Star Trek: The Q Continuum (46 page)

“They’re just letting them get away?” Picard asked. He knew that neither entity had truly been destroyed. If Q was to be believed, both Gorgan and (*) would later bedevil James T. Kirk in the twenty-third century.

“Without 0, they’re petty nuisances at best,” Q said with a shrug. “From now on, they’ll be forced to lurk furtively in the most obscure recesses of the galaxy, preying like highwaymen on the occasional unwary starship. Nothing the Q need worry about, in other words.”

“Your concern for the rest of us is overwhelming,” Picard pointed out dryly.

“It’s all a matter of scale, Jean-Luc. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Q grabbed Picard by the shoulders and forcibly turned his view away from the insatiable black hole and back toward the sector of space where 0 and The One continued to contend against the Continuum with every weapon at their disposal, apparently undaunted by the desertion of two of their allies. “Now, that pair posed rather more of a problem.”

Disdaining symbolic weaponry, The One unleashed lightning bolts from His fingertips. The scent of ozone wafted through the vacuum as the electrical barrage held Q’s friend at bay. “Heathen! Infidel!” The One raged, the luster of His golden armor undimmed. Overlapping metal plates covered The One’s entire body from the neck down; only His forbidding visage remained uncovered. “Feel the power of My Holy Anger. Quake in terror, O foolish one, as My Mighty Hand strikes you down.”

“That remains to be seen,” the Q shot back, his blond locks concealed beneath his helmet. His superior tone resembled Q’s, although not quite as scathing in its sarcasm. “The Q do not quake.”

He ducked his head beneath the upper edge of a bronze, rectangular shield. His cautious stance, crouched behind his protective shield, testified to the intensity of The One’s thunderbolts. Although Q had said that the battle was turning against 0 and his allies, Picard saw no sign of imminent defeat where The One was concerned; if anything, the monotheistic monster had the advantage against the opposing Q. Even His burnished plate armor, worthy of a medieval knight, appeared superior to the primitive Bronze Age gear of the Q warriors.

“Curb thy mocking tongue,” He declared, advancing on the Q, His fulsome beard framing His stern features like the mane of a roaring lion. “The time of thy chastisement is at hand.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the Q retorted from behind his shield, whose gleaming surface was now dented and scorched in places. He backed away from The One, holding up his shield all the while. Sparks flew from the battered shield as The One’s relentless pace consumed the distance between Himself and His intended victim. “Q! Oh, Q!” the overwhelmed Q called out to his compatriots. “Help me out over here! Better sooner than later!”

Picard had no way of knowing exactly which Q the imperiled entity was addressing, but his cry for help drew both the female Q and Quinn to his side. The sad-eyed Quinn came back to the fracas reluctantly, his expression not unlike the Organians’, but his Amazonian companion was all too eager to take on another foe. “There’s a black hole waiting for you, too,” she taunted The One, placing herself between the oncoming deity and her endangered associate. Her shield blocked bolt after bolt from The One, and she retaliated with an energy blast of her own that stopped The One in His heavenly tracks. Quinn followed her lead, protecting the third Q with his shield while firing a beam of sizzling heat from his free hand.

“Strumpet!” The One cursed, halting where He stood. “Witch!” He beat one gauntleted hand against the molded steel of His breastplate, producing a resounding clang that sounded even in the silent depths of interstellar space. The female Q’s attack bounced harmlessly off His chest, while Quinn’s heat ray merely caused the fringes of His beard to smoke and smolder. Even with the odds now three against one, He refused to give up, proving Himself a more dangerous and determined adversary than either Gorgan or (*). “Be thou false gods as plentiful as sands upon a beach, yet The One shall vanquish you all. None there is who can stand against The One. Great is My Glory, inescapable is My Severe and Final Judgment.”

“Please,” the female Q said, rolling her eyes. “Only a Q has the right to be so insufferably full of herself.” She glared at Him through narrowed eyes, her classically sculpted jaw set firmly. “Q, Q,” she addressed her brothers-in-arms, “let’s show this tiresome pretender what all-powerful really means.”

