The next image was of a more somber scene. Rain hesitated, and realized what she was looking at: a state funeral, but one of such huge scope it dwarfed that of an ancient pharaoh. She saw Noonien Singh’s face upon a towering, black-bordered banner standing tall beside the white minarets of the Taj Mahal. His funeral, she realized.
“He died in 2172, having lived for more than two hundred years,” Bashir told her, sensing the question before she voiced it.
Not soon enough. Rain wanted to say it out loud, but she couldn’t, afraid of the response she might invoke.
Out of sight of the troopers, they quietly slipped into the companionway that ran the length of G Deck. O’Donnel’s voice was low and intense. “You realize what this means? We’re on borrowed time here, Shaun.”
He nodded, thinking it through. Most of the Botany Bay’s sleepers had been on The List. They’d been on borrowed time since the very beginning.
Noonien Singh had made it very clear, chasing some of them, men like Jack Roykirk, all the way to the Atlantic after Khan’s tanks had rolled over the concrete wall around Paris, after he had rained nuclear fire down on London. The List was a document that Singh’s lieutenant Joaquin Weiss had compiled, of all the best thinkers and scientific minds, the greatest intellects that Earth had to offer. While Khan’s soldiers marched across the world, his agents ranged even farther, kidnapping, coercing, or simply buying off every genius he could find. Khan didn’t just want the world; he wanted the future, and the minds who would shape it. Those that went with him became little more than slaves to Khan’s war machine. Those that defied him were marked for death.
It was Wilson Evergreen who brought them together in Nevada. He gathered as many as he could from the ones who escaped Khan’s net, engineers like Roykirk, Nobel-winning theoretical physicists like Andrei Novakovich, genius cosmologists like Geoff Mandel, and more.
Wilson was a strange, studied man with his odd turns of phrase and piercing gaze. A multi-billionaire before Khan had plunged the world into war, Evergreen owned Groom Lake, buying up the former USAF base from the crumbling, cash-poor American government. He had rockets, he had men and machinery. He offered them a way out. An escape clause.
Shaun Christopher had thrown in with him because he had nothing left. Dorothy and the girls were gone, their lives snuffed out by a Khanate-backed terror cell in just one of a thousand bombings, assassinations, and sabotages designed to soften up America for the inevitable invasion. It had worked in Russia, in China, and in Australia. It would work in America too. It was just a matter of time.
A hard dart of memory cut into Christopher’s thoughts.
The night before the launch, out on the pad. In the distance, the moonlight gleaming off Botany Bay’s sister ships, Savannah and Mayflower, where they rested on the alpha and delta pads. In defiance of safety regulations, he’d come across Evergreen smoking a thin cigar beneath the engine bells of the silent DY-102.
“Those things will be the death of you, Doc.”
Wilson gave him a grin in return. “If I’m lucky.”
“Why aren’t you coming with us? You never did say. God knows, you’ve put more of yourself into this project than anyone else on Earth.”
“Someone has to remain, Shaun. Someone has to see how it plays out.”
“Khan’s going to destroy this planet. I know the kind of man he is. He’ll burn it to ashes if he can’t rule it all.”
Evergreen gave him a hooded look and said something that made his blood run cold. “What makes you think he won’t win?”
The next day they broke orbit; contact with mission control was lost a few hours later when a suicide bomber detonated herself inside the command bunker. Savannah and Mayflower never made it off the ground. From then on, they’d been on their own.
“Sooner or later, someone is going to realize who we are, and what the Botany Bay represents.”
Christopher gave a slow nod, thinking of the cargo they carried down on I Deck.
“When they do,” she continued, “they’ll kill us all.”
Shaun shot her a look. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what the situation is, Shannon.”
