by Greg Cox
Sargon wished he knew. “Perhaps only a few hundred years. Perhaps forever. The receptacles will preserve our essences for half a million years, maybe longer. Time enough, I hope, for interplanetary explorers to stumble onto the ruins of our civilization, perhaps providing us with new bodies with which to greet tomorrow.” If only there had been time to construct android bodies for their dispossessed souls, to provide them with mobility after the turmoil on the surface died out, but the war had come upon them too quickly. Indeed, it was a small miracle that he had succeeded in preparing this vault and these few receptacles before the inevitable catastrophe rendered organic life impossible on this planet for all time to come. “It seems probable that other species will explore the stars, just as our own ancestors did. We can only pray that our alien successors will possess the curiosity and the compassion to free us from our long imprisonment.”
“You pray, old man,” Henoch responded. “For myself, I just hope that our future bodies, if any, won’t be too unappealing in appearance.” He laid his hands upon the final dormant sphere, then glanced back over his shoulder, a mocking smile upon his face as always. “Let me guess, it won’t hurt a bit.”
A moment later, nothing was left of Henoch except a constant glow at the center of his chosen orb. Sargon could not say he missed him. If I don’t hear his voice again for half a million years, then that might be a blessing of sorts.
Now it was his turn. With a mental command, he extinguished the lights in the catacomb, so that only the collected life force of his fellow refugees illuminated the chamber as he left it behind and entered an adjacent compartment only half the size of the depository he had departed. There a solitary globe, as yet unlighted, rested atop a central podium linked to the most advanced sensor apparatus Sargon could assemble in the face of the mounting hostilities above. Here was where his consciousness would wait out eternity, searching the heavens for the instruments of their deliverance. Unlike Henoch and Thalassa and the rest, whose minds would dwell in dreamless slumber until they were awakened once more, a portion of his psyche would remain aware throughout the centuries, probing the empty corridors of space and sending out an urgent plea for assistance to whatever enterprising beings might someday pass this way.
As he placed his palms against the cool, inanimate surface of the receptacle, and felt his mind flowing out of his body and into the motionless sphere, he wondered how long he would truly have to wait.
The female Q has Gorgan on the run. His seraphic features melt into a hideous mask of bestial fury, only partially obscured by his verdant aura, as he snarls back at his relentless pursuer. Sensing a convenient wormhole, he dives toward that tantalizing means of egress, but some unknown presence within the wormhole blocks his entrance long enough for the Q to catch up with him. She cuts off his retreat with a searing blast of fifth-dimensional fire and he retaliates in kind….
Brightly colored lights streaked the night sky above the western hemisphere of Bajor. Upon a balcony at the top of the highest tower in the temple, the kai watched a burst of chartreuse flame erupt in the heavens, then sputter and die as it traced its way above the horizon. More eruptions filled the sky in its wake, obscuring ancient constellations and outshining the stars. It was as though the Celestial Temple itself was on fire.
“What is it, Holiness?” asked Vedek Kuros fearfully, tugging on the kai’s silken sleeve to draw her attention down from the inexplicable stellar pyrotechnics. “Is it the Reckoning?”
The kai shook her head thoughtfully, causing the ornate silver chain dangling from her ear to sway back and forth. “I think not,” she said. “The Sacred Texts are very clear that the Reckoning shall not occur until after the Coming of the Emissary.” She gave him a playful smile. “You haven’t, by any chance, neglected to inform me of the Emissary’s arrival, have you?”
“Oh no, Holiness!” the vedek insisted. “How could I? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Calm yourself, Kuros, I was only joking.” She reached out to cup his ear and sensed that his pagh was deeply troubled by the curious lights in the sky. “The Reckoning is not yet upon us. This is something far different, I think.”
The vedek was not alone in his fears, she knew. From her lofty perch high above the sacred city of B’hala, she could see the people gathered in the great square below, their eyes turned upward in awe and terror. Hundreds of Bajorans, from every clan and D’jarra, surrounded the monumental stone bantaca in the center of the city, perplexed and unnerved by the violent heavenly display, but unable to look away. The vivid colors of the celestial explosions cast a shifting spectrum of shadows upon the faces and rooftops beneath her. It was as beautiful as it was mysterious.
