by Greg Cox
Power radiated from 0 like a gust of chilling wind. Picard felt the passage of the energy upon his face, stinging his cheeks, yet the power was not directed at him but at the imposing presence of the Coulalakritous. What could 0 do to such magnificent entities? Picard wondered. Had not the Coulalakritous already demonstrated their ability to defend themselves?
Yet, to his horror, he beheld the huge plasma cloud begin to shrink beneath 0’s assault, its expansive volume diminishing by the second. The billowing gases slowed and thickened, the swirling eddies coming to a halt. Picard was only mildly surprised to discover that he could still hear the varied voices of the Coulalakritous crying out in distress, their words slurred and winding down like a malfunctioning recording:
no…nooo…noooo…not…anewwww…ceasssse…sooooo…cooooold…stopppppp…traaaaaap…noooooo…essssscaaaaaape…ceasssssse…at…onccccccce…ceasssssse…freeeeeezzzing…helppppppp…
“Yes, stop!” young Q seconded anxiously. “You don’t need to do this, 0. Whatever they did, they’re not worth our attention, let alone your peace of mind.” His gaze darted back and forth between 0 and his imploding target. “Er, you can stop anytime now, anytime at all….”
The enraged immortal paid no heed to either Q or the Coulalakritous. His hate-filled eyes protruded from their sockets while phantom tentacles wavered in and out of reality around him. A trickle of saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth as he ground his broad white teeth together. All his effort and concentration were aimed without exception at the intangible community that had possessed the audacity to elude his control. 0 raised his arms, an action echoed by a blur of black extensions, and coruscating scarlet energy flashed about his extended fingertips.
The cloud of plasma had already contracted to at least one-third its original size. It no longer looked truly gaseous in nature, but more like a mass of steaming, semiliquid slush. Then the slush congealed further, sucking in the last retreating wisps of vapor and turning a dull, ugly brown in hue. Picard had a horrifying mental image of an oppressed prisoner being crammed into a box far too small for him, as he watched, helpless to intervene, while 0 forced the entire awesome accumulation of gas-beings ever closer to a solid state.
…Weeeeeee willllllll notttttttt forrrrrgetttttttt… the Coulalakritous vowed, their separate voices finally merging into one before falling silent entirely. Where only moments before had existed an incandescent cloud of blazing plasma, there now remained only a dense, frozen snowball, indistinguishable from any of a billion comets traversing the dark between the stars. If they registered on the Enterprise ’s sensors in this state, Picard guessed, we wouldn’t give them a moment’s thought. Were the Coulalakritous still conscious and aware of their utter paralysis? Part of Picard prayed that they were not.
Yet 0 was not satisfied. His beefy hands curled into grasping claws, he brought them closer together above his head, as if literally squeezing the onetime cloud between his palms instead of merely empty space. His phantasmal other self, superimposed upon his humanoid shell, shadowed his every move. Less than a kilometer away from 0, the inert chunk of ice that was the Coulalakritous kept on being compressed by invisible forces, its crystalline surface cracking and collapsing inward beneath the crushing power exerted by the vengeful immortal. How far did 0 intend to take this? Picard wondered, aghast. Until the very atoms that composed the Coulalakritous fused together, igniting a miniature supernova? Or was 0 able and willing to compress his victims’ mass to so great a density that the Coulalakritous would be reduced to a microscopic black hole, a pinprick in reality from which they could never escape? Was such a horrendous feat even possible?
Young Q appeared to fear something along those lines. “I think that’s enough, 0,” he announced with unexpected firmness. With a burst of pure energy, he placed himself between 0 and his prey, grunting involuntarily as he felt the force of 0’s unchecked ire. The flesh upon his face rippled and grew distorted, like that of an old-time astronaut enduring tremendous G-forces, and his bones crunched together noisily as he shrunk into a slightly squatter, more compact Q, losing at least a centimeter of height. He held his ground, though, and 0’s attack rebounded upon its source, staggering the older entity and sending him stumbling backward through empty space. Q to the rescue? Picard marveled, more than a little startled by this atypical display of altruism. I mean, of all people…Q?
