Star Trek: The Eugenics War, Vol. 1

by Greg Cox

  Desperate to get away, to elude the unnamed menace to the north, the man tried to break free, but could not escape Noon's powerful grip. “Let me go!” he yelled, tears gushing from sightless eyes. His voice gurgled wetly, as though his lungs were slowly filling with liquid. “Please, I don't want to die!”

  The man was scared out of his mind, Noon realized, but by what? Still hanging on to the lamppost with his strong right arm, Noon longed for a spare hand with which to slap the man in the face, to snap him out of his hysterical state; instead he could only shake the man roughly before interrogating him again. “Speak to me—quickly!” he ordered. The incongruity of a fourteen-year-old boy bullying a grown man several years older than he was went unnoticed in the frenzied chaos threatening to engulf them. “What's happening? What started this panic?”

  “I don't know!” the man protested, trying futilely to tug himself free. He swung at Noon's chin, connecting with his fist, but the indomitable youth shrugged off the blow, then retaliated by yanking on the man's arm hard enough to dislocate his shoulder. The man yelped in pain, his face contorting beneath his bushy black beard. “Stop, please! My arm!”

  “Speak!” Noon gave the injured limb a vicious twist. He took no pleasure in hurting this unlucky stranger, but he craved answers and would do whatever was necessary to extract them from his unwilling captive. “Tell me now and you shall go free.”

  Wincing in agony, the man nodded and cradled his aching arm with his free hand. “Yes, yes! Of course!” he babbled, his watery eyes pleading for mercy. “It's something in the air! Poison! It killed my wife, my daughters . . . they died where they fell, coughing out their last breaths!” His entire body quaked at the memory. “For pity's sake, young sir, let me go!” Blackened eyes stared past Noon, into the north wind. “We have to go now, believe me! The poison—it's coming toward us even as we speak! Death is in the air!”

  Satisfied that the man knew little more about the catastrophe, Noon expertly popped the dislocated arm back into its socket, then let go of him as promised. Sparing neither another word or backward glance, the unfortunate man staggered away as quickly as he could, holding on tightly to his bad arm as he disappeared into the flood of scrambling refugees. Noon forgot the man just as swiftly, sifting instead through the particulars of the story he had just heard. Poison in the air?

  Perhaps this was an enemy attack, he speculated, but his keen mind immediately cast doubt on that theory. Located at the heart of the subcontinent, Bhopal was hundreds of miles from the nearest border and, although the state capital, hardly a prime military target. Aside from the government bureaucracy, its principal industry was the old, and increasingly obsolete, pesticide factory at the outskirts of town. Just north of here, in fact, Khan recalled. An alarming possibility intruded into his mind, filling his soul with dread. Oh, no! Not that . . . !

  Guessing the truth, but needing confirmation, he grabbed on to the lamppost with both hands and shinned up the iron post until he was several feet above the onrushing crowd. Peering north up the length of Hamidia Road, he saw thick white fumes blowing toward him, only four or five blocks away. The swirling mist was carried by the same icy wind that had chilled him ever since his arrival in the alley, and, through the fumes, he glimpsed a multitude of bodies littering the streets and sidewalks, some twitching and shuddering, others moving not at all. Fallen bodies were everywhere; he couldn't even begin to count the casualties.

  Sirens blared overhead, too late for the blinded man's wife and daughters, and a police helicopter came flying over Hamidia Road, high above the throngs of scared and ailing civilians. “Warning! Poison gas is spreading!” the copter's loudspeakers bellowed over the heartrending cries of the frightened populace. Whirring propellers whipped up the air around Noon, but could do little to drive back the toxic cloud advancing southward. “Run! Run for your lives!”

  Too little, too late, Noon thought bitterly, while yet admiring the courage and discipline of the police officers trying to spread the alarm. The suffocating white fumes crept forward, forcing the helicopter to climb higher to avoid being caught within the toxic cloud, even as Noon's worst fears cemented into certainty.

  The chemical plant up north, he realized. Built decades ago by an American company, Union Carbide, to manufacture various forms of insecticide. Critics had been insisting for years that the outdated and run-down facility, housing many tons of toxic chemicals, was a disaster waiting to happen; as an engineering student, Noon had personally toured the plant in the past, and been appalled by its crude design and deteriorating condition, as well as by the slipshod conduct of its poorly trained employees. Corporate greed and inertia had kept the plant in operation, however.

