Star Trek: The Q Continuum (44 page)

The brightness faded and the fugitives, as well as Picard and the elder Q, were surrounded by four new individuals, clad in the intimidating armor of Roman legionnaires. Picard recognized the female Q, significantly younger than she had appeared upon the
Enterprise,
not to mention a stern-looking humanoid who bore an uncomfortable resemblance to himself.
One of Q’s little jokes,
Picard theorized, recalling that the true appearances of the Q had been translated into images his human mind could comprehend.
Should I be flattered or insulted that Q keeps casting me as the heavy hand of authority?
He suspected the latter.

The remaining new arrivals were unfamiliar to him. One was a pale-skinned male, holding his crested bronze helmet against his breastplate, who looked about the same age as the young Q, with straight blond hair combed back away from his brow. He appeared nervous, looking back and forth among his fellow Q for support. The fourth newcomer, somewhat older than the others, had sad eyes, accented by mournful pouches, and a philosophic manner. “Good old Quinn,” the original Q said beside Picard. “May he rest in peace.”

The Q quartet raised their arms at their sides and coruscating beams of blue-white energy leaped from their fingertips, connecting with the outstretched hands of their associates to form an incandescent fence around 0 and the other malefactors, or, more accurately, a living quincunx with the young Q at its center. The brilliant beams crackled with unleashed power. Picard could not help feeling trapped, even though he knew that the hunters were not even aware of his presence.

The archaic armor donned by the Q only made them look more formidable. The scintillation of their discharged energy reflected off polished bronze helmets, cuirasses, and greaves. Crescent-shaped plumes of thick horsehair crested the Corinthian-style helmets that partially obscured their deceptively human features. Short, double-edged swords hung on their right hips, held on by a leather belt or baldric. While realizing that the historical costuming was largely an illusion created by Q, Picard had to admit that the ancient armor seemed more appropriate to this primeval conflict than, say, the plum-colored Starfleet uniforms he and Q now wore.

“You cannot hide from the Continuum,” said the Q who could have been the captain’s twin. Picard recognized his double’s voice as that which had boomed from the heavens earlier. Apparently the spokesman for the Continuum had deigned to make a personal appearance after all. “Do not resist our judgment.”

No, Picard thought, rethinking the matter. Not a spokesman, but a judge. An imperial Roman judge. A quaestor.

“Yes, Q,” his future mate urged, resembling an Amazon in her martial regalia, “give up this lunacy before it’s too late. You’ve gone too far this time.”

“It’s for the best, Q,” said Quinn, more in sorrow than in anger. “I know you meant well.”

“That’s right,” the blond Q added, attempting a not terribly convincing smile. Picard guessed he was a friend and contemporary of Q’s. “Hey, I misplaced the entire Deltived Asteroid Belt once, but it all turned out okay in the end.”

Unlike the rest of the tribunal, who seemed to have Q’s best interests at heart, the quaestor had no patience with the erring youth and his dubious acquaintances. His Picardian expression was deadly serious. “Q is our problem and will be dealt with accordingly. The rest must be banished forthwith.”

Penned in by the power of his peers, young Q rose to his feet. His simulated Adam’s apple bobbed sheepishly as he opened his mouth to speak.
What course will he take now?
Picard wondered. Would he surrender without a fight?

0 made the decision for him. “Never!” he cried, firing a blast of searing energyfrom his hands at the immense dilithium crystal beneath them and triggering a matter-antimatter explosion that flung them all, through countless layers of liquid and vapor, out of the gas giant’s majestic atmosphere into the icy vacuum of space. Picard felt himself being propelled at incredible speeds, like a quantum torpedo fresh from its launcher tube. Agonizing G-forces yanked the flesh of his face tightly against his skull as he achieved escape velocity from the gravitational sway of the Brobdingnagian planet. He was unable to halt or even control his headlong flight through the Detrian system.
Blast you, Q,
he cursed as he rocketed helplessly.
You could have warned me.

