Star Trek: The Q Continuum (15 page)

“Says the man who was nearly expelled from Starfleet Academy—twice,” Q replied. “And we’re not done yet.” He flipped over the hourglass once more, reversing the flow of sand. “This was only the beginning.”

There’s more?
Picard thought. How much longer did Q intend to keep him away from his ship? “No more,” he began to protest, but his angry words were swallowed up by another flash of supernatural light, leaving the quarks to continue alone their endless and invisible pavanes.

He was on his way again—to only Q knew where.

Lieutenant Reginald Barclay did his best to ignore the ceaseless hum of the Calamarain as he inspected the battered probe, but that was easier said than done. He was all too aware that the steady drone in the background emanated from the same entities, called the Calamarain according to Chief La Forge, that had inflicted the damage he was now evaluating. If they could do this to the molded duranium-tritanium casing, what could they do to ordinary human flesh and blood?

Barclay shuddered, glad that no one was present to witness his attack of nerves. Sometimes his imagination was just a little too vivid for his own peace of mind, even if Counselor Troi tried occasionally to convince him that his rich imagination could be a source of strength rather than a liability, provided he managed to control it rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, that was about the only eventuality he couldn’t imagine.

And who wouldn’t be worried, now that the captain was missing, too? Abducted by Q, from what Chief La Forge said. Barclay had a great deal of faith in Captain Picard’s ability to keep the ship intact despite the numerous—too numerous, as far as Barclay was concerned—hazards encountered in deep space, but how could the captain extricate them from this crisis if he wasn’t even aboard? It was enough to make even a Klingon nervous…maybe.

The probe, plucked from the Calamarain’s grasp moments before its imminent destruction, rested on the floor of Transporter Room Five. Approximately four meters in length, it was a conical, metallic object with a bulbous, multifaceted head constructed of triple-layered transparent aluminum. The matte black finish of the probe was scorched and dented while the once-transparent head, resembling the eye of an enormous insect, appeared to have been partially melted by whatever forces had assailed the probe. The formerly clear sensor windows had clouded over, turning opaque and milky. A fissure along the right side of the cone revealed a sliver of charred circuitry beneath the ruptured hull.

A full-color, three-dimensional picture of a similar crevice opening up along the length of the
Enterprise
itself forced its way into Barclay’s mind, but he pushed it away as fast as he could.
That’s the way,
he told himself.
Just focus on the job.
He scanned the probe with his tricorder, detecting no significant residual radiation, before gingerly laying his hands on the blasted surface of the mechanism. To his surprise, it felt slightly warm to the touch, despite having been beamed in straight from the cold of interstellar space. He consulted his tricorder again and observed that the metals composing the hull remained agitated at an atomic level, although the degree of ionic activity was swiftly falling off as the disrupted matter restabilized. He recorded the data into the memory of the tricorder and charted its progress for several seconds. The forced acceleration of the atoms within the alloy, along with the resulting stresses of its molecular bonds, were consistent with the sort of tachyon overload La Forge had suggested he look out for. Tachyons definitely seemed to be the Calamarain’s weapons of choice, but what kind of harm could they impose on Federation technology, not to mention innocent Starfleet officers?

Convinced that he had learned as much as he could from the torn and toasted exterior of the probe, he proceeded to the next stage of the autopsy, wincing slightly at the more alarming connotations of that term. First, he confirmed that the deuterium microfusion propulsion unit at the rear of the probe was indeed deactivated; fortunately, class-2 sensor probes were not equipped with warp capacity, so he didn’t have to worry about any loose particles of antimatter poking a hole into reality as he knew it. Next, using a delicate phaser scalpel, he peeled off a section of the burnt outer casing, exposing the intricate navigational and sensory apparatuses within.

The probe’s innards did not look much better than its supposedly protective sheath. Most of the circuitry was fused and useless now. Still, he chipped the carbon scoring away from one of the output ports and plugged a palm-sized data-retrieval unit into the central memory processor in hope of rescuing whatever scraps of information might have survived the tachyon barrage.
There’s probably not much left,
he thought glumly,
but here goes nothing.

Unexpectedly, the retrieval unit whirred to life at once and began humming almost as loudly as the Calamarain themselves. “Hey!” he said out loud to the empty transporter room. Maybe the internal damage wasn’t as bad as it looked.

He waited until the unit had recorded all available data onto an isolinear chip, then began dissecting the entire mechanism, methodically extracting the coprocessors one at a time, scanning every component with his tricorder to record the extent of the damage (if any), then moving on to the next one. It was slow, laborious work and Barclay soon found himself wishing that Chief La Forge had been able to spare another engineer to assist him at the task.

