Star Trek: The Q Continuum (7 page)

“Overdosing on testosterone again, Number One,” he asked, not budging a centimeter, “or are you merely picking up the slack now that everyone’s favorite atavism, the redoubtable Worf, is gone?”

“I’m warning you, Q,” Riker said with emphasis. Picard admired his first officer’s nerve. Q had them hopelessly outmatched in raw power, but maybe Riker could prevail through sheer force of personality. Stranger things had happened.

“Oh, very well,” Q grumbled, rising from the chair. Riker nodded at Ensign Clarze, who gulped once, then resumed his place at the conn. “I hardly wanted to steer this pokey hulk for the rest of eternity.” He gave Riker a disgusted look. “I can’t believe I ever saw fit to offer you the powers of a Q.”

That piqued the other Q’s interest. “This is the one?” she asked, her mysterious grudge against Q and Guinan forgotten for the moment. She walked over and circled Riker, then placed her hand over her mouth and tried, not very successfully, to keep from laughing. The baby q mimicked his mother’s merriment. “Well, that would have certainly shaken up the Continuum. Small wonder they stripped you of your powers after that.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said sullenly. Caught up in their quarrel, neither Q seemed to notice as the
Enterprise
returned to its previous heading. Picard thanked providence for small favors, but his frown deepened as his gaze fell upon the frozen form of Data. The android officer remained immobile, his mouth open in silent reply to his captain’s inquiry.

“Q!” he barked, unwilling to let his first officer take on all the risks of defying Q.

“Yes?” the two elder Qs replied simultaneously.

Picard felt a headache coming on. “You,” he specified, pointing at his longtime nemesis. “Restore Mr. Data immediately.”

That Q glanced impatiently at the inert android, as though Data were a minor annoyance already dismissed from his mind. “Priorities please, Jean-Luc. We still haven’t settled this matter of the barrier.”

“Might I remind you, Q,” Picard observed, “that Mr. Data once saved your life, at considerable risk to his own existence.”

For once, Q looked vaguely taken aback. He gazed back at the android with a chastened expression. “But surely,” he blustered, “I have repaid that debt many times over with my invaluable services to this vessel.”

“Reasonable people might dispute that point,” Picard said dryly. He lifted his eyes to espy the female Q and her child. “Your family is here, Q. Is this really the example you wish to set for them?”

Q peeked back over his shoulder at the woman and the boy. His wife raised a curious eyebrow. The child sucked on his thumb, watching Q with awe and adoration.

“Fine!” he said indignantly. He pantomimed a pistol with his thumb and index finger and pointed it at Data’s head. “Bang.”

“—tenant,” Data finished, coming back to life. He paused and assumed a contemplative expression. “How unusual. There appears to be a discrepancy between my internal chronometer and the ship’s computer.” He surveyed the bridge until his gaze fell upon the party of Qs. “May I assume that one of our visitors is responsible?”

“Precisely so,” Picard confirmed, relieved that Data appeared to be back to normal. “Now then, Mr. Data, you were about to inform Mr. La Forge of the status of a particular computer program.”

“Really, Jean-Luc!” Q complained, storming up to the command area. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were beginning to take me for granted.” He shook a warning finger at Picard. “You really shouldn’t do that, you know. You’re not the only Starfleet captain I can bestow my attentions on, in this or any other quadrant.”

What does he mean by that?
Picard wondered, although he was far more concerned with the report from Data that Q seemed so determined to postpone. “I’m sure Captain Sisko would welcome a second round of fisticuffs,” he told Q, then turned his attention back to Data. “Please proceed with your report.”

Data eyed Q curiously, waiting for a second to see if the impertinent entity would interrupt him a third time, but Q seemed to have given up for the present. Q leaned sideways against a nonexistent pillar, looking rather like a gravity-defying mime, and pouted silently.

“It appears that the program is showing a degree of calibration drift,” Data stated. “It is possible that an unknown fraction of the data may have been lost during the start-up routine.”

Picard paid little attention to the specifics of the problem, which Data and Geordi were surely capable of resolving, but found it eminently reassuring to hear the business of the ship proceeding despite the presence of their unwanted visitors. Displaying a similar hope that order had been restored, Riker took his place at the starboard auxiliary command station.

“Well,” Geordi replied to Data, “that explains the eight percent falloff in AFR ratios I keep seeing.” His artificial eyes zeroed in on the engineering monitor as he scratched his head. “There must be a problem in the diagnostic subroutines. Maybe we need to completely recalibrate.”