“Really?” She glared at him, her hands on her hips. “Think of it this way. Suppose in 2010 we found a schooner off the coast of New England, full of guys from 1781 who had proof positive that Benedict Arnold had actually founded America, and that George Washington was a killer and a traitor? What would happen to them?” Shannon took a shaky breath. “We’ve woken up in the middle of Khan Noonien Singh’s bloody legacy, and that makes every one of us a threat to the lie of his empire.”
Christopher pushed past her. “This is…It’s like a nightmare. Tell me we’re still in the cryo-pods, still dreaming.”
“Nobody dreams during cryo-sleep. This is the real thing, Shaun.” When he didn’t respond, she stepped toward him. “Shaun?”
He held a finger to his lips and pointed. In the shadows, in the lee of a wiring conduit, a figure was barely visible. “Who’s there?” he demanded, after a moment.
The petite, elfin girl from the Defiance stepped into the light, the one with the strange dappling on her skin. “Dax,” said Shannon. “You’re their science officer.”
“That’s right.”
Shaun’s jaw hardened, as suddenly the possibility of being forced to do something dangerous pressed itself to the front of his thoughts. “How long have you been standing there?”
“‘We’re on borrowed time,’” Dax repeated. She kept her hands flat at her sides, trying to appear non threatening. “Long enough, Captain Christopher.”
“Then we have a problem,” Shannon said darkly.
Dax shook her head. “No. In fact, what we have here is an opportunity.”
5
“I have kept things hidden,” Dax told them. “There is nothing in the Botany Bay’s logs I cannot read. Any file corruption there was easily correctable.” For the moment, she didn’t mention that what information the Khanate’s files did have on the DY-102 bore a high-level security encryption. “The data I released to the crew was what I wanted them to see.”
Christopher and O’Donnel exchanged a loaded look. “And why would you do something like that?” asked the captain. “I don’t imagine your boss would be understanding with you if he found out about it. These people don’t seem like the type.”
Dax fingered the torc around her neck. “Do you know what I am? Do you know what this collar represents?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m a helot, Captain Christopher. A bonded woman.”
“A slave?” O’Donnel’s lip curled in disgust at the word.
Ezri nodded. “This collar marks me. At a single command, the princeps could use it to strangle the life from me without ever laying a hand on my neck.” She sighed. “You are not blind. I know you have noticed the differences. Bashir and Amoros, they are pure-strain humans, but as the princeps was so clear to point out, I’m a Trill. An alien.”
Christopher folded his arms. “Yeah, about that. You look human enough to me, the speckles notwithstanding.”
She glared at him. “I am the humanoid host for a centuries-old vermicular symbiont that lives inside my chest cavity. Is that alien enough for you?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he replied, sensing the seriousness in her tone.
“They are different from us,” said O’Donnel, thinking. “She’s right about Bashir and the others. Those men and women, they’re a magnitude above us. Physically and mentally, I’d guess. Stronger and faster.”
Christopher nodded grimly. “And three hundred years of natural evolution wouldn’t advance them that much, would it?”
“There is nothing natural about the Children of Khan,” said Dax. The name brought the two humans up short, as if it were a curse. “Every thread of DNA inside them has been enhanced, altered, re-formed.”
“He got what he wanted,” said the captain, in a
voice laden with regret and cold fury. “He remade humanity in his own image. Damn him.”
“What does that make us, then?” demanded the woman. “Are we going to become slaves as well?” She grimaced. “To hell with that.”
The captain shook his head. “No. Remember what you said? We’re the men in the eighteenth-century schooner, right? They’ll stick us in a cage, poke us with sticks. Show us off to their kids as a sad reminder of what humanity used to look like.” He snorted. “If we’re lucky.”
The woman stepped closer to Dax, her eyes hard. “You told us there’s an opportunity. What did you mean by that?”
Ezri nodded. “I know from your flight log that you lifted off ahead of schedule. You were forced to.”
“Khan’s agents attacked the launch site,” said Christopher. “We were ready to go, so we lit the motors and set the clock running.” His expression darkened. “His men massacred hundreds of good people at Groom Lake. People who were my colleagues and my friends. Civilians and scientists, not soldiers.”
