“Anesthetized the subject,” he clarified, “to prepare it for further testing.”
Further testing? Crusher still couldn’t believe what she was hearing and seeing. Even with his unearthly new powers, how could Faal knock out a baby Q? What in heaven’s name has happened to him? she wondered, shocked as much by his psychotic behavior as by his unexpected new abilities. What had changed a noted physicist and father into a crazed stealer of children?
For the first time in Crusher’s experience, the female Q’s arch and haughty manner gave way to a very human emotional outburst. “My baby!” she cried out in anguish. “q!” Her eyes flashed with murderous hatred. “Give me back my son this instant!”
Faal laughed, remarkably unconcerned by the female Q’s maternal fury. “That might have terrified me before, when I was a powerless corporeal being like the rest of them.” He sneered in Beverly’s direction. “But I’m stronger now, a transcendent being like yourself. Strong, stronger, strongest.”
He keeps getting more and more disturbed and irrational, Crusher thought, remembering the soft-spoken Betazoid scientist she had met at the onset of their mission. He had seemed so sane, so normal, then. It’s like there’s been a different person growing inside him. How else to explain those dual brain patterns, as well as his increasingly criminal behavior?
The female Q was not interested in explanations. All she wanted was her child, and to strike out at the being who had harmed him. “Die!” she spat. “Die and disappear!”
She flung out her fingers—and nothing happened. Faal remained as humanoid as before, the anesthetized baby Q still tucked under one arm, his innocuous-looking fingers held out before him like a weapon. Then he did the last thing Crusher expected him to do. He started to sing.
“Sweet little baby,
Peaceful you lie,
We’ll play some games,
And then you will die….”
“Oh no,” the female Q whispered, her confidence and anger replaced by an unmistakable look of alarm. Beverly could tell that more than just the sinister lyrics of the lullaby had disturbed her. She just wished she knew why.
Ten
Ensign Clarze grabbed on to the twisting appendage with both hands, trying to pull it away from his throat, but the inhuman limb was too strong, seeming composed of equal parts matter and energy. He opened his mouth, either to breathe or to scream, but could succeed at neither. He was being strangled to death upon the bridge of the Enterprise, before the horrified eyes of Jean-Luc Picard.
“Q!” the captain shouted at the other immortal, who stood dumbfounded next to Ops. “Save him, blast you!”
Although more solid than the spectral limbs Picard had intermittently spied in the past, this tentacle was not made of flesh as the captain knew it. Lambent veins of azure light, the same hue as 0’s wild eyes, coursed along the length of the monstrous extension. It was like a limb of pure phaser fire, or a small child’s first crude attempt at a hologram, but clearly no less tangible for all that.
Q blinked in surprise, as if the importance of rescuing one insignificant crewman had not occurred to him before. “As you wish,” he said, apparently too unnerved by 0’s return to want to debate the issue. Ignoring the radiant tentacle, he extended an open palm at 0 himself. A blinding beam of white light fell upon 0, throwing his ragged shadow upon the viewscreen behind him.
“Ha!” 0 barked loudly. He staggered, but did not fall, before Q’s broadside. The white light washed over him, bleaching his image beneath its brilliancy, yet the manic grin on his face did not change. “Not bad at all, not at all bad. Picked up a grain more gumption over the ages, I see.”
“I’d hoped to disintegrate you,” Q replied, lowering his hand in disappointment. The white light seeped into the folds and crevices of 0’s scarecrow-like form, leaving him conspicuously unharmed. “No such luck, alas.”
Data, with his superhuman reflexes, reacted next. Springing from his seat at Ops, he dug his golden fingers deeply into the shining tentacle and struggled to pry it loose from Clarze’s throat. Amused, 0 stepped back to let the android work, stretching the tentacle taut between his chest and the endangered ensign. No symptom of exertion showed upon Data’s impassive features, but Picard knew that Data had to be using every kilogram of strength he possessed. Placed under tremendous strain, concealed servomotors within Data’s arms and shoulders whirred audibly. Horribly, that didn’t seem to be enough. The tentacle resisted Data’s strenuous efforts while it continued to choke its victim, even as Riker hurried to assist Data.
