Star Trek: The Q Continuum (40 page)

The smoldering red sun of Tkon was ready to move. Surrounding the cooling orb was the largest matter-transference array ever constructed in the memory of the universe, a spherical lattice of sophisticated technology several times greater in diameter than the star itself, painstakingly constructed by the finest minds in the Tkon Empire over the course of a century. It was a staggering feat of engineering so immense that it impressed even Q, especially when he considered that this stunningly audacious project had been conceived of and executed by mere mortal beings immeasurably less gifted than either he or 0.

“Look at that,” he crowed, pointing out the massive structure that surrounded the crimson sun like a glittering mesh cage. “Can you believe they actually pulled it off, despite everything that Gorgan and the others did to disrupt their little civilization? I don’t know about you, but I think they deserve a round of enthusiastic applause.”

“They haven’t done it yet,” 0 said darkly. His heavy brows bunched downward toward the bridge of his nose as he glowered at the caged sun. His beefy fists clenched at his sides.

Funny,
Q thought.
You’d think he would be proud of how well this test turned out, especially after that embarrassment with the Coulalakritous.
But he was too elated to fret overmuch over his companion’s unexpectedly sour mood.
Perhaps this is simply a case of post-testing melancholia, perfectly understandable under the circumstances.
“Oh, but they’re almost finished. The empress even got that cease-fire she was asking for. See, there’s a delegation from Rzom at the palace at this very moment, on hand to witness the historic event along with representatives from the entire sector. Even as we speak, that sparkly gadget of theirs is mapping the star, absorbing all the facts and figures they’ll need to convert it into data, then beam it to that empty patch over there.” He pointed to a singularly lifeless section of space beyond the borders of the empire: a perfect dumping ground for obsolete stars. “And see,” he enthused further, stepping across the sector, crossing light-years with each stride before coming to a halt a couple of paces short of an incandescent yellow sun encased in a vast transference lattice identical to the one containing Tkon’s dying sun, “here’s the bright and shiny new star, good for another five billion years or so, that they’re going to put in the old one’s place.” He took a few steps backward to take a longer view, scratching his jaw contemplatively. “Hmmm. I suppose relocating that star does spoil the aesthetic design a bit, but I guess I can get used to it.”

He strolled back toward 0, chatting all the way. “And the timing! Think of it. They’re going to have to beam the new sun into place less than a nanosecond after the old one disappears, just to minimize the gravitational effects on the whole system. A pretty tricky operation for a species still mired in linear time, don’t you think?”

One of these aeons,
he decided,
I’m going to have to bring Q back to this moment so she can see it for herself. And she thought this was going to turn out badly!

“Oh, they’re cunning little creatures, there’s no question of that,” 0 agreed, his eyes fixed on the caged red fireball around which the Tkon Empire still orbited, at least for a few more moments. “Cunning and crafty, in a crude, corporeal kind of way.” A cross between a sneer and a smirk twisted the corners of his lips. “For all the good it will do them.”

Q blinked in surprise. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “They won, fair and square.”

“Don’t be naive, Q,” 0 said impatiently. “This isn’t over yet.” He clapped his hands together, producing a metaphysical boom that set cosmic strings quivering as far as a dozen parsecs away. In response, three spectral figures emerged from the celestial game board that was the Tkon Empire. They started out as mere specks, almost as infinitesimal as the empress and her peers, but rapidly gained size and substance as they rejoined 0 and Q on a higher plane. “My liege,” Gorgan addressed 0 somewhat apologetically, “is it time already? I feel there is so much more we could do. In truth, I was just warming up.”

“They are a stiff-necked people,” The One confirmed, the worlds of the empire reflected in the gleaming golden plates of His armor, “slow to repent, deeply wed to their infamy.”

(*) said nothing, spinning silently above their heads, resembling nothing less than the swollen red sun of Tkon. Q wasn’t sure, but he thought the glowing sphere looked fuller and brighter, more
sated,
than before. Or perhaps it was simply more hungry than ever.

“I was thinking maybe a children’s crusade,” Gorgan suggested, “starting with the youngest of their race….”

