Naturally, q’s mother was charmed by her offspring’s naive misunderstanding. “Oh, isn’t that adorable?” she said. Propelled by the motion of their miniature limbs, the insects began to lift off from the floor, adding to the ash and debris in the air. Fortunately, the female Q scooped up the floating bugs with a net she materialized from nowhere, then consigned both the net and its chittering contents to oblivion. “I’m sorry, dearest,” she explained to the child, patting him on the head, “but our present surroundings are barbaric enough without any additional infestations.”
Baby q objected strenuously to the sudden disappearance of his playthings. He scrunched up his face and let out an earsplitting squall while simultaneously kicking his little legs. His tantrum shook the entire bridge, which lurched from side to side, nearly throwing Riker out of his chair. Behind him, he heard Ensign Sondra Berglund, who had replaced Leyoro at tactical, stumble awkwardly in her heavy magnetic boots. “That’s enough,” he barked at the female Q. “He’s your child. Do something about him.”
To his surprise, the woman actually looked abashed, as if she feared the child’s behavior reflected poorly on her parenting skills. “Now, now,” she cooed to q in a soothing tone, “you can play with your funny arthropods another time.” Accompanied by a brief flash of white light, an enticing jumja treat appeared in q’s balled-up fist. Not surprisingly, the delectable glop-on-a-stick successfully distracted q, who abandoned his uproar in favor of sucking energetically on the sugary confection. “There,” his mother said approvingly. “Isn’t that better?”
Although the candy calmed the child, it also made something of a mess. Riker already spotted sticky handprints all over Troi’s customary seat. Deanna herself was currently in sickbay, under the care of Dr. Crusher. He allowed himself a moment of concern regarding Deanna’s safety, praying that the doctor’s efforts had protected Deanna, with her empathic sensitivity, from the barrier. Be well, imzadi, he thought.
Deanna’s Betazoid gifts rendered her unusually susceptible to the concentrated psionic energy surrounding the ship, as were their civilian passengers: Professor Lem Faal of Betazed, and his two children. As full telepaths, the Faal family were probably more at risk than anyone else aboard the Enterprise. For that reason, he had ordered all three Betazoids, along with Deanna, to sickbay before they even entered the barrier. He’d hoped that precaution would be enough to keep their guests safe, but, insanely, Faal had caused a disturbance in sickbay, attacking Deanna and escaping with his son. Even now, security was searching for the missing patients.
I knew Faal was upset about his experiment being called off due to the unexpected attack of the Calamarain, but I never expected him to resort to violence. Thank heavens, Deanna wasn’t seriously harmed, Riker thought, or I’d be tempted to beam him to the Calamarain myself.
At tactical, Ensign Berglund had regained her footing. “Shield strength is fluctuating, Commander,” she reported, “by variances of twenty percent and more.” Her eyes never left the display panel. “I’m doing my best to stabilize the deflectors, but it’s not working.”
Riker glanced quickly at Lieutenant Reginald Barclay, now positioned at the secondary aft science station. It had been Barclay’s idea to divert telekinetic energy from the barrier to the ship’s shields by way of the organic bio-neural gel packs in the Enterprise’s computer system, a hastily improvised tactic that had proven successful…so far.
“The gel packs are still absorbing energy from the barrier,” Barclay assured Riker, gulping nervously, “but it’s hard to quantify. I had to reroute the monitoring program to science two after the engineering station exploded.” He cast a wary look at the charred remains of the main engineering console, only a few stations away. “The gel packs were never intended to serve as batteries for psychic energy, so there are no established parameters to judge their efficiency.”
“This is correct, Commander,” Data confirmed. He had carefully evaluated Barclay’s preliminary findings earlier, as had Geordi La Forge. “Prolonged exposure to the barrier is causing a significant percentage of bio-neural circuitry to incinerate. At present, energy absorption exceeds extinction by a rate of approximately forty-seven-point-three-four percent, averaged over the duration of our stay in the barrier, but at any given moment the quantity of energy available to the deflector array can vary dramatically, just as Ensign Berglund reports.”
