Star Trek: The Q Continuum (20 page)

“What now?” Picard asked, unable to look away from the rapid-fire parade of images. “What does he intend to do?”

“Stick a pin in a map,” his companion stated. “Entrust his future to the fickle whims of chance.” He shrugged apologetically. “It seemed like the only thing to do at the time.”

The young Q glanced back over his shoulder, and, for a second, Picard thought they had been exposed. But the youth was merely giving the lifeless ruins one last look before taking a deep breath, closing his eyes, crossing his fingers, and hurling himself forward into the mist-draped opening of the time portal. Picard had only an instant to register the young Q’s disappearance before the other Q’s hands shoved him roughly from behind, propelling him straight into the waiting maw of the Guardian of Forever.

According to standard Starfleet guidelines, it took zero-point-three-five seconds to go from impulse flight to warp travel. According to Riker’s chronometer on the bridge, Geordi and his engineering crew did it in zero-point-two.

It wasn’t nearly fast enough.

Riker felt a momentary surge of acceleration that trailed off almost immediately as the Calamarain hit them from behind like the front of a hurricane. The ship’s inertial dampers were tested to the limit as its propulsive warp field collapsed instantaneously, causing the vessel to skid to a halt through friction with the cloud’s billowing mass. The storm enveloped them at once, much to the delight of little q, who clapped his tiny hands in synch with the thunder.

Riker was considerably less amused.
Dammit,
he thought.
It’s not fair!
He was no Betazoid, but he could practically feel the distress and disappointment permeating the bridge. Baeta Leyoro swore and slammed a fist into her open palm. Lieutenant Barclay poked at the engineering controls rather frantically, as if hoping to reverse their readings. Only Data appeared unaffected by the dashing of their hopes of escape, looking preoccupied with his repairs to the operations console. “Let me guess,” Riker said bitterly. “No more warp drive.”

Barclay swallowed nervously before confirming the awful truth. “I’m afraid not, Commander. Something’s interfering with the field coils again.”

“If this is typical of your expeditions,” the female Q sniffed, “it’s a wonder that you humans ever got out of your own backwoods solar system.”

If we’d known the likes of you were waiting for us,
Riker mused,
we might have had second thoughts.
Outwardly, he disregarded the Q’s needling, preferring to address the problem of the Calamarain, who at least refrained from waspish gibes. He was starting to wonder, though, whether this was truly a new entity at all, or if the original Q had simply had a sex change. Granted, he had already seen both Q and his alleged mate at the same time, but somehow he suspected that materializing in two places simultaneously was not beyond Q’s powers.

“Shall I go to impulse, sir?” Ensign Clarze asked.

Riker gave the matter a moment’s thought. Was there any way they could outrace the Calamarain? Given that they had previously encountered the cloud-creatures in an entirely different sector several years ago, he could only deduce that the Calamarain were capable of faster-than-light travel on their own, assuming that these were indeed the very same entities that had attacked Q aboard the
Enterprise
during the third year of their ongoing mission. Certainly, the storm had managed to keep pace with them at impulse speed.

“No, Mr. Clarze,” Riker declared evenly. They were running low on options, but he was determined to maintain a confident air for the sake of the crew’s morale. “Well, Mr. Data?” Riker asked, addressing the android. “It’s looking like you’re our best hope at the moment.”

If all else failed, he thought, he would have to order a saucer-separation maneuver, dividing the
Enterprise
into two independent vessels. The Calamarain appeared to clump together as one cohesive mass; possibly they could not pursue two ships at the same time. In theory, he could distract the sentient cloud with the battle section while the majority of the crew escaped in the saucer module. Naturally, he would remain aboard the battle bridge until the bitter end—and hope that Captain Picard eventually returned to command the saucer.

Apparently tired of standing upon the bridge, the female Q and her little boy had, without even thinking of asking anyone’s permission, occupied Riker’s own accustomed seat, to the right of the captain’s chair. The child sat on his mother’s lap, sucking his thumb and watching the main viewer as if it were the latest educational holotape from the Federated Children’s Workshop. Riker didn’t waste any breath objecting to the woman’s brazen disregard of bridge etiquette and protocol. Why bother arguing decent manners with a Q?
I wonder how long they’ll choose to stick around if I have to separate the saucer,
he wondered.
Would they transfer to the battle bridge as well, and stay all the way to the ship’s final annihilation?

Before he sacrificed one half of the
Enterprise,
however, along with the lives of the bridge and engineering crew, Riker intended to exhaust every other alternative, which was where Data came in.

And the Universal Translator.