“Security!” Picard ordered. “Phasers on full.” Racing around the starboard side of the bridge, Sondra Berglund positioned herself so that Data was out of the line of fire, then unleashed her phaser upon the tentacle where it stretched between 0 and Clarze. A young security officer, Caitlin Plummer, joined Berglund, adding her own phaser to the assault. Parallel beams of crimson energy struck the tentacle, producing a crackling cascade of white-hot sparks, but the luciferous tendril did not come apart. 0 cackled raucously, insanely indifferent to whatever pain the three-pronged attack on his extremity inflicted on him. Smaller tentacles erupted from his shoulders, flailing about alongside his head.
Clarze’s eyes bulged from their sockets, his tongue protruded from his wide-open mouth. “Keep firing!” Picard commanded, consumed by fury and frustration. Couldn’t anything stop this monster? “Q!” he demanded. “You can’t let him kill again!”
Q shook his head mournfully. “I’m sorry, Jean-Luc. I tried.”
“Then try again, damn you!” Picard refused to give up, even as 0 laughed off the heroic efforts of four Starfleet officers to rescue their comrade from 0’s homicidal grasp. He couldn’t accept that he had to sit by helplessly again while 0 murdered with impunity. The destruction of the Tkon, as tragic and horrible as it was, had been a chapter out of ancient history, long known to Picard. This was happening now.
“What’s the matter, Q?” 0 mocked him. “Not up to your game these days? Playing the impotent bystander again? Take a good look, Q. You’re next!”
Intent on Q now, 0 released Clarze and retracted his ectoplasmic tentacle back into his torso. The Deltan ensign dropped from his seat at the conn, his limp body crumpling to the floor. Berglund and Plummer switched off their phasers immediately, but, moving even faster, Data had already knelt to check the young man’s condition. Picard held his breath, hoping for the best, while the android’s fingers felt Clarze’s throat.
Data rose without ceremony, letting Clarze’s skull lie where it fell. “His neck is broken,” he announced gravely. “I regret to say he is dead.”
Picard stared in horror at the young helmsman’s body, at the deep bruises mottling his exposed neck, the blue cyanotic tint of his lifeless face. He remembered, with bitter irony, that he had assigned the inexperienced crewman to the conn because the captain had anticipated smooth sailing on this mission and it had seemed like a valuable opportunity to give new personnel like Clarze a taste of bridge duty. Now the Deltan youth’s Starfleet career had been cut prematurely short, along with any other dreams or ambitions he might have harbored. All thanks to 0.
This one death should not shock me, Picard thought numbly. After all, he had already seen 0 murder trillions, when the sadistic entity condemned the entire Tkon Empire to extinction; intellectually, Clarze’s brutal slaying was just one more casualty to add to 0’s age-old list of crimes. But it didn’t feel that way. “How dare you?” he said, his voice choked with feeling. He rose from his chair to look 0 in the eye. “He was only a boy.”
“Bye-bye, boy,” 0 sang giddily. “Boy oh boy.” He snapped his fingers and Clarze’s body stirred unexpectedly. Picard experienced a momentary surge of hope. Could Data have been mistaken? That was practically impossible, but there was Clarze moving again, clumsily climbing off the floor. Riker reached out to help the young man rise, then yanked back his hand abruptly, eyes wide with shock and disgust. Picard understood why when the figure’s dead blu
e face turned toward him for a moment and he saw the emptiness in the fixed, blank eyes. Suddenly, he realized the full horror of what was occurring. Ensign Clarze was quite dead, in fact, but 0 had revived his lifeless body.
With awkward, jerky motions, the animated corpse of the Starfleet officer retook his former seat at the conn. Dead fingers mechanically tapped the helm controls. “There,” 0 said smugly, “the boy is back where he belongs. Take us bye-bye, boy.”
Even Q looked appalled by 0’s latest atrocity. He released another burst of light against his former mentor, this time to even less effect. “By the Continuum,” he whispered in hushed tones, “what have you become?”
“And you!” Picard said furiously, turning on Q. “Why couldn’t you stop him?”