Riker nodded. “Let me know the instant the scale tips the other way. Ensign Clarze,” he instructed the young Deltan crewman at the conn, “set a course that takes us straight out of the barrier in the shortest possible time. When we go, I want to leave here in a hurry.”
“Yes, sir,” Clarze said. Riker had been impressed by the way the inexperienced ensign had kept his cool during this crisis, coping with both the hostile activities of the Calamarain as well as the always unsettling caprices of Q and his kin. He resolved to make a note of this the next time he and Deanna completed their personnel evaluation reports, assuming any of them came out of this alive. He gazed at the lambent glow of the main viewer. Somewhere beyond that incandescent haze, the Milky Way waited for them, as did, perhaps, an angry and homicidal mass of sentient plasma.
Where are the Calamarain? Riker brooded. And, just as importantly, where is Captain Picard?
Two
Six hundred thousand years ago:
“What have you done??”
The booming voice came without warning, reverberating through space-time and startling five celestial figures, in addition to two more who looked on anonymously from a slightly different phase of reality. Jean-Luc Picard, late of the Starship Enterprise, stood amid the starry vastness of space, accompanied by Q, his self-appointed guide on this forced excursion through galactic prehistory, and watched, as through a one-way mirror, as Q’s younger self faced the consequences of his fateful alliance with the malicious cosmic entity who called himself 0, as well as with 0’s trio of malevolent cronies.
Like 0 and the others, Picard presently existed on a sublimely magnified scale, such that stars and planets were no more than ball-sized spheres of matter and burning gas in comparison. His gaze encompassed parsecs of open space, and yet that stern and unforgiving voice seemed even larger than himself. Picard cast a speculative glance at Q, then lifted his eyes heavenward. “The Q Continuum, I presume?”
“Just so,” Q affirmed. Clad in the latest Starfleet uniform, he gestured toward his younger self, standing a few light-years away. More than a hint of melancholy tinged his ordinarily sarcastic voice. “In truth, I wasn’t too surprised, even then. I could hardly expect the Continuum to overlook the small matter of a premature supernova, not to mention the total destruction of a major spacefaring civilization.”
Still saddened by the tragedy, Picard looked back over his shoulder at the lifeless void that was all that remained of the mighty Tkon Empire, destroyed by 0 in a fit of pique after his underlings failed to subvert its civilization. Where once a sophisticated and admirable people, numbering in the trillions, had spread their culture throughout their solar system and beyond, achieving heights of technological wizardry exceeding those of the Federation, the detonation of their sun, brought on abruptly by 0’s supernatural puissance, had extinguished nearly every trace of their existence, leaving only a few scattered ruins on distant outposts to mark their passing. Picard could still feel the relentless tug of the black hole the Tkon’s sun had become. Invisible to his naked eye, even in this transfigured state, the dense gravitational vortex pulled on him like an undertow, so that Picard found himself leaning forward to counter its attractive force. What was done to the Tkon, he mused, was a crime of interplanetary proportions.
Now, it seemed, as detective Dixon Hill might put it, the time had come to face the music….
“I’m s-sorry,” the younger Q stammered, staring up at the source of the bodiless voice. His fine attire, which had resembled that of an eighteenth-century European dandy, several hundred millennia ahead of its time, transformed at on
ce into a coarse and uncomfortable sackcloth robe. “I never meant for this to happen.”
In fact, Picard recalled, the young Q had played little part in the annihilation of the Tkon, had even attempted to stop 0 once he realized what the other was up to, but to no avail. At worst, he had been only an unwilling accessory to genocide, not that this seemed to have spared Q’s conscience much. After all, if not for Q’s recklessness and gullibility, 0 and his unholy associates would have never gained entry to this reality in the first place. Q had promised to take responsibility for 0 when he rescued the mysterious wayfarer from some extradimensional wasteland. 0 in turn had welcomed three lesser entities into Q’s reality, making Q responsible by extension for the depredations of these sinister beings, who now faced judgment beside Q and their ruthless sponsor. Picard wondered how much the other Q would hold the young Q to his original promise.
“WHAT HAS BEEN DONE CANNOT BE UNDONE.”
