by Greg Cox
The guard scrutinized 0 with a scowl upon his face. “You’re not Q,” he stated flatly.
“You can say that again,” 0 proclaimed, unabashed, “but I’d be grateful if you’d let me trod your fine road. Young Q here tells me it’s the swiftest way around these whereabouts.”
He clapped Q on the back, sending Q staggering forward toward the guard. Looking on from less than five meters away, Picard noted that the youth had traded his monkish black robe for something closer to what 0 wore, minus the rags and tatters, naturally. He now wore boots, breeches, and a heavy fur coat. Just what Q needed, Picard thought sarcastically, a disreputable role model.
The guard gave Q a disapproving glance, then inspected his clipboard. “State your name, species identification, planet or plane of origin, and the nature of your business in the Continuum.”
0 rolled his eyes, seemingly unimpressed by this display of authority. “Are you sure you don’t want my great-great-grandmother’s genetic code as well?” he asked dryly. Sighing theatrically, he launched into his recitation. “0’s the name, my species is special, my origin is elsewhere, and my business is none of yours. Is that good enough, or would you care to arm-wrestle for it?” He shook off his shaggy greatcoat and rolled up his sleeve. Right behind him, the young Q placed a hand over his mouth to muffle an attack of giggles.
The guard looked considerably less amused by 0’s flippancy. His scowl deepened and he lowered his clipboard to his side. “Where are you from,” he asked, and Picard somehow sensed he was speaking for the whole of the Q, “and why should we permit you access to the Continuum?”
0 retrieved his coat from the pavement and threw it over his shoulder. “Well, the where of it is a long story that depends a lot on who’s telling it. Let’s just say I was once quite a mover and shaker a good ways from here, but I’m afraid that my able accomplishments were not always appreciated by those that should have known better, so it came to pass that the time was right for me to set off for greener pastures.” He leaned forward and brushed some of the dust from his boots before straightening his spine, adjusting his hat, and addressing the guard. “As for why you should allow me safe passage through your local stomping grounds, aside from basic hospitality, that is…why, this peerless young paragon will vouch for me.”
“Is this true?” the guard demanded of Q. He didn’t seem to regard the young entity as much of a paragon.
Q gulped nervously, wilting under the guard’s censorious stare. He looked to 0 for support and was greeted by a conspiratorial wink. The newcomer’s boldness rubbed off on Q, who squared his shoulders and glared back at the guard defiantly. “Certainly!” he announced. “0’s word is good enough for me. What’s with this siege mentality anyway? We could do a lot worse than open our borders to new ideas and exotic visitors from foreign lands.”
0 beamed at him. “That’s telling ’em, friend.” He poked the guard’s badge with his finger. “You should listen to this young fellow if you’ve got any sense under that shiny, shorn scalp of yours.”
That was uncalled for, Picard thought.
“So be it,” the guard decreed. “This entity is permitted within the Continuum—on the understanding that you, Q, take responsibility for him.”
“They expected you to be the responsible one?” Picard remarked, arching an ironic eyebrow. “Why do I get the impression this was a horrendous mistake?”
The older Q averted his eyes from the scene before them. “For a lower life-form, you can be annoyingly prophetic sometimes.”
Caught up in his newfound bravado, the young Q didn’t hesitate a bit. “Agreed,” he said grandly. “Raise up the gate, my good man.”
“Well done,” 0 whispered. He doffed his wide-brimmed hat and plopped it onto Q’s head. Grabbing his erstwhile sponsor by the elbow, he dragged his bad leg toward the barricade and the vast interdimensional highway beyond. Picard looked on as the guard retreated to his booth. Moments later, the horizontal beam tilted upward until it was perpendicular to the road, and the newly united fellow travelers strode into the future, embarking on the endless highway for destinations unknown.
“So tell me, Q,” 0 asked as his voice receded into the distance, “have you ever considered the fundamental importance of testing lesser species…?”
