All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [34]
Finally, the chief spoke up again. “We’ve entered the Chavez system, sir.”
The captain turned to Data. “Commander… is there anything unusual in the vicinity?”
The android looked back at him. “How would you define unusual, sir? Every region of space has unique properties that cannot be found anywhere else.”
Picard thought about it—trying to piece it together the way it happened the first time. Finally, he came up with something.
“There should be a barrier of some sort,” he recalled. “A large plasma field… highly disruptive.”
Tasha worked at her tactical board. After a while, she shook her head. “Nothing, sir.”
Frustrated, the captain looked down again at O’Brien’s console. “It’s the right time… the right place. He should be here.” O’Brien’s brow puckered. “Who, sir?”
Straightening, Picard looked around the bridgewand called out. “Q.t We’re here, dammit!” There was no answer.
Again, he addressed his nemesis. “This has gone on long enough! What sort of game are you playing?” Still no response—at least, not from Q.
The bridge crew was responding, however. They were exchanging glances from one to the other—no doubt starting to wonder about their captain’s sanity.
Frowning, he turned to Troi. “Counselor, do you sense an alien presence of the sort I described earlier? A superior intelligence?” She looked worried. “No, sir.”
In the aft section, though they didn’t think Picard noticed, Worf and Tasha were whispering back and forth. “What is a… Q?” he asked.
She shrugged. “As far as I know, it’s a letter of the alphabet.”
Blast it, thought the captain, where was he? Where was his alien tormentor?
“This is not the way it’s supposed to happen…” he muttered. Then he spoke in a louder, more authoritative voice. “Maintain position here,” he told them. “I’ll be in my ready room.”
En route, he endured his officers’ stares without a word. What could he say, after all? That the super-intelligent being he’d been expecting hadn’t shown up? That he’d diverged from Starfleet orders to lead them on some kind of wild-goose chase? Disgusted, he entered his ready room… … and found himself in a different place entirely. It was a courtroom of sorts, made of glass and steel, without a single surface that wasn’t hard and unyielding. A crowd was packed into the place—a gallery of leering, hollow-eyed scarecrows, men and women who pointed at him and shrieked his name.
Among them, were the same haggard souls he had seen in the vineyards of his “future” and in the shuttlebay of his “past”—except that their numbers had vastly multi-plied. The air was rank with their scent, with their hatred and desperation.
Suddenly, he knew where he was—and when. He had been here before, after all. The time was the twenty-first century, the era of mankind’s post-atomic horror.
That explained the hunger and the poverty that char-acterized the spectators… the bitterness in their voices, the hopelessness in their eyes.
And this venue was the one in which he had been placed on trial several years earlier. Not just him alone, either, but all of humanity.
As if to confirm his suspicions, everyone looked in one direction at once—at an entrance to the room, ap-proachable only through a long, dark hallway. There was someone making his way down that hallway now— someone sitting cross-legged on a floating chair. Q, thought the captain. Who else?
A moment later he was proven right. With impeccable timing, the entity emerged from the shadows, playing the crowd like a virtuoso~ The haggard ones roared their approval as Q wafted out to the center of the room, wearing an elaborate set of judge’s robes.
Holding his hand up, he quieted the cheering throng. Finally, there was silence—utter and complete. With a supercilious smile on his face, Q turned to Picard.
“Mon capitaine,” he said, his eyes twinkling with irony. “I thought you’d never get here.”
CHAPTER 12
mmQ,, said the captain. “I thought so.” The entity shrugged. “Actually, you were only about ninety-six percent