Star Trek: The Q Continuum (38 page)

The woman hesitated, chewing on her bottom lip, torn between her own urgent errand and the plight of the boy. He could sense her indecision and concern. She reached a decision quickly, though, just like a Starfleet officer. “My name is Sonya Gomez, and I was on my way back to Engineering from sickbay anyway.” Milo noticed a foam cast around her left wrist and sensed some residual soreness from the injury. “Why don’t you come along with me and we’ll see if your father is there? If not, I’m sure we can spare someone to see you back to your quarters.”

“Okay,” Milo said. He sure couldn’t think of a better plan. Gomez held out her hand, and Milo accepted it gratefully. She began to lead them down the corridor in the same direction he had just come when she suddenly stopped and cocked her head. A quizzical expression came over her face. Milo felt a surge of optimism within her heart.

“Hey, listen to that,” she said. “The thunder’s stopped.”

She’s right,
Milo thought. He would have said so, except for the blazing fire that ignited inside his skull. His small frame convulsed unexpectedly, like he was being electrocuted. He heard Sonya Gomez shouting in alarm from somewhere very far away. She shook his shoulders, but he couldn’t feel it, not like he could feel the fire as it poured from his brain into the rest of his body, causing his entire body to tingle and twitch.

His eyes rolled upward and he lost consciousness, but instead of falling into blackness, all he found waiting for him was a brilliant purple light.

Glevi ut Sov, Dowager Empress of Tkon, awoke early one morning during the dawning of the Age of Makto, in the eightieth year of her reign, troubled by the shadows of unremembered dreams. She no longer slept as well as she once had. A symptom of her advanced age, she wondered, or of the increasing precariousness of the times? Her reign had been a turbulent one, marked by civil war and catastrophe, although she remained steadfast in her conviction that the Great Endeavor was worth any sacrifice she and the empire had endured.
Only my conscience does not plague me,
she thought.

Unlike her decrepit body, her private chambers had changed little over the decades. Skilled artisans had successfully concealed any evidence of the damage inflicted by the earthquake of seven years ago, or by the bomb that had failed to assassinate her only a few months before. She permitted herself a defiant smile; sometimes her stubborn ability to survive impressed even her.
They’ll not get rid of me that easily,
she vowed, not for the first time.

She kneaded her weary eyes with skeletal knuckles, wishing she could clear her mind as readily. What had that dream been about anyway? The memory lurked at the back of her awareness, just beyond her reach, but the feeling remained, a sense of alarm mixed with inspiration, as if she had finally isolated the root cause of all that disturbed her suffering empire. There
was
a root cause, of that much she felt certain; over the last several decades, as she had assiduously studied reports from all over the empire, she had grown convinced that there was a reason for the numerous, often seemingly unrelated adversities that had rocked the foundations of their society for all these many years, a reason that sometimes seemed to lurk just beyond the awareness of her consciousness. Perhaps this latest dream held the key to an answer she already knew deep within her soul.

She knew better than to chase the memory, however. Dreams were like fish: The harder you tried to hold on to them, the more slippery they seemed to be. If it was important, it would come back to her in time. After all, she wasn’t planning to die right away, at least not today.

Doing her best to ignore the creaking noises that, perversely, her hearing remained keen enough to detect, she carefully lowered her feet into the well-worn slippers on the floor. Despite the incessant appeals of her attendants, she still refused to let anyone help her aged bones rise. As long as she could stand, however shakily, on her own two feet, so, she was convinced, would the empire. It was a silly superstition, but she held to it nonetheless.

The chambers lighted slowly, as was her preference these days. She took a moment to steady herself, then reached out and grasped the sturdy walking stick propped against the wall by her couch. A polished quartz rendition of the Endless Flame emblem topped the stick. Her shadow, now much thinner than she might like, waited patiently for her to begin their daily trek to her venerable desk. With a sigh, she obliged the shadow by putting one foot before the other. The soles of her slippers squeaked as she shuffled across the floor.

As ever, the outer rooms felt too cold for comfort, so she gave the chamber a mental command to increase the temperature by at least ten grades. That she could effect such a change merely by thinking it still amazed her; out of habit, she often spoke aloud to her palace, much to the whispered amusement of the younger members of her court.

