Title: Only Human Part IV
Author: Alara Rogers
Series: TNG
Rating: NC-17
Codes: Q/f, AU
Part: 12/12+1
Summary: Q and T'Laren are taken captive aboard their own ship by the Ferengi.

The door to engineering was closed.  T'Laren could hear Yalit shouting orders.  "...completely gut the transporter controls, so we can get the power back on and *find* them!"

Now she was glad Q had given her an extra phaser.  She detached herself from the velcro, floating down toward the floor.  Gently she kicked off the wall with her bare feet, so that even Ferengi hearing couldn't catch it, what with Yalit shouting and the closed door in the way.  A few pushes later, she was halfway down the corridor.  Sickbay's doors, by design, would open in the lack of power rather than shut.  She swung into Sickbay and touched the ceiling with one velcro knee, holding herself in place, as she set one of her two phasers to overload.  Then she leaned out the door and threw it down the hall at the door to engineering with all her strength, quickly ducking back into Sickbay, where its wall would protect her from the blast.

A violent explosion.  Shouting.  Yalit's voice.  "They're here!  Form a circle, fire outward!"

A clever idea.  With the doors to engineering blasted open, T'Laren could see three Ferengi in a triangle, shining lanterns out into the darkness of the corridor, and firing phasers.  But they were firing solely in the plane of the floor and the two meters above it, and their feet clanked on the floor with the repeated thudding of magnetic boots.  They were slow, tethered down even more than gravity would hold them, and they were still not thinking in three dimensions.  In the center of the triangle, spillover from the lantern showed the dim shape of a very tiny, naked Ferengi floating untethered to the floor.  At least Yalit could handle zero gee; well, either that, or she was sticking to her beliefs about women being naked even when wearing magnetic boots would be helpful.

*[Q.  How many are there left?  I see four in front of me.]*

*//breathing hard, exertion/anxiety near panic but focus/[The two chasing me.  I think that's all.]*

*[Where are you?]*

*[Deck 4.  Trying to get to the armory.]*

*[I can't get there quickly with no power.]*

*[Take engineering and get the power on.  The bridge barely works but engineering has almost all the same controls, and you have computer voice access.  Get the power on and you can do anything Yalit didn't physically disable.]*

*[If there are only four left... I want to stun them.//i want to kill i want to break their bones but i don't want to want//If I have Yalit stunned, I can hold her hostage against the last two.]*

*//relief/[Yes.  Yes, stun them.//oh please so tired of killing people/mortal death is so disgusting and they're just like us but i'm killing them it's like killing a q when i was one it hurts i want to stop//]*

She was surprised.  Q had been so adamant that they had to kill, so cold and unconcerned with any moral issues.  But the emotions she felt from him now were disgust, largely with himself, and overwhelming guilt.  Her motivations for wanting not to kill came from Vulcan pacifism, logic, and her personal desire to *not* feel blood lust, to *not* enjoy committing murder.  But Q's reaction seemed to be entirely emotional, and in fact he almost seemed ashamed of the intensity of his own guilt.

*[All right.  I'll use stun.]*  She adjusted her phaser.

The triangle was rotating slowly around Yalit, but staying in engineering.  That was unfortunate.  Had they spread out or come her way, she could just have waited until they got to sickbay and then ducked out and stunned them.  Now she was going to have to go in there.  Very slowly T'Laren eased her way under the door jamb, caught the velcro in the hallway and lay almost flat against the ceiling, inching forward bit by bit.

Their lanterns occasionally illuminated the air just under her, so obviously they had considered she might be floating high, but they didn't seem to consider the possibility that she was flat on the ceiling.  T'Laren recalled briefings on the Ferengi after the Federation finally made visual contact with the then-mysterious race.  They were understood to have purchased 90% of their technology, including the very concept of the warp drive.  Perhaps the Ferengi had *never* had space travel in zero gee; perhaps they'd bought artificial gravity before even going to space.  Q's idea of shutting down artificial gravity had really been very helpful.

Carefully, slowly, T'Laren took aim, waiting until all of them were specifically focused down.  She pulled off one of her velcro mitts and flung it at the wall, a distance away from her, angled so it would fall into the plane where people would walk if there were gravity.

The mitt hit the wall with a faint chuff.  Ferengi hearing picked it up instantly, the lights all turned on her mitt and the phasers all fired.  And in that moment when they were all committed to looking away from her, she fired down at their heads.  One.  Two.  Yalit looked up.  Three. The last one fired wildly toward her, but missed.  And that was four.

She kicked free of the velcro and shoved off at full speed into engineering, where the dim emergency lights were plenty for her to see by.

Immediately she could see what had happened to the power.  Yalit had simply removed all the dilithium crystals.  T'Laren retrieved a magnetic belt from one of the unconscious Ferengi and locked herself to the console so she could hook the crystals in.

