STAR TREK - TOS by The Eugenics Wars Volume 2

Author:The Eugenics Wars, Volume 2 [2, The Eugenics Wars, Volume]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-07T14:41:07+00:00

Now more intrigued than irritated, Khan desired to know more. “Bring him to me,” he instructed. .

“Your Excellency ... ?” Joaquin sounded a cautionary note.

“Fear not, my friend,” Khan assured him. “Our visitor could not have come this far without being thoroughly searched by our security forces.” He confidently admired the high sandstone walls surrounding the garden. “You are my last line of defense, but hardly my only one.”

“If you say so, Your Excellency.” Joaquin’s hand hovered over the gleaming brass hilt of his belt-buckle knife nonetheless. He positioned himself in front of Khan even as the attendant left to fetch the unnamed stranger.

Khan doubted that the assassin existed who could[217]overcome both him and Joaquin single-handedly.

After all, Khan, too, was armed, with his ceremonial kirpan, so it was only natural that curiosity exceeded caution in his soul. An associate of my mother? he wondered in astonishment. After all these years?

Sarina Kaur’s former colleagues had scattered throughout the world after the fall of the Chrysalis Project.

Some had died, some had disappeared into new identities, while still others had been placed under lifetime observation or house arrest by their respective governments. Khan had made intermittent attempts to recruit some of the surviving scientists to assist Phoolan Dhasal in her lab on Chrysalis Island, but had ultimately concluded that the effort required more trouble than it was worth. The leftover geneticists were merely ordinary humans, after all; deprived of his mother’s visionary genius, it was unlikely that they could offer any skills or insights beyond that which Dhasal and her staff already possessed.

And yet, here was a purported compatriot of his mother showing up at Khan’s doorstep almost two decades after the first Chrysalis’s thermonuclear destruction. A mysterious Englishman, no less. Khan felt his pulse quicken with excitement. Who knows what new possibilities this unanticipated guest may bring? he thought hopefully, feeling his spirits lift from the dreadful malaise that had engulfed him. Did not the poet Homer teach, “All strangers and beggars are from Zeus”... ?

He waited long minutes until Atal returned with their visitor. At first glance, the anonymous caller proved a disappointment; Khan frowned at the sight of a short, dumpy, older man, whose disheveled and[218]

unhealthy appearance inspired little confidence. Bald and overweight, with sagging jowls and the flushed complexion of a heavy drinker, the pear-shaped stranger looked to be maybe seventy years old, and well past his prime. His ruddy face was slick with sweat, and perspiration soaked through the front of his button-down denim shirt as well as beneath the armpits of his rumpled khaki bush jacket. His shabby safari garb, reminiscent of the bygone days of the British Raj, made him look like a one-time Great White Hunter gone very badly to seed.

“Good morning, Mr. Khan,” he said, obsequiously clutching a dented pith helmet to his chest. He shambled across the garden toward Khan, wheezing with exertion. “Thank you so much for receiving me.”

“Lord Khan,” Joaquin corrected him sternly.

“Yes, yes, of course,” the man stammered nervously. “Lord Khan, naturally.

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