Star Trek: The Q Continuum (11 page)

“Yes, Commander,” Data said, scanning the readouts at Ops. From the captain’s chair, Riker could see a string of numerals rushing across Data’s console faster than a human eye could follow. “The tachyon barrage emitted by the Calamarain has increased by several hundred orders of magnitude. The intensity of the tachyon collisions is now more than sufficient to fatally damage both the ship and its inhabitants if not for the protection afforded by our deflectors.”

“I see,” Riker said, none too surprised. The Calamarain had demonstrated the potency of their offensive capabilities the last time they ran afoul of the
Enterprise.
“Mr. La Forge, are our shields holding?”

“For now,” Geordi affirmed, “but we can’t maintain the deflectors at this level forever.”

“How long can we keep them up?” Riker asked. He watched the luminous plasma coursing across the screen, the iridescent hues swirling like a kaleidoscope.
It’s strangely beautiful,
Riker reflected, regretting once more that humanity and the Calamarain had to meet as adversaries.

“Exactly?” Geordi said. “That depends on what they throw at us.” The circuit patterns upon his implants rotated as he focused on his engineering display. “If they keep up the pressure at this intensity, the shields should be able to withstand it for about five hours. Four, if you want to play it safe.”

Good,
Riker thought. At least they had time to get their bearings and decide on a strategy. He didn’t intend to stay a sitting duck much longer, but it might be in this instance that a judicious retreat was the better part of valor. There was too much unknown about both the Calamarains’ motives and their abilities for him to feel comfortable committing the
Enterprise
to an all-out armed conflict. And as for their mission, and Professor Faal’s experiment…well, that was looking more unlikely by the moment.

“I can do more from Engineering,” Geordi offered. “Permission to leave the bridge?”

“Go to it, Mr. La Forge,” Riker said crisply as Geordi headed for the turbolift. He looked at Troi and saw that the counselor still had her eyes closed, a look of intense, almost trancelike concentration upon her face. “Deanna?” he asked quietly, not wanting to jar her from her heightened state of sensitivity.

“They’re all around us,” Troi answered, slowly opening her eyes. “Surrounding us, containing us, confining us. I’m sensing great anger and frustration from every direction, but that’s not all. Beneath everything, behind the rage, is a terrible fear. They’re desperately afraid of something I can’t even begin to guess at.”

“How typically vague and ominous,” the female Q said from the bleachers, rolling her eyes, to the amusement of her offspring. “Perhaps, young lady, you’d get better results with tea leaves.”

“Never mind her,” Riker said to Troi. “Thank you, Deanna.” He tried to interpret her impressions, but too much remained unknown. How could such powerful entities, capable of thriving in the deadly vacuum of space, possibly be afraid of the
Enterprise?
The very idea seemed laughable, especially when a much more probable suspect sat only a few meters away.

He spun his chair around to confront the anachronistic wooden bleachers and the incongruous duo resting upon them. Riker inspected the female Q. She was an attractive woman, he noted, more so than Q deserved, in his opinion. Remarkably tall, too; it wasn’t often Riker met women who were the same height as he, but the individual standing in front of him met his gaze at near eye-level.
She looks almost as imposing as a Klingon woman,
he thought.
Although I guess an omnipotent being can be as tall as she wants.

“You,” he accused. “Are you at the heart of this business? Are the Calamarain afraid of you?”

“Me?” the woman asked. She added ketchup to a hot dog that had not existed a heartbeat before. Neither had the ketchup, for that matter.

“Yes,” Riker answered. “The Calamarain tried to kill your husband before. Is it you they fear?”

“They should,” she said darkly, then assumed a more chipper expression, “but I’m in a forgiving mood today. No, First Officer, that’s not it; the Calamarain have far more to worry about than me and little q these days.”

“What do you mean?” Riker demanded. He didn’t get the impression the woman was dissembling, unlike the original Q, who always came off as about as sincere as a Ferengi used-shuttle salesman, but who could tell with a Q? As he understood it, this wasn’t even her true appearance. “Explain yourself.”

The little q reached for his mother’s hat, so the female Q amused him by trading their headwear with a snap of her fingers. The oversized hat looked ridiculous on the child’s small head, but q giggled happily, his face all but concealed by the drooping brim of the hat.

