Title: Only Human Part IV Author: Alara Rogers Series: TNG Rating: NC-17 Codes: Q/f, AU Part: 11/12+1 Summary: Q and T'Laren are taken captive aboard their own ship by the Ferengi. In the dark, Q took three steps along the wall and felt for the hatch in the wall. He'd removed it so many times while he was exploring *Ketaya* and working on ways to fix the problem Lhoviri had left him with, he had no trouble doing it in total darkness. Yalit was shouting about getting a lantern on. That wasn't good. He had to move quickly. Q clambered into the Jeffries tube and pulled himself through. Artificial gravity was still on; it would only go out if *all* the crystals blew. It was kind of unfortunate about that because it would give him a huge advantage if gravity did go out, given that he was the only being here who actually thought about space in three dimensions (more, technically, but at *least* three), but on the other hand, if all the crystals blew, he didn't have enough replacements to get warp back once the Ferengi were defeated. Three meters in. Turn left. If they came after him he was trapped; they were smaller than he was, and his size gave him very little maneuvering room in these tubes. He had to get to one of the consoles before the power came on. They'd get it on quickly with all the spare crystals he'd shown them the last time; what he'd engineered should only have blown one or two. Half a meter and then up. Four more meters and he was there, feeling the console under his fingertips. He waited, until the dim lights of the Jeffries tubes came on. Q waited impatiently as the console booted up. Before the LCARS screen came up, he hit the escape sequence, which dumped him into the text input screens the programmers used to deal with system level administrative tasks. And then he put in his back door command and sent it. "Good luck trying to get anything to work now, trolls," he muttered to himself. The LCARS screen came back up, with the request for password. Q typed the password, and then spoke it, restoring his voiceprint to the computer. The feeling of being able to control the computer again with his voice was an unbelievable relief. But it would be stupid to continue to speak; Ferengi hearing was excellent, and he had no defenses if they climbed in here and found him. Without computer access they'd have a hard time locating him, but he'd lose that advantage if he kept talking. So he opened another keyboard interface, and began to type. The first thing he did was pull up their location. They were actually more than halfway to the Romulan Neutral Zone. And nowhere near the Bolian homeworld. Q wondered if Yalit had made a deal with the Romulans after all. A neutral trading post, Miona Station, was within a few hours of transit from here at regular warp, slightly over a day from their original position before transwarp kicked on. That was probably where Yalit had planned to dump T'Laren, and possibly where she'd meet and negotiate with whoever she wanted to invite to bid on Q. Q swallowed, realizing suddenly that the Ceulan homeworld was actually only two or three days of transit from here. Pain was pain and death was death, but the way the Ceuli wanted to execute him frightened him more than most of his other enemies' intentions toward him. He checked for *Profit Margin*. It wasn't in sensor range. The only ships that were appeared to be heading toward or leaving Miona Station. So it was at *least* a few hours away, possibly as much as more than half a day. The crystals had blown out near the edge of Yalit's planned course, before they could turn around and head in the other direction -- luck, because he hadn't known what sort of course Yalit would plot for the transwarp test. First things first. Q pulled up a map of all life signs on *Ketaya.* One Vulcan, in the corridor outside his suite. Good, T'Laren had gotten out. One human, in the Jeffries tube system. And twenty-one Ferengi -- no, make that twenty. He'd thought for a moment there was a life sign in the corridor with T'Laren, but he must have been wrong, because there was no sign of a Ferengi there now. There were six on the bridge, two in the captain's quarters, seven in engineering, and five more moving in the corridors. The bridge was important. There were only two places on the ship that allowed precise control of the transporter, the transporter room itself and the bridge. And the bridge would give him control of many other systems, unlike the transporter room. Strategically, he needed control of the bridge. Q began typing in commands. He had a plan. &&& When Q warned her to be ready, T'Laren paced over to the door. She couldn't do anything to tip her hand to the Ferengi monitoring her, so she paced, restlessly, like a caged tiger. And then the power went out. She'd done this before. Without wasting energy, she pulled the panel off the emergency door release and yanked the lever. The doors opened loudly, as she'd expected. She ducked to the side of the door. "You better not be trying to escape again! I'll shoot!" a voice yelled. "Don't think I won't!" It was one of the ones who had taken her swimming, who had been stroking his lobes and probably fantasizing about raping her. Sudden rage built. T'Laren had much more control of herself now that the worst symptoms of the *pon farr* had passed, but because she hadn't been able to fully satisfy it, elements of the emotional instability and violence remained. She waited, silent, barely breathing. "Hey! Where are you? I'm going to start shooting if I don't hear from you!" And there he was. She could hear his feet, the jingle of the little metal bangles he wore to prove how rich he was, could smell worms on his breath. In one swift motion, T'Laren turned to face him, grabbed him, and clamped the back of his neck in the *tal shaya* maneuver. A quick clench of her fingers, a twist, and his neck broke neatly and cleanly. She was breathing hard. The worst part of this was not that she had to kill. Q was right, unfortunately; as outnumbered as they were, they really didn't have a choice about that. The worst part was that she liked it. Killing the Ferengi sent a thrill through her body almost as exciting as finally having Q in her arms had been. T'Laren knew, intellectually, that the whole reason for Surakian discipline was that Vulcans were biologically an incredibly violent species, that the *pon farr* had *always* linked lust and violence, and that if she was a chooser, killing men who stood between her and the man she had chosen was part of the blood fever and could arouse her as much as killing a challenger for his woman could arouse a man... and in fact the bloodlust had even been known to short-circuit the *pon farr*, satisfying its requirements without sex being involved at all. It was biology, not her fault. But she felt filthy, more degraded than she'd felt naked and locked in a closet howling her needs to the uncaring walls. Not only was she a rapist, she got a sexual thrill out of killing people. Telling herself that she wasn't really like this and it was the remnants of the *pon farr* doing it to her didn't actually make her feel much better about it. Well. If killing people with her bare hands sent shocks of pleasure through her nervous system, perhaps killing people with a phaser would let her achieve more detachment, more control. She groped in the dark until she found the dead