The Q Continuum_ Q-Space Part 9

"Oh, never mind that, Jean-Luc," Q said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand. "Do try not to get caught up in mere trivia."

Only Q could be so blase, Picard thought, about the genesis of a dangerous s.p.a.ce-time anomaly, and so negligent as to the possible consequences of his actions. He opened his mouth, prepared to read Q the riot act, when the boy came up with a new trick that rendered Picard momentarily speechless. Miniature mushroom clouds sprouted from the teen Q's fingers and he hurled them about with abandon, paying no heed to either Picard or the older Q. A toy-sized nuclear blast whizzed by Picard, missing his head by a hair. "Can he see us?" Picard asked, ducking yet another fireball.

"If he wanted to, of course," Q answered. A nuclear spitwad pa.s.sed through him harmlessly. "But he has no reason to even suspect we are here, so he doesn't."

I suppose that makes sense, Picard thought. He could readily accept that the older Q was more adept at stealth and subterfuge than his youthful counterpart. He wondered if Q felt the least bit uncomfortable about peeking in on his past like this. "Aren't you at all tempted," Picard asked, "to speak to him? To offer some timely advice, perhaps, in hopes of changing your own past?"

"If only I could," Q said in a surprisingly melancholy tone. Picard was disturbed to see what appeared to be a genuine look of sorrow upon his captor/companion's face. What kind of regrets, Picard mused, can plague such as Q?

The moment pa.s.sed, and Q regained his characteristic smugness. "You're not the only species, Jean-Luc, that worries incessantly about preserving the sanct.i.ty of the timeline. If changing one human life can start a historical chain reaction beyond any mortal's powers to predict, imagine the sheer universal chaos that could be sp.a.w.ned by tampering with a Q's lifetime." He shuddered, more for effect than because of any actual chill. "Remind me to tell you sometime about how your own Commander Riker owes his very existence to a momentary act of charity by one of my contemporaries. It's quite a story, although completely irrelevant to our present purposes."

Picard hoped that Q was exaggerating where Will Riker was concerned, but he saw Q's point. Various ancient theologians throughout the galaxy, he recalled, had argued that even G.o.d could not undo the past. It was comforting to know that Q recognized the same limitation, at least where his own yesterdays were concerned. Picard took a closer look at the adolescent figure not too far away. "What is he...you...doing now?"

Before their eyes, the teen Q rose to his feet, dusted some stray solar matter from his bare knees, and stretched out his arms. Suddenly he began to grow at a catastrophic rate, expanding his slender frame until he towered like a behemoth above his older self and Picard. He seemed to grow immaterial as well, so that his gargantuan form caused nary a ripple in the ongoing thermonuclear processes of the star. Soon he eclipsed the great golden sun itself, so that its blazing corona crowned his head like a halo. His outstretched hands grazed the orbits of distant solar systems.

"I don't understand," Picard said. "How can we be seeing this? What is our frame of reference?" The gigantic youth loomed over them, yet he was able to witness the whole impossible scene in its entirety. He tore his gaze away from the colossal figure to orient himself, but all he could see was the sparkle of stars glittering many light-years away. Somehow they had departed from the sun completely without him even noticing. "What is this place? Where are we now?"

"Shhh," Q said, raising a finger before his lips. "You must be quite a pain at a concert or play, Picard. Do you always insist on examining the stage and the curtains and the lighting before taking in the show?" He quietly applauded the boy's grandiose dimensions. "Just go with it. That which is essential will become clear."

I hope so, Picard thought, feeling more awestruck than enlightened. There must be some point to this, aside from demonstrating that Q was as flamboyant and egotistical in his youth as he is in my own time.

The boy Q inspected his own star-spanning proportions and laughed in delight. It was an exuberant laugh, Picard noted, but not a particularly malevolent one. Picard was reminded of the optimistic, idealistic, young giants in H. G. Wells's The Food of the G.o.ds, a novel he had read several times in his own boyhood. Most unexpectedly, he found himself liking the young Q. Pity he had to grow into such a conceited pain-in-the-backside.

"I was adorable, wasn't I?" Q commented.

Is that what he wants me to know? Picard thought. Merely that he was once this carefree boy? "Even Kodos the Executioner was once a child," he observed dryly. "Colonel Green is said to have been a Boy Scout."

"And Jean-Luc Picard built s.h.i.+ps in bottles and flew kites over the vineyards," Q shot back. "Evidence suggests that he may have briefly understood the concept of fun, although some future historians dispute this."

Picard bristled at Q's sarcasm. "If this is some misguided attempt to reawaken my sense of fun," he said indignantly, "might I suggest that your timing could not be worse. s.n.a.t.c.hing me away while my s.h.i.+p is in jeopardy is hardly conducive to an increased appreciation of recreation. Perhaps you should postpone this little pantomime until my next scheduled sh.o.r.e leave?"

Q rolled his eyes. "Don't be such a solipsist, Jean-Luc. I told you before, this isn't about you. It's about me." His head tilted back and he stared upward at the Brobdingnagian figure of his younger self. "Look!" he exclaimed. "Watch what I'm doing now!"