Not that he was all too eager to return to Engineering, not while there was still a chance he might run into Lem Faal again. That distinguished and ever-so-intimidating scientist still gave him dirty looks every time Barclay had to come by Faal’s temporary workstation to check with Mr. La Forge about something or another.
I can’t believe I almost wrecked the pulse generator,
he thought, reliving those awful, endless seconds for the one thousandth time. His cheek still burned where Faal
almost
hit him. Barclay knew that he had completely thrown away any chance he had of taking part in the historic experiment, even assuming the Calamarain let the operation proceed as planned.
Another wasted opportunity,
he thought, the latest in a long string of self-administered wounds to his Starfleet aspirations. Counselor Troi insisted that his reputation among his peers wasn’t nearly as bad as he feared, but sometimes he wondered if she was just being nice.

At times like this, he thought, his mind wandering somewhat, it was very tempting to sneak away to the nearest holodeck and escape from the stress and humiliations of the real world. Perhaps he could relive some of his greatest holovictories, like defeating Baron Diabolis in Chapter Twenty-Three of
The Quest for the Golden Throne
or outwitting Commander Kruge before the Genesis Planet completely self-destructed. The latter was one of his proudest moments; after seventythree tries, he’d actually managed to save Spock without sacrificing the original
Enterprise,
which was even better than the real Kirk had been able to do. Perhaps next time he could save David Marcus, too….

No,
he thought, shaking his head to clear his mind of past and future fantasies. He had worked too hard to get a handle on his holodiction problem to backslide now, especially when Chief La Forge and the others were depending on him. He refocussed all his concentration on the job at hand, using the phaser scalpel to separate two fused coprocessors, then gently pulled a melted chip out of its slot.

A glint of blue flame peeked out from beneath the slot and Barclay scooted backward on his knees, half-expecting the entire probe to explode in his face like a defective torpedo. When nothing of the sort occurred, he crept back toward the probe, his tricorder outstretched before him.
Funny,
he noted; the tricorder wasn’t reporting any excess heat or energy.

There was definitely something there, though: an incandescent blue glow that seemed to come from somewhere deeper within the inner workings of the perhaps-not-totally lifeless probe. Not entirely trusting his instruments, Barclay held up his open palm in front of the mysterious radiance. His skin didn’t detect any heat either, but he thought he felt a peculiar tingling along his nerve endings. He might be imagining the sensations, he reminded himself, painfully aware of his own tendency toward hypochondria. He still remembered, with excruciating accuracy, that time last month when he paged Dr. Crusher in the middle of the graveyard shift, thoroughly convinced that he was dying from an accidental overdose of genetronic radiation and in immediate need of massive hyronalyn treatments, only to discover that there was nothing wrong with him except a slight case of heartburn. Maybe it was best, he concluded, to reserve judgment on the whole question of whether he was really feeling something or not.

But what was causing that glow? It wasn’t very intense, more like the bioluminescent gleam of a Rigelian firefly, but he couldn’t account for what might be producing the light.
Wait a sec,
he thought, a hypothesis forming in his mind. Maybe bioluminescence was precisely what he was looking at. Excitement overcoming his trepidations, he reached down with both hands and pried out an entire shelf of singed isolinear coprocessors, then looked back eagerly into the cavity he had exposed. There, beneath the discarded rows of coprocessors, was the source of the lambent blue sheen: the newfangled bio-gel packs that were rapidly becoming the next generation of Starfleet data-processing technology. The organic memory cells, designed to accelerate the transfer and storage of information from the probe’s sensors, looked surprisingly undamaged compared with the rest of the probe’s entrails; they were laid out in a sequence of finger-sized sacs connected by semipermeable silicate membranes that appeared to have remained intact despite the pummeling endured by the probe. Now that the preceding layer of circuitry had been removed, he could see that all of the gel packs were imbued with the same strange, unaccountable incandescence that had first attracted his attention.

Even though the bio-organic technology was relatively new, having been introduced on the ill-fated
U.S.S. Voyager
before that ship ended up in the Delta Quadrant, Barclay knew the packs didn’t ordinarily glow this way; they were intended to store information, not energy. Something must have happened to them during the probe’s interrupted voyage to the barrier.
You know,
he thought,
the light from the packs kind of looks like the glow of the galactic barrier.