I must issue some manner of statement, the kai realized, knowing it was her duty to comfort her people in this time of turmoil, but what can I tell them? Nothing in the Sacred Texts spoke of such tumult amid the firmament nor hinted when the unnatural phenomenon might cease. In her heart of hearts, she knew that the dazzling portents lighting up the night were not the work of the Prophets, nor even the unholy mischief of the dreaded Pah-wraiths. Those powerful beings, both the good and the wicked, were of Bajor. These disturbances, she sensed deep within her own pagh, were something different, something alien to them all, but no less dangerous to all who lived.
The strange lights shone on for a thousand days….
The furious struggle between the Q and the forces of 0 attract the interest of other transcendent beings. Some such entities come to investigate….
“Q,” Picard asked. “Who are those beings over there?” He gestured toward a quartet of humanoid figures standing silently at the perimeter of the war, looking on with pained expressions upon their faces. Unlike the combatants, they had not assumed the garb of Earth’s ancient warriors, wearing instead simple Grecian chitons made of what looked like common wool. Their faces were youthful and unmarked by time. They clasped their hands together before their chests in a meditative pose. Picard was struck by the aura of peace and dignity the beings projected, which reminded him somewhat of the sadly departed Sarak of Vulcan.
“Oh, them,” Q said disdainfully. “Those are the Organians. Relative youngsters compared to the Continuum, but still reasonably evolved at this point in galactic history.”
The Organians, Picard thought, wide-eyed and astounded. They were semimythical beings in his own time, legendary for their historic role in averting a bloody war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire decades before Picard’s birth. The Organians had largely kept to themselves since then; Picard had never thought that he might actually see one in person.
Q was considerably less awestruck. “A bunch of upstart, idealistic kids, really. Slackers and layabouts, all of them. Compared to their childish doctrine of pacifism and noninterference, your Prime Directive is practically an incitement to riot.”
Picard took Q’s assessment of the early Organians with a grain of salt; small wonder Q dismissed a people who practiced the virtues of forbearance and restraint. The Federation of his own time owed a lot to the reluctant peacemaking of these people or their descendants. Still, he could not deny that the Organians of this era seemed content to stay on the sidelines during the Continuum’s heated struggle to subdue 0. As he watched the cosmic battle develop, his doppelgänger among the Q plucked a steel-tipped lance from the ether and hurled it at 0 himself, who materialized a disk-shaped shield just in time to block the spear. Deflected, the weapon ricocheted toward the assembled Organians, who merely shook their heads sadly at its approach. The spear vanished only seconds before it would have struck the placid spectators, followed a heartbeat later by the Organians themselves. The four figures dissolved into the emptiness of space, having apparently seen enough of the barbaric melee.
“And good riddance,” Q commented derisively. “You know what they say, Jean-Luc, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the whole god-awful mess.”
“Is that so?” Picard asked. “Your younger self doesn’t
appear to be contributing much to the situation, one way or another.”
It was true. The young Q cowered in a desolate corner of space, apart from the others, looking distinctly miserable and conflicted. He squatted in the vacuum, rocking back and forth on his heels, as he peered at the furious hostilities through his fingers as he held both hands over his face. It was a far cry from the preening arrogance Q would display in the future. “It’s all my fault,” he whispered, although no one but Picard and his older self was listening. “What have I done?”
“Q!” 0 cried, besieged by the leader of the Q, who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of spears. “Cease your babbling and help me, friend. We’re under attack here!”
“Don’t listen to him, Q.” Always a tall woman, the female Q was nothing short of imposing in her armor. She thrust at Gorgan with her short sword while shouting at Q. The deceptively angelic entity pounded his fists atop each other, invoking his power, but the sword kept cutting closer and closer to his emerald aura. “He’s not your friend. You don’t owe him anything.”