Young Q flinched beneath every syllable, just as his older counterpart winced in sympathy. The mature Q was clearly troubled by this peek at his ignominious youth, but made no effort to intervene in what transpired. Even the Q, Picard observed with a certain relief, drew the line when it came to tampering with the past; not even the gods could erase yesterday, no matter how much they might want to. Q obviously survived this occasion, he inferred, or else he would have never been able to torment me in the future. He shook his head. Lucky me.
“It all started out as a game,” young Q tried to explain, pleading for understanding with outstretched hands, “a simple test of their resourcefulness….”
“That’s enough, boy,” 0 interrupted harshly. Unlike Q, he saw no need to discard his anachronistic finery. His stylish velvet suit, olive green in hue, looked even more elegant and ostentatious next to Q’s penitent gray robe. The buckles on his polished black shoes shone like silver, while one ruffled sleeve, Picard noted, was scorched from when he had thrust his merciless hand into the heart of the Tkon’s murdered sun. “We’ve no need to justify ourselves to their sort.”
“But it’s the Continuum,” Q pointed out, while his older self mouthed the very same words. This incident was obviously imprinted deeply in the later Q’s memory. “They’ve come for us. They know what we’ve done.”
“Stiffen your spine, I say, and shut your mouth.” 0 limped across the vacuum and rested a meaty hand upon Q’s shoulder. His three henchmen, whom Q knew as Gorgan, (*), and The One, clustered behind him, letting their leader face the judgment of the Continuum. “We’re all in this together, Q. There’s no backing out now.”
“YOU,” the stentorian voice targeted 0, sounding not unlike Picard’s own resonant timbre. “YOU AND YOUR FAMILIARS DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU MUST BE CAST OUT FOR ALL TIME.”
“I’ve heard that before,” 0 said with a chuckle, then glared at the sky with icy blue eyes. He placed his hands on his hips and thrust out his wide chin. His raspy voice held not a note of regret or repentance. “How dare you judge any of us, you pontificating pests? What do you know of the noble art of testing developing species, forcing them to prove their potential and worthiness to survive? Of the guile and glory of pushing lesser life-forms to their ultimate limits and beyond? What have you ever done that can match what we have accomplished, you cautious Continuum? We’re better than the lot of you!”
“0!” young Q whispered frantically to his former role model and mentor. Once 0’s insolent disregard for the authority of the Continuum had thrilled and delighted the callow superbeing, but that was before 0 had gotten him into real trouble. Before Tkon. Picard could only imagine how tempted the elder Q must have been to warn his younger self of impending events.
“Don’t hide behind these sonorous sound effects,” 0 challenged the bodiless voice. “Face us in person, preternatural deity to preternatural deity, if you’ve got the guts and gumption.”
“YOU ARE NOT WORTHY TO LOOK UPON THE Q. YOU SHALL BE BANISHED FROM THIS REALM.”
“Do your worst,” 0 dared the Continuum. Taking a deep breath, he seemed to call upon his full strength, just as he had when he froze the Coulalakritous into a solid mass. A flickering aura formed around his humanoid guise, along with a vague impression of another, less substantial form superimposed upon his anthropomorphic persona.
Once before, another half a million years in the past, Picard had beheld this shadowy other aspect of 0. As then, the images were indistinct and almost subliminal in nature, and all the more ominous for their tantalizing and suggestive elusiveness. Try though he did to discern the actual shape of 0’s alter ego, Picard caught only transitory glimpses of whipping tendrils that extended beyond the boundaries of 0’s human form like the unfurled wings of some alien raptor. That which is only half-seen is all the more troubling to the imagination, he reflected; although Picard had often conversed comfortably with alien beings who varied dramatically from the humanoid model, what he spied of 0’s other form sent a chill through his body. Or maybe it is just the implication of deliberate deception that is so unnerving. What other secrets might 0 be hiding?
Whatever his shape or origins, 0 remained a force to be reckoned with. Even separated from the scene by one degree of existence, Picard felt the power radiating from 0, stinging his exposed face and hands like a freezing wind. “Stand fast,” he called out to Q and the others, his gravelly voice rising to a thunderous roar. “These censorious charlatans don’t know whom they’re dealing with! If we stick together, we can withstand any foe.”