“What?” 0 was as taken aback by Q’s actions as Picard. “Are you out of your all-knowing mind?” he bellowed, visibly dismayed by the young Q’s defiance. His ruddy face grew even more crimson. A vein along his left temple throbbed rhythmically like a pulsar. “Get out of my way, or I swear I’ll…I’ll…”
Q flinched in anticipation of the other’s wrath, but no explosion, verbal or literal, followed. Perhaps caught off guard by his own angry words, 0 faltered, falling mute even as the flailing, insubstantial tendrils that enshrouded him withdrew into some private hiding place deep within his person. He turned his back on Q and the two invisible onlookers while he struggled to regain his composure. “0?” the young Q inquired anxiously.
When the stranger, his clothes still smoldering from his first battle with the Coulalakritous, faced them again, no trace of animosity could be found in his expression. He looked contrite and abashed, not to mention exhausted by his exertions. Perspiration plastered his damp curls to his skull. “Forgive me, friend, for losing my temper that way. I shouldn’t have raised my voice to you, no matter how vexed that malodorous miasma made me.”
“Never mind me,” Q responded, stretching his body until he regained his usual dimensions. He looked back over his shoulder at the solidified chunk of Coulalakritous tumbling through the void, its momentum carrying the frigid comet slowly toward them. “What in the name of the Continuum have you done to them?”
0 paused to catch his breath before replying. Freezing the gas-beings had obviously taken a lot out of him. All the blood had drained from his face, leaving him drawn and pale. Lungs heaving, he bent forward, hands on his knees, and stared at his shoes until his color returned. “That?” he inquired, short of breath. “A mere bit of thermodynamic sleight-of-hand, and nothing those cantankerous clouds didn’t have coming to them.” He limped across the vacuum until he hovered only a few meters away from his fretful protégé. “You have to understand, Q, that in any tests there must be penalties for failure, and for deliberate cheating, or else there’s no inducement to excel. It looks harsh, I know, but it’s the only way. Lesser lights are not going to submit to our tests out of the goodness of their hearts. They seldom comprehend, you see, the honor and the opportunity being bestowed upon them. You need to motivate them, and sometimes that means having the gumption to apply a sharp poke when necessary.”
“But the Coulalakritous?” Q asked, sounding baffled. “What exactly did they—”
“Things didn’t go off quite as I planned there,” 0 interrupted, striking a conciliatory tone. “To be honest, I underestimated how out of practice I am, and how inexperienced you are.” He saw Q bristle at the remark and held up his hand to fend off the younger being’s objections. “No criticism intended, friend, merely a statement of fact. I’m the one at fault for dropping us both into the deep end before we were ready. Perhaps we should round up some able assistance before trying again.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully as the approaching ball of ice, roughly the size of a Starfleet shuttlecraft, barreled helplessly toward the location where he and Q just happened to be standing. “Yes, extra hands, that’s the ticket. And I know just the right reinforcements to enlist in our cause….”
“Reinforcements?” Q asked, seconds before the frozen Coulalakritous would have collided with the two humanoid figures. Neither seemed particularly concerned about the oncoming comet. “Who do you mean?”
“Wait and see,” 0 promised. With a casual wave of his hand, he deflected the course of the tumbling mass of petrified plasma and sent it hurling off at a forty-five-degree angle from him and his companion. “Follo
w me, Q. You won’t be disappointed.” He vacated the scene in a flash, taking the young Q with him. Left behind, Picard watched as the victimized Coulalakritous receded into the distance. The closest star, the nearest possible source of warmth, was countless light-years away.
“It took them a couple millennia to thaw out again,” Q whispered in his ear. He glanced down at the bronze pocketwatch in his hand. “Not that they learned anything from the experience. They’re still just as ill-mannered as before.”