Without any other warning except Q's excited outburst, the teen Q began to shrink as swiftly as he had grown only moments before. His substance contracted and soon he was even smaller than he had been originally, less than half the height of either Picard or the older Q. But his process of diminution did not halt there, and he quickly became no larger than a doll. Within seconds, Picard had to get down on his knees, kneeling upon seemingly empty s.p.a.ce, and strain his eyes to see him. The boy Q was a speck again, as he had been when Picard had first spied him across the immeasurably long radius of the solar core. A heartbeat later, he vanished from sight. Picard looked up at the other Q, who had a devious smile on his face. "Well?" Picard asked, frustrated by all this pointless legerdemain. "He's gone."

"Au contraire, mon capitaine," Q said, waving a finger at the puzzled human. "To Q, there is no zero," he added cryptically. "Let's go see."

In a blink, Picard was somewhere else. It was a strangely colorless realm, a shapeless world of stark black and white without any shading in between. The utter darkness of s.p.a.ce had been supplanted by an eerie white emptiness that seemed to extend forever, holding nothing but flying black particles that zipped about ceaselessly, tracing intricate patterns in the nothingness. A slow-moving particle arced toward Picard and he reached out to pluck it from its flight. The black object streaked right through his outstretched hand, however, leaving not a mark or a tingle behind, leaving Picard to wonder whether it was he or the particle that was truly intangible.

He hoped it was the particle. Certainly, he thought, patting himself for confirmation, he felt substantial enough. He could hear his own breathing, feel his heart beating in his chest. He felt as tangible, as real, as he had ever been.

But where in all the universe was he now?

Total silence oppressed him. There were no sounds to hear and no odors to smell. Not even the limbo where Q had first transported him, with its swirling white mists, had seemed quite this, well, vacant. For as far as his eyes could see, there were only three objects that seemed to possess any color or solidity: himself, Q, and a now-familiar young man cavorting among the orbiting particles. Picard watched as the adolescent Q did what he had not been able to do and caught on to one of the swooping particles with his bare hands. Compared with the youth, it looked about the size of a type-1 phaser and completely two-dimensional. It dangled like a limp piece of film from his fingertips.

Picard looked impatiently at the Q he knew. "What are you waiting for? Explain all this, or do you simply enjoy seeing me confused and uncertain?"

"There is nothing simple about that joy at all, Jean-Luc, but I suppose I do have to edify you eventually. This," he said grandly, "is the domain of the infinitesimal. What you see buzzing about you, smaller than the very notion of sound or hue, are quarks, mesons, gluons, and all manner of exotic subatomic beasties. Or rather, to be more exact, they are the possibilities of micro-micro-matter, discrete units of mathematical probabilities following along the courses of their most likely speeds and directions. Whether they actually exist at any one specific time or place is open to interpretation."

"Spare me the lecture on quantum theory," Picard said, doing his best not to sound impressed. He hated to give Q the satisfaction of watching him play the dumbstruck mortal, but, if Q was in fact telling the truth about their present location, if they were actually existing on a subatomic level, then it was hard not to marvel at the sights presented to him. "Is that really a quark?" he asked, pointing to the young Q's immaterial plaything. The boy was peering into the thin black object as if he saw something even smaller inside it.

"Cross my heart," his older self said, "an honest-to-goodness quark, not to be confused with that grasping barkeep on you-know-where."

Picard had no idea whom Q was referring to, and he didn't really care. Perhaps the greatest challenge posed by Q, he reflected, was to see past his snideness to the occasional tidbits of actual revelation. Picard took a moment just to bask in the wonder of this uncanny new environment, one never before glimpsed by human eyes. It was sobering to think that, ultimately, everything in existence was composed of these phantom particles and their intricate ballet.

"'The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself,'" he recited, recalling his precious Shakespeare. "'Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.'"

"My goodness, Picard," Q remarked, "are you moved to poetry?"

"Sometimes poetry is the only suitable response to what the universe holds for us," Picard answered. The essential building blocks of matter darted around him like flocks of birds on the wing. "This is fascinating, I admit, but I fail to see the relevance to your earlier warnings and prohibitions. What has this to do with my mission to the galactic barrier?"

"More than you know," Q stated. An hourgla.s.s materialized in his hands and he tipped it over, letting the sands of time pour down inexorably. "Keep watching. Here's where things start to get messy."

The boy Q held the quark up in front of him, like a sc.r.a.p of paper, then thrust his arm into the quark up to his elbow. His hand and lower arm disappeared as if into a pocket-sized wormhole. He dug around inside the quark for a moment, the tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in his concentration, until he seized hold of something and yanked it back toward his body. It looked to Picard like he was turning the quark inside out.

Instantly, the entire submicroscopic realm changed around them all, becoming a sort of photonegative version of its prior self; Picard looked about him to see a dimension of total blackness, lightened only by flying white particles. Black was white and white was black and the young Q gazed goggle-eyed at what he had wrought. "I don't understand," Picard said. "What's happening?"

