“You break, you buy, Tommy,” it said.
Tom held the marble up to his eyes and found Q’s oversized eyeball staring back at him. “But I didn’t do anything,” he said to the eyeball, feeling for all the world like a little kid who had just been caught swiping a cookie from the cookie jar. “And I don’t have anything to pay with.”
“That’s not the point. If something breaks, in this case a star system, a planet, or a nebula, someone has to buy. Ask any Ferengi if you doubt me. It’s the direct corollary to the whole choice principle. You make a choice, there are consequences. Someone has to pay for it. Why else would I have brought you here to deal with Kathy’s indiscretion?”
“Uh, what about your indiscretion,” Harry said, smiling smugly. “We haven’t gotten to that yet.”
“You are an irritating toad, Mr. Kim,” eyeball Q said, and promptly turned into a puff of smoke.
A prune-faced dwarf appeared at Tom’s side with a square tablet in his wrinkled, liver-spot-covered hand. He took Tom’s left hand and placed it on the tablet, which lit up in reply. “It’s all yours, buddy,” he croaked, and gave Tom a palm-sized box.
“How did I pay for this?” Tom said, dubiously studying his new possession.
“Loan. Guaranteed by Q. He’s a vicious one to borrow from so I’d make sure my payments are on time.”
Tom lifted the lid gingerly. Yep. The broken marble was inside. Engraved in small text on the lid was “Monorha” and a series of numbers that Tom believed must be its coordinates. “I own Monorha?”
Q materialized by Tom’s side. “That is correct, Mr. Paris. Next time, perhaps, you should break something more interesting. I’d give you a chance, if we didn’t need to press on.” A finger snap and—
Tom, Harry, and Q stood on a plateau. Before them, a barren purple-brown field, blanketed in shadows and twilight, spread as far as they could see. To their backs, a slick obsidian wall curved over their heads like a sarcophagus lid, shielding them from bone-chilling wind whistling through rock teeth and down onto the open plain. Lightning cleaved the darkness; thunder answered in protest. The cacophonous sounds of war stormed in the distance.
Death lingered here; Tom felt it seeping through the ground, drifting on the dank air. He’d felt similarly back on Caldik Prime before his choices cost three Starfleet officers their lives.
“Before you ask, Mr. Kim,” Q said, giving Harry a meaningful gaze, “this is the place where the Nacene finally settled their differences about whether they should continue to exist in two dimensions. One side favored locking themselves up in Exosia to ‘fix’ the unbalanced strings. The other side believed that exploration was their right and demanded to be allowed to come and go freely.”
Vaporous outlines—ghostly armies—flowed over the hills and down into the plains. From the heights, the soaring, diving, floating phantasm looked like a tide pool of sea anemones with glowing tentacles waving with the tides. The Nacene did not wound, the Nacene annihilated. Tom found it impossible to look away from the horrible beauty of dancing colors and flashing lights.
“This place became Monorha, our own Mr. Paris being the latest in a long series of unfortunate owners,” Q said. “All that Nacene destruction gave rise to life. An unforeseen consequence of the Nacene’s choices.”
“I get it,” Harry said dryly.
Directly opposite their position, a tall humanoid figure, more radiant than the Nacene below, appeared on a cliff, cloak flowing out behind him. He opened his arms to the starry sky above and cried out terrible invocations, calling on forces alien to Tom’s understanding. Each spoken word caused Tom to tremble until his knees could barely support him. “Who is that?” he whispered.
Q studied Tom, with amusement or sympathy Tom couldn’t tell, for a long moment before speaking. “The Exiles called their leader ‘the Light,’ and for a while it appeared the Light might be victorious. In the end, though, the Exosia Nacene won and the passageway was closed. You’ve met some of the Exiles—”
Without looking away from the Light, Harry said, “Suspiria and the Caretaker.”
