by Greg Cox
A crimson beam struck the beast between the eyes. It reared backward in shock, clawing at the air, then fell like a rock back onto the grassy sward. Switching off his phaser, Khan glanced quickly at Marla.
“That did it,” she reported, keeping her tricorder aimed at the smilodon. “It’s dead.”
Not soon enough, Khan thought bitterly. Lowering his phaser, he hurried to Rao’s side. Hot blood gushed from angry gashes in the Indian guardswoman’s thigh, while Rao clenched her teeth and tried to keep from whimpering. Khan instantly regretted not including Dr. Hawkins in the search party, just because he had been reluctant to risk the camp’s only physician. “The medkit!” Khan shouted.
Marla quickly furnished him with one of the many Starfleet medkits Captain Kirk had provided the colonists with. The futuristic drugs and equipment were foreign to him, and he swiftly moved aside to let Marla take charge. He prayed that her Starfleet training had included basic first aid and field medicine.
“Save her,” Khan said tersely. “I will not lose another loyal soldier.”
Marla gulped. “I’m a historian, not a doctor, but I’ll do what I can,” she promised, examining Rao’s injuries with a small handheld scanner. “Broken bones, torn arteries … this looks bad.” She drew a silver metallic instrument from the medkit and pressed it against Rao’s shoulder. Khan heard a hiss of pressurized air. “That should help with the pain,” Marla stated, and Khan noted a look of immediate relief on Rao’s face, even as Marla reached for some manner of surgical laser. “Now I just need to stop the bleeding.”
With admirable speed, Marla cauterized and bound Rao’s wounds, then encased her upper leg in some sort of fast-setting plaster. “That should hold for now,” Marla told Khan, “but we have to get her back to the camp and Dr. Hawkins. She needs rest to recover from the shock and blood loss.”
“Of course,” Khan agreed. At his command, Joaquin and Ericsson constructed a simple travois from the foliage at hand and placed Rao carefully atop a layer of matted grass and leaves. Despite the severity of the situation, Khan derived a degree of pleasure from assigning Ericsson the onerous task of dragging the travois and Rao all the way back to the camp.
“Go,” he commanded the Norseman. “Watch over your patient,” he added to Marla. He looked over the bloodstained thicket with a calculating eye. “Joaquin and I will follow after you shortly. I am not quite done here.”
Marla looked puzzled, but did not question him. Faith and discretion, he noted approvingly. Two laudable qualities in a woman.
He watched as Marla and Ericsson departed with Rao, then turned to inspect the dead smilodon and the adjacent scrub. Careful scrutiny failed to discern any trace of the two missing colonists, let alone any evidence of more sabertooths. Khan guessed that the injured smilodon had managed to drag itself to the relative sanctuary of the thicket, but that the creatures’ true lair was elsewhere.
I will find their den, he vowed.
But not today.
He nodded at Joaquin and drew his dagger from his belt. He knelt beside the lifeless animal, grabbed its skull by the ears, and cleanly sliced its throat. “Let us claim our trophy,” he said.
As Khan had expected, the sight of the man-eater’s tawny pelt produced an incredible reaction upon his return to the camp, one more than worth the time it had taken to gut and skin the dead sabertooth. Heartfelt cheers and cries of relief greeted Khan as he strode across New Chandigarh bearing the striped hide across his shoulders like Hercules of old. Behind him, Joaquin dutifully carried the creature’s tusks, plus several kilograms of bloody red tissue. “Fresh meat for all!” Khan announced extravagantly. “We shall not dine on Starfleet charity tonight!”
His words inspired another wave of jubilation, but Khan did not fool himself into thinking that a single dead cat ended the threat posed by the sabertooths. Ceti Alpha V had claimed first blood, and Khan had seen that blood partially avenged, but, in his heart, he knew the colony’s battles had only just begun.
“A hard beginning maketh a good ending,” as the proverb goes, he thought. Let it be so here.