But the cumulative force of the Continuum struck like disruptor fire from a Romulan warbird, dispersing 0’s ectoplasmic tentacles and sending him staggering backward into Gorgan and The One. Gorgan’s voluminous robes and flowing white locks, suffused as ever by a faint greenish aura, flapped like hung laundry in a hurricane while The One’s gleaming metal armor protected him only slightly better. His stern and bearded visage blinked in the face of the attack, the flesh of his face pulled tightly against the skull beneath. Hovering above their heads, the glowing crimson sphere that was (*) was stretched into a faint, translucent oval by the concussive force directed against them. “Do your worst!” 0 bellowed, ribbons of smoke rising from his seared garments. “I’ll not surrender, never again!” Pressing forward, dragging his lame left leg behind him, he clenched his fists and hurled blasts of pyrotechnic energy at his unseen foes. Blazing fireballs arced like meteors across the heavens, exploding into scarlet bursts of light and heat so bright that Picard was forced to look away.
“Eyes front,” the Q beside him said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss anything.”
Picard squinted into the glare. Not for the first time, he wondered what Q’s purpose was in showing all this to him. What have these fantastically ancient events to do with my own life and times?
If 0’s fiery assault had any effect on the Continuum, Picard saw no sign of it. 0 was powerful, no doubt, but he was only one where the Continuum represented the collective might of who knew how many. Of his lackeys, only The One rose to his defense. “Bow not to false gods!” He declared, flinging one thunderbolt after another after 0’s fireballs. His austere, patriarchal features could’ve been carved from the hardest Cardassian granite; even His long, forbidding beard was stiff and unyielding. “Feel the sting of My Righteous Fury.”
Despite the aid of The One, 0 began to lose ground. Battered by the irresistible force of the Continuum, the murderer of the Tkon Empire was forced to retreat once more, spewing a trail of blinding conflagrations behind him. Young Q felt the wrath of the Continuum as well. He tumbled head over heels, nearly rolling away from 0 and the others before 0 reached out and grabbed on to Q’s forearm, digging his fingers into Q’s metaphysical flesh. “I’ll never yield, never I say,” the stranger gasped, squinting his eyes against the impact of the Continuum’s offensive, “but even the most courageous combatant knows when to retreat. Time to flee to fight again, Q. Get us away from here!”
“What?” The beleaguered young godling looked uncertain. Wringing his ha
nds nervously, he looked back and forth between 0 and the direction from which the Q’s attack emerged. Can he see his fellow Q? Picard wondered. Does he know too well how angry they must be? The Continuum had punished Q before, he recalled, for follies far less consequential than this. “I don’t know what to do,” the youth said. “I’m not sure.”
“Don’t run, you fool,” the later Q whispered to his young self, who, alas, could not hear the voice of experience speaking. “You’re only making it worse.”
“Run!” 0 urged him. He tossed away his stylish brown wig, exposing his own reddish hair, tied in the back. His black silk cravat had come undone, dangling loosely around his neck. “We have to flee, Q, now. Or are you prepared to take the blame for what happened to the late, lamented Tkon Empire?” His crippled leg dragged behind him, reminding Picard that 0 was unable to travel faster than light without Q’s assistance. “Are you ready to pay for my crimes?”
“But it wasn’t my fault,” Q whimpered. His face was contorted by fear and distress. Tears leaked from his eyes. “Not all of it, not really.”
“Are you so sure of that?” 0 asked, showing him no mercy. “Are you certain that the high-and-mighty Q Continuum will see things the same way? From what I’ve seen so far, they’re not the forgiving type.” A devilish grin stretched across his broad, ruddy face. “They’ll deal with you most harshly of all, I’ll wager.”
“YOU CANNOT OVERCOME US,” the voice of the Continuum intoned.
“SUBMIT TO BANISHMENT OR RISK DESTRUCTION.”
“Don’t do it,” the older Q said, shaking his head mournfully.