A sickeningly recognizable clap of thunder shook the sickbay, causing miniature warp-core breaches inside her aching skull. The Calamarain, she realized, feeling a savage sense of vindication through the pain, which now seemed to extend all the way down to her toes. I knew we hadn’t seen the last of those BOVs, she thought, using a bit of Angosian army slang. Better Off Vaporized, it meant, although that had proved maddeningly redundant where the gaseous Calamarain were concerned. Still, barrier or no barrier, it was obvious the Enterprise was under attack once more.
I need to get back to the bridge. Never mind the pain, she wasn’t about to slack off in a med ward while the ship was under enemy fire. Duty called, and she had a responsibility to defend the Enterprise to the best of her abilities. Now, if I can just sit up without my skull exploding…
Her first try went badly. She had barely lifted her head from the padded cushion of the biobed when a sharp, jabbing pain stabbed through the back of her head like a Nausicaan bayonet. Gasping, she let her skull drop back onto the cushion, shutting her eyes against the too-bright lighting overhead. She considered calling for a doctor or nurse, but knew that any medical personnel would just try to talk her into staying put. Probably just as well that nobody seemed to have noticed her return to consciousness yet; she hoped that didn’t mean that Dr. Crusher and her staff were coping with too many other casualties to pay attention to her.
Let’s try this again, she thought, gritting her teeth. She began to shove the surgical support frame off her, noticing for the first time that she no longer had any feeling in her fingertips. I don’t even want to know what that means. The exertion caused her head to throb faster and harder, but she eventually succeeded in sliding the SSF up and away from her body. Then came the hard part: sitting up and putting her feet on the floor. The imaginary bayonet jabbed her again, but this time she was ready for it, letting the pain course through her even as she willed her muscles to keep on moving regardless.
Easy does it, she told herself as she slipped off the bed and onto the floor. At first, sickbay swirled around her like a gravitational vortex and she felt her stomach roll over queasily. The dizziness passed, though, and she took a moment to orient herself.
Where are all the medics? she wondered as no one rushed to her side. There seemed to be something going on at the other end of the ward, perhaps in the pediatric unit, but her eyes were too blurry to make out the details. Doesn’t matter, she thought. The bridge was where she was needed most, directing the fight against the Calamarain.
Despite the disruptor blasts behind her eyes, and the creeping numbness in her limbs, a familiar exhilaration crept over her, giving her the strength to keep one foot marching in front of the other, right through the door out of sickbay. Forget what all those pill-pushers and head-shrinkers back on Angosia said. “Reintegration into civilized society”…hah! This was where she belonged, on the front lines again, doing what she knew best. Fighting to survive.
These Calamarain were a different kind of adversary, to be sure, but they must have their weaknesses, points of vulnerability that the crew could discover and take advantage of. Another thing she’d learned over the course of her career: No enemy was unbeatable. The trick was staying alive long enough to see your victory.
Once she thought she heard a voice calling after her, urging her to return to sickbay, but she didn’t look back. She just kept walking.
Easy does it….
Fourteen
“Tag!”
0 appeared sans fanfare atop the bar, kicking aside a row of freshly replicated glass goblets. They crashed onto the carpeted floor of the officers’ lounge, shattering to pieces and showering Q with tiny glass slivers that might have stung him inordinately had he not had the wit and the wherewithal to transform them into harmless bits of soft-cooked rice first.
With the ship on alert status, the lounge was deserted except for a single Bolian bartender, who was currently hiding at the far end of the bar. The sky-blue upper hemisphere of his round head peeked over the rim of a bin of fresh ice, gawking wide-eyed at the ragged, scarecrow-like figure who had just materialized upon the bar. I suppose it really is too much to hope, Q thought, that such a timorous specimen will have the fortitude to enforce the dress code around here.