It had been a controlled shutdown, not a short circuit that blew out the crystals, so it wasn't necessary to do a cold intermix to get the power on.  The moment she had two-thirds of the crystals in, it came up on her own.  She put in the rest of them quickly, figuring that if Q needed transporters they'd need maximum power capacity.

Then she used a control console to get life sign readings for the ship, and went cold.  The one human reading and the two Ferengi readings on Deck 4 were on top of each other.  T'Laren opened the link, and was immediately hit with overwhelming terror, exhaustion, despair and terrible pain.

They had Q.

&&&

Q ran.

It was more like leaping and flying short distances than running; he kept using bursts of oxygen to get him back onto the floor, or return him to a wall, or someplace he could kick off from so he could keep up his momentum.  He was also breathing off the oxygen tank every other breath, which was slowing him down, but his chest had finally succumbed to the low oxygen density and burned with leaden pain every time he tried to breathe without it.  There were storage rooms and maintenance closets all over the place, and if there were power he could hide in one of them, but he couldn't get the doors open under these circumstances.

The armory was halfway from the Jeffries tubes under the front of the ship to the airlock in the back.  Q fumbled his way to it in the dark, getting lost and first undershooting, then overshooting, before he got it.  The door was locked, of course, so he had to feel around for the exterior manual release, and it didn't work anyway.  Then Q remembered that the armory had a second, hidden manual release, for safety.  He had to feel around for that, too, and then put in a three digit code using a physical dial with a very tiny emergency light above it so he could barely make out the numbers.

He heard shouting down the corridor.  They were here.  Q yanked the door to the armory closet open, reached inside... and found nothing.

Of course.  The Ferengi *had*, in fact, stolen all the phasers.

A moment or two of feeling around confirmed it.  No weapons.  He wondered if everything he had had in the storage rooms had been stolen too, and if that stuff had been on *Profit Margin* if it was, but he couldn't devote much time to it because the Ferengi would have him in line of sight if the lights were on.  Their lanterns didn't reach this far, but they would when they got closer.  He had to get out of here.

Leaving the empty armory's door open, he kicked off down the hall.  The oxygen tank would be too loud, so he didn't use it, but the clank of his shipboots hitting the floor or wall as he kicked sounded horribly loud, and apparently the Ferengi could hear it because they kept shooting at where he had just been after he pushed off.  He was using the oxy tank to breathe off of so he wouldn't audibly gasp... until the tank ran out.  And then the thing wasn't worth anything to him, so he threw it toward the Ferengi in hopes that it would hit one of them, and kept going.  He had to get to the other entrance to the Jeffries tube, near the airlock.

And then the lights came on.

"There he is!" one of them screamed from down the hall, well within phaser range, and Q swallowed and closed his eyes, because he was dead.  They couldn't miss him at this range.

"Stop or we'll shoot!" one yelled.

"You'll shoot anyway," Q called back, unable to change his trajectory or stop even if he'd wanted to, since he hadn't reached a wall yet.

And then a burst of phaser fire hit him in the leg.  Q screamed, pain more searing and intense than even the neurowhip sheeting through him.  He tumbled, rolling, unable to control any of his motions through the mind-destroying pain, and the only thing he could think was that the next shot was going to be the last thing he ever felt.

Instead a weight tackled him, slamming him into the wall.  Q cried out in pain again, and then he was being spun around and there were fists in his face, his stomach and his chest, repeatedly slamming him back against the bulkhead.

They were shouting at him.  "You happy now?  You killed my brothers, my uncles, my cousins, you killed my father!  Are you happy now? Didn't do you any good, did it?"

He didn't beg.  That was the one thing he clung to as he felt ribs crack and teeth loosen.  He couldn't stop himself from crying out, from gasping and whimpering and occasionally screaming, but he managed not to beg.  There would be absolutely no point to begging, because he really had killed their relatives in some fairly horrible ways, and begging for mercy would only whet their appetite for revenge.  They were going to beat him to death no matter what he said, and the pain in his leg was so bad he couldn't focus on fighting back.

And then one of them said, "No, Frej.  Stop hitting him.  I've got an idea.  He transported everyone on the bridge except for poor Antek into space.  The airlocks are right down there.  Why don't we throw *him* into space?"

"Yeah.  Yeah, let's do that."  The man punched him again in the face.  "Not so high and mighty now, are you, hyuu-mon?"

The whole ship was spinning around him.  The Ferengi took his arms and leapt, frog-marching him down the hallway, and his head kept hitting the ceiling on the up-bounce because he was taller than they were and they weren't bothering to put out their free hands to push off from the ceiling until after he'd already hit.  Although the lights were on now, Q could barely see, shock and pain making his vision a tunnel hazed in gray.  He hurt so much he was almost looking forward to being thrown out the airlock.  Dying of vacuum was not pleasant, but maybe it would be better than living with his leg like this.  He thought maybe he would lose the leg, and never walk freely again without prosthetics, and then he remembered that his captors were about to kill him, which made his concern rather irrelevant.  Pain made him sob, but at least he wasn't begging.