A finger unconsciously stroked the base of her skull where, beneath her snow-white hair and delicate skin, her personal psi-transmitter had been implanted. All her physicians and technologists swore to her that she couldn’t possibly feel anything from the implant. You won’t even know it’s there, all the brilliant young geniuses insisted; everybody has one these days. No doubt they knew what they were talking about, but she was positive she felt an itching at the back of her neck sometimes, not to mention a faint buzzing in her ears.
Maybe I’m just imagining it,
she thought,
just like I imagined whatever I dreamed last night.

Placing her stick against the side of the desk, she sat down in her chair, grateful for the extra heat that was already flooding the chamber. She supposed she could just keep the heat going continuously, so that the chambers would always be warm right from the start, but that struck her as extravagantly wasteful, especially during wartime. Given all the sacrifices she had demanded of her people over the years, all the resources poured into the Great Endeavor despite every crisis that had threatened to derail it, the least she could do was cope with a bit of chill upon waking, especially when she suspected that a good part of the cold was simply her aging metabolism taking its time to come up to speed each morn.

She directed a thought at the freshly restored wall across from her and the city presented itself to her once more, lifting her spirits. Ozari-thul still rose proudly beneath the ruddy glow of dawn. True, many towers were under repair while wary imperial fliers patrolled the skies above them, but the heart of Tkon still beat as soundly as her own, the people going about their business even in the face of terrorism and sabotage. The scarlet sun confessed its mortality every day, yet the time was swiftly approaching when the slow death of that ancient orb would no longer endanger the worlds and people now within its radiance.
I cannot betray their confidence in me,
she thought.
The Great Endeavor must be completed.

A twinge of hunger interrupted her musings and, in response, her breakfast appeared atop the desk. The biscuits and jam were tempting, and to blazes with what her doctors said about the honey, but she pushed the tray aside for the moment. Something, perhaps the lingering influence of that elusive dream, compelled her to check on her empire first.

Gazing down upon the tinted crystal disk, newly replaced after the bombing, she retrieved the latest bulletins. As usual, it made for depressing reading. New fighting along the intermediate orbits. Two more ships lost and a nebular mining station fallen to the rebels. Demonstrations and work stoppages throughout the inner worlds, even rumors that the governor of Wsor was secretly trying to negotiate a separate peace with Rzom in exchange for neutrality in the war. A devastating jungle fire on the fourth moon. Mass suicides among the commerce artists. A blight on this season’s crop of
tamazi,
plus an outbreak of melting fever in the provinces of Closono-thul. Intelligence reports on a new millennial cult calling for the preordained destruction of Tkon. Flooding along the canals on Dupuc. A massacre on the second moon of a planet she had never heard of before.

On and on it went. Disasters. Combat. Epidemics. Accidents. Atrocities. Raids. Carnage. Fatalities. Revolts. Armed incursions…bad news from every corner of the empire, loyal or otherwise. The only consolation was that the rebels seemed to be hurting just as much, which was cold comfort indeed; despite close to a generation of internecine conflict, she still thought of the outer planets as under her protection, even if she had to fight to save them from themselves. The war itself had turned into one long, bloody stalemate in which neither side could gain any lasting advantage over the other. Was that the fault of her generals, she wondered, or were there other factors at work?

A piece of her dream flashed across her consciousness, almost too quickly to identify. Something about a captive beast…and spears? She reached for it, but it slipped away as quickly as it came.
Patience,
she counseled herself.
Let it come at its own speed.
She had learned to trust her dreams over the course of her lifetime, much as her visionary ancestors must have.
Don’t force it. Wait.

The image felt oddly familiar, though, as if she had dreamed it before, perhaps many times before, without ever remembering it.
Until now,
she thought,
to some degree.

Turning her attention away from ephemeral fragments of the night before, she lifted a biscuit, generously drenched in honey, to her lips, then put it down again. “Too late,” she sighed. The endless litany of dire news reports had killed her appetite.

She stared again into the disk, looking for some sign of a pattern, of a common thread linking all the disparate hardships tormenting her people. There was a link, she suddenly felt convinced. Her dream had told her so, even if she couldn’t yet recall how it went. Perhaps the answer lay, she thought, in those
other
reports, the ones that didn’t appear to make sense at all, that hinted in fact at the supernatural.