“There are references in the logs to a ‘cargo,’” Dax continued. O’Donnel stiffened at the mention of it, and Ezri knew that her instincts were on track. “Something you had to protect.”
“The sleepers,” said Christopher, looking away.
Dax shook her head. “We both know there is more aboard this ship than your sleeping crewmates, Captain.” She blew out a breath. “We do not have time for any more veiled comments or half-truths.”
“Why should I tell you a damn thing?” Christopher replied. “If what you’re saying is right, I ought to be going for the weapons locker right now.”
“Why?” Steel entered her voice. “Because I am like you. Because I have lost friends and comrades resisting Khan’s dynasty over the centuries, but unlike you I could not sleep through all the madness and the bloodshed. I had to watch Noonien Singh’s augments cut a path of murder and conquest across the stars. I was there for it all. I saw them subjugate whole races and wipe out worlds that did not conform to their ideals of genetic superiority. I watched his kind grind freedom into dust, feed innocent people fear and insidious lies until they bowed their heads and willingly put on their own chains. I saw them build his bright, shining lie, stone by stone.” She sucked in a tight breath. “I have resisted Khan and his kindred since the day their ships blackened the sky over Trill. And I have done it from the inside, year after year, used and abused by them with this cursed collar marking me forever.”
The Botany Bay’s captain was silent for a moment. “If what you’re telling me is right, if the Khanate’s reach extends out this far, then what could we possibly do to oppose it? Less than a hundred people, and each one of Bashir’s crewmen as tough as any five of us?”
“That’s if we could even get the others awake,” O’Donnel said bitterly. “Right now, six flight crew is all we’ve got.”
“Five, with Rain still over on the Defiance,” he corrected.
Dax gave Christopher a level look. “I think you can help us, Captain, because I think I know what your cargo is, and I want you to show it to me.”
O’Donnel shot him a glare. “Shaun, we can’t trust her—”
He rounded on the other woman. “Look around, we can’t trust anyone!” His jaw hardened. “We ran, Shannon! We ran from Earth because we thought we couldn’t win against Khan. Well, guess what? We were right! And that son of a bitch followed us out here. He got here first.”
“So we fight?” O’Donnel snapped back. “With what?”
“With the only weapon that we have.”
“As a senior warrior-captain, I am entitled to the full benefits of citizenship in the Khanate,” Bashir was saying, helping himself to another glass of wine. “One of the First Khan’s greatest gifts to mankind was the creation of a system of governance and society that is both firm and fair. He used the model of the Roman Empire as a basis.” The hologram room had taken them to Geneva, on the roof of a sculptured cylinder of glass and steel the Defiance’s commander had called the Senatorial Assembly.
The vista of the snowcapped Swiss mountains in the distance all around them was postcard-perfect, but Robinson wasn’t seeing it. Rain’s hands knitted; she had to put them together for fear she might pick up something and hurl it in a fit of undirected anger. “Roman?” she repeated. “Did he include all the stuff about slavery and conquest?”
Bashir let out a short, humorless snort. “Perhaps I am moving too quickly for you—”
She glared at him. “Don’t patronize me. If all this is supposed to impress a girl, it’s not working.”
The princeps put down the glass. “I apologize,” he said tightly. “I thought you would appreciate a better understanding of the realities of the situation. Perhaps I expected too much.”
“What is too much is all this!” Rain gestured around, her temper finally showing itself. “This…this propaganda! What, do you think that I’m some dumb-ass hick just because I’m from a different century? You think I’m gonna be impressed because you show me some high-tech dog-and-pony show? News flash, pal. I was there when all this stuff happened, and this fairy story isn’t how it went down!”
He advanced toward her, a strange look on his face caught halfway between anger and dismay. She got quickly to her feet, aware that she might have said too much, forgetting exactly where she was. But Rain was too far down the road now to back up. She couldn’t even if she wanted to; her distaste at the whole display was just too much to hide.