Looking puzzled and somewhat disturbed, Q contemplated his own empty hand, then peered suspiciously at 0. “I’m not sure,” he said finally, three words that Picard had never expected to hear from Q. “He’s…different now. He’s found some new source of power.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Riker said, leaving the empty conn and joining Picard. He signaled Berglund and Plummer to back away from 0 slowly before they attracted his attention. Picard didn’t like the idea of leaving 0’s zombie at the conn, but was not willing to sacrifice another crew member by assigning one to that post.
“Captain,” Barclay shouted from science II. “The warp drive is accelerating.” Proving him completely accurate in his assessment, the rushing streaks of white upon the viewscreen stretched even thinner, approaching invisibility as the Enterprise’s velocity increased by several orders of magnitude. “Warp factor eight point five,” Barclay reported.
Is this 0’s doing as well? Picard confronted Q again. “What’s wrong, Q? You stopped him five hundred thousand years ago. How can he be more powerful now? Explain.” Before he could attempt any strategy against 0, he needed to know what was happening.
“I don’t understand,” Q murmured, more to himself than Picard. “Unless—” An unwanted realization rushed over his features, chilling Picard as he was forced to wonder what dire possibility Q could have possibly failed to anticipate, and whether Q would even attempt to explain. “Oh no.”
Before Q could share his fears, 0 turned his back on the conn and strolled counterclockwise around the bridge to where Q waited apprehensively. “The rudder is readied,” he declared, “our course is corrected. Ready to play, Q?” The smirk on his face could not conceal the ancient enmity in his eyes. “Quisling. Quitter. Quarry.”
Q flinched with each epithet 0 spat at him. “I didn’t have any choice,” he began, “not after what you did. You went too far, or farther than I wanted to go at least.” His faced darkened as he remembered all that happened millennia past, all that he had just relived with Picard. “Besides, the Tkon won! They beat you fair and square.”
0’s cocky grin devolved into a grimace. “Quell your quibbles, Q, or I’ll quash you like the quivering, quarrelsome quadruped you are.”
“I should never have let you into this multiverse in the first place,” Q said defiantly. “I should have left you to freeze in that arctic limbo where I found you. Which reminds me, I never got a chance to ask: Just how many realities have you been kicked out of anyway?”
“Quack! Quadroon!” 0 clenched his fists above his head and, spiderlike, matching pairs of energized tentacles sprung from his sides, granting him eight limbs in all. Four incandescent extremities leaped forth to ensnare Q within their grasp. Q seemed to welcome the clash, which had been so many aeons in the making; with uncharacteristic violence, he grabbed for 0’s scrawny neck with his bare hands and began to throttle his onetime mentor and role model. Picard had never seen Q act so savagely.
For less than a moment, they grappled upon the bridge, 0’s glowing tentacles wrapping around Q like coruscating cables, Q’s fingers digging into 0’s metaphorical flesh, each of them quite intent on squeezing the life out of the other. Then, in a burst of light that left Picard blinking, both figures disappeared from the bridge.
Where did they go? the captain wondered, staring at the empty space that two superbeings had occupied only a heartbeat before. Had that flash been Q’s doing or 0’s? They could be anywhere in time or space right now, he realized, battling for who knows how long. Was it possible that the dueling entities could keep each other occupied for all eternity, or at least a mortal lifetime or two? There were worse outcomes to imagine, even though he wasn’t sure that even Q deserved to be locked in combat with his first and worst enemy until the end of time.
But what if 0 succeeded in destroying Q, as he clearly seemed to have the potential to do? Then every species and civilization could be facing mortal jeopardy. Picard found himself in the peculiar position of rooting for Q. Better a mischievous imp like Q than the devil himself, he thought.
In the meantime, he needed to prepare for the eventuality that either Q or 0 or both could return at any moment. He surveyed the bridge, his gaze quickly falling on the abominable sight of the murdered ensign’s resurrected body still manning his former post, soulless fingers making minute course corrections to the Enterprise’s trajectory even as Picard watched.
No, he thought. Not one minute more. Until this instance, he had always thought that nothing worse could happen to a sentient being than to be assimilated by the Borg, but this obscene desecration might have disgusted even the Borg Queen. Picard could only pray that no trace of Ensign Clarze’s consciousness remained within the undead revenant he had become. “Ensign Berglund,” he said coldly. “Give me your phaser.”
