Title: Only Human Part IV Author: Alara Rogers Series: TNG Rating: NC-17 Codes: Q/f, AU Part: 10/12+1 Summary: Q and T'Laren are taken captive aboard their own ship by the Ferengi. "You really did it!" Yalit said to him with malicious cheer as he entered engineering. "Didn't think you had it in you, honestly, but you did it. How does it feel to commit bestiality?" She sniggered. "You seemed to like it just fine from what I could see." Q took a deep breath. "Is there something I should know about you? Something you're not telling me? You seem positively obsessed with the details of my sex life. Some sort of prurient interest in me?" She snorted. "You've got no lobes and there's no meat on your bones. If I wanted to fuck you, it'd only be because it's so sweet to hear you cry and beg, not because I actually wanted your cock." "Oh, right, I forgot. You're incapable of any kind of sexual desire that doesn't involve causing pain. I'm sure if it were biologically possible, you'd be just as much a rapist as your offspring seem to want to be." She shrugged. "You can't tell me that someone who's famous for tormenting half the species in the galaxy can't understand the attraction of making people suffer. The only reason hurting people doesn't get you hard is that energy beings don't have cocks and you don't have the power to do anything more than make smart-ass remarks now that you're human." "And the entire concept of making people suffer pain during *sex* is not just disgusting, it misses the entire point of the ritual. When I had my powers and engaged in pleasure-sharing activities with my fellow Q, I could make them beg because they were desperate for more, not because they wanted me to stop." "Most of the men I've been with begged me for more, too." "So you took advantage of perverts with miswired brains to increase your personal power and satisfy your lust for other people's pain. Good work if you can get it, I suppose." "It's just what I'd expect from a human from the Federation to judge other people's sex lives and tell people who're getting some harmless enjoyment that they're perverts, but really, I thought some sort of godlike being would be more advanced than that. Is that why they threw you out?" "You hit me three times with a neurowhip! I was in agony for the whole day! Then you drugged my friend so she'd need someone to have sex with her, and nearly killed her! How is that harmless enjoyment?" "It's not." Yalit's smile came back, twice as nasty as before. "It's what you deserve for trying to ruin my reputation, belittling me, insulting me, and lying to me." "Oh really." Q's own smile matched Yalit's for cold malice. "So explain to me why what you did to me to punish me for 'trying to ruin your reputation' was something that was *guaranteed* to destroy your reputation, what little of it you might have had. See, as soon as the Federation finds out that you drugged a Vulcan woman to force her into sex, you will be branded a common criminal. A rapist, a trafficker, the lowest of the low. They'd have looked the other way about the kidnapping itself, but now that you've committed sexual assault, your reputation is *ruined.*" "I'm not worried about it." "You should be. Even if you force the Federation to grant you a pardon, it'll *still* get all over that you did it in the first place, and your reputation as a scientist and inventor will be gone. And I wouldn't be so sure they'll *give* you a pardon. They have literally hundreds of different legal entities that could possibly charge you with a crime for what you've done to Federation citizens, so even if one such gives you a pardon they can come after you with another, and I wouldn't expect your ability to blackmail high-ranking Ferengi masochists to save you this time; if you're blackmailing them, they'd probably be delighted to see you disappear into the Federation penal system where you'll never be heard from on Ferenginar again." "I *said*, I'm not worried about it. Why don't you leave worrying about my reputation up to me?" She motioned with her head into engineering. "Now, we've got work to do. In two days we'll be at the Bolian homeworld, where we can just drop your friend off. If you want the Federation to be invited to bid on *you*, I want a transwarp test that works before then." Q blinked. "The Bolian homeworld? We were nowhere near there." "Until we went into transwarp a couple of times. Our tests might've been short, but they got us some distance. You want to argue with me, or you want to work toward earning your freedom back?" Put like that, it was obvious what he needed to do. Annoyed, because he'd really wanted to get more of a reaction than that to what he'd thought was a sure-fire zinger, Q walked deep into the engineering room to get to work. But the Bolian homeworld thing nagged at him, even as he explained the documentation he'd created to Yalit and her sons. Early in his time as a human, Q had gotten horribly frustrated with the fact that he didn't know where anything was or how it related to each other in terms