“I believe I have,” Data stated, “successfully developed a set of algorithms that may translate the Calamarain’s tachyon emissions into verbal communication and vice versa, although the initial results may be crude and rudimentary at best.”

“We don’t want to recite poetry to them,” Riker said, “just call a truce.” He stared grimly at the luminescent fog stretching across the main viewer. Jagged bolts of electricity and incessant peals of thunder rocked the ship. “Say hello, Mr. Data.”

The android’s fingers manipulated the controls at Ops faster than Riker’s eye could follow them. “I am diverting power to the primary deflector dish,” he explained, “in order to produce a narrow wavelength tachyon stream similar to those the Calamarain appear to use to communicate. If my calculations are correct, our tachyon beam should translate as a simple greeting.”

“I hope you’re right, Data,” Riker said. “It would be a shame if we accidentally insulted them by mistake.”

“Indeed,” Data replied, cocking his head as if the possibility had not previously occurred to him, “although it is difficult to imagine how we could conceivably make them more hostile than they already appear to be.”

You’ve got a point there,
Riker admitted, given that the Calamarain had spent the last several hours dead set on shaking the
Enterprise
apart. The sharp decline in the strength of the ship’s deflector shields testified to the force and severity of the Calamarain’s assault.
Perhaps now we can finally learn why they attacked us in the first place.

“Greeting transmitted,” Data reported. The tachyon emission was invisible to the naked eye, yet Riker peered at the viewer regardless, looking for some sign that the Calamarain had received their message. All he saw, though, were the same churning mists and flashes of discharged energy that had besieged the
Enterprise
since before the captain disappeared.

Troi abruptly sat up straight in her chair. “They heard us,” she confirmed, her empathic senses once more linked to the Calamarain. “I feel surprise…and confusion. They’re not sure what to do.”

“Good work, Mr. Data,” Riker said, hope surging inside him for the first time in nearly an hour, “and you too, Deanna.” Was he just deluding himself or had the oppressive thunder actually subsided a degree or two in the last few moments? They weren’t out of the woods yet, but maybe the Calamarain had stopped hammering them long enough to contemplate Data’s greeting.
Go ahead,
he thought to his amorphous foes.
Think it over some. Give us another chance to make contact!

“Commander,” Data alerted him, “short-range sensors detect an incoming transmission from the Calamarain, using the same narrow wavelength they applied earlier.”

Hope flared in Riker. Thanks to Data, they still had a prayer of turning this thing around.
Too bad Captain Picard isn’t here to speak with the Calamarain. He’s probably the best diplomat in Starfleet.
“Put them through, Mr. Data.”

“Yes, Commander,” Data said. “Our modified translator is interpreting the transmission now.”

A genderless, inhuman voice emerged from the bridge’s concealed loudspeakers. The voice lacked any recognizable inflections and sounded as though it were coming from someplace deep underwater. “We/singular am/are the Calamarain,” it stated.

“I apologize for the atonal quality of the translation,” Data commented, “as well as any irregularities in syntax or grammar. Insufficient time was available to provide for nuance or aesthetics.”

“This will be fine,” Riker assured him. “Can the computer translate what I say into terms the Calamarain can understand?”

“Affirmative, Commander,” Data said. “You may speak normally.”

Riker nodded, then took a deep breath before speaking. “This is Commander William T. Riker of the
Starship Enterprise,
representing the United Federation of Planets.” He resisted an urge to straighten his uniform; the Calamarain were not likely to appreciate any adjustment in his attire, even if they could see him, which was unlikely. Their senses were surely very different from his own. “Do I have the honor of addressing the leader of the Calamarain?”

There was a lag of no more than a second while Data’s program translated his words into a series of tachyon beams; then that chilling voice spoke again. “We/singular speak from/for the Calamarain,” it said in its muffled, watery tones.

What precisely did it mean by that?
Was more than one individual addressing him at once, Riker wondered, or was it merely a verbal conceit, like the royal “we” once employed by Earth’s ancient monarchs? Or could it be that the Calamarain genuinely possessed a collective consciousness like the Borg? He repressed a shudder. Anything that reminded him of the Borg was not good news. Riker decided to take the speaker at its word, whoever it or they might be.

“We come in peace,” he declared, going straight to the heart of the matter. “Why have you attacked us?”

After another brief pause, the eerie voice returned. “Mote abates/attenuates. No assistance/release permitted. Stop/eliminate.”

What?
Riker gave Data a quizzical look, but the android could do nothing but shrug. “I am sorry, Commander, but that is the closest translation,” he said.

“Deanna?” Riker whispered, hoping she could decipher the Calamarain’s cryptic explanation.

