Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [65]
“I’ve been here,” she whispered, but the same heavy sensation that had slowed her true memories to a crawl now clogged her brain. She couldn’t recall it. “Think, Kathryn, think!” she told herself in a harsh whisper. It wasn’t a real place, she knew that much, but it was real, in its own strange way.
A sudden image of a little girl and a white rabbit appeared in her mind. This whole thing reminded her of the famous Lewis Carroll children’s story, and she was most definitely cast in the role of Alice. Where, then, was the white rabbit, the one who had lured her here with the…
The gateway. She remembered now, remembered it all. The gateway was the rabbit hole into this strange, bizarre world, where the most dignified captain in the fleet had made a clumsy pass at her, where she was reduced to being a terrified cadet or elevated to the equally false rank of a hometown hero. The gateway had been real, and whoever was casting these illusions was real. No white rabbit, but a trickster par excellence.
She could identify the place now, though she did not recognize it per se. She was inside the very heart of the Q Continuum.
The door opened and closed with a bang. A little boy rushed out. He was towheaded and tanned, wearing a straw hat, shirt and shorts, suspenders, and nothing on his feet. For all the world, he looked like the classic image of Tom Sawyer. He uttered a delighted, incoherent cry when he saw her, and ran toward her. It was such a happy, living sound that it startled Janeway.
Barkley wriggled furiously in her arms. She struggled to hold on to him, but he leaped down and ran across the green grass to leap into the arms of a small boy. Both fell to the ground, joy writ plain in every movement, every laugh, every wriggle.
She had finally found Fluffy’s master.
“The boy has formed such odd attachments to mortal creatures,” came a voice right beside her that Janeway knew all too well. “Can’t imagine where he gets it.”
Janeway turned around with deliberate slowness to regard the grinning figure of Q.
Chapter 2
He was clad, as usual, in his appropriated Starfleet uniform. She was happy that Barkley had found his home and his master, who had obviously missed him terribly. She was much less than happy to see Q again. Even as she regarded him, struggling to keep her emotions down, anger roiled to the forefront.
“I might have known you would have something to do with this,” she snapped. “It’s got your stink all over it. I should have figured it out when Will Riker had nothing but good things to say about you.”
He lifted his hands in mock horror. “Kathryn! You wound me to the quick. Such undeserved slurs!”
“Undeserved?” Janeway let her outrage come unchecked. She strode toward Q and shoved her face up to his. “Those gateways had to be your doing. It’s just the sort of thing you’d get your sick amusement from opening doors here and there, letting innocent people wander through and get lost. Let me count up all the deaths you’re responsible for. There’s the Ammunii ship two hundred and ten lives. The Kuluuk, whom you didn’t kill outright but who would most certainly be alive in their own space. That’s four hundred and fifty-seven. There are the all the V’enah and Todanians who”
“I repeat,” Q said mildly, “you’ve got it all wrong. As you humans usually do. Calm down, dear Kathy, and have a spot of tea.”
Janeway found herself sunk deep in the cushions of a flowery chair which had lace doilies on the arms and over the back. She struggled to extricate herself, realizing as she did so that she was clad in a full-length, constricting dress. It was a yellowish paisley pattern, and she strongly suspected that the thing restricting her