man's phaser. It was already set to kill, not stun. Apparently the Ferengi had been really frightened of her ability to withstand stun while the *pon farr* was in full rage. The stun setting would take her out *now*, but they probably didn't know that. She would have to be very careful. When T'Laren had gotten dressed this morning, she had never put her boots on; she hadn't bothered to try to wear footgear since removing them during the *pon farr*, in fact, because her body was in water conservation mode and her feet were somewhat bloated. Now, it would be helpful -- boots would be loud on the corridor floor. Silently she padded out of the room barefoot, listening and looking. The darkness was total, but her eyes had adapted and would see any heat source as powerful as a warm-blooded being as a dim glow. The Ferengi could hear better than she could, but they would be walking about with clacking boots and jingling metal, and she could see and smell better than they'd be able to. Her hand held the phaser, lightly. She'd sense Q's approach telepathically, and probably smell him as well, before she'd be in range to shoot him, so she was confident that she couldn't accidentally run into him, and *anyone* else she encountered on this ship was an enemy to shoot on sight. There would be nothing stopping her from firing the phaser the moment she saw or otherwise sensed any being at all. &&& It wasn't difficult for Q to find the commands to lock the bridge so only his voiceprint could open it. That would keep anyone from being able to get on or off the bridge. Hacking into life support was a bit more difficult. For obvious reasons it wasn't a system that had been made particularly easy to get to. But after a few minutes he had control. Now to set things for *his* benefit. *[T'Laren. Can you handle zero gee?]* *[Most certainly.]* Good. He killed gravity. The resulting weightlessness gave him a sense of euphoria, literally a weight that dragged him down being lifted off him. That ought to make life extremely difficult for the Ferengi. The next thing to do was make things easier for T'Laren and more difficult for the Ferengi she'd be fighting. He set the temperature, humidity and oxygen mix controls to Vulcan normal -- hot, dry and thin. Given that the Ferengi homeworld was more humid and cooler than Earth was in general, with a denser atmosphere, changing to Vulcan normal would be much harder on them than it was on him. Although, at some point, he would have to get himself an oxygen tank. His brain wouldn't work at its highest capacity if he didn't provide it as much oxygen as humans were evolved to need. But it would be some time before he got to that point. And now, the main event. The prospect of doing this both frightened and exhilarated him. Ever since becoming mortal, Q had never taken another mortal's life. He considered it wrong, for the same reason harming another Q would have been wrong. Harming or destroying a life that existed at your own level of existence was a moral evil, whereas harming or destroying a lesser life was just not particularly nice. But when one was of the Powers of the universe, one could pretty much count on other Powers not doing anything to harm one. Once everyone reached a certain level of evolutionary development, violence between beings was almost unheard of. It wasn't quite as easy to maintain non-violence when one was mortal, because there were no shortage of other mortals trying to hurt you. He reminded himself that he didn't have the luxury of a moral high ground. T'Laren's and his lives or freedom were at stake. Even Federation law authorized him to use deadly force to protect himself from death or slavery. The Ferengi were pirates, and you were allowed to kill pirates. Q took over transporter control. From here there was a limited number of things he could do, but they were enough. The primary safety interlock on the transporter would not allow life forms to be transported anywhere but an enclosed space with atmosphere or a planetary surface. But the primary safety interlock on the transporter, like the primary safety interlock on the airlock and the replicator restriction table attached to his voiceprint, was based on a piece of hardware that Q had removed during his time with T'Laren before the conference. And the secondary safeties were software-controlled, and therefore, with the level of access his backdoor gave him, Q could just shut them off. He checked the life forms on the bridge. They were clustered around the door. Excellent, that would make grabbing multiple life forms easy. Q put in transport source coordinates, target coordinates, and activated. Three of the life signs vanished off his map. They reappeared outside the ship, and less than a minute later disappeared again. His life sign scan wasn't looking for dead bodies that *used* to be alive. The other three life signs on the bridge had spread out. No, be honest. They weren't life signs, they were Ferengi. They were living, sentient beings of the same evolutionary level that he now lived at, very similar to himself as he was now, who were probably soiling their pants in terror right now, quite possibly begging and crying for mercy. Watching mortals beg and cry had occasionally amused him in the old days; after the Continuum had executed two of his two friends who had committed unauthorized reproduction *and* gone to live among humans, Q, forbidden to take out his frustrations on the human species, had run into a hapless Physm ship, and had taken great sadistic pleasure in their pleas for mercy when they turned out to be far too mentally disorganized, too superstitious and not nearly logical or rigorous enough, to pass his test. That was what they should get, he'd thought, for being too stupid to deserve space travel. He hadn't penalized the entire species, because *one* had been smart enough to figure out how to survive, so he'd let her live and limp back to her homeworld... which, of course, had backfired on him a year ago when she'd come for him, because she'd still been too stupid to figure out that sending an assassin to kill him could very well end up killing an innocent person by mistake, but obviously the possibility that she could someday threaten him had never occurred to him at the time. Now Q took no real pleasure in these deaths. When he'd been thinking of them as little dots on his map, obstacles to be overcome, he had enjoyed wiping them out the way he'd have enjoyed taking an opponent's rook or bishop during a game of chess. When he reminded himself that they were the same kind of life form as he was now, capable of the same emotions he felt, it made him slightly sick. He wished he could reclaim the detachment, the feeling that mortal lives were nothing and he could destroy them for fun if he wanted to, that he'd felt as a Q, but that was long gone... he'd spent too long living alongside them, suffering the things they suffered, to be able to enjoy mortal deaths. This was something he had to do because they were going to kill him and T'Laren if he didn't, but the only Ferengi he was going to enjoy killing was Yalit. The others were merely their mother's (or grandmother's, in the case of the younger ones) dupes. He had to kill them, but he couldn't make himself feel good about it. One was sitting in the captain's chair. That was probably DaiMon Dar, who had viciously insulted T'Laren for