Finally, after several endless moments, some sort of metaphysical friction, or perhaps the cushioning effect of numerous quantum filaments, curbed his momentum and brought him to a stop somewhere outside the solar system he had just been forcibly expelled from. To his annoyance, he found Q waiting for him, looking none the worse for wear. “My, I had forgotten how exhilarating that was,” he observed. “Hope you enjoyed the ride, Jean-Luc.”

Picard gave Q a withering look. “Never mind me,” he said darkly. “What happened to 0 and the others?”

“Look behind you.” Q shook his head glumly and affected a pained expression. “I’m afraid it’s turned into something of a free-for-all.”

The battle was fought on a cosmic scale. As Picard looked on from what he prayed was a safe distance, colossal figures strode the stars, hurling entire planets and suns at each other. Millennia passed in what felt like seconds as the war against 0 wreaked havoc on what Starfleet would later name the Alpha Quadrant. Picard tried to take it all in, but it was impossible to do more than glimpse fragmentary snapshots of the unthinkable devastation:

The gleaming plate armor of The One, more appropriate to the Age of Chivalry, clashes anachronistically with the Roman war gear of the blond Q, who has reluctantly hidden his face behind his plumed helmet. Determined to resist capture, He saps the energy of a nearby star, turning it against His foe. On the third planet orbiting that sun, the days grow ever colder, forcing an unsuspecting people to cope with the incidental consequences of a conflict beyond their understanding….

The android Ruk stood upon a snow-covered hilltop on Exo III, watching as massive drilling machines carved a cavern into the face of a granite cliff. Many such caverns were being dug these days, as his Creators sought to escape the freezing conditions upon the surface by seeking shelter deep beneath the planet’s crust. He and his fellow androids would join the Creators underground, serving the Creators as they always had. There would be many changes in the days to come, as both androids and the Creators adapted to their new subterranean existence, but Ruk was confident that he would continue to function effectively regardless of any unexpected alterations in the parameters of his existence. Had not the Creators programmed him to adapt and survive?

An icy wind blew flakes of frozen moisture against the angular planes of his face. His dermal sensors recorded that the external temperature was several units below the freezing point, but he did not feel the cold as a Creator might. His massive body was immune to pain or discomfort. His heavy feet sank deep into packed layers of snow and permafrost that would never ever thaw.

No one knew, not even the finest minds among the Creators, why the sun had grown steadily colder year after year. None knew how to reverse the process. All the Creators could do was burrow toward the planet’s core in search of the warmth they needed to survive. Ruk admired their resolute determination to outlive the fading sun. The Creators were teaching him an important lesson.

Nothing was more important than survival.

(*) thrives on war, so war it incites, feeding on the chaos it creates to find the strength it needs to fend off the scholarly Q with the sad eyes, whose metaphorical spears rain on (*) without cease. On yet another world, caught unbeknownst in the midst of the celestial war, it discovers a people whose mental gifts, and towering ambitions, leave them ideally suited to its purposes….

“But, Sargon, are you absolutely sure this is necessary?” Thalassa asked. “Isn’t there some other way?”

Sargon considered his wife’s plaintive entreaty. It was indeed a lot he was asking of her, of all of them, but they had no choice. His eyes swept over the austere lines of the hastily constructed vault. Row upon row of steel niches ran along the opposite wall, stretching the entire length of the futuristic catacomb, each niche holding a single translucent globe. All but two of the spheres glowed from within, holding the psychic essences of valiant comrades. One of the remaining globes awaited Thalassa.

“It is the only solution,” he said solemnly. “According to my calculations, the forces unleashed by the war will soon rip away the entire atmosphere, rendering our world uninhabitable. Only by storing our minds in these receptacles can we hope to preserve some vestige of our population and culture.”

“But to live without bodies of our own? And for how long?” She stared in anguish at her own hands, memorizing the fragile complexity of the flesh and bone she soon must sacrifice forever. “It’s horrible.”

Sargon nodded. “Perhaps it is the price we must pay for our terrible arrogance.”
The coming cataclysm is no one’s fault but our own,
he thought.
We dared to think of ourselves as gods and look what has become of us.