of how a human could perceive the universe; of course he knew where all the worlds of the Federation were, and more, and in fact probably had a better idea of what was on most of the planets in the galaxy than anyone else did. But he kept running into problems where he'd forget that some world he'd visited many times was deep in the Delta or Gamma Quadrants and nowhere near anywhere humans could get to, or that the transit time between Earth and, say, Betazed, was several days and not instantaneous, or that there were some worlds the Federation simply couldn't go anywhere near because of that pesky Romulan Neutral Zone that formed a sphere around Romulan space and cut off most of the Beta Quadrant from Federation exploration unless Starfleet wanted to send a ship out *around* Romulan space, which would apparently take a year and a half. It made him look stupid, when he forgot things that Federation citizens took for granted as basic facts everyone knew. So he had spent a lot of time with star maps, memorizing where the worlds he knew about actually were in relation to each other rather than in relation to the nodes of the Continuum, and cursing himself for not having been more careful when he picked out what memories he was going to bring with him into his human existence. Why did he even *need* to remember how anything related to nodes in the Continuum anyway? He wasn't ever going back there with his primitive human brain. There was no way they could be anywhere near the Bolian homeworld. Q knew exactly how fast warp-equivalent 13 was, *Ketaya*'s top speed; he knew how much space *Ketaya* could have crossed at top regular warp speed since they were taken captive; he knew where the Abister singularity was in relation to the rest of Federation space, including the Bolian homeworld; and he knew there was no way they could possibly be two days away from the Bolian homeworld. But why would Yalit even bother saying something like that if it wasn't true? What did she gain by lying to him? It hit him then in a cold wash of horror, while he was in the middle of writing out the corrected diagrams for part of the process he had described in his handwritten and hand-encrypted documentation. He stopped for a moment, staring at the wall in absolute horror, before bending his head back down and pretending to work so Yalit couldn't see his expression. Yalit wasn't afraid of what would happen to her reputation once it got out that she had kidnapped and sexually assaulted Federation citizens because Yalit had no intention of releasing either of them back to the Federation. All she had to do was beam T'Laren into outer space and claim she'd been beamed to a planet. Or, since Q could demand to talk to T'Laren to confirm that she was all right, beam her into a holodeck set up to look like the Bolian homeworld, have her confirm that she was safe, and then kill her as soon as *Ketaya* was out of the area and Q couldn't check anymore. Or, since Ferengi weren't usually big on killing possibly valuable merchandise, maybe they would sell her to slavers. It could be true that Yalit wasn't planning on going anywhere near the Romulan Neutral Zone, but selling T'Laren to traders who *were* going there, who could then re-sell her to the Romulan Empire as a captive Vulcan breeder to create telepathic spies with, was entirely within the realm of possibility. And if that were the case, then Yalit had absolutely no intention of ever ransoming him back to the Federation, either. Someone who wanted to kill him would be the safest bet; he'd have given her transwarp, and she'd ensure he'd never get rescued by the Federation to tell people what she had done. If she sold him to the Cardassians or Romulans or someone, the Federation could notice from the technological advances that *something* was going on, send their own intelligence agents to investigate, and possibly rescue him, but if she sold him to the Ceuli or the Maierlens or Beryllians, he would be dead and the Federation would never learn of his fate. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Yalit was telling him the truth, that she was going to free T'Laren and offer the Federation a chance to ransom him back. But what if he wasn't wrong? What if he let her send T'Laren off the ship to whatever unknown fate, and then he'd be alone and totally helpless for whatever Yalit wanted to do with him? What if Yalit decided to *keep* him, threaten him with torture to keep him producing technological advancements for her to sell? Her brood were obviously good at keeping secrets, given that Ferengi women weren't even allowed to manage money and yet she was in charge of their family's fortune. If an obscure Ferengi physicist suddenly started coming up with major advancements in technology, how many years would it be before the Federation figured out where he'd gone? And what would have happened to T'Laren in the meantime? No one was looking out for her; until she'd turned up on *Yamato* her family and friends had thought she was dead. Either Yalit was stupid, and