“Why should I have to do anything?” the woman answered. She took a moment to inspect her reflection in the shining, silver surface of a sealed cupboard, then tucked a few stray curls back into place. “My child is perfectly safe.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Beverly shot back, shouting to be heard over the blaring alarm, “but how about the rest of us?”
The female Q shrugged. “The way Q talks, you people live this way every day. If it’s not the Dominion or the Borg, it’s a temporal anomaly. If it’s not an anomaly, it’s a warp-core breach or a separated saucer.” She smiled indulgently. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your quaint and colorful way of life. It’s far more educational for q to see you in your natural environment.”
“This is not a field trip!” Beverly protested, despite a growing sense of futility. The original Q had never taken human lives seriously, so why should his mate be any different?
“I beg to differ,” the Q said. Then she and her beaming baby boy disappeared without so much as a goodbye.
Beverly feared she knew where the omnipotent pair were heading. Where else would they find a better view of the developing crisis? Before she silenced the alarm and summoned Ogawa and the rest of her emergency personnel, she paused long enough to tap her combadge. “Crusher to the bridge. Expect company.”
Ten
William Riker suddenly found himself in command. Before he could react, before he could even rise from his seat, Q vanished from the bridge, taking Captain Picard with him. “Captain!” Deanna called out, but the captain’s chair was empty.
For a fleeting second, Riker worried about what might be happening to Captain Picard, but there was nothing he could do for the captain now. The safety of the crew and the ship had to be his number-one priority. This isn’t the first time Q has snatched the captain, he recalled, and Q’s always brought him back before. He could only pray that this time would be no exception.
“Scan for any nearby concentrations of ionized plasma,” Riker ordered Data. “I want to know the instant the Calamarain come within sensor range.” He stood and walked to the center of the command area, quickly considering the problem posed by the Calamarain. They didn’t know for sure that the alien cloud-creatures posed a threat to the ship, but he didn’t intend to be caught napping.
“Commander,” Data stated. “The Calamarain are coming into visual range now.”
A great cloud of incandescent plasma drifted between the Enterprise and the barrier, obscuring Riker’s view of the shimmering wall of energy. The lambent cloud had a prismatic effect, emitting a rainbow’s range of colors as it swirled slowly through the vacuum of space. Although the gaseous phenomenon, several times larger than the Sovereign-class starship, bore little resemblance to sentient life as Riker was accustomed to it, looking more like a lifeless accumulation of chemical vapors, he knew that this was the Calamarain all right, an entity or collection of entities capable of inflicting serious harm upon humanoid life if they chose to do so. Riker had no way of knowing if these were precisely the same beings who had menaced them before, but they were clearly of the same breed. “Mr. La Forge,” he asked, “how are our shields?”
“They should stand up to them, Commander,” Geordi reported. “I’ve set the shield harmonics to the same settings that worked last time.” He double-checked the readouts at the engineering station and nodded at Lieutenant Leyoro, who monitored the shields from her own station at tactical. “Let’s just hope the Calamarain haven’t changed their own parameters over the last few years.”
“I don’t understand,” Lem Faal wheezed, slowly coming to grips with a radically altered situation upon the bridge. “Where is Captain Picard?” His bloodshot gaze swung from the captain’s empty chair to the bizarre alien apparition upon the main viewer. “Commander Riker!” he exclaimed, seizing upon the first officer as his only hope. “You have to stop that entity, drive it away. The probe…they could ruin everything!”
“Mr. Mack,” Riker barked to a young ensign stationed near the starboard aft turbolift. “Escort Professor Faal to his quarters.” He sympathized with the unfortunate scientist, but the bridge was no place for a civilian during a potential combat situation, and Riker didn’t need the distraction.
“Commander, you can’t do this!” Faal objected, hacking painfully between every word. He looked back at the screen as the young ensign took him by the arm and led him toward the nearest turbolift entrance. “I have to know what’s happening. My experiment!”