“Speak for yourself, Sargon,” a sardonic voice requested. Henoch strolled toward the elderly scientist and his wife, smiling. The representative from the Northern Coalition smiled more than any man Sargon had ever met; it was one of the reasons he distrusted him. “I take no responsibility for the precarious position we now find ourselves in. Perhaps you should have said as much to your own generals, before they challenged our claim to the borderlands.”

Sargon frowned, resisting the temptation to strike out at the foreigner with the power of his mind. “You are here as a gesture of peace,” he reminded Henoch, “in hopes of future harmony among our people. Do not abuse our generosity by baiting me with your self-serving propaganda.”

Henoch shrugged. “I suppose it is rather too late to argue politics at this point. If I did not think the war unwinnable by either side, I would not have joined you here today.” He scratched his chin speculatively. “Funny, though, how quickly the conflict escalated, almost as if powers beyond our ken were somehow pulling our strings, setting us against each other.”

You seek to blame anyone but yourself,
Sargon thought, wondering once more whether it was wise to include Henoch and a handful of his followers among those whose consciousness would be stored in the receptacles, against the far-off day when they might live again. He did not care for Henoch, whose affable charm barely concealed a scheming nature, but he and his people were part of the society Sargon had worked so hard to preserve. To exclude them from this final chance for salvation would be an act of selfishness and paranoia comparable to those that had doomed their world.
For better or for worse, he is one of us.

An explosion upon the surface, several miles overhead, shook the vault despite its reinforced steel walls. The war was drawing nearer and growing more intense. “It is time, my love,” he told his wife.

“I am ready,” she said bravely and approached one of the dormant spheres, securely tucked away in its recess. For the last time, save in memory, Sargon gazed upon the physical form of his lifelong mate and partner, savoring the elegant arch of her eyebrows, the delicate tips of her pointed ears. Then she laid her palms upon the curved shell of the receptacle and closed her eyes in concentration. “Until we live again,” she said.

A bluish glow flared within the sphere only an instant before a bright red nimbus spread over her body. Sargon wanted to look away, but could not, standing by passively as the scarlet energy consumed every trace of Thalassa’s corporeal remains, leaving not an atom behind. Only when her body had been completely disintegrated, her life force transferred to the interior of the globe, did he lower his face into his hands and sob.

From a technical standpoint, it was not necessary to destroy the body while transferring the mind, but practically there was no better alternative, lest the underground vault become a charnel house. Judging from the sound of the battle being waged above, soon there would be no one left to dispose of the bodies of those whose thoughts and memories now resided within the receptacles.
Forgive me,
he thought to the glowing globe that held his wife’s spirit.
Forgive us all.

“So you actually went through with it,” Henoch observed, inspecting Thalassa’s receptacle before wandering over to the last empty sphere visible within the catacomb. “I insisted upon being the last to go, just in case there was trickery afoot, but seeing that you were genuinely willing to sacrifice your own wife to this farfetched scheme, I suppose I might as well trust you one crucial step further.” He ran a finger over the empty globe, inspecting it for dust. “So how long do you expect we will wait in this underground mausoleum before some wayfaring space travelers drop by to say hello?”

Sargon wished he knew. “Perhaps only a few hundred years. Perhaps forever. The receptacles will preserve our essences for half a million years, maybe longer. Time enough, I hope, for interplanetary explorers to stumble onto the ruins of our civilization, perhaps providing us with new bodies with which to greet tomorrow.” If only there had been time to construct android bodies for their dispossessed souls, to provide them with mobility after the turmoil on the surface died out, but the war had come upon them too quickly. Indeed, it was a small miracle that he had succeeded in preparing this vault and these few receptacles before the inevitable catastrophe rendered organic life impossible on this planet for all time to come. “It seems probable that other species will explore the stars, just as our own ancestors did. We can only pray that our alien successors will possess the curiosity and the compassion to free us from our long imprisonment.”

“You pray, old man,” Henoch responded. “For myself, I just hope that our future bodies, if any, won’t be too unappealing in appearance.” He laid his hands upon the final dormant sphere, then glanced back over his shoulder, a mocking smile upon his face as always. “Let me guess, it won’t hurt a bit.”