refused to recognize the damage that her criminal activities would do to her reputation if she were found out; or Yalit was canny and ruthless, understood well the danger and fully intended to prevent it from becoming a problem by never letting either Q or T'Laren anywhere near the Federation again, and was clever enough to lie about it to keep Q producing. And given everything she'd done, given the kidnapping in the first place and the fact that she'd seen through Q's own lies and tortured him into submission, given that she'd sent T'Laren a peace offering impregnated with more drugs and a plausible lie to keep T'Laren taking the drug that was supposed to let Yalit's sons rape her... no. No, Q was sure of it. Yalit intended to kill them both, sell them into terrible slavery, or do *something* that would keep her crimes from ever being found out. He started feigning exhaustion then, started yawning, pretending to nod off at his work and then jerk himself "awake" with a start, made his speech start to slur as the day wore on, blinked a lot, closed his eyes and pretended to have a hard time opening them, and generally acted distracted and sluggish. Finally Yalit laughed at him harshly. "Rough night for you, hmm? Can't keep yourself awake? Go back to your woman and sleep, you're useless to me like this. I want you alert and fresh tomorrow morning, or I'll wake you up with a little of this." She patted the neurowhip. Q didn't have to feign fear. "You won't need to do that. I'll be fine tomorrow. I just... I just need to get some sleep. We'll finish building this tomorrow. I promise." "Good. You remember that." They had to escape. He had to concentrate on pretending to be tired, on walking slowly when he wanted to run, bite his nails or lips, run his hands through his hair, pace wildly. Even when he was back in his room, his cell, he couldn't reveal how panicked he was. How could they get away when he couldn't coordinate anything with T'Laren? He couldn't even tell her of the threat; the trick with the sonic shower wouldn't work twice. T'Laren was in the main area of the room, sitting in a meditative pose on the couch. She had showered and gotten dressed, and while she still looked thin, overtired and a bit haggard, at least she didn't look like, well, like she'd been locked in a closet for a day and a half. Q felt a sudden rush of concern and fear for her as he saw her; what if Yalit did send her away in two days? How could they engineer an escape in that amount of time? What was Yalit going to do to her in two days? Where were they sending her? Not the Bolian homeworld, he knew, but where? And then he felt an answering response -- guilt, still, and self-hatred, and nagging arousal, and a sense of failure, and worry. They had a mental link, still, and simply seeing her and feeling concern for her had automatically opened his shields and let it flow between them again. In as brusque a voice as he could manage under the circumstances, he said, "My back is killing me. Can I trust you not to leap on me and rape me if you fix it? Because I really think you owe me at least that much." Her face lit up, for moderate, almost-Vulcan-controlled-but-not-there-yet values of lighting up. "You would... trust me to touch you again?" "That depends on whether you feel an overwhelming need to invade my mind, take me over and make me do nauseating things to your body, or not. Think you can control yourself?" "I -- yes, yes, of course. Of course I'll help you. I'll do anything you ask." A completely unwanted thought about things he might ask her to do that would be fair recompense for the disgusting things she'd made him do for her flitted through his head, but he crushed it. This was serious, and the fact that the things she'd done to and for him yesterday, before everything had gone bad, had stimulated his imagination in ways he'd rather not have it stimulated under the circumstances had to be irrelevant. "Fine. I'll take off my shirt. Don't consider it an invitation; I just want a decent backrub." "You don't need to. I... I don't believe you've ever... I've done it with your clothing on every other time I can recall." "Yes, well, there hardly seems a point to maintaining any sense of bodily modesty around you anymore, is there? I used to make you do it with my clothes on because I didn't want to be inadvertently sending you any messages you could misinterpret about wanting to indulge in disgusting mortal reproductive rituals. Now that we actually *have*, I feel I can accomplish the same purpose by simply telling you, bluntly, no. I don't want you like that, so keep it to a backrub." "I... of course." He went in the other room and stripped off his elaborate outer clothing so he could actually *get* to his shirt, and took it off. She was a touch telepath. She needed skin to skin contact. His heart was pounding, terror that this wouldn't work and they couldn't come up with a plan and in two days T'Laren would be sent off to slavery or death and he'd be left alone to face a similar fate by himself, mixed