Star Trek: The Q Continuum (56 page)

Picard held his breath, his body as tense as an engaged warp coil, as Berglund carried out his command. The first evidence of its effects came when the brilliant blue flashes of the stressed shields vanished from the turbulent display of churning clouds and jagged thunderbolts upon the main viewer. He braced himself for everything from a catastrophic hull breach to the searing pain of radiation burns, but all that greeted his expectant senses was the muted rumbling of the storm as it seemed to hold back the full force of its fury.
Yes,
he thought, elated. The Calamarain were honoring the truce!

“Captain, look!” Ensign Berglund called out. She pointed at the ceiling above the command area, where a glowing mist was phasing through the solid duranium over Picard’s head. He rose from his chair, his neck craned back, watching in wonder as what appeared to be an actual portion of the Calamarain entered the confines of the bridge. “Er, is this what you were expecting, Captain?” Berglund asked.

“Not exactly,” Picard admitted, although this physical manifestation was not entirely without precedent. Ten years ago, during their previous encounter with the Calamarain, a segment of the gaseous mass had infiltrated the
Enterprise
in search of Q.
Welcome aboard,
he thought wryly.

The shimmering cloud, roughly the size of an adult Horta, descended from the ceiling and began to circulate around the bridge, inspecting its surroundings with evident purpose and curiosity. Lieutenant Barclay and the other officers were quick to make way for the traveling cloud, being careful to give it a wide berth, although the security officer stationed between the port and starboard turbolifts, Ensign Plummer, looked to Picard for guidance. “Shall I attempt to apprehend the intruder, Captain?”

Picard shook his head. He wasn’t even sure how to approach the amorphous entity, let alone take it prisoner. “I believe we should think of this as more of an envoy than an intruder,” he declared. The cloud completed its circuit of the bridge, then began to hover over the mangled engineering station, emitting a steady hum that reminded Picard of the honeybees in his father’s vineyards. “Data, can we communicate with the entity at this proximity?”

“Just a moment, Captain,” the android replied. His fingers moved across the operations panel faster than Picard’s eyes could follow. “There,” he announced less than five seconds later. “The revised algorithms, along with a directive to detect and produce low-intensity tachyon bursts via the inertial dampers, has been downloaded into the primary translation system linked to your combadge. That should suffice, sir, within a 94.659 percent range of accuracy.” He shrugged sheepishly. “My apologies, Captain. It was the best I could accomplish under such rigorous time constraints.”

Give Data a couple more hours,
Picard,
and he could probably compose sonnets in Calamarain.
“This will do, Mr. Data. Thank you.” He approached the iridescent cloud, being careful not to make any movements, sudden or otherwise, that might be construed as hostile. He felt a tingling sensation, like static electricity, upon his hands and face as he neared the representative from the Calamarain.
Do they have individual names,
he wondered,
or even a singular noun?

“Greetings,” he said. “Welcome to the
Enterprise.
I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard.” Ordinarily, he would offer a hand in friendship but that hardly seemed appropriate given the complete absence of anything resembling an appendage. The vaporous substance of the entity appeared completely undifferentiated; he couldn’t begin to tell where its head was, if that term had any meaning at all to the Calamarain.
Hard to imagine,
he thought,
that Q and I actually assumed the form of the Coulalakritous during our voyage through the past.
Already, the experience seemed like a half-remembered dream; his human brain had never been meant to retain the experience of existing as an intelligent gas.

“I am/are of the Calamarain.” The voice emerged from Picard’s combadge, sounding identical to the inflectionless tones the Calamarain as a whole had employed. “State/propose your intentions/desires.”

Small talk was not on the itinerary, it seemed. “The entity called 0, who injured the Coulalakritous in the past, is aboard this vessel,” Picard explained. “Can you help us subdue him before he does more harm?”

The cloud hummed to itself for several seconds before replying: “Negative/ never. Chaos is too ascendant/hazardous. Condemned/congealed the Coulalakritous. I/we cannot oppose again/ever.”

Picard thought he was starting to get a feel for the Calamarain’s bizarre syntax, but he didn’t like what he believed he was hearing. Although perfectly willing to defend the galactic barrier or punish the
Enterprise
for its perceived transgressions, it appeared the cloud entities were not willing to confront 0 directly. Were they merely made fearful by ancestral memories of their defeat and persecution in the distant past, or was 0 truly that much more powerful than the Calamarain? If so, then all their struggles might be in vain.

“Captain,” Data spoke up. “Forgive me for interrupting, but I believe I may have located a clue to the location of either Q or 0.”

“Yes?” Picard asked. He recalled that he had asked Data to monitor power consumption throughout the ship in hopes of keeping track of 0’s pursuit of Q. He considered deactivating the Universal Translator for this discussion, but reconsidered.
Let the Calamarain see and hear what we are doing to cope with the danger.
Perhaps it would inspire them to action of their own.
I might even settle for a useful suggestion or two,
he thought.

