STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds I

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  Guinan wrestled within herself as to whether to alert security or Commander Merritt that she knew of the captain’s whereabouts, but did not look forward to the questions of what made her so sure that he was there. Besides, [179] her inner voice told her that he was in danger and time was short.

  She tried to open the door, but found it to be locked. All the locks on the station had number keypads. Each its own six-digit number combination. As a safety feature, after someone entered three wrong codes, the lock would freeze up for an hour, in an effort to eliminate anyone from trying random numbers until they found the right code. Guinan knew that if she were to gain entry into this room she must do it right the first time.

  Silently, she closed her eyes and concentrated intently on the numbered keypad. With her eyes firmly closed, she reached out and slowly began to enter numbers.

  “You will pay, Picard. You will pay with your life for the life of my family.” Jean-Luc found himself tensing up as the creature moved closer to him.

  Suddenly, the being stopped, stiffened, then fell forward, landing facedown on the floor in front of Jean-Luc. The unexpected move caught the captain by surprise. Somehow, he found it hard to believe that such a move could have been planned by the alien being. It was then, over the glare of light in his eyes, that he saw the hilt of a knife protruding from the being’s back. Jean-Luc found himself recoiling from the being, not only because his kidnapper was no longer a threat, but also due to the knowledge that someone else was in the room.

  “Who’s there? I know that you must be there. Release me, please!” Jean-Luc was unsure of whether he wanted to meet his benefactor, for fear of trading one life-threatening situation for another.

  [180] Through the glare of the light, he began to see a shape emerge. The form did not seem to be humanoid—the strangely shaped head, large billowing body. Then, from somewhere in the back of his mind, the shape took on a name.

  “Guinan?” he asked.

  “Who else could it be?” was the reply. Within moments, Guinan was by Jean-Luc’s side, working to release the electronic binders. In a few seconds, Jean-Luc was free.

  As Jean-Luc rubbed his wrists, attempting to get the circulation going, he asked, “How did you know where I was?”

  “I’m a listener, remember?” was Guinan’s reply. “I listened and learned the location of your whereabouts. Don’t worry yourself about how. Just accept it.” Guinan smiled that know-all smile and her eyes twinkled. At this time, Jean-Luc found it best to let the matter rest and just be thankful that he had been found.

  “And now, dear Captain, I believe we need to let the law enforcement officials on this station know that you have been found unharmed and call Commander Merritt. He’s just about made himself sick with worry.”

  “And how again was it, Guinan, that you were able to locate the captain?” The Hemoda law enforcement official stood in front of Guinan, eager for an answer.

  “Well, I went back to my room and went to bed. Somehow, I seemed to remember someone saying something about getting even with Starfleet concerning his wife being killed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier and call me before [181] going out and taking this investigation into your own hands?” The officer seemed more than a little agitated with her. “And just how did you know where to find the captain?”

  “I told you,” Guinan said. “I was taking a walk after my realization that someone had said something about Starfleet when I heard a noise from behind the door. I believed that I recognized the captain’s voice, so I entered the door to find the kidnapper advancing on the captain, threatening to kill him. I didn’t have time to contact you, so I only reacted to the situation.”

  “So you expect me to believe that you were out for a stroll after a disturbing dream and just happened to hear the captain’s voice behind an unlocked door, which you entered, and sank a knife in the back of the kidnapper?” The Hemoda gazed at Guinan in disbelief, waiting for her reply.

  Guinan’s face blossomed with that all-knowing smile as she replied, “That pretty much explains it.”

  The Hemoda turned to Jean-Luc. “And do you have anything to add?”

  “I do not. As far as I know, it happened just the way Guinan said it did. I have no reason to disbelieve her. I am merely thankful she happened along when she did or I would be dead by now, I’m sure.”

  “Very well,” the Hemoda stated. “I have no choice other than to consider this case closed.”

  Guinan sat back in her room, with the lights at one-quarter normal level, and watched the flame of the candle flicker in her face. This time, she was not alone.

  [182] Jean-Luc sat back in the pillow chair that was thrown on the floor, slowly sipping his glass of wine. “You lied to the Hemoda, didn’t you? About how you found me.” Guinan only looked at him and smiled.

  “Now, Jean-Luc, you are familiar with my people—the listeners. But some of us are more than just listeners. We can also sense things.”

  “You’re a telepath,” Jean-Luc guessed.

  “No, we do not read minds. The feelings that I have cannot be explained. Very few of my people have the abilities I have. I can read disturbances in the cosmos. When things are not right, I can feel it. My grandmother had the ability and she referred to it as ‘the power.’ I have no better term for it.”

  “Well,” Jean-Luc said as he held up his glass, “here’s to your grandmother and ‘the power.’ I’m glad that I was able to benefit from it.” Guinan only looked at Jean-Luc and smiled.

  “What is it?” Jean-Luc asked. “You always look at me like that and smile as if you know something I don’t. I find it rather disturbing at times.”

  “It’s nothing, I assure you, Captain. I just find you to be something special, that I have been waiting decades to come across. I’m just glad to have finally met up with you.”