“Exactly. And lest you forget, the one who masqueraded as your captain’s sister,” Q said. “The wardens locked up Exosia by patching the gateway between the two dimensions, making it impossible for the exiled Nacene to reenter. The Exiles decided that they’d explore this universe until they found a way for them to exist safely in both places.”
As the ramifications of Q’s story sank in, Tom began making connections. “The Light and his followers built the black-hole array the Monorhans think of as Gremadia—as a place to refuel and renew their energy,” Tom said.
Q raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Excellent, Mr. Paris. Perhaps Kathy is rubbing off on you after all.”
“And the Monorhan system?” Harry said finally.
“It’s not a system. At least, not a real one. Looks like space, feels like space. But it isn’t. It’s a construct that protects the gateway to Exosia. At least, that was its function up until recently, when the patch was dislodged and the boundary between Exosia and your continuum became porous again.”
“The destruction of the Blue Eye—” Harry said, comprehension dawning. “That’s what did it!”
“Give the boy a cookie,” Q said. At which point a large chocolate chip cookie materialized in Harry’s hand. Harry rolled his eyes and flung the cookie aside.
“This time, however,” Q said, “the damage was so catastrophic that it disrupted some of the strings. Their vibrations shifted ever so slightly and as a consequence have started throwing all these interrelated systems out of balance. Soon, all the strings will shift vibrations and contraction will begin. All matter will come together, ending the universe prematurely.”
“How soon is soon?” Tom said, worriedly.
“Twenty million years, give or take. I realize that’s a future beyond any you can fathom, but that’s practically a weekend vacation for a Q. Big enough problem for you boys?”
“But what happened to the Light?” Harry asked.
Q sighed and shook his head. “Studied with us for a while. Promising fellow. But he fell in love with a small-town girl—always had a weak spot for humanoids. Came up with the wacky idea that if they could mingle their matter together and create a child, their offspring might be able to undo all the damage the Nacene had done. Had to give up his life so that the little guy could be born, but born he was.”
You have to admire a guy who gave it all up for love, Tom thought, though he had a hard time reconciling the frightening, powerful figure on the cliff with a vision of a lovesick Romeo. “Did his plan work?” Tom asked.
“Too soon to tell,” Q said. “That’s why you boys are here.”
In the space of a heartbeat, the purple-brown field receded into the horizon until it dissolved into the haze.
Voyager’s senior staff gathered around the conference room viewscreen where Seven had called up her research data. B’Elanna’s eyes flickered over the equations and theoretical projections, and she felt the numbness seeping back into her body. Except as it related to engineering and navigation, astrophysics (especially the quantum side) had never been B’Elanna’s expertise. Comprehending Seven’s work, however, required only a rudimentary understanding of physics, so it was hard to discount her conclusions. Damn it all if Seven’s data didn’t appear solid!
The former Borg had extrapolated her theories based on sensor data collected over the past week. Under most circumstances—especially in physics, where time frames were measured in million-year blocks, not days—a week’s worth of data would hardly be enough to base such a complex analysis on and produce credible results. It was like drawing conclusions about planetary geology based on a grain of sand! The rapid changes in Monorhan space seemed to negate any concerns over hasty conclusions, though. If anything, Seven’s analysis was barely keeping abreast of the situation. B’Elanna’s stomach crawled up her throat; she repressed the urge to throw up. Rollins and Ayala peppered Seven
with questions. B’Elanna knew she should probably be paying attention to their discussion, but she found this whole situation so unsettling that she was having a difficult time convincing herself this wasn’t a stress-induced nightmare.
Nakano, who was downloading the data into a padd for her personal use, asked B’Elanna if she’d like her to perform a similar download for engineering. B’Elanna declined. She’d come to the unarguable conclusion that regardless of what Seven’s data said, they were inescapably screwed.
“So what do we do?” Chakotay said at last.
“I doubt that any of our efforts at reversing this quantum shift will be effective,” Seven said. “My preliminary models indicated that beyond Monorhan space, the transformation would occur more slowly, taking perhaps tens of thousands of years.”