“She’s just jealous,” 0 insisted, parrying another assault from his grim opponent. His iron shield transformed into a rubber trampoline that bounced the other Q’s spear back at him. The quaestor ducked promptly, but the rebounding lance sliced the crest off his helmet. A gigantic crescent of horsehair flew off into a nearby nebula where it would later confound generations of Iconian explorers. “They’re all jealous. They envy our vitality, our courage and freedom. They can’t stand that we actually have the guts to enjoy our omnipotence as we see fit, that we want to shake things up instead of simply maintaining the status quo. They want to destroy us because we prove how weak and impotent the rest of them really are.” Seizing the offensive, he fired at his foe with a crossbow that hadn’t existed a second before. “Do you want to be destroyed, Q?”
“No one will be destroyed,” the quaestor promised, “if you surrender now.” The bolt from the crossbow spontaneously combusted before it could strike home. The young Q looked up hopefully at the quaestor’s words, a reaction that did not go unnoticed by 0.
“You might as well annihilate us all,” he bellowed as he loaded another quarrel into the crossbow. “What’s the alternative? Submitting to the will of the Continuum, condemned to an eternal half-life of dull conformity and anonymity? No, I’d rather take my chances here, and if you’re smart, Q, you’ll do the same!”
The young Q reacted by throwing his hands over his ears to keep the sound of the debate away from him. He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a mournful howl that could be heard even above the clang of armor and weaponry. Not the most mature response, Picard noted, but strangely in character. Only Q could think that the universe and all its dilemmas would go away if he just ignored them.
“I didn’t know what to do,” the later Q recalled. “I felt like unbridgeable chasms had cut me off from both 0 and the Continuum, but that neither side would let me alone. I was lost and alone in the middle of a war.”
Like I was, Picard thought with a start, after Locutus was captured from the Borg, but before Beverly restored my humanity. He had been isolated, too, neither of humanity nor of the Collective, but an exile from each. That was not at all the same thing, he reminded himself hastily; unlike Q, he had not brought that hellish limbo upon himself. Still, he found himself identifying with the young Q more than he liked.
“Where are the other Q?” he asked, eager to change the subject. It dawned on him that he had no idea how many individuals comprised the entire Continuum. Were these four pseudo-legionnaires the sole extent of Q’s peers? That seemed unlikely; he had always gotten the impression that the Q’s population was as infinite as their abilities.
“Putting out fires, mostly,” Q answered. “In case you haven’t noticed, this particular donnybrook is producing no end of collateral damage on various planes of existence. A battle between beings of our exalted nature does more than break a few windows, Jean-Luc; why, during a recent civil war among the Q, in your own far-off century, there were supernovas going off all over the Delta Quadrant.” He shuddered at the memory. “To be honest, those fractures in the galactic barrier, the ones that your Federation scientists are so keen on, are actually a regrettable aftereffect of that nasty little war.”
Now he tells me, Picard thought, although he still wasn’t sure what the barrier had to do with 0 and this hard-fought conflict in the distant past. Why am I here?
“Anyway,” Q continued, “the majority of the Continuum are occupied with patching up the most grievous wounds in the fabric of reality, leaving a few close friends and associates to deal with me personally. In their own inimitable fashion, of course.”
Q’s explanation sounded plausible enough. Now that he knew to look for them, Picard thought he glimpsed phantom figures scurrying about in the background. They were like shadows, insubstantial silhouettes moving almost too fast to be seen, going about their mysterious errands like stagehands at work behind the scenes of some massive theatrical production. Are they always there, Picard mused, spying them only out of the corner of his eye, or only during a crisis of this magnitude? Despite all he had witnessed, there was still so much he did not understand about the metaphysical realm the Q inhabited.
“So I see,” he said, turning his thoughts to less ineffable matters. “And just how long did this personal matter go on, Q? Strange as this may seem to you, I am anxious to return to my own life at some point.”
“If you must know,” Q said, “this ugly altercation lasted a mere one hundred thousand years as you reckon time.” He nodded toward the celestial battlefield. “Look, the tide is already starting to turn.”