Inspiration struck him like the blast of a holographic disruptor beam (set well within conventional safety parameters). He quickly scanned the gel-filled sacs to confirm that the curious glow was not an aftereffect of a tachyon overload. This had nothing to do with the Calamarain then, and perhaps everything to do with the probe’s brief proximity to the barrier itself.

According to the latest scientific theories, which Barclay had studiously reviewed before getting kicked off the wormhole project, the energies that composed the galactic barrier were largely psychokinetic in nature. He had not programmed his tricorder to scan for any psionic traces before, but now he recalibrated the sensor assemblies to detect emanations along the known psychic frequencies and checked out the probe again.

Voilà,
he thought, feeling much as he had when he found the (holographic) lost Orb of the Prophets; there they were, distinct pockets of psionic energy contained within the shining gel packs. Obviously, the bio-neural material within the packs had somehow absorbed small quantities of psionic energy from the barrier.
Is that why the Calamarain attacked the probe,
he wondered. It was even possible that the borrowed psionic power had helped protect the organic components of the probe from the Calamarain’s tachyon bombardment.

This is amazing,
he thought. Who knew what the full implications of his discovery might be? He couldn’t wait to tell Mr. La Forge. Even the thought of facing Professor Faal again didn’t seem as daunting as before, at least in the abstract. He double-checked his tricorder readings one more time, then headed for the exit. “Wow,” he murmured to himself, proud of his accomplishment and wondering if this heady feeling was what Mr. La Forge or Commander Data felt whenever they made some startling scientific breakthrough. Reality, he discovered, could be even more satisfying than a holodeck.

Who would have thought it?

The storm was well and truly upon them.

The wrath of the Calamarain could be felt all over the bridge, much more viscerally than before. The unremitting hum of the plasma cloud had grown into the rumble of angry thunder that battered the ears of everyone aboard. On the main viewer, lightning arced across the prow of the saucer section, striking violently against the forward deflector shields. Riker gritted his teeth as the impact slammed him back into his seat. Sparks flew from the tactical station behind him, singeing the back of his neck, and he spun his chair around in time to see Leyoro snuff out the flames with her bare hands. “Shields down to fifty-one percent,” she reported, rerouting the deflector readings through the auxiliary circuitry even as she extinguished the last white-hot spark beneath the heel of her palm.

Riker scowled at the news, the smell of burning circuitry irritating his nostrils. Their defenses were almost halfway down already, and they hadn’t even begun to fight back. Hell, they still didn’t know why they were under attack. “What in blazes did we do to provoke this?” he asked out loud.

“I am afraid I cannot yet determine that, Commander,” Data answered from his station at Ops, “although I believe I am making progress in adapting the Universal Translator to the transmissions from the Calamarain.” Deanna stood at the android’s side, between Ops and the conn, her hands cupped over her ears in a futile attempt to screen out the roar of the thunder. How could she be expected to sense anything, Riker thought, in the middle of a tempest like this? “The counselor’s impressions are proving quite informative,” Data stated nonetheless.

“How much more time do you need?” Riker asked. Given a choice, he’d rather talk with the Calamarain than engage them in battle, but the
Enterprise
couldn’t take this pummeling much longer. There was only so long he was willing to turn the other cheek.

“That is difficult to estimate,” Data confessed. “The intensity of the barrage is now such that it is extremely problematic to filter out what might be an attempt at communication, much like trying to listen to a whistled melody in the midst of a hurricane.”

“Give me your best guess,” Riker instructed.

Data cocked his head to one side as he pondered the problem. “Approximately one-point-three-seven hours,” Data concluded after only a few seconds of contemplation. “As a best guess,” he added.

“Thank you, Mr. Data,” Riker said, although he would have preferred a significantly smaller figure. At the rate the storm outside was eating away at their shields, the
Enterprise
might not last another hour, unless they started giving as good as they got.
Who knows?
he thought.
Maybe the Calamarain are like the Klingons, and only respect aliens who fight back.

Then again, he reminded himself, it took the Federation close to a hundred years to come to terms with the Klingon Empire….

A new thunderbolt rocked the ship, tilting the bridge starboard. Next to Data, Deanna staggered and grabbed on to the conn station to maintain her balance. Riker felt a shudder run along the length of the bridge, and possibly the entire starship, before their orientation stabilized. “We have damage to the starboard warp nacelle,” Ensign Schultz reported from the aft engineering station.

“Casualties reported on Decks Twelve through Fourteen,” another officer, Lieutenant Jim Yang, called out from the environmental station. “No fatalities, though.”

Not yet,
Riker thought grimly.

“Commander,” Leyoro spoke up, echoing his own thoughts, “we can’t wait any longer.”

