Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [48]
Summoning all the willpower he had to bear, Picard stared at Crusher. “Do as you see fit, Beverly.”
Q-as-Ronin snapped his fingers and became Vash, a woman Picard met on Risa. “As for you, Jean-Luc, do you truly think this drip of a doctor will give you Vash’s lust for life?” Another finger snap, and he became Anij, the Ba’ku woman. “Or Anij’s wisdom?” Then he became the youthful Marta Batanides, his old Academy friend, with whom he had never had any kind of romantic relationship. “And let’s face it, we never get over our first love.”
“Thank you, Jean-Luc,” Crusher said, and Picard could hear the tension in her voice, “but I’m sure it’ll all work out.”
With an exasperated sigh, Q changed back to his own form, again in the Starfleet captain’s uniform. “You people are just no fun at all.”
And then he disappeared.
Crusher let out a long breath, and Picard could see the tension leaving her shoulders. “That was impossible. I so wanted to punch him—especially when he became Ronin.” She looked at him. “Who was that last one he turned into?”
“It’s a long story,” Picard said quickly.
“Really?”
Sighing, Picard said, “Marta was one of my Academy classmates.”
“I don’t remember you ever telling me about her.”
He deliberately left out the last name so Crusher wouldn’t connect it with the high-ranking admiral in Starfleet Intelligence. “I’d really rather not discuss it, Beverly—it will simply start a protracted discussion about Q, which I’d just as soon avoid.”
After giving him a look that made it clear that she was most assuredly not giving up this easily, but merely tabling the discussion for now, she said, “I wonder what Q wants.”
Picking up the wineglass, Picard said, “I’m quite sure that Q will let us know in due course. He always does.”
12
Malon Supertanker Keta
Delta Quadrant
One day before the end of the universe
“WE HAVE A PROBLEM—SHIELD NUMBER 2 IS FAILING.”
Controller Sheel looked up sharply at Liswan’s report. “What do you mean, shield number 2 is failing?”
Liswan frowned. “Which part of the sentence didn’t you comprehend?”
Running a hand through his thinning brown-gold hair—and pulling out a few tufts, to his annoyance—Sheel said, “All of it—or, rather, none of it. What I don’t comprehend is why.”
“Remlap doesn’t have that answer, sir. All she will say is that the shield is failing.”
“Why am I not surprised? Tell her to fix it.”
Shaking her head, Liswan said, “She can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t know the cause,” Liswan said slowly, as if speaking to a child. Sheel had to resist the urge to punch her in her gold-skinned nose. “Can’t really fix it unless—”
“Fine, fine. How soon until it fails?”
“She isn’t sure—”
“—how long that will be, either, of course.” Sheel peered down at his console, located in the center of the tanker’s bridge.
“But the most we have is twelve hours,” Liswan said. “The problem is, when the shield fails, we’ll all be exposed to the theta radia—”
Angrily turning on his first mate, Sheel said, “Are you laboring under the delusion that I don’t know what’ll happen when the shield fails?”
“Well,” Liswan said with a shrug, “you didn’t know what ‘Shield number 2 is failing’ meant, so I thought it’d be better to be safe than—”
“Liswan, be quiet,” Sheel snapped, then turned back to the console. They were on course for system KMH-5, which had an O-type star where they could dump their antimatter waste. In order to achieve faster-than-light travel, the Malon used a matter/antimatter annihilation drive, which created a waste product that was teeming with theta radiation. Other worlds had learned the trick of eliminating the waste, but the Malon had not. In his more cynical moods, the controller thought that the government kept it that way, because waste disposal was a major source of revenue. Without the need for supertankers like the Keta, shipyards would lose major contracts, and the people building them would be unemployed. The Malon had enough economic hardships these days, especially