with desperate hope that maybe this *would* work and they could find a way to win free, and the excitement at the thought of touching another mind. If they didn't merge, if they kept it to the top levels -- and after his experiences yesterday, Q was sure he could keep it there as long as T'Laren didn't go berserk and use all her telepathic strength on him -- then he could talk to her the way he had talked to other Q. He had been deaf and mute to his own native language for so long, afraid of what very little communication he *could* manage in it because it would leave him so exposed, but now the worst had happened and he knew how to keep himself safe, assuming she didn't assault him, which he *had* to assume because she seemed sane again and if he didn't trust her when she was sane, he had no one he could trust at all. When T'Laren came in the room, following him, he felt a surge of lust from her as she saw him shirtless, and for a moment he almost panicked and called the thing off. But then it tamped down, Vulcan control finally good for something. He felt nervous and vulnerable as he laid down on the bed, stomach down and face turned to the side of the bed where he could still see her. "You ruined my back, and the horrible chairs in engineering haven't helped any. See what you can do with my shoulders." "I'll do whatever I can to help." Her fingers touched him, warm and firm, and he flinched. But there was no sense of cold fire, no impression of her mind pressing against his or the force of her telepathy opening a path to his mind. He could feel her even more strongly than before -- she was so pathetically eager to please him, to repay him for what he did for her and make up for what she did to him, so relieved and overjoyed that he was actually willing to let her do anything to make recompense, let alone that he still trusted her enough to let her touch him, that it completely swamped the desire she still felt. He knew, then, that he'd made the right decision. T'Laren wasn't in control of her emotions the way a Vulcan should be, possibly not even the way a human in her situation should be, but she was fully in control of her actions again and her emotional state was dominated by the guilt she felt over what she'd done to him and her desperate need to make amends. She wouldn't hurt him. Besides, her fingers felt incredibly good as they dug into his tight muscles. He hadn't been making up the part about his back hurting. Q sighed, starting to relax slightly for the first time since waking up today. Tentatively he sent, *[T'Laren? Can you hear me?]* Her hands broke contact. "Q?" she said, sounding startled. "What?" he asked, putting an irritable tone in his voice. "I thought... Didn't you say something to me?" "What, are you hallucinating now?" "No... I must have imagined it." She put her hands back on his body. *[You didn't. I'm sending telepathically. _Try_ to avoid tipping the Ferengi off that I'm doing it, please. Can you respond?]* For several seconds he thought she wasn't going to respond, that either she couldn't or she hadn't received. Then she sent, *[Q? How are you... Are you actually speaking to me? Mind to mind?]* *[You _are_ a telepath. This really shouldn't be such a big shock.]* *[But I haven't mind-melded with you.]* *[You didn't notice? We have some sort of mental link. Didn't you feel it?]* *//Shock/startlement/joy almost painful/[No... no, I didn't. And they don't work like this. I was... I couldn't have done this with Soram unless we were actively melded. We only sensed each other's emotions, and since we sought to control our emotions, even that was rare.]* *[Well, I _have_ spent millions of years talking to people in _exactly_ this way, so it shouldn't come as a complete surprise that I can actually speak telepathically. I mean, I'm not a talking horse.]* *[I didn't know _I_ could talk this way, Q. It's not just that I can telepathically communicate with a human without being melded... I know you have much more skill with telepathy than other humans. It's that I can do this at _all_.]//wonderment/* *[Well, restrain your enthusiasm, because we have a serious problem.]* He sent her a memory burst of his conversation with Yalit, his thought processes, and his horrified realization that Yalit was most likely lying through her teeth. *[Q?]/confusion//* *//Irritation/[_What?_ Did you not understand what I'm telling you?]* *[That's exactly it. I don't understand. I... what you just thought at me was... too _dense_, I think. I only understood bits and pieces.]* Q sighed in exasperation, the sound turning into a gasp of pleasure as T'Laren found a particularly painful knot and rubbed it hard, working it loose. His back arched, sensations that were almost painful in their intensity shooting through his nerves. "Nngh. Right there, yes." *[I suppose there's a difference between talking to a Q and talking to a mortal after all. I'll have to do this the long, slow way, I suppose.]* *[Do you even realize how amazing it is that we can communicate at all this way? This just is not how Vulcan telepathy works.]