Star Trek - Gateways 7 - WHAT LAY BEYOND

by Various

  Fluffy. Where was the little animal? "Barkley. Fluffy," she called, and the class erupted in laughter.

  "Silence!" ordered Kerrigan. The cadets tried to comply, but couldn't quite manage to completely eliminate a few stray snorts and snickers. "Cadet Janeway, take your seat. Now. And report to me after your classes today. I've got something special lined up for your detention."

  At that moment, with a snicking sound of claws on smooth flooring, Fluffy/Barkley skidded around a corner and rushed up to her. Dropping the bag of PADDs, she scooped the animal up and felt him lick her face. Even though she clasped him to a petite, nineteen-year-old body, the memories of the true years were emblazoned in her mind. Voyager. Chakotay. Tuvok. All the rest of her incredible crew. The journey they had undergone, the losses, the tragedies and victories that had kept them going. That was what was real, was true and important, not this false classroom.

  She turned to face Kerrigan. "You're a petty tyrant, Wendy Kerrigan. You were abusing your power for years before I got here and you're still doing it even in my imagination."

  Kerrigan straightened to her full, imposing height of nearly six feet. "I hope you like civilian life, Janeway, because you're about this far from getting yourself expelled."

  "I graduated with honors," Janeway retorted, warming to the task. "I have my own command, a crew that's as loyal and true to the ideals of Starfleet as you are bitter and false to them. I don't know why I haven't acted earlier. I'm going to see to it that you're fired. I'm going to tell them everything. The last thing impressionable young cadets need is someone like you beating all the life and enthusiasm out of them."

  "You may leave, Janeway." Hate blazed in those eyes. Janeway lifted her chin and stared right back.

  "I'll leave, all right. But I'll be back. You won't."

  She turned and - - stood at the front of the room. Twenty-six faces gazed up at her with rapt attention. Janeway smiled a little, then touched the holographic display unit.

  "Who can tell me what this is?"

  Twenty-six hands shot up. Janeway picked the shy little girl in the back. "Cadet Anson?"

  "That's a Borg cube," the girl whispered, barely audible.

  "Correct. And what is this?"

  It was a loaded question. The image of Seven of Nine appeared, looking the way she had when she was still part of the collective. The bald head, the arrogant gaze, the fit body tightly swathed in black. More hands shot up.

  "Cadet Garcia?"

  "That's a Borg," he replied with confidence.

  "You're right... and you're not right. Can anyone tell my why Garcia's identification is only partially correct?"

  Now there were only a few hands. Janeway picked Cadet Bedony. "Yes, Cadet?"

  "It's a Borg, but it's also your crew member Seven of Nine. Before you liberated her from the collective."

  Janeway smiled. "That's right." She touched another button and a holographic Seven of Nine, most of her humanity restored, stood beside the image of her former self. Janeway had to chuckle at the reaction of some of the male cadets, and one or two of the females. Seven of Nine was indeed a strikingly attractive woman. She was almost unrecognizable as the drone she had been. Even though these cadets were familiar with her - who wasn't? Seven was the biggest celebrity of all of them from the minute they returned home - Janeway wasn't surprised that most of them had found her unrecognizable.

  She continued her talk, showing images of Neelix and Kes, the Hirogen, the Vidiians, the Caatati, the Malons, and several of the other races Voyager had encountered during its amazing trek. Her mind drifted back to the day when she and her entire crew had been feted with a glorious parade in the heart of San Francisco.

  Janeway frowned. Something was not right. She could remember the parade, but not preparing for it, nor what had happened afterward. She glanced down at her notes. They were all gibberish scribblings. There was not a single recognizable word on the PADD. And beside the podium at which she stood sat a small doglike creature. When it caught her gaze, its tail began to thump happily.

  "Barclay," she whispered.

  Hands shot up. She looked up, confused. "What?"

  "Reginald Barclay. The one who made contact with you through Pathfinder. He was the one who brought you home." Cadet M'Benga looked very pleased with herself.

  Feeling somewhat dizzy, Janeway looked down at the creature. No, she hadn't been talking about Reginald. She'd been talking about this creature. Barkley. Fluffy. Tom and Neelix had argued about naming him, and as far as she had heard, they never had decided....

  Her hand went to her temple. A vein throbbed there. She tried to concentrate.

  "Admiral Janeway?" It was young Cadet Anson, standing beside the podium. Concern was on her face. "Are you all right?" Tentatively, the girl stretched out a hand and placed it on Janeway's arm.

  Janeway, moved by Anson's gesture, reached to pat that hand. She froze in midmotion.

  "You're not real," she said, quietly, but with conviction. Cadet Anson stared back at her, her blue eyes wide with confusion and hurt. Slowly, lowering her gaze, the girl withdrew her hand from Janeway's arm, curling the fingers closed and hiding it behind her back as if ashamed. Her soft cheeks turned fiery red.

  "Admiral?" The voice belonged to Cadet M'Benga.

  Janeway tore her gaze from Anson to regard M'Benga steadily.