“These are representations of the established historic records,” Bashir told her. “This is fact.”
Rain stabbed a finger down at the plaza below, where a radiant Khan accepted the adulation of a massive crowd. “That,” she snapped, “is bullshit.”
“You dare?” She saw his fist clench, and for a second Rain thought he was going to strike her. Suddenly, she realized the depths of the mistake that she had made.
“You’re not trying to play me.” She shook her head, sounding out the thought. “You actually believe this garbage, don’t you? You people really think that’s how it happened.”
“I would know if it was a lie.” He ground out the words like pieces of broken glass. “I would know.”
The words flowed out of her, unbidden. “That scene in New York? That never happened!”
“How can you be certain of that?” he demanded. “You were not there! You had already fled!”
“I know because I know the people who lived there. I know because I lived in that city!” she shot back, her ire rising, old hurts thundering back to the fore. “Me and a million other refugees from California, Kansas, Ohio…forced to live in tent towns all along the Eastern Seaboard after Khan’s sleeper cells detonated suitcase nukes in a half-dozen cities!” Rain stepped up to Bashir, looking up into his cool, blue eyes. “It was his fault! Khan! He made it happen. Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, San Diego, Seattle, and all the others, wiped off the map! He hit the country like a hammer, shattered it into factions and infighting…”
“It was a conspiracy inside the U.S. government that was responsible for those atrocities. Khan saved your country. He saved the world from itself.”
“He didn’t save the world, he stole it!” She prodded him in the chest. “New York would not have welcomed Khan! America hated him! The world hated him! He was a dictator, steeped in blood—”
“Be silent.” The words were so quiet she almost missed them.
“He built his empire on suffering! Do you want to know what he did in Canada, Eastern Europe, India? The death camps, the enforced termination of pregnancies? The sterilization programs, the ethnic cleansing? The bombings and the mass graves?”
“I told you to be silent!” Bashir’s words became an angry shout, and he reached out to grab her. Rain tried to dodge, and he caught the sleeve of her ship suit, ripping it open as she pulled away.
“You’re standing inside this lie, and it’s so huge you can’t even see it!” Sharp tears spiked her eyes; Rain was reme
mbering all the people the Eugenics War had taken from her. “Turn it off! Turn it off!” she shouted up at the perfect sky. “Computer! Shut the damn thing off!”
But the crowd below went right on cheering. “It will only respond to me.” Bashir’s gaze was as hard as iron as he spoke the words aloud. “Computer. End program.”
The images shimmered and died, and they were there in an empty room with walls of glowing yellow grids. Robinson was shaking, her breath coming in gasps. She knew she should stop now, before she said any more, but the words kept coming. It was as if they had been bottled up for so long inside her that they could no longer be contained; and there was the smallest glimmer of doubt in Bashir’s eyes that made her keep on, hammering at the armor of his indoctrination.
“You think Khan’s a liberator and a hero, but he was a murderer,” she told him. “All he cared about was creating a master race of augmented humans just like him.” Rain stifled a shuddering sob. “I look at you, O’Brien, Amoros, and the others, and I know that he succeeded. And the victors always get to write the history books, don’t they?”
“You are lying to me,” he said, and for the first time she heard hesitation and true uncertainty in Bashir’s voice.
With Christopher taking the lead, it was easy enough for them to avoid Tiber’s troopers where they stood guard, by working their way down through a series of maintenance ducts to I Deck, the very lowest level of the Botany Bay. O’Donnel knew the vessel like the back of her hand; the woman had been part of the team that came up with the original DY-series design. Dax had scrutinized the plans of the sleeper ship; on the blueprints, the tier of the vessel lying against the DY-102’s keel was labeled as algae tankage and hydroponic gardens. She knew there was more, however. The modifications stood out to her trained eye. The volume of bulkheads and interior spaces on I Deck was slightly less than it should have been.
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