His face a twisted mass of lumpen flesh, his shimmering robes reduced to smoking, blackened rags, Gorgan was the first to abandon the fight. His insubstantial form wavered in the void like a mirage above the desert. Turning his back on the female Q and her slashing sword, he fled through space with the armored woman in hot pursuit. Desperate to escape her, he raced back to the very site of the Tkon Empire’s destruction, diving into the gaping black hole that had once been their sun, apparently choosing to risk the unknown perils beyond the event horizon rather than face the wrath of the Q. “Coward!” the female Q called out. “Don’t let me see you show your hideous face in this multiverse again.”
Emboldened by its comrade’s escape, (*) retreated from the fray as well. Quinn lowered his sword arm, showing little interest in chasing after the evil entity now that it had been routed. He heaved a heavy sigh, gratefully removing his helmet, as (*) disappeared down the black hole after Gorgan. The hungry gravitational vortex swallowed up every last flicker of (*)’s bloodthirsty light.
“They’re just letting them get away?” Picard asked. He knew that neither entity had truly been destroyed. If Q was to be believed, both Gorgan and (*) would later bedevil James T. Kirk in the twenty-third century.
“Without 0, they’re petty nuisances at best,” Q said with a shrug. “From now on, they’ll be forced to lurk furtively in the most obscure recesses of the galaxy, preying like highwaymen on the occasional unwary starship. Nothing the Q need worry about, in other words.”
“Your concern for the rest of us is overwhelming,” Picard pointed out dryly.
“It’s all a matter of scale, Jean-Luc. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Q grabbed Picard by the shoulders and forcibly turned his view away from the insatiable black hole and back toward the sector of space where 0 and The One continued to contend against the Continuum with every weapon at their disposal, apparently undaunted by the desertion of two of their allies. “Now, that pair posed rather more of a problem.”
Disdaining symbolic weaponry, The One unleashed lightning bolts from His fingertips. The scent of ozone wafted through the vacuum as the electrical barrage held Q’s friend at bay. “Heathen! Infidel!” The One raged, the luster of His golden armor undimmed. Overlapping metal plates covered The One’s entire body from the neck down; only His forbidding visage r
emained uncovered. “Feel the power of My Holy Anger. Quake in terror, O foolish one, as My Mighty Hand strikes you down.”
“That remains to be seen,” the Q shot back, his blond locks concealed beneath his helmet. His superior tone resembled Q’s, although not quite as scathing in its sarcasm. “The Q do not quake.”
He ducked his head beneath the upper edge of a bronze, rectangular shield. His cautious stance, crouched behind his protective shield, testified to the intensity of The One’s thunderbolts. Although Q had said that the battle was turning against 0 and his allies, Picard saw no sign of imminent defeat where The One was concerned; if anything, the monotheistic monster had the advantage against the opposing Q. Even His burnished plate armor, worthy of a medieval knight, appeared superior to the primitive Bronze Age gear of the Q warriors.
“Curb thy mocking tongue,” He declared, advancing on the Q, His fulsome beard framing His stern features like the mane of a roaring lion. “The time of thy chastisement is at hand.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the Q retorted from behind his shield, whose gleaming surface was now dented and scorched in places. He backed away from The One, holding up his shield all the while. Sparks flew from the battered shield as The One’s relentless pace consumed the distance between Himself and His intended victim. “Q! Oh, Q!” the overwhelmed Q called out to his compatriots. “Help me out over here! Better sooner than later!”
Picard had no way of knowing exactly which Q the imperiled entity was addressing, but his cry for help drew both the female Q and Quinn to his side. The sad-eyed Quinn came back to the fracas reluctantly, his expression not unlike the Organians’, but his Amazonian companion was all too eager to take on another foe. “There’s a black hole waiting for you, too,” she taunted The One, placing herself between the oncoming deity and her endangered associate. Her shield blocked bolt after bolt from The One, and she retaliated with an energy blast of her own that stopped The One in His heavenly tracks. Quinn followed her lead, protecting the third Q with his shield while firing a beam of sizzling heat from his free hand.