“I sense no deception,” she said. “They are quite sincere, very much so. Whatever they’re trying to tell us, it’s very important to them.” She bowed her head and massaged her brow with both hands, clearly striving to achieve an even greater communion with the enigmatic aliens. “Beneath their words, I’m picking up that same mixture of fear and anger.”

Why would the Calamarain be afraid of us?
Riker couldn’t figure it out. If the events of the last hour or so had proved anything, it was that the
Enterprise
could not inflict any lasting harm on the Calamarain.
If only I knew what they meant,
he thought. “I don’t understand,” he said, raising his voice. “What do you want of us?”

“Preserve/defend mote,” the Calamarain insisted obscurely.

What is that?
the spider asked.
That is what?

Something was there, on the other side, that he could not quite identify, something at the center of it all. The smoke surrounded the bug, and the bug surrounded
It,
but what was
It,
glowing within the entrapped insect like a candle in a skull? Sparking like a quark in the dark?

There was something Q-ish about it, but different, too. Not the Q, nor a Q, but flavored much the same.
It is new,
the spider realized with a shock.
Newer than new. Q-er than Q.

New…
For the first time it occurred to the spider to wonder how much might have changed, there on the other side. But that would depend on how long he’d been outside, wouldn’t it, and that would be…?
No! Not! No!
His mind scuttled away from the question, unable to face the answer that loomed just past his awareness.

Change, change,
he chanted, calming himself.
Change on the range into something quite strange.
Change could be good, especially his own. He could make changes, too, and he would, yes indeed, just as soon as he could.

Everything changes, and will change even more….

Someone was singing in the snow.

Picard had little time to orient himself. An instant ago he had inhabited the arid ruins encircling the Guardian of Forever. Now he seemed to be located amid a frozen wasteland, his boots sinking into the icy crust, cold and distant stars shining in the dark sky far above him. The rime-covered plain stretched about him in all directions. Like Cocytus, he thought, the ninth and lowest level of hell. His breath misted before him, but he did not feel in any danger of freezing to death. Q’s work, no doubt. The cold, dry air felt chill against Picard’s body, nothing more.
Very well then,
he thought, disinclined to question his lack of hypothermia. He had more important mysteries to solve, like where was that infernal singing coming from?

The voice, rich and resonant, carried through the glacial cold:

Still unaware of his two humanoid observers, the young Q looked similarly intrigued by the robust voice crooning through the frigid air. Deterred not at all by the forbidding landscape, he trudged across the frosty tundra in search of the source of the melody. Picard and the older Q followed closely behind him, sometimes stepping in his sunken footprints. Starlight trickled down through the endless night, but not enough to truly light their way. Defying logic and conventional means of combustion, Q whipped up a torch, which he held out in front of him. Lambent red flames flickered above his fist, casting an eerie crimson glow upon their frozen path. The sleeves of Q’s charcoal robe flapped slowly in the biting winter wind, and Picard found himself wishing that Starfleet uniforms came complete with gloves and a scarf. Although no new snow fell from the cloudless sky, the breeze tossed loosely packed white flakes into the air, making vision difficult. The icy bits pelted his face, melting against his reddened cheeks and brow.

They marched for several minutes, during which time Picard observed the utter absence of any signs of animation. Nothing moved upon or above the ice except the windblown particles of snow. Picard wondered if any form of life existed beneath the permafrost, such as that found in Antarctica. Perhaps, if he could place this planet by means of the constellations overhead, it might be worth bringing the
Enterprise
by to check? Then he recalled that all of this was taking place millions of years in the past. Any life-forms that might exist here and now would most likely be long extinct when he returned to his own time.
For all I know, this entire planet and star system may not even exist in the twenty-fourth century.

The soles of his boots crunched through the snow. No, he knew instinctively, there was no life here. This was a dead place, devoid of vitality, empty of possibility. Save for the singing voice, and the soft hiss of the burning torch, the icy plain was locked in silence.
Much like the old Klingon penal colony on Rura Penthe,
he mused,
known to history as the “aliens’ graveyard.”
Surely, that icebound planetoid could have been no more bleak and inhospitable than this.

The echoing refrain grew louder as they neared its origin. Soon Picard spied the figure of a man, human in appearance, sitting upon a granite boulder covered by a thick veneer of frost. He appeared larger than either Q, and his stout frame was draped in heavy clothing that looked as though it had seen better days yet nonetheless retained a semblance of faded glory. His heavy fur coat was frayed around its sleeves and along its hem while his high black boots were scuffed and the heels worn down to the sole. Rags were wrapped around his hands and boots to hold on to his heat, and a ratty velvet scarf protected his throat. A wide-brimmed hat, drooping over his brow, and tattered trousers completed his outfit, giving him an archaic and faintly dispossessed air.