0 shook his head. “You’ve done enough, all of you, although hardly as much as I might expect.” Gorgan drew back, dipping his head sheepishly; his angelic features seemed to melt beneath the flickering light of (*), growing coarser and more lumpish in response to 0’s implied criticism. Even The One appeared slightly abashed. The radiant halo framing his bearded, patriarchal features dimmed until it was barely visible. “You’ve bled the beast,” 0 admitted grudgingly. “Now it’s time for me to administer the final stroke.”

He knelt above the fenced-in star, then thrust his open hand into the very core of the sun, his wrist passing immaterially through the steel and crystal framework the Tkon had so laboriously erected around the star. “Wait!” Q shouted. “What are you doing?” The young superbeing rushed forward, determined to stop 0 from doing whatever the older entity had in mind.
This isn’t fair,
he thought.
Not to the Tkon, and not to me.

0 glanced over his shoulder, undaunted by the sight of the agitated Q running toward him. “Grab him,” he said brusquely, and Gorgan and The One obeyed without hesitation. Q felt four hands take hold of him from behind, pulling his arms back and pinning them against his spine. His feet kicked uselessly at the space beneath him, unable to propel him onward as long as the others maintained their grip.

“Pardon me, boy,” Gorgan said with exaggerated politeness. He twisted Q’s wrist until the captive winced in pain. “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to interfere at this particular juncture.”

“That which must be, must be,” The One agreed, holding on tightly to Q’s right arm and shoulder. “Such is it written in the scriptures of the stars.”

“No!” Q yelled. “You have to let me go. I said I’d be responsible for him. I’m responsible for all of this!” He tried to free himself by changing his shape, his personal boundaries blurring as his form flowed from one configuration to another so quickly that an observer would have glimpsed only fleeting impressions of a three-headed serpent, coiled and twisting, whose triune bodies merged into that of a salt vampire, wrinkled and hideous, the suckers on his fingers and toes leeching the substance from his captors before they withdrew into the flat, leathery body of a neural parasite, flapping toward the empty space overhead, his stinger lashing at the others even as it became the ivory horn of a shaggy white mugato, who flexed his primitive primate muscles against his restraints, which resisted even the corrosive hide of a Horta, capable of boring through the hardest rock—but not through the metaphysical clutches of the others.

“Stop it! Let me go,” he shouted, now a poisonous scarlet moss, a thorny vine, a drop of liquid protomatter, a neutron star…. “This isn’t what I wanted.” He jumped from tomorrow to yesterday, backward and forward in time, by a minute, by a day, by a century. He shifted from energy to matter and back again, multiplied himself infinitely, turned his essence inside out, and twisted sideways through subspace. Yet whatever he did, no matter how protean his metamorphoses, how unlikely and ingenious his contortions, his captors kept up with him, holding him tighter than an atom clung to its protons.
They can’t do this to me,
he fumed, tears of rage and frustration leaking from his eyes whenever he had eyes.
I’m a Q, for Q’s sake!

But Gorgan and The One were formidable entities in their own rights. Together, and assisted perhaps by the unholy energies of (*), they were enough to drag the struggling Q safely distant from where 0 now toyed with the Tkon’s sun. “Sorry about this, friend,” 0 said, watching Q’s futile efforts to liberate himself with open amusement. “It’s for your own good. Obviously, you still have a lot to learn about the finer nuances of testing. Most importantly, you must never let vain little vermin like these get the better of you; it only means that you didn’t make the standards stringent enough to begin with. Remember this, Q,” he said, shaking a finger on his free hand pedantically. “If the test isn’t hard enough,
make it harder.
That’s the only way to ensure the right results.”

He’s insane,
Q realized suddenly, wondering how he had missed it before.
I was so blind.
Defeated, he reassumed his original form, sagging limply between Gorgon and The One, only their constant restraint holding him upright. “What are you doing?” he whispered, fearful of the answer.

0 shrugged. “Nothing much. Just speeding things up a mite. Take a look.”

All around the star, the metallic lattice began to glow with carefully controlled energy. The Tkon were beginning the transference. In the throne room of the imperial palace, beneath a majestic stained-glass dome commemorating a thousand generations of the Sov dynasty, the aged empress, no more than a fragile wisp of her former self, but with eyes still bright and alert, gratefully accepted a tiny goblet of honey wine from her faithful first minister as they gazed in rapture at the culmination of the Great Endeavor to which she had devoted her life and her empire. Throughout the solar system and beyond, trillions of golden eyes watched viewscreens large and small, and the citizens held their breath in anticipation of the miracle to come.