"Quiet," Q shushed him, his gaze fixed on his younger self, who was whooping and hollering in triumph. He appeared very pleased with himself, unlike the curiously somber Q standing next to Picard. Clearly, this memory held no joy for Q, although Picard could not tell why that should be so. Am I missing something? Picard wondered.

"Q!" a booming Voice exploded out of the darkness, startling both Picard and the adolescent Q, but not, conspicuously, the Q Picard was most accustomed to. He knew exactly what was coming.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" the Voice boomed again.

The boy glanced about guiltily, dropping the now snow-white quark like a hot potato. He struck Picard as the very portrait of a child caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. The inverted quark flopped like a dead thing at the boy's feet, and he tried to kick it away casually, but it stuck to the sole of his sandal. "Um, nothing in particular," he replied to the Voice, trying unsuccessfully to shake the quark from his foot. "Why do you ask?"

"YOU KNOW WHY. YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO TRIFLE WITH ANTIMATTER. WHY HAVE YOU DEFIED THE EDICTS OF THE CONTINUUM?"

The Voice sounded familiar to Picard, although its excessive volume made it hard to identify. Where have I heard it before? he thought. And what was that about antimatter? He surveyed his surroundings another time; was all of this actually antimatter? He was used to conceiving of antimatter as a fairly abstract concept, something tucked away at the heart of warp engines, safely swaddled behind layers of magnetic constriction. It was difficult to accept that antimatter was all around him, and that, contrary to the fundamental principles of physics, no explosive reaction had resulted from his contact with this realm. Antimatter, in any form, was intrinsically dangerous. Small wonder the rest of the Continuum frowned on the young Q's impulsive experiments.

Sheepishness gave way to defiance as the teen Q realized there was no way to escape the blame. "It's not fair!" he declared. "I know what I'm doing. Look at this!" He s.n.a.t.c.hed the telltale quark from his foot and waved it like a flag. "Look all around! I did this-me!-and nothing got hurt. Nothing important, anyway."

"THE WILL OF THE CONTINUUM CANNOT BE FLOUTED."

Without any fanfare, the quantum realm reversed itself, returning to its original monochromatic schema. Once again, inky particles glided throughout a blank and silent void. "I liked it better the other way," the boy Q muttered to himself. Picard glanced at his companion and saw that the older Q was quietly mouthing the same words.

"YOU MUST BE DISCIPLINED. YOU ARE REQUIRED TO SPEND THE NEXT TEN MILLION CYCLES IN SOLITARY MEDITATION."

"Ten million!" the boy protested. "You have to be joking. That's practically forever!" He flashed an ingratiating smile, attempting to charm his way out of hot water. "Look, there's no harm done. How about I just promise not to do it again?"

"THE JUDGMENT OF THE CONTINUUM CANNOT BE QUESTIONED. TEN MILLION CYCLES."

"But I'll be ancient by then!" the young Q said.

"Ouch!" his future self responded.

"MAKE IT SO," the Voice declared, and Picard suddenly realized whom the Voice reminded him of. Me. The Voice sounds like me. Was that why Q had always delighted in provoking him, he speculated, or was the similarity merely an unusually subtle joke on Q's part? Either way, it appeared obvious that Q had developed a grudge against authority figures at a very early age.

"Just you wait," the boy vowed bitterly, more to himself than to his oppressor.

"One of these days I'll show you what I can really do, you wait and see."

"THE TEN MILLION CYCLES BEGIN NOW," the Voice stated, apparently unimpressed by the youth's rebellious att.i.tude. Do I really sound that pompous? Picard had to wonder. Surely not.

Staring sullenly at his feet, the young Q vanished in a twinkle of light. Picard could not tell if he had transported himself willingly or if he had been yanked away by the Continuum. He supposed it didn't matter much.

"Believe me, Jean-Luc," Q said, gazing mournfully at the spot his earlier self had occupied, "when I was that young, ten million cycles really did feel like an eternity."

Picard found it hard to sympathize, especially when he was being held against his will while the Enterprise faced unknown dangers. "Was this extended flashback really necessary?" he asked. "It comes as no surprise to learn that you started out as a juvenile delinquent."

"Says the man who was nearly expelled from Starfleet Academy-twice," Q replied. "And we're not done yet." He flipped over the hourgla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p? "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.

Interlude

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 ent.i.ties, 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 s.h.i.+p intact despite the numerous-too numerous, as far as Barclay was concerned-hazards encountered in deep s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sailed 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 s.p.a.ce. 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, cla.s.s-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 sc.r.a.ps 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 wis.h.i.+ng that Chief La Forge had been able to spare another engineer to a.s.sist 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 a.s.suming 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 s.h.i.+ft, thoroughly convinced that he was dying from an accidental overdose of genetronic radiation and in immediate need of ma.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+p 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 a.s.semblies to detect emanations along the known psychic frequencies and checked out the probe again.

Voil, 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 s.h.i.+ning gel packs. Obviously, the bio-neural material within the packs had somehow absorbed small quant.i.ties 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?

Twelve.

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 s.h.i.+elds. 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. "s.h.i.+elds 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. h.e.l.l, 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 c.o.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+elds, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 stars.h.i.+p, 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.