2294
Carol Marcus waded through waist-high fronds as she traversed the
central valley of the Genesis Cave, deep inside the “lifeless”
planetoid Regula.
A complex system of artificial solar generators preserved a
semblance of the diurnal rhythm one would experience living on a
planet’s surface, and a team of holographic engineers had even
created a convincing facsimile of the sky to conceal the stone roof
looming three hundred meters overhead. Looking up at the ersatz
sun, Marcus basked in its warmth and yellow radiance.
The improved illusion of a natural environment was only one of many
upgrades Marcus and her team had made to the original Genesis Cave,
which had served as a template for dozens of others. Its water
supply had been increased, and its food crops had been supplemented
with food synthesizers that could transform basic proteins into a
variety of more complex forms, providing Marcus and the cave’s 338
scientists, artists, and free-thinkers in residence a diet of lean
meats without the complications of raising or slaughtering
livestock.
Beneath the lush landscape, however, dwelled the real secret of
Memory Omega—its massive archive of linked computer banks, a
storehouse of knowledge unlike any
other in the galaxy. No matter what happened beyond the sheltering
walls of the project’s subterranean redoubts, the scientists of
Memory Omega would continue to conduct new research and develop new
technologies.
As Marcus climbed the steps of the communications building,
however, she couldn’t help but feel concerned about what was
transpiring “outside.”
She stepped through the door to find her son, David, monitoring
signals from the cave’s one link to the galaxy at large—a small
subspace-radio antenna mounted on the surface of Regula.
“What’s the latest news?” she asked.
“Not good,” David said. “Lots of frequencies are being jammed, but
the few I can still get are talking about attacks by Klingon fleets
on the fringe systems.” He threw her a worried look. “It sounds
like Starfleet’s losing a lot of ships out there.” Shaking his
head, he added, “It’s only a matter of time before the invasion
starts.”
Marcus folded her hands against her chin, as if in prayer. “We
don’t know that,” she said. “It might be just another flare-up,
trouble in the outer colonies—”
“Mother,” David cut in. “These aren’t just border skirmishes. The
Klingons are on the move, and so are the Cardassians.” He switched
off the subspace transceiver. “I think we need to face facts: it’s
time to retract the antenna.”
“So soon?”
“Leaving it up, even as a passive receiver, is risky. Cloaked
Klingon fleets are all over Terran space. There’s no telling if or
when they’ll scan this system.”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Once we take down the antenna, we’ll
be blind to the outside.”
David got up and gently took hold of
his mother’s shoulders. “The enemy only needs to detect our antenna
once to destroy everything we’ve worked for, and everything our
people outside are dying for. Mother … it’s time.”
She sighed. Her son was right; it was time to finish what they had
started four years earlier when they’d blown up the evacuated
Regula I station. Nodding at the subspace transceiver, she said,
“Retract the antenna. I’ll tell the other sites to do the
same.”
Her son walked to the master control panel. Keying in commands on
the touchscreen console, he retracted the base’s subspace antenna
beneath the surface of Regula and sealed the hatch of its silo,
which was camouflaged against both visual scans and sensor
sweeps.
Standing beside David at the console, Marcus tapped in her command
code and accessed the quantum-key transceiver, their undetectable
link to their far-flung colleagues. She selected all the quantum
nodes and broadcast a concise directive to every Memory Omega site
concealed throughout local space:
Go dark. Go silent. Operation Omega has
begun.