“Where’s this?” 0 asked exuberantly, looking around the empty lounge. “This is where?” He hopped off the bar, his remnant-wrapped feet scattering the grains of rice further. Q could not resist staring in morbid fascination at the scarred and ruined remains of the madman’s mangled left foot. “A well-stocked watering hole for wayward wanderers? An excellent choice, Q. I could do with a swallow of spirits. Hunting a heinous hound like yourself is thirsty work, or my name isn’t—” He hesitated, his eyes glazing over as if he couldn’t quite place his own appellation. “Faal? Q?” He smacked the side of his head and Q thought he heard neurons rattling. His madness would have been amusing if it weren’t so unnerving. “0! Now I remember. You’re Q and I’m 0 and you have to die. Devils and demiurges, do I need a drink!”
His upper right tentacle snatched a clear, cylindrical decanter from the bar counter. From the bilious green hue of the beverage sloshing within, Q identified it, with a revolted grimace, as Sluggo Cola, the most popular soft drink throughout the Ferengi Alliance. 0 pried open the bottle with his yellow teeth and spit the cap onto the floor. Q watched in amazement as 0 drained off half the bottle. I thought only Ferengi could drink that dreck, he thought, or would want to. “Ah, that hits the spot it hits.” He thrust the bottle at Q. The viscous green brew fizzed when exposed to the air, sending a spray of tiny bubbles out the open neck. “Here, have a quaff on me, Q. Make it last because that’s what it is, your last.”
“Er, no thanks,” Q demurred. If he absolutely had to choose a last drink, he’d prefer something more along the lines of a fine Saurian brandy, vintage 2247, say. “It’s all yours,” he insisted, pulling back his hands to reject the vile libation. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the Bolian bartender creep out the closest exit. That’s it, Q thought, piqued by the mixologist’s cowardly desertion. He’s definitely not getting a tip.
“Drink!” 0 demanded, pointing both a phaser and an antique derringer at Q’s head. “You weren’t too proud to share a bottle of elixir the first time we met, or so I recall. Drink, Q, drink.”
If you’d been drinking this loathsome concoction then, Q thought, reluctantly accepting the bottle, I might have left you where I found you. He discreetly wiped the neck of the bottle on his sleeve, eyed the spuming contents doubtfully, then closed his eyes and took a hasty gulp.
It was even worse than he had imagined, both slimy and sickeningly oversweet; he couldn’t decide what was most unappetizing, the texture or the taste. Taken together, they made Klingon bloodwine taste like Chateau Picard in comparison. It took all his omnipotence not to gag on the repellent slop. Instead he forced himself to finish off the bottle. If ever I had any doubts that 0 was a total sadist at heart, this clinches it.
At least that insufferable Guinan creature was not around to witness his humiliation. Praise the Continuum for small favors! He wondered if Picard had finally had the good sense to dispense with her dubious services and, more importantly, if he would live long enough to congratulate Jean-Luc on his great good fortune if this were indeed the case.
Despite the truly awful nature of the Ferengi soda, he dragged out the last swallow for as long as he could, uncertain what 0 would do once this celebratory drink was concluded. He peered down the length of the bottle at the firearms poised to extinguish his immortal existence. Could he blink away faster than 0 could spray him with phaser fire and/or hot lead? Probably, but he didn’t want to chance it. I need a foolproof distraction, he mused.
“Fast, faster, fastest,” 0 ordered impatiently. His lower lateral tentacles yanked the bottle out of Q’s hands so quickly that a mouthful of Sluggo Cola spilled onto the pristine carpet beneath their feet. “That’s enough,” he said, cocking the derringer
and upping the setting on the phaser. “Say goodbye, Q. Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of that talented tot of yours, see if I don’t.”
“Watch out!” Q shouted desperately, pointing at the bar. “Behind you!”
0 frowned, giving Q a look of utter contempt. “Oh, now I’m disappointed, Q. Doubly and duly disappointed. That trick was old, old, old before I ever set foot in this great, glittering galaxy.” He shook his head while keeping his guns aimed steadily at his onetime protégé. “A bad note to bow out on, boy oh boy. Good thing there was no one to see it but you and me.”
Just then, the Calamarain returned with a vengeance. A dense, scintillating fog spread past the wide, panoramic windows of the lounge while a violent shudder shook the hijacked starship from prow to stern. “Smoke!” 0 exclaimed in surprise, taking his eyes off Q for only a fraction of a second. “That stinking, sulphurous, sanctimonious smoke!”
