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Spock had been laboring over the data storage device removed from Hamish for several days now. Of course the technology was archaic, and some portions had been damaged over time. The data he was able to retrieve was impressive, however, in a frightening way—detailed technical notes about how the Augments were created in the laboratory, for example, by an international team of geneticists.
Those scientists were hardly revolutionaries hiding in a dark basement somewhere; they did their work openly, supported by multiple Earth governments in their quest to build a human being better able to overcome injury and disease. How that had become twisted into a small cadre of would-be conquerors Kirk was not yet sure, but the scientists did seem a little off-kilter in their writings. Each Augment was an experiment in themselves, with the scientists showing they could customize their abilities, appearance, even personality—or so they claimed.
The scientific team was nearly as good at grandiose proclamations as Khan was. But Kirk couldn’t help feeling like the Augments were more than the sum of their parts, and that this took people by surprise, people who really ought to have known better.
The Augments had salvaged photographs and diaries from when they were young, even some video. They’d grown up in the laboratory, of course—a heavily guarded compound remodeled inside to a sterile facsimile of a real home, with cameras and sensors and scientists with clipboards recording everything they said or did, for later analysis. Kirk couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for them; it was okay to feel sorry for the kids they had been, he decided. They were innocent then, didn’t know any better, had no control over their lives.
There was an archive of Augment-related news articles someone had collected, most digital but some images of actual clippings from larger publications. Kirk wondered how many of the originals had been lost in the chaos of the wars and told Uhura to research it. There were certainly a lot of things that he hadn’t realized, even with all his reading: how Augment blood started being used to cure people with serious diseases, for example, but bitter disputes quickly broke out over who should be cured, who should decide, if there were any horrible side effects.
One article described how a group of preteen Augments were traveling India on a goodwill tour, and their vehicles were mobbed by a massive crowd of people desperate to get their hands on the source of the ‘miracle cure’—in the melee one Augment girl was yanked from the group and torn to pieces. In a photo of the group at a monument on the same trip Kirk swore he could pick out a young Khan—what kind of despicable impression would that give him of ordinary humans? Violent, greedy, mindless, selfish. Unable to rule themselves, let alone others.
And then, the Augments grew up.
The sections on the battles of the Eugenics Wars were the most damaged—Spock suspected they’d been hastily assembled from poor source material, and the data storage device had a shockingly limited capacity. Fortunately—depending on your point of view—they had eye witnesses with excellent memories on board the ship.
Khan, Ruby, and Hamish trooped into the conference room, as requested. Hamish and Ruby were holding hands, Khan having been left out this time. The security detail stayed outside.
Ruby and Hamish greeted everyone by name, while Khan lounged in the chair at the opposite end of the table from Kirk, looking vaguely amused. “Captain, have you ever thought about adding some color to this room?” Ruby asked him earnestly. “It’s very grey.”
“It’s a place of serious business, my dear,” Khan told her patronizingly.
“I like a bit of color, too,” Hamish offered, in defiance of Khan. “Maybe some yellow accents?”
“Or pink!” suggested Ruby.
“Kirk didn’t call us here for decorating tips,” Khan reminded them. “Though I’m sure we could make some improvements. He wants to know about the wars.”
“We’ve been looking at that data chip you carried, Hamish,” Kirk began. “You managed to save some amazing material.”
Hamish shrugged modestly. “Naturally,” Khan commented.
“We just want to fill in a few blanks about the progress of the wars,” Kirk went on, “since that material was the most damaged. I’m sure you guys could write a book on it—“
“I’ve been thinking of doing that, actually,” Hamish offered. “Writing a book about the wars. Maybe several books. Do you think the public would see them? Or would they just be classified?”
“Maybe if you had the right tone,” Kirk hedged. “Sort of… regretful?” He did not think Khan could write such a book, but Hamish might be able to.
“Yeah, I think I could do that,” Hamish decided, dryly.
“Anyway, for right now you can be concise,” Kirk went on. He checked his datapad. “Okay, for the first skirmish, in Moscow, how many Augments were actually there?”
Hamish answered most of the questions, which surprised Kirk a little. He’d been steeling himself to wade through Khan’s lavish boasting to get the facts. But Hamish answered with precision and accuracy, a reminder that he was a soldier as well as a doctor. Occasionally Khan offered a comment or correction, usually based on knowledge he’d had as commander-in-chief that hadn’t been passed on to Hamish in the chaos. Ruby said very little.
“Okay, the next few battles are pretty well-documented,” Kirk told them, scanning the notes he’d made. “So we’ll jump straight to the last one, the Battle of Turkana, and that’ll be all—“ He looked up to see Ruby’s expression suddenly crumple, and Hamish closed his eyes tightly as if in pain. Okay, yeah, they were talking about war, but they’d been very calm so far, even when discussing setbacks. “Are you guys—“
“Out,” Khan said to them simply. Hamish looked like he might protest and Khan tipped his head slightly towards the door, a silent repetition of his order, and this time Hamish and Ruby scrambled up, clinging to each other as they marched stiffly out the door.
Kirk felt a little bit like a heel, though mostly confused. “Sorry,” he told Khan, intending it for Ruby and Hamish. “I didn’t realize it was upsetting them. We could’ve taken a break—“
Khan waved him off, seeming unaffected himself. “It was inevitable,” he claimed. “Turkana was a very emotional event.”
“Your final defeat,” Spock noted neutrally.