  "I'm not an admiral. I'm Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation starship Voyager. We're still lost in the Delta Quadrant." As she stated the words, she knew in her heart the truth of them. Her mind knew it, even though the evidence of her eyes might suggest otherwise. She was missing parts of the homecoming parade day because there never had been a homecoming parade, nor even a homecoming.

  Fluffy/Barkley barked.

  "We were leading a caravan through dangerous space," she said, continuing to speak aloud. The cadets had fallen silent and now stared at her as if she had gone mad. Which, she supposed, to their way of looking at things, she had.

  Except they weren't real. None of this was real. "I stepped through a gateway," she said, her voice growing louder. "With Fluffy. And I'm not here teaching or attending an Academy class, I'm not on the bridge of the Enterprise, I'm on the other side of that gateway and someone is pulling the strings."

  She picked up the dog, felt the reassuring warmth, the thump of its heart.

  "I don't take kindly to being controlled," she said aloud to whoever was listening. "Show yourself and let us open a dialogue. I don't know if you're trying to make me feel more at home or are simply toying with me. Either way, it's not working. I can see through it." The cadets disappeared. The room remained. Janeway took a deep breath and strode out the door.

  It was the fragrance that registered first. She breathed in the scent of freshly cut grasses, the sweetness of flowers she could identify - apple blossom and roses, honeysuckle and freesia - and some achingly wonderful smells she couldn't. The light was bright, but her eyes adjusted quickly to behold one of the most tranquil scenes she'd ever had the good fortune to witness.

  Green grass, waving in the gentle breeze that had carried the delectable scents to her nose, stretched as far as the eye could see. Over there was the shimmering image of a stream. She could barely hear its happy burbling. And to her right, a large house, surrounded by a white picket fence. Huge oak trees provided shade on a warm summer day, and from one of those oak trees dangled a swing. A porch hosted two rocking chairs and a small table, upon which there was pitcher of what Janeway was willing to bet was icy cold lemonade.

  "I've been here," she whispered, but the same heavy sensation that had slowed her true memories to a crawl now clogged her brain. She couldn't recall it. "Think, Kathryn, think!" she told herself in a harsh whisper. It wasn't a real place, she knew that much, but it was real, in its own strange way.

  A sudden image of a little girl and a white rabbit appeared in her mind. This whole thing reminded her of the famous Lewis Carroll children's story, and she was most definitely cast i
n the role of Alice. Where, then, was the white rabbit, the one who had lured her here with the...

  The gateway. She remembered now, remembered it all. The gateway was the rabbit hole into this strange, bizarre world, where the most dignified captain in the fleet had made a clumsy pass at her, where she was reduced to being a terrified cadet or elevated to the equally false rank of a hometown hero. The gateway had been real, and whoever was casting these illusions was real. No white rabbit, but a trickster par excellence.

  She could identify the place now, though she did not recognize it per se. She was inside the very heart of the Q Continuum.

  The door opened and closed with a bang. A little boy rushed out. He was towheaded and tanned, wearing a straw hat, shirt and shorts, suspenders, and nothing on his feet. For all the world, he looked like the classic image of Tom Sawyer. He uttered a delighted, incoherent cry when he saw her, and ran toward her. It was such a happy, living sound that it startled Janeway.

  Barkley wriggled furiously in her arms. She struggled to hold on to him, but he leaped down and ran across the green grass to leap into the arms of a small boy. Both fell to the ground, joy writ plain in every movement, every laugh, every wriggle.

  She had finally found Fluffy's master.

  "The boy has formed such odd attachments to mortal creatures," came a voice right beside her that Janeway knew all too well. "Can't imagine where he gets it."

  Janeway turned around with deliberate slowness to regard the grinning figure of Q.

  Chapter 2

  He was clad, as usual, in his appropriated Starfleet uniform. She was happy that Barkley had found his home and his master, who had obviously missed him terribly. She was much less than happy to see Q again. Even as she regarded him, struggling to keep her emotions down, anger roiled to the forefront.

  "I might have known you would have something to do with this," she snapped. "It's got your stink all over it. I should have figured it out when Will Riker had nothing but good things to say about you."

  He lifted his hands in mock horror. "Kathryn! You wound me to the quick. Such undeserved slurs!"

  "Undeserved?" Janeway let her outrage come unchecked. She strode toward Q and shoved her face up to his. "Those gateways had to be your doing. It's just the sort of thing you'd get your sick amusement from - opening doors here and there, letting innocent people wander through and get lost. Let me count up all the deaths you're responsible for. There's the Ammunii ship - two hundred and ten lives. The Kuluuk, whom you didn't kill outright but who would most certainly be alive in their own space. That's four hundred and fifty-seven. There are the all the V'enah and Todanians who - "

  "I repeat," Q said mildly, "you've got it all wrong. As you humans usually do. Calm down, dear Kathy, and have a spot of tea."

  Janeway found herself sunk deep in the cushions of a flowery chair which had lace doilies on the arms and over the back. She struggled to extricate herself, realizing as she did so that she was clad in a full-length, constricting dress. It was a yellowish paisley pattern, and she strongly suspected that the thing restricting her breathing was a whalebone corset.