Interlude
Where is Q, the spider hissed. Q is where?
His stench was all over the bug over there, but not Q himself. Beneath the smelly smoke, it reeked of Q. Q had been with it, or would be, or should be. What did it matter when? Not at all, not for Q. Never for Q.
Damn you Q, you damn me, damn Q, damn me! He remembered it all now. Q was to blame, Q and all those other Q, parading their pompous, prejudiced, pitiless power throughout perpetuity. There were too many Q to count, far too many to be allowed to exist, but that could be remedied, given the chance. Hew the Q. Hew Q too. Rue, Q, rue! Your day is through!
The scent of Q set the spider salivating. Its avaricious arms scraped at the wall, greedy to grab, keen to consume. Where are you now, Q, my old Q. What have you been doing all this time? What has time done to you and to me and to we. Have you ever thought of me? You should have, yes, you should.
The time was coming. The voice had promised. Soon.
Q will pay. All the Q will pay. Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and Q and QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ…
Q-Zone
Prologue
Soon, he cackled. Sooner. Soonest.
Behind the wall, he watched with keen anticipation as lesser life-forms, no more than a bug or a wisp of smoke to him, buzzed about on the other side. Only the wall, the wretched wall that had kept him out for longer than his muddled memory could even begin to encompass, kept him from reaching forth and swatting both bug and smoke away. Tendrils of his contorted consciousness capered spiderlike against the edge of the wall, scraping away at the boundaries of his banishment. He couldn’t touch the other side just yet, but he could watch and wait and wonder about what he would do when the wall, the wicked and wearying wall, finally came down.
Very soon, he singsonged, soon soon soon. The wall would crumble. The voice had promised him so, that teensy-tiny voice from the other side. It was difficult to conceive how such a paltry piece of protoplasm could possibly undo that which had held him back for so long, but he had hope and reason to believe. Already he sensed that the wall was weaker than before, minute faults and fissures undermining its primal, protracted permanence. All it needed was one good push from the other side and a gap would be formed, the gap he needed to break through. And then…and then what time has done to the galaxy will be nothing compared to what I’ll do to all those stars and planets and people. He flexed his tendrils in his eagerness to be free once more. Yes, that’s right, all the things I’ll do…to Q and Q and Q.
There was only one thing that worried him. What if someone silenced the other voice before it fulfilled its promise? And not just anyone someone, but Q. That Q, the quisling Q, the Q who could never, ever be trusted. I can smell you, Q. His stench was all over the shiny silver bug on the other side. It stank and perhaps could sting. Stink, stank, sting, bee, he chanted to himself. You can’t stop me. Q can’t escape me.
Soon could not come soon enough….
One
Ship’s log, stardate 51604.3, First Officer William T. Riker reporting.
Captain Picard is missing, abducted by the capricious entity known as Q. We can only pray that Q will return the captain unharmed, although time has taught us that Q is nothing if not unpredictable.
The captain’s
disappearance cannot have come at a worse time, as the Enterprise is under attack by the gaseous life-forms whom Q calls the Calamarain. Although Lieutenant Commander Data has succeeded in adapting our Universal Translator to the Calamarain’s inhuman language, allowing us a degree of communication with them, we have thus far failed to win their trust. They have rendered our warp engines inactive and will not permit us to retreat, so we must persuade them otherwise. Speed is imperative, as our time is running out.
To complicate matters, we have a number of potentially disruptive guests aboard the ship. Chief among them are a mysterious woman and boy who claim to be Q’s mate and child. Like Q himself, these individuals treat the ship and its crew as mere toys for their amusement. Furthermore, they appear unwilling or unable to inform us where Q has taken Captain Picard.
Equally uncooperative is Professor Lem Faal, a distinguished Betazoid physicist, whose ambitious attempt to breach the immense energy barrier surrounding our galaxy has been interrupted by the unexpected arrivals of both the Q family and the Calamarain. Dying of an incurable disease, and obsessed with completing his work in the time remaining to him, Faal has vigorously challenged my decision to abort the experiment in light of the unanticipated dangers we now face. While I sympathize with the man’s plight, I cannot allow his single-minded determination to endanger the ship further.