“Agreed,” Riker said, hitting the alert switch on the command console. He regretted that yet another first-contact situation had to lead to a show of force, but the Calamarain hadn’t given them any other choice except retreat.
Let’s see what happens when we bite back,
he thought. “All crew to battle stations.”

Baeta Leyoro, for one, was raring to go. Her white teeth gleamed wolfishly as she leaned over the tactical controls. “All weapons systems primed and ready,” she announced. “Awaiting your command.”

“Start with a midrange phaser burst,” he ordered. “Maximum possible dispersal.” The wide beams would weaken the burst’s total force, but Riker saw no obvious alternative.
How the hell,
he thought,
do you target a cloud?

“Yes, sir!” Leyoro said, pressing down on the controls. Phaser arrays mounted all along the ship’s surface fired at once, emitting a unified pulse that spread out from the
Enterprise
in every possible direction. On the screen, Riker saw the pulse emerge as a wave of scarlet energy that disappeared into the billowing, churning mass of the Calamarain. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the turbulent cloud became even more agitated when and where it intersected with the phaser burst. The roiling gases swirled furiously, throwing off electrical discharges that crackled against the
Enterprise
’s shields. A clap of thunder rattled Riker all the way through to his bones.

“I sure felt that,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “The question is: did they feel us?” He peered over at Deanna, who had taken her seat beside him the minute he sounded the battle alert. “Any response from out there?”

Deanna shook her head. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. They’re already so upset, it’s hard to tell.”

He nodded.
In for a penny,
he thought,
in for a pound.
“Another burst. Increase phaser intensity to the next level.” There was no turning back now. He hoped he could avoid actually killing one or more of the Calamarain, but their alien nature made it impossible to gauge the ultimate effect of the phaser beams. He had no intention of going to maximum strength before he had to, but, one way or another, he was going to make these strange, bodiless beings think twice about attacking this ship.

“Here goes nothing,” Leyoro muttered as she fired again. A second burst of directed energy, even more dazzling than before, met the fury of the Calamarain. Once again, it was absorbed into the accumulated plasma almost instantaneously.

The cloud’s reaction was just as immediate.

With a howl even louder than any Riker or the others had heard before, the Calamarain shook the
Enterprise
savagely. Riker held on tightly to the armrests of the captain’s chair while keeping his jaw firmly set to avoid biting down on his tongue. All about the bridge, crew members bounced in their seats, their minds and bodies jangled by the brutal quaking. Even Data appeared distracted by the disturbance; he looked up from his console with an impatient expression upon his golden face, as if he were anxious for the shaking to cease so he could continue with his work. Riker knew just how he felt.

Mercifully, the worst of the battering subsided after a few moments, although the sentient tempest still raged upon the screen and the thunder reverberated ominously behind every buzz and beep from the bridge apparatus. Riker felt his temples begin to pound in concert with every resounding peal. He searched the bridge to make sure that no one had been injured seriously, then looked back at Deanna. The counselor’s face was pale, her eyes wide with alarm.

“They felt that,” she gasped. Obviously, she had shared at least a part of the Calamarain’s pain.

“I got that impression,” he said.

Barclay had hoped that Mr. La Forge would be alone when he reached Engineering, but no such luck. The first thing Barclay saw as soon as he got off the turbolift was the chief engrossed in a heated discussion with Lem Faal, who was the last person Barclay wanted to run into right now. The red alert signals flashing all around the engineering section only added to his trepidation, as did all the busy Starfleet officers hard at work in response to the alert.

Engineering was abuzz with activity, much more so than usual. Every duty station was manned, sometimes by more than one individual. His fellow engineers shouted instructions and queries back and forth to each other as they hastily adjusted and/or monitored illuminated instrumentation panels all along Engineering. Yellow warning signals blinked upon the tabletop master systems display, indicating problems with at least half a dozen vital ship systems, while a whole team of crew members, led by Sonya Gomez, clustered around the towering warp engine core, carefully manipulating the enclosed matter/antimatter reaction. Ordinarily, Barclay could have expected a friendly greeting upon entering Engineering, but at the moment his colleagues were too intent upon their assigned tasks to take note of his arrival. Even Lem Faal seemed too busy with Chief La Forge to spare Barclay another dirty look.

Maybe this isn’t the best time,
Barclay thought, his previous enthusiasm cooling in the face of the irate Betazoid scientist. He wanted to talk to Mr. La Forge about his discovery in Transporter Room Five, but the chief looked like he had his hands full with the red alert, not to mention Professor Faal. The visiting scientist was obviously upset. He held on to a duranium pylon for support while he argued with La Forge. “I don’t understand,” he said. “We can’t cancel the experiment now. It’s ridiculous.”

