Ten.

William Riker suddenly found himself in command. Before he could react, before he could even rise from his seat, Q vanished from the bridge, taking Captain Picard with him. "Captain!" Deanna called out, but the captain's chair was empty.

For a fleeting second, Riker worried about what might be happening to Captain Picard, but there was nothing he could do for the captain now. The safety of the crew and the ship had to be his number-one priority. This isn't the first time Q has s.n.a.t.c.hed the captain, he recalled, and Q's always brought him back before. He could only pray that this time would be no exception.

"Scan for any nearby concentrations of ionized plasma," Riker ordered Data. "I want to know the instant the Calamarain come within sensor range." He stood and walked to the center of the command area, quickly considering the problem posed by the Calamarain. They didn't know for sure that the alien cloud-creatures posed a threat to the ship, but he didn't intend to be caught napping.

"Commander," Data stated. "The Calamarain are coming into visual range now."

A great cloud of incandescent plasma drifted between the Enterprise and the barrier, obscuring Riker's view of the shimmering wall of energy. The lambent cloud had a prismatic effect, emitting a rainbow's range of colors as it swirled slowly through the vacuum of s.p.a.ce. Although the gaseous phenomenon, several times larger than the Sovereign-cla.s.s starship, bore little resemblance to sentient life as Riker was accustomed to it, looking more like a lifeless acc.u.mulation of chemical vapors, he knew that this was the Calamarain all right, an ent.i.ty or collection of ent.i.ties capable of inflicting serious harm upon humanoid life if they chose to do so. Riker had no way of knowing if these were precisely the same beings who had menaced them before, but they were clearly of the same breed. "Mr. La Forge," he asked, "how are our shields?"

"They should stand up to them, Commander," Geordi reported. "I've set the shield harmonics to the same settings that worked last time." He double-checked the readouts at the engineering station and nodded at Lieutenant Leyoro, who monitored the shields from her own station at tactical. "Let's just hope the Calamarain haven't changed their own parameters over the last few years."

"I don't understand," Lem Faal wheezed, slowly coming to grips with a radically altered situation upon the bridge. "Where is Captain Picard?" His bloodshot gaze swung from the captain's empty chair to the bizarre alien apparition upon the main viewer. "Commander Riker!" he exclaimed, seizing upon the first officer as his only hope. "You have to stop that ent.i.ty, drive it away. The probe...they could ruin everything!"

"Mr. Mack," Riker barked to a young ensign stationed near the starboard aft turbolift. "Escort Professor Faal to his quarters." He sympathized with the unfortunate scientist, but the bridge was no place for a civilian during a potential combat situation, and Riker didn't need the distraction.

"Commander, you can't do this!" Faal objected, hacking painfully between every word. He looked back at the screen as the young ensign took him by the arm and led him toward the nearest turbolift entrance. "I have to know what's happening. My experiment!"

Ensign Mack, an imposing Samoan officer, stood a head above the stricken Betazoid researcher, and had the advantages of youth and superior health besides, so Riker had every confidence that the ensign would be able to carry out his orders. Soon enough Faal's gasping protests were carried away by the turbolift, and Riker turned his attention to more critical matters: namely, the Calamarain.

He stared at the breathtaking spectacle of the immense, luminescent cloud; under other circ.u.mstances he would have been thrilled to encounter such an astounding life-form. If only there was a way to communicate with them, he mused, knowing that Captain Picard always preferred to exhaust every diplomatic effort before resorting to force. Unfortunately, the Universal Translator had proven useless the last time they confronted the Calamarain, whose unique nature was apparently too alien for even the advanced and versatile language algorithms programmed into the Translator. "Counselor," he asked Troi, "can you sense anything at all?"

"Aside from Professor Faal's distress?" She closed her eyes to concentrate on the impressions she was receiving. "The Calamarain are more difficult to read. All I'm picking up from them is a sense of rigid determination, a fixity of purpose and conviction. Whatever they are about, they are committed to it without doubt or hesitation."

He didn't like the sound of that. In his experience, an utterly fixed viewpoint could be the hardest to achieve a mutual understanding with. Fanatics were seldom easy to accommodate. He could only hope that the goal the Calamarain were so set upon did not involve the Enterprise.

We should be so lucky, he thought doubtfully.

"Commander," Leyoro called out, "the Calamarain are pursuing the probe."