“Who is this?” Picard asked. “I don’t recognize him.”

“Of course not,” Q retorted impatiently. “Your ancestors weren’t even a gleam in creation’s eye yet.”

It wasn’t that foolish an observation,
Picard thought, considering the timelessness of Q and his ilk. “Is this what he genuinely looked like,” he asked his guide, wanting to fully understand what he was witnessing, “or are we dealing in metaphor again?”

“More or less,” Q admitted. “In fact, he resembled a being not unlike a Q, whose true form would be patently incomprehensible to your limited human senses.”

So this is your interpretation of how he first appeared to you,
Picard thought.
He must have made quite an impression.
Although worn and ragged, the stranger presented an intriguing and evocative figure. Singing to himself, he was engaged in what looked like a game of three-dimensional solitaire. Oversized playing cards were spread out on the snow before him, or floated in fixed positions above the mud-slick ground, arranged in a variety of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal patterns. He looked engrossed in his game, meticulously shifting cards from one position to another, until the flickering, phosphorescent light of Q’s torch fell upon the outermost row of cards. He looked up abruptly, fixing gleaming azure eyes on the young Q, his face that of a human male in his mid-forties, with weathered features and heavy, crinkly lines around his eyes and mouth. “Say, who goes there?” he said, sounding intrigued rather than alarmed.

Q faltered before the stranger’s forthright gaze, taking a few steps backward involuntarily. “I might ask you the same,” he retorted, his brash manner failing to conceal a touch of obvious apprehension. He thrust out his chest and chin to strike a less nervous pose.

“You must understand,” his older self whispered in Picard’s ear, “this was the first time since the dawn of my omniscience that I had encountered anything I didn’t understand. A little healthy trepidation was only natural under the circumstances.”

Picard was too entranced by the unfolding scene to respond to Q’s excuses. “Well said!” the stranger laughed lustily. “And you’re more than welcome, too. I was starting to think I was the only preternatural deity stuck in the middle of this irksome Ice Age.”

“W-who are you?” Q stammered. Fog streamed from his lips; another artistic touch, Picard guessed, courtesy of the other Q. “What are you?”

“Call me 0,” he said, doffing his hat to reveal unruly orange hair streaked with silver. “As to where I’m from, it’s no place you’ve ever heard of, I promise you that.”

“That’s impossible,” young Q said indignantly, his pride stung. “I’m Q. I know everything and have been everywhere.”

“Then where are you now?” the stranger asked.

The simple question threw Q for a loop. He glanced around, feigning nonchalance (badly), and seemed to be searching his memory. Taking his own inventory of their surroundings, Picard noted a trail of deep, irregularly paced footprints stretching away in the opposite direction from the way they had come. As far as he could see, the tracks extended all the way to the horizon. How long, he wondered, has the stranger been wandering through this wintry Siberian wasteland?

“Er, I’m not sure,” Q confessed finally, “but I’m quite certain it’s no place worth remembering. Otherwise, I would recognize it at once, as I would your own plane of origin.”

The individual who called himself 0 did not take offense at this challenge to his veracity. He simply chuckled to himself and shook his head incredulously. “But there’s
always
someplace else, no matter how far you’ve been. Some unknown territory beyond the horizon, across the gulf, or hidden beneath a hundred familiar layers of what’s real and everyday. There has to be someplace Other or why else do we roam? We might as well just plant ourselves in one cozy cosmos or another and never budge.” He clapped his gloved, rag-swaddled hands together, and a curved glass bottle, filled with an unknown liquid of pinkish tint, appeared in his grasp. He wrenched the stopper from the spout and spit it onto the hoarfrost at his feet. Roseate fumes poured from the mouth of the bottle.

“For myself,” he said, after taking a swig from the carafe, “I don’t much care whether you believe me or not, but if I’m not from the parts you know, then where did this come from? Answer that.”

He offered the bottle to Q, who looked uncertain what to do. “How do I know you aren’t trying to poison me?” he said, striving for a light, jokey tone.

0 grinned back at him. “You don’t. That’s the fun of it.” He shoved the bottle at Q. “Come now, eternity’s too short not to take a chance now and then. Caution is for cowards, and for those who lack the gaze and the guts to try something new.”

“You really think so?” Q asked. Despite his earlier misgivings, he was clearly curious about the rakish stranger. It struck Picard that 0’s professed philosophy was a far cry from the conservative limits imposed on the young Q by the Continuum.

“I
know
so,” 0 declared. He wagged the bottle in front of Q’s face, then started to withdraw it. “But maybe you don’t agree. Perhaps you’re one of those timid, tentative types who never do anything unexpected….”