These strange, unexplainable incidents had been part of the bulletins for years, although often hidden in the margins or between the lines. Usually described as “apocryphal” or “unconfirmed,” they had remained eerily consistent over the decades: accounts of dead soldiers rising up to fight again, of carefully maintained technology failing without cause, of storms and hurricanes birthed without warning out of clear skies and tranquil seas, of all manner of impossible occurrences taking place despite every precept of logic and science, just like that rain of
vovelles
that had fallen upon the city so many years ago, when she was barely more than a child.
I haven’t thought of that for ages, but I suppose that’s when it all started to go wrong.
A vision of swollen, overripe spheres of fruit pelting themselves against her windowpane, making wet, smacking noises while their juices ran like rivulets of blood down the transparent glass, surfaced from the dusty recesses of her memory.
It’s almost as if some higher power were playing with us, testing us….

At once, her dream came back to her, more vivid than before. She saw a great horned animal at bay, its hooves pawing the ground, its curved ivory horns stabbing the air above its massive head. Its fur was dark and matted, except for a white patch upon its brow in the shape of a flame. Three masked figures, and two more farther back in the shadows, had the beast cornered, prodding it with long sharp sticks that drew blood wherever they pierced the animal’s shaggy hide, but never enough to inflict serious injury on the beast. The wounds were like pinpricks, intended not to kill but only to torture and enrage. Maddened, the poor creature frothed at the mouth and blew steam from its snout, roaring its helpless fury even as the bloody spears came at it again and again.

Then, finally, when the beast could offer no further resistance, the masked tormentors laid down their spears and stepped aside, making way for the fourth figure to advance toward the vanquished animal, a shining silver blade resting in his grip. This fourth figure, to whom the others seemed to defer, wore no mask, but she could not discern his features no matter how hard she tried. All she could see was the light reflecting off the burnished sheen of the blade as he raised it high above the beast’s drooping head. The fifth figure came forward finally, reaching out as if to stop the bearer of the sword, but he had waited too long. There was no more time, and the blade came sharply down—

The empress came back to her chambers with a start, one hand jerking forward and knocking the breakfast tray over the edge of the desk. Crystalline plates and teacup crashed onto the carpet, splintering into dozens of tiny shards and soiling the Taguan carpet with a mixture of tea, crumbs, and honey. She gave the mess only an instant’s thought, disintegrating the broken meal and transferring it away, before clearing the disk and contacting her new first minister. The head and shoulders of a middle-aged Tkon came into focus.
He looks more like his father every day,
the empress thought, recalling another trusted first minister from many years ago. “Most Elevated,” he addressed her. “I’m delighted to hear from you. I have excellent news regarding the Great Endeavor. I believe we may be ready to commence the solar transference in a matter of weeks.”

His words cheered her spirits, momentarily dispelling the pall cast by her premonitions. Never mind the dark wonders alluded to in the reports, the true miracle was that the Great Endeavor had proceeded toward completion despite all the calamities of the last seventy-odd years. It had required constant pressure from the throne to keep the massive project on track, but perhaps soon her persistence would be rewarded and the empire preserved.
I will die happy,
she thought,
even if we can accomplish no more than that.

She could not allow such hopeful musings, however, to distract her from her current purpose. “Those are fine tidings indeed,” she told him, “but let us speak of another matter. I want you to arrange an imperial address to be sent out simultaneously across the entire empire, including those regions currently in revolt. I assume we have the capacity to transmit my words into even Rzom and the other outer planets?”

Fendor arOx looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, actually, although we’ve taken pains not to let the rebels know that we still had the means to do so. It’s a hidden advantage we’ve been holding in reserve.”

“A wise decision,” she assured him.
He’s as prudent as his father, too.
“But the time has come to employ that advantage. I wish to speak to my fellow Tkon, all of them. And as soon as possible.” The memory of her dream, of that spectral blade slashing down, chilled her in a way no heated chamber could hope to overcome. She knew now that this very nightmare had been haunting her sleeping hours for more years than she cared to estimate, only now escaping into the clear light of day. “I feel very strongly that the future of the empire is at stake.”