Snapping his fingers, his father drew the prism from his hand and set it spinning in midair. Moments later, the image of Kathryn Janeway and her crew working to destroy the anomaly they had discovered in the Delta Quadrant during their first mission played out. Having already watched it hundreds of times, Q felt that, dramatic as events were, they had lost their potency.
“What’s wrong with this picture, son?” his father demanded.
“A human found an answer you couldn’t?” Q replied petulantly.
“Look again.”
Q did so, but whatever his father was getting at eluded him.
After a few moments of silence his father said, “Did you by any chance attempt to enter this timestream?”
“Yes.”
“And did you succeed?”
“No.”
“And why do you suppose that was?”
“Because the timeline no longer exists. Once Admiral and Captain Janeway altered history, it collapsed.”
“Wrong.”
Q felt suddenly dizzy and longed to release himself from his human body. Beneath his father’s withering gaze, he held his form.
“You can’t enter this timestream and neither can I, because Kathy’s solution was criminally shortsighted—not unlike several other choices she’s made and for which, thanks to you, I might have the opportunity to take her to task. The actions she took here, and the actions you would have her take again, erased the entire Q Continuum from existence.”
Q felt his entire body shudder violently.
“That’s impossible.”
“It took me by surprise as well. This is one of many reasons it pays to study carefully the actions of these lesser beings. From time to time they stumble across things they cannot be expected to comprehend, and even with the best of intentions they create absolute chaos. I’m not just trying to save them from themselves, I’m trying to save all of us from their ignorance.”
“How does closing a spatial anomaly erase the Q Continuum?” Q demanded.
“This isn’t just any anomaly, son.”
“Yes, thank you. That much I already know.”
“Anything that occurs within this continuum, much like actions in our own, has the potential to affect the entire history of the multiverse. Do or undo something here, and it is as if the action was taken at the dawn of time.”
“So Aunt Kathy closed this continuum and by doing so, altered history . . .”
“. . . from the beginning,” his father finished for him. “The physics underlying her solution is within her grasp, and you have brought her back to repeat this unacceptable action. Thankfully, I’ll be able to prevent that from occurring. But had you listened to me in the first place—”
“You didn’t tell me anything but ‘no.’ You could have brought me here and shown me the consequences.”
“I shouldn’t have to. I’m your father; you should have taken me at my word.”
“Allowing Aunt Kathy to die had nothing to do with the end of the Borg?”
“We’ll never know, but play this timeline a few hundred years further into the future and you’ll see that if she had not altered time to bring her people home several years early, the Borg would have continued their normal, and quite predictable, path of assimilation until eventually they would have reached the Federation with such overwhelming force that it would have fallen in a day. The rest of the galaxy would have followed soon after. I suppose I should thank ‘Kathy’ for sparing us the incredible tedium of a galaxy filled with Borg, but you’ll forgive me if I can’t muster the enthusiasm, since none of us would have been around to be bored senseless by it.”
Q sighed. “So Aunt Kathy can’t help us.”
“No. Which is why I told you to leave it alone.”
“And you can’t either.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.” His father smiled. “I know already what can’t be done. I’m still working on what can.”
“Is the rest of the Continuum working with you?”
“No,” he admitted ruefully.
“Why not?”
“It’s a collective blind spot among them. As soon as I understood that, I knew they’d be useless to me.”
“They can’t see it?”
“No.”
“But you can? How?”
“Because you’re my son. Everything that concerns you is of paramount concern to me. And if you’d just left well enough alone, and trusted me, you’d never have known, either.”
“Losing my ability to travel into the future made that impossible.”
“It’s temporary, I assure you.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because the multiverse has our back on this one, even if the Continuum doesn’t.”
Q suddenly saw a new section of the puzzle quite clearly. “The multiverse wants this continuum returned to its original orientation from which it cannot impact the events of space-time.”
“That’s right. At least not for a very, very, very long time.”
“Aunt Kathy accomplished this once, but when she failed to do it again, the multiverse began ordering events so that someone else would.”
“Excellent.”
“And that someone is?”
“Me.”
“Then you plan to confront Eden?”
The light fell from his father’s face.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Eden, the commander of the Voyager fleet.”
“Who?”
“Father?” Q said, aghast.
Q again set the prism spinning. At his direction it began to show the entire history of the fleet’s interactions with the anomaly. As soon as the Achilles entered the area, the prism showed a room where a Lendrin male and Afsarah Eden stood staring at a display panel.
His father froze the frame and stared at it for a long time.
“How did I miss that?” he finally said softly.
How did he miss that? The terror that had momentarily begun to abate roared through Q with a deafening force.
“Possibly because this is the only timeline in which Eden exists,” Q suggested.
“What?” his father gasped.
“I assumed that meant Eden was one of us, as she is clearly unbounded by time just as we are.”
“There are countless individuals who exist in only one timeline,” his father corrected him.
“At the epicenter of a convergence containing the possibility of eradicating the multiverse?”
“You might have something there,” his father grudgingly allowed. “Where did she come from?”
“She isn’t a Q?”
