To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (3 page)

McCoy finally broke the funereal hush. “According to my tricorder, the air is definitely breathable.” He peered at the lighted display panel on his instrument. “Slight traces of craylon gas, but nothing our lungs can’t handle.”

Kirk took the doctor’s word for it and unfastened the airtight seal of his helmet. Lifting the headgear from his shoulders, he took an experimental breath. To his relief, he did not fall over, gasping.

The air was hot and dry, but just as breathable as McCoy
had promised. Although uninhabited since Khan’s escape from Ceti Alpha V a year ago, the shelter still smelled of unwashed human bodies crammed into close quarters for far too long.

I left more than seventy colonists here nineteen years ago,
Kirk recalled.
How many of them survived in this miserable hovel?
Chekov had reported seeing only a couple of dozen followers with Khan, all of them noticeably younger than their hate-crazed leader. The explosive demise of
Reliant
, however, had made a final body count impossible.
Besides McGivers, how many men and women perished in this godforsaken place?

“Shades of
Robinson Crusoe,
” McCoy murmured, having removed his own helmet. He ran a gloved finger over the casing of a jury-rigged air purifier mounted to one wall, leaving a trail in the yellow dust covering the inactive mechanism. He shook his head at the meager living conditions implied by the ill-equipped shelter.

“Perhaps,” Spock agreed, “if Robinson Crusoe was a genetically engineered superman.” He rested his matte-black helmet onto one of the empty cots. “One can only speculate whether ordinary humans could have survived so long under such adverse conditions.”

McGivers didn’t,
Kirk thought. The face of the lovely redheaded historian rose from his memory like a restless spirit. He had not known her well, but she had been one of his crew, before he left her behind with Khan and the others.
She chose to stay with Khan,
he reminded himself,
but did I leave her any choice? It was that or a court-martial…
.

Remembering what Khan had told Chekov about McGivers’ death, Kirk looked about cautiously for the sealed terrarium in which Khan had kept his deadly Ceti eels. To
his surprise, the transparent container was nowhere to be seen, although a circular impression atop a dusty tabletop hinted at where the terrarium had once rested.

That’s peculiar,
he thought. Had Khan brought his vile “pets” with him when he escaped the planet? If so, the creatures must have died when
Reliant
exploded.

“Looks like they left in a hurry,” McCoy said, toying with a ceramic cup he found next to a pile of dirty plates and utensils. “They left everything behind.”

Kirk nodded. He had noticed the same thing. “After eighteen Earth-years, I imagine they were sick of looking at them,” he guessed.
Plus, Khan was doubtless in a rush to claim his revenge
. A shelf of antique books caught his eye, and he scanned the titles on the spines of the volumes.
King Lear. Moby-Dick. Paradise Lost
.

Kirk was surprised that Khan had abandoned his precious library, but only for a moment.
After all those years, his superior brain must have memorized every word
.

“Look at this,” McCoy said. He had stumbled across an old Starfleet-issue medkit. Blowing the dust off its lid, he opened the kit, which turned out to be almost completely depleted of first-aid supplies. Only a few skinny rolls of bloodstained gauze remained, along with a broken hypospray and a handful of empty medication cartridges. “Dear Lord,” the doctor whispered.

Kirk remembered how appalled McCoy had been, during their trip to twentieth-century San Francisco, at the barbaric medical technology of the time. He could well imagine the doctor’s dismay at finding even worse conditions in their own era.

McCoy glanced around the forlorn shelter. “Genetically engineered or not, how on earth did Khan and his people
survive being cooped up in these broken-down cargo bays for eighteen years?”

“As a matter of fact, that was not what occurred,” Spock said.

“What?” McCoy reacted. He turned toward their Vulcan companion, who surveyed the habitat’s interior with a cool, analytical gaze. “What do you mean by that?”

“Surely, Doctor, you did not believe that these refurbished cargo carriers comprised the entirety of the survivors’ dwellings.” Spock gestured toward the shelter’s sparse decor. “Use your logic. Do you see the resources to sustain a working colony, no matter how rudimentary? Where are the foodstuffs produced?”

Good questions,
Kirk thought, even though he suspected he already knew the answers.

