by Greg Cox
Despite the tumult, Data promptly responded to Riker’s query. “Without a better understanding of the Calamarain’s psychology, I cannot accurately predict their behavior should we penetrate the barrier.”
Of course, Riker reprimanded himself, I should have guessed as much. “What about us? How long could we last in there?”
Data replied so calmly that Riker would have bet a stack of gold-pressed latinum that the android had deactivated his emotion chip for the duration of the crisis. “With our shields already failing, I cannot guarantee that the ship would survive at all once we passed beyond the event horizon of the barrier. Furthermore, even if the Enterprise withstood the physical pressures of the barrier, the overwhelming psychic energies at work within it would surely pose a hazard to the entire crew.”
“What about Professor Faal’s plan?” he asked, grasping at straws. “Can we try opening up an artificial wormhole through the barrier, maybe use that as an escape route?” It would be ironic, Riker thought, if Faal’s experiment, the very thing that had ignited this crisis, proved to be their ultimate salvation. Still, he was more than willing to let Faal have the last laugh if it meant preserving the Enterprise. Lord knows he didn’t have any better ideas.
Data dashed his hopes, meager as they were. “The professor’s theory and technology remain untested,” he reminded Riker. “Furthermore, to initiate the wormhole it would be necessary to launch the modified torpedo containing the professor’s magneton pulse emitter into the barrier, but there is a ninety-eight-point-six-four percent probability that the Calamarain would destroy any torpedo we launch before it could reach the barrier.” Data cocked his head as he gave the matter further thought. “In any event, even if we could successfully implement the experiment, there is no logical reason why the Calamarain could not simply follow the Enterprise through the wormhole.”
Damn, Riker thought, discouraged by Data’s cold assessment of his desperate scheme. The first officer was willing to gamble with the ship’s safety if necessary, but there was no point in committing suicide, which seemed to be what Data thought of Riker’s plan. Never mind the wormhole, he railed inwardly, I should have tried entering the barrier earlier, when our shields were in better shape. But how could he have known just how bad things would get? Why wouldn’t the Calamarain listen to reason?
Turbolift doors slid open and Alyssa Ogawa rushed onto the bridge, a full medkit trailing behind her like a balloon on a leash. Gravity boots kept her rooted to the floor. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” she said to Riker.
“Thank you, Nurse,” he answered. “Please give everyone on the bridge, except Mr. Data, of course, a dose of librocalozene to head off any zero-G sickness.” He glanced behind him where Barclay was still keeping a safe distance from both the smoking science console and Lieutenant Leyoro. “You can start with Mr. Barclay.”
“Ummm, I’m allergic to librocalozene,” Barclay whimpered, clutching his stomach. “Do you have isomethozine instead?”
Ogawa nodded and adjusted the hypospray.
Riker repressed a groan. He didn’t have time to deal with this. “Do Ensign Clarze next,” he advised Ogawa. The last thing he needed was a queasy navigator. As the nurse went to work, he returned his attention to Data.
“One further consideration regarding the barrier,” the android added. “Starfleet records indicate that the danger posed by the barrier’s psychic component increases proportionally to the telepathic abilities of certain humanoid species.” He looked pointedly at Troi. “Please forgive me, Counselor. I do not mean to alarm you, but it is important that Commander Riker fully comprehend what is at risk.”
“I understand, Data,” she said, not entirely concealing the anxiety in her voice.
So do I, Riker thought. If he did dare to brave the barrier, Deanna would almost surely be the first casualty. Not to mention Professor Faal and his children, he realized. They were from Betazed, too, and, being fully Betazoid, even more telepathically gifted than Deanna. Flying into the barrier would surely doom the children. Could he actually give that command, even to save the rest of the crew?
“Do whatever you have to, Will,” Deanna urged him. “Don’t worry about me.”
How can I not? he asked her silently, already dreading the pain of her loss. But Deanna was a Starfleet officer. In theory, she risked her life every time they encountered a new life-form or phenomenon. He couldn’t let his personal feelings influence his decision. If only I could switch off my own emotion chip, he thought.