It was true. The scintillating cloud receded into the distance as it abandoned the Enterprise in favor of chasing the much smaller projectile. The speed and accuracy of its flight belied any lingering doubts about the cloud's sentience. Through the prismatic ripples of the cloud, he saw the glitter of discharged energy outlining the probe as its protective forcefield struggled to shield it from the attack of the Calamarain. Why are they doing this? Riker wondered. The probe poses no threat to them.

"The readings from the probe are going berserk," Geordi said. "A ma.s.sive overload of tachyon emissions." He studied the output at the science station. "Commander, if we could retrieve the probe at this point, examine its hull, we might be able to learn a lot more about the offensive capabilities of the Calamarain."

That may be for the best, Riker thought, taking his place in the captain's chair. It was obvious that the probe was not going to fulfill its original mission within the barrier. "Bring us within transporter range," he ordered. "Mr. La Forge, prepare to lock on to the probe."

"Commander!" Lieutenant Leyoro exclaimed. "That will mean lowering our shields. In my opinion, sir, the probe's not worth risking the ship for."

"If we don't learn more about the Calamarain, we may pay for it later on," he pointed out. "They don't seem interested in us at the moment, only the probe." Why is that, he wondered. The probe came nowhere near them. Why did they go after it?

The starship soared toward the amorphous, living fog that now held the probe in its grasp. Puzzled, Riker witnessed the coruscating shield around the probe growing weaker and less effective before his eyes. The flaring bursts of power came ever more sporadically while the targeted projectile rocked back and forth beneath the force of the cloud's a.s.sault. How much longer could the probe withstand the fury of the Calamarain?

"Shields down," Leyoro reported unhappily.

"I'm trying to lock on to the probe," Geordi said, having transferred the transporter controls to his science station, "but the Calamarain are interfering."

"Deliberately?" Riker asked.

"Hard to say," Geordi answered. "All I know is those tachyon emissions are making it hard to get a solid lock on the probe."

"Do what you can," Riker instructed, "but be prepared to abort the procedure at my command." Leyoro was right to a degree; if the Calamarain showed any interest in coming after the ship itself, they would have to sacrifice the probe and its data.

His combadge beeped, and he heard Dr. Crusher's voice, but before he could respond a white light flared at the corner of his eye. For a second Riker hoped that maybe Q and the captain had returned, then he spotted the female Q and her child sitting behind him on a set of wooden bleachers that had materialized at the aft section of the bridge, blocking the entrances to both of the rear turbolifts. The child now wore an antiquated Little League uniform and baseball cap instead of the sailor suit that had clothed him earlier. His mother wore a matching orange cap and jersey, with a large capital Q printed in block type upon the front of her uniform, as opposed to the lower-case q upon the little boy's jersey. "See," she told q, pointing toward the main viewer, "this is what they call an emergency situation. Isn't it funny?"

The boy laughed merrily and pointed like his mother. "'Mergencee!" he squealed, bouncing up and down upon the bleachers so forcefully that the timbers creaked.

Riker seldom resorted to profanity on the bridge, but he bit down a pungent Anglo-Saxon expression as he tore his gaze away from the grossly inappropriate tableau that now occupied the bridge. He'd have to deal with the two sightseeing Qs later; right now his attention belonged on the sight of the endangered probe, its shields flashing within the vaporous depths of the Calamarain. Still, he felt less like the commander of a mighty starship than like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus.

"Now, pay attention," the female Q instructed her child. "This is supposed to be educational as well as entertaining." She plucked a pair of red and black pennants from out of the air and handed one flag to little q, keeping the other one for herself as she sat upon the bleachers. The pennants were made of stiff red fabric with the word "Humanoids" embossed on one side. "While your father is occupied elsewhere, let's make an outing of it, a.s.suming the funny humanoids can keep their ship in one piece for that long."

"Pieces!" little q chirped. "Pieces!"

On the screen, a flash of crimson flame erupted from the side of the probe as its hull crumpled beneath the stresses exerted by the Calamarain. "Mr. La Forge?" Riker asked, guessing that soon there would be nothing left of the probe to salvage.

"I think I've got it," Geordi called out. "Energizing now."

The golden flicker of the transporter effect raced over the surface of the probe, supplanting the futile sparking of its failing forcefield. The probe faded away completely, leaving behind only the spectacular sight of the Calamarain floating 'twixt the Enterprise and the galactic barrier.

"One point to the lowly humans," the female Q announced, writing a neon-yellow Arabic number one in the air with her index finger. The fiery numeral hung suspended above the floor for a breath before evaporating. A silver whistle appeared on a cord around her neck. She blew on it enthusiastically, hurting Riker's ears with the shrill sound, before declaring, "Game on!"