“Captain,” Leyoro spoke up, her face grim, “I have to protest any discussion of a top-secret mission in front of these unauthorized civilians.” She eyed the Q trio dubiously. “All details of a technological nature are strictly classified.”

“As if we would have any interest in your pathetic little scientific secrets,” Q said scornfully. “You might as well try to hide from us the secret of fire. Or maybe the wheel.”

“Wheel!” the baby q chirped, and began rotating slowly above the floor until his mother set him upright again. Thankfully, he was not inspired to summon fire.

“Your point is well taken, Lieutenant,” Picard said, sympathizing with Leyoro’s concerns; on one level, it felt more than a little strange to be conducting this discussion in front of a party of intruders. “But I’m afraid that Q is correct in this instance. Realistically, it is doubtful that the Federation possesses any technological secrets that the Q Continuum could possibly covet.” Besides, he admitted silently, there was little point in concealing their efforts; Q had proved time and time again that he was supremely capable of spying on them regardless of the time or place. “You may proceed with your work, gentlemen.”

“Must they?” Q asked peevishly. “It’s all academic anyway. There isn’t going to be an experiment.”

Geordi did his best to ignore Q. “Now I’m getting a drop-off in the triple-R output,” he informed Data. “We might have a bigger problem than the diagnostic subroutines.”

“Possibly,” Data conceded, “but it could simply be a transtator failure. That would also be consistent with calibration errors of this nature.”

“And so on and so on,” Q broke in, his voice dripping with boredom. He righted himself until he was perpendicular to the floor once more. “Are you done yet? We have infinitely more important matters to get back to.”

Q’s offspring, Picard noted, no matter how young he might actually be, seemed to possess a greater reserve of patience than his egomaniacal father. “Mr. Data,” he said, “I do not pretend to be intimately acquainted with the finer points of Professor Faal’s computer programs. Do you anticipate any difficulties working out these problems prior to our arrival at the barrier?”

“No, sir,” Data said. Fortunately, the android did not require sleep like the rest of them, although Data often chose to simulate a dormant state in order to further his exploration of humanity, so Picard had no doubt that Data would work through the night if necessary.

Q yawned, and not from fatigue. “Are we quite through with this dreary business?” he inquired. A nervous-looking Ensign Clarze, who was surely less than eager to be teleported away from his post again, kept his eyes determinedly focused on the screen ahead of him even as Q ambled back to the conn. “Then can I finally prevail upon you to abandon this monumentally misguided exercise? Leave the barrier alone. It is not for the likes of you to tamper with.”

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was simply that he had reached his limit, but Picard had suddenly had enough of Q’s perpetual snideness and high-handed pronouncements. “Get this straight, Q. I take my orders from Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, not from the Q Continuum and most especially not from you!”

Q recoiled from Picard’s vehemence. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the Borg this morning,” he sniffed. He raised his eyes unto heaven and struck a martyred pose. “Forgive him, Q, for he knows not what he says. I try to enlighten these poor mortals but their eyes are blind and their ears are deaf to my abundant wisdom.” He shrugged his shoulders, dropped his arms to his sides, and turned to his mate. “Honeybunch, you talk to him. Tell him I know what I’m talking about.”

The female Q was busy wiping her son’s nose, but she looked up long enough to fix her brown eyes on Picard and say, “He knows what he’s talking about, Captain.” She returned to her son and muttered under her breath, “If only he didn’t.”

“Big wall!” the toddler interjected, adding his own two cents’ worth. “Bad! Bad!” He stamped his tiny foot on the floor and the entire bridge lurched to starboard. Picard grabbed on to his armrests to keep from being thrown from the chair. Data padds and other loose instruments clattered to the floor. Riker stumbled forward, but managed to keep his footing. Baeta Leyoro swore under her breath and shot a murderous glare at Q and his family. Yellow alert lights flashed on automatically all around the bridge. An alarm sounded.

“Now, now,” the female Q cooed to her son. “Be gentle with the little spaceship. You don’t want to break it.” She patted the child on the head and he looked down at his feet sheepishly. Picard felt the
Enterprise
’s flight path stabilize.

He silenced the alarm and ended the yellow alert by pressing a control on his armrest. Although the crisis seemed to have passed, he was unnerved by this demonstration of the baby’s abilities. Suppose the child threw a real tantrum? Not even the entire fleet might be able to save them. “Q,” he began, addressing the male of the species, “perhaps there is a more suitable location for your son? Children do not belong on the bridge,” he said quite sincerely.

