Star Trek: The Next Generation - 117 - Q are Cordially Uninvited...

by Rudy Josephs

  Crusher didn’t see any present, but that didn’t surprise her. Q could just materialize anything he wanted out of the air. “And what is this gift?” she asked, knowing she would regret it.

  “Me.”

  Yes, she immediately regretted it.

  “Thank you, but I think I’ll return it unopened,” Crusher replied.

  “I’ve always liked you, Beverly,” Q said. He clearly enjoyed their banter. “You always were my favorite.”

  “You once turned me into an Irish setter,” she reminded him.

  “Admit it, your hair never looked better!” he replied. “The canine version of you did have a stunning coat.”

  Crusher had to laugh, but she was not laughing with him. “Yes, because that is the right way to woo a woman.”

  “What?” Q was genuinely confused. He looked down at himself on her bed. “Is it the uniform? I assumed you had a thing for uniforms. Okay, then. I’ll change.” He snapped his fingers, and the gray-and-black Starfleet uniform transformed into a similarly colored silk robe.

  Crusher shuddered at the thought of what might be underneath. “Didn’t I hear something about your own marriage or mating or whatever the Q call it? How would your . . . partner feel about you making a pass at me?”

  “Things didn’t work out as planned,” Q replied. “Now my worse half is off on her own, gallivanting around the galaxy with other people from my past. A fella gets lonely, you know.”

  “And you thought on the eve of my wedding was the best time to address that particular issue? With me?”

  “Some women would consider themselves lucky,” he said. “I am quite the catch.”

  Crusher crossed the room and pulled her door all the way open. “Consider me throwing you back.” It was a futile gesture, she knew. Q did not need—nor did he ever use—doors, but it helped her make her point.

  “Throwing me out of your bed will not help you find your fiancé,” he warned.

  Crusher tensed. She inherently knew that something must have been wrong for Jean-Luc not to have come. Aside from the suspicion that Q would have visited him first, they certainly weren’t being quiet. If Jean-Luc had kept his door open like they’d discussed, he most surely would have heard them.

  A quick glance down the hall confirmed that the door to his bedroom was indeed shut. She could only hope that he was on the other side, in spite of what Q had implied.

  “Getting into bed with you will likely not help me find him either,” Crusher said.

  “True. But we’d have fun in the meantime. Call me if you change your mind.” Q was gone as quickly as he’d appeared.

  Beverly Crusher did not wait another second before tearing down the hall.

  4

  Picard caught flashes of gray fur when he looked back over his shoulder. The creatures were gaining. They had been nothing more than rumbling noises in the distance moments before; now they were real. And only one long city block away. Picard did not let his gaze linger long enough to count the animals, but it was a considerable pack. There was no way to outrun them.

  “We need to find shelter!” he called out to Vash.

  “Over there!” She altered her path, running toward the nearest building, one of the stone and glass edifices that seemed sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught of the creatures.

  The captain heard Vash’s pleas as they ran: “Please be open. Please be open. Please be open.”

  He joined her as they reached the doors. Each grabbed a handle on the clouded glass and pulled. The doors opened freely without so much as a squeal of the hinges, but they were stopped dead by the pile of debris blocking the entryway.

  “Next building!” Picard said as he continued down the street.

  The creatures were getting closer. It looked to be six or seven of them—all gray with black markings, each about twice the size of a targ and infinitely more savage.

  The next doors opened as easily as the ones before, but the entrance was similarly blocked by debris. A stack of metal chairs was piled haphazardly from the floor to the top of the doorframe.

  “What is going on?” Vash yelled over the howling of the creatures. “Who barricades a door that opens out like this?”

  “Questions for later.” Picard pulled a loose chair out of the stack. “We need to get inside.”

  Vash quickly joined him in his work. The metal was surprisingly lightweight, which made the choice for a barricade even stranger. As soon as Picard removed a chair from the center of the pile, it loosened the stack and they all came down, spilling into the building. Picard and Vash followed, pulling the door shut behind them as they kicked the fallen chairs out of their way.

  “Here!” Vash handed him the broken metal leg of a chair. Though the metal was light, it was unusually strong, resisting Picard’s attempt to bend it. Having passed the test, he shoved it through the interior handles of the doors as a makeshift lock. He doubted the creatures were dexterous enough to pull open a door, but he didn’t want to risk it. For the moment, they were safe.

  It was just in time, as the first of the creatures jumped, claws first, at the door.

  The glasslike substance held the animal back. The doors did not crack as the impressive weight crashed into them, and the animal tumbled back into the approaching pack.

  The pack did not approach the door once their leader righted itself. They stood in the street in an arc formation, daring the humans to come outside where they could become dinner.

  Picard finally had a chance to examine the creatures up close and in safety from the other side of the glass doors. Their gray fur was matted and dirty. What he’d originally believed to be black markings was actually some kind of soot. Several spots of fur had been torn from each of their bodies, and the mottled gray skin showed through. They’d been fighting among themselves or been attacked by other scavengers. Either way, Picard did not want to see what had happened to the losers of those fights.