  Jean-Luc looked at Guinan suspiciously. “Somehow, I think there’s more to it than you are leading me to believe.”

  “Can’t you just accept the fact that you have acquired a friend like no other you have ever had? I feel ours is a friendship that will continue for many years to come. I think that we will have many more adventures together.”

  “You seem to forget—I am the captain of a Starfleet [183] vessel, and you are a barkeep. Do you really think our paths will cross that often?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps you will someday have need of a barkeep on your ship.”

  “A barkeep on my ship? Surely you jest. Why would anyone ever need a barkeep on a starship?”

  Guinan only smiled. “Oh, stop overanalyzing everything and pour me another glass of wine.”

  Civil Disobedience

  Alara Rogers

  Earth was ruined.

  Devastation stretched for a thousand miles, where once there had been a thriving civilization. A civilization with a short history and a great deal of promise, cut down just as it had started to extricate itself from the muck of its evolutionary origins. It hardly seemed fair.

  It was the way the universe worked, of course. Q knew that. Species had their brief gaudy hour, their moment in the sun, and were then usually supplanted. And what supplanted them didn’t have to be more beautiful, or more advanced as his people considered it, merely better adapted to Me at this level.

  Forbidden. Forbidden to interfere.

  He wore the shape of one of these fallen people, a tall biped with dark hair and dark eyes, his attention turned inward as he Walked through the ashes of a world. Huge, gaping craters pockmarked the landscape where once there had been vast cities. All gone, consumed in a single holocaust.

  It is forbidden.

  A being approached him. He glanced at it—one of the [185] creatures that had destroyed this world. “You have not been assimilated,” the creature said.

  “Very good,” he replied darkly. “Next perhaps you’ll master division.”

  “All humans are to be assimilated,” the creature said, and raised its weapon.

&nb
sp; He severed the creature’s connection to its fellows, rendering it alone, confused, and capable of feeling pain. He then heated the temperature of all the metal in its body to 1500° Fahrenheit. The creature screamed, and screamed, writhing in impossible agony, and finally lay still.

  Q thought about resurrecting it to torture it some more, but that really wasn’t what he wanted to do. What he wanted to do was wipe out its entire species. And that was forbidden, as forbidden as intervening to save the lives of these people had been.

  They took you in, they protected you in your hour of need, and you killed them. You set the machinations in motion. You caused this. They saved your life, the only time in your existence that you were vulnerable, and you stood by and let them die.

  His thoughts tormented him. In a futile attempt to outrun them, he fled, reappearing halfway around the planet.

  This place had been a city called Paris once, a city that had filled a young human named Jean-Luc Picard with dreams. Q had seen those dreams in that human’s mind, once. Now, in a ship up above, orbiting the planet, that human, long since a grown man, orchestrated the destruction of this city. The ugly cyborg creatures swarmed over the remains, analyzing, studying, dissecting. Occasionally they dragged survivors from the wreckage and forced them to [186] become one of them, as they had done with Picard. No, no longer Picard. Locutus now.

  “In all the universe, you’re the closest thing I have to a friend, Jean-Luc. ...”

  You could have saved him and you didn’t. You could have saved them and you didn’t. You caused the problem and you were too frightened to fix it.

  It is forbidden. ...

  Yes, and that never stopped you before. But now you’ve lost your nerve. Take away your powers once, and you’re revealed as the pathetic creature you are. Coward.

  You killed them with your little game, just as surely as if you’d brought the Borg here yourself.

  He sat down heavily in the middle of the street. The milling cyborgs ignored him, their sensors telling them that he was an anomaly, and to be avoided. They’d seen through the eyes of the one he’d killed, the nanosecond before Q had severed it from the collective, and so they knew now what he was. They feared his people, did the Borg. But they didn’t fear them enough.

  And shall I make a grand dramatic gesture? Shall I rain fire on the complexes of your homeworld, turn your cubes inside out, send the knowledge of madness burning through your entire collective? Shall I sever the links that bind you all together, and laugh as you starve and destroy one another?

  And for that grand dramatic gesture, die?

  Or shall I ignore you and what you’ve done? They were a minor little species at best, barely worth my notice, certainly not worth my death. What should it matter to me that they protected me when I needed it, at risk to their own lives? [187] What should it matter to me that they held promise, that someday in the far far future they could have been like us?

  What should it matter to me that one who interested me, amused me, entertained me, was consumed by you and destroyed his own kind, at the cost of his soul?

  When I was the one who caused it by introducing him to you?

  He shook his head no. No, he could not ignore it. It mattered. It mattered more than almost anything ever had.

  But they forbade you to intervene. They’ll kill you. You know that.

  Yes, well, if I’m such a coward that they can make me jump through hoops for them, then life isn’t much worth living, is it?

  And with a thought, he was elsewhere in space and time, watching a final desperate battle.

  Before him stood the Enterprise—a ship he had a proprietary interest in, of sorts. It had been Picard’s ship, before the Borg had kidnapped the captain. The people aboard had a makeshift weapon, cobbled together from instruments that had never been intended to serve the purpose. With it, they hoped to destroy their enemy, though it would also destroy their captain, and most likely themselves. The risk was worth it, the need to destroy the Borg greater than any other imperative.