“Really?” Q asked. “You gave that insufferable Wesley the run of the place as I recall.” He stood on his tiptoes and peered over everyone’s heads, as if expecting to find young Wesley Crusher hidden behind a console. Then he lowered his soles to the floor and considered his son. Little q held on to his mother’s leg while watching the viewscreen through droopy eyelids. “Still, you may have a point,” Q told Picard. “He is looking a trifle bored.”

“———?” he said to his wife in a language that bore no resemblance to any tongue Picard had ever heard before, one so inhuman that even the Universal Translator was stumped.

“———,” she replied.

An instant later, the baby disappeared. Picard felt an incalculable sense of danger averted until a new suspicion entered his mind. “Q,” he asked warily, “where exactly did the child go?”

Q acted surprised by the question. “Why, Jean-Luc, I understand the
Enterprise
has excellent child-care facilities.”

He and the other Q vanished from sight.

Although entire families no longer lived permanently on the
Starship Enterprise,
Holodeck B could be converted into a children’s center to accommodate the offspring of the various diplomats, delegations, and refugees who often traveled aboard the ship. During such times, the holographic center was kept open twenty-four hours a day, to handle the varying circadian rhythms of each alien race as well as to allow for emergency situations. Since alien encounters and other crises could hardly be expected to occur only during school hours, there had to be some place where any mothers and fathers aboard the ship could safely stow their children during, say, a surprise Romulan attack. The last thing anyone wanted was visiting scientists or ambassadors who were unable to assist in an emergency because they couldn’t find a babysitter.

Ensign Percy Whitman, age twenty-five, didn’t mind working the graveyard shift at the children’s center. The Faal children were still living on Betazed time, according to which it was roughly the middle of the afternoon, but they seemed well behaved and remarkably quiet.
That’s the nice thing about telepathic kids,
he thought.
They can talk among themselves without disturbing anyone else.
All of which gave him more time to compose his work-in-progress, a holonovel about a sensitive young artist who works nights at a kindergarten for nocturnal Heptarians until he is recruited by Starfleet Intelligence to infiltrate the Klingon High Command.

Tonight the writing was going unusually well. He was already up to Chapter Seven, where the hero, Whip Parsi, fights a duel to the death with the treacherous heir to a hopelessly corrupt Klingon household. “His mighty
bat’leth
sliced through the sultry night air, keening a song of vengeance, as Whip struck back with all the skill and fury of one born to battle,” he keyed into the padd on his desk.
Yeah,
he thought, transfixed by his own output,
that’s great stuff.
He’d work out the holographic animation later.

A squeal of high-pitched laughter yanked him away from his gripping saga. He looked up from the padd to check on his charges. Everything seemed in order: the two smaller children, roughly two years old in human terms, played happily on the carpeted floor, stacking sturdy durafoam blocks into lopsided piles that inevitably toppled over, while their eleven-year-old brother played a computer game in one of the cubicles at the back of the room. Childish watercolor paintings of stars and planets decorated the walls.

Another meter-high tower of multicolored blocks collapsed into rubble and the toddlers squealed once more.
Nothing to be alarmed about here,
Whitman thought. He started to go back to his masterpiece-in-the-making, then paused and scratched his head. Say, hadn’t there been only
one
little tyke before?

He put aside his personal padd and checked the attendance display on the center’s terminal.
Let’s see…
Kinya and Milo Faal. That was one all right, a little Betazoid girl and her older brother. He stood up behind the desk and checked out the smaller children again.

The girl was easy to identify. Her blond curls and striking Betazoid eyes distinguished her from the other gleeful youngster. But where had that child, a brown-haired boy in a white sailor’s costume, come from? Had someone dropped off another kid without him noticing? He wasn’t aware of any other children visiting the ship, but he was only an ensign; no one told him anything.

Could this be some sort of test or surprise inspection? Maybe the new kid wasn’t really here at all but was just a holographic image that had appeared from nowhere while he wasn’t looking. He checked out the holographic control display embedded into his desk, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

“Milo?” he called out. Perhaps the eleven-year-old had noticed something. “Did you see anybody come by in the last half hour or so?”

“Uh-uh,” Milo grunted rather sullenly, never looking away from his computer game. Whitman suspected that Milo thought he was much too old for the children’s center and was taking it out on the babysitter.