“About the Calamarain,” Riker prompted firmly. Even with their shields defending them from the Calamarain’s lethal tachyons, he had no desire to linger in their grasp any longer than necessary. This Q could play the doting mother on her own time. “I’m still waiting for an explanation.”

“Such a one-track mind,” the Q sighed. “Q is right. You creatures really do need to learn how to stop and smell the nebulas now and again.” She tapped the child-sized baseball cap upon her head and it expanded to fit more comfortably. “I’m sure if my husband wanted you to understand about the Calamarain and their selfish grievances, he would have explained it all to you. Mind you, I don’t blame him for keeping mum where this whole business is concerned. Kind of an embarrassing anecdote, especially since it was all his fault in the first place.”

What in blazes does she mean by that?
Riker briefly wished that he had hung on to the supernatural powers Q had granted him years ago, just so he could threaten to kick this other Q off the ship if she didn’t start giving him straight answers. “Embarrassing?” he said with deeply felt indignation. “Your husband kidnapped our captain. For all I know, he sicced the Calamarain on us, too. I call that more than ‘embarrassing’ and I want to know what you intend to do about it, starting with telling us just where Q has taken Captain Picard.”

The female Q peered down her nose at Riker. “I’m not sure I approve of your tone,” she said icily, placing her hands over baby q’s ears. The child, curious, grew a new pair of velvety silver bunny ears out of the top of his scalp, foiling his mother’s well-intentioned efforts.

“I don’t want your approval,” Riker said. The hum of the Calamarain buzzed in his ears, reminding him that he had more important things to do than waste his breath trying to reason with a Q. “I want you to lend a hand, answer my questions, or get off the bridge.”

His harsh tone got through to little q, whose childish grin crumpled into tears and sobs. The mother fixed a chilly stare on Riker, who felt his life expectancy shrinking at a geometrical rate. “Well, if that’s how you’re going to be,” she huffed. Without another word, she disappeared from the bridge, taking little q and the bleachers with her.

Well, that’s something,
he thought, thankful that members of the Q Continuum tended to leave as unexpectedly as they arrived.
For indestructible, immortal beings, they sure seem pretty thin-skinned.
He swiveled his chair around to face the prow of the bridge. On the main viewer, he saw a portion of the Calamarain, its iridescent substance drifting past the window like some lifeless chemical vapor. The roiling gases outside the ship looked more agitated than before. The rainbow colors darkened, the separate fumes clumping together in heavy, swollen accumulations that promised an approaching storm. Flickers of bright electricity leaped from billow to billow, sparking like bursts of lightning through the all-encompassing cloud. Riker felt like they were trapped inside the galaxy’s biggest thunderhead. “Deflectors?” he asked, wanting a status report.

“Shields holding,” Leyoro informed him, “although I’m detecting an increase in harmful tachyon radiation.”

“That is correct,” Data confirmed from Ops. “The Calamarain have rapidly raised the intensity of the emissions directed against the ship, possibly in an attempt to penetrate our defenses.” He peered intently at the display at his console. “By placing further pressure upon our shields, the amplified nature of the Calamarain’s attack reduces our safety factor by 1.531 hours.”

“Understood,” Riker said, “but we’re not going to stick around that long.” The captain was missing. The ship was under attack. A prudent departure was definitely in order, he judged. He knew he did not need to worry about leaving the captain behind; Q could find the
Enterprise
anywhere in the universe if he felt so inclined. It seemed a shame to turn tail and run when all they had managed to do so far was misplace Jean-Luc Picard, but there was no compelling reason to continue the experiment in the face of an enemy; it was a pure research assignment after all. The barrier had been around for billions of years. It could wait a little longer. “Mr. Clarze, prepare to go to warp.”

“Commander,” Lieutenant Leyoro pointed out, “we haven’t even tried to strike back at the Calamarain yet. Perhaps we can drive them away with our phasers?”

Riker shook his head. “There’s no reason to get into a shooting war, not if we can simply turn around. For all we know, the Calamarain may have legitimate interests in this region of space.” He saw Deanna nod in agreement. “Take us out of here, Mr. Clarze.”

