Free To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh by Greg Cox

surrounding the camp.
When and where,
he wondered,
will the demons strike again?
    He would sleep no more tonight.
    Neither, he suspected, would anyone else.

6
    They found the remains of Eric Lutjen less than three meters away from the camp. All that remained of the ill-fated superman was grisly morsels of flesh and bones, including a skull from which every trace of skin had been stripped away. Dried blood splashed the long grass around the ghastly sight. Winged condor-like scavengers of prehistoric proportions had already descended on the creature’s leavings, and the loud report of a rifle shot was required to disperse the enormous birds before Khan could take possession of the bones.
    “Gather the remains,” he commanded his party, which had emerged from the camp after sunrise. Noon was still hours away, but the suffocating heat was already reminiscent of Calcutta in March. The sunbaked dirt around the campsite had yielded no useful tracks, but it had been easy enough to follow Lutjen’s blood through the brush to the site of his killer’s feast. “No follower of mine shall be left as carrion, not while it is within my power to prevent.”
    He looked in vain for the carcass of the wounded beast itself. Had the creature fed on Lutjen despite its injury, orhad another predator stumbled onto the colonist’s defenseless body? Despite his words, he wondered if he would find the remains of Blasko and Gorinsky as well, or had they been dragged too far into the veldt to be recovered?
    It was an inauspicious beginning to their first full day on Ceti Alpha V.
    “Oh my God, Khan,” Marla exclaimed, averting her eyes from their gruesome discovery. Her alabaster skin grew paler still, and Khan feared she might vomit. “It’s horrible!”
    No doubt such butchery was a rarity in the pristine world of the twenty-third century. Khan came from a different, more violent era, however, and he looked on the bloody spectacle without flinching. “You must learn to be stronger,” he counseled her, not unkindly. “Ours is a raw and primeval world now, with nature red in tooth and claw.”
    “I know,” she said a trifle queasily. With obvious effort, she regained her composure, fighting back the nausea through sheer strength of will. She forced herself to watch intently as Parvati Rao collected the scattered pieces. “I’ll try,” she promised Khan.
    He smiled, proud of her recovery. He had originally questioned the wisdom of bringing her along on this expedition, but, given the incident with Zuleika Walker, he understood why she hadn’t wanted to be left behind at the camp.
It is well,
he thought,
that she has not proven a liability
.
    “Are you quite certain, Lord Khan, that you hit the beast?”
    Harulf Ericsson craned his neck and made a show of searching fruitlessly for the wounded monster. A mocking undercurrent in his voice belied the innocuous wording of his query. “Perhaps, in the dark and confusion, your beam went astray?”
    As with Marla, Khan had been reluctant to leave Ericsson back at the camp, but for completely different reasons. Better to have the smirking Norseman nearby than give him an opportunity to stir up trouble and sedition in Khan’s absence.
Keep your friends close,
as the saying went,
but your enemies closer
.
    “My aim was true,” Khan asserted. There had been no further attacks after he’d shot the escaping beast in midspring, which implied that, if nothing else, the unleashed phaser beam had scared away the pack of predators for the night. Khan found it hard to believe that any mortal beast, however fearsome, could have traveled too far from the camp after being blasted by a phaser set on Kill.
    “So where then, Your Excellency, is the animal’s body?” Ericsson asked sardonically, earning him a murderous glare from Joaquin, who hefted his rifle ominously. Khan gestured for Joaquin to back down; for the moment, there were more pressing dangers than Ericsson’s mocking tone.
    Where was the