“It’s not a total loss, you know,” Q said finally. “Supernovas such as that one are the only place in the universe where elements heavier than iron are created. Ultimately, the raw materials of your reality, even the very atoms that make up your physical bodies, were born in the heart of an awesome stellar conflagration such as we now behold. Who knows? There may be a little bit of Tkon in you, Jean-Luc.”
“Small comfort to the trillions who perished, Q,” Picard responded. The face of the Tkon empress, both as a lovely young woman and as the fine old lady she became, was still fresh in his memory. She came so close to saving her people.
“Try to take the long view, Picard.” Q squinted at the luminous ball of light that had consumed the Tkon Empire; it was like staring straight into a matter/antimatter reaction. “All civilizations collapse eventually. Besides, there are still traces of the Tkon floating around the galaxy, even in your time. Artifacts and relics that attest to their place in history.”
“Like the ruins on Delphi Ardu,” Picard suggested. He wished now that he had visited the site himself, instead of sending an away team. Riker had been quite impressed by what he had seen of the Tkon’s technology and culture.
“Just to name one example,” Q said. “Then there’s this little toy.” He wandered away from the nova, past what had been the Tkon’s home system, until he came upon a golden star, about the size of a large tribble, encased within what looked like a wire framework. A few lighted crystal chips, strung like beads upon the wire lattice, blinked on and off sporadically. Of course, Picard recalled, the sun the Tkon had intended to beam into their system, and the gigantic transporter array they constructed to do so. “It’s still there,” Q stated, “forgotten and never used. If I were you, Picard, I’d find it before the Borg or the Dominion do.” He gave the relic a cursory glance. “Not that this has anything to do with why we’re here, mind you.”
Picard saw an opportunity to press Q on his motives. “Very well, then. If the destruction is so very insignificant, on a cosmic scale, they why are we here? What’s the point?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Q asked, sounding exasperated. He turned and spoke to Picard very distinctly, pronouncing each word with patronizing slowness and clarity. “This isn’t about the Tkon. It’s about him.”
The blinding flash of the supernova dazzled Q right before the shock wave knocked him off his feet. He tumbled backward, the force of the explosion wrenching him free of Gorgan and The One, who were equally staggered by the blast. Qscrambled to his feet, several light-years away from the nova, then stared slackjawed at what 0 had wrought. The light and the impact may have hit him already, but the psychological and emotional effect of what had happened was still sinking in.
A series of lesser shock waves followed the initial explosion, shaking the space-time continuum like the lingering aftershocks of a major earthquake. Q tottered upon his heels, striving to maintain his balance, while some detached component of intellect wondered absently how much of the star’s mass remained after the detonation; depending on the mass of the stellar remnant, Tkon’s sun could now devolve into either a neutron star or a black hole. He watched in a state of shock as, in the wake of the supernova, the collapsing star shed a huge gaseous nebula composed of glowing radioactive elements. The gases were expelled rapidly by the stellar remnant, expanding past Q and the others like a gust of hot steam that left Q gasping and choking. Cooling elemental debris clung to his face and hands like perspiration. “Ugh,” he said, grimacing. He’d forgotten how dreadful a supernova smelled.
The radioactive nebula expanded past Q, leaving him a clear view of all that remained of the huge red orb that had once lighted an empire. The stellar remnant had imploded even further while he was blinded by the noxious gases, achieving its ultimate destiny. He couldn’t actually see it, of course, since there was literally nothing there except a profound absence, but he knew a black hole when he saw one. He could feel its gravitational pull from where he was standing, pulling at his feet like an undertow. Was this void, this empty black cavity, all that was left of the Tkon empress and all her people?
It’s all my fault, he thought. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
He turned on 0 in a rage. “How could you do that? They were winning your stupid game, then you changed the rules! A supernova, without any warning? How in creation could they possibly survive that?”