“Yes, sir,” the young Deltan said from the conn, entering the appropriate coordinates into the helm controls. Riker noted a light sheen of perspiration upon the pilot’s domed skull; he’d probably never been caught inside a sentient cloud before.
Could be worse,
Riker thought. According to the history tapes, Kirk’s
Enterprise
had once been swallowed by a giant space amoeba. “Heading?” Clarze asked.

“The nearest starbase,” Riker said, “to report our findings.”
Too bad we never got the chance to take on the galactic barrier,
he thought. Still, no experiment was worth risking the
Enterprise,
especially with civilians and children aboard. Starfleet would have to challenge the barrier another day, with or without Professor Faal. It was tragic that the dying scientist had to be thwarted this close to the completion of his final experiment, but the Calamarain had given them no other choice. Who knows? Maybe someday they might even get another chance to establish genuine contact with the Calamarain.

At the moment, though, he found himself more worried about the fact that the viewscreen still held the image of the Calamarain despite his order to go to warp. “Mr. Clarze?”

“I’m trying, Commander!” Clarze blurted, jabbing at the control panel with his fingers. “But something’s wrong with the warp engines. I can’t get them to engage.”

“What?” Riker reacted. If the warp engines were down, the
Enterprise
was in serious trouble. He knew from experience that they could not outrun the Calamarain on impulse alone. He glanced over his shoulder at the crew member manning the aft science station. “Mr. Schultz, what’s our engine status?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” Ensign Robert Schultz said, peering anxiously at the monitors and display panels at the aft engineering station. “The warp core is still on-line and the plasma injectors seem to be functioning properly, but somehow the warp field coils are not generating the necessary propulsive effect. I can’t figure out why.”

“That’s not good enough,” Riker said. Hoping that Geordi had already made it back to Engineering, he tapped his comm badge. “Geordi, this is Riker. What the devil is going on down there?”

“I wish I could tell you,” the chief engineer’s voice answered, confirming the speed and efficacy of the ship’s turbolifts. “We can initiate the pulse frequency in the plasma, no problem, but something’s damping the warp field layers, keeping our energy levels below eight hundred millicochranes, tops. We need at least a thousand to surpass lightspeed.”

“Understood,” Riker acknowledged, remembering basic warp theory. He glanced at Data, wondering if he should pull the android off Ops and send him to assist Geordi in Engineering.
Not unless I absolutely have to,
he decided. “What about the impulse drive?”

“That’s still up and running,” Geordi stated, “at least for now.”

That’s something, I suppose,
Riker thought, although what he really needed was warp capacity. “Anything you can do to fix the field coils in a hurry?”

“I can run a systems-wide diagnostic,” Geordi suggested, “but that’s going to take a while. Plus, I’ve already got half my teams working overtime to maintain the deflectors.”

In the meantime, we’re stuck here,
Riker thought,
with our shields failing and the Calamarain at the door.
“Do what you can, Mr. La Forge.” He clenched his fists angrily, frustrated by this latest turn of affairs. It seemed retreat was no longer an option, at least not at present. They might have to fight their way out after all. A strategic notion occurred to him, and he reopened the line to La Forge. “Geordi, have an engineering officer look at the remains of the probe the Calamarain attacked. I want to find out as much as we can about their modes of attack.”

“You got it,” Geordi promised. “I’ll put Barclay on it right away.”

Riker experienced a momentary qualm when Reg Barclay’s name was mentioned. Deanna insisted that Barclay was making substantial progress, and certainly the man had come in useful when they had to repair Zefram Cochrane’s primitive warp vessel back in 2063, but even still…Then again, it dawned on him, analyzing the probe was probably less stressful under the circumstances than working on the shields or engines, so the probe and Barclay made a good fit.
I should never have doubted Geordi’s work assignments,
he thought.
He knows exactly what his people are capable of.

Just as Riker knew what a certain android officer could do when the chips were down. “Mr. Data, since we can’t get away from the Calamarain, we need to find out what they want. I want you to give top priority to establishing communication with the Calamarain. Perhaps our sensor readings can give you what you need to bring the Universal Translator up to speed. Work with Counselor Troi, if you think she can help. Maybe her nonverbal impressions can provide you with the clue you need to crack their language.”