Oddly this just made Khan shrug, as though he didn’t find that aspect very important, and he gave Kirk an expectant look. “Okay. Well, the reports are contradictory,” Kirk went on. “They seem to have a small group of Augments defeating a much larger army, and then—you guys just surrender.” He shook his head, certain something must be missing.
“That is precisely what happened,” Khan replied. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then faced the officers with determination. “I think you may not be aware of this,” he began, “but we had children.”
Kirk blinked at him dully. “What?”
“Of course!” McCoy replied suddenly. “Some of the medical data I’ve been studying—it didn’t make sense before.”
“Wait, children?” Kirk repeated skeptically. “There’s nothing about that in the records. Is there?” he checked with Spock.
“Perhaps some oblique references,” Spock allowed. “Were the children also created in a laboratory?”
“No, they were our biological children, conceived and born in the usual fashion, as humans do,” Khan clarified. “Our creators wanted us to be sterile. Another choice that was taken from us.” There was loathing in his tone. “But we overcame it. Our bodies changed to have the functions most creatures take for granted, to allow us the natural right of—“ Kirk made a ‘get on with it’ noise.
“We had children,” Khan repeated, pulling himself back on track. “At the time of Turkana, there were nine of them, ages three to six. They were… ours,” he tried to explain. “No matter which Augments were their biological parents, they belonged to all of us. They were our future, our hope.”
He paused and Kirk was forced to ask the question that he thought he already knew the answer to. “What happened to the children?” He felt slightly sick as he waited for the answer.
“They were murdered,” Khan told them simply. He was sober, but then he was almost always sober; if he had difficulty retelling the story, he didn’t let it show. “We knew the last stand would be at Turkana,” he went on. “The final massing of the armies against us. We would very likely defeat them and be able to rule Earth in peace once again.” Kirk made no comment on this goal, out loud anyway.
“Our children were protected in the fortress, as safe as we could make them. But a small group of enemy soldiers went around behind our lines and penetrated our defenses. They killed the children. That was their plan.” Khan paused pensively. “It was a good plan. If that’s how you wanted to play it.”
Kirk knew he shouldn’t expect Khan to start sobbing as he spoke; with Ruby and Hamish gone he was colder, more vicious, the way Kirk remembered him being at their first meeting. Granted, he’d shed a tear then, thinking of his crewmembers dead; but now his tone was icy, tinged with fury, only his eyes blazing. His emotions were hate, anger, revenge, even for those long dead.
After a moment he continued. “Ruby had given birth to the first child, a boy named Bowen. He was six. She was in the group that found them dead.” Khan sighed suddenly. “An empath is a powerful thing, Kirk. I don’t think you have much experience with them?”
“No,” he confirmed.
“She turned her despair outward,” Khan described. “She aimed it at all the enemy soldiers. Can you imagine, the vast plain of Turkana, looking out on the sea, filled with ten thousand wailing, screaming soldiers? Battle-hardened men and women, suddenly and inexplicably so sad that they threw themselves off the cliffs, cut their own wrists, shot themselves with their own weapons.” He seemed to be watching it right then in his mind, and no one else could escape imagining it, either. “Anyway,” he went on after a moment, “our children were dead, and we were surrounded by corpses. We lost the will to fight. We surrendered to the next band of troops we saw.”
There was a long pause, because no one knew what to say after that. Ruby was so pleasant and sweet, it was hard to imagine she’d been involved in the wars at all, let alone killed anyone. But, Kirk was forced to remind himself, it was likely she had killed, or facilitated killing in some way, even before he’d known she was capable of doing it on such a large scale. There were very few wars where anyone, on either side, had clean hands.
Probably small children were an exception, though.
“If this search for our new planet goes on for much longer,” Khan continued in a lighter tone, “I’d like to explore the possibility of us having children in the interim. If we could get a few through pregnancy and infancy in a safer environment, that would help us to better establish ourselves on an unknown planet.” He might have been talking about cattle or crops, Kirk though, perhaps unfairly but perhaps not. If you took what was Khan’s away from him, he became angry—so far it had generally been people, which was understandable, but if it extended to everything he laid claim to—
Well, the Eugenics Wars.
Kirk shook his head and tried to think clearly. “Okay, that’s a really awful story, but thank you for clearing it up,” he acknowledged. No need to offer Khan soft words and a hug, he clearly didn’t need or want them. “We’ll consider the issue of more children at a later date. It’s on the table,” he assured Khan when the man’s eyes flickered. “You might have noticed it’s not Starfleet policy to have children on board starships. You don’t think Ruby’s going to do that again?” he asked worriedly, more to the point.
Khan found his concern prudent. “She’d never done it before, even when she was quite upset,” he mused, “so I think it must be rare. People always thought she and Hamish were quite useless, as far as Augments went,” he added dryly.
“Hamish can’t do that, can he?” Kirk checked.
“He hasn’t yet,” Khan shrugged. “He worked with the children frequently and was also quite upset when they died, but…” No amorphous murderous rage spread from him to anyone else, apparently. “Augments have been tested in war, but we have not been tested much in peace. I think we will prove capable of extraordinary feats, if given the opportunity.” Good ones, his tone said, or at least ones he looked forward to seeing.
Kirk tried to focus on the fact that Khan was excited about having his own planet, and not resentful about being sent into exile. That was the far better situation, especially the more Kirk learned about what the Augments could do.
“Okay, well, I think that’s everything for now,” Kirk decided, and Khan strolled away, heedless of the devastation in his wake as always.