The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume One (61 page)

I can’t,
Kirk realized soberly.
Not yet.

An uproar at the far end of the plaza intruded upon Kirk’s somber
[397]
mus
ings. Along with the other attendees of the banquet, including the regent herself, he looked on in surprise as two imposing colony members, no doubt bred for their intimidating stature, marched toward the main table, dragging with them a struggling figure whom Kirk quickly identified as Korax. “Let go of me, you misbegotten
targs!”
the irate Klingon lieutenant snarled, his wrists handcuffed together. A black eye and split lip suggested that Korax had not surrendered to the colony officers without a fight. “You will regret this, Earthspawn! I swear by Kahless’s name that I will have my revenge!”

Masako Clarke rose from her seat with a look of consternation. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded. By contrast, Kirk observed, Koloth looked less surprised than annoyed by his first officer’s capture.

“We caught this outworlder inside the primary forcefield generator, trying to download classified information about the colony’s defenses,” one of Korax’s captors announced. Like the accused spy, the security guard’s face bore evidence of a violent struggle. Kirk was somewhat relieved to note that genetically engineered supermen were evidently just as capable of receiving a bloodied nose as anyone else.

Clarke’s face hardened and she sternly confronted the Klingon seated beside her. “Is this true, Captain Koloth?” she asked indignantly

The Klingon commander was the very picture of wounded innocence. “Madame Regent, you must believe me! I am utterly appalled to even think that one of my men might be so misguided as to abuse your generous hospitality.” He rose from his chair and shook his head theatrically at Korax, who endured the rebuke in surly silence. “I assure you, Regent, that, if these charges are true, Lieutenant Korax will be severely disciplined.”

Kirk suspected Koloth of telling only half the truth. If Korax was punished at all, he surmised, it would be for getting caught rather than for the espionage itself. Kirk had not forgotten Koloth’s involvement in the plot to poison grain vital to the survival of the Federation colony on Sherman’s Planet. Compared with that, what was a little unauthorized snooping?

[398]
Clarke wasn’t buying Koloth’s act either. “I think it would be best,” she addressed the Klingon commander frostily, “if you and your people departed Sycorax immediately.” She capped the bottle of Romulan ale and handed it back to Koloth. “And you can take your gift with you.”

“With all due respect, Regent,” Koloth warned, letting a hint of steel show through the velvety facade of his impeccable etiquette, “I urge you to reconsider this decision. The Klingon Empire is not about to let this minor ... misunderstanding ... get in the way of our long-term interests where your colony is concerned.”

To her credit, Clarke refused to be cowed by the Klingon’s veiled threat. “These security officers will escort you back to your shuttlecraft, Captain,” she stated forcefully. “I believe our negotiations have concluded.”

Koloth nodded, accepting the inevitable, for now. “Very well,” he acceded, returning the rejected bottle to its sheath. “You may come to regret your actions this evening,” he informed the regent darkly, before dipping his head toward Kirk and McCoy. “Farewell, Captain, Doctor. No doubt we shall meet again.”

Flanked by an entire team of armed security guards, who had arrived on the scene within seconds of the regent’s pronouncement, Koloth and his men were led out of the plaza. “I don’t like the look of this,” McCoy muttered quietly to Kirk. “It’s not like the Klingons to give up so easily.”

“They haven’t,” Kirk said with total confidence. While he remained undecided regarding the Paragon Colony itself, he was certain of one thing.

They had not heard the last of Koloth and his forces.

“Your chief engineer beamed
what
onto Koloth’s warship, Captain?”

“Tribbles,” Kirk repeated, grinning at the memory. He had been entertaining the regent and the other diners at the table with the story of his earlier run-in with Captain Koloth at K-7. At least forty-five minutes had passed since the Klingons had been summarily ejected from the colony, and the banquet was winding toward its conclusion.
[399]
A bowl of ice cream—vanilla, of course—rested on the tablecloth in front of Kirk as he wondered how to best convey the insidious cute-ness of the purring tribble hordes.