“No.”
Suddenly the darkness roared back, threatening to engulf him.
“Father, listen to me,” Q said quickly. “Whatever you are planning to do, don’t. Just leave it alone.”
“Son, please.”
“No. You say all of this could have been avoided if I had trusted you. Now I’m asking you to trust me.”
“I do,” his father said kindly. “But you are out of your depth here. You’ve barely begun your life as a Q. I’ve been doing this for billions of years.”
“I know. But this isn’t your fight.”
“Of course it is. Now go to Septurnal Prime. Your mother is worried sick. I suggested she go there and allow the astral eddies to calm her nerves. I’ll join you both there shortly.”
“But, Father—” Q pleaded.
“No buts. And if you attempt to come within a million light-years of that ship, you can rest assured I will stop you.”
With a wink, his father snapped his fingers and disappeared. The theatrical and completely unnecessary flourish was actually touching. No Q actually required a physical gesture to accomplish anything. That his father continued to do so for effect brought a fresh torment to Q’s being.
Once he had understood at least part of his godmother’s interactions with the anomaly, and watched from afar as Aunt Kathy worked with Afsarah Eden to unravel its mys
teries, he’d begun to accept how all of this must end. He’d believed that his father would know too, and that he’d never had any intention of trying to change it. This conversation, while incredibly instructive, only confirmed his initial suspicions. That his father might actually care was something—though now, Q found himself wishing that his father didn’t.
Either way, there was but one path before him. The only problem was that now he wasn’t sure he had the courage to walk it.
Chapter Thirty
VOYAGER
“No,” Kathryn Janeway said softly as her legs lost their strength, and she availed herself of the nearest chair to avoid landing on the deck in her quarters.
“We’ve reviewed the sensor logs,” Chakotay said calmly. “We were trying to evade a new series of fractures, but we now have definitive evidence that the three ships remaining in normal space have been destroyed.”
Seven hundred and eighty-five people.
Sixty-three billion people.
When does this madness end?
“Seven has reviewed the logs and believes that the entire event was instigated by the individuals within the anomaly,” Chakotay added.
“How could she know that?”
“We don’t have clear readings of what was going on inside, but there is no evidence that anything changed, prior to the event, in the portions of the ships we could scan. One moment, everything was status quo; the next, our ships break off at the barrier and implode. Within seconds, the anomaly expanded briefly to absorb their destruction, then reverted to its original state.”
“Seven thinks . . .” Kathryn stammered, struggling to wrap her brain around it, “. . . that seven hundred eighty-five people intentionally destroyed their ships, presumably ending their lives? For what conceivable purpose?”
“To seal Omega.”
The admiral looked up sharply to see that Captain Eden had entered her quarters without bothering to ask. Or maybe she had not heard it.
“Omega?”
“The Omega Continuum,” Eden clarified.
Kathryn was glad she was already seated because an entire continuum composed of the most destructive particle known to the Federation was the only thing she could imagine that would make this situation worse.
“We almost didn’t get your team out . . .” Chakotay began.
“I apologize, Chakotay,” Eden said, quite contrite. “But I was able to gather a great deal of information we needed.”
“Where are B’Elanna and Hugh?” he asked.
“Commander Torres is briefing Seven. Cambridge is meeting with the Doctor, undoubtedly to review the subatomic scans he took of me during our time aboard Quirinal.”
“Could we go back a minute?” Kathryn asked. Finding her feet, she stood and confronted Eden. “The Omega Continuum?”
“Don’t you think we should brief the captain first on our conversation with Mister Jobin?”
Before Kathryn could object, Eden raised a hand and said, “That won’t be necessary.”
“Why not?” Kathryn asked.
“Just before we moved to the transport site, I made brief physical contact with the barrier.”
And it didn’t kill you? the admiral thought.
“No, it didn’t,” Eden replied to Kathryn’s unspoken thought. “It provided me with a full understanding of how we got here and what exactly we are facing.”
“It’s Omega?” Chakotay asked.
Eden smiled bitterly. “The particle the Borg thought of as perfection and the Caeliar managed to domesticate as a power source is a pale reflection of true Omega. They were synthetic particles, corrupted by the boronite used to create them. The Omega Continuum is a discrete region underpinning the entire multiverse, composed entirely of pure Omega. It contains the destructive force required to end the multiverse, once it has run its course, and at the same time give rise to the next multiverse. It is an integral part of the eternal cycle of birth, life, and death.”
“Is it anything like the Q Continuum?” Kathryn asked.
Eden nodded. “They exist to balance one another.”
Chakotay shook his head. “How?”
“The Q Continuum contains the ultimate creative power of the multiverse. Omega is the ultimate destructive force,” Eden explained. “Both release their power slowly over vast expanses of time and in precise relation to one another until the multiverse has run its course, a process that normally takes much longer than any of us could imagine.”
Kathryn began to pace restlessly. The name and size of the problem sounded about right. The thought that there might be a solution within the grasp of any mortal was a little harder to believe.