Ensign Mack, an imposing Samoan officer, stood a head above the stricken Betazoid researcher, and had the advantages of youth and superior health besides, so Riker had every confidence that the ensign would be able to carry out his orders. Soon enough Faal’s gasping protests were carried away by the turbolift, and Riker turned his attention to more critical matters: namely, the Calamarain.
He stared at the breathtaking spectacle of the immense, luminescent cloud; under other circumstances he would have been thrilled to encounter such an astounding life-form. If only there was a way to communicate with them, he mused, knowing that Captain Picard always preferred to exhaust every diplomatic effort before resorting to force. Unfortunately, the Universal Translator had proven useless the last time they confronted the Calamarain, whose unique nature was apparently too alien for even the advanced and versatile language algorithms programmed into the Translator. “Counselor,” he asked Troi, “can you sense anything at all?”
“Aside from Professor Faal’s distress?” She closed her eyes to concentrate on the impressions she was receiving. “The Calamarain are more difficult to read. All I’m picking up from them is a sense of rigid determination, a fixity of purpose and conviction. Whatever they are about, they are committed to it without doubt or hesitation.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. In his experience, an utterly fixed viewpoint could be the hardest to achieve a mutual understanding with. Fanatics were seldom easy to accommodate. He could only hope that the goal the Calamarain were so set upon did not involve the Enterprise.
We should be so lucky, he thought doubtfully.
“Commander,” Leyoro called out, “the Calamarain are pursuing the probe.”
It was true. The scintillating cloud receded into the distance as it abandoned the Enterprise in favor of chasing the much smaller projectile. The speed and accuracy of its flight belied any lingering doubts about the cloud’s sentience. Through the prismatic ripples of the cloud, he saw the glitter of discharged energy outlining the probe as its protective forcefield struggled to shield it from the attack of the Calamarain. Why are they doing this? Riker wondered. The probe poses no threat to them.
“The readings from the probe are going berserk,” Geordi said. “A massive overload of tachyon emissions.” He studied the output at the science station. “Commander, if we could retrieve the probe at this point, examine its hull, we might be able to learn a lot more about the offensive capabilities of the Calamarain.”
That may be for the best, Riker thought, taking his place in the captain’s chair. It was obvious that the probe was not going to fulfill its original mission within the barrier. “Bring us within transporter range,” he ordered. “Mr. La Forge, prepare to lock on to the probe.”
“Commander!” Lieutenant Leyoro exclaimed. “That will mean lowering our shields. In my opinion, sir, the probe’s not worth risking the ship for.”
“If we don’t learn more about the Calamarain, we may pay for it later on,” he pointed out. “They don’t seem interested in us at the moment, only the probe.” Why is that, he wondered. The probe came nowhere near them. Why did they go after it?
The starship soared toward the amorphous, living fog that now held the probe in its grasp. Puzzled, Riker witnessed the coruscating shield around the probe growing weaker and less effective before his eyes. The flaring bursts of power came ever more sporadically while the targeted projectile rocked back and forth beneath the force of the cloud’s assault. How much longer could the p
robe withstand the fury of the Calamarain?
“Shields down,” Leyoro reported unhappily.
“I’m trying to lock on to the probe,” Geordi said, having transferred the transporter controls to his science station, “but the Calamarain are interfering.”
“Deliberately?” Riker asked.
“Hard to say,” Geordi answered. “All I know is those tachyon emissions are making it hard to get a solid lock on the probe.”
“Do what you can,” Riker instructed, “but be prepared to abort the procedure at my command.” Leyoro was right to a degree; if the Calamarain showed any interest in coming after the ship itself, they would have to sacrifice the probe and its data.
His combadge beeped, and he heard Dr. Crusher’s voice, but before he could respond a white light flared at the corner of his eye. For a second Riker hoped that maybe Q and the captain had returned, then he spotted the female Q and her child sitting behind him on a set of wooden bleachers that had materialized at the aft section of the bridge, blocking the entrances to both of the rear turbolifts. The child now wore an antiquated Little League uniform and baseball cap instead of the sailor suit that had clothed him earlier. His mother wore a matching orange cap and jersey, with a large capital Q printed in block type upon the front of her uniform, as opposed to the lower-case q upon the little boy’s jersey. “See,” she told q, pointing toward the main viewer, “this is what they call an emergency situation. Isn’t it funny?”