His henchmen, no longer jarred by the explosion of moments before, began to converge on Q once more, but 0 waved them away. Now that the deed was done, he appeared more than willing to face the young Q’s anger. He wiped the stellar plasma from his hands, then straightened his jacket before addressing Q’s objections. “Now, now, Q. Let’s not get too worked up over this. You clearly missed the point of this exercise. I was simply testing their ability to cope with the completely unexpected, and isn’t that really the only test that truly matters? Any simple species can cope with civil disorder or minor natural disasters. That’s no guarantee of greatness. We have to be more strict than that, more stringent in our standards.” He tilted his head toward the black hole a few parsecs away, assuming a philosophical expression. “Face facts, Q. If your little Tkon couldn’t handle something as routine as an ordinary supernova, then they wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.”
“He sounds just like you,” Picard observed.
“You must be joking.” Q looked genuinely offended by the suggestion, although thankfully more appalled than annoyed. “Even so dim a specimen as yourself must be able to see the fundamental difference between me and that…megalomaniacal sadist and his obsequious underlings.”
“Which is?” Picard asked, pushing his luck. In truth, he had a vague idea of where Q was going with this, but he wanted to hear it from Q’s own lips.
“I play fair, Jean-Luc.” He held out the palms of his hands, beseeching Picard to understand. “There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with tests and games, but you have to play fair. Surely you’ll concede, despite whatever petty inconveniences I may have imposed on you in the past, that I have always scrupulously held fast to the rules of whatever game we were playing, even if I sometimes found myself wishing otherwise.”
“Perhaps,” Picard granted. He could quibble over Q’s idea of fairness, particularly when competing against unwilling beings of vastly lesser abilities, but allowed that, with varying degrees of good sportsmanship, Q had let Picard win on occasion. At least that’s something, he thought, feeling slightly less apprehensive than he had mere moments ago. “And 0?” he prompted. “And the Tkon?”
Q made a contemptuous face. “That was no test, that was a blood sport.”
His younger self could not yet articulate his feelings so clearly. Distraught and disoriented, he wavered in the face of 0’s snow of words. 0 sounded so calm, so reasonable now. “But you killed them all,” he blurted. “What’s the good of testing them if they all end up dead?”
“An occupational hazard of mortality,” 0 pointed out quite matter-of-factly. “You can’t let it get to you, Q. I know it’s hard at first. Little helpless creatures can be very appealing sometimes. But trust me on this, the testing gets easier the more you do it. Isn’t that right, comrades?” The other entities murmured their assent, except for (*), who maintained his silence. “Pretty soon, Q, it won’t bother you at all.”
Q thought that over. The idea of feeling better later was attractive, offering the promise of a balm for his stinging conscience, but maybe you were supposed to feel a little bad after you blew up some poor species’ sun. Is this what I want to do with my immortality? he wondered. Is 0 who I really want to be?
“Let me ask you something,” he said at last, looking 0 squarely in the eye. He knew now what he needed to know. “Aside from the Coulalakritous, has any species—anywhere—ever survived one of your tests?”
0 didn’t even bother to lie. The predatory gleam in his eyes and the smirk that crossed his face were all the answer Q required.
It was the beginning of
the first Q war….
Q-Strike
Prologue
Let the ending begin. Begin the end of eternity ….
It was finally happening. After endless, empty aeons of exile, his liberation was at hand. Balls were rolling. Gears were turning. A shiny, silver key had inserted itself into the eternal lock and now awaited only a flick of the wrist to open wide the gate and let him back into that vast array of suns and planets and moons and swirling nebulae from which he had so long been barred.
Turn the key. Set me free. Free me, me, me!
Time, too much time, had taken its toll on the orderly procession of his thoughts, but not his infamous ingenuity and enthusiasm. He could scarcely wait to make his mark on the galaxy once more, teach it the true meaning of terror and torment. He’d pick up right where he left off—before Q spoiled everything.
All due to Q, and Q and Q, too.