“The story Jobin told you was true,” Eden went on. “I was born of the Omega Continuum. As it evolves throughout the trillions of years of the life of the multiverse, it remembers and records the history of the multiverse. My unique ability to ‘know’ things is a gift of my heritage. My human mind can contain only a small fragment of it, but all of it is available to me when my quantum state begins to align with its true nature.”
“Then you already know what happened to your uncles?” asked Kathryn.
Eden fought back the tears rising in her eyes, and when she had regained control said, “They went back to the portion of the Omega Continuum present in the Beta Quadrant—where they first entered. They believed they could seal Omega off from normal space, thus making it unnecessary for me to return. They wanted my life to be as normal as possible and as long as possible. They had no idea there were multiple access points running throughout the entire multiverse, or that their actions would be futile.”
“Why did our people sacrifice themselves?” Chakotay demanded.
“Once they entered Omega, they understood that any mass or energy brought within its boundaries accelerates Omega’s natural progression. The fractures they fell into were a result of my connection to Omega, but once they were created, the only way for the people in Omega to close them was to destroy themselves and their ships. Otherwise, the lifespan of the multiverse would have been shortened to a matter of months, perhaps a few weeks at most.”
“Why didn’t it work?” Chakotay asked. “The ships are gone, but the anomaly is still there, albeit quite smaller.”
Afsarah Eden turned away and could not meet his stern gaze as she replied. “Tallar remains within Omega,” she said softly. “In order to close the access points here and in the Beta Quadrant, Tallar would have had to make the same sacrifice our people did. In the end, he was unable to do his part.” When she turned back, her face was streaked with tears, “Tallar wanted me to know all of Omega’s secrets, all that he had kept from me. And he couldn’t bear to take Jobin’s life along with his own. He waited too long to follow our people’s lead.”
Chakotay’s face hardened. Kathryn was sure she had never seen him so thoroughly disgusted.
“Don’t judge him too harshly,” Kathryn counseled.
“It’s hard not to,” Chakotay replied, “considering the opportunity he just wasted.”
“The actions of our crews have temporarily stabilized the anomaly here,” Eden said, knowing it was faint comfort. “They have bought us the time we will need to prevent Omega’s spread, and the end of the multiverse. Even if Tallar had joined them, the threat would still exist. When the Anschlasom first breached and corrupted Omega, they left ruptures in multiple places. Those ruptures would have remained, and many of them are outside the range of any Starfleet vessels. We could not have solved this problem alone from here.”
“We did it once,” the admiral replied.
“Perhaps,” Eden allowed.
“We did,” Kathryn insisted. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.”
Clearly choosing her next words carefully, Eden said, “The only thing that will completely seal the Omega Continuum and end its threat to every sentient being in the multiverse is for me to return to the Continuum. Tallar thought he had created me, and in some ways he did. I was made from him, but not
to answer his prayers. I was created to restore the balance that had been corrupted by the Anschlasom .”
“The Anschlasom wreaked their havoc thousands of years ago,” Kathryn said. “You’ve been around for what, fifty years? Why did the Omega Continuum take so long to try to restore the balance?”
“Everything that happens within Omega effectively happens at the beginning of time. What the Anschlasom did ten thousand years ago they did at the dawn of time. What Jobin and Tallar did allowed Omega to self-correct when all other possibilities for such a correction had been removed.”
“You mean when my future self and I altered the timeline.”
Eden nodded. “My life was designed by a presence of complete knowing.”
“It put you where you would be needed at the right time?” Chakotay asked.
“Because we weren’t going to be,” Kathryn said somberly. “If I never alter time, Jobin never discovers the anomaly, because it doesn’t exist, and you are never created.”
“I despise temporal mechanics,” Chakotay sighed.
“It’s more than that,” Kathryn said softly to herself.
“What?” Chakotay asked.
“I wasn’t going to be here,” the admiral replied, as she watched her own death replayed countless times in a loop running continuously in her mind. “I didn’t want Voyager to return to the Delta Quadrant. I would have risked, I did risk, everything to prevent that from happening. Had I survived, even after the Borg were defeated, I would have argued against the fleet’s mission. However, had I not prevailed, I would have led the mission. Chakotay would still have been Voyager’s captain, and you,” Kathryn said, indicating Eden, “would have had no reason to be here.”
“I don’t see the significance,” Chakotay admitted.
“My death became what the Q refer to as a fixed point in time. I’m not supposed to be here. The multiverse didn’t want me here.”
“But you are here,” Chakotay insisted.
As Kathryn forcibly willed the recurring images of her death to stop, the voice that commanded her to move on and ignore Q’s request sounded again.
This isn’t right.
“I don’t think I should be,” Kathryn admitted softly.
Chakotay stepped in front of her and took her hands. “I do,” he said firmly. “I don’t know what you saw, or felt, or learned from the Q. You said that the first time you encountered this thing, you managed to contain it. That’s why Junior wanted you here, so you could figure out how to do it again. If that goes against the will of the universe or the multiverse or whatever allowed you to die, along with the sixty-three billion the Borg annihilated on their way to perfection, I don’t care.”
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