Picard was appalled. Small wonder the Calamarain had been eager to exact their revenge on Q back in the twenty-fourth century. “That’s all you have to say about it?” Picard demanded, offended by Q’s cavalier tone. “An entire speciesfrozen into suspended animation for heaven knows how long, and you have the audacity to complain about their manners? Didn’t this atrocity teach you anything? How could you not have realized how dangerous this 0 creature was?”
“Oh, don’t overdramatize, Jean-Luc,” Q replied, a tad more defensively than usual. “Perhaps I was a trifle blind, in an omniscient sort of way, but ultimately it was a mere prank, nothing more. A trifle mean-spirited, I concede, but there was no real harm done, not permanently. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, our ionized friends were merely inconvenienced, not actually injured in any way that need concern us here.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Can I help it if the Calamarain didn’t see the funny side of it?”
“If what I witnessed just now was nothing more than a prank,” Picard declared indignantly, “then I shudder to think what you would consider genuine maliciousness.”
Q gave Picard a smile that chilled the captain’s blood. “You should,” he said.
Three
“Reg?” Deanna asked between two claps of thunder. “Are you feeling all right?”
Riker glanced over his shoulder at Barclay, who was manning the primary aft science station. The nervous lieutenant was looking a bit green, possibly from the constant shaking caused by the assault of the Calamarain. Despite the best efforts of the Enterprise’s inertial dampers, the bridge continued to lurch from side to side, a far cry from the usual smooth ride. The rocking sensation reminded Riker of an Alaskan fishing vessel he’d served on as a teen, but surely it wasn’t bad enough to make anyone nauseous, was it?
Barclay started to reply, then clapped both hands over his mouth. Riker rolled his eyes and hoped the queasy crewman would not have to bolt for the crew head. Barclay was a good man, but sometimes Riker wondered how he ever got through the Starfleet screening process. Behind the command area, Baeta Leyoro snorted disdainfully.
“That will be enough, Lieutenant,” Riker instructed her. Maintaining morale under such arduous conditions was hard enough without the crew sniping at each other, even if he half sympathized with the security chief’s response. “How are our shields holding up?”
“Sixteen percent and sinking,” Leyoro responded. She glared at the tempest upon the viewscreen.
Riker nodded grimly. They needed to find some way to retaliate. He would have preferred a more peaceful resolution to this conflict, but they were rapidly running out of options. Unfortunately, conventional weapons had thus far proven ineffective against their attacker; phasers had not discouraged the Calamarain, whose close quarters to the Enterprise precluded the use of quantum torpedoes. Maybe, he mused, the Calamarain required a more specialized deterrent.
Lightning flashed across the viewscreen, and an unusually violent shock wave rocked the bridge, interrupting Riker’s thoughts and slamming him into the back of the captain’s chair. His jaw snapped shut so suddenly he narrowly avoided biting off the tip of his tongue. To his left, he heard Deanna gasp in alarm, but whether she was reacting to the sudden impact or the Calamarain’s inflamed emotions he couldn’t begin to guess. At the conn, Ensign Clarze stabbed at his controls in a desperate effort to stabilize their flight but met with only mixed results. The floor beneath Riker’s feet pitched and yawed like a shuttle going through an unstable wormhole. Even Data had to strain to keep his balance, digging his fingertips into the armrests of his chair. We can’t take much more of this, he thought.
As if to prove the point, Riker felt his stomach turn over abruptly. Oh, no, he thought. He identified the sensation at once, even before he spotted a puddle of spilled coolant, released during an earlier impact, lifting off from the floor and floating through the air, forming an oily globule only a few meters away. “We have lost gravity generation throughout decks one through fourteen of the saucer section,” Data confirmed.
At least we didn’t lose the entire network, Riker thought. The ship’s internal gravitation system was divided into five overlapping regions; from the sound of it, they had lost gravity in about half of the saucer. In theory, the entire battle section of the ship, including Engineering, still had gravity, but for how much longer? This latest technical mishap provided an eloquent testament to the Calamarain’s offensive capabilities. It took a lot to take out the gravity generators; even with a total power loss, the superconducting stators that were the heart of the graviton generators were supposed to keep spinning for up to six hours. He couldn’t remember the last time he had experienced zero gravity anywhere aboard the Enterprise, except in the holodecks, where reduced gravity was sometimes employed for recreational purposes.