  Until tonight, when Bhopal's luck finally ran out. Fools! Noon thought angrily, gripping the pole with both his hands and ankles. Who had allowed such an obvious hazard to fester all this time, upwind of a major population center? Even knowing what he did about the plant's defects and dangers, Noon was still taken aback by the scale of the catastrophe unfolding around him. At least four kilometers of densely packed slums and shantytowns, as well as a major railway station, he recalled, were crammed between the Union Carbide plant and this suburban district. How many victims have there been already? he wondered, envisioning the deadly fog as it swept through block after block of crowded neighborhoods, suffocating people in their sleep. How many deaths?

  “Thousands,” he estimated, his voice a whisper. Thousands would die—no, were doubtless dead already. He railed inwardly at the entrenched corruption and incompetence that had made this atrocity possible. If I were in charge of the world, he vowed, such criminal carelessness would not be allowed. A fierce resolve gripped him, that the world, overrun by imbeciles and charlatans, was careering out of control, sorely in need of a firm hand at the wheel. Someone needed to put this long-suffering planet to rights, and Noon could think of no one better suited to do so than himself. Not if I ruled the world, he corrected himself, fully understanding his true destiny at last.

  When. A voice from the street below intruded upon his lofty musings. “Noon!” Seven shouted, having fought his way through the tumult to catch up with the youth. Like Noon before him, he hung on to the bottom half of the lamppost to keep from being carried away by the panicked horde. “We have to get away from here!”

  Was that all this colossal slaughter meant to Seven? Merely another daring mission to escape from? With a disdainful sneer, Noon dropped to the sidewalk below, his muscular legs easily absorbing the impact of his landing. “Leave me alone!” he snapped.

  Twin antennae sprang from Seven's servo. He aimed the sensors at the approaching cloud, then scowled at the sequence of beeps the wand emitted. “That's methyl isocyanate,” he informed Noon urgently. “Even you can't survive that.”

  Despite the youth's justifiable wrath, Seven's warning caught Noon's attention. He was quite familiar with MIC, a volatile and highly toxic compound that reacted violently with water. He could readily imagine what a cloud of gaseous MIC could do to a human being's eyes and lungs.

  Even still, he was not yet ready to abandon Bhopal to its ghastly fate. “But all these people!” he objected, his adolescent voice cracking. “They're dying by the hundreds!”

  “I know,” Seven said grimly. The servo's antennae retracted and he hurriedly gave his all-purpose instrument a new set of coordinates. By now, the bulk of the fleeing crowd had moved on, leaving them alone upon the sidewalk, amid the dead and the dying. Only a few paces away, in the middle of a street, an old woman in a bright yellow sari writhed upon the asphalt, drowning in her own fluids. She was only one of many dozens, unable to outrun the choking death that had come upon her in the night. “It's too late,” Seven insisted, his face hardening into a stoic mask. “There's nothing we can do now.”

  A familiar blue fog began to form behind Seven, but Noon resisted stepping toward the shimmering portal. “My friends!” he reminded Seven, staring upward at the nearby apartment complex. His classma
tes from the university—Darshan, Rajiv, Zail, Maneka—were surely up there now, in a penthouse apartment belonging to Zail's older brother. “I can't just leave them!”

  Seven followed Noon's gaze to the upper stories of the towering concrete building. “If they're high enough, your friends should be all right,” he stated confidently, “provided they stay indoors and keep the windows closed.” He looked north, toward the sprawling slums surrounding the city. “It's those who live closer to the earth, or without shelter at all, who will bear the brunt of this horrible accident.”

  His cold-blooded analysis of the situation fanned the flames blazing within Noon, but the brilliant teen could not refute Seven's assessment. In theory, his friends would likely survive, unlike the gasping masses impelled into the streets by the ever-expanding cloud of poison. Already, the first faint whiffs of the MIC threatened him and Seven, causing Noon's eyes and throat to burn. This is it, he realized. My last chance to save myself. He could either join the retreating mob in their panic-stricken flight from the gas—or take the preternatural avenue of escape offered by Gary Seven.

