STAR TREK - TOS (47 page)

The nerve gas assault on the Palais des Nations anticipated a similar attack that occurred in Japan not long after. In March 1995, members of Aum[431]Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult, released sarin gas in crowded rush-hour subway trains in Tokyo, killing a dozen innocent commuters and injuring countless more. (An earlier trial run, in June 1994, killed another seven people.) Thankfully, neither event claimed as many casualties as the attack in Geneva.

Concocted by German scientists in the 1930s, sarin was also used by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, against both Iran and the Kurds. Twenty-six times more deadly than cyanide gas, it works by inhibiting the production of cholinesterase, an enzyme produced in the liver that causes contracted muscles to relax.

With no cholinesterase, muscles stay contracted, resulting in suffocation, paralysis, and eventual death.

(Dr. Beverly Crusher, of the
U.S.S. Enterprise,
later diagnosed the cause of Claire Raymond’s death as an “embolism,” suggesting that the sarin caused some sort of fatal clotting in the unfortunate woman’s brain.)

Giving credit where it’s due, it should be noted that Walter Nichols’s revolutionary cryosatellite technology has an absolutely astonishing record of success. Not only did it preserve Khan and several dozen of his followers way into the twenty-third century, but it also allowed Claire Raymond and two other twentieth-century Americans to be revived nearly a hundred years later, in the time of Captain Picard. Those twentieth-century cryonics units were obviously built to last!

Chapter Seventeen:As Roberta suspects, Seven was no doubt busy in the summer of 1994 monitoring the tense situation in Southeast Asia, where North Korea had threatened to turn its long-time rival, South Korea, into a “sea of flames” in response to U.S.[432]accusations that it was attempting to develop nuclear weapons by diverting plutonium from power plants to bomb-making. Attempts to mediate the situation by former President Jimmy Carter (with perhaps the covert assistance of Gary Seven) were complicated by the sudden death of North Korea’s long-time dictator, Kim Sung, leaving it unclear as to who was in charge in Pyongyang. A tentative accord was finally achieved in October of 1994, but only after many months of anxious uncertainty that surely occupied much of Seven’s attention.

Chapter Eighteen:The symptoms exhibited by the late Dr. Donald Williams, although artificially accelerated, correspond with the known effects of necrotizing fasciitis. For more information on this very real, but thankfully rare, syndrome, check out the Web site of the National Necrotizing Fasciitis

Foundation at: http://nnff.org.

Chapter Nineteen:As Seven observed, the Eurotunnel running beneath the English Channel (popularly known as the Chunnel) officially opened on May 6, 1994, when Queen Elizabeth II took the train to meet French President Mitterrand at Calais, but did not begin carrying regular passengers until November 14 of that same year. I’m guessing General Morrison was tempted to attack the gala opening in May, but may have decided that the security surrounding the Queen was just a little too tight; hence, he waited for real passenger service to begin.

Eight years in the building, the Chunnel cost over $15 billion and was one of the most ambitious and expensive engineering projects this side of the Millennium Gate.

[433]
Chapter Twenty:
The less said of the John Bobbit castration scandal of early 1994, the better.

Chapter Twenty-one:Believe it or not, there really was a flesh-eating bacteria scare in June 1994, especially in England where the London tabloids hyped the “epidemic” for all it was worth. A high-ranking government official was finally obliged to deliver a live address on national television in hopes of calming the panic. Naturally, he didn’t say anything about Phoolan Dhasal’s germ warfare experiments.

Chapter Twenty-two:Contemporary accounts confirm that a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion occurred in the South Pacific on September 5, 1995, provoking a storm of international protests. Little did the world know that France’s apparent resumption of nuclear testing was just a cover story Gary Seven arranged to account for the atomic destruction of Khan’s germ warfare capability.

Chapter Twenty-three:One of the first genetically engineered foodstuffs to be approved for human consumption, “Flavr Savr™” tomatoes were test-marketed in Chicago in the summer of 1994, and could be found on sale in the United Kingdom by spring 1995.

Like the Great Khanate, they were not a total success.

Chapter Twenty-four:Rumors of a top-secret UFO hangar and testing facility, codenamed “S-4” and located in the rocky hills overlooking Papoose Lake, south of Area 51, have circulated for years among UFO researchers and conspiracy buffs. Unfortunately, like so much of the Eugenics Wars, no definitive proof of its existence can be found in the official histories of the time.

[434]
Chapter Twenty-five:
Nineteen ninety-six was an election year in India, full of heated rhetoric and charges of political corruption, so it is perhaps no surprise that resentment against Khan’s heavy-handed tactics finally bubbled over into open revolt that year.

Following his bombing of Khan’s “terrorist base” in Chandigarh, U.S. President Bill Clinton later launched similar bombing raids on Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Serbia. The air assault on Chandigarh was a singularly effective one, with the result that no trace of Khan’s fortress can now be found anywhere in the vicinity.

Chapter Twenty-six:Despite the mysterious disappearance of the original prototype, the DY-100 class sleeper ships became the mainstay of mankind’s continuing exploration of space, until innovations in sublight propulsion rendered them obsolete by 2018. The final fate of the
Botany Bay,
of course, was not to be discovered until Captain Kirk and the Starship
Enterprise
found the ancient vessel floating derelict in space some three hundred years after the Eugenics Wars. It is unclear how the
Botany Bay
ended up in the Mutara Sector and why it never reached its original destination, but, as Seven warned Khan, spaceflight is not without risk; we can only speculate about navigational malfunctions, wormholes, quantum filaments, or any number of other unforeseen hazards.

Chapter Twenty-seven:Although Shannon O’Donnell’s stint at Area 51 remains undocumented, like everything else related to that top-secret base, it is known that she later married a man named Henry Janeway and played a[435]crucial role in the inception of the famous Millennium Gate project of the early twenty-first-century.

So much for the 1990s! Only seven more years until Shaun Christopher lands on Saturn ...

—Greg Cox

January, 2002

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