Already a tiny portion of himself, the merest sliver of his soul, had slipped into a crack in the wall, merging with one of the crude and contemptible creatures there, peering out through its obsolete ocular apparatus, while the rest of him snapped and scratched impatiently at the primordial partition that had defied him for longer than his scattered mind could begin to encompass, but not for very much longer. He is the key. The key is me. The key to set me free. He had seen things through the primitive eyes of his avatar within the wall, seen the child of Q and Q, the child of the future.
My future. Mine! he roared at the silent wall, while spider legs of extended thought capered and clawed and craved release. Hear me Q? Hear me here…and now. He probed for further cracks in the wall, shouted into the flickering fissures.
Now the end has begun. Begin the end of Q….
One
Ship’s log, stardate 51604.3, First Officer William T. Riker reporting.
Captain Picard remains missing, transported away by Q, who alone knows when and if the captain will return to the Enterprise. In his absence, I have barely managed to preserve both the ship and the crew, despite the best efforts of the gaseous life-form known as the Calamarain.
Our situation remains grave. To escape the Calamarain, we have taken refuge within the outer fringes of the galactic barrier. Although our shields, modified to absorb psychokinetic energy from the barrier itself, protect us from the worst of its effects, we cannot remain immune to the destructive force of the barrier indefinitely. Already the more telepathically sensitive members of the crew are experiencing discomfort and even pain from the excess of psychic energy composing the barrier and now surrounding the ship.
Due to damage inflicted by both the Calamarain and the barrier, our warp engines are inoperative, and we have lost artificial gravity in large portions of the saucer section, including the bridge. I can only hope that we can complete the most needed repairs before we are forced to exit the barrier and reenter our galaxy, perhaps to face the Calamarain again.
Lieutenant Baeta Leyoro’s pain-racked cry echoed throughout the bridge. If not for the lack of gravity, she would have surely collapsed to the hard duranium floor; instead the stricken security officer levitated in midair, her body doubled over in agony as the psychic flux of the barrier set her synapses on fire. A plait of black hair rose from her scalp, swaying like a cobra about to strike. A heart-wrenching whimper escaped her lips, squeezing out from between tightly clenched teeth.
Riker blamed himself. I should have sent her to sickbay immediately, the moment I realized that her augmented nervous system made her uniquely vulnerable to the barrier. Instead he had waited until it was too late, with the result that she had succumbed to her seizure halfway between her post and the turbolift. But now was no time to second-guess himself. “Beam her directly to sickbay,” he ordered, then slapped the combadge on his chest. “Riker to Dr. Crusher. Lieutenant Leyoro requires emergency care. Expect her at once.”
Even as he warned Beverly of the incoming patient, a shimmering silver glow enveloped the floating, fetal form of Leyoro. Thank heavens the transporters are still working, Riker thought, relieved that Leyoro could benefit from that technology at least, even if their jury-rigged deflectors, experimentally altered by Lieutenant Barclay and Data, had not been enough to protect her. The scintillating twinkle of the transporter effect shone even brighter amid the dimly lit bridge, where only flashing red alert signals provided any illumination at all. Even the blue tracking lights that routinely ran along the floor of the bridge had been snuffed out by the abuse the Enterprise had sustained over the last several hours.
Riker’s own head throbbed in sympathy with Leyoro; he suspected that his long-standing telepathic bond with Deanna had increased his sensitivity as well, weakening his brain’s defenses against the psychic barrage. Swollen veins pounded beneath his temples and brow, although the ache was not yet fierce enough to make him abandon his post. My brain will have to explode first, he vowed defiantly, his jaw set squarely beneath his black beard. He nodded grimly as Leyoro vanished in a cascade of sparks that swiftly evaporated before his eyes.
“Got her,” Beverly’s voice confirmed via his combadge. “Crusher out.”