nothing but being a woman and then had fondled her at phaserpoint and threatened to rape her to make Q cooperate. Well, okay, maybe Q could feel just a mild bit of sadistic pleasure in *one* of the deaths besides Yalit's. He put in the coordinates for the captain's chair, made the transporter narrow-focus onto the life form only so he wouldn't accidentally take the chair, and beamed whichever Ferengi it was into space, hoping it was the DaiMon. For all Q knew, given that Dar had been the first one to bring up *farr t'gahn*, he might have actually been the one who had T'Laren drugged, and Yalit might simply have given her blessing rather than coming up with the plan. And then he heard voices. "The tricorder says he's right up ahead!" Silently Q swore. This was bad. He couldn't beam any life forms out of the Jeffries tubes with the level of control he had here; in fact the life sign monitors hadn't been able to precisely tell him that anyone was in the Jeffries tubes besides himself. The Ferengi were still reading as being in engineering... no, there it went. There was a lag, that was the problem. That, and he really wasn't deep enough in to make finding him a challenge. He couldn't retreat; without this control console he had no weapons at all. If they had tricorders, they could find him wherever he went. Quickly Q paged through the help file looking for the hull breach protocols. Was there a way to throw a barrier between him and his pursuers? Yes, but not a very good one. Q put up a containment force field less than half a meter away from him, designed for a serious hull breach that would penetrate halfway to engineering. It would work very well against hard vacuum, but it wouldn't stand up to phaser fire for long. *[T'Laren!]/sheer panic//* *[What's wrong?]* *[There are Ferengi in the Jeffries tubes less than four meters from me. They say they have tricorders, so they're going to find me any minu -- oh shit.]* They came into view and immediately started firing at his force field. "There he is!" "Why can't we hit him?" "It's a forcefield! Change to kill setting and fire to overload the field!" *[On my way.]* *[_Hurry!_]* He couldn't simply sit here and let them shoot at him. When the field overloaded, any stray shot fired after that would hit him directly and kill him. Q floated backward, pushing himself with his hands on the tube flooring and walls while his legs were strung out behind him, watching them as they fired over and over again at his force field, and it flared brighter each time they did. If he remembered correctly, the next turn was... yes, right there. He rotated himself, pulled himself into the up tube, and flung himself downward, flying in the lack of gravity as fast as he could push himself against walls. Above him he heard the sizzle as his force field failed, and now they were floating in after him, yelling. "Surrender now and we won't kill you!" Q resisted the temptation to yell back at them how completely untempting the offer was. Frankly he would prefer a quick burst of phaser fire to the slow evisceration the Ceuli would commit on him, or being enslaved for the rest of his life, not to mention that Yalit would certainly torture him with the neurowhip if she could get her hands on him alive. Particularly after she found out he'd just killed four of her family members. But while death by phaser was a better alternative than being taken alive, it still wasn't a *good* alternative. He was breathing hard, his heart pounding, and the dry heat and lower oxygen content of the air was making him dizzy as he fled. He had to put as many turns between him and the Ferengi as possible; as soon as they could see him they could shoot him. Q pushed off from the wall to his side and went rocketing down another tube, this one running alongside the inner Deck 3 bulkhead. He sent T'Laren an image of his position in relation to a map of the ship itself, and felt her assent. She was in position to help him. Q stopped at one of the junction points in the tube, breathing hard. The Ferengi came into view, and he threw up his hands. "Don't shoot! I surrender!" There were two of them. One of them adjusted his phaser, possibly setting it to stun. The other slapped his hand. "No, Fril. I don't want him *unconscious* for this." Q didn't have to pretend to be afraid. He shrank back against the wall. "I surrender. Please don't hurt me." This one was one of the guards Q had had several encounters with by now. He was one of the ones who'd held Q down and made him eat bugs. The Ferengi smiled with sharp-toothed malice and floated toward Q. "I said I wasn't going to *kill* you if you surrendered. I never said I wasn't going to *hurt* you, hyuu-mon." And then the deck panel between Q and the Ferengi banged open, directly in front of the one making threats. Before he could react a slim hand reached in and grabbed him by the lapel of his coat, and yanked him through the opening. Q heard a cracking noise, like stepping on a twig in a forest. The other Ferengi yelled, "Brill!" and pushed off toward the panel, phaser out. Q sent T'Laren a spatial image of where the second Ferengi was in relation to the opening. Her other hand stuck through the opening and fired at the Ferengi. The blast sent the man backwards, floating back down the Jeffries tube with a black burn mark covering his entire torso and a look of agony frozen on his face, his eyes still open. T'Laren stuck her head into the opening. "Q? Are you all right?" He was possessed of a sudden urge to kiss her. Which, as grateful as he might be to her for saving his life, would be stupid, since it would imply that he was ready to forgive her for what had happened two days ago, which he wasn't, or that he was open to the concept of indulging in more sordid activities with her, which... he wasn't going to admit to if it was true. Instead he took a deep breath. He was shaking. "I'll be fine, but I need to get an oxygen tank out of the nearest replicator. And painkillers. My head's really starting to hurt." "Why did you change the environment to Vulcan normal atmosphere?" "Because you can handle it and the Ferengi can't." "What about you?" "I can handle it better than the Ferengi. Especially since I still have replicator access, and they don't, so I can get an oxygen tank." "The nearest replicator is in one of the passenger quarters. Do I have replicator access? I'll get them for you." "No, I didn't have your voiceprint on file. They erased our voiceprints, they didn't just lock them out. I'd need to get back to the control console, but I have to do that anyway." He looked past T'Laren. "Unfortunately there's a dead Ferengi in my way. What happened to the other one?" "The Vulcan death grip," T'Laren said shortly. She didn't sound happy about it. "Can you give me his phaser?" "Can you actually fire one?" "I don't see why not. They're not that complicated." She bent down and retrieved the phaser while Q, with great distaste, fished the dead Ferengi out of the Jeffries tube and tossed him out the opening. "You can take his phaser if you want to be a two-fisted gunslinger." "I'm handed. It would do me little good." "Take it anyway. You can use it as a hand grenade if you overload it. It doesn't look like it has the modern safeties on it." "Very well. How quickly do you need that oxygen?" "I'll re-enable you to the computer and then you go get it for me. Give me a minute, I have to get back to the console." "I'll wait in the nearest passenger suite." Q pushed off back down the tubes, and quickly returned to the console. He set the computer system to accept the voiceprint of anyone speaking the password "shoeshine" -- the first word that came up in the dictionary lookup -- and then transmitted to T'Laren. *[Say "shoeshine" and you'll be in.]