“Are you sure?” Whitman asked. It just didn’t make any sense. How could there be an extra kid?

“Uh-huh,” Milo said, extremely uninterested in anything any grown-up had to say. On the terminal before him, several invading Tholian warships bit the dust in a computer-generated blaze of glory.

Whitman closed his eyes and massaged his temples, growing increasingly agitated by this uncrackable dilemma. The way he saw it, there was no way he could ask anyone for an explanation without looking like a careless and incompetent idiot. His stomach began to churn unhappily.
Maybe if I just keep my eyes shut,
he thought desperately,
and count to ten, everything will go back to normal and I’ll have the right number of kids again.

It was a ridiculous, pathetic fantasy, but it made as much sense as what had already happened so far. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted slowly under his breath. He swallowed hard, then opened his eyes.

Only one toddler sat on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling with unrestrained wonder. Whitman couldn’t believe his luck, until he noticed the wobbly stack of blocks rising up in front of him. He craned his neck back and followed the tower of blocks to its top—where he saw the other child, the one in the sailor suit, teetering at the top of an impossibly tall block pile that reached above Whitman’s head. The boy’s unruly brown hair brushed the ceiling and he giggled happily, completely unfrightened by his precarious perch. The other child clapped her tiny hands together, cheering him on.

“Oh…my…God,” Whitman gasped, unable to believe his eyes. Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, afraid to exhale for fear of bringing down the tower of brightly colored blocks. Across the room, Milo, intent on his one-man war against the Tholian marauders, was oblivious of the miracle.

The baby reached out his hand and two more blocks lifted off the floor and drifted upward into his waiting fingers. Whitman rubbed his eyes and struggled to figure out what was happening. Had something gone wrong with the artificial gravity? Could this be some bizarre holographic malfunction? Stranger things had been known to happen; he’d heard a few horror stories about near-fatal accidents within the old
Enterprise
’s holodecks, like that time a holographic Moriarty had almost taken over the ship. Or when Counselor Troi was nearly gunned down during a Western scenario.

Whitman picked up his padd and dropped it over the desk. The padd fell straight down, just like it was supposed to, so the gravity was working fine. But how then had the little boy managed to erect such a ridiculous structure?

He cautiously snuck out from behind the desk, arms outstretched to catch the teetering toddler if and when he plummeted to the floor. He had to fall soon, Whitman told himself. The ramshackle pile of blocks looked like an avalanche waiting to happen. It could collapse at any second. When it did, would he be able to grab the kid before he crashed to the ground? What would Whip Parsi do at a time like this? He hit the medical emergency alert button, summoning help in advance of the ghastly plunge that was sure to come.

The child continued to stack his blocks. Having run out of room between himself and the roof, the boy blithely turned himself upside down and crawled out onto the ceiling. He began lining up his new blocks in a row across the length of the ceiling while he hung there effortlessly like a fly upon a wall. “Choo-choo!” he burbled.

Whitman suddenly felt very silly holding his arms out.
A gravity screwup,
he thought.
It has to be.
Never mind that he still didn’t know how this kid got here in the first place. He was about to contact Engineering when the door whished open and Counselor Troi rushed in. Her hair was disheveled and she looked like she’d come straight from bed, pausing only to throw on a fresh uniform.

“Gee, you’re fast,” Whitman said, remembering his medical alert from mere moments ago.

“The captain sent me,” she explained.

“No security team?” Baeta Leyoro asked, sounding both incredulous and offended.

“That is correct, Lieutenant,” Picard confirmed. “I believe that Counselor Troi is better suited to handle this situation.” If the infant q had indeed been deposited in the holographic children’s center, then Deanna’s empathic skills and training were more likely to keep the child under control than a squadron of phaser-wielding security officers, assuming that any of them had even a prayer of stopping q from wreaking havoc aboard the ship.
This is all Q’s fault,
he thought angrily.
He simply can’t resist making my life difficult.

Leyoro fumed visibly. The dark-haired security chief abandoned her station at tactical and marched into the command area to face Picard. “Permission to speak frankly, sir?” she requested. Her eyes blazed like a warp-core explosion.

“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he said. With Q and his mate absent for the time being, there might be no better time to hear what Leyoro had to say. Will Riker paid close attention to the irate officer as well, while the rest of the crew carried on with their work, no doubt listening attentively.