  Misty white tendrils slithered down the sidewalk, licking at his ankles. Seven lingered at the periphery of a very different fog, one that glowed blue and radiant. “Noon!” he called out stridently, his face and figure growing indistinct within the numinous azure mist. “We can't wait any longer!”

  He was right, damn him. Holding his breath, his eyes screwed tightly shut against the searing chemical fumes, Noon swallowed his pride and ran into the roiling cloud of plasma, his fists clenched in anger and frustration. He half-expected to collide with Seven inside the incandescent haze, but he encountered no resistance at all, the older man having apparently dematerialized mere instants before. Opening his eyes, Noon slowed to a trot within the opaque blue limbo Seven somehow used to flit hither and yon about the Earth. The transporter's electric tingle was pleasant compared to the caustic effects of the MIC. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, which still burned slightly, but the pain quickly faded, suggesting that no permanent damage had been done. Not to me, that is.

  Many thousands in Bhopal could not say the same. Even the survivors, he expected, would bear the scars of this day for the rest of their lives, in the form of lasting illnesses and injuries, not to mention painful memories of loved ones lost. Never again, he decided, a look of unshakable determination upon his youthful face. I shall not permit it.

  He kept walking forward until the mist began to thin. “Seven!” he cried out impatiently, desiring to waste no more time dealing with the crafty American's technological sleight-of-hand. There was too much to be done, there were too many injustices to be remedied. “Can you hear me, Seven? We must speak at once!”

  As he stepped out of the tingling plasma, Noon expected to find himself back in Seven's offices in New York. Instead he had returned to his college dormitory in New Delhi, over six hundred kilometers north of Bhopal. The glowing fog evanesced rapidly, leaving the irate teenager and the older American in the center of Noon's private room, which was just as cluttered and cozy as he had left it. An electric typewriter and pocket calculator sat atop the heavy sheshamwood desk, next to piled textbooks and research papers. More books, ranging from advanced engineering texts to classics of Asian and Western literature, bulged from the inadequate bookshelves or accumulated in stacks upon the simple dhurrie carpet covering the floor. An ivory chess set, the pieces carved in martial poses, rested on a hand-carved chowkie stool, beside a smallish television set perched atop a heap of painted wooden milk cartons. Light mosquito netting covered the wrought-iron posts of his unmade bed, while the Nishan Sahib, the scarlet pennant of the Sikh people, adorned the monsoon-blue wall above his desk.

  The familiar setting failed to quench his righteous fury at the inexcusably preventable disaster that had befallen Bhopal. “I suppose you expect me to thank you,” he hissed venomously at Seven, “for rescuing me in the nick of time.” He angrily kicked over the carved wooden stool bearing the chessboard, scattering pawns and bishops to the far corners of the room. “Never mind that, while we were playing spy games at the South Pole, my people were dying, gassed to death like rats being exterminated!”

  He recalled the scurrying vermin he and Seven had encountered immediately upon their arrival in Bhopal. Small wonder the rodents had been so agitated in that dismal alley; they must have scented the fatal venom approaching on the wind. Did those rats fare any better than their two-legged brethren? he wondered morosely. And why was there no advance warning alerting city dwellers of the accident at the plant? There should have been time enough to raise some manner of alarm, if only to warn people to get indoors and close their windows. More administrative incompetence, he guessed, his blood boiling at the needless loss of life. Simpletons! Half-wits!

  “I am very sorry,” Seven volunteered, “that this disaster has struck your country.” He stood stiffly at the back of the room, in front of a shelf crammed with used hardcovers and paperbacks. “It's a terrible thing.”

  His feeble condolences were not enough for Noon. “Then why couldn't you have averted it?” he accused Seven, turning savagely on the older man. “Why was a satellite over Antarctica more important than that ticking time bomb of a plant next to Bhopal?”

  “I'm not omniscient,” Seven stated quietly, taking no offense at Noon's harsh words. “There was no way of knowing that this was going to happen tonight.”

  “That plant was a menace that should have been shut down years ago!” Noon paced back and forth across the floor, unable to stand still. He hurled his heated reproaches at Seven like poison darts. “Everyone knew that! Why didn't you?”