“The EPS power grid indicates that Holodeck Seven is in use,” Data reported. He turned from his display console to face Picard. “I find this unusual during a state of red alert.”

So did Picard.
That must be Q and 0,
he felt convinced. Who else would be playing games in a holodeck in the middle of a galactic emergency? “Excellent work, Mr. Data. I think you may be on to something.” He spun around to face the envoy from the Calamarain, a strategy for survival coming together in his mind. It would take all his diplomatic skills to pull it off, but maybe there was a way to put 0 back in the bottle again, before he could enlist The One to his cause once more.

“Listen to me,” he told the swirling cloud of ionized plasma, standing so close to the radiant entity that the minuscule hairs on the back of his hands stood at attention. “I know that 0 hurt you badly long ago, but maybe you don’t have to fight him alone….”

“Dad?”

Milo hoped that he was dreaming, that he hadn’t really woken up yet, but knew in his heart that this nightmare was all too real. That really was his father, his eyes glowing like a Tholian, getting ready to perform some kind of experiment on a baby in a transparent bubble. Looking more closely, he recognized the baby as that weird Q kid who had popped into the holodeck during their first night aboard the
Enterprise.
A barely healed scab on his soul tore open again as he remembered how impressed his father had been by the Q baby, even as he ignored both him and Kinya.
Figures,
he thought. Even with all that had happened—cloud monsters and the barrier and everything—
that
hadn’t changed. Their father still cared about everything except his own children.

“Milo, please come away from there,” a voice said behind him. “It’s not safe.” Counselor Troi placed her hands gently upon his shoulders and tried to pull him away from the doorway. He was very relieved to see that his father hadn’t killed her after all, but he didn’t want to be shuffled off to some holographic daycare center again. His father had gone crazy, it looked like, and Milo had to find out what was going to happen next, no matter what. “Please, Milo.” The counselor tugged insistently. “Come with me.”

“No,” he said emphatically and, to his surprise, her hands sprang away from him as if burned.
Did I do that?
he thought, astounded. It sort of felt like he did; right when she let go of him he sensed something flow out of him. Like telepathy, but stronger. He
pushed
her away, using a muscle in his head he hadn’t even known was there before.

Funny thing, though. Counselor Troi didn’t look half as surprised as he was. Scared, yes, worried, sure, but not surprised. He looked into her mind to find out why and, sure enough, there it was.
The barrier.
The galactic barrier had given him amazing new powers, just like it had his father.

Does this mean Dad’s not dying anymore?
he wondered. He didn’t like the image of himself he saw in the counselor’s thoughts, with the creepy glowing eyes and all, but maybe it would be okay if this meant that his father had been cured of Iverson’s disease. Maybe their family could finally get back to normal, sort of.

The way his father was acting, though, that didn’t seem likely. He had glanced in Milo’s direction when he first showed up, and for a second Milo had thought he saw a trace of real live interest, and maybe even a glint of approval, in his father’s spooky new eyes, but then he went right back to staring at the Q baby like it was the Sacred Chalice of Rixx or something. “Beginning environmental testing,” he droned aloud, more boring science stuff like always. “Introducing concentrated zenite gas into observation chamber….”

Zenite?
Milo didn’t get it. That stuff caused brain damage, didn’t it? He watched in horrified fascination as a gray mist began to fill the transparent dome containing the Q baby. What was the point of this? Milo had read all his father’s scientific treatises, about the barrier and wormholes and such, and he didn’t remember anything about testing zenite gas on alien babies. He felt faintly sick to his stomach.

The baby’s mother, whom Milo spotted on the other side of the dome, looked more than nauseated; she looked positively crazed with fear. Tears ran down her cheeks and her eyes were wild. From out of nowhere, she somehow produced the largest phaser rifle Milo had ever seen and fired it directly at his father.

“No!” Milo cried out, but his father just looked annoyed. With a wave of his hand, he created a vortex in the air that absorbed the phaser beam before it reached him. Milo’s panicked shout attracted his father’s attention, though. He looked away from the Q baby to peer at his own son with new eyes.
In more ways than one,
Milo thought.

Meanwhile, the gray fumes reached the baby’s nostrils. He wrinkled his nose and made a face. Then he stomped his feet and the toxic smoke turned into a miniature rainbow that dissolved into a hundred prismatic floating crystals before vanishing entirely. “Oh, good boy, q!” his mother gasped in relief, while stubbornly trying to shoot past the vortex protecting Milo’s father. She fired high and low and even attempted a ricochet or two, but his father managed to keep the vortex between himself and the business end of the crimson phaser beam. “That’s a very good boy!”

“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!