Myriad Universes - Infinity's Prism Part 32

"You and me both," Rain admitted.

The Defiance's commander nodded. "Yes, of course. I can only guess at how you must feel at this moment. Dislocated, adrift in time." He put down his gla.s.s. "I want to help you."

"How are you going to do that?"

His grin widened. "You have lost centuries, Rain, but I can give them back to you. I can show you what happened while you slept." Bas.h.i.+r got to his feet and spoke to the air again. "Computer? Run program Bas.h.i.+r Iota One. Historical database tie-in."

Rain flinched as the mesa melted away and reformed, the sky lightening, the rusty stone morphing into gray skysc.r.a.pers and city streets. "This is New York," she gasped, recognizing the location. They were sitting in Grand Army Plaza, looking out across the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It seemed so real, she could barely grasp the idea that this was all an elaborate simulation.

"These events took place two years after you left Earth," he told her. "The holo-program was constructed from surviving archive footage."

The buildings were as she remembered them: striking and bold, but still a shadow of their former glory, with many windows boarded up and dark. There were no guns.h.i.+ps overhead though, not like there had been the last time she had visited the city. And no smell of smoke in the air, no trace of the grim texture of a metropolis on the edge of war. Where were the checkpoints and the police patrols? There were no food lines choked with tired people, none of the street-screens showing endless cycles of footage from CNN's embedded crews on the Eurasian and Mexican fronts.

But there were cheering crowds lining both sides of the street. Many of the people waved pennants that seemed blurry and indistinct. Not American flags, she thought.

"Here he comes," said Julian. "Look!"

Rain got to her feet and stared in the direction Bas.h.i.+r was pointing. Rolling steadily up the avenue from Midtown came a line of heavy armored vehicles in urban camouflage, troop carriers, self-propelled guns, and main battle tanks. Each of them bore a symbol across its hull, a crescent moon crossed over a circular sun picked out in yellow.

Ice formed a hard ball in her stomach, and Robinson heard her blood rumbling in her ears. She reached out a hand to grab the table for support; Bas.h.i.+r didn't notice. He was too engaged by the sights around them.

No, her mind echoed the denial, no, no no no no...

She couldn't look away. She wanted to, but it was impossible to turn her head. The big tanks parted to roll past them, going onward in the direction of Harlem, and the rolling murmur of the excited crowd surged like a tide as one armored personnel carrier, bristling with communications antennae, grumbled up the middle of the avenue. Standing proudly atop the roof of the vehicle was a man in a bright red tunic and trousers, his dark face turned imperiously to the people, greeting them with waves and fatherly nods. In one of his hands he held the Stars and Stripes, cradling it in a gentle, respectful fas.h.i.+on.

"Dear G.o.d." The words fell from her lips. "He won." She couldn't take it in. As an astronomer, Rain had seen stars millions of light-years distant, galaxies and supernovae, cosmic sights on a ma.s.sive scale, and held them all in her thoughts; but this sight was beyond her. The enormity of it was just too much.

Unable to take her eyes off Noonien Singh's face, she was dimly aware of Bas.h.i.+r nodding at her side. "This is the beginning of his victory march to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where he accepted the surrender of the president on the White House lawn," he told her. "The Khan chose to land in New York, because that was where those who had come to America in the past had landed when they sought a new future...But instead, he brought a new future to America."

Khan's vehicle pa.s.sed them, and the man in red spared them a glance and a smile.

Bas.h.i.+r returned it. "He freed the American people from a cruel and callous government, and in doing so he laid the last stone of his foundation for a better world." He looked down at Rain and smiled sadly. "If you had not left, you could have seen this with your own eyes." He looked away, shaking his head. "But I understand the choice you made. Two years before this...it must have seemed as if the world was shrouded in a darkness that it would never escape."

"Yes," she managed, forcing out the word through a wall of shock. There was darkness, Rain recalled, the memory chilling her, and Khan Noonien Singh was the one who brought it down on us.

Shannon spoke slowly and carefully, her voice carrying no further than Shaun's ears. "I tried to get some more information out of Amoros. He's not easy to have a conversation with, but he opened up when I worked the idiot angle a little." Her lip curled. "These folks seem to respond well to that, thinking they're the smartest guys in the room."