Taking the type-1 phaser from the young Canadian officer, he clicked the weapon to its highest setting, then fired it directly at all that remained of Ensign Clarze. For a split second, an intense red glow outlined the reanimated body; then the phased energy broke down the atomic bonds holding the flesh and bone and blood together, vaporizing them until not a single molecule remained intact. Picard lowered the weapon to his side, feeling his heart pound within his chest. 0 will pay for this, he vowed.
“You did the right thing, Captain,” Riker said, standing stiffly at his side. “Request permission to take over at the conn.”
“Make it so,” Picard said hoarsely, grateful for Riker’s offer to take the helm under such grisly circumstances.
Riker sat down at the conn, occupying the space so recently filled by Clarze’s animated cadaver. “Let’s hope Q and that other creature are gone for a long time.” His fingertips rested atop the helm controls. “Shall I set course for Starbase 146?”
“Most definitely,” Picard agreed. From the looks of it, the Enterprise was badly in need of maintenance. Furthermore, he wanted to warn Starfleet of the threat posed by 0 as soon as possible. Returning the phaser to Ensign Berglund, who had resumed her station at tactical, he resolved to contact Engineering next, to get a complete status report on the ship’s primary systems from Geordi La Forge. Q had obligingly restored the lights and gravity upon the bridge, but what about the rest of the Enterprise? His hand hovered above his combadge.
“Captain,” Riker addressed him crisply. The urgent tone of the first officer’s voice alerted Picard at once that there was more trouble afoot. “The conn is not responding to my commands.”
Blast, Picard thought. This was 0’s work, no doubt. “Switch to auxiliary controls,” he suggested.
Riker shook his head. “I tried that. I’m completely locked out.” His hands marched over the controls decisively, but the hairbreadth streaks rushing past them on the viewscreen revealed that the Enterprise was still heading straight along the course set by 0 and his zombie helmsman.
An ominous suspicion stirred within Picard’s mind. “What is our heading?” he demanded. “Can you deduce our ultimate destination?”
Riker consulted the navigational display at his console. “As nearly as I can tell, Captain, we’re headed directly toward the very center of the galaxy.”
I feared as much, Picard mused. “People to free,” 0 had sa
id in his ranting, rambling way. 0 almost certainly intended to use the Enterprise to liberate The One from his eternal confinement behind the Great Barrier, which surely meant that, unless Q succeeded in exterminating his ancient adversary, he and his crew had not seen the last of 0. Picard realized that he could not possibly let 0 unleash another genocidal superbeing on the cosmos, even if it meant destroying the Enterprise-E and everyone aboard. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, and that 0 cannot immobilize our self-destruct procedure as easily as he took control of the conn.
There was much he needed to explain to Riker and the others, but first Picard glanced once more at the spot where both 0 and Q had vanished from sight. Where are you, Q, he wondered, and how can we stop the greatest mistake of your youth from wreaking havoc on the future of all who live?
Eleven
“Gametime, Q! Ready to play?”
The corridors of the Enterprise E were as streamlined and antiseptic as Q had come to expect from Starfleet. To be perfectly honest, he had always been a trifle disappointed by the Federation’s sense of design, and this new flagship of Picard’s was no exception. He would have gone for something a good deal more baroque or rococo; not as gothic as that dreary Deep Space Nine, but certainly something with a bit more flash and style.
Picard would hate it, of course.
But how had he ended up in this hall in the first place, and where was 0’s voice coming from? Only a nanosecond ago, he’d been locked in mortal combat with the deranged entity, their respective powers pitted against each on a dozen different levels simultaneously. He could only assume his involuntary transportation to this unremarkable locale meant that he had lost the first round of their contest.
How terribly galling and unexpected. Q had hoped that the age and experience he’d gained since he last clashed with 0, over half a million years ago, would have given him considerably more of an edge this time around, but, no, he had failed to anticipate how greatly 0’s insanity had progressed during his long exile. His madness gives him the advantage, he realized, allowing 0 to distort and transform reality, even transcendental reality, in ways that Q could equal only if he was willing to sacrifice his own sanity. He wasn’t quite willing to go that far…yet.