“Shields down to twelve percent,” Leyoro announced. She didn’t remind Riker that time was running out. She didn’t need to. Working briskly and efficiently, Ogawa pressed her hypospray against Leyoro’s upper arm, then moved on to Deanna. Riker hoped she wasn’t wasting her time; if their shields collapsed entirely, they’d all have a lot more to worry about than a touch of space sickness. Too bad we can’t inoculate the crew against a tachyon barrage.
Frustration gnawed at his guts. “Blast it,” he cursed. “We can’t stay here and we can’t risk the barrier. So what in blazes are we supposed to do?”
To his surprise, a tremulous voice piped up. “Excuse me, Commander,” Barclay said, “but I may have an idea.”
Four
“I don’t understand,” the young Q said. “What are we doing back here? I mean, it’s a fascinating site, but I thought you’d seen enough of it.”
Looking on, quite unseen, Picard wondered the same. He found himself once more facing the legendary alien artifact known as the Guardian of Forever, as did 0 and young Q. The immeasurably ancient stone portal looked exactly as it had the first time Q had brought him here: a rough-hewn torus, standing five meters high at its peak and surrounded by crumbling ruins of vaguely Grecian design. It was through this portal, he recalled, that the young Q had first drawn 0 into reality as Picard knew it.
“Never again my plans gone astray,
Never again my life locked away,
Never again to die,
Never again, say I….”
0 sang softly to himself in a voice little more than a whisper; the song seemed to have special meaning to him. Could it refer, Picard wondered, to the recent debacle with the Coulalakritous? The stranger’s archaic garments, he observed, no longer bore the scars of that confrontation. 0 limped across the rubble-strewn wasteland until he was directly in front of the Guardian. “Listen to me, you decrepit doorway,” he addressed it, placing his hands upon his hips and striking a defiant pose. The shifting winds blew swirls of gritty powder around his ankles. “I’m not fond of you and I know you don’t approve of me, but you’re in no position to be picky about whom you choose to serve. I’m stronger now than when last we met, and getting more like my old self with every tick of the clock.” He bent over and lifted a fist-sized chunk of dusty marble from the ground, then held it out before him. The solid marble burst into flames upon his palm, but 0 did not flinchfrom the fiery display, continuing to hold the burning marble until it was completely incinerated. When nothing was left but a handful of smoking ashes, he flung the smoldering residue onto the ground between him and the portal. “I trust we understand each other.”
“I COMPREHEND YOUR MEANING,” the Guardian said, its stentorian voice echoing off the fallen marble columns and shattered temples around it. “WHAT AND WHERE DO YOU DESIRE TO BEHOLD?”
0 glanced back at the young Q, who sat upon a set of cracked granite steps several meters behind his companion, looking confused but intrigued. “I knew I could make this antiquated archway see reason,” he told Q with a conspiratorial wink, “and the question’s not where, but whom.” Turning back toward the portal, he opened his mouth again, but what next emerged from his lips bore no resemblance to any language Picard had ever heard, with or without access to a Universal Translator. Indeed, he didn’t seem to hear the words so much as he felt them seeping into his skin, burrowing directly into some primordial back chamber of his brain. He looked away from 0, back at Q’s earlier self, and saw that
the youth appeared just as baffled as Picard.
“What sort of language is that?” Picard asked the older Q standing beside him. He placed his hands over his ears, but the sounds—or whatever they were—still penetrated his mind. “What is he saying?”
Q shrugged. “I didn’t know then,” he said in a fatalistic tone, “and I don’t know now. A call to arms, I imagine, or maybe just a list of names and addresses.” He leaned against a tilted marble column and shook his head sadly. “What’s important is, they heard him.”
“Who?” Picard demanded, shouting in hopes of drowning out the unsettling effect of 0’s inhuman ululation. It didn’t work, but Q managed to hear him anyway.