Suddenly, an explosion rocked the floor of the plaza. Plates and glasses rattled at every table and, through the branches of the redwoods surrounding the dining area, an enormous orange fireball could be glimpsed rising over the trees maybe three-quarters of a mile away. Kirk leaped to his feet, reaching instinctively for his phaser, only to remember that he had come unarmed to the formal state dinner. Of the three Starfleet officers present at the banquet, only Lieutenant Lerner was ready to repel any immediate assault. Kirk was proud to see that the security officer already had his weapon out, and had taken a defensive position in front of the regent’s table.

As yet, however, there was no sign of an attack, aside from the initial explosion. Billowing black clouds of smoke continued to rise beyond the trees, and Kirk could smell the blaze from where he was standing. Strident klaxons sounded in the distance, audible even over the hubbub of excited and frightened voices echoing throughout the outdoor plaza, as the colony’s fire department and other emergency services went into action with admirable speed, but Kirk was utterly convinced that the explosion had been no mere accident.
This is Klingon work,
Kirk thought, clenching his fists at his sides.
I’m sure of it.

An anxious-looking aide, his face pale, hurried to the regent’s side and whispered hastily in her ear. Clarke’s own face blanched at the dire news she had clearly just received. “Oh, no!” she whispered, her worried gaze glued to the unchecked smoke and flames on the horizon. “I never thought ...”

“What is it, Madame Regent?” Kirk asked, determined to find out what had the regent so dismayed. “If there’s any assistance we can provide ...”

“Yes,” McCoy added emphatically As always, he was a doctor first. “Please let me help treat the wounded.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Clarke said sincerely, “but I’m afraid the situation is even more serious than it appears.” She lowered her voice to avoid inciting a panic. “The explosion occurred at our primary
[400]
deflector array. According to early reports, an entire bank of forcefield projectors has been destroyed, threatening the structural integrity of the dome itself.” Her gaze rose reluctantly toward the bioorganic blister vaulting high above their heads, the colony’s principal line of defense against the toxic atmosphere outside.

The deflector array,
Kirk acknowledged,
exactly where Korax was captured less than an hour ago.
This was conclusive evidence of Klingon sabotage as far as he was concerned. Obviously, Korax had been up to more than simple snooping.
Probably a photon grenade,
he theorized,
activated by remote control once Koloth’s shuttle was safely clear of the dome.

“Look!” Gregor Lozin pointed up at the roof of the dome, a look of outright fear replacing his usual suspicious scowl. Blue flashes of Cerenkov radiation crackled along a sizable segment of the huge chartreuse hemisphere, providing dramatic proof that the colony’s vitally needed forcefield was already weakening in spots. Suddenly, the translucent dome looked perilously thin and fragile, especially compared with the hellish heat and pressure threatening to break through the life-preserving barrier.

“How long,” Kirk asked Clarke softly, “can your dome hold up against the pressure, without the additional protection of the forcefield?”

The regent had the hopeless-yet-steadfast demeanor of a ship’s captain fully prepared to go down with her ship. “Hours,” she said despairingly. “At most.”

To Be Continued

in

STAR TREK

THE EUGENICS WARS

The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh

VOLUME TWO

Historical Notes on
The Eugenics Wars,
Volume One

When the original
Star Trek
television series first alluded to the fearsome Eugenics Wars of the 1990s, probably none of the show’s writers or producers guessed that we would still be concerned with such matters all the way
into the twenty-first century. Regrettably, many of the vital details regarding the rise of Khan Noonien Singh remain unrecorded by contemporary historians, but it may interest some readers to note where and when the events chronicled in this volume intersect with the “official” history of the late twentieth century. ...

Chapter One:
Zealously guarded, the Berlin Wall still stood as a symbol and artifact of the Cold War in March 1974, as it would for many years to come.