“That’s pretty quick when you figure a star’s life cycle—” Ayala said.
“Or the orbital paths of some comets,” Rollins said.
“How comforting—knowing we won’t be around to witness the destruction of the universe as we know it. Especially since it looks like it’s our fault,” B’Elanna said cynically. “Nothing like having that responsibility laid at our feet.” She walked away from the crowd gathered around the screen and dropped back into her chair. Slouching down, she buried her head in her hands, massaging her sinuses, where a headache had started gestating. Chakotay needed to end this meeting—soon. Her engines needed her.
The officers, one by one, returned to their chairs. Once everyone was seated around the table, the discussion resumed.
“It appears that our plan to evacuate the region immediately was the logical one,” Tuvok said. “Perhaps we can devise a method to isolate or contain Monorhan space so that the destruction spreads no further.”
Finally, a voice of reason, B’Elanna thought.
“Actually,” Seven said, “we may not want to evacuate the region yet.”
I didn’t just hear what I heard. B’Elanna raised her head, mouth agape. The Borg had finally taken leave of her senses. Seven’s obsession with the Omega molecule had been more than a bit crazy, but this was full-on delusional. Throwing her arms behind her head and smirking at Seven, B’Elanna said, “This I’ve got to hear.”
Seven raised a single, perfectly arched eyebrow, sending what B’Elanna knew was wordless rebuke.
B’Elanna had been told that her system was nanoprobe-free, but moments like these made it hard to believe it: the odd connection between her and Seven remained. She frowned.
With a sniff, Seven turned back to the rest of the senior staff. “I have maintained surveillance of the microsingularity since it formed after the collapse of the white dwarf,” Seven said. “While I’ve focused primarily our resources on the larger issues of the region, particularly as they relate to navigation, I have been able to delineate facts that may prove to be relevant to our current predicament. Computer, reduce lighting fifty percent.” From where she sat, she activated a viewscreen at the front of the room.
With a yellow grid as a background, a rendering of Monorhan space appeared, indicating the positions of the planets, the stars, the microsingularity, the remains of the former location of Gremadia. Voyager’s current trajectory out of the system was indicated by a solid blue line swooping through the illustration. Also on the map was a blinking green dot indicating the most probable location of the missing shuttle. The green dot was six to seven hours away under present circumstances.
B’Elanna knew what she’d been told—that there wasn’t any discernible sign of Tom within the region—but that didn’t change her hope that he’d just show up at the rendezvous point with a wild and crazy story about where he’d been and why they hadn’t been able to find him. She might have to kill him for his hijinks, but at least she’d know he wasn’t squashed into billions of atoms somewhere.
“Computer, add energy-distribution-analysis data to the Monorhan map,” Seven commanded.
The computer chimed an acknowledgment, and a swirled red-and-white vortex appeared over the grid, the pinprick centered directly over the microsingularity. A key off to the side of the diagram indicated that the red coloring mapped photonic energy; the white coloring indicated other energy. B’Elanna further examined the explanatory key and discovered that this was Seven’s future projection for the distribution of light energy in this sector. In the near future, the Monorhan sun wasn’t in danger of disappearing, nor was Voyager in danger of losing her own lights. But such an outcome was inevitable within months, maybe weeks if the subspace changes accelerated. This whole region of space would be snuffed out like a candle.
B’Elanna placed her elbows on the table, leaning forward to rest her head on the backs of her hands so she could get a better look. Narrowing her eyes, she studied the diagram intently, and then glanced up at Seven. The Borg looked far too smug. B’Elanna could practically hear Seven’s words: Good. I have your attention. You will come to the same conclusions I have and I will need you to support what I am about to propose. To which B’Elanna anticipated responding, Like hell I will. The longer she looked, however, the more right Seven appeared to be. She muttered a Klingon invective under her breath, ignoring Chakotay’s withering glare. She took a deep breath. Fine. I’ll say it.