Together, the three Q rose from behind their antique shields, uniting their wills against the common foe. The One clenched His metal gauntlets and hurled lightning from His eyes, but the jagged thunderbolts crashed uselessly against an invisible wall that left the row of grim-faced Q untouched by the tumultuous attack. Picard heard a deep, resonant hum rising from where the three Q stood side by side. Even from a distance, he could feel the power swelling between them, growing ever more indomitable as their respective energies came into synch. There was a tension building in the nonexistent atmosphere, like the hush that precedes a storm. The vacuum hummed like the engine room of the
Enterprise
right before it went into warp.

At last, even The One appeared daunted by the trinity of Q. He took an uncertain step backward, retreating from the light, while doubt blurred the rigid imperturbability of His features. “I am My Own Deliverance,” he chanted, but His voice lacked the Old Testament certainty of before, “I shall not quaver in My Resolve. I am The One!”

“Oh, lighten up,” the female Q said in return.

A dazzling aura enveloped the three figures, uniting them within a single shimmering nimbus of energy. The light was so bright that Picard had to look away, the unexpected blaze leaving dancing blue spots before his sight. He raised a hand before his face to protect his suddenly watery eyes from the glare.

“Pure, raw Q power,” Q told Picard. “Lacking in style somewhat, but effective.”

An instant later, The One’s right leg disappeared. There was no beam or weapon employed, no projectile force or matter penetrated the armor and amputated the limb; it simply ceased to exist, erased bloodlessly from the Q’s level of reality. The One stared down in shock at the space His leg had occupied. “No,” He murmured, his vainglorious self-worship shaken, “this cannot be.” But even as He spoke, His remaining leg vanished, followed by His right arm. His truncated body, encased in the remains of His armor, floated awkwardly in space. “Stop it!” He commanded. “I am The One. I am eternal!”

The Q systematically dismembered Him. They bloodlessly erased His solitary arm, then His armored torso and throat, until all that remained was His bearded head, floating disembodied in space as It screamed obscenities at the heavens.

The severed head, looking like a bust of some forgotten prophet, drifted away from the battlefield, while the cosmos echoed with the sound of His bellicose vows of vengeance. “Perhaps we should delete His tongue as well,” the female Q suggested, the light about the trio dimming gradually.

“Let’s not be savages,” Quinn advised her. “Even the damned deserve to give voice to their torment.”

“If you say so,” she said, sounding none too convinced. “I think He’s a frightful boor who deserves everything He gets.”

“Let’s just call it a win,” the third Q urged, his shoulders sagging forward. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m positively tapped out. A mere stellar breeze could blow me away.”

He had a point. By now the luminous halo surrounding the trio had faded enough that Picard could once more look upon them directly. He wiped salty tears from his eyes as his vision cleared. All three Q were breathing hard and looked exhausted, although the female Q was doing her best to maintain her customary hauteur. Q’s contemporary and chum removed his helmet and Picard saw that his blond hair was pasted to his skull by perspiration. “That was more difficult than I expected,” he said. “How ever do lesser species manage to fight wars all the time?”

“I know what you mean,” Quinn agreed, leaning forward with his hands upon his knees. Even in the absence of gravity, he acted like he could barely support his own weight. His helmet disappeared in a blink, horsehair crest and all. The bags beneath his eyes looked deeper than before. “Just wait until you’re my age.

“This isn’t over yet,” the female Q chided them, despite her own evident fatigue. The last glimmer of their amplified aura quietly expired, and she strode away from them toward her future husband, still crouching amid infinity, unable to tear his aghast gaze away from the endless clash between 0 and the authoritative Q who so resembled Picard. Both parties in the duel paused barely an instant to acknowledge the brutal defeat of The One.

“You are alone now,” the spokesman for the Q intoned. “Your foul creatures fled or undone.” Spears and crossbow had given way to crossed swords. 0 and the Q fought with silver blades as everyone from Picard to the miserable young Q looked on. The ring of steel against steel rang paradoxically through the vacuum as the unforgiving Q sought to subdue his foe. An avid fencer himself, Picard saw no flaw in his doppelgänger’s technique, although 0 fought back with an undeniably effective mixture of calculation and ferocity. “Abandon this irrational resistance,” he demanded. “Surrender to the judgment of the Continuum.”