But within the heart of the dying sun, a darker miracle was taking place. The last of the star’s diminishing supply of hydrogen fused rapidly into helium, which fused just as quickly into carbon, which fused in turn into heavier elements such as oxygen and neon, chemical processes that should have taken millions of years occurring in the space of a heartbeat. The heavy elements continued to fuse at an unnatural rate, producing atoms of sodium and magnesium, silicon, nickel, and so on, until the star began to fill with pure, elemental iron. The dense iron atoms resisted fusion for an instant, but 0 exerted his will and forced the very electrons orbiting the nucleus of the iron atoms to crash down into the nucleus, initiating a fatal chain reaction that should not have taken place for several million more years.

“Stop,” Q whispered hoarsely, knowing what was to come. The star was still at the center of the empire!

On null stations positioned around the lattice, and in control rooms manned by expert technologists, jubilant anticipation turned into panic as painstakingly calibrated instruments, tested and refined for decades, began delivering data too impossible to believe. The star was changing before their eyes, aging millions of years in a matter of seconds, turning into a ticking time bomb with an extraordinarily short fuse. “What is it? What’s happening?” asked the empress in her throne room as the countdown to the planned solar transference suddenly came to a halt, and puzzled ambassadors and governors and wavecasters and war tenors and sages exchanged baffled and anxious looks. “I don’t understand,” she began, putting down her goblet. “Has something gone wrong?”

Her primary scientific adviser, psionically linked to the project’s control center, blanched, his face turning as white as milk. “The sun…” he gasped, too shocked to even think of lowering his voice, “it’s fluxing too fast. Much too fast. It’s going to destroy us all.”

“Why?” the empress demanded, leaning forward on her throne. “Was it something we did? Did the Endeavor cause this?” She grasped for some solution, the proper course of action. “What if we halt the procedure?”

“No,” the trembling adviser said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand. We couldn’t do this. Nothing could do this. It’s impossible, I tell you. This can’t be happening.”

It’s him,
she realized.
The figure from my dream. The executioner with the sword. His wicked game is coming to its end.
After all their struggles, all the glory of their ancient past and the hardships of her own generation, could their entire future be extinguished so abruptly and with so little compassion? It seemed unthinkable, and immeasurably unjust, but somehow it was so. How could they contend against a vicious god?

“We did our best,” she whispered to her people in their final moments. A single tear ran down her cheek. “Let that always be remem—”

She never finished that sentence. The red sun, rushing through its death throes at 0’s instigation, expanded in size, swallowing and incinerating all the inner planets of the system, including fabled Tkon. 0 jumped back from the ballooning star, scrambling away like a man who has just lit a firecracker. Gorgan, The One, and (*) retreated as well, dragging Q with them. All of them knew that the sudden expansion was only the beginning.

An instant later, the star collapsed upon itself, its entire mass imploding, raining back upon the stellar core, which then exploded again in a spectacular release of light and heat and force that dwarfed, by countless orders of magnitude, all the energy it had previously emitted over all the billions of years of its long existence. For one brief cosmic second, it shone brighter than the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy put together, including what would someday be called the Alpha Quadrant. The flare could be seen beyond the galactic barrier itself, glowing like the Star of Bethlehem in the skies of distant worlds too far away to be reached even at transwarp speed.

Thanks to 0, the Tkon’s sun had become a supernova, only moments before they hoped to say farewell to it forever.

Jean-Luc Picard watched in hushed silence as the entire Tkon Empire was destroyed for all time. He was horrified, but not surprised. After the
Enterprise
’s encounter with the ancient Tkon portal on Delphi Ardu, Picard had reviewed the archaeological literature on the Tkon Empire, so he knew all about the supernova that eventually annihilated their civilization. He had never guessed, however, that Q had played any part in that disaster.
I’ve always wondered,
he thought,
how a culture capable of moving stars and planets at will could be destroyed by a predictable stellar phenomenon. Now I know.

