“Interesting,” his father noted, talking to himself. “Subject responds to negative environmental stimuli through metamorphic substitution. To compensate for subject’s paranormal behavioral strategies, future tests must—” The oncoming phaser beam attempted to bypass Faal’s vortex by branching into two separate streams. Faal barely managed to summon a second vortex in time, blocking both forks of the phaser attack, but the effort broke his train of thought. He glared at the mother Q with a look that Milo knew too well: the leave-me-alone-I’m-working look.
“Milo,” he called out unexpectedly. “I need your help, son. Use your new powers to keep that interfering woman away from me. Use your mind. Mind is all that matters.”
Milo was stunned and excited. His father needed him? For the first time in months, since his mother died really, Dad was paying attention to him again, including him in his life. And all it took was these strange new powers. This was almost too good to be true.
“No, Milo!” Counselor Troi urged him. “You have to get away from here. Your father’s…not well.”
But he’s still my father, Milo thought, shoving the counselor away more forcefully, all the way out into the adult ward. The more he used his new powers, the more natural they felt. I can’t let him down now, not when we finally have a chance to be together again.
“Leave my father alone!” he shouted at the baby’s mother. He felt kind of bad about it, since she just seemed to want her baby back, but his father knew what he was doing, didn’t he? Maybe the baby wasn’t really a baby, but some sort of the shapechanging alien in disguise. Like a Changeling or an allasomorph.
Whatever she really was, the distraught woman paid no attention to Milo, but just kept firing wildly at his father. By now the single beam had diverged into over a dozen separate forks, attacking his father from every conceivable direction. His father had been forced to transform his defensive vortex into a protective bubble that covered him from head to toe. “Please, Milo,” he called. “I can’t work under these conditions.”
There had been a time, Milo recalled, before everything went wrong, that his father had sometimes taken Milo into his lab and let him help out with the experiments. Dad had given him simple tasks to perform, like replicating fresh isolinear chips or entering gravitational statistics into the wormhole simulations, and called him his “best lab assistant.” Milo felt an ache at the back of his throat; he hadn’t realized until now how much he’d missed that.
The ruby-red phaser beams hemming his father in, crisscrossing each other in their attempts to sneak past his defenses, reminded Milo of the Tholian webs in his favorite computer game, the same one he’d been playing the night he first met the baby Q and his mother. Well, two can play at that game, he thought.
With a thought, a pair of miniature Tholian warships popped into existence and flew straight for the woman (if that’s what she really was) firing at his father. The diamond-shaped, prismatic ships began to enclose the woman within an intricate energy field consisting of overlapping rays of red-gold light.
At first, the woman looked more irritated than concerned by the web, sweeping the first few strands away with the muzzle of her rifle, but Milo closed his eyes and concentrated harder. To his surprise, he discovered he could still see the entire room even with his eyes shut. He clenched his fists and the severed strands snapped back into place.
Behind him, Counselor Troi pounded uselessly on the soundproof forcefield he had erected in the doorway of the children’s ward. Commander Riker stood beside her, scanning the door with a tricorder and shaking his head. The invisible wall swallowed her words, but he could still hear her thoughts in his mind. Stop it, Milo. This is wrong. Your father is wrong. You’ll just make things worse.
“Please, Milo, don’t do this,” Dr. Crusher pleaded, echoing the counselor. He had barely noticed the doctor before, standing behind the baby’s mother, safely out of the line of fire. Now she eased away from the other woman, seeking safety from the glittering Tholian vessels. “You’re making a mistake.”
No, he thought desperately. Tears stung his eyes. You’re wrong. You have to be. Both the doctor and the counselor had argued with his father before. They had insisted that the barrier would harm Milo and his father, might even kill them, but it hadn’t hurt them after all; it had made them stronger instead, maybe even cured his father of the Iverson’s, which everyone said was impossible. His father had been right then. He had to be right now, too.
Didn’t he?