“Never!” 0 swung his scimitar at his opponent’s head, only to be blocked by an upward parry of the Q’s shining saber. “And I’m not alone. Young Q will come to my aid yet, you’ll see!”

Surely the strangest aspect of this cosmic swordfight, Picard observed at once, was that the precise nature of the duelists’ blades kept changing from second to second. As Picard studied the fight, critiquing every feint and parry, 0’s curved scimitar became a cutlass, then a broadsword, then a Klingon
bat’leth.
Likewise, the Q’s weapon of choice transformed sequentially into an elegant épée, a rapier, a Scottish claymore, and a Romulan
gladius.
Regardless of their shape, all the blades appeared constructed of the same indestructible material; although sparks flew when the protean swords met each other, neither blade broke beneath its adversary, no matter how overmatched one might seem when compared to the size or weight of the other. Both blades, after all, were not really made of tempered steel, but were in fact tangible extensions of the duelists’ preternatural powers of concentration.
I wonder what this actually looks like,
Picard mused,
from a perspective of a Q.

“Take that, you draconian dictator!” 0 said, laughing exuberantly. He thrust the point of an Italian
cinquedea
at the Q, barely missing the other’s hip. “I defy your despotic Continuum and its suffocating sobriety. Q is the only one of you with any spark of talent or initiative in him. He’ll see that, too, after I’ve destroyed the lot of you!”

There had to be a reason 0 cowed The One and the others, Picard guessed; he had to be the most puissant of them all. The captain wished he knew more about where 0 had come from originally, before Q found him in that interdimensional wasteland. What manner of being was he really? All Picard knew was that 0 was something darker and far more dangerous than the charming rogue he occasionally feigned being. That congenial facade was rapidly slipping away as he hacked and slashed at the Q with a long
katana.
“See, Q,” he hollered to his hesitant protégé, “you’ve no need to fear the likes of these sour-faced spoilsports. Never fear! Never again!”

The female Q had a different idea. Still panting from the exertion required to dismantle The One, she reached Q’s side and yanked his hands away from his ears. “Look at me!” she pleaded, throwing away her helmet so she could confront him face-to-face. “Look at them.” She compelled him to open his eyes and behold his fellows. “You’re one of us, Q, and you always will be.”

Hearing her impassioned declaration, 0 scowled and risked glancing away from his intricate duel with the lead Q. If looks could kill, which in 0’s case was a distinct possibility, the female Q would have been incinerated instantly. Since that didn’t occur, he was forced to resort to other measures. A stray asteroid, consisting of several million tons of solid iridium, passed within his field of vision and, without missing a stroke of his swordplay, he snatched up the asteroid with his free hand, imbuing it with a lethal quantity of energy, and sent it hurling toward the female Q like an assassin’s bullet.

“Watch this, Picard,” the later Q advised. “You may find it of interest.”

Caught up in her efforts to bring the young Q to his senses, the female Q did not notice the deadly asteroid rocketing toward her unshielded head at nearly warp speed. Her future husband spotted it, though. “Look out!” he shouted, pushing her out of the line of fire—which left the accelerated asteroid zooming toward him.

Reacting faster than light, Q ripped open the fabric of space-time, creating a gash in creation between himself and the speeding projectile. The asteroid flew into the fissure, where it traveled backward in time and space until it emerged back into reality on a collision course with the third planet of an obscure solar system countless light-years, and millions of years, away from the heart of the battle. With Q’s power enhancing his perceptions, Picard had no problem recognizing the blue-green orb that the asteroid slammed into with breathtaking force.
“Mon dieu,”
he gasped. “That’s Earth!”

“So much for the dinosaurs,” Q said, shrugging.

Picard was staggered by the implications of what he had just seen, watching in horror as a cloud of dust and ash enshrouded the entire planet, cutting it off from the warmth of the sun. “You can’t be serious,” he gasped. “Surely, you don’t mean—”

“No use crying over spilled iridium,” Q said curtly. He clapped his hands and the catastrophic collision receded from view. “As fascinating as that little sideshow must be, given your provincial roots, we mustn’t neglect the main event, especially since my younger self is finally emerging from his morass of confusion, and after a mere one hundred millennia.”

Numb with shock, Picard let his eyes wander back to the pitched combat between 0 and the quaestor….