by Greg Cox
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
About the e-Book
(NOV, 2003)—Scanned, proofed, and formatted by Bibliophile.