* *[Thank you,]* she sent after a moment. *[That worked. Where do you want your oxygen?]* *[I'll have to get to the bridge in a few minutes, so just leave it in the tube there and close up the panel.]* He checked the life sign map. *Uh-oh. This could be a problem.* Two of the Ferengi were heading for the transporter room, presumably to shut down the transporter physically. *[T'Laren! You need to get over to the transporter room! The Ferengi may be trying to shut it down!]* *[Why? What are you using the transporter for?]* *[Um... I transported four Ferengi into space.]* *//Horror/disgust/...moderated by guilt/[I suppose killing by phaser or by breaking necks leaves them no less dead...]* *[Yes, and you'd do well to remember that.]* *[I committed suicide by spacing myself. It's not a pleasant death, Q.]* *[Well, once I have the bridge, I can beam them out on wide dispersal so they just never rematerialize. That would be painless. Besides, do you honestly think being shot with a phaser is fun?]* *[No, but it kills very quickly. Being spaced... doesn't.]* *[That's not what you told me when you threatened to throw _me_ out the airlock... oh my head... I think the telepathy is causing this. I'm shutting up now.]* His head was pounding horribly, and there were halos again. *Oh no. I can't have a migraine. Not now.* He needed to get those meds. But first he needed to clear the bridge. No. Meds first. Reluctantly, Q went back to the spot in the tubes where T'Laren had left his medication and his oxygen tank. He grabbed the hypo and pressed it to his own neck, used to it from the days when Li had actually let him get the painkillers he needed out of the replicator. Oh, yes. That was *much* better. The halos and the pounding faded away, and the wash of relief bathing his head felt almost like ecstasy in itself. A few hits off the oxygen tank eased the tightness in his chest, and he carried the tank back with him to the control console, since the passages were too narrow for him to wear it on his back. Ferengi were clustered around the transporter. He needed to move quickly. He could take out the ones actually *at* the transporter, but there was sustained phaser fire going on inside the bridge. They were probably trying to cut their way out, and if they succeeded and cut a hole in the bulkhead or cut the door open, the bridge wouldn't be defensible anymore. No, he had to deal with the guys on the bridge, and trust T'Laren to protect the transporter. Besides, if he could take over the bridge and then lost transporter, there were other tricks he could pull. But he had no way of taking over the bridge -- well, short of shooting the two Ferengi, and given that he had no experience with gun battles and they did, that didn't sound like a great plan -- without the transporter. He zeroed in on the life sign nearest the door, the one near where the phaser was being used, and transported him into space, phaser and all. "Sorry," Q muttered. "Once I get bridge control I can just disintegrate you guys, but until then I'm afraid it's space for you." Since T'Laren had pointed out to him that death by space was a very unpleasant way to go, he felt worse about killing them; in the past when he'd felt the need to kill mortals himself, he'd usually simply made them disappear, unless he was trying to make a point by killing them in a less merciful way. The majority of those mortals who'd ended up dead because of things he'd done had died as a side effect of something he'd put into motion, the way the Borg had killed 18 of Picard's crew, not because he had personally killed them. It was already not sitting well with him that he had to kill mortals while he himself was also mortal; killing them in an extremely painful way was actually making him feel guilty about it, not a sensation he enjoyed. But he'd already been through all this already. He had no choice. The last one was moving around the bridge rapidly. For a moment Q wondered what the hell he was doing, and then he realized. Of course, if he was moving rapidly and randomly, Q couldn't lock on to him. The Ferengi had figured out the only way to save his own life. He was probably bouncing off the walls, flying around the bridge as fast as he could kick off the surfaces. Had Q still been a Q, conducting a test, he would spare the man's life for being smart enough to solve the puzzle, but he was a human and powerless except for the control of the transporter. He couldn't afford to let the Ferengi live. And then he lost transporter control. His readouts told him the transporter was disabled. T'Laren wasn't there yet, but she was close. Q took a deep breath. Most likely this would get him killed. But at this point, it was one Ferengi who was frantically zipping around the bridge, who couldn't possibly know if Q had left the control console or not, and Q could possibly outshoot one man who was taken completely off guard. He needed bridge control and from here he had no weapons that could work at a distance if he had no transporter. He could wait for T'Laren, but there was no guarantee she could get control of the transporter room; she was a Starfleet officer, not a superhero. She wasn't even security; she was a counselor. So. He took another deep breath, and then kicked off the wall. Time to try for the bridge. The worst that could happen was that he'd be killed; he was pretty sure they were beyond trying to take him alive by now. &&& T'Laren had training in zero gee, and training in combat, but not a lot of training in zero gee combat. A few minutes of logical reasoning, however, indicated that she should probably stick close to the ceiling, because the Ferengi were likely to be trying to stay on the floor and were unlikely to look up. Most planet-bound species didn't. As a tiny girl, T'Laren remembered playing zero gee maneuvers with her mother; the spacefaring Vulcans trained their children to think in three dimensions, since they had invented faster than light travel several generations before artificial gravity, and their traditions, like most Vulcan traditions, had continued after there was no real need. But T'Lal had died, and T'Laren had spent the rest of her life on planets or in artificial gravity. She was no expert on this... but she was probably better at it than the Ferengi. Fortunately, the *Tamlin*-class yachts had zero gee velcro strips running along the edges of the ceilings and floors. T'Laren acquired herself velcro gloves and knee pads, and began crawling along the ceiling edge like some sort of insect. Magnetics would have worked but would have been much louder than velcro. It was much slower than she would have liked; kicking off the walls and flying down the corridor had much more appeal, but if one of the Ferengi surprised her she would have no way to change her trajectory and dodge if she were floating. She had more than enough physical strength to tear free of the velcro instantly if one surprised her now, and since she was on the ceiling, they were unlikely to surprise her. By the time she