The boy laughed merrily and pointed like his mother. “’Mergencee!” he squealed, bouncing up and down upon the bleachers so forcefully that the timbers creaked.
Riker seldom resorted to profanity on the bridge, but he bit down a pungent Anglo-Saxon expression as he tore his gaze away from the grossly inappropriate tableau that now occupied the bridge. He’d have to deal with the two sightseeing Qs later; right now his attention belonged on the sight of the endangered probe, its shields flashing within the vaporous depths of the Calamarain. Still, he felt less like the commander of a mighty starship than like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus.
“Now, pay attention,” the female Q instructed her child. “This is supposed to be educational as well as entertaining.” She plucked a pair of red and black pennants from out of the air and handed one flag to little q, keeping the other one for herself as she sat upon the bleachers. The pennants were made of stiff red fabric with the word “Humanoids” embossed on one side. “While your father is occupied elsewhere, let’s make an outing of it, assuming the funny humanoids can keep their ship in one piece for that long.”
“Pieces!” little q chirped. “Pieces!”
On the screen, a flash of crimson flame erupted from the side of the probe as its hull crumpled beneath the stresses exerted by the Calamarain. “Mr. La Forge?” Riker asked, guessing that soon there would be nothing left of the probe to salvage.
“I think I’ve got it,” Geordi called out. “Energizing now.”
The golden flicker of the transporter effect raced over the surface of the probe, supplanting the futile sparking of its failing forcefield. The probe faded away completely, leaving behind only the spectacular sight of the Calamarain floating ’twixt the Enterprise and the galactic barrier.
“One point to the lowly humans,” the female Q announced, writing a neon-yellow Arabic number one in the air with her index finger. The fiery numeral hung suspended above the floor for a breath before evaporating. A silver whistle appeared on a cord around her neck. She blew on it enthusiastically, hurting Riker’s ears with the shrill sound, before declaring, “Game on!”
The great cloud that was the Calamarain drifted in place for a moment, perhaps unaware at first that its prey had escaped, but then it raced toward the screen, growing larger by the instant. Smoky tendrils reached out for the Enterprise. “It’s coming after us,” Leyoro said.
“Estimate interception in one minute, thirty-two seconds,” Data stated.
Riker heard Troi gasp beside him. He wondered if she was feeling the Calamarains’ hostile emotions, but there was no time to find out. “Mr. La Forge,” he called out. “Is the transport complete?”
“We have it, Commander,” Geordi assured him. “It was close, but we beamed it into Transporter Room Five.”
“Raise shields,” he ordered Leyoro. The incandescent cloud filled the screen before him. Unknown vapors churned angrily, stirring up ripples of ionized gas. He tried to distinguish individuals within the mass of radiant fog, but it was impossible to single out one strand of plasma among the whole. It’s possible, he thought, that each Calamarain does not exist as a single entity the way we do. They may be closer to a hive-mind mentality, like the Borg.
That comparison did nothing to reassure him.
“Already on it,” Leyoro said promptly, with a fierce gleam in her cold gray eyes. Riker suspected she was never truly happy except when fighting for survival. A dangerous attitude in the more civilized and peaceable regions of the Federation, but possibly a valuable trait on a starship probing the boundaries of known space. You can take an Angosian out of the war, he thought, but you can’t always take the war out of an Angosian. Not unlike a certain Lieutenant Commander Worf….
The plasma cloud surged over and around the Enterprise. Riker felt the floor vibrate beneath his boots as their deflectors absorbed and dispersed some variety of powerful force. A low, steady hum joined the background noise of the bridge, buzzing at the back of his mind like a laser drill digging into solid tritanium. He could practically feel the grating sound chafing away at his nerve endings. That’s going to get real old real fast, he thought.