“Them,” he said venomously. He pointed past the imperious figure of 0 to the open portal itself. As before, a thick white mist began to stream from the top of the archway, spilling over onto the arid ground at 0’s feet. Peering through the haze, Picard saw a procession of historical images rushing before his eyes like a holonovel on fast-forward. The races and cultures depicted were unfamiliar to him, and Picard was extraordinarily well versed in the history of much of the Alpha Quadrant, but, as one image gave way to another at frightening speed, he thought he could begin to discern a recurring theme:
Larval invertebrates emerge from silken cocoons and proceed to devour their insectile parents. Adolescent humanoids, covered in downy chartreuse feathers, riot in the streets of an elegant and sophisticated metropolis, toppling avian idols and putting ancient aeries to the torch. A lunar colony declares its independence, unleashing a devastating salvo of nuclear missiles against its homeworld.
Generational conflict, Picard realized, seizing on the common thread. The new violently destroying the old.
0 stretched out his hand toward the portal, beckoning with his fingers, and a figure emerged from the haze, stepping out from the parade of matricidal and patricidal horrors to assume form and definition outside the portal. He was a silver-haired humanoid of angelic demeanor, resplendent in shimmering amethyst robes that billowed about him from the neck down. A sea-green aura surrounded him, blurring his features somewhat, and, despite his humanoid mien, he failed to achieve any true solidity, resembling a glimmering mirage more than an actual being of flesh and blood. He did not look particularly dangerous, but Picard suspected that first impressions might be deceptive, especially where any confederate of 0’s was concerned.
“Gorgan, my old friend,” 0 greeted him, lapsing into conventional speech. “It’s been too long.”
“Longer for you, I suspect, than for any other.” Gorgan’s deep voice echoed strangely among the barren ruins, sounding artificially amplified. He tipped his head deferentially, revealing an immaculate silver mane that swept back and away from his broad, expansive brow. Beneath the greenish glow, his face seemed pinkish in hue. “I am at your service, my liege.”
0 accepted the other’s expression of fealty without question. “We have plenty to discuss, but stand aside now while I round up more of our comrades from departed days.”
Gorgan stepped away from the portal, seemingly content to await 0’s convenience, but the young Q was incapable of such patience. “Wait just one nanosecond,” he called out, springing up from the battered stone steps. “I’m not so sure about this. I agreed to accept responsibility for you, not…whoever this is.” He gestured toward Gorgan, who regarded him with what looked like wry amusement. The newcomer’s apparent lack of concern about Q’s identity and objections only rankled the youth further. “I insist you tell me what in the Continuum you think you’re doing.”
“I’m not thinking anything,” 0 said brusquely. “I’m doing it, and never mind the Continuum.” He reached out once more for the portal and there was a momentary flicker within its aperture as the Guardian appeared to shift its focus. A flustered Q, having clearly lost control of the situation, stumbled hesitantly toward 0. Despite his evident unease, he also appeared consumed by curiosity. “Don’t worry so much,” 0 reassured him. “I promise you won’t be bored.”
“You can say that again,” the older Q remarked gloomily.
Visions from the past or future cascaded beneath the arch of the Guardian, capturing the attention of both the young Q and Picard. Although Gorgan’s face remained benignly serene, an avid gleam crept into his eyes as he watched the historical vistas unfold:
Tribes of fur-clad savages hurl rocks and sharpened bones at each other amid a primeval forest. Mighty armies clash on battlegrounds awash in turquoise blood, the ring of metal against metal echoing alongside the cries of the wounded and the dying. A fleet of sailing ships sinks beneath the waves of an alien sea, their wooden masts and hulls torn asunder by blazing fireballs flung by catapults upon the shore. Mechanized steel dreadnoughts roll through the blasted rubble of an embattled city while bombs fall like poisonous spores from the smoke-choked sky, blooming into flowery displays of red-orange conflagration. In the hazardous confines of a teeming asteroid belt, daring star pilots flying sleek one-man vessels wage a nerve-wracking, hyperkinetic, deep-space dogfight, executing impossible turns as they fire coruscating blasts of pure destructive energy at enemy spacecraft performing equally risky maneuvers; the eternal night of space lights up like the dawn for a fraction of a second every time a sizzling beam strikes home or a brazenly fragile ship collides with an asteroid that got too close.