reached the transporter, her heart sank. The doors to the transporter room were open, a position they should not be in unless they had jammed or someone had cut through them, and the two Ferengi inside the room had gotten the console panel off and were disassembling the transporter. No, to be more accurate, they were tearing it apart, ripping out wires in big handfuls. This wouldn't be easy to repair; Q wouldn't be happy. Maybe she shouldn't have taken the time to use the velcro. Especially since it seemed she didn't need it; the two men were held to the console with magnets on their belts, and were entirely occupied with what they were doing, not looking up or even noticing as she crawled into the room. This was too easy. T'Laren drew her weapon and fired, twice. The first Ferengi dropped from a phaser to the head without ever seeming to realize the peril he was in; the second was looking up, an expression of shock on his face, when she shot him too. The surge of rage and satisfied bloodlust she had felt when she'd killed with her hands was almost, but not entirely, abated by killing from a distance; she felt a grim satisfaction that disturbed her, but was at least not bloodthirsty joy. Now she was going to have to fix the transporter. She kicked off the ceiling, grabbed onto the console, and swung herself down where she could unbuckle the dead men's belts and fasten one around herself. This left her uncomfortably exposed -- she was visible to anyone who walked by the transporter room, with her back to the broken door, unable to see a potential threat -- but there was no other way she was going to fix this thing. She closed her eyes and summoned up images of the schematics of a transporter. Having a husband who'd been Chief Engineer was good for something; if they'd been more careful about *how* they broke the transporter, she might be completely out of luck, but they had been randomly ripping out wires and all she needed to do was remember how to reconnect them. Most Vulcans had eidetic memory for anything they'd read. She certainly had read many of Soram's technical manuals. What a pity she wasn't one of the ones with eidetic memory. Well. If this didn't work she could contact Q and show him what she was seeing; if he didn't know how to repair a transporter, he had access to a computer and could look up a manual. But she didn't like the headache he had been suffering from. Q's repeated migraines during distance telepathic contact told T'Laren that there was something harmful about this form of communication; perhaps there was a reason Vulcan telepathy didn't usually work this way. She wished she had a medical tricorder to scan Q with, but there would be time for that after they won, if they lived, and if they didn't win or didn't live, the point would be moot. &&& There were three entrances to the bridge of *Ketaya*. One was the observation deck and dining room, one was the captain's quarters, and one was the Jeffries tube access in the ceiling. Q had locked all of them earlier. Before he left the console, however, he unlocked the Jeffries tube access. This would be a problem if the Ferengi who was bouncing around the bridge figured out that the tube was unlocked and climbed into it, but it was unlikely he'd sit still long enough to try to test it after seeing five of his family members beamed away. Q made sure the phaser was set to "kill" -- quite aside from the fact that if he stunned his opponent he might not be able to bring himself to shoot to kill after that, a glancing blow from stun wouldn't necessarily disable but a glancing blow from kill would cause considerable damage to his opponent -- and then kicked off the walls and went up through the maze of access tubes, up to Deck 1, over the top of the deck with the hull of the ship right above him, and then down through the opening into the bridge. He shoved the panel open, quickly, and ducked back into the opening as phaser fire blistered the panel. Okay. Getting out of here was going to be a challenge. "What did you do to my family?" the Ferengi in the room screamed. "Where did you beam them? Where did they go?" The inside of the panel had a latching mechanism in the center, but the bottom was smooth, burnished ship-metal. Very slightly reflective. And the Ferengi wore very, very colorful clothes. Q could see him as the faintest of colored blurs reflected in the bottom part of the panel that was hanging down into the bridge. "Space, actually," he said. He needed to provoke the man, make him react stupidly. "But don't worry, I was watching the life sign monitors. It took less than a minute for each of them to die." The Ferengi screamed, firing repeatedly in front of himself and flying across the room at the panel. Had Q let any part of his body through the opening, the Ferengi's rapid phaser fire would have hit him. But Q could see the Ferengi's approach, as the blur in the bottom of the panel got larger. The colored blobs and the pattern of phaser fire indicated that the Ferengi had rotated himself so he was facing up, his arm coming around to point up. He was going to pass under the opening, just below the panel, and fire upward to take Q out. Q looked at the panel, at the image in it, at the tube around him, and calculated his angles. And then he fired through the opening, before the Ferengi's eyes or gun had cleared the lip yet, pressing the trigger when none of the Ferengi was visible yet so that the actual firing, and the lightspeed death it emitted, would happen just at the moment that the top of the Ferengi's head came into the phaser's line of sight. There was a horrific scream. Q kept his finger on the button for continuous fire for a second. No more flashing lights of phaser burst showed coming from the blob in the panel. And then the whole Ferengi's head came into sight, or what was left of it as it had floated under Q's phaser fire for a second. Q couldn't even recognize which Ferengi this one had been. His stomach heaved. *This is zero gee. I can't throw up. Zero gee, can't throw up. It'll float all over the room and there'll be no way to clean it and it will be disgusting. Can't throw up, zero gee.* It didn't help. He threw up. He did manage to throw up in the Jeffries tube, retching repeatedly until there was nothing coming up but bile, and then he pushed himself through the opening and shoved the panel closed before any of his vomit had a chance to float into the bridge. The dead Ferengi with the phaser-charred head was still floating through the room, on the same trajectory he'd been on when Q had killed him. Q tried very hard to pretend he wasn't there. He didn't want to touch the body, didn't want the physical, tactile reminder that there had been a sentient being there and now there was a piece of meat because he had pressed a button on a phaser and burned the being's face off. Funny, this was not a reaction he'd expected to have. He *had* killed mortals before. But not when he was one. He'd been so worried about how his proficiency with a phaser could possibly work and how could he know how to shoot anybody and it turned out trajectories and angles and hand-eye coordination were all things he could do without thinking about it. He could look at a reflection approaching him and know exactly where it was in the room below him, exactly where he had to hold his phaser, exactly when he had to pull the trigger to kill the man before the other came into range to kill him. That had turned out to be child's play. He was actually a very good shot. It was the part about now someone being dead because he'd shot them that he was having a hard time with. *Him or me. Him or me. It was faster than you gave his family, anyway. Stop it. You're being an idiot. How many millions, billions of mortals have you seen die? Now here you're going to fall to pieces because you shot someone in the head with a phaser. Quit being pathetic and get back to work. You're going to need to kill more of them before you're done.