Moving as fast as Milo’s racing thoughts, the tiny Tholian ships completed the web around the mother Q, enclosing her completely within a lattice of gold and red strands. “Very good, Milo,” his father approved. Milo couldn’t remember the last time his dad had actually praised him for anything. “I’m proud of you, son. Proud, prouder, proudest.”
Lem Faal added his own strength to the web, so that Milo could feel his father’s thoughts pulsing alongside his as they worked together, father and son united at last. There was a strange sort of shadowy tinge to his father’s thoughts, like a tone in his voice that Milo had never heard before, but he didn’t care, not as long as they were a family again.
The web contracted swiftly, limiting the woman’s range of motion. She tried to sweep the strands away again, yet only succeeded in tangling the muzzle of her weapon in the unyielding strings of energy. She finally managed to yank the rifle free, only there was no longer any room to point it anywhere but straight up. The phaser beam shot through a gap in the lattice, ricocheting off the ceiling to continue its Hydra-like assault on Milo’s father. “What is this…?” she snarled, frustrated and angry.
Come with me, Counselor Troi begged him telepathically. Your sister is safe. Let me take you to her. She needs you, Milo.
Milo’s eyes snapped open. That’s no fair! Milo thought. How could she ask him to choose between his sister and his father? It’s wasn’t fair at all! He looked over his shoulder at the exit to the children’s ward. Where was Kinya anyway? And how would she fit in, now that he and his father had been brought together by the magic of the barrier? They couldn’t just leave her alone. They were all she had, and she was just a little girl.
“It’s all right, baby,” the woman sobbed to her child, her fingers reaching out through the gaps in the web. The anguish on her face tore at Milo’s conscience.
“Mommy won’t leave you.”
Milo couldn’t help thinking that the baby’s mother seemed more worried about her little boy than his father was about Kinya. Or about me, he admitted, before I got these powers.
“Good work, Milo,” his father encouraged him as the web continued to contract upon the hostile woman. She could scarcely poke her weapon through the constricting strands anymore. The multiheaded beam emanating from the phaser rifle dwindled to a single narrow beam as she had to concentrate more of her energy to keep the netting away from her face and body. “Crush her son. Mind over mother. Crush Crusher, too. Crush her. Crusher.”
What? Milo blinked in confusion. He saw a look of fear appear on Dr. Crusher’s face as she heard what his father said. Milo didn’t understand. What had the doctor done, except try to help them? She’s wasn’t a shapechanging alien monster or anything. Why hurt her?
“Son?” the mother Q said. For the first time, the ensnared woman looked away from Faal and her baby to truly focus on Milo. He was suddenly very scared by the cold intensity of her regard. Nobody (except his father maybe) had ever stared at him with so little feeling or compassion. His mouth went dry and he started to tremble, especially after a crafty smile lifted the corners of the woman’s lips. Please, Dad, he thought. Don’t let her do anything to me.
Too late. In a flash, he suddenly found himself inside the web, held tight against the woman, whose right hand was clenched around his neck like a magnetic vise. Her phaser rifle had vanished, and she had her other arm around his waist, even as his own web held him fast as well, the glowing strands of energy digging into his skin like taut optical fibers
. How did this happen? he wondered in despair. Nobody told me she could do this!
“You!” she snapped at his father. “You and the creature inside you. I have a painfully simple proposition for you. You have my son. I have yours. Give me back my baby or I will exterminate your unfortunate offspring posthaste.”
To make her point clear, she squeezed Milo’s neck until he whimpered. Help me, Dad, he thought. He wanted to be brave, but his heart was pounding in his chest and his skin had gone cold all over. He tried to push her away with his mind, the way he had Counselor Troi, but she was too strong for that. Between the netting and her iron grip, he couldn’t move a millimeter. Don’t let her hurt me, Dad, he pleaded.
“No!” Dr. Crusher exclaimed, hurrying up to the woman as close as the patrolling Tholian vessels would allow. “I know you want to get your baby back, but you can’t hurt this boy. He’s not to blame for his father’s madness. He’s just a child.”
