaining sabertooths would have already fled the vicinity, but he wished to take no chances. He had already lost several followers to this unthinkable cataclysm; he was not about to lose another colonist to the tusks of a fear-maddened smilodon. “Beware of eels!” he added, as another possible hazard occurred to him.

It is no doubt too much to hope,
Khan cursed silently,
that the fires and tremors might at least kill off those noxious parasites!

A sudden aftershock rattled the cliff face, causing the climbers to drop to their knees and grab on to the ridge to keep from tumbling back down to rock-strewn plain below. An avalanche of gravel, dirt, and ash cascaded down onto the refugees’ heads and shoulders. Khan heard the sound of cracking stone, followed by an urgent cry from Marla. “Khan, watch out!”

Khan glanced up in time to see a large boulder plummeting straight toward him. He threw himself to one side, narrowly evading the boulder—only to hear a panicked shriek cut off abruptly. A hundred kilograms of falling granite collided with mortal flesh and bone, then smashed to earth seconds later.

No!
Khan thought in rage and frustration. He peered down over his shoulder at a lifeless human form half-buried beneath the shattered remains of the boulder. “Who?” he whispered hollowly, dreading the answer.

“Kamala Devi,” Amy Katzel answered, biting back tears.

Khan recalled a brilliant microbiologist who had also enjoyed a brief career as a Bollywood movie idol. His broad shoulders drooped limply, crushed beneath the weight of this latest tragedy.
So much talent and potential,
he grieved,
snuffed out in an instant
.

Like Parvati and MacPherson and Rodriguez….

Despair beckoned, but Khan refused to surrender to hopelessness. Too many people, including Marla, still depended on him. Lifting his head, he waited for the deadly aftershock to subside completely, then completed his ascent to the cave entrance. Pitch-black shadows filled the gaping mouth of the cavern.

As a precaution, he fired a beam of killing energy into the tunnel, in the unlikely event that a smilodon, or perhaps a nest of Ceti eels, waited within. When no bestial cry greeted the phaser blast, he nodded at Joaquin to proceed.

The bodyguard stepped past Khan, his rifle ready. His wife aimed her flashlight ahead of him. Ducking his head beneath the lip of the cave entrance, Joaquin led the other colonists into the sheltering depths while Khan lingered outside, making sure no straggler was left behind.

From his perch upon the ridge, Khan could see clusters of other torches making their way across the midnight landscape below. Many of the scattered groups moved slowly and intermittently, as though possibly burdened by injured comrades among the survivors. He shuddered to imagine how many casualties the colony had suffered.

How many of my people are grievously wounded? How many dead?

“It’s not your fault,” Marla whispered, as if reading his mind. The sensitive historian had not yet followed the rest of the party into the caves. “This was like Pompeii or Krakatoa … there was nothing you could have done.”

Khan drew little comfort from her words, no matter what truth they might hold. He was the colony’s supreme commander; he should have been prepared for any catastrophe. “Go,” he told her softly. “Stay close to Joaquin and
Ling. They will keep you safe.” He guided her firmly but gently toward the mouth of the cave. “I will join you shortly.”

Perhaps sensing his need for solitude, Marla did not contest his decision. “All right,” she said. “Take care of our people. I’ll be waiting when this terrible night is over.”

She disappeared into the cliff face, leaving Khan alone upon the ridge. In the distance, he spied flames and smoke rising from what had once been New Chandigarh.
All our work, all these months of struggle and survival,
he lamented,
swept away in a matter of minutes
.

It was too cruel.

The planet came apart?

Kirk paused in his reading. According to Chekov, Khan claimed that Ceti Alpha VI exploded six months after he and his followers arrived on this very planet, resulting in a global cataclysm that all but destroyed the world’s ability to support life. But what had caused the disaster in the first place?

“I’ve never understood this,” he said, lifting his gaze from Khan’s journal. He glanced upward, as though peering through the roof of the cavern at the desolate wasteland above. “How could Ceti Alpha VI have exploded? This system seemed perfectly stable when we left Khan here, nineteen years ago.” He shook his head in confusion. “Planets don’t just explode.”

“This is true,” Spock agreed. Despite the weight of his environmental suit, he appeared completely at ease; Kirk envied his Vulcan strength and endurance. “Unlike, say, the Genesis Planet, whose matrix was composed of unstable protomatter, conventional planets are not capable of
spontaneous detonation. Other cosmological factors must have been at work.”