  As the captain leaned closer to their level, the leader stepped forward, growling. Picard saw intelligence in its eyes. Maybe not full sentience, but it did appear to be thinking, taking in the situation. The material the doors were constructed from was thin and clear, but it was strong. The creatures seemed to know inherently that repeated attempts at the door would be fruitless. The simply sat there, watching. And waiting.

  Much as Picard wanted to study the pack, there were other mysteries to be solved. He turned away from the doors and made note of the lobby for the first time. Like the exterior, the inside was all stone and glass, with windows that ringed the building, allowing the afternoon light to shine through.

  Bright shafts of glass stood in clumps at various points in the lobby like a crystal forest that ran from floor to ceiling. The shafts grew denser the farther he moved into the building, each one brighter with light than the one before it. “This is fascinating.”

  “What?”

  “This glass substance,” he said, as Vash joined him. “It’s a conduit of light. It reminds me of the Andorian ice caves. Sunlight is collected above us—on the roof, I assume. It’s carried down in this material, dispersing light through the lobby. Probably the rest of the building as well.”

  “That’s convenient, considering any powered lights would be inoperative by now.”

  “Don’t you see?” Picard said. “For a society rumored to have such advanced technology, to go back to nature in the design of its architecture is a surprising development.”

  Vash leaned against one of the glass shafts. “And you say you’re not interested in archaeology anymore.”

  “I never said I wasn’t interested,” Picard replied. “It’s just the timing wasn’t exactly fortuitous.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” Vash said. “I’m just glad those doors didn’t have electric locking mechanisms. What was with the barricade, anyway? It could hardly be functional. Do you think maybe the Myndrans were invaded? By an overwhelming force of people who were ironically weak?”

  “More likely th
e Myndrans weren’t strong enough to construct more formidable barriers,” Picard suggested, as he moved to examine a desk near what appeared to be a bank of turbolifts. He considered it was possible the desk was some kind of security station, one that might have a communications device.

  “Perhaps some kind of biological agent,” Picard continued as he searched. “The survivors, in their weakened state, might have been trying to increase their chances of protecting themselves from these mysterious invaders.”

  “Well, whoever they may have been, I assume they never found the treasure, or else Q wouldn’t have left us here,” Vash said.

  There was no recognizable technology at the desk, much less any communications equipment. If there had been, it would have been unlikely they could have used it for long-range communication anyway. “You continue to be surprisingly trusting of Q.”

  “We’d been through a lot together, exploring the Gamma Quadrant, among other places.” Vash hopped up on the desk and sat, swinging her feet out and back. “This doesn’t feel like a pointless endeavor to me.”

  “Whatever the purpose, I just want to get home,” Picard said. “I’m beginning to wonder if these people may have eschewed technology.”

  “Or maybe it’s just so advanced we don’t recognize it,” she said, with a nod toward the glass shafts of light. “That would be in keeping with the rumors about the Myndrans. How else would they have traveled so many light-years away to collect the Treasure of the Ancients from so many different civilizations?”

  Picard shook his head. The idea that they could be so close to the mythical treasure was enticing. Vash would be useless to him until they found some clue that the treasure was real or proof that they were on a fool’s errand. He would have been lying if he’d said he wanted the latter to be true.

  Vash looked like she was about to say something, but she stopped herself. She jumped down from the desk and looked around the lobby. “There has to be another way out. A building this size would have multiple entrances and exits.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Picard said. “But I’d like to get a better handle on our situation. Not much we can tell from street level without tricorders.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Picard answered her by raising his eyes toward the ceiling.

  Vash shrugged. “Why not? It’s only a half-dozen stories tall. There must be a stairwell around here somewhere.”

  Once Picard had checked again to be sure the exterior doors were secured, they made their way through the lobby. The symbol for stairwells was apparently universal: a line zigzagging vertically up a bronze-colored placard. The sign was at the far end of the bank of turbolifts. Those had not been designed to function through natural power, since they were not working at all. Obviously, the Myndrans had believed in some technology before they disappeared.

  Like the front entrance, there was no keypad beside the door to the stairwell, nor were there any obvious sensors to register their approach and open the door for them.

  “It’s locked,” Vash said, after turning the handle and meeting resistance.

  Picard gave the door a push. There was a little give but not much. It wasn’t locked, as Vash had said, but something was blocking them from getting inside. Vash noticed it give and, without a word, joined him in pushing against the door.

  It took a bit of pressure, but the door finally moved enough to let them slip into the stairwell. It was cramped inside, made even more so by the pile of chairs shoved against the door.

  The stairwell had no exterior windows, but the shafts of glass were banisters here that circled all the way up the building.

  Picard led the way up the stairs, testing each door they passed on the way up. Like the lobby doorway, these were manually operated. Each was locked from the other side. He considered forcing one open to search the floors for anything that could help them get a message off the planet, but it was unlikely they would find anything helpful in a random building. They needed to find some kind of communications hub or maybe even a docking station.

