You should have let him sleep (chapter 13 of 15)
What have you done?
Khan didn’t say it aloud but the dismay written all over his features spoke clearly enough. He sagged on the floor ungraciously, covering his face. John stood up, dusting his clothes, and came over to kneel before the horror-stricken man. He wasn’t afraid of him anymore. For the split-second when their eyes met - John’s determined as he activated the call and Khan’s wide and frozen in surprise - John knew that he’s got his friend back.
“John,” it was Sherlock’s old voice all over again, “I was going to give that communicator to you...I was going to let you beam out of here...how could you do that?”
“You fucking well know how,” John smiled at the crushed man before him, giddy with relief despite the hopelessness of their situation. “It’s what we do. What we always did. Saving the innocent.”
He took the face of his friend in both hands, lifting it up, forcing Khan to look him in the eyes. “I didn’t sleep frozen like a fucking bag of peas for nearly three hundred years only to watch you saving my life again. And, just for the record, I hate transporters.”
“I have a shuttle outside,” Khan found his tongue, eyes going blank for a moment - was he calculating the remaining time? - before he gritted his teeth and stood up briskly: “Let’s go. Hurry.”
“We’re not going to make it,” John remarked almost casually, not pretending to be fooled. Khan only swallowed and quickened his pace; the walls around them vibrating with energy that made the air feel crackling in their mouths. At the door, Khan threw a large cloak over both of them; running with their heads low against the whirling sand they reached the shuttle. John shut the door behind them and sealed it, Khan already busy over the starting sequence.
It was all senseless, really. John could do his math; he knew enough about the Genesis device and the maximum speed of Reliant’s shuttles to be damn certain that they would never make it past the stratosphere in time to escape the wave. The ships on the orbit were safe - the wave needed matter to propagate, it didn’t reach into free space - but even the thin air in the outer edges of the atmosphere was solid enough to carry it on, transforming everything within its reach. They were going to die.
At least, I don’t have to go to his funeral this time. John found the thought ridiculously comforting.
*
James Kirk gasped when the world became solid around him again; the back of his head hitting the platform with a painful thud. Wait, platform?
The dancing round lights above his head finally stopped and came into focus-he recognised that they, indeed, were the beam emitters, set into a hexagon pattern. He was in the transporter room. He rolled his head to the side to take a look at the rest of the room and his breath stopped.
At least ten-no, twelve people surrounded him in a silent half-circle, waiting. One of them stood out among them; long, leonine hair around his remarkably appealing face, now shadowed with grim and severe expression. Kirk remembered him instantly; fifteen years hadn’t changed him much. Joachim, Khan’s favourite and second in command.
That’s done it, Kirk thought as he slowly rose to his feet. At least, he’ll be facing his death standing.
Joachim’s eyes rested on the communicator and Jim Kirk remembered the surprise move of John Watson; the way the man charged at Khan like a cannon ball, snatching the little gadget in the spur of the moment with the surest hand-there was more to Captain Watson that met the eye, Kirk finally understood that. Then it hit him, with whom Watson remained alone down there, and his heart clenched.
“Khan said that this was between you and him alone,” Joachim spoke, at last. Kirk watched him warily. Don’t they know what happened down there? No, they don’t. They think I killed their leader.
“Would you give me your word, Admiral; that no charges will be brought against us?”
Joachim’s voice was calm and steady. Kirk nodded, his poker face on-he didn’t want to give away how bewildered he was by the whole turn of events.
“Then we surrender,” Joachim said with grave finality.
“I accept,” Kirk replied formally. The semi-circle parted before them, expecting Kirk to leave for the bridge and assume command of Reliant; Kirk jumped to the transporter console instead, checking on the sensor readings for any human signal from the surface. If there still was time…
The sensors were overloaded. With Genesis set off on the surface, nothing could be distinguished from the orbit.
“You want to beam aboard the Enterprise,” Joachim misunderstood Kirk’s intentions, motioning him back to the platform and assuming the post behind the console. Kirk shot him a sidelong glance.
“Are you quite sure you don’t want to…how should I put it: avenge your leader?”
“I adored him,” Joachim’s eyes flared, “I would give my life for his any time, gladly. But…there was some darkness in him - some emptiness, I never understood. His loyalty to us was unerring. Yet he failed to see, what we truly needed,” the young man acknowledged.