“Over time, a disproportionate amount of photonic energy in the region will be swirling toward the microsingularity,” B’Elanna said, looking away from the illustration and up at Seven. “I didn’t believe the singularity had that kind of gravitational pull yet. It’s still pretty small. To be drawing in photonic energy from all over the sector within several weeks—I thought only light that passed within the pull of the event horizon could be drawn in. This diagram seems to have a magnetic quality to it.”
“It does,” Seven agreed. “Something in the character of this specific object pulls photonic energy toward it. Take a look at another view, recorded by our sensors in the moments after Gremadia exploded.” She ordered the computer to shift illustrations. Instead of a whirlwind of alternating colors trickling into the singularity, the display showed a solid red stream swamping the object like flood-waters over a levee.
“I don’t understand it,” Chakotay said. He glanced at B’Elanna, seeking her thoughts. “Why photonic energy?”
The engineer shrugged.
“A singularity with that strength should be pulling planets and all other cosmic detritus toward it,” Ayala said. “But there’s not even the subtlest of orbital shifts in any of the pathways of the planetary bodies or even the meteor belt when you compare the most recent data with the older data.”
“Precisely,” Seven said, obviously pleased.
Ayala might make a competent replacement for Harry after all, B’Elanna thought. We’re all replaceable, aren’t we….
“I believe this isn’t a singularity the way we understand singularities,” Seven said. “To refer to it as such is a misnomer.”
“That would certainly be consistent with everything else about this region—which is that nothing is consistent,” B’Elanna muttered under her breath.
“Our hypothesis was correct,” Chakotay said, methodically pacing the length of the room. “It isn’t a singularity: it is a destabilization of the boundary between this artificial system and whatever else it is connected to—”
“Exosia,” B’Elanna said. “Home of the Nacene.”
Silence smothered the room. The senior staff sat in contemplative quiet for a long moment. B’Elanna imagined that everyone was as sobered as she at the prospect of dealing with thousands, if not more, Nacene, should Exosia open to their space-time.
“Could we stabilize Monorhan space if we closed this boundary?” Ayala asked finally.
“Possibly,” Seven said. “But more immediate to our concerns is my belief that the Doctor was pulled into Exosia as a consequence of the last major regional disruption—the destruction of Gremadia. If we want to find him, our best chance is to probe the rift to see if we can locate any traces of him.”
The words
had barely left Seven’s lips before B’Elanna was out of her chair. She’d had enough of Borg madness to last her the rest of her life. Fists on hips, she stormed at Seven. “You’re saying we need to reverse course and go back into the heart of Monorhan space.”
“Yes I am.” Seven’s placid expression said that she’d anticipated this reaction, angering B’Elanna all the more.
B’Elanna opened her mouth, paused, blinked, and shook her head. “I’m speechless. After what you’ve just told us about this region turning into so much Swiss cheese, I don’t know how in the hell you expect us to knowingly go back into the worst of it!” She gave in to the overwhelming need to escape her chair and stalked the length of the room several times, waiting for the other senior staffers to voice their objections.
“The Doctor’s backup modules were irreparably damaged, Lieutenant,” Seven said. “There’s not a trace of his programming left aboard Voyager. We have to have a medical officer.”
“What about Nakano?” B’Elanna argued.
“I’m not a doctor, B’Elanna,” Nakano said softly. “I’m just a few steps beyond a nurse.”
Realizing that no one else was going to speak up, B’Elanna stopped beside Chakotay, who leaned against the wall beside the computer. “Surely you can’t be taking this seriously. The captain’s last order was to exit Monorhan space!”
“At the time the captain gave that order, she had no idea that we lost the Doctor,” Chakotay said. He turned to Seven. “How long can we safely remain within the boundaries of Monorhan space?”
“Less than a day,” Seven said.
String Theory, Book 3: Evolution Page 9