“Such as?” Kirk prompted.

Spock gave the matter some thought. “It is impossible to determine for certain, at least not without a comprehensive gravimetric analysis, but it is possible that a miniature black hole, perhaps ejected from a binary system elsewhere, passed through the Ceti Alpha system. Its tremendous gravitational pull could have literally torn Ceti Alpha VI apart while simultaneously affecting the orbit of Ceti Alpha V.” Spock arched a speculative eyebrow. “Such a disaster is theoretically possible, and fits the description provided by Khan.”

Kirk nodded. Trapped as Khan was on a primitive world, without any advanced astronomical sensors, he would have had no way to know for certain what had caused the cataclysm, but he surely would have been able to observe the disappearance of Ceti Alpha VI … and feel the effects of its passing.

Makes sense,
Kirk thought regarding Spock’s theory.
More or less
. “Shouldn’t we have noticed a black hole approaching the system when we were here before?”

“Not necessarily, captain. A black hole with mass sufficient to destroy Ceti Alpha VI might still have had an extremely small Schwarzchild radius.” Spock was referring to the hole’s outer boundary, the point of no return beyond which neither matter or energy could escape. “If the hole was traveling through empty space, as it would have been en route to the Ceti Alpha system, there might have been very little evidence of its passage.”

I suppose,
Kirk thought. Spock’s explanation, plausible as it was, did not entirely assuage his sense of guilt for having
missed the approach of the black hole so many years ago, if that was indeed what had set off the catastrophe.
It’s possible we may never know for sure what really happened here
.

“What about some sort of artificial planet-killer?” McCoy suggested. The doctor leaned against the wall of the grotto, letting the crumbling limestone support his weight. “Like that doomsday machine we ran into way back when?”

Spock considered the notion. “Possible,” he concluded, “but improbable. That particular mechanism was singularly methodical in its operation; it is unlikely that a similar device would have destroyed Ceti Alpha VI but spared the rest of the solar system.”

“It was just a suggestion,” McCoy muttered.

Kirk glanced at the chronometer on his environmental suit. They had been out of touch with Sulu for more than an hour now.
We ought to return to the surface soon,
he realized. Fortunately, many of the journal entries were brief or repetitive, containing only a terse listing of rations consumed, crops yielded, minor disciplinary infractions, and so on. He skipped over these entries in search of the overall history of the colony.
I can always examine the book more closely later on,
he reasoned.

The murky illumination made deciphering Khan’s intricate handwriting difficult, and Kirk found himself pining for his reading glasses, which remained back aboard the
Yakima
. He had gotten about two-thirds of the way through the journal when a faint noise from outside the grotto caused him to look up from the book in surprise. “Did you hear that?” he asked aloud.

Neither Spock nor McCoy had time to respond before a pair of fists burst through the wall behind the doctor. A
muscular arm locked itself around the McCoy’s throat, causing him to gasp for breath. Kirk and Spock reached for their phasers even as an unexpected figure appeared in the entrance to the grotto. “Drop your weapons,” the newcomer barked, “or my friend will break your companion’s neck!”

The speaker was a striking blond woman, who looked several decades younger than Kirk. Human in appearance, she aimed a wooden crossbow at Kirk while glaring at him and Spock with icy blue eyes. Her baleful expression made it clear she was deadly serious. “Your weapons,” she repeated harshly. “Now.”

A strangled croak from McCoy added emphasis to her threat.

“All right,” Kirk said. Nodding at Spock, he placed his phaser down on top of Marla’s sarcophagus. Spock did likewise, his stoic Vulcan features betraying not a flicker of trepidation. “Let him go,” Kirk told the woman, gesturing toward McCoy. “We don’t mean you any harm.”

“Quiet!” the woman snapped. Keeping her weapon squarely pointed at Kirk’s head, she stepped farther into the murky tomb, allowing more intruders to scramble through the open doorway. “Take their weapons,” she instructed her cohorts. Kirk winced as their phasers were snatched up by eager hands. Almost as an afterthought, the woman shouted to her accomplice outside the grotto. “Let the hostage breathe … for now.”

The arm around McCoy’s throat relaxed slightly, and Kirk heard the doctor suck in the sere, stagnant air of the cavern. “Are you all right, Bones?” he asked, risking another outburst from the mystery woman.

“Well enough,” McCoy croaked, the color slowly returning
to his face. “I told you we should have gone to Yosemite, though.”