Picard had no difficulty identifying the theme of this grisly pageant. War, he realized, appalled by the sheer bloody waste of it all even as he was struck by the foolhardy courage of the combatants. War, pure and simple.
Called forth from the billowing fog, another entity emerged from the time portal. Even more so than Gorgan, however, this being lacked (or perhaps declined) human form, manifesting as a flickering sphere of crimson energy spinning fiercely about two meters above the ground, casting a faint red radiance on the dust and debris below. No sound emerged from the sphere, nor did its passage produce so much as a breeze to rustle the gritty powder it glided over. Whatever this entity was, it seemed even more immaterial than the gaseous Coulalakritous, consisting like Gorgan of undiluted energy, not matter at all. Much like the energy being who impregnated Deanna Troi several years ago, Picard recalled, or perhaps the entity who possessed me during the Antican-Selay peace negotiations. Indeed, Starfleet had discovered so many noncorporeal life-forms over the last couple of centuries that Picard sometimes wondered if sentient energy was actually as common throughout the galaxy as organic life had proven to be. Judging from their appearance, both Gorgan and this new entity provided support for such a supposition.
“Hello again, (*),” 0 said to the shimmering sphere, and Picard hoped he would never need to pronounce that name himself, if that was in fact what the energy creature was called. “Welcome to a whole new arena, billions upon billions of new worlds, all waiting for us.”
If (*) responded to 0, it did not do so in any form Picard could hear. Instead it simply spun silently in the air, undisturbed by the errant gusts of wind that blew perpetually throughout the ruins. Moving away from the Guardian, it passed straight through a solid marble column, emerging unchanged from the other side of the truncated masonry. Perhaps at 0’s direction, it joined Gorgan at the sidelines, hovering a few centimeters above the robed man’s head. The crimson glow of (*) overlapped with the other’s greenish aura, yielding a zone of brown shadows between them.
Stalled halfway between the steps and 0, the young Q inspected the rotating sphere with interest, then remembered his doubts about this entire procedure. “See here, 0, I can’t just stand by while you conduct all this…unauthorized immigration. I don’t know a thing about these entities you’re so blithely importing into my multiverse.” He strode forward and laid a restraining hand upon 0’s shoulder. “Can’t you at least tell me what this is all about?”
“All in good time,” 0 said gruffly. Looking back over his shoulder, he glowered at Q with enough menace to make the younger being withdraw his hand and step backward involuntarily. Q gulped ner
vously, his eyes wide and uncertain. His gaze fixed on his would-be mentor, he failed to notice Gorgan and (*) advancing on him with deliberate, predatory intent. A cruel smile appeared on the humanoid’s lips while the glowing sphere rotated faster in anticipation. Gorgan’s features shifted behind his luminous aura, growing subtly more bestial. The threat of violence, metaphysical or otherwise, hung over the scene, although Picard could not tell how much the young Q was aware of his present jeopardy. All his anxious wariness seemed directed at 0 and what he might do next. Picard found himself in the odd position of sympathizing with Q, even though, intellectually, he recognized that the young Q could not possibly suffer irreparable harm at this point in history since he had to survive long enough to afflict Picard in the future. Unless, he reluctantly acknowledged, Q is about to throw another blasted time paradox at me.
To Picard’s surprise, and the young Q’s relief, 0 abruptly switched modes, adopting a more congenial attitude. His eyes no longer intimidated and his voice grew more ingratiating. Temporarily turning his back on the Guardian, he strove to allay Q’s reservations while, unseen by Q, Gorgan and (*) quietly retreated to their earlier posts. “Unauthorized immigration? Really, Q, that doesn’t sound like you. You weren’t so cautious and conservative when you rescued me from that loathsome limbo, or when you so eloquently argued my case before the Continuum. As I recall, you stated pretty boldly that the Continuum could use some fresh blood and new ideas. Well, here they are,” he said, an arm sweeping out to indicate (*) and Gorgan. “Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind now.”