“So what’s the story?” McCoy asked. Despite his skeptical tone, Kirk thought he caught a trace of hope in the doctor’s voice, as though he was relieved to hear that the castaways’ lives might not have been as bleak as they first appeared. “Don’t tell me Khan built a Shangri-La just over the next ridge. This entire planet is one big wasteland.”

“Precisely,” Spock agreed. “The surface of Ceti Alpha V is nearly incapable of supporting life, which is why, logically, we must look beneath the surface.”

“That’s right,” Kirk confirmed. “Kyle and the rest of the
Reliant
survivors reported finding some sort of underground caverns after Khan stranded them on the planet. Unfortunately, they were in no shape to explore them at the time.”

Kirk felt a renewed surge of anger at Khan as he recalled the madman’s brutal treatment of
Reliant
’s crew. Keeping only the engine-room company, whom he forced into service via the
mind-warping Ceti eels, Khan had banished the rest of the crew—some three hundred men and women—to the planet’s surface, but not before venting eighteen years of pent-up fury on the innocent Starfleet personel. Throats had been cut, and bones broken, in a vicious prelude to the massacre at Regula I. At least ten victims had not survived their injuries, and the rest had been too hungry and hurting to do much more than survive.

Khan’s idea of poetic justice, no doubt,
Kirk thought resentfully.
Never mind that not one of those people was responsible for his exile here!

“I don’t remember anything about caverns,” McCoy protested. He hesitated, a look of uncertainty upon his face. “At least I don’t think I do.”

“You weren’t exactly yourself after Spock’s death,” Kirk reminded him gently. “You had other things on your mind.”

Spock’s
katra
, among other things.

“In my mind, you mean,” McCoy retorted, giving the Vulcan a dirty look. “But I guess I can be forgiven for blanking on a debriefing or two.” He glanced down at the scuffed duritanium floor of the shelter. “Caves, you say?”

Kirk nodded. “Kyle mentioned something about an access panel in the floor. Let’s look for that.”

“Of course, Captain,” Spock said.

Borrowing Kirk’s tricorder, the science officer scanned the floor. Kirk watched intently, holding his breath.
Where the devil is that panel?

An electronic beep announced that the tricorder had found something. His gaze fixed on the sensor display, Spock crossed the compartment until he came to a stretch of floor covered by a torn canvas tarp. He kneeled and
yanked the tarp aside with his free hand, exposing a hinged metal grille embedded in the floor. Rising, he nodded at the grille knowingly. “As I surmised, the fresher air is rising from somewhere below, from an underground cavern, either natural or otherwise.”

Kirk opened the grille. A dusty steel ladder led down into a murky, unlit shaft.
What are you hiding down there, Khan?
he asked silently, but the vengeful tyrant was beyond answering.
What answers are buried beneath these huts?

The captain made an instant decision. “Let’s go,” he declared, donning his helmet once more. He activated the suit’s built-in searchlight and stepped onto the top rung of the ladder. “I want to see what’s down there.”

“Are you sure that’s wise, Jim?” McCoy asked. Nevertheless, he dutifully reached for his own helmet.

Kirk paused upon the ladder. “Mr. Spock, do you detect any structural instability below?”

“Not in the immediate vicinity, Captain.” He aimed the tricorder directly at the yawning shaft. “The dense mineral contains trace amounts of kelbonite, making it difficult to scan beyond, say, one hundred thirty-two point six meters.”

Kirk smiled at his friend’s unerring precision. “We’ll take our chances then.” He gave both men a serious look. “Our suits should protect us from any lurking eels, but keep a watch out anyway.” He tapped the type-2 phaser affixed to the belt of his environmental suit. “If you see one, shoot to kill.”

“No kidding,” McCoy muttered. The doctor had seen firsthand the injuries an immature eel had inflicted on Chekov’s cerebral cortex.
Thank goodness the damage wasn’t permanent,
Kirk thought.

He activated his helmet’s searchlight and resumed his descent down the ladder. The metal rungs were scratched
from constant use and wobbled unnervingly. Kirk breathed a sigh of relief when he reached the bottom of the shaft, roughly fifty meters below the compartment above.

Turning away from the ladder, which rattled beneath the weight of first Spock, then McCoy, Kirk swept the darkness with the beam of his searchlight. He found himself in a lifeless cavern, which appeared to be the nexus of several subterranean tunnels that radiated out from the central shaft like the spokes of a wheel.