“We’re under attack,” La Forge pointed out, looking past Faal at the cutaway diagram of the
Enterprise
on the master situation monitor, his attention clearly divided between Faal and the ongoing crisis. “It’s a shame, but I’m sure Commander Riker knows what he’s doing.” He started to turn away from the irate physicist. “Now, you’ll have to excuse me while I see what’s the matter with our warp engines. You should go back to your quarters.”

“This is more than a shame,” Faal objected, a faint whistle escaping his throat with every breath. La Forge had discreetly briefed the engineering team on the physicist’s medical problems, and Barclay felt sorry for the man despite the bad blood between them. Iverson’s disease, like all manner of illnesses and medical threats, terrified Barclay. Even though he knew Iverson’s disease was caused by a genetic disorder and was by no means contagious, listening to Faal’s tortured breathing still gave him the creeps.

“I’ve devoted years to this project. It’s my last hope for…well, I suppose you’d call it immortality.” His knuckles whitened as he held on to the pylon with what looked like all his strength. “Your Commander Riker has no right to make this decision. I’m in charge of this experiment. Starfleet specifically told your captain to cooperate with my experiment!”

La Forge shrugged impatiently. “I don’t know much more than you do, but I know we can’t pull this off in the middle of a combat situation, especially with the captain missing.” He hurried over to the master systems display, where Ensign Daniel Sutter stepped aside to permit La Forge access to the primary workstation. La Forge continued to speak to Faal as he simultaneously ran a diagnostic on the graviton polarity generators. “Maybe the Calamarain will go somewhere else and we can try again. Or maybe you’ll have to try another section of the barrier.”

“No,” Faal said, following closely behind La Forge. He sounded ever more sick and distraught. “This is the ideal location. All our sensor readings and calculations prove that. We have to break through the barrier now. I might not get another chance. I don’t have much time left….”

Barclay was getting tense just listening to this conversation. He seriously considered turning around and coming back later.
But what if the way the bio-gel packs in the probe absorbed some of the barrier’s energy turns out to be important?
He’d never forgive himself if the
Enterprise
got destroyed and it was all his fault; it was bad enough that he’d infected the entire crew with that mutagenic virus a couple of years ago.
Don’t live in the past,
Counselor Troi always told him.
Show people what you’re capable of.

Mustering up all his courage, Barclay stepped closer to the chief and Faal. The Betazoid genius spotted him approaching and gave him a murderous look; clearly, he hadn’t forgotten the incident with the pulse generator. Or forgiven.

“Excuse me, sir,” Barclay said to La Forge. He could feel Lem Faal’s baleful glare burning into the back of his neck. “But when you’ve got a moment, I’d like to talk to you about something I found in that probe you asked me to look at.”

La Forge sighed, as if the rescued probe was just one more thing for him to worry about. Barclay immediately regretted bringing it up. “Can this wait, Reg?” he asked with a slight edge of irritation in his tone. “There’s an emergency with the warp engines
and
the deflectors.”

“Yes. No,” he answered. “I mean, I don’t know.”

Professor Faal lost his patience entirely. “What are you doing, wasting time with this idiot?” Saliva sprayed from his mouth as he gasped out the words. “This is intolerable! I want to speak to Commander Riker!”

Before La Forge could respond, a tremendous clap of thunder echoed through Engineering, drowning out even the constant thrum of the warp core. The floor swayed beneath Barclay’s feet and he found himself stumbling down a sudden incline that hadn’t existed an instant before, bumping awkwardly into no less than Professor Faal himself.
Just kill me now,
he thought.

La Forge frowned as the floor gradually leveled out again. “This isn’t good,” he said. Circuit patterns rotated in his ocular implants as he concentrated on the tabletop display, taking stock of the situation. “I can’t waste any more time with this. Reg, make sure the professor gets back to his quarters okay, then head back here. We’ll talk about the probe later.” Without a backward glance, he stalked across Engineering toward the warp core, issuing orders as he went. “Sutter, divert impulse power to the subspace field amplifiers. Ortega, keep an eye on the EPS flow….”

Why me?
Barclay thought, left alone with Lem Faal.
Couldn’t someone else—anyone else—escort Faal? He already hates me enough.
But La Forge was in charge; he had to keep his eyes on the big picture. “Yes, sir,” Barclay said dutifully, if less than enthusiastically. “Please come with me.”