  “That's not my job,” Seven answered, refusing, much to Noon's aggravation, to accept any complicity in the nightmare they had just exited. “What's happening in Bhopal is a tragedy of horrendous, even historic, proportions, Noon, but it was only an industrial accident, not the start of a world war. My primary mission is to prevent mankind from destroying itself completely.” He stepped toward Noon, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I can't solve all of Earth's social and economic problems. Nor should I. Those are for your own institutions—your own leaders and reformers—to grapple with as best they can. I'm sorry.”

  Noon could not believe his ears. “Accidents happen? Is that all you can say to me?” He heard shouting, and racing footsteps, outside the room, the dormitory jolting to life despite the lateness of the hour. News of the disaster is spreading, he surmised, none too surprised by this development. If bad news traveled quickly, then word of Bhopal's agonized convulsions must be crossing the country faster than a supersonic jet.

  He strode across the room and switched on his small portable television set. It took less than a second to locate a special emergency bulletin, transmitted live from Bhopal. On the screen, thousands of injured victims mobbed a hospital emergency room, completely overwhelming the unprepared doctors and nurses. An ashen-faced reporter, clutching a microphone within his trembling fingers, informed viewers that equally horrific scenes were taking place at hospitals throughout the entire city. Preliminary estimates suggested that as many as twenty thousand people were in desperate need of medical attention, far more than Bhopal's overstressed emergency services could even begin to cope with. The camera lingered on row after row of choking and sobbing Indians stretched out on hastily erected cots outside the hospital. Many more, perhaps beyond help, were left to die on blankets and mats laid out in the parking lot, largely ignored by the frantic hospital workers madly running about, trying in vain to keep up with the tidal wave of poisoned refugees.

  Noon lowered the volume on the television, content to let the hideous images speak for themselves. “This is more than just an ‘ accident,’ ” he spat at Seven. “This is an obscenity that should have never been allowed to occur. In a better world, a world under firm control, such abominable negligence would not be tolerated.” He angrily slammed his fist into his open palm. “Least of all by the likes of
you!”

  “Perhaps,” Seven offered by way of paltry consolation, “this tragedy will lead to positive steps to prevent future accidents of this nature. Increased safety standards. Greater awareness of the dangers of stockpiling dangerous chemicals near heavily populated areas. Stricter enforcement of whatever environmental statutes already exist.” His dark suit, and pious platitudes, reminded Noon, unfavorably, of an undertaker. “It is a sad but universal principle that the most lasting lessons frequently come at the highest cost. It's small comfort now, I understand, but such disasters often spur enormous progress in the long run. I know; I've seen it happen before.”

  Noon would not let Seven shirk his responsibility so easily. “Do not lecture me, old man. I have seen the resources at your disposal, the astonishing technology at your command. You have the power to enforce your will anywhere in the world.” He shook an accusing finger at the complacent, middle-aged spymaster. “And yet you let billions suffer while greedy corporations and weak, fallible, inferior men allow this planet to spin out of control. Men such as we, of superior intelligence and ability, have the power—the duty!—to bring order to the world!”

  “There's a fine line between order and tyranny, Noon,” Seven sermonized. “The human race cannot truly advance unless it is free to learn from its experiences, even those as heartbreaking as we now see in Bhopal. Civilization cannot be imposed on the world through force and coercion. It has to evolve naturally, over time.” He placed the overturned chess set back on its stool and began carefully putting the tiny ivory soldiers back where they belonged. “Trust me on this, Noon. I know what I'm talking about.”

  Noon laughed mirthlessly. “Trust you? I did so once, and look what has become of my homeland!” On the television screen, silent aerial footage depicted city streets literally strewn with corpses. Noon clicked off the TV in disgust. “No, it is clear to me now that, despite all your impressive talk about making the world a better place, you lack the courage and conviction to do more than tinker with the status quo.” He crossed his arms atop his muscular chest, striking a heroic pose before the crimson pennant upon the wall. “The longsuffering people of this planet deserve more than your timid halfmeasures and insignificant course corrections. They require a genuine visionary, a leader who is strong enough to take the reins of command, and bold enough to guide mankind into a new golden age!”