The walls of the tunnels were rough and uneven, as was the stony floor beneath his feet. Jagged stalactites hung from the ceiling, even though the dripping moisture that had formed them appeared to have dried out long ago. The massive excavation reminded him of the underground mining complex on Janus VI; Kirk half-expected to see a Horta come burrowing through the walls at any minute.

Reaching the floor of the cavern, Spock and McCoy added their own searchlights to his. The added illumination exposed curtains of solid calcite adorning the walls.

“Good Lord,” McCoy murmured, taking in the gloomy ambience of the sepulchral vault. Kirk wondered if McCoy was also remembering Janus VI, or perhaps the menacing corridors of Roger Korby’s underground sanctuary on Exo III.

“Fascinating,” Spock remarked. He aimed the tricorder down one of the narrow tunnels. “I’m detecting a rather extensive network of underground chambers, linked by branching corridors.” An opened vent in his helmet allowed him to sniff the air, which smelled only slightly better than the sour atmosphere in the cargo bays. “The fresher air is being generated in some of the chambers ahead. Possibly gardens of some variety?”

Kirk was impressed. “How large is this network?”

“Impossible to say, Captain,” Spock replied. “As I mentioned, the presence of kelbonite makes long-range scanning difficult. There may even be additional levels deeper below us.”

Kirk ran the palm of his glove over a section of wall that showed evidence of being chiseled by hand. “Did Khan and his people carve out this entire installation?” Even with eighteen years of superhuman labor, it seemed an enormous task to complete.

Spock shook his head. “More likely, they adapted an existing network of caverns for their own use. Portions of these catacombs appear to have been formed by natural geological processes, while other regions have been expanded and excavated by artificial effort.”

“Perhaps they were driven underground,” McCoy speculated, “by the cataclysm that devastated the surface?”

“A highly probable supposition, Doctor,” Spock said.

Kirk glanced upward at the thick limestone roof of the cavern. A thought occurred to him and he activated the communicator in his helmet. “Kirk to
Yakima
,” he said. “Can you read me, Sulu?”

Static alone greeted his hails.

Just what I was afraid of,
Kirk thought. Between the storm, the duritanium crates, and some five hundred meters of solid rock, they were effectively cut off from their ship.
Just the way Chekov and Terrell were, when Khan ambushed them
.

“Looks like we’re on our own,” he said with shrug, knowing that Spock and McCoy had heard his futile attempt to contact Sulu.

“Well, that’s a comforting turn of events,” McCoy drawled.

Now what?
Kirk thought, contemplating the profusion of
tunnels leading away from the cavern. If Spock was right, it could take hours—if not days—to fully explore this underground labyrinth. This was a job for full-fledged archeological survey, not a trio of vacationing Starfleet officers.

Once again, he asked himself just what he expected to find here.
A sworn affidavit from Khan, exempting me from all responsibility for the castaways’ fate?

That hardly seemed likely.

“Captain,” Spock called out. “I believe you should come here.”

The science officer had wandered partway down one of the murky corridors, his searchlight probing the darkness ahead. A hint of excitement in his voice, discernible only to those who knew him well, galvanized Kirk, sending him running as fast as his weighted gravity boots would allow.

The tunnel was a short one, leading to a dead end about fifty paces away. Kirk found Spock facing the calciteencrusted wall at the end of the corridor, scanning the obstruction with his tricorder. “What is it?” he asked. As far as Kirk could tell, the wall ahead appeared indistinguishable from the crumbling limestone all around them.

“This barrier is not what it appears to be,” Spock reported. “I was searching for a section of cavern that was low in kelbonite when I discovered that this particular wall is, in fact, composed of reconstituted thermoconcrete, fashioned to mimic the look and texture of natural limestone.”

Kirk’s eyes widened. Thermoconcrete was a silicon-based building material used by Starfleet to construct emergency shelters and, on at least one occasion, to patch the wounds of an injured Horta. Kirk remembered leaving
Khan with a quantity of thermoconcrete when he dropped off the colonists on Ceti Alpha V years ago.

“Well, I’ll be!” McCoy blurted, joining them before the ersatz cave wall. “Sure would have fooled me.”