Starfleet training included zero-G exercises, of course, but Riker could only hope that the rest of the crew didn’t feel as rusty as he did. The last time he’d actually done without gravity had been during his short-lived flight on Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix, and that had hardly been a combat situation, at least from his perspective. Even the most primitive shuttle had come equipped with its own gravity for the last hundred years or so. We’re not used to this anymore, he worried, wishing he’d scheduled more zero-G drills before now.
Still, the bridge crew did their best to adjust to the new conditions. Keeping a watchful eye on the drifting coolant, Clarze ducked his hairless dome out of its way. Deanna’s hair, already shaken loose by the previous jolts, snaked Medusa-like about her face, obscuring her vision, until she neatly tucked the errant strands back into place. Behind and above the command area, a scowling Baeta Leyoro had lost contact with the floor and begun floating toward the ceiling. Executing an impressive backward somersault, she grabbed the top of the tactical podium with both hands, then pulled her body downward until she was once more correctly oriented above the floor. “Get me some gravity boots,” she snapped at the nearest security officer, who rushed to fulfill the command.
Following standard procedure, Riker clicked his chair’s emergency restraining belt into place, and heard Deanna doing the same. The hovering blob of spilled coolant wafted dangerously near Data’s face, and Riker anticipated a gooey mess, but the air purification system caught hold of it and sucked the viscous mess into an intake valve mounted in the ceiling, just as similar valves cleared the atmosphere of the ashes and bits of debris produced by the battle. Thank goodness something’s still working right, Riker thought. “Ensign Berglund,” he addressed the young officer at the aft engineering station, “any chance we can get the gravity back on-line?”
“It doesn’t look good,” she reported, holding on tightly to a vertical station divider with her free hand. “I’m reading a systemic failure all through the alpha network.” She perused the readouts at her console avidly. “Maybe if they try reinitializing the entire system from main engineering?”
Riker shook his head. He didn’t want Geordi and his people concentrating on anything except keeping the shields up and running. “Gravity is a luxury we’ll just have to do without for a while.” Easier said than done, he realized. Humanoid bodies were simply not designed to function without gravity, especially so suddenly; pretty soon, Barclay wouldn’t be the only bridge member seasick. He tapped his combadge. “Riker to Crusher. I need a medical officer with a hypospray full of librocalozene right away.”
“Affirmative,” Beverly replied. She didn’t ask for an explanation; Riker realized sickbay
must have lost gravity as well. “Ogawa is on her way.”
By foot or by flight? Riker wondered, grateful that the turbolifts did not require gravity to operate properly. “Thank you, Doctor.” Glancing around the bridge, he saw that Leyoro’s security team was already distributing magnetic boots from the emergency storage lockers to every crew member on the bridge, starting with those standing at the aft and perimeter stations. The Angosian lieutenant stomped her own boots loudly on the floor as she regained her footing. “Good work,” he told her tersely, indicating her team’s rapid deployment.
“Standard procedure,” she replied, shrugging. “I figure we’re better off facing these stupid BOVs with our feet firmly on the ground.”
“BOVs?” Riker asked. He didn’t recognize the term, presumably a bit of slang from the Tarsian War.
Leyoro flashed him a wolfish grin. “Better Off Vaporized,” she said.
That might be a bit redundant in this case, he thought, considering the gaseous nature of their foes. He appreciated the sentiment, though; he was getting pretty tired of being knocked around himself. But what could you do to an enemy who had already been reduced to plasma? That was the real problem, when you got down to it. Explosions and projectiles weren’t much good against an undifferentiated pile of gases. The Calamarain had already blown themselves to atoms, and it hadn’t hurt them one bit.