* Now he had the bridge. "Computer, display life sign monitors on screen, overlaid on map of ship." "Acknowledged," the computer said. And there they were. One in the captain's quarters, right on the other side of the locked door. Four in engineering, including the only female Ferengi life sign. Two in the Jeffries tubes near engineering, moving toward the bridge. Three roaming around the ship, one on this deck, two headed toward the transporter room. And T'Laren, the sole Vulcan life sign, in the transporter room. He opened a channel. "T'Laren, can you hear me?" Her voice came through main speakers. "Q? Where are you?" "The bridge. I've got control of it. What's the situation with the transporter?" "I couldn't stop them from disabling it in time. I am attempting to repair it, but the situation is dangerous; the doors are stuck open and I cannot fix the transporter without turning my back to the door." Q tried making the transporter doors shut. "They're broken. I can't shut them. But I can tell you the positions of all the Ferengi on the ship. There are two headed your way." "Very well. Where else are they?" "Four in engineering, one on monitors which I'm shutting down now, one on this deck but not on monitors, and two coming toward you." He looked at his readouts. "Damn. Their other ship is actually catching up with us. I was hoping to have more time." "How long before it arrives?" "Moot point, T'Laren, I'm going into warp to get away from it." He punched in a course, and fired up the engines. Nothing happened. "Or maybe not." A diagnostic scan revealed what was going on; they had no warp drive. It had been physically disabled. "Okay, scratch that. Someone in engineering killed warp drive." "Can we go to impulse?" "There's really no point to that. T'Laren, I need transporters back ASAP. Our weapons are pathetic. We can't take on the Ferengi ship and right now we can't run." "What good can you do with transporters? They'll have shields up; you won't be able to beam people off them." "I have a plan, trust me. But I need transporters. Oh, and those two Ferengi are going to be able to see you in the next 30 seconds unless you hide." "I'll have to deal with them before I can finish fixing the transporter, then." "Obviously. Do what you have to do." "Q, can you cut off all lighting to this deck?" "Oh. Yeah, of course. Good idea." He killed the lights on Deck 3. As an afterthought he killed them on Deck 2 as well, where engineering was; of course there were emergency lights in engineering that weren't under bridge control, but they were going to be harder to work with even for the Ferengi with their dim-adapted eyes. The *Profit Margin* came into range. Q's heart sank. Their shields were up; they must have been expecting an acknowledgement code at the end of the test, or something. If they had waited the full hour to go to high warp to catch up, they wouldn't be here now; they must have been pushing their engines to maximum since at *least* the half hour mark at the start of the test. So now they were flying in, shields up, expecting trouble, and Q couldn't run because Yalit had disabled warp, and his phasers were truly pathetic. The only advantage he had was that their mother and other family members were aboard *Ketaya*, so they wouldn't shoot right away. "This is the *Profit Margin*, acting DaiMon Rek in command. *Ketaya*, acknowledge! Are you all right over there?" Q didn't open a channel. He couldn't afford to respond. What he needed was transporters. And *Profit Margin* to drop its shields. "*Ketaya,* acknowledge! What's going on?" The life signs indicated that T'Laren was probably occupied fighting the Ferengi who had gone to the transporter room. He wasn't going to get transporters for a few minutes, at least. "*Ketaya*, explain why we just found five of the crew floating in space, or we are going to fire!" Q raised shields, prepared to fire *Ketaya's* inadequate phasers, and then realized that Yalit or somebody had managed to cut them off too. He was dead in the water, no way to run, no way to fight, nothing but shields and *Profit Margin* could just hammer on them until they went down. "Now would be a good time to fix the transporter, T'Laren," he muttered, but didn't send it telepathically -- she didn't need the distraction right now. &&& In the darkness, T'Laren waited behind the transporter console. The two Ferengi barreled in at full speed. "Where is she?" Interesting. They must have a means of communicating with each other, she thought, to know that she was the one in the transporter room. The monitors didn't have infrared, so they couldn't know exactly where she was now that Q had killed the lights. Of course, she knew exactly where *they* were, because she'd had half a minute to dark-adapt her eyes for seeing infrared and because they were being loud. She floated up silently in the darkness, head coming up over the console where she could see them, and fired. She hit the first one. The second one kicked off the floor and flew across the room, returning fire and forcing her to dodge. She had the console to pull against or push off from, to alter her trajectory, so she was able to get out of the way rapidly and then change position again so the Ferengi wouldn't be able to shoot at the places she might have dodged to. He didn't have the same advantage. She could hear approximately where he hit the ceiling, could see where he was firing his phaser from, and knew there was nothing else he could hit on his trajectory to alter it until he got back to the floor. So she fired into his path downward. The Ferengi screamed, his phaser firing wildly at the ceiling, and then nothing. *It's unfortunate that you don't seem to be trained for zero gee combat very well*, T'Laren thought, looking at the dead man as his infrared trace visibly cooled. *In a phaser battle in zero gee you should never be far from a point where you can change trajectory, or your opponent will simply track where you're going to be and fire there.