It was one thing, though, to read about the extinction of a people in a dry historical treatise; it was something else altogether to witness the tragedy with his own eyes, share the lives of some of the individuals involved. His throat tightened with emotion. He blinked back tears. Trillions of fatalities were just a statistic, he reflected, until you were forced to realize that every one of those trillions was a sentient being with dreams and aspirations much like your own.

He had to wonder what humanity would do, four billion years hence, when Earth’s own sun faced its end.
Will we display the prescience and the resolve that the Tkon achieved in the face of their greatest challenge? Will we seize the chance for survival that was so cruelly snatched away from the Tkon at the last minute?
He prayed that generations of men and women yet unborn would succeed where the Tkon so nobly failed, and thanked heaven that a similar crisis would not face the Federation in his lifetime.

Or would it? The Tkon’s sun had ultimately detonated millions of years before its appointed time, thanks to the preternatural influence of beings like Q. What was to stop such creatures from doing the same to Earth’s sun, or any other star in the Alpha Quadrant? He glanced at the familiar entity beside him, presently honoring the death of the Tkon with an uncharacteristic moment of silence, and was newly chilled by the terrifying potential of Q’s abilities.
Q has threatened humanity with total obliteration so many times,
he thought,
that I suppose I should not be too shocked to discover that he has been involved in carrying out just such an atrocity, no matter how indirectly.
It was easy to think of Q as simply a prankster and a nuisance. The supernova blazing before them bore awful testament to just how dangerous Q and his kind really were.

“It’s not a total loss, you know,” Q said finally. “Supernovas such as that one are the only place in the universe where elements heavier than iron are created. Ultimately, the raw materials of your reality, even the very atoms that make up your physical bodies, were born in the heart of an awesome stellar conflagration such as we now behold. Who knows? There may be a little bit of Tkon in you, Jean-Luc.”

“Small comfort to the trillions who perished, Q,” Picard responded. The face of the Tkon empress, both as a lovely young woman and as the fine old lady she became, was still fresh in his memory.
She came so close to saving her people.

“Try to take the long view, Picard.” Q squinted at the luminous ball of light that had consumed the Tkon Empire; it was like staring straight into a matter/antimatter reaction. “All civilizations collapse eventually. Besides, there are still traces of the Tkon floating around the galaxy, even in your time. Artifacts and relics that attest to their place in history.”

“Like the ruins on Delphi Ardu,” Picard suggested. He wished now that he had visited the site himself, instead of sending an away team. Riker had been quite impressed by what he had seen of the Tkon’s technology and culture.

“Just to name one example,” Q said. “Then there’s this little toy.” He wandered away from the nova, past what had been the Tkon’s home system, until he came upon a golden star, about the size of a large tribble, encased within what looked like a wire framework. A few lighted crystal chips, strung like beads upon the wire lattice, blinked on and off sporadically.
Of course,
Picard recalled,
the sun the Tkon had intended to beam into their system, and the gigantic transporter array they constructed to do so.
“It’s still there,” Q stated, “forgotten and never used. If I were you, Picard, I’d find it before the Borg or the Dominion do.” He gave the relic a cursory glance. “Not that this has anything to do with why we’re here, mind you.”

Picard saw an opportunity to press Q on his motives. “Very well, then. If the destruction is so very insignificant, on a cosmic scale, they why
are
we here? What’s the point?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Q asked, sounding exasperated. He turned and spoke to Picard very distinctly, pronouncing each word with patronizing slowness and clarity. “This isn’t about the Tkon. It’s about
him.”

The blinding flash of the supernova dazzled Q right before the shock wave knocked him off his feet. He tumbled backward, the force of the explosion wrenching him free of Gorgan and The One, who were equally staggered by the blast. Qscrambled to his feet, several light-years away from the nova, then stared slackjawed at what 0 had wrought. The light and the impact may have hit him already, but the psychological and emotional effect of what had happened was still sinking in.

A series of lesser shock waves followed the initial explosion, shaking the space-time continuum like the lingering aftershocks of a major earthquake. Q tottered upon his heels, striving to maintain his balance, while some detached component of intellect wondered absently how much of the star’s mass remained after the detonation; depending on the mass of the stellar remnant, Tkon’s sun could now devolve into either a neutron star or a black hole. He watched in a state of shock as, in the wake of the supernova, the collapsing star shed a huge gaseous nebula composed of glowing radioactive elements. The gases were expelled rapidly by the stellar remnant, expanding past Q and the others like a gust of hot steam that left Q gasping and choking. Cooling elemental debris clung to his face and hands like perspiration. “Ugh,” he said, grimacing. He’d forgotten how dreadful a supernova smelled.