The great cloud that was the Calamarain drifted in place for a moment, perhaps unaware at first that its prey had escaped, but then it raced toward the screen, growing larger by the instant. Smoky tendrils reached out for the Enterprise. "It's coming after us," Leyoro said.

"Estimate interception in one minute, thirty-two seconds," Data stated.

Riker heard Troi gasp beside him. He wondered if she was feeling the Calamarains' hostile emotions, but there was no time to find out. "Mr. La Forge," he called out. "Is the transport complete?"

"We have it, Commander," Geordi a.s.sured him. "It was close, but we beamed it into Transporter Room Five."

"Raise shields," he ordered Leyoro. The incandescent cloud filled the screen before him. Unknown vapors churned angrily, stirring up ripples of ionized gas. He tried to distinguish individuals within the ma.s.s of radiant fog, but it was impossible to single out one strand of plasma among the whole. It's possible, he thought, that each Calamarain does not exist as a single ent.i.ty the way we do. They may be closer to a hive-mind mentality, like the Borg.

That comparison did nothing to rea.s.sure him.

"Already on it," Leyoro said promptly, with a fierce gleam in her cold gray eyes. Riker suspected she was never truly happy except when fighting for survival. A dangerous att.i.tude in the more civilized and peaceable regions of the Federation, but possibly a valuable trait on a starship probing the boundaries of known s.p.a.ce. You can take an Angosian out of the war, he thought, but you can't always take the war out of an Angosian. Not unlike a certain Lieutenant Commander Worf....

The plasma cloud surged over and around the Enterprise. Riker felt the floor vibrate beneath his boots as their deflectors absorbed and dispersed some variety of powerful force. A low, steady hum joined the background noise of the bridge, buzzing at the back of his mind like a laser drill digging into solid tritanium. He could practically feel the grating sound chafing away at his nerve endings. That's going to get real old real fast, he thought.

"Permission to open fire?" Leyoro asked, eager to return fire. Her survival instincts could not be faulted, Riker knew. They had kept her alive during both the war and the veterans' revolt that came afterward.

He shook his head. "Not yet. Let's not rush into battle before we even know what we're fighting about." Their shields had fended off the Calamarain before. He was confident that they would buy them a little breathing s.p.a.ce now.

A jolt shook the bridge, which rocked the floor from starboard to port and back again before stabilizing a moment later. Everyone on the bridge caught their breath, except for the female Q, who cheerily turned to her child and said, "Come to think of it, I believe we may be rooting for the wrong team." The stiff cloth pennants the pair clutched in their hands switched from red fabric to something slick and, in its shifting spectrum of colors, reminiscent of the Calamarain. Riker noted that the lettering on the miniature flags now read "Nonhuman life-forms."

"One point to the Calamarain," she said, blowing sharply on her referee's whistle, "and the score is tied."

Riker refused to be baited, not while his ship was under attack. "Report," he instructed his crew. "What caused that shock?"

"Really, Commander Riker," the female Q chided, "who do you think caused it? The Calamarain, of course. Do you see any other threatening aliens in the vicinity?"

"Just you," Riker said curtly. "Mr. Data, please define the nature of the attack."

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 ent.i.ties, capable of thriving in the deadly vacuum of s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sumed 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 embarra.s.sing 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. "Embarra.s.sing?" 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 'embarra.s.sing' 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 acc.u.mulations that promised an approaching storm. Flickers of bright electricity leaped from billow to billow, sparking like bursts of lightning through the all-encompa.s.sing 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 a.s.signment 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 s.p.a.ce." 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 s.p.a.ce 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 surpa.s.s 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 a.s.sist 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, a.n.a.lyzing the probe was probably less stressful under the circ.u.mstances than working on the shields or engines, so the probe and Barclay made a good fit. I should never have doubted Geordi's work a.s.signments, 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."

"Yes, Commander," the android replied. He sounded like he was looking forward to tackling the problem. "A most intriguing challenge." He studied the displays at Ops, swiftly switching from one sensor mode to another until he found something. "Counselor Troi," he said after a few moments, "I am detecting a directed transmission from the ent.i.ty on a narrower wavelength than their tachyon barrage. It may be an attempt at communication. Can you sense its meaning?"

Riker could not see Deanna's face from his chair, but he could well imagine the look of concentration on her face. Even after all these years, her empathic abilities still impressed him, although he could recall more than a few instances when he'd wished that she had not been able to see through him quite so easily. Like that time on Risa, he thought.