“Whatever war crimes we did back on Earth, I think that we have served our sentences on Ceti Alpha Five. This spiral of injustice and revenge has to end, Admiral. Don’t you think, after all those years, that the time has come…for forgiveness?”
“About time,” Kirk smiled and shook the hand Joachim was offering in a firm grip.
*
The shuttle engines strained in their sharp ascension. The air around them buzzed with electric charge, the force of the field generated by the Genesis almost splitting the molecules apart, but the shell of the shuttle worked like Faraday’s cage; they were safe inside. At least, before the wave would hit upon them and swallow them whole. Khan was bent over the pilot console, trying to redirect all available energy to the engines to push their maximum speed higher. John couldn’t help but admire the stubbornness with which Khan was fighting the inevitable.
Three hundred years and three minutes and I think he’s brilliant again - like the old days.
“She thought I was missing something.” John woke from his reverie to find out that his friend was watching him-talking to him, actually.
“Sorry, who?”
“The Deltan. She said I was missing something. She didn’t want to spoil the finding for me,” Khan-no, Sherlock, frowned.
Dear Zinaida. John smiled sadly. “Mycroft thought the same.”
Sherlock drew his brows closer together as if he had problems recalling the name. Then he groaned. “I should have known. He was never going to give up on his little brother.”
“Master of abduction, yeah,” John made a wry face.
“If only he had left you alone…you could have lived - a long life, not this-”
“Not much of a life without you,” John interrupted him, squeezing his arm. Sherlock looked down, silent for a while, before he replied: “Not much of a life without you, John.”
Deep below them, in the monotonous greyish desert lost in the never-ceasing whirls of sand storm, a single bright spot appeared. For a moment, it simply glowed, gathering its strength - then it burst out in a growing bubble of fire, spreading wide, soaring high, and consuming everything. Its speed appeared to be slow but John knew that they were deceived by the distance.
“It’s beautiful,” Sherlock exhaled, his pale eyes mirroring the fiery glow. “God, I hate it so much.”
John’s laughter was suddenly stopped short by the sharp beep of incoming communication.
“Enterprise to Galileo,” John recognised the calm and precise voice of Captain Spock, “we can see you on our sensors.”
Sherlock’s eyes shot up, alert. “It’s the altitude,” he murmured. “The field’s weaker here.”
John sprang to the communicator, keeping one eye on the approaching line of destruction where the old was transformed into the new.
“Can you pull us out?”
“The Genesis field is too strong. With two for the transport, we cannot guarantee that your signatures won’t intermix.” John shuddered when his memory promptly supplied the image of distorted, wretched abominations that sometimes emerged from the beam after fatal transporter failure. He really shouldn’t have studied the transporter functions into such details...
“You have to go one by one.”
In the empty space in the back of the shuttle, a faintly flickering column of energy appeared. Enterprise couldn’t lock the beam precisely on their signal so they waited for them to jump in. John shot another glance out of the window - the wave was already at their heels.
“Okay,” he forced his voice out, “move, Sherlock. Go!” It’s my turn with the jumping off the roof, anyway.
Sherlock grabbed him by the shoulders in a desperate hug, and for one second John stared into the deep eyes, wanting to tell him, it’s all right, just go-
-when he felt a sharp pain on his forehead - his head jerked back with the force of the blow - and his world went dark before he realised what happened.
Sherlock caught the unconscious body of his friend and lifted it off the ground effortlessly, covering the distance to the beam in two long strides and shoving the body in none too gently. He watched it disappear, being carried away to safety. It was the last thing he saw in his life before the wave caught up with the shuttle and everything turned into white nothingness.
*
John Watson and Leonard McCoy stood in the day room of the Enterprise, now turned into an improvised mortuary. The bodies of the last two members of the Genesis team were laying under white sheets, waiting to be shipped to their homeworlds. John lifted the corner of the sheet from Zinaida’s face, unbearably beautiful even in dead.
McCoy cleared his throat. “I couldn’t find any cause of death.”
“The Deltans can will themselves to die,” John replied flatly. “When their...partner...is gone.”
I’d have liked you to teach me how to do it, he thought as he stooped to kiss the cold forehead.
“You should have let me sleep, Zinaida,” he whispered, the grief he had almost forgotten burning in his chest with renewed intensity. “I’ve failed.”
“I don’t think so,” McCoy shook his head, sad, knowing smile softening his face. “You’ve saved him - from himself.”
.
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