“Don’t tell me that,” the woman said sharply. She sounded furious enough to kill entire worlds if necessary. “Tell his father. It’s his choice to make. A child for a child. A son for a son.”
Milo bit down on his lower lip, trying not to cry. Please, Dad, give her what she wants. Give her back her baby. Maybe the woman would go away then. He and his father could start all over again, and Kinya, too. He still wasn’t sure what his father wanted with the Q baby in the first place, but he didn’t want to die for it. We don’t have any choice, Dad. Let her have the baby!
To his dismay, his father had to think about it. “Milo?” he murmured, and for a second he sounded like the father Milo remembered, even with the weird white eyes. “My son?” Then all the emotion drained from his face and, his neck turning stiffly like a badly programmed hologram, he looked down at the baby in the bubble instead. “No,” he said mechanically. “This is the child. The child of Q and Q. The child of the future of the evolution of the mind….” A padd materialized in his hand, and he began tapping out notes, as if neither Milo nor the baby’s mother were even there anymore. “Appendix: Some Thoughts on the Relationship Between Advanced Consciousness and Corporeal Manifestation. To be completed following eventual dissection of subject. Compare and contrast to Vulcan concept of katra and synaptic pattern displacement in postsomatic organisms….”
Milo’s jaw dropped open as a pain as large as Betazed itself crushed his heart. This was the ultimate betrayal. Just when it looked like his father had finally started caring about him again, just when Milo had let himself hope that the bad times and the loneliness were over, Lem Faal chose the Q baby—and some stupid experiment—over the life of his own son! Milo slumped against the woman behind him, held up by the Tholian webbing stretched tightly against him. As he gave up on his father, the web Milo had created, with the help and encouragement of that same false father, began to fade away, as did the two tiny Tholian ships. Despite the absence of the web, Milo didn’t even try to break away from the woman’s grip. Go ahead and kill me, he thought bitterly. I don’t care anymore.
Instead she shoved him away without a second’s thought. “Go,” she said brusquely, like she had no more use for him. Milo stumbled across the floor, dazed and uncertain. His legs felt hollow and limp, and he had to grab on to the edge of a tripod-mounted scanner several centimeters taller than he was. Dr. Crusher hurried around the back of the laboratory to throw an arm around him and guide him toward the door. The doctor’s efforts barely registered on him; Milo was too numb to notice. Now what do I do? he thought, hurt and relieved and bewildered all at the same time.
The baby’s mother had no answers from him. Freed from the scale-model Tholian web, she had gone straight to the transparent dome imprisoning her son. “Hang on, little q,” she cooed, trying to reassure the anxious toddler. Her voice cracked as she spoke. “Everything will be okay. Mommy will get you out of there somehow.”
“Come along, Milo,” Dr. Crusher whispered in his ear. “You don’t have to stay here any longer.”
Milo dragged his feet, unable to look away from the heartbreaking spectacle going on only a few steps away.
The Q baby bounced up and down inside the bubble, reaching out for his mother, his tiny hands pressed against the inner surface of the dome. He looked confused and frightened, mystified by the unyielding barrier between him and his mother. “Mommy?” he cried. “Mommy?”
A new pang stabbed Milo’s battered emotions. At least the Q baby, whatever it was and whyever his father wanted it, knew that his parent loved him and wanted to protect him, which was more than Milo could say. He couldn’t bear to watch them anymore. I don’t care if they’re not what they appear, he decided. A baby deserves a mother who cares about him.
“I’ll help you,” he blurted.
The doctor tugged on his arm gently. “Milo, I don’t think this is a good idea. Just come with me.”
Milo wasn’t listening. Shaking off her arm, he ran up to the woman who had, only moments ago, threatened to kill him. “Let me help you. You and me. Two against one. Against him.” The aching pain in his chest turned into anger and determination. He couldn’t let his dad wreck another family. “Let’s get your baby out of there.”
The woman looked down at him, anxiety and fear giving way to hope in her eyes. She scrutinized Milo from top to bottom, weighing his sincerity, then nodded her head. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll try anything.”