Christopher nodded absently. Bas.h.i.+r's people wore their arrogance plainly, it was true. "Go on."

"He told me they're bolting an engine sled to the s.p.a.ceframe. FTL drives capable of pus.h.i.+ng us to, get this, hundreds of times light velocity."

"That's imposs-" He halted. "Okay, I keep forgetting. Three and a half centuries of technological advancement, right. Plenty of time for them to learn how to twist the laws of physics into a pretzel." Shaun sniffed. "Nice of Bas.h.i.+r to ask before he let his goons start messing with our ride."

"Forget that, the engines thing is just for starters. It gets worse," Shannon insisted, her eyes hard.

"It usually does."

"Amoros told me that Defiance isn't just a stars.h.i.+p, it's a wars.h.i.+p. They're out here protecting Earth's interests. Showing the flag."

"A hundred light-years away from Sol?" The concept of such a distance pulled at Christopher's reason. "Who the h.e.l.l are they protecting Earth from all the way out here?"

"I asked him the very same question. 'The enemies of the Khan,' he said."

"Khan?" The air in the cryo-chamber was bitter, but the chill that ran through Shaun Christopher's body at the sound of that name was far deeper, far colder. He grabbed her and pulled her close. "No," he insisted, "that has to be wrong! Three hundred sixty-two years, Shannon! He can't still be alive! Not even him, he can't be alive!"

"He isn't," she replied, with some slight relish in her voice. "But what he left behind is. We thought he'd kill himself, that those augmented freaks would rip each other to bits..." O'Donnel shook her head. "Seems we were wrong."

Shaun sagged against the pipe work, the cold leaching the heat from his skin. "Noonien Singh," he said to the air, "you son of a b.i.t.c.h. You couldn't let us get away, could you? After everything we gave up, everyone who died...You still couldn't let us go."

Bas.h.i.+r showed Rain moments from across the next ten decades, skipping over the years in blinks of holographic pixels. She saw gaudy renditions of Khan leading from the front against the warlords of China; Khan liberating orphans in Yugoslavia; Khan dissolving the United Nations amid a storm of cheers; Khan setting foot on Mars and Europa; Khan breaking the light barrier aboard the experimental stars.h.i.+p Morningstar; Khan and Khan and Khan...

She sat on the chair, her hands in a tight ball as Bas.h.i.+r talked her through each scene. He was absorbed in the display, unaware of her silent disgust at it all.

The images were so sanitized, so blatantly false that she wanted to scream. Each holograph made Noonien Singh appear as a benevolent leader, a warrior-king who showed both n.o.bility and compa.s.sion in addition to his battle prowess. The Khan was cast like a colossus, striding the Earth and freeing it from a series of oppressors. The people in every program were always happy and joyful in Khan's presence, as if he illuminated them just by being there.

It sickened her, the great monstrous falseness of it. Where, she wondered, were the scenes of the "containment facilities" where Khan sent his enemies and those his ethnic profilers felt unsuitable to remain in the gene pool? Where was footage from the cities and civilian targets obliterated during the b.l.o.o.d.y advances across Europe? There was nothing about the terror attacks, the secret murders, the biological experimentation, the conspiracies and pacts of a dictator with his claws about the world.

And Bas.h.i.+r was part of it. He could see the glimmer in the commander's eyes, the need to believe the brilliant, stunning perfection of the lie.

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," Bas.h.i.+r 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 doc.u.ment 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, n.o.bel-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, a.s.sa.s.sinations, 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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. G.o.d 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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."

"n.o.body 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 pet.i.te, 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. Bas.h.i.+r 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 Bas.h.i.+r 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, reformed."

"He got what he wanted," said the captain, in a voice laden with regret and cold fury. "He remade humanity in his own image. d.a.m.n him."

"What does that make us, then?" demanded the woman. "Are we going to become slaves as well?" She grimaced. "To h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.sacred 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 s.h.i.+p 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 d.a.m.n 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, s.h.i.+ning lie, stone by stone." She sucked in a tight breath. "I have resisted Khan and his kindred since the day their s.h.i.+ps 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 Bas.h.i.+r'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-"