Impulsively, Q grabbed the carafe by its curved spout and gulped down a sizable portion of the bottle’s contents. His eyes bugged out as the drink hit his system like a quantum torpedo. He bent over coughing and gasping. “By the Continuum!” he swore. “Where did you find that stuff?”

0 slapped Q on the back while deftly retrieving the bottle from Q’s shaking hand. “Well, I’d tell you, friend,” he said, “but then you don’t believe in places you’ve never laid eyes on.”

Next to Picard, across the ice from the young Q and his new acquaintance, an older-but-arguably-wiser Q confided in the starship captain. “It’s true, you know,” he said, a wistful melancholy tingeing his voice, “I’ve never tasted anything like it ever again. I’ve even tried recreating it from scratch, but the flavor is never quite right.”

Only Q,
Picard thought,
could get nostalgic about something that happened millions of years in the past.
Still, he thought he could identify with some of what Q was experiencing. He felt much the same way about the
Stargazer,
not to mention the
Enterprise
-D.

By now, the young Q had recovered from the effects of the exotic concoction. “That was fantastic!” he blurted. “It was so…different.” He said that last word with a tone of total disbelief, then regarded the stranger with new appreciation. “I don’t understand. How did you get here, wherever here is? And are there others like you?”

0 held up his hand to quiet Q’s unleashed curiosity. “Whoa there, friend. I’m glad you liked the brew, but it seems to me you have the advantage on me. Where are you from, exactly?” His icy blue eyes narrowed as he looked Q over. “And what’s this Continuum you mentioned a couple moments ago?”

“But surely you must have heard of the Q Continuum?” Q said, all his misgivings forgotten. “We’re only the apex of sentience throughout the entire…I mean, the
known
…multiverse.”

“You forget, I’m not from around your usual haunts,” 0 said. “Nor have I always been camped out in this polar purgatory.” He swept his arm to encompass his arctic domain. “A bit of a wrong turn there, I admit, but that’s what happens sometimes when you strike out for parts unknown. You have to accept the risks as well as the rewards.” He regarded Q with a calculating expression, brazenly assessing the juvenile superbeing. Picard didn’t like the avid gleam in the stranger’s eyes; 0 seemed more than simply curious about Q. “Perhaps you’d care to show me just how you got here?”

His game abandoned, 0 began to sweep his playing cards together, combining them into a single stack. Picard peeked at the exposed faces of the cards, and was shocked to see what looked like living figures moving about in the two-dimensional plane of the cards. The suits and characters were unfamiliar to him, bearing little resemblance to the cards used in
Enterprise
’s weekly poker games, but they were definitely animated. He spotted soldiers and sailors, balladeers and falconers and dancing bears among the many archetypes represented upon the metal cards, and apparently crying out in fear as 0 shuffled them together. Although no sounds escaped the deck, the figures shared a common terror and state of alarm, their eyes and mouths open wide, their arms reaching out in panic. “What in heaven’s name,” Picard started to ask Q, but 0 patted the cards into place, then dispatched the deck to oblivion before Picard could finish his question. Snow-flecked air rushed in to fill the empty void the stack of cards had formerly occupied.

Had the young Q noticed the unsettling nature of the cards? Picard could not tell for certain, but he thought he discerned a new wariness entering into the immature Q’s face and manner. Or maybe, he speculated, 0 simply seemed a shade too eager to uncover Q’s secrets.

“How I got here?” young Q repeated slowly, displaying some of his later self’s cunning and evasiveness. “Well, that’s a terribly long and complicated story.”

“I’ve got time,” 0 insisted. He clapped his hands and another ice-coated boulder appeared next to his own. He gestured for Q to take a seat there. “And there’s nothing I like better than a good yarn, particularly if there’s a trace of danger in it.” He looked Q over from head to toe. “Do you like danger, Q?”

“Actually, I think I should be going,” Q stated, taking a few steps backward. “I have an appointment out by Antares Prime, you see? Q is expecting me, as well as Q and Q.”

His retreat was short-lived, for 0 simply rose from his polished stone resting-place and advanced on Q, dragging his left leg behind him. His infirmity caught the young Q by surprise, freezing him in his tracks upon the tundra; Picard guessed he’d never seen a crippled god before. “Not so fast, friend,” 0 said, his voice holding just a trace of menace, a hint of a threat. “As you can plainly see, I can’t get around as quickly as I used to.” He leaned forward until his face was less than a finger’s length from Q, his hot breath fogging the air between them. “Don’t suppose you know an easy exit out of this oversized ice cube, do you, boy?”