In his absence, New Chandigarh’s fortifications had been significantly improved. The briar fence was twice as high now, while a buffer zone of cleared land now extended two meters beyond the walls in all directions. Huge steel cargo carriers had been dragged into place to serve as watchtowers facing the four corners of the compass. Searchlights, powered by a portable generator, were mounted atop each of the improvised watchtowers.
Excellent, Khan thought. The prowling sabertooths would not so easily take them unawares tonight. He prayed that the camp’s strengthened defenses would spare them further depredations, at least until they had time and material enough to build a proper stockade.
The bulky cargo bays looked particularly substantial. Khan made a mental note to convert them into sheds or confinement cells at some point, after they’d been fully emptied of provisions. In the meantime, heavy canvas tents, rescued from the three-hundred-year-old stores of the Botany Bay, had been raised within the encampment, providing further shelter from the coming night.
After checking on Parvati Rao, who had thankfully survived being dragged back to camp, Khan conducted a thorough inspection of the settlement. He was gratified to see that, as per his commands, every colonist went about his or her business armed, with a rifle, pistol, blade, or axe. A good start, he concluded, but we still need more weapons. Spears, bows, arrows….
New Chandigarh’s sole phaser rested securely against his hip, but Khan knew he could not rely on its awesome power forever. Eventually, its energy would run low, as would their limited supplies of ammunition and gunpowder. The sooner the colony began manufacturing its own armaments, the better.
But first Khan had a more somber duty to perform.
“The deaths of our beloved comrades—Eric Lutjen, Dmitri Blasko, and Nadia Gorinsky—are a sobering reminder of the challenges we will face in conquering this primeval world. But do not lose heart,” Khan instructed his people. “I remind you that each of us has already cheated death, awaking to new life hundreds of years in the future, long after our ancient enemies have faded into history.”
The memorial service was held shortly before sunset, before another night of terror could begin. Lutjen’s sundered remains were cremated atop a blazing pyre, rendering them immune to further desecration. That the bodies of the other two victims had not yet been recovered galled Khan’s soul, although he took care to keep the bitterness from his voice as he presided over the ceremony.
“Mourn our departed friends we must, but we will honor them best by meeting the hardships ahead with courage and determination. Only by carving an empire out of this forbidding wilderness can we ensure that our comrades’ names will be remembered forever!”
His people nodded, their dismal faces lit by the fiery glow of the burning pyre, whose crackling flames matched the anger blazing deep inside Khan’s heart.
Someday soon, he promised himself, I will hunt the rest of the sabertooths to their lair.
7
THREE MONTHS AFTER DAY ONE
“Toxic. Toxic. Edible.”
A variety of alien roots, nuts, berries, and grubs were laid on a blanket at the edge of a newly cleared field. Marla knelt in the dry red dirt beside the blanket while she scanned the samples with her tricorder. Just our luck, she thought wryly. Only those squirmy yellow worms are safe to eat.
“Dammit,” Parvati Rao swore, obviously sharing Marla’s reaction to the revolting-looking grubs. She leaned against her walking stick as she looked over the blanket’s contents. “I had high hopes for those juicy orange berries.”
Marla shook her head. “You’d be dead before you finished off a handful of them.” She rose and brushed the dust from her skirt. A wide-brimmed hat, made of woven grass, protected her head from the blazing sun overhead, but offered no relief from the sweltering humidity, which indicated that a rainy season was approaching, just as the Enterprise’s planetary modeling
had predicted. “Spread the word to the others to leave those berries alone, no matter how succulent they look.” She shrugged off her own disappointment, even though her mouth watered at the sight of the tempting fruit. Khan had them all on strict rations, and Marla was hungrier than any modern, twenty-third-century human should ever expect to be.
Beneath her fraying Starfleet uniform, her body felt bonier than a Vulcan matriarch’s. Marla guessed that she’d lost at least ten kilograms since setting foot on Ceti Alpha V, with no end in sight. They weren’t exactly starving—hunting and gathering turned up enough food and game to live on, augmented by carefully regimented nutritional supplements from their provisions—but at times Marla thought she would kill for a working food slot. Her historian’s imagination was haunted by visions of the Donner party and the famine on Tarsus IV….
“Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow,” she sighed.
Testing the local flora and fauna for toxicity had become a regular part of Marla’s routine. With the colonists clearing fields in anticipation of the coming monsoon, new samples were turning up almost daily. So far she’d identified about a half-dozen native life-forms as suitable for human consumption, along with a number of nasty poisons to avoid.
“Anything else?” she asked Daniel Katzel, who was standing guard over the field. The former computer hacker stood a few paces away, dividing his attention between Marla’s survey and the ongoing effort to clear the field of leftover roots and rocks.
“You bet,” he answered brusquely. Daniel’s face was shaded by the brim of his hat. He put down his rifle and picked up a Starfleet-issue specimen jar. “Take a look at this little bug-eyed monster.”
Something gray and scaly skittered inside the transparent aluminum canister. “Goddamn!” Parvati exclaimed as Daniel brought the jar closer for the inspection. “What the bloody hell is that?”
Parvati’s casual profanity betrayed her twentieth-century roots, but Marla knew what she meant. The creature inside the jar was truly hideous, like some mutant hybrid of a wood louse and a scorpion. Roughly thirty centimeters in length, from its pincers to its tail, the life-form appeared to be a mollusk of some sort, possibly a gastropod or chiton, whose dorsal shell consisted of overlapping plates of horny armor. Slitted red eyes peered malignantly from the creature’s skull, while a pair of vicious-looking pincers protruded from its open maw. An angry noise, somewhere between a squeal and a snarl, escaped the trapped specimen as its pincers scratched furiously at the transparent walls of the jar.
As a Starfleet officer, Marla had been trained not to judge alien life-forms by their appearance. Even still, something about the caged mollusk sent a shiver down her spine, as though someone had walked upon her grave….
“Found it burrowing underneath a rock,” Daniel explained, “like a Plutonian sand-spider on Captain Proton.” Three centuries in hibernation had not diminished Katzel’s enthusiasm for the classic science fiction of his own era. “Damn near took off Rodriguez’s toe with those pincers.”
Parvati shuddered in sympathy, no doubt recalling her own close encounter with the local wildlife. “Well,” she asked hesitantly. “Can we eat the bugger?” Judging from her dubious tone, Marla suspected that, despite the food shortage, the other woman was praying the answer was negative.
“Let’s see,” Marla said, scanning the creature through the walls of the canister. “Hmm. Not exactly toxic per se, but I’m detecting some sort of odd neurochemical in the specimen’s offspring, which seem to be present in larval form beneath the creature’s outer shell.” She adjusted the tricorder’s controls, trying to get a more precise reading, only to be interrupted by an electronic beep from the instrument. The readout on the display screen wavered, then dissolved into visual static.
“Hell!” Marla cursed. Clearly, Rao’s penchant for profanity was rubbing off on her.
“What is it?” the other woman asked.
Marla smacked the side of the tricorder with her hand, but the display did not right itself. “I was afraid of this,” she admitted. “It’s exhausted its energy supply.” She looked up from the unresponsive device. “I need to get a fresh power cell back at the camp.” Strapping the tricorder over her shoulder, she glanced over at the walls of New Chandigarh, about thirty meters away. “I’ll be right back.”
“Want me to join you?” Parvati asked.
Marla shook her head. While she appreciated the offer, the other woman’s leg had never fully recovered from the sabertooth’s attack; indeed, Rao had only recently graduated from a crutch to a walking stick. Marla would make better time on her own, plus why subject Parvati to an extra hike if it could be avoided? “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Why don’t you keep an eye on our ugly friend there? I’m sure Khan will want to see it when he gets back from the hunt.”