Convinced that Leyoro’s fate now rested in the capable hands of the ship’s medical officer, Riker leaned forward in the captain’s chair and turned his attention to other pressing matters. A brilliant violet glow emanated from the forward viewscreen, catching his eye. Overloaded by the immeasurable radiance of the galactic barrier, the screen had initially gone dead upon their entry into the mysterious wall of energy. Now the screen flared back to life, but only to show a brighter form of blankness, filled from top to bottom by an undifferentiated display of pure luminosity. The glare from the screen pierced his eyes. “Someone dim the main viewer,” he instructed gruffly.
“Affirmative, Commander,” Data responded. Seated at Ops, the gold-skinned android manipulated the controls at his station. Scorch marks along the console’s polished metal casing testified to the rigors of their recent battle against the Calamarain, as did numerous other scars all around the bridge. A fragment of torn polyduranide sheeting drifted past Riker’s face, free from the downward pull of gravity, and he batted it away with a wave of his hand. On the screen, the phosphorescent effulgence of the galactic barrier faded to a more subdued but equally uninformative gleam. “Is that acceptable, Commander?” Data inquired calmly.
“That will do, Mr. Data,” Riker said. The sooner they put the barrier behind them, the better. He tapped his combadge again. “Riker to La Forge. What’s our warp status?”
Geordi’s voice answered him from Engineering, sounding more than a little harried. “We’ve patched up the plasma-injection system, but the warp-field coils in the starboard nacelle still need a lot of work. We’re talking another hour at least.”
“Understood,” Riker acknowledged. There was no need to urge La Forge to hurry; the engineering chief knew full well how shaky their shields were compared with the awesome power of the barrier. The devil of it is, Riker thought, we don’t even know why the Calamarain attacked us in the first place, even though it obviously had something to do with the barrier. Were the gaseous entities still waiting for the Enterprise outside the wall? Riker didn’t want to find out until he knew the ship could make a quick escape at warp speed. With any luck, the Calamarain will have given us up for dead the moment we flew into the barrier.
“I certainly hope you’re not planning to sit here forever,” said a voice to his left, belonging to a tall, auburn-haired woman who had usurped Deanna’s seat in the command area. Her tone could be described as patronizing at best, contemptuous at worst. “As impressive and mystifying as our surroundings must appear to creatures of your ilk, I’m afraid I grew accustomed to such spectacles several millennia ago.” She raised an impeccably manicured hand to her mouth in an only partially successful attempt to stifle a yawn. “Can’t you do something just to liven things up a bit?”
The woman in question, balancing a sleepy toddler upon her knee, was reportedly Q’s wife and the mother of
his child, two propositions that frankly boggled Riker’s mind whenever he cared to think of them, which definitely wasn’t now. “If we’re not sufficiently entertaining for you, you’re more than welcome to leave,” he informed her. Ever since she had refused to use her Q-like omnipotence to rescue the Enterprise from its current predicament, let alone enlighten him as to what Q had done with Captain Picard, he had resolved not to let either her or her child distract him from his duty.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said haughtily. The pips on the collar of her fake Starfleet uniform identified her (inaccurately) as a five-star admiral. Typical, Riker thought; from what he had seen so far, the female Q’s ego was easily a match for her husband’s. “I told you before, I intend to find out what precisely my esteemed spouse and partner finds so intriguing about this primitive vessel, no matter how excruciatingly tedious that task proves to be. Besides,” she added, smiling indulgently at her small son, clad in equally counterfeit Starfleet attire, “little q enjoys your aboriginal antics.”
“Ant-ticks!” q burbled happily. He waved a pudgy little hand, and a parade of tiny insects suddenly appeared on the floor of the command area, marching single file past the elevated captain’s chair and across the top of Riker’s gravity boots. Despite his determination to ignore Q’s visiting relations as much as possible, the first officer had to suppress a shudder at this reminder of the seemingly harmless infant’s abilities. Such amazing power in the hands of a child was enough to send a chill down a Vulcan’s spine. Like the original Q isn’t immature enough, he thought.