  On a lovely oak table in front of her was a delicious-looking spread of finger sandwiches and pastries.

  Q, dressed in what Janeway guessed to be formal Edwardian, poured. "Would you like cream or sugar with your Earl Grey?" Suddenly he snapped his fingers. "Whoops, that's dear old Jean-Luc. You like coffee, don't you?"

  And so quickly it was dizzying, Janeway was in a cozy nook at a coffee bar of the late twentieth century. She was now sitting on a wooden stool in front of a small, battered table. Soft jazz played in the background and in front of her was a large cup of coffee as black as night and smelling as rich as heaven.

  She wanted to toss the steaming contents onto Q's smirking face, but restrained herself.

  "All right," she said with an effort. "I think I know what happened, what you did, but you're telling me I'm wrong. So explain to me what really happened. I'm listening."

  Q, dressed in black denim pants and a black turtle-neck sweater, and sporting an earring in his left ear, took a sip of his own coffee. "Ah, delicious. I can see why you like it so much. Well, it's a very long story."

  "My attention span is not," Janeway warned.

  He pursed his lips, made a tsk-tsk sound, and then sighed. "What do you want to hear about first?"

  "The gateways."

  "Very well." Suddenly they were in a child's nursery. To her consternation, Janeway found herself to be a small child, wearing a frilly pinafore that horrified her. Her mind was the same, but trapped in a six-year-old's body. Q loomed over her, an enormous book in his hands. Its cover was of tooled leather and bore the title The History of This Universe.

  Despite herself, Janeway would have given a lot to have been able to get her hands on that book.

  "Once upon a time," said Q in a singsong voice, "there was a wonderful, remarkable, intelligent, benevolent, superior, humorous, witty, handsome - "

  "Q," said Janeway, her high-pitched six-year-old's voice nonetheless managing to fully convey the depth of her impatience.

  Q sighed. "Now, now, little Kathy, mustn't interrupt your bedtime story or you'll not get the answers you want." He glared at her over the enormous book propped up in his lap. Angrily, Janeway folded her small arms over her chest and sank back into the nursery chair. Q was a nearly omnipotent being. If he didn't want to tell her something, he wouldn't. In a very real sense, she was entirely at his mercy. She'd have to let this "story" unfold the way he wanted it to.

  "Much better." A plate full of chocolate-chip cookies and a large glass of milk materialized on the table beside Janeway's chair. She didn't touch either.

  "As I was saying," said Q, "once upon a time there was a race known as the Q Continuum. Now, of course, being such omnipotent and benevolent beings, they turned their attention some five hundred thousand years ago toward assisting other races in attaining culture and technology."

  "You're lying again. That's a direct violation of what you've told us before," said Janeway. "It was my understanding that in the case of Amanda Rogers, for example, she had to either join the Continuum or forsake her powers." 'That's quite true. You may have a cookie."

  One appeared in her hand. Irritated, Janeway tossed it back onto the plate. Warm chocolate clung to her fingers.

  "However," Q continued, "that was a few short, human years ago. And the reason we have adopted this new, improved policy toward inferior species was because things had gone wrong earlier. You're vaguely able to grasp the wisdom of such strategies yourselves, you Federation types, with your own Prime Directive."

  Janeway nodded. She was starting to get some answers, and she felt herself calming a little. She wiped her chocolate-stained fingers on the pinafore.

  "So, there was a very pleasant and promising race called the Iconians."

  "Iconians! The gateways ... of course," breathed Janeway. It all made sense now. She had thought the strange portals had looked familiar, but she hadn't been thinking in terms of ancient, vanished technology. Therefore, she hadn't made the connection.

  Q sighed heavily. "Kathy, do you want to hear the story or just go right to bed without any supper?"

  "Q, please. A favor." The sound of a child's voice issuing from her own lips was driving her crazy. "Restore me to my adult image. Your talking down to me this way doesn't help my listening skills any."

  "All you needed to do was ask," he said, maddeningly. In a heartbeat, they were on the porch Janeway had glimpsed earlier, both in the surprisingly comfortable rocking chairs. Between them was a small wicker table bearing, as Janeway had guessed, a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses with ice and slices of lemon. Moisture condensed on the metal pitcher and slipped silently down the side.

  "No stories. No teasing." Suddenly Q was wearing a trench coat and a fedora. "Just the facts, ma'am." Just as suddenly, he was in his Starfleet uniform.

  On the lawn in front of them, the little boy - Q's chi
ld, her godson - romped with Barkley/Fluffy. She wanted to hear about him too, but she needed to learn about the Iconian gateways first.

  'The facts are these, and they're very simple. We liked the Iconians. We wanted to help them."

  "We, or you?"

  "Oh, I can't shoulder all the blame for this one," said Q. "There were others involved. We gave them technology, and they used it for benevolent purposes. Everything was working according to plan. Then, somebody got mad at them." He sighed. "A feeling I know all too well."

  "So, in the end, their own technology - the technology you gave them - was their destruction," said Janeway.

  "Well," and he squirmed a little in his rocking chair, "kind of. I'm not supposed to tell you everything."

  "Well, for Heaven's sake, please at least tell me something!"