* She knew better. Basic Starfleet training, and games she'd played with her mother as a very small child, and the racial memory she carried of her mother and her mother's mother and all the generations before her of Vulcans who had traveled in space, traders and explorers who followed the ways of Surak but rejected the planetary boundaries of Vulcan's gravity well. And then the ship rocked violently, and she was flung sideways at high speed. "Q! I've secured the transporter room again and I need lights. What's going on?" "We're under attack. *Profit Margin* seems to have found the fellows I beamed into space." The lights came back on. "How soon can you get me a working transporter?" "I don't know. I thought I had rewired it correctly, but it doesn't seem to be working." "Oh for the... never mind. I'll need you to change it anyway. Look at the transporter and send me what you see." "I don't know if I can do that." "Try." So she looked at the transporter, studying the tangle of wires, and attempted to transmit to Q what she was seeing. She was still amazed at being able to do this. She would never have been able to send Soram an image of what she saw. "Okay," he said verbally, through the coms, "I got that. Now I'm going to send you instructions for what to do." The ship shook again. "But first I'm going to go to impulse. Hang on." Yalit didn't seem to have disabled impulse too; in fact it was impossible to do that on *Ketaya* without shutting down all power. She felt the hum of the engines firing up, and the slight jerk, offset by the inertial dampeners, as they moved forward. "That'll buy us a couple of minutes, but probably nothing more." The first thing she got from him was another confused burst of tangled memory and information. [Q, I can't understand that. Can you break it down?] //impatience/fear/[We don't have time for this...]/ This time he sent a rapid-fire set of verbalized instructions, with images of what he was talking about. She did the first three things he had said, and then realized that she was completely confused. [Q, is this going to work? It seems like you have me wiring this thing backwards.] //grim amusement/[Bingo. That's almost exactly what you're doing.] [Can you send the instructions again? More slowly? I can't remember them when you send them all at once, so quickly like that.] [I thought Vulcans were smart.]/ The ship shook violently again. [/Dammit, they've caught up with us! T'Laren, I need my transporter!] [Then show me how to finish what you need!] He sent another burst of multiple instructions. She carried out the first three again. [Send them to me three at a time. That seems to be what I can understand when sent at once.] The ship shook again. The next set of instructions he sent came with fear and anxiety attached, and the knowledge that shields were about to fail. T'Laren finished that set rapidly, and transmitted the request for more before she was quite done with the last one. [Last part. Do these--] More shaking under phaser fire as he sent the last set of instructions. T'Laren ran through them as quickly as she could. [I'm done! What now?] [You need anything out of the replicator? I need to wipe out our pattern storage database.] [We can re-download at Miona Station. Do what you have to do.] [Okay. Pull out a couple of your hairs and lay them carefully on one of the transport pads. Then get to engineering. See if you can secure it for me. There's four in there.] She floated up and over to the transport pad, laid the hairs down, pushed away, and was sent flying into the wall by another burst of phaser fire outside. Under these circumstances she'd have to use the velcro, or she'd be thrown into a wall every time the phasers hit. She hoped Q would be able to hold off on needing engineering immediately. What did he need to transport hair for, she wondered? &&& The transporter worked. He breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled up the antimatter program. It was one of the ones they'd built when they were trying to devise weapons against the Borg, based on his suggestion and expertise. He'd been greatly relieved that they hadn't needed it -- he had called it a weapon of last resort and made sure that Starfleet had known not to use it unless necessary, because if the Borg had adapted the technique it could have been disastrous. Transporters converted matter to energy and then, using the carrier wave containing the pattern, performed the reverse transformation. In theory, once you had the energy, converting it to antimatter should be just as easy as converting it to matter. In practice, the precision level of the transport pattern preserved matter at the atomic level. To get to the quark level, which would be required in order to flip the quarks and make the substance come out as antimatter, required ten times the storage space and significantly more processing power. To get the storage space in the computer system for the extrapolation he needed to do, he deleted everything out of the replicator pattern storage array. He ran the disassembling scan portion of the transport beam, dematerializing the hair on the platform, but did not initialize the output beam; this was going to take several minutes. And there went his shields. The phaser fire raked *Ketaya's* left nacelle, half-severing the support strut. Q opened a channel. "Don't shoot! We surrender!" DaiMon Rek appeared on his viewscreen. "*Where is my mother?*" he snarled. "Yalit's in engineering. She disabled my phasers and warp drive. You can run a life sign scan to prove she's okay -- she's the only female Ferengi aboard." "How did five of my brothers and nephews end up floating dead in space?" This had to be done carefully or it had the potential to backfire on Q *really* badly. "Fortunes of war," he said with a shrug, smirking. "Sorry about that." The man went purple. "We are beaming aboard to take control of your bridge. Prepare to be boarded!" The transmission cut. Q was breathing hard. If they boarded all over the ship, he was dead. By smirking at them as he told them he'd killed their family, he had tried to provoke them into coming directly to the bridge, where they'd be able to immediately capture and punish *him*. Sometimes being a walking target for violent beings' violent tendencies could come in handy. It sounded like the plan had worked. Now to enact the rest of his plan. His process was done and ready to beam out. As *Profit Margin's* shields dropped, so they could beam over here, Q activated the beam-out to transport the antimatter-converted hairs over there. Three pillars of light appeared on the bridge. Q set his phaser to overload while kicking off for the ceiling. He yanked the panel down and flung his overloading phaser down toward the three materializing Ferengi. As the men solidified, he pulled himself into the Jeffries tube overhead and threw himself sideways, directly through the floating globs of vomit he'd left there before. Behind him there was an explosion, and the shockwave actually shoved him down the tube some distance as overheated air from the explosion rose up and then expanded into the tube. Then the ship shook violently in the other direction, thrown off course and spinning around. Without artificial gravity, the inertial dampeners couldn't fully handle the load, and the Jeffries tube actually rotated around Q, until the wall of the tube hit him and sent him flying the short distance to the other wall. Q threw out his arms and legs to catch himself, bracing himself against the tube until the ship stopped shaking. He reoriented himself and threw himself down through the opening, back down to the bridge. The panel that should close the opening, which he hadn't had time to shut behind him before the phaser exploded, had been torn loose and was floating around the bridge, as was one of the three Ferengi... no, actually, it was only the head and torso of the Ferengi, trailing blood and fecal matter as he floated limply through the air, his entire lower body gone and nothing left to hold anything in his torso. The other two Ferengi who'd beamed over weren't even visible until Q realized that the walls were painted the color of Ferengi blood, and a light crunchy paste of