  They pressed on for another few floors to find that the door to the rooftop gave way with ease. No lock. No barricade. “Emergency escape?” Picard guessed.

  “Escape from what?” Vash asked. “And to where?”

  Glass circles dotted the rooftop floor. Picard assumed they became those shafts of light farther down into the building. The rest of the roof was empty except for the doorway they’d just come through.

  The buildings around them were all roughly the same height, each a half-dozen stories. They grew taller toward the city center, but none of them reached the heights of the man-made structures on Earth.

  On the other side of the building they saw that they were close to the edge of town. Only a few blocks away, the structures thinned out, giving way to parks grown over with weeds. Beyond that, the land grew wilder out to the mountains in the distance.

  The sky was bright enough to suggest that there was still time before nightfall. It would be at least a day’s journey to the mountains at any rate. “We’d never make it to the mountains before it got dark,” he said.

  “I doubt any treasure would be there,” Vash said. “Q would have put us close to its location but not too close. Besides, the Treasure of the Ancients may be a treasure, but I doubt it’s a buried one. These people would want to keep it close.”

  They turned inward toward the city. One building stood out at the city center as the tallest and most ornately designed. “My guess is that that would be too obvious,” Picard said.

  “Maybe,” Vash said. “But these people are extinct for a reason. It’s possible they were oblivious.”

  Picard finally gave in. If they were going to get off the planet, he would have to accept that Q had sent them to find the treasure. That being the case, it made the most sense to start taking the stories seriously and consider what clues he already had. “If we believe the stories—”

  “And as we’ve established, I do,” Vash interrupted.

  Picard continued: “The Myndrans designed technology that allowed them to travel across the galaxy faster than any warp ship the Federation has witnessed. This allowed them to steal the greatest artwork and most prized possessions of dozens, if not hundreds, of planets. I don’t think a race like that would be so bold in designing a building that begs attention.”

  “Now, now, Jean-Luc. You know the egos involved in the treasure-hunting game,” Vash said. “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

  And that inherently was the difference between the two of them. Picard preferred to think the best of people—with Q as a notable exception. Vash tended to assume the worst.

  Picard leaned over the edge of the rooftop to see that the pack was still on the street below. They’d spread out, away from the front door, but were keeping watch. A quick trip to the opposite side of the building showed that two of the animals had made their way around to the back. Picard had been right: That showed some semblance of planning and a modicum of intelligence.

  Being that they were atop the building at the end of the block, he could see that all three sides were covered. They could wait out the animals overnight, but Picard had a wedding to get back to.

  “We’re not getting out that way,” Vash said, as she joined him peering over the edge.

  “No, we most certainly are not,” Picard said.

  “Guess that just leaves travel by rooftop,” Vash said.

  Picard moved to the fourth side of the structure. The building they’d been unable to get into was within reach and maybe a meter below the one on which they were standing. Beyond that, the rooftops seemed roughly the same height down the long city block.

  It was an option for escape, but not a particularly easy one.

  * * *

  Jean-Luc’s room was empty, as Crusher had known it would be. Q was a menace who could not be trusted, but she took him at his word when he’d said Picard was gone. Honestly, she should have suspected something like this. Har
dly an important event went by in Picard’s life that Q didn’t know about. It was just like him to try to interfere.

  They’d done so well at keeping their plans a secret from everyone they knew. Jean-Luc hadn’t wanted to call too much attention to their wedding, and she was fine with that. She hadn’t even told Wesley. Her son was off exploring the galaxy, and she wasn’t even sure how to get in touch with him. Besides, she would have hated for him to drop everything to come for the small ceremony they had planned. They were planning to preserve the event with a holorecorder so they could share their day.

  Beverly had already had the big wedding. She didn’t need another. She didn’t want to deal with a wedding to her commanding officer in front of his crew. Riker and Troi had a wonderful marriage; their two weddings had occurred prior to his taking command of the Titan. They were already an established couple in the eyes of their crew. Of course, none of that secrecy worked with a being that claimed to be omniscient.

  Crusher didn’t expect to find any clues in the guest room, which is why the pith helmet sitting on the chair was a surprise. A white scarf was wrapped around the dome, and when she picked it up she caught the faint scent of rosewater. It told her all she needed to know.

  She would have laughed if she weren’t so concerned about finding Jean-Luc. It was such an obvious ploy on Q’s part. At least she took it as a sign that her husband-to-be was safe. Crusher didn’t doubt for a second that he was trying to find his way back to her, but she wasn’t about to sit around waiting for that to happen.

  Rushing back to her room, Crusher threw a robe on before heading out into the cool night air. Marie was surprised to see her standing alone at the doorway and even more shocked when Beverly quickly explained what had happened. “Are you sure he’s okay?” she asked as Beverly came into the living room.

  “Absolutely,” the doctor replied. “Q would never hurt Jean-Luc. Not intentionally, at least. He acts likes he’s a threat. Though I don’t think that’s what his plan is in this case.”