She stood stiffly in front of him, her hands clasped behind her back. “With all due respect, sir, I cannot do my job effectively if you keep countermanding my recommendations. If you have no faith in me as your head of security, then perhaps you should find someone else.”

Just for a second, Picard wished that Worf had never accepted that post at Deep Space Nine. “Your service record is exemplary,” he told her, “and I have a great deal of confidence in you. However, dealing with Q, any Q, is a unique situation that calls for unorthodox approaches, like sending a counselor in place of a security team.”

“I believe I am accustomed to coping with unexpected circumstances,” she maintained. “In the past, I have smuggled defectors across the Neutral Zone in an uncloaked ship, rescued political prisoners from a maximum-security Tarsian slave labor camp, and even repelled a Maquis raid with nothing more than a single shuttlecraft and a malfunctioning photon torpedo.”

Having thoroughly examined Leyoro’s file before granting her the post of security chief, Picard knew that she was not exaggerating in the slightest. If anything, she was understating her somewhat colorful (and faintly notorious) history.
Not to mention rebelling against her own government when the Angosian soldiers escaped from that lunar prison colony,
he thought.

Still.

“Despite your varied accomplishments,” he insisted, “a Q is unlike any threat that you could have encountered before. Force and shows of force can accomplish nothing where a Q is concerned.” He hoped Leyoro would understand what he was saying and not take the matter personally. “This is not about you or your capabilities, but about what a Q can do. Namely, anything.”

Leyoro appeared mollified. She relaxed her stance and stopped radiating anger. The furnace in her eyes cooled to a smolder. “So,” she asked, “how do you deal with an entity like Q?”

“Lieutenant,” he answered, “I’ve been trying to figure that out for a good ten years now.”

Beverly Crusher arrived at Holodeck B only minutes after Troi. Not that any of them really needed to have hurried. The baby q looked quite content to play with his blocks up on the ceiling. Watching him was a disorienting, vaguely vertiginous experience. Troi kept glancing down at the floor to make sure that she wasn’t simply looking at a reflection in a mirrored ceiling.

She wasn’t.

“Now what do we do?” she asked aloud. “Send a shuttle up there to fetch him?”

“I may have a better idea,” Beverly answered, “but first let’s get the rest of these kids out of here.” At the doctor’s suggestion, Percy Whitman began corralling the little Faal girl and herding her toward the door. Troi felt sorry for the poor ensign; she could sense his anxiety and confusion. She had attempted to explain to him quickly about Q and Q and q, but he remained as rattled as before.

“Percy,” she whispered as he passed by. “Feel free to drop by my office later if you want to talk about this.”

He nodded weakly and gave the tiny Betazoid girl a pat on the back to keep her moving. Enthralled by the astounding spectacle of her peer’s visit to the ceiling, the other toddler was not very eager to leave. She started crying, but Percy ssshed her effectively and led her out the door. Sitting upside down above everyone’s heads, merrily stringing his blocks across the ceiling, q did not notice his playmate being escorted away. Troi breathed a little easier when the youngest of Professor Faal’s children disappeared into the corridor. She had summoned Faal himself to the holodeck, but the scientist could just as easily claim the children outside the chamber, safely away from the baby q’s unpredictable activities.

That left only the eleven-year-old at the computer terminal.
Milo,
she recalled from Lem Faal’s personal files. She began to inch her way along the edge of the chamber, hoping to sneak the older boy out without attracting q’s attention. “Milo,” she called in a hushed tone. “Milo?”

Caught up in his game, he had not yet observed any of the oddities taking place nearby, nor did he hear her call his name. Troi admired the intensity of his focus even as she wished that he would lift up his head from the screen for just one moment. She had no idea what the baby q might do to another child if provoked, but she didn’t want to find out.

The door to the holodeck was sliding shut behind Ensign Whitman when Lem Faal stormed into the simulated child-care center. His thinning hair was disordered and a heavy Betazoid robe, made of thick, quilted beige fabric, was belted at his waist. “What’s this all about?” he said irritably, sounding as if he had been unpleasantly roused from sleep. “What’s going on with my children? First, I got an urgent call, then that strange young man out there”—he gestured toward the corridor—“said something about an upside-down baby?” Beverly tried to shush Faal, fearing he’d startle q, but the scientist spotted the child upon the ceiling first. “By the Sacred Chalice,” he whispered, taken aback. His red-rimmed eyes widened. His mouth fell open and he gasped for breath.