* *[Are you going to bitch about it all night? We have serious matters to discuss.]* *[I'm not complaining. Far from it. I'm astonished. But yes, I did gather from what little I was able to interpret of what you sent that there's a problem. Something about, you think Yalit is going to kill us?]* *[She told me--]* He actually had to focus to keep it verbal; his instinct was to just send T'Laren the memory of the conversation, but apparently either their communication channel didn't have the bandwidth or T'Laren lacked the processing power to handle memory bursts outside of a full meld. *[When the power failed, she told me that if I gave her transwarp and worked with her to prevent these kinds of problems, she'd return you to the Federation. That she wouldn't sell you to the Romulans, because she won't make enough profit on it to go to the Neutral Zone. She was saying it so I would get the power back on without blowing up the ship, but I thought she was sincere, until today. But she said today that she would be dropping you on the Bolian homeworld in two days. There's no way we could be near the Bolian homeworld enough that you could be dropped there in two days. And then I realized that if she lets us go back to the Federation, her reputation as a scientist will be destroyed... she'll be a convicted felon, or an accused rapist, or even if she does manage to get a pardon she'll still never live down what she did to us with drugging you. But if she kills you or sells you into slavery, after you're off the ship, how would I know? It makes much more sense for her to kill us or dispose of us by selling us into slavery than it does to ever let us go back to the Federation.]* *[...Yes. That makes sense, I'm afraid.]* *[So what do we do about it?]* *[I don't know. You are hardly a trained fighter and they have never hesitated to stun me. Is there a way you can get the power to fail while you're in engineering?]* He grinned. *[Absolutely. And if I know it's coming, I can get into the Jeffries tubes and get to a computer, so when the power comes on, I can get into the system.]* *[How would you do that? They locked us out.]* *[You remember that program I wrote for you to restrict my own access to the system? Remember that back door you pointed out that I could have written into it if I felt like it?]* *//Amusement/[I did wonder if you might have done something like that.]* *[Who, me, be devious? Naah.]* *[As long as you can guarantee that the power will be off for a few minutes, I can easily locate and nerve pinch the guards that are usually outside our door.]* Q hesitated. T'Laren was Starfleet, and a Vulcan to boot. She was probably not going to react well to this, but he had to point it out. *[You can't nerve pinch them, T'Laren. We're vastly outnumbered. We have to kill them.]* *[If we _have_ to kill, then we can kill. But if I creep up on an opponent in darkness, and I have a way to disable him and take his phaser without killing, that is the only right thing to do.]* *[No. Morally right, maybe, but we don't have the luxury of taking the moral high ground. Our lives are at stake, T'Laren. There's at least twenty Ferengi aboard this ship at any given time, because that's how many men Yalit told me she'd have take turns raping you if I didn't help you with your little problem.]* He caught a backwash of horror and rage from her mind. Good. Maybe if he reminded her of exactly what the Ferengi were capable of doing to them, she wouldn't resist him on this. *[If you knock them unconscious, they'll start waking up while you're still taking others out. They're not going to go easier on us if they recapture us just because we refrained from killing any; if we successfully pull off an escape attempt and then we don't follow through by getting them all off the ship one way or another, they will outnumber us, they'll overpower us, and then they probably _will_ rape you just to teach us a lesson or something. And they'll probably use a neurowhip on me. Or rape me, too. Yalit threatened to have her goons do that once. Or both.]* His fingers tightened in the blankets, clenching, unable to stop himself from tensing up even as T'Laren was still working on his back, and he knew the full dimension of the fear he felt was getting through the link, but he didn't try to hide it from her. She had to know what they were up against, and she had to know how worried he was. *[And then they'll kill you or sell you to slavers who're on their way to Romulus anyway, and they'll sell me to people who want to torture me to death. We _can't_ fail. We don't have a starship backing us up, and they've got a whole other ship they can bring into play; if I let the test run for a few minutes before the crystals blow, the other ship won't be in range to help them for some time, but we have no idea how many Ferengi are aboard that thing and we _don't have weapons_ worth speaking of. We have to be able to take them all out, rapidly, have them stay out, get the transwarp back on and run like hell, or alternately take them all out, have them stay out, and find a way to destroy their other ship even though its shields are probably better than our weapons. We can't do that if we let them live.]