The radioactive nebula expanded past Q, leaving him a clear view of all that remained of the huge red orb that had once lighted an empire. The stellar remnant had imploded even further while he was blinded by the noxious gases, achieving its ultimate destiny. He couldn’t actually see it, of course, since there was literally nothing there except a profound absence, but he knew a black hole when he saw one. He could feel its gravitational pull from where he was standing, pulling at his feet like an undertow. Was this void, this empty black cavity, all that was left of the Tkon empress and all her people?

It’s all my fault,
he thought.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.

He turned on 0 in a rage. “How could you do that? They were winning your stupid game, then you changed the rules! A supernova, without any warning? How in creation could they possibly survive that?”

His henchmen, no longer jarred by the explosion of moments before, began to converge on Q once more, but 0 waved them away. Now that the deed was done, he appeared more than willing to face the young Q’s anger. He wiped the stellar plasma from his hands, then straightened his jacket before addressing Q’s objections. “Now, now, Q. Let’s not get too worked up over this. You clearly missed the point of this exercise. I was simply testing their ability to cope with the completely unexpected, and isn’t that really the only test that truly matters? Any simple species can cope with civil disorder or minor natural disasters. That’s no guarantee of greatness. We have to be more strict than that, more stringent in our standards.” He tilted his head toward the black hole a few parsecs away, assuming a philosophical expression. “Face facts, Q. If your little Tkon couldn’t handle something as routine as an ordinary supernova, then they wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.”

“He sounds just like you,” Picard observed.

“You must be joking.” Q looked genuinely offended by the suggestion, although thankfully more appalled than annoyed. “Even so dim a specimen as yourself must be able to see the fundamental difference between me and that…megalomaniacal sadist and his obsequious underlings.”

“Which is?” Picard asked, pushing his luck. In truth, he had a vague idea of where Q was going with this, but he wanted to hear it from Q’s own lips.

“I play fair, Jean-Luc.” He held out the palms of his hands, beseeching Picard to understand. “There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with tests and games, but you have to play fair. Surely you’ll concede, despite whatever petty inconveniences I may have imposed on you in the past, that I have always scrupulously held fast to the rules of whatever game we were playing, even if I sometimes found myself wishing otherwise.”

“Perhaps,” Picard granted. He could quibble over Q’s idea of fairness, particularly when competing against unwilling beings of vastly lesser abilities, but allowed that, with varying degrees of good sportsmanship, Q had let Picard win on occasion.
At least that’s something,
he thought, feeling slightly less apprehensive than he had mere moments ago. “And 0?” he prompted. “And the Tkon?”

Q made a contemptuous face. “That was no test, that was a blood sport.”

His younger self could not yet articulate his feelings so clearly. Distraught and disoriented, he wavered in the face of 0’s snow of words. 0 sounded so calm, so reasonable now. “But you killed them all,” he blurted. “What’s the good of testing them if they all end up dead?”

“An occupational hazard of mortality,” 0 pointed out quite matter-of-factly. “You can’t let it get to you, Q. I know it’s hard at first. Little helpless creatures can be very appealing sometimes. But trust me on this, the testing gets easier the more you do it. Isn’t that right, comrades?” The other entities murmured their assent, except for (*), who maintained his silence. “Pretty soon, Q, it won’t bother you at all.”

Q thought that over. The idea of feeling better later was attractive, offering the promise of a balm for his stinging conscience, but maybe you were supposed to feel a little bad after you blew up some poor species’ sun.
Is this what I want to do with my immortality?
he wondered.
Is 0 who I really want to be?

“Let me ask you something,” he said at last, looking 0 squarely in the eye. He knew now what he needed to know. “Aside from the Coulalakritous, has any species—anywhere—ever survived one of your tests?”

0 didn’t even bother to lie. The predatory gleam in his eyes and the smirk that crossed his face were all the answer Q required.

It was the beginning of the first Q war….