tiny, tiny fragments of bone and liquefied flesh was covering the consoles that hadn't been destroyed in the blast. Q was partially in shock, numb to the horror of what he'd just caused. His viewscreen was gone, but miraculously sensors were still up. Previously *Profit Margin* had shown fifteen life-signs. Now *Profit Margin* wasn't there at all, just some random debris in space. T'Laren's hair had made just enough antimatter to blow the other small ship to bits without seriously damaging *Ketaya*, just as he'd calculated. Even better, none of those fifteen life signs were showing on *Ketaya* right now. Two Ferengi were in the Jeffries tube from engineering, heading his way, just as they'd been before, probably having been slowed down a good bit by all the shaking but they were moving at a good clip now. Two were in the captain's quarters/monitor room, again, and they were apparently cutting through the locked door to the bridge with their phasers. And four were in engineering. The same number of Ferengi as had been there before he'd blown up *Profit Margin* were still there. The smell hit him then. For several moments he had only been able to smell ozone from the ionized air, but now a wave of the smell of blood, feces and burned flesh hit him. The detachment he'd been able to manage so far dissolved, as the impact of what he'd just done hit him fully. There was nothing in his stomach, so when he doubled over retching anyway, at least nothing came out. Not that it helped, with the air full of blobs of liquid Ferengi innards. He didn't want to do this anymore. He didn't want to kill any more of these people. For a moment he had a fantasy of staying exactly where he was, doing nothing, until either the team cutting the door or the team coming through the Jeffries tubes caught him, and they would probably kill him, and then he wouldn't see the half Ferengi body floating around and the badly shredded remains of the corpse whose face he'd burned off and the patina of flesh and bone covering everything. But no. *You're going to give up and die because you're a bad person? What an idiot. It's three million years too late to be a good person, Q. If you were going to lay down and die out of guilt for killing mortals, maybe you should have killed yourself aboard the Enterprise after all.* But he didn't want to do what he was going to have to do to save himself. He couldn't unlock the observation deck door, because the Ferengi on the bridge's attempt to cut through it had damaged it and fused the locking mechanism. The transport platform would take him into engineering, also swarming with Ferengi. So he had no escape route unless he removed his pursuers from either the Jeffries tube or the captain's quarters' door. And he had no phaser any more, so it would have to be the transporter. But the antimatter protocol couldn't handle anything larger than a kilo. He purged the program, restoring the usual matter-based process. The problem now was that the rewiring he'd had T'Laren do had destroyed all the usual safety protocols, including the discriminate matter protocol that made sure only whole objects would be picked up in the beam. Which meant he couldn't take the guys who had an active phaser, because if he accidentally cut a working phaser in half it would explode, and the shrapnel from the exploding door would rip him to bits. With shaking hands, he focused the transporter on the Ferengi above him. They were actually in the stretch above the bridge now, moments from reaching him. Q activated the transport. There were horrible, horrible high-pitched screams over his head, and then silence. Q looked up. There was a hole in the bulkhead over his head -- he had aimed the beam low rather than high to avoid accidentally transporting part of the hull, so he'd gotten the floor of the tube, his own ceiling, instead. Q took a hit off his oxygen tank, the smell in the room almost paralyzing him with nausea even though he had vomited everything in his guts up. A few deep breaths of pure O2, and he was able to kick off for the hole in the Jeffries tube. Floating in the tube was a severed Ferengi head and a few centimeters of shoulder on one side of the hole, knees and lower legs of a different Ferengi on the other. There was so much blood in the tube he needed to close his eyes and find his way blind, and he had to hold his breath because the blood would have choked him otherwise. He found his way to the turn down and kicked off down it, finally able to open his eyes and breathe, just as he heard the doors to the bridge bang open behind him. The power went out. That had to be Yalit, recognizing that leaving the power up, and thus leaving Q free to use the transporter, was deadly. That didn't bother him so much; he'd gone through the tubes in the dark before. And then he heard screams behind him, and one voice yelling "Focus! Focus the light up ahead so we can get the bastard! Stop, stop shining it on Tak's head, *stop...*" They had lights. Dammit. Q took another hit off his oxygen tank, and then curled into a ball around the tank so he could use it for propulsion. His back was in the direction he needed to go, his knees slightly apart to give the air somewhere to escape to, one arm wrapped around the tank holding it to his chest and one hand ready to release the valve. He could still hear the Ferengi's cries of outraged horror. They'd found their other relative's legs. If they caught Q, it was unlikely he'd survive it. Q released the valve and the oxygen shot out, pushing him at high speed down the tube toward the bottom of *Ketaya*. He kept one hand out to keep from hitting the walls, occasionally kicking the wall to steer and speed himself even more, shooting all the way down the main shaft to Deck 4. In the dark he misjudged the distance and ended up slamming into the bottom of the shaft, hard. The oxygen tank fell out of his armhold and began spinning around, whacking Q in the head before he managed to catch it and shut the valve. A phaser shot seared the wall next to him. Q yelped and dove up for the opening to the lateral tube that ran along Deck 4. He needed a phaser, and he needed to stay out of the way of his pursuers. Belatedly he wished he'd recovered the phaser of the guy whose face he'd burned off, but he'd been too much in shock to think of it at the time. The ones chasing him lacked a tank of gas to use as a means of propulsion, so they couldn't move as fast, but it had been a mistake for him to go straight down a single shaft where they could use their hand lamps and superior hearing to detect that he was in line of sight, and shoot at him. In the dark and with the entire height of *Ketaya* between him and them, their accuracy was lousy, but it would only take one lucky hit. He turned the canister back on and shot down the narrower lateral tube, until he overshot the opening and had to catch it with his feet. Q kicked open the panel and crawled out into the corridor. The armory was here on Deck 4 with the rest of the storage. If the Ferengi hadn't already stolen all the phasers, he could get one, and then the lights the Ferengi were carrying would show them to him and let him shoot them before they could use the lights to find and shoot *him*. Of course, odds were that they *had* stolen all the phasers, but with the power off, he had no access to the transporter. The phasers in the armory were his only hope.