* He could actually feel her recognition that his logic was correct, even as her moral system rebelled against his conclusions. *[Very well. Until we have secured control of the ship, we will kill them if they are combatants. I don't want to kill the child who brought me the grapes, and I don't want to kill Yalit. //i do want to kill yalit but wanting to kill is wrong// People who cannot fight, we should not kill.]* *[Children can point a phaser. So can Yalit. I won't promise not to kill _anyone_ until I know we're safe.]* *[Q, you aren't the one who's going to be killing people. I have the military training. You need to take control of the computer system and keep yourself in a safe, secure location until I've secured the ship.]* *//negation/[You're right, it would be ridiculous to have me running around with a phaser. But I'm not going to sit there like some sort of princess in a tower and wring my hands while you risk your life. I'm going to do what _I_ know how to do.]* *[And in the context of warfare, what _do_ you know how to do?]* *//vicious delight/[I know how to use technology in ways you mortals have never thought of, because I've seen other mortals come up with it. I gave the Federation the tricks they used to defeat the Borg. And I know something that nobody in the Federation or even its nastier neighbors seems to have figured out.]* *[What is that?]* *[That teleportation isn't just a means of transport. It's a weapon.]* She stopped touching him abruptly, but he could still hear her mental voice. *[The _transporter?_]* *[Bingo.]* *[How am I still hearing you? I'm not touching you anymore!]* *[I don't know, but I am getting a horrendous headache. I think perhaps my brain isn't really well-designed for this anymore.]* *[Well. We have a plan, at least. And perhaps, if we can communicate when we aren't touching, we can coordinate tomorrow. I'll assume I should move the moment the power goes out, but if you have a way of warning me before it goes back on...]* *[If I'm still in engineering to know it's coming back when it goes back on, the plan will have gone very wrong. I won't be able to warn you. But if we can communicate without touching... I have no idea if it will work at a distance. You're not a distance telepath of any kind and I shouldn't be a telepath at all. But we can try it tomorrow when I'm in engineering, see if it works. And I really have to stop doing this. Everything's starting to get halos.]* *[A migraine?]* *[About to be.]//alarm//[What are you doing?]* She dug her fingers into a spot on his collarbone. *[I'm about to knock you unconscious. If you lose consciousness before the migraine starts, it might never begin, or you might be unconscious through the worst of it.]* *[Really? That actually works? Why didn't you do that for me when I wanted you to break my neck?]* *[I wasn't entirely rational at the time, Q. I didn't think of it.]* He took a deep breath. The idea of being knocked out wasn't appealing, but the terrible pain building in his head, and the eerie glow around solid objects heralding pain so terrible he wouldn't be able to tolerate light or sound, were much less so. Q hadn't had many full-blown migraines in his human existence -- most of his headaches were tension headaches, terrible in their own way but not as mind-numbingly awful as a migraine. Most of them had happened while the Maierlen assassin was stalking around the base, so he'd thought they were a reaction to the waspoid stings, but since then he'd had one or two without any connection to the waspoids. Even Li had been willing to give him medication when he'd been hit by migraines -- apparently, unlike his other headaches, they actually showed up when Li scanned his brain. *[All right. Go ahead.]* There was a sudden stabbing pain in his collarbone, and then waves of numbness radiating down his spine, nauseating him and making him lose any sense of his body, and then a final wave of cold darkness washing over his consciousness. &&& T'Laren sat by Q's unconscious form for several minutes after nerve-pinching him. She hoped he'd naturally fall asleep before the nerve pinch wore off; it wasn't that late, but he hadn't been sleeping well. He was still willing to trust her. At least, to the extent of being willing to work with her to escape the Ferengi. Perhaps she shouldn't read so much into it; Q was capable of being ruthlessly practical when he had to be, and with his life at stake it shouldn't be surprising that he could push aside his anger at her. But the fact that he could do it at all gave her hope. She'd had no idea that she'd formed a permanent link with him last night. Most Vulcans were bonded together by healers, either as children or in their marriage ceremony as adults, the way she had with Soram. She hadn't even known she *could* form a permanent link with anyone, much less a