“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….
He almost killed Q, the young Q thought in amazement. He could scarcely imagine such a thing, let alone witness it with his own all-seeing eyes. Obliterating the Tkon was one thing; tasteless and excessive and even sadistic, true, but still only affecting one mortal population. But to threaten the immortality of a Q…!
And 0 appeared perfectly willing to do so again. At this very moment, he menaced another Q with a sword in each hand, assailing the Continuum’s implacable quaestor with a bayonet clenched in one and a kukri dagger in the other. The savage intensity of his onslaught was slowly but surely winning out over the meticulous fencing skills of the Q, who clearly lacked 0’s gleeful hunger for the kill. The Q fought defensively, wielding a darting saber, but he was beaten backward by 0’s vicious blows. The stranger’s shapeshifting sword rang against the other’s metal cuirass and greaves as he repeatedly slipped past the Q’s desperate parries. “See,” 0 called to the young Q, “the Continuum doesn’t stand a chance. And it’s all thanks to you!”
He’s right, Q realized. Q can never forgive me for what I’ve done, none of them can.
But maybe that wasn’t the point. He had never really wanted the Continuum’s approval anyway. Far from it, in fact. All he ever truly craved was the courage to follow his own instincts, no matter where they led.
Driven back by the simultaneous thrusts of a Viking broadsword and an Apache tomahawk, the quaestor tripped over a constellation. He tumbled through space, momentarily out of control, while his weapon slipped from his fingers, evaporating into the ether. 0 pounced on the opportunity; by the time the quaestor righted himself, the point of a sharpened leg bone was at his throat. “Pay close attention,” 0 instructed Q, “and you’ll see how to deal with opposition. This pallid entity”—he pressed the tip of his prehistoric pigsticker hard enough to spill a drop of luminous silver ichor—“will never dampen our fire again. Never!”
Q glanced about him in a panic. The other Q stood by helplessly, even his formidable girlfriend. He could sense that they were all too depleted to rescue their leader, even if they knew how to extricate him from his perilous situation. “Wait!” he asked 0 desperately, stalling for time while he tried to figure out what to do.
“What for?” 0 demanded, brandishing the primitive poniard beneath the other Q’s chin. “Admit it, Q. You’ve wanted to do this a hundred times before.”
True enough, he conceded. There had been times when he would have liked nothing better than to run the Continuum through with an ectoplasmic skewer. He recalled all those occasions in his turbulent childhood and early youth when this particular Q had disciplined and restrained him, imposing odious limits on the young Q’s freewheeling imagination. All he needed to do now, Q recognized, was stand aside and let 0 deliver a killing blow that might scare off the rest of the Continuum for an eternity or two. Total freedom, unlimited anarchy, beckoned. He could do whatever he pleased. He could become just like 0….
“I have a better idea,” he said.
In a fraction of a second, the young Q traded places with the Q who resembled Picard. Suddenly, the tip of 0’s weapon was poised at Q’s throat instead, with the quaestor safely out of the way.
Now it was 0’s turn to be disoriented. He blinked in disbelief as his mouth fell open. The point of the sharpened bone wobbled in his grip. “I don’t understand,” he began. “What are you do—”
Q grabbed on to the bone with both hands and sent a powerful galvanic current rushing down the length of the filed tibia into 0’s manifested form. The stranger twitched spasmodically as the shock coursed through him, and, for an instant, Q caught a glimpse of subliminal tentacles writhing in pain. His shoes blew off his feet while the ruffled sleeves of 0’s linen shirt burst into flames. 0 stared at Q with a look of anguished betrayal in his bulging blue eyes. “How could you?” he gasped before his bad leg gave out and he collapsed face-first toward the empty abyss of space.
In a strange, uncomfortable sort of way, Q felt as if he had struck down a part of himself.
Five
“Handle with care the spider’s net,
You can’t be sure that a trap’s not set….”
The young Q stood in dock before the high tribunal of the Continuum, along with 0 and, disturbingly, the disembodied head of The One. Chained and manacled, 0 crooned to himself, his mind seemingly undone by this latest defeat. He rattled his chains in time with his demented ditty and refused to look at Q.
Only a few paces away, with neither arms nor legs to fetter, nor even a torso on which to slither snakelike upon the floor, the severed head of The One had been confined within a sturdy metal cage resting on the floor of the courtroom. His angry eyes, impossibly alive, glared through the bars of the cage while he ground his teeth together impotently, reminding Picard of those rare occasions on which Data’s head had been detached from his body. But Data had never looked so enraged and vengeful.
“Is this it?” Picard asked. “The end of the war?”
“Almost,” Q promised. “All that remains is the disposition of the prisoners, including myself.”
The female Q, still armored Amazonian-style, stood guard between the two outsiders and the young Q, ready to defend Q should either of the alien entities attempt to exact revenge on Q for his betrayal. Her hand rested on the sword at her side. The two other Qs sat in the jury box, looking on with solemn expressions. They had retained their armor, but removed their plumed helmets out of respect for the court.
Picard’s doppelgänger stared down at the prisoners from an elevated seat behind a h
igh black bench. He had exchanged his armor for a Roman toga, and a crown of laurel leaves rested upon his hairless dome. Recalling the memorable instances in which the later Q had placed Picard (and the rest of humanity) on trial, the real Jean-Luc found it oddly satisfying to see the roles reversed for once.
No walls or ceiling enclosed the courtroom of the Continuum. Tipping back his head, Picard could see the entire Milky Way Galaxy spread out overhead. To think, he mused, that that shimmering spiral of stars and solar systems, a hundred thousand light-years in diameter, contained the whole of the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma Quadrants, holding every species and civilization from the Borg to the Dominion to countless new life-forms as yet unknown. Even in his own time, Starfleet had explored only a fraction of the galaxy above. It was a humbling thought.
The quaestor brought down his gavel, calling the court to attention. “Enemies of the Q Continuum,” he addressed 0 and The One in as stern a voice as Picard had ever heard. “You have been accused of malicious mischief and conduct unbecoming that of highly advanced entities.”
“I reject your authority,” 0 protested, breaking off from his song and shaking his adamantine chains. “You have no jurisdiction over me.”
The One seconded the motion, the jaws of the disembodied head speaking loudly despite the absence of lungs or anything else below them. “All commandments flow from My Wisdom. Thou shalt have no higher laws than Mine.”
The quaestor was unimpressed by the prisoners’ arguments. “Your access to this plane was done at the sufferance of the Continuum, and at the instigation of one of our less prudent constituents.” The magistrate fixed a cold eye upon the young Q, who gulped nervously. Having exchanged his sackcloth robe for prison stripes, Q looked as guilty as he doubtless felt. “This renders the Continuum responsible for your future activities, just as it renders you both subject to our considered rulings.”