  But it wouldn’t happen that way. Q knew their future all too well, had seen it all unfold before while standing helpless, forbidden to interfere. Their attempt would cause their own destruction, as circuits in their makeshift weapon overloaded and exploded, destroying their ship and critically [188] damaging the Borg ship they fought. But the Borg ship would regenerate. And the captive human would survive, to oversee the destruction of his entire planet, as deep within what remained of his soul went mad, shrieking.

  It was such a simple thing to prevent that future, to reach out to the ship and disable their weapon, so the weapon would destroy itself in fighting but nothing else. With that done, the Enterprise crew would be forced to get creative. They’d realize their only hope was in their transformed captain, and rescue him.

  Q followed the timeline just long enough to see it happen, to see history change around him. Picard was saved from being Locutus and became the key to stopping the Borg invasion of Earth. The humans had been saved. Q watched it happen, then returned to his time, to face the consequences that awaited him. He had been specifically warned against intervening; he was still on probation after the loss of his powers and their subsequent return. This time, he was sure, they would take those powers away and never offer a hope for their return.

  Or perhaps they’d simply kill him outright. He rather preferred that alternative.

  But the humans would live. His rash act in introducing them to the Borg would not cause humanity’s destruction, Picard’s damnation. He had paid his debt.

  And wouldn’t you think it’s hysterically amusing that I should die to save you, Jean-Luc?

  It’s just as well that you’ll never find out.

  “Did you perhaps misunderstand your orders?” they asked, a sinuous sarcasm weaving through their combined [189] voice. “You were specifically instructed not to intervene in the humans’ conflict with the Borg. Do you deny that?”

  “I do not,” he said, trying to be brave in the face of the beings who knew his every weakness, knowing he had just sealed his fate. “I understood the orders.”

  “And did you understand that you are on probation? That this body has judged you to have misused the abilities We granted you, disobeyed Us, caused havoc and disorder and misery wherever you go, and for this you were sentenced to mortality? You understand that you were paroled with the understanding that you would defy Us no longer, and that your disobedience in this matter speaks of very dire consequences?”

  He stood before the force of the entire Continuum, temporarily severed from them, discontinuous. He had stood in this place before, partially severed, facing the full might of his brothers and sisters turned against him. That time, he had been granted a reprieve, for committing a selfless act—but they’d placed him on probation. One further act of disobedience, and he would find himself standing before them again. And so he had, and so here he was.

  A single focused voice, like the chanting of a crowd, bore down on him. Other voices murmured around him, a pressure against his mind, too chaotic and complex for him to decipher individual threads. They conversed with one another, but to him, the one who might be made an outsider, they presented only one voice.

  “I understood that as well.”

  “Then why did you defy Us?”

  “Because”—and he took his courage in metaphoric hands—”you were wrong.”

  [190] A murmuring of surprise and shock went through the assembled. Few dared to call the Continuum wrong.

  “Explain.”

  Nothing he said could make matters any worse for him now; he had to believe that. So he would speak the truth, and die for that if need be. Better than going to his death a coward, apologizing for a “crime” he did not, in fact, regret.

  “When I first introduced the humans to the Borg—and I make no claims for the correctness of that action now—I knew perfectly well that they would not be able to stand up to the Borg directly in combat. I also believed that the
y had promise, promise that should not be allowed to be so easily destroyed. I intended to demonstrate to them the power of the Borg, to warn them against complacency, and then, when the Borg inevitably precipitated conflict with them years too early, I intended to guide the humans in small ways, to aid them so it would be possible for them to survive.

  “I do not argue for the morality of that plan, either. But it was my plan, and You interfered. When You forbade me to intervene as I had intended, You placed me in a situation where my actions caused the very disaster I had hoped to prevent. Through Your effect on me, my action in introducing the humans to the Borg changed from a simple cultural intervention to an act of genocide, and that was unconscionable to me. If we will not destroy the Borg, who have destroyed so many promising lower life-forms in their path, how could we justify destroying humanity?

  “I acted to rectify the mistake I had already made, in full awareness of what the consequences to myself would be. And I accept Your verdict, whatever it should be, but I will not accept the correctness of Your position. I was right to do [191] what I did, even if I should die for it.” He folded his energies about himself. “I await sentencing.”

  He did not expect the reaction. He had expected the gathering to harden against him, had expected to feel friends and family turning away from him, as they prepared to cast the sentence that would end his life. Instead he felt a ripple of joy travel through them. And the one who had first had him condemned, who had placed him on probation in the first place, detached from the masses of Q all around and came forward, radiating happiness and pride. “Congratulations, little brother.”

  This confused him. Congratulations? For what?

  “It is the sentence of this court,” the other proclaimed, and his voice was, for a moment, the voice of the entire Continuum, “that this Q has demonstrated sufficient grasp of morality, the consequences of his actions, and willingness to accept responsibility, to be reinstated as a full member of our Continuum, with all the rights and privileges allowed as such.”