Indeed, according to what we have gathered from the Calamarain, our first effort to dare the barrier was the very event that provoked the Calamarain’s wrath, thus threatening us all with destruction….
The storm raged around them. From the bridge of the Enterprise-E, Commander William Riker could see the fury of the Calamarain on the forward viewscreen. The massive plasma cloud that comprised the foe, and that now enclosed the entire Sovereign-class starship, had grown increasingly turbulent over the last few hours. The sentient, ionized gases outside the ship churned and billowed upon the screen; it was like being trapped in the center of the galaxy’s biggest thunderhead. Huge sonic explosions literally shook the floor beneath his feet, while brilliant arcs of electrical energy flashed throughout the roiling cloud, intersecting violently with their own diminished shields. The distinctive blue flare of Cerenkov radiation discharged whenever the shield repelled another bolt of lightning from the Calamarain, which was happening far too often for Riker’s peace of mind.
With the captain absent, his present whereabouts unknown, Riker was in command, and fighting a losing battle against alien entities determined to destroy them. Not this time, he vowed silently, determined not to lose another Enterprise while Jean-Luc Picard was away. Once, in that cataclysmic crash into Veridian III, was enough for one lifetime. Never again, he thought, remembering the sick sensation he had felt when that grand old ship had slammed into its final port. Not on my watch.
Their present circumstances were precarious, though. Warp engines down, shields fading, and no sign yet that the Calamarain were willing to abandon their ferocious attack on the ship, despite his sincere offer to abandon the experiment and retreat from the galactic barrier—on impulse if necessary. Diplomacy was proving as useless as their phasers, even though Riker remained convinced that this entire conflict was based solely on suspicion and misunderstanding. Nothing’s more tragic than a senseless battle, he thought.
“Shields down to twenty percent,” Lieutenant Baeta Leyoro reported. The Angosian security chief was getting a real baptism by fire on her first mission aboard the Enterprise. So far she had performed superlatively, even if Riker still occasionally expected to see Worf at the tactical station. “For a glorified blast of bad breath, they pack a hell of a punch.”
Riker tapped his combadge to initiate a link to Geordi in Engineering. “Mr. La Forge,” he barked, “we need to reinforce our shields, pronto.”
Geordi La Forge’s voice responded immediately. “We’re doing what we can, Commander, but this tachyon barrage just keeps increasing in intensity.” Riker could hear the frustration in the chief engineer’s voice; Geordi had been working nonstop for hours. “It’s eaten up most of our power to keep the ship intact this long. I’ve still got a few more tricks I can try, but we can’t hold out indefinitely.”
“Understood,” Riker acknowledged, scratching his beard as he hastily considered the problem. The thunder and lightning of the storm, as spectacular as they looked and sounded, were only the most visible manifestations of the Calamarain’s untempered wrath. The real danger was the tachyon emissions that the cloud creatures were somehow able to generate and direct against the Enterprise. Ironically, it was precisely those faster-than-light particles that prevented the ship from achieving warp speed. “What about adjusting the field harmonics?” he asked Geordi, searching for some way to shore up their defenses. “That worked before.”
“Yeah,” Geordi agreed, “but the Calamarain seem to have learned how to compensate for that. At best it can only buy us a little more time.”
“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Riker said grimly. Every moment the deflectors remained in place gave them one more chance to find a way out. “Go to it, Mr. La Forge. Riker out.”
He sniffed the air, detecting the harsh odor of burned circuitry and melted plastic. A few systems had already been fried by the relentless force of the aliens’ assault, although nothing the auxiliary backups hadn’t been able to pick up. The Calamarain had drawn first blood nonetheless, while the starship crew’s own phasers had done little more than anger the enraged cloud of plasma even further, much to the annoyance of Baeta Leyoro, who took the failure of their weapons personally.