Chapter Five:
Think
Dr. Lozinak’s glow-in-the-dark mouse is just a whimsical figment of my imagination? So did I. Imagine my surprise on discovering that, in fact, a bioluminescent bunny rabbit was born in France in February 2000, the creation of a transgenic “artist” who added the green fluorescent protein of a jellyfish into the DNA of an albino rabbit, producing a mammal that glows bright green under the right kind of light. Little did he know, of course, that the Chrysalis Project had beaten him to the punch over a quarter of a century earlier. (For more info on the glowing bunny, check out: www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html.)

Chapter Six:
As mentioned by Gary Seven, one of the real-life
[402]
founders of modern genetic engineering was Har Gobind Khorana, an Indian-born biochemist. Khorana won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his work on the chemistry of the genetic code, and later led the team that first synthesized a biologically active gene. (No doubt Khan’s mother was one of his students. ...)

Chapter Seven:
The smallpox epidemic that Roberta alludes to actually occurred in India in 1974, killing approximately ten to twenty thousand people.

Chapter Eight:
Metal detectors at airports were indeed a new fixture at airports in 1974, in response to a wave of real-life skyjackings.

Chapter Twelve:
As mentioned by Sarina Kaur, the Soviet Union did, in fact, launch a major germ-warfare program, “Biopreparat,” in 1974, despite having signed the Biological Weapons Convention shortly before. The program ultimately employed approximately thirty-two thousand scientists and staff, and really did develop special refrigerated warheads capable of delivering smallpox or bubonic plague to target sites within the United States and Europe.

Chapter Fourteen:
Although such stories have been repeatedly denied by the U.S. Government, rumors that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in 1947 persist to this day.

Chapter Twenty-Three:
On May 18, 1974, there actually was an underground nuclear explosion beneath the desert in Rajasthan. The Indian government claimed it was a peaceful atomic test, but we know better.

Also: In July of 1974, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences called for a temporary moratorium on genetic engineering, prompted no doubt by the discreet efforts of Gary Seven.

Chapter Twenty-Six:
Sadly, the bloody riots in Delhi following the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi are a matter of historical fact.

Chapter Twenty-Nine:
The existence of the ozone hole over Antarctica became public knowledge in 1985, not long after Gary Seven’s mission to the South Pole. The space shuttle
Discovery,
which debuted in 1984, did not “officially” start conducting classified military missions until ’85, but clearly
Discovery
must have launched Dr. Evergreen’s top-secret satellite a few months earlier than that.

Chapter Thirty:
The 1984 chemical leak in Bhopal, India, remains
[403]
one of the worst industrial accidents in history. The final death toll has never been accurately determined, but fatalities numbered in the thousands, with maybe fifty thousand more victims permanently disabled. Small wonder the young Khan was so outraged by the disaster.

Chapter Thirty-One:
Area 51, in Nevada, has long been rumored to be the repository of the U.S. government’s most top-secret UFO research projects.

Chapter Thirty-Two:
Although better known these days as the trademark weapon of
Xena: Warrior Princess,
the
chakram
is, in fact, a traditional Sikh weapon whose use dates back to at least the sixteenth century Khan surely would have been schooled in its use, even before
Xena
reruns began airing in Delhi. The wheel-like
chakar
is also unique to the Sikhs.

Also, at least one hidden tunnel is known to run beneath the southern wall of the Kremlin, providing an escape route to the nearby Moskva River. The secret passage beneath Lenin’s Tomb, however, has so far managed to stay out of the guidebooks.

Chapter Thirty-Three:
Mikhail Gorbachev was already shaking things up in the Soviet Union by October of 1986, when he met with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik in the hope of convincing Reagan to halt development of the “Star Wars” missile defense system. But Reagan’s commitment to his Strategic Defense Initiative, along with his predilection for jelly beans, is matter of historical record. As a result, the summit ended in a stalemate, just as “Radhinka” feared.