Khan remained obsessed with tracking the sabertooths to their lair. Although they had not lost another colonist to the man-eaters since improving the camp’s defenses, there had been any number of close calls; just yesterday a trio of smilodons had attacked a party of would-be ranchers trying to corral some of the local bison. One man’s back had been severely mauled before the predators were driven off, and the entire ranching expedition had been forced to retreat in disarray. Every night Marla could hear the deadly cats prowling the veldt, to the fury of Khan, who had never forgiven the smilodons for slaying three of his people on that ghastly first night. Marla knew he would not rest until he’d repaid that debt in the sabertooths’ blood.
Sometimes his passion for revenge frightened her. It’s probably just as well, she thought, that Captain Kirk and the others are all light-years away by now. She never wanted to come between Khan and his wrath.
“Sounds good,” Parvati said, assenting to Marla’s wishes, so Marla set off through the fields toward camp. It was at least forty-five degrees Celsius, and the combined heat and humidity sapped her strength, leaving her drenched in perspiration. As far as she was concerned, the monsoon couldn’t come too soon, and not just because they needed the rain for their crops. She was tired of being hot and dirty and dusty all the time. What she wouldn’t give for a decent sonic shower…!
No more of that, she scolded herself. Self-pity was a luxury she was doing her best to overcome, along with the gnawing ache in her stomach. Maybe I should have grabbed a few of those grubs to munch on. To her slight dismay, the squiggly worms were sounding better and better.
The gates of New Chandigarh soon came into view, and she took a moment to admire the progress the colony had made since their arrival on the planet. Barbed wire and a high metal fence, cannibalized from construction materials found in the cargo bays, had replaced the wall of thorns, although four of the now-empty cargo carriers still served as watchtowers. Crude doorways, carved out by a red-hot phaser beam, provided entrance to the converted metal shells.
A crimson banner, bearing the image of a crescent moon superimposed upon a sun, fluttered from flagpole rising from the center of the camp. The flag had been designed by Khan himself, Marla knew, during his reign on Earth three hundred years ago. Together, the sun and the moon symbolized totality—everything in the world, all that Khan had once intended to rule.
Just as he now intended to rule Ceti Alpha V.
Meanwhile, the original tents had given way to roughly fifteen one-story huts, of a primitive “wattle-and-daub” variety. Not unlike the early structures at the first Botany Bay colony in Australia, she reflected. Horizontal lengths of saplings, harvested from a grove of palm trees they’d discovered farther down the river, had been stretched between four sturdy timber posts, creating walls that resembled antique washboards. Thatched roofs covered the tops of the newly built huts, while canvas from the discarded tents provided an additional level of insulation for the ceilings.
Back in the eighteenth century, Marla knew, such crude structures had been plastered on the outside with mud, but Khan had shrewdly realized that sunbaked mud would be unlikely to survive the coming monsoon. As a result
, the walls of the huts had been lightly daubed with fast-setting thermoconcrete, of the sort used to construct emergency shelters by Starfleet landing parties. Marla took pride in having suggested the idea to Khan in the first place; ironically, despite a lifetime devoted to the study of the past, she now found herself the colony’s resident expert on “future” technology and materials.
Not that my fellow colonists appreciate my efforts, Marla thought, the buried resentment surfacing against her will. At least not most of them.
She pushed the painful knowledge aside with effort, returning her attention to the growing settlement. Someday, she hoped, there would be time to manufacture actual bricks from the clay by the river, and stone tiles to replace the thatched roofs. She envisioned graceful brick buildings rising from the camp’s humble beginnings, adorned perhaps with polished marble, or rare woods imported from the great deciduous forests to the south, to make New Chandigarh a city worthy of Khan’s ambitious dreams of empire.
But for now, of course, hunting and farming took priority.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, somewhere to the southwest. Marla sniffed the breeze. Was it just her imagination or was there a wisp of ozone in the air? Another electrical storm on the way, she surmised. Another sign, along with the mounting humidity, that the rainy season should be arriving any day now.
Bring it on, she thought eagerly. Anything to cool things off a bit!
Trudging wearily through the feverish heat and dust, she walked through the front gate of the colony. No friendly faces or salutations greeted her return to the camp—only a few sullen and/or disinterested glances from men and women who quickly went back to their respective chores, turning their backs on Marla.