This is all Q’s fault, Riker thought. Captain Picard had shielded Q from the Calamarain several years ago, and apparently they had neither forgotten nor forgiven that decision. It was the Enterprise’s past association with Q, he believed, that made the Calamarain so unwilling to trust Riker now when he promised to abort Professor Faal’s wormhole experiment. Tarred by Q’s bad reputation…talk about adding insult to (possibly mortal) injury!
For all we know, he mused, the Calamarain might have sound reasons for objecting to the experiment. If only they could be reasoned with somehow! He glanced over at Counselor Deanna Troi, seated to his left at her own command station. “What are you picking up from our stormy friends out there?” he asked her. The seriousness in his eyes belied the flippancy of his words. “Any chance they might be calming down?”
Troi closed her eyes as she reached out with her empathic senses to probe the emotions of the seething vapors that had enveloped the ship. Her slender hands gently massaged her temples as her breathing slowed. No matter how many times Riker had seen Deanna employ her special sensitivity, it never failed to impress him. He prayed that Deanna would sense some room for compromise with the Calamarain. All he needed was to carve one chink in the other species’ paranoia and he was sure he could find a peaceful solution to this needless conflict.
Blast you, Q, he thought bitterly. He had no idea what Q had done God-knows-when to infuriate the Calamarain so, but he was positive it was something stupid, infantile, and typically Q-like. Why should he have treated them any differently than he’s ever treated us?
Riker’s gaze swung inexorably to the right, where an imperious-looking auburn-haired woman rested comfortably in his own accustomed seat, a wide-eyed toddler bouncing on her knee while she observed the ongoing battle against the Calamarain with an air of refined boredom. Mother and child wore matching, if entirely unearned, Starfleet uniforms, with the woman bearing enough pips upon her collar to outrank Riker if they possessed any legitimacy—which they most definitely did not. The first officer shook his head quietly; he still found it hard to accept that this woman and her infant were actually Q’s wife and son. Frankly, he had a rough time believing that any being, highly evolved or otherwise, would willingly enter into any sort of union with Q.
Then again, the female Q, if that’s what she truly was, had enough regal attitude and ego to be one of Q’s relations. A match made in the Continuum, he thought. She seeme
d content to treat the imminent annihilation of the ship and everyone aboard as no more important than a day at the zoo, which was probably just how she regarded the Enterprise. At least the little boy, whom she called q, appeared to be enjoying the show. He gaped wide-eyed at the screen, clapping his pudgy little hands at each spectacular display of pyrotechnics.
I’m glad somebody’s having a good time, Riker thought ruefully. I suppose I should be thankful that I don’t have to worry about the kid’s safety. The two Qs were probably the only people aboard the Enterprise who weren’t facing mortal danger. Who knows? he wondered. They may even be at the heart of the problem. Could the Calamarain tell that Q’s family was on the ship? That couldn’t possibly reflect well on the Enterprise.
“I’m sorry, Will,” Troi said, reopening her eyes and lowering her hands to her lap. “All I can sense is anger and fear, just like before.” She stared quizzically at the iridescent plasma surging across the viewer. “They’re dreadfully afraid of us for some reason, and determined to stop us from interfering with the barrier.”
The barrier, Riker thought. It all came back to the galactic barrier. He could no longer see the shimmering radiance of the barrier on the forward viewer, but he knew that the great, glowing curtain was only a fraction of a light-year away. For generations, ever since James Kirk first braved the galactic barrier in an earlier Enterprise, no vessel had ventured into it without suffering massive casualties and structural damage. Professor Faal had insisted that his wormhole experiment would have no harmful effect on the barrier as a whole, but the Calamarain definitely seemed to feel otherwise. They referred to the barrier as the “moat” and had made it abundantly and forcefully clear that they would obliterate the Enterprise before they would permit the starship to tamper with it. I need to find some way to convince them that we mean no harm.