The Birth of Iconia

Chapter 23

Khan watched the readings on the sensors from his command chair. He wanted action, but he forced himself to be patient. After a few hours, one of his scientists pointed out that the ribbon was intersecting the orbit of a planet, and that they might be able to find out more from the ground. Whatever was so special about this thing, Khan did not want anyone else to find it. He ordered his personal shuttle readied.

Thankfully, the planet he landed on would support life, although marginally. He waited in his shuttle staring out at a sandstorm on this desert planet's surface. He would wait until the last moment to exit the shuttle. Everything he had seen from the ship said that the shuttle would need to be powered down when the ribbon hit. He saw the light begin to change outside, then he stepped through the manual hatch.

Outside, the sand and wind tore at his robes. He had to shield his eyes from grit. Then, the ribbon hit. Suddenly, he was no longer on this dead world. He was in Botany Bay, looking at his friend, Juaquin, in his support pod. As he watched, the gauges started to raise. He looked around and saw that all of his people were waking up. He was thrilled! He glanced at another monitor and saw that the ship was approaching a planet. He walked through the door onto the bridge and stepped out onto a balcony. He was now looking down on a crowd of people. There were thousands, chanting his name and looking to him for leadership.

He turned around and saw a woman with red hair spilling over her shoulders, smiling at him. 'Marla', the name came unbidden to his mind, yet he knew it was her. Knew it was his wife. He loved her with all his heart, more than his own life.

Something in his mind was nagging at him, saying this wasn't the way things had turned out. Marla was dead, yet he had never met her and she was his wife. His mind was confused, a state he had almost never experienced. She reached out for him and drew him close, kissing him. He started to pull back, but then went with it, his mind even more confused. He loved her, but didn't know her. What was going on?

Then, everything was gone and he was standing in white. There were no features anywhere around him. No walls, no ceiling, not even any floor. Just a featureless white. He wasn't sure how long he stood there. Finally, he saw a man approaching him.

Even as he thought, "Who is this?" his mind said, "Soran."

He started to form another question, "What are you doing here?" but the thought, "I exist here in this unreality," flooded his mind as he thought it.

"Do you answer all my questions as I think of them?" was thought concurrently with "It certainly appears that way, doesn't it?"

He was angered by the insolent tone of the thought, but the laughing tone came back, "Deal with it."

He was furious, and his hand reached out to grab the laughing man, but he grasped only air. The man was now ten feet behind him, laughing even more.

"You foolish man. You think you can hurt me?" The laughter was becoming intolerable for Khan. He swung around and charged the laughing Soran. Just as before, Soran was now behind the enraged Khan. Soran stopped laughing and turned coldly serious. "You can never hurt me, Khan. You could imagine snapping my neck like a twig, but you could never hurt the real me. You can even imagine killing Kirk over and over again. But you'll never do it. Because he's not here. He's out there in reality. What you would find here is unreal. It's not worth anything!" The last was shouted, as if someone was tearing Soran's heart out of his body. "You can dream anything here. You can't have any of it. Nothing you can ever do here matters!"

"Did Kirk enter here?" Khan asked quietly.

"Of course he entered here. How do you think he's so powerful?"