non-telepath. Although she was starting to have her suspicions about that. What Q had just been doing wasn't possible for a non-telepath. It wasn't just that non-telepaths wouldn't know how to conduct a conversation in *words* while mind-to-mind; he had actually opened a link and transmitted through it, and kept doing it even when she wasn't touching him at all. The fact that the link had already been formed, by her, while she'd been mad with *pon farr* too long denied, was bizarre in itself, but the fact that Q could use it the way he had... the only conclusion she could draw was that he wasn't a non-telepath. Somehow, he was a telepath without telepathy, locked inside his own head until someone linked to him, but as soon as the bridge was built he was apparently capable not just of sending messages over it but of sending troops. Her mind was still reeling from his attempt to transmit her a set of full memories; she could have gotten that from him if they had been melded, in full mental contact, but not over a marital link. And that was another thing. Eventually she was going to have to either figure out how to dissolve the link, or explain to Q that by Vulcan common law they were now married. Though the upper classes of pre-Surak Vulcan had demanded elaborate ceremonies to establish marital bonds between betrothed couples, the commoners of Old Vulcan had had much simpler strategies; they went to the healer, they got bonded, they consummated the bond in *pon farr*, and that was it, they were married. Then after they recovered the man usually went to live with the woman's family and the woman's family threw a really big party for the couple. No one on Vulcan did things that way anymore; when Surak's teachings had leveled most of Vulcan's class system everyone had adopted the upper class marriage customs, where betrothal occurred in childhood and was formalized in the ceremony before *pon farr*, or possibly during it, but the common law was still on the books and quite a few of the spacefaring Vulcans T'Laren descended from through her mother used the simplified custom, usually but not always after getting a Federation marriage license. Generally, only spacefarers who married homeworld Vulcans, like T'Laren's own mother, bothered with the full ceremony. Common law would not recognize a bond between two women, but between a man and a woman, or two men, a permanent bond forged in *pon farr* meant the couple was married, even if they had made the bond themselves without relying on a healer. There were more ridiculous things in the universe than the notion of accidentally marrying Q, or of herself *or* Q marrying anyone, in fact, but right now she couldn't think of them. She was legally dead and Q was, well, Q. And after what she had just done to him, she was sure he'd be even *more* appalled than he would ordinarily be at the thought of marrying her. Of course, if tomorrow didn't go well the whole point would be moot. She was fairly sure that she could force the Ferengi to kill her in combat if she had to -- she would *not* be made a captive breeder. But they would be much more careful with Q, as he was both more valuable and less dangerous in combat. Although, that would possibly be an underestimation. Q couldn't fight hand to hand, she wasn't sure he'd even know *how* to use a phaser or be able to aim it, and he would be helpless against weapons like the neurowhip... but given what he had thought to her about using the transporter for a weapon... It was entirely possible that Q and she, in combat, would be most akin to the Vulcan weapons of mass destruction, the high-powered psis of the days before Surak, and the ordinary troops who would always accompany the psis to protect them from mundane threats long enough to allow them to deploy their minds and kill mass numbers. Q wasn't a psi, but his intellect might possibly make him far, far more dangerous than she was... if he could actually deploy his plan, and that would depend on what she could do to help him. She had very little interest in food, but she needed to eat something. Tomorrow she would need to be at her full strength. T'Laren went over to the bowl of oatmeal from this morning and forced herself to finish it. &&& In the morning, it took a great deal of effort for Q to hide how nervous he was. He dressed in one of the exercise outfits T'Laren had made him get out of the replicator and choked down breakfast, the whole time thinking about how he could modify the notes he'd already created to make sure the crystals blew. It would be best if he could let the transwarp test run for several minutes, so they would be as far from *Profit Margin* as possible. He'd need time to take out all the Ferengi here on *Ketaya* before having to deal with the other ship. As he left the room, he tried sending to T'Laren. *[Can you hear me?]* Several moments passed, and then, *[Yes. Where are you?]* *[Not in engineering yet. I'll try again when I get there.]