A split second was all Q needed. Humorless and vindictive the Calamarain might be, and sanctimonious, too, but he certainly couldn’t fault their timing. By the time, 0 looked back at his quarry, Q was already somewhere else. Transporter Room Three, to be exact.
A single crewman was stationed at the transporter controls. A Caldonian, from the look of his bony forehead. “Halt! Who are you?” he demanded, with admirable presence of mind, when Q materialized without warning upon the transporter platform. He reached for his phaser, but Q had no time to waste with Starfleet security procedures so he simply relocated the Caldonian recruit to the first place that came to mind, namely the bridge. Maybe Jean-Luc can use an extra pair of hands, he thought.
Racing the clock, knowing that 0 would be following close behind him, Q hastily reset the transporter controls from about two meters away, programming the console to erase the coordinates as soon as it completed the transfer. With any luck, using the Enterprise’s own primitive matter-transmission technology would throw 0 off the trail for a time, at least long enough to give Q a chance to regroup and reevaluate the situation.
But where exactly to beam to? Q hesitated, momentarily stumped. He had already tried the hydroponics bay, the environmental science lab, stellar cartography, a shuttlebay, a torpedo tube, an empty escape pod, Picard’s private quarters, the matter-antimatter reaction chamber, the gymnasium, the lounge, and inside Data’s cat, but 0 had found him every time and he was running out of ideas. The Enterprise-E was larger than the last one, but it wasn’t that much bigger.
Where next? The arboretum? Sickbay? The deflector dish? Suddenly, the perfect hiding place popped into his mind. And none too soon; even as he programmed the appropriate coordinates into the transporter controls, 0 appeared upon the platform less than a meter away, brandishing his bloodthirsty arsenal. “There you are there!” he cackled. “And no thanks to that fulminating fog that saved you the last time. Smoke and mirrors, that’s all it is. Smoke and mirrors, I say!”
They’re no friends of mine, Q thought, having no doubt that the Calamarain would be perfectly happy to see both him and 0 destroyed forever; after all, hadn’t the gaseous beings been nursing the same grudge for over a million years? Granted, Q was forced to concede, there was something nauseatingly appropriate about their appearance on this occasion. The Calamarain, back when they’d been the Coulalakritous, had been there at the beginning of his escapades with 0, and they had never forgiven him for his own small part in that unfortunate episode, so it was only fitting (in a thuddingly hamhanded and moralistic kind of way) that they be here at the end…if the end this be. That their unexpected return had actually worked to his benefit at first he chalked up to pure coincidence, possibly the only force in the universe that was beyond even the control of the Q.
He did not explain any of this to 0. Why bother? Instead he said three little words that Picard and his predecessors had practically worn out over the last century or so. “Beam me up.”
Q dissolved into a pillar of silver sparks….
Fifteen
“And thou, all-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world!”
Lear’s immortal words came back to Picard as the Calamarain subjected the Enterprise to their tumultuous animosity. The ship pitched and yawed beneath their assault. He gripped the armrests of his chair tightly even as his spine slammed into the cushion padding the back of the seat. Coruscating bolts of lightning arced across the viewscreen, igniting flashes of sky-blue Cerenkov radiation wherever the electrical bursts intersected with the ship’s deflector shields.
“Shields down to forty-four percent,” Ensign Berglund reported from tactical. Given the destructive barrage directed at the Enterprise, Picard thought it was a minor miracle that the shields were holding up as well as they were.
“The extra energy we absorbed from the galactic barrier, and diverted to the deflectors, is fading the farther we get from the barrier, Captain,” Lieutenant Barclay confirmed from his own station. “And the standard field generators were badly damaged earlier. Engineering is still conducting repairs.”
“I see,” Picard said gravely. According to Riker, before he left the bridge to cope with the crisis in sickbay, the Enterprise had already endured several hours of such abuse while Picard was away, before the first officer took the ship into the barrier to elude the Calamarain. What’s worse, Riker also reported that none of the Enterprise’s offensive capabilities had demonstrated any lasting effect upon the living plasma storm, making retaliation all but impossible.
Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise. Knowing what he now did, Picard could hardly blame the Calamarain for their fury against 0 and Q and anyone else who might seem to be associated with them. When last he saw the Calamarain—mere hours ago by his reckoning, a million years past by the rest of the universe’s—the sentient cloud of ionized plasma, or perhaps only their ancestors, had been frozen into an inert block of solid matter by 0’s unearthly powers, with Q as his unwilling accomplice. The older Q had told him that 0’s victims had remained frozen so for thousands of years. If the Calamarain of the present truly believed that the Enterprise had deliberately liberated 0, as it must have appeared to them, small wonder that they were so determined to exact revenge. Guilt by association, he thought, the hardest kind to refute.
Riker had attempted diplomacy as well, and to no avail, but Picard believed it had to be worth another try. No matter how damning the evidence against them, which had only grown worse thanks to Lem Faal’s unsanctioned breach of the barrier, he had to convince the Calamarain that they shared a mutual foe in 0. That we protected Q from their wrath years ago cannot help our case, he acknowledged reluctantly. “Data,” he instructed, “initiate a tachyon transmission to the Calamarain.”
The Calamarain communicated via faster-than-light particles, not speech as humanoids knew it. When last Picard had encountered them, Q’s special brand of magic had permitted him to comprehend their inhuman language. Now, in the absence of Q and his miraculous abilities, he was forced to rely on a translation program newly devised by Lieutenant Commander Data, a program that Riker had warned still had some rough edges. It will have to do, he resolved.
Before he could begin to formulate his address, however, he was surprised by the unheralded appearance of a shocked-looking crew member, who appeared suddenly in front of the main viewer. Picard recognized Lieutenant Royel, a junior-grade officer assigned to transporter operations. “Captain? Lieutenant Commander Data?” The Caldonian crewman glanced around the bridge, clearly befuddled by his abrupt arrival. “I don’t understand. I was just in Transporter Room Three a second ago, then this strange man appeared out of nowhere. He had a Starfleet uniform, but I didn’t recognize him.”
“Understood,” Picard said, suspecting that he had a better idea of what had occurred than the displaced lieutenant. Picard took this as confirmation that 0 had not yet caught up with Q, and thus an encouraging sign. “I believe you ran afoul of the entity called Q.” Royel’s eyes widened in recognition of the name; Picard envied the lieutenant his prior lack of
personal contact with Q, who had doubtless moved on by now. “You may return to your post.”
“Yes, sir.” Royel still looked a bit dazed, but ready and willing to do his duty. He headed briskly toward the starboard turbolift.
What did Q want with the transporters? Picard had to wonder. He felt like he was fighting a war on three fronts. The Calamarain without, 0 within, and Lem Faal raising havoc in sickbay as well. The Calamarain presented the most immediate threat to the overall safety of the ship, he decided, so that took priority at the moment. Q would have to keep 0 occupied for the time being, while Riker dealt with the problem of Lem Faal. “Is the translation program still on-line?” he asked Data.
“Affirmative, Captain. You may speak normally.”
Picard took a moment to survey the bridge. With the priceless exception of Data, the bridge was uncomfortably devoid of senior officers. Leyoro, Troi, La Forge, Riker…all were injured or occupied elsewhere on the ship. At the captain’s direction, Lieutenant Jim Yang had taken on the rather thankless job of manning the frozen conn, leaving Ensign Berglund at tactical. Picard had total faith in the young officers, who had all graduated at the top of their classes at the Academy, but, deep down inside, he had to admit to being slightly troubled by the fact that the most experienced officer on the bridge, aside from he and Data, was none other than Reginald Barclay. At times like this, Picard thought, I rather regret that both Worf and Chief O’Brien transferred to DS9.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. “Attention, people of the Calamarain. This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. Please call off your attack on this vessel. Like yourself, we seek to contain the entity known as 0, whom we recognize that you have a legitimate grievance with. Let us discuss this problem and arrive at a solution of benefit to us all.”