His father was still tapping notes onto his padd, muttering to himself in what Milo’s mother used to call “academese.” He inspected the readout on one of the mounted display screens, then keyed the data into his notes. “The subspace dimensions of the subject are highly variable, with little apparent correlation to dimensions of humanoid manifestation. Disparate suggests further lines of inquiry along fourth-dimensional axis….”
“Stop it, Dad!” Milo shouted as loud as he could, using his mouth as well as his mind. No matter what happened next, he was not going to let his father ignore him anymore. “It’s over now. All of it.”
Lem Faal looked up in surprise from his padd. “Milo?” He spotted the baby’s mother standing beside Milo. “What is that irrelevant Q doing free again? I thought I told you to keep her under control.”
Don’t tell me what to do, Milo thought. You don’t have the right. The anger poured out of Milo then. He couldn’t have held it back if he tried. Months of pain and resentment and crushed feelings hit Lem Faal like the cloud monsters had hit the Enterprise before, over and over again. Lem Faal staggered backward, the padd with his ever-so-important notes crashing to the floor. The mother Q added her anger to Milo’s, and it felt cleaner, purer than his father’s contaminated thoughts had been. Between the mother’s relentless need to rescue her child, and Milo’s own resolve to end his father’s madness, the power they wielded had become an irresistible force. Lem Faal tried to defend himself, vortexes and forcefields and flickering energy pulses springing into existence only to be blown away like cobwebs in a hurricane. He was driven back into a wall of monitors, the manifestations of his power evaporating like mirages. “Mind over matter,” he babbled incoherently. “Mind over…Milo?”
All at once, the alien glow in his father’s eyes was gone. He looked confused and disoriented, clutching his chest as he gasped for breath, which whistled plaintively through lungs that sounded weak and clotted. “Where is your mother, Milo?” he asked. “Where’s Shozana?”
He sagged to his knees, then collapsed face-first onto the floor. “About time,” the mother Q said without a trace of compassion, “although I doubt that was all of him. That was just a little piece of 0 that found a bit of power to nest in.” She spun around and reached out for the transparent dome. This time no forcefield deterred her and the dome crumbled to dust at her slightest touch. Within a second, she had her baby clutched to her chest, stroking his head while she cooed in its ear. “My poor little q! My poor, brave little q!”
Now that it was over, his father crumpled upon the floor, Milo felt thoroughly drained. At le
ast it’s finally over, he thought. At last. He felt like he had lost his real father months ago, the same time he lost his mother. The rest was just a bad emptiness that went on much too long. A little piece of zero, like the mother Q said. A living, breathing hole where a father should have been. He dissolved the forcefield over the entrance and Commander Riker and Counselor Troi rushed into the children’s ward. Phaser in hand, the commander knelt to check on his father while Counselor Troi squeezed Milo’s hand in hers. “Let’s go see your sister, Milo,” she said softly, and this time he didn’t push her away.
“You really scared me there for a moment or two,” Crusher said to the female Q, who continued to stroke and comfort her child. The doctor felt thankful things had turned out as well as they had, thanks to young Milo. “When you threatened to kill Faal’s son, I wasn’t sure you were bluffing. Remind me not to invite you to our weekly poker game.”
“Actually, I prefer contract bridge,” the female Q replied, regaining some of her previous hauteur now that the worse was over. She beamed at her smiling child, wiping away the tearstains on his cheeks. Crusher thought q looked none the worse for his captivity. Never underestimate the natural resilience of children, she thought. Especially a Q child. “Forgive me if I don’t stay to tidy up,” the Q continued, looking around at the biomedical chamber of horrors that Faal had transformed the pediatric unit into, “but I have a rather important errand to run.”
“What about him?” Riker asked gruffly, calling the Q’s attention to the prone figure upon the floor. “Are you quite sure he’s powerless now?”
“A good point,” the Q conceded. Her eyes narrowed as she gave the problem of Faal a moment’s thought. Then a very Q-like smirk appeared on her face, preceding a white flash that lit up the ward for a single heartbeat.