* He smiled cheerily at Yalit as he walked in to engineering. "I think we're almost ready for another test, if you folks implemented the changes I showed you yesterday. I have a couple more things you need to do, and then we should be good to go." "You're remarkably cheerful." "I'm looking forward to getting this thing done so you actually get around to ransoming me back to the Federation. I'm sure that as long as transwarp is incomplete, you won't even open the bidding." "You're awfully confident that the bidding will go your way." "None of the tiny little pipsqueak species who want to kill me have the resources the Federation does, the Cardassians have no money, the Klingons already have a treaty with the Federation so they'd just return me, so really my only threat is the Romulans and you've already admitted you don't want to go anywhere near the Neutral Zone. I imagine you'll have to involve the others in the bidding just to ratchet the price up, but I have every confidence that the Federation can and will outbid *any* other power in the galaxy." And this was true, at least as far as powers that the Q Continuum wouldn't step in to protect him from per their agreement with Picard and the Federation, but irrelevant now that he was sure she didn't dare to return him to the Federation. "I might change my mind about the Romulans." "Yes, and the Romulans might take me off your hands and then blow you up to recover their money. There's a reason they're famous for deceit." "Well. We'll see. What have you got for us today?" He took out the notes. This part was really, really important. He hadn't been able to refer to the notes, since they were kept in engineering, so he'd had to do the calculations in his head, from memory. In his head wasn't a difficulty, but from memory could possibly be a problem. As it turned out, though, as he reviewed the notes again, they matched what he had remembered. His calculations would work. "All right, here's what you need to do..." As he copied out the second half of the notes, decrypting it as he went along, he introduced several errors. If Yalit caught him at this... he didn't even want to think about that. But he maintained his composure. Yalit had absolutely no way of reading Vizoran mathematical script, had no way of knowing what angle he'd rotated his diagrams to. She'd catch him when the power went out, but she couldn't catch him before that. He had to believe that. Because if he didn't believe that, he'd never be able to hide his fear, and *that* would give him away. It was noon by the time they had implemented his designs. Four cups of coffee and he was a jittery wreck. Over and over again he measured the distance to the Jeffries tube entrance with his eyes, always when Yalit wasn't looking. Over and over he scanned the engineering room, observing where everyone was, mapping his escape route. When the test began, he propped himself against a wall near the Jeffries tubes, arms folded, a confident grin on his face to mask the near-panic he felt. How was he going to do this? He wasn't a security officer, he wasn't trained for physical violence. What made him think he could do this? Lack of choice, he reminded himself. If he failed, he'd die or be sold into slavery, or both. But if he didn't try, the same would happen. His only hope was to try. He couldn't make matters *worse* for himself at this point. But what if he was wrong? What if Yalit was planning to ransom him back to the Federation? Then she'd still have the secret of transwarp, and the Q Continuum would condemn him for that the moment it got any further than her, and he would never go home again. This was the only way he could make up for his weakness in giving in to her, the only way he could erase his mistake. Yalit and every engineer in this room had to die, to protect the mortals in this quadrant from the destabilizing influence of suddenly acquiring working Thetaran transwarp technology. If he didn't succeed in taking over the ship and destroying the Ferengi, he might as well die, because if Yalit sold that transwarp drive his existence had no meaning. They passed the ten minute mark. "Looks good," Yalit said. "We're doing better than the last test." "Mother, do you think we'll do it this time?" one of the Ferengi asked. "We'll run the test for thirty minutes, then turn around and return to *Profit Margin*. An hour long test should prove whether the system is stable or not." *[T'Laren. Do you hear me?]* Again the momentary lag, and then *[Yes, I hear you.]* His head was starting to hurt. *[Be ready.]* Q got himself another cup of coffee and returned to his spot against the wall, except this time half a meter closer to the Jeffries tube. The Ferengi were all gathered around the consoles excitedly, chattering about the potential profits they could make if this worked. Deep breath. Another. Any minute now. Why hadn't they blown yet? Did he make a mistake in his calculations? Was this going to actually *work*, and ruin his only chance of freedom? And then there was a huge noise, the crash of crystals shattering and the sound of an explosion, and all the power went dead. Showtime.