“Permission to open fire?” Leyoro asked, eager to return fire. Her survival instincts could not be faulted, Riker knew. They had kept her alive during both the war and the veterans’ revolt that came afterward.
He shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s not rush into battle before we even know what we’re fighting about.” Their shields had fended off the Calamarain before. He was confident that they would buy them a little breathing space now.
A jolt shook the bridge, which rocked the floor from starboard to port and back again before stabilizing a moment later. Everyone on the bridge caught their breath, except for the female Q, who cheerily turned to her child and said, “Come to think of it, I believe we may be rooting for the wrong team.” The stiff cloth pennants the pair clutched in their hands switched from red fabric to something slick and, in its shifting spectrum of colors, reminiscent of the Calamarain. Riker noted that the lettering on the miniature flags now read “Nonhuman life-forms.”
“One point to the Calamarain,” she said, blowing sharply on her referee’s whistle, “and the score is tied.”
Riker refused to be baited, not while his ship was under attack. “Report,” he instructed his crew. “What caused that shock?”
“Really, Commander Riker,” the female Q chided, “who do you think caused it? The Calamarain, of course. Do you see any other threatening aliens in the vicinity?”
“Just you,” Riker said curtly. “Mr. Data, please define the nature of the attack.”
“Yes, Commander,” Data said, scanning the readouts at Ops. From the captain’s chair, Riker could see a string of numerals rushing across Data’s console faster than a human eye could follow. “The tachyon barrage emitted by the Calamarain has increased by several hundred orders of magnitude. The intensity of the tachyon collisions is now more than sufficient to fatally damage both the ship and its inhabitants if not for the protection afforded by our deflectors.”
“I see,” Riker said, none too surprised. The Calamarain had demonstrated the potency of their offensive capabilities the last time they ran afoul of the Enterprise. “Mr. La Forge, are our shields holding?”
“For now,” Geordi affirmed, “but we can’t maintain the deflectors at this level forever.”
“How long can we keep them up?” Riker asked. He watched the luminous plasma coursing across the screen, the iridescent hues swirling like a kaleidosco
pe. It’s strangely beautiful, Riker reflected, regretting once more that humanity and the Calamarain had to meet as adversaries.
“Exactly?” Geordi said. “That depends on what they throw at us.” The circuit patterns upon his implants rotated as he focused on his engineering display. “If they keep up the pressure at this intensity, the shields should be able to withstand it for about five hours. Four, if you want to play it safe.”
Good, Riker thought. At least they had time to get their bearings and decide on a strategy. He didn’t intend to stay a sitting duck much longer, but it might be in this instance that a judicious retreat was the better part of valor. There was too much unknown about both the Calamarains’ motives and their abilities for him to feel comfortable committing the Enterprise to an all-out armed conflict. And as for their mission, and Professor Faal’s experiment…well, that was looking more unlikely by the moment.
“I can do more from Engineering,” Geordi offered. “Permission to leave the bridge?”
“Go to it, Mr. La Forge,” Riker said crisply as Geordi headed for the turbolift. He looked at Troi and saw that the counselor still had her eyes closed, a look of intense, almost trancelike concentration upon her face. “Deanna?” he asked quietly, not wanting to jar her from her heightened state of sensitivity.
“They’re all around us,” Troi answered, slowly opening her eyes. “Surrounding us, containing us, confining us. I’m sensing great anger and frustration from every direction, but that’s not all. Beneath everything, behind the rage, is a terrible fear. They’re desperately afraid of something I can’t even begin to guess at.”
“How typically vague and ominous,” the female Q said from the bleachers, rolling her eyes, to the amusement of her offspring. “Perhaps, young lady, you’d get better results with tea leaves.”
“Never mind her,” Riker said to Troi. “Thank you, Deanna.” He tried to interpret her impressions, but too much remained unknown. How could such powerful entities, capable of thriving in the deadly vacuum of space, possibly be afraid of the Enterprise? The very idea seemed laughable, especially when a much more probable suspect sat only a few meters away.