Star Trek: The Q Continuum by Greg Cox Read Free Book Online Page A

badge. “You are trying my patience.”
    “But, Jean-Luc, I haven’t even remarked yet on your spanking new Enterprise.” He sauntered around the bridge, running a white-gloved finger along the surface of the aft duty stations and checking it for dust. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you’ve traded up?” He wandered over to the illuminated schematic of the Enterprise -E on display at the back of the bridge. “Very snazzy and streamlined, but somehow it lacks the cozy, lived-in quality the old place had. Whatever happened to that bucket of bolts anyway? Don’t tell me you actually let Troi take the helm?”
    Deanna gave Q a withering look, worthy of her formidable and imperious mother, but otherwise declined to rise to Q’s bait. “Very well, Q,” Picard said, “it’s obvious you’ve been keeping tabs on us. Now if you don’t mind, we have an urgent mission to complete.” He started to tap his badge once more, wondering if Q would let him complete his call to Geordi.
    Of course not.
    “Oh, that’s right!” Q said, slapping his forehead. “Your mission. However could I have forgotten? That’s why I’m here, to tell you to call the whole thing off.”
    “What?” Picard hoped he hadn’t heard Q correctly.
    No such luck. “Your mission,” Q repeated. “Your big experiment. It’s a bad idea, Jean-Luc, and, out of the goodness of my heart, I’ve come to warn you.” With a flash of light, Q transported himself to directly in front of the captain’s chair. He leaned forward until his face was only centimeters away from Picard’s. He spoke again, and this time his voice sounded deadly serious. “Read my lips, Captain: Don’t even think about breaking the barrier.”
    Then he disappeared.
Interlude
    I smell Q, he sniffed. Q smell I.
    From behind the wall, across the ether, a familiar odor tantalized his senses. Singular emanations, nearly forgotten, impossible to mistake, aroused fragmented flashbacks of aeons past…and a personality unlike any other.
    Q, Q, that’s who, he sang. Q is back, right on cue!
    Musty memories, broken apart and reassembled in a thousand kaleidoscopic combinations over the ages, exploded again within his mind, sparking a storm of stifled savagery and spite. It was all Q’s fault after all, he recalled. False, faithless, forsaking Q.
    He wanted to reach out and wrap his claws around the odor, wring it until it screamed, but he couldn’t. Not yet. It was still too far away, but getting closer and closer, too. He flattened himself against the wall, straining impatiently for each new omen of the apostate’s approach. A whiff on the cosmic winds. A ripple in space-time. A shadow upon the wall. They all pointed to precisely the same cataclysmic conclusion.
    Q is coming. Coming is Q.
    And he would be waiting….

Four
    How far could he trust Q? That was the question, wasn’t it?
    Picard brooded in his ready room, having turned over the bridge to Riker so that he could wrestle with the full implications of Q’s warning in private. The music of Carmen, the original French Radio recordings, played softly in the background. He sat pensively at his desk as Escamillo sang his Toreador’s Song, the infectious melody decidingly at odds with his own somber musings. Picard’s weary eyes scanned the dog-eared, leatherbound volumes that filled his bookshelves, everything from Shakespeare to Dickens to the collected poetry of Phineas Tarbolde of Canopus Prime; precious though they were to him, none of the books in his library seemed to offer any definitive solution to the problem of establishing the veracity of an erratic superbeing. At least, he reflected, Dante could be confident that Virgil was telling him the whole truth about the Divine Comedy; the possibility of deceit was not an issue.
    So could he believe Q when Q told him that penetrating the barrier was a bad idea? The easy answer was no. Q was nothing if not a trickster. Mon Dieu, he had even posed as God Himself