And then gravity hit, and Q fell hard to the floor, and for a moment he blacked out from the pain.  When he came back to himself he heard T'Laren's voice.  "...and push them along the floor, so you cannot reach them."

"I -- I can't move," one of the Ferengi gasped.  

Q tried to get up and found that he was far, far too heavy.  His neck didn't even have the strength to lift his head off the floor.  When he turned it so he could see the Ferengi, he could see that they were in the same position, flat against the floor.

It was so hard to breathe.  Between the pain, the thin air, and the incredible weight of his own body pressing on his lungs, Q thought he would probably black out again.  But T'Laren had control of engineering.  He had to stay conscious.  She might need his help.  Q forced himself to breathe deeply, struggling against the weight of his chest.

"Your mother's head is under my boot," T'Laren's voice came over the comm system.  "I need only rest my full weight on that foot, in this gravity, and her skull will be crushed."

Some part of that was a bluff.  Q knew that T'Laren wasn't enough stronger than the Ferengi to be standing freely without support in a gravity field that was crushing them, and him, against the floor.  It was much more likely, given her penchant for altering the gravity in specific rooms to be more intense, that she was manipulating the gravity on this deck only.  On the other hand, in normal gravity she could still crush Yalit's skull with a hard stomp.

"No!"

"No, please!  Leave her alone!"

"Then leave the phasers near Q, and crawl away from him.  I will lower the gravity very slightly to facilitate this.  Failure to do exactly as I say will cause your mother's death."

"How do we even know she's alive?" one asked indignantly.

"She is unconscious, as I have stunned her.  If you would like to hear her voice to confirm that she lives, I could kick her until she awakes.  I am sure that after several of her ribs snap she will recover enough from stun to be able to scream."

"*No!*"

"No, don't hurt her!"

"Then do as I say.  *Now.*"

Pleading with T'Laren not to hurt their mother, the two Ferengi crawled, slowly, away from their phasers and away from Q, leaving the phasers near Q's sides.

"Q.  Can you hear me?"

*[Yes.  But I can't breathe, so don't expect me to yell it out.]*

"I am going to lower the gravity. Will you be able to sit up and confiscate the phasers?"

"Yes," he said weakly, barely able to force the word out against the weight, because what choice did he have?  He wasn't actually in any shape to do this, but T'Laren couldn't keep control of engineering if she had to come down here to collect some phasers from prisoners.  Surely he could stay conscious long enough to hold some phasers.

Then the gravity let up, and he was able to sit.  He felt suddenly light-headed in the removal of the weight.  The air was returning to Earth normal too, cooling and turning richer, easier to breathe.  Q reached for the two phasers, carefully trying to avoid putting pressure on his burned leg.

"Both of you.  Proceed to Storage Room 3 and enter it.  If you hesitate I will kill Yalit."

The two Ferengi headed for the nearest storage room, presumably 3, and ran inside, babbling pleas not to hurt their mother.  The storage room doors opened as they entered, and then clicked, locking.

"Q," T'Laren's voice said.  "I'm lowering the gravity to lunar standard.  Can you make it to sickbay on your own?"

Q tried, carefully, to get himself up.  The pain in his ribs was bad, but bearable if he had to move.  The moment he put any pressure at all on his burned leg, though, as he tried to get himself into a crawling position, the pain went from a red-hot agonized throbbing to a white flare that wiped out his consciousness for a moment, and when he came to himself he was lying on the floor again, on his side.  "No," he gasped.  "I can't get up at all."

"What happened?  I know you're hurt, but not how."

"Phaser.  To my left leg."  He swallowed, trying not to sob.  "It's... it's completely black, from just above my knee down to right above my ankle.  I don't... I think I'll probably lose it."

"Well, don't panic.  If it's necessary to give you a new leg, Federation doctors can probably give you a new one the way they gave you a new alimentary canal when you drank acid, by cloning and replacing the tissue.  Just sit and try to remain as calm as you can.  I'll be there to help you to sickbay in a few minutes, and we'll give you some painkillers."

"How can we do that?  I deleted the replicator database!  There's no more meds of any kind on the ship!"  A sob did escape him then at the thought that he would have to endure this pain until they got to Miona Station, which on impulse only would be days, and with him too badly hurt to inspect the damaged warp nacelle, they didn't dare go to warp even if T'Laren got warp working again.  Oh, and there wasn't any food either, so they would go hungry for days, too.

"Don't worry.  The medical database is backed up on every medical tricorder.  We will be able to give you medicine.  Now I'm going offline so I can lock up these Ferengi and get to you.  Try to stay calm until I get there."

He lay on his back, breathing deeply, trying not to cry, although small whimpers of pain kept escaping his lips.  This actually felt a lot like the acid had, except that he wasn't dying of it so he had to remain alive and conscious to endure the pain.  For a moment he almost wished the Ferengi had succeeded in spacing him.  The men he'd killed might have died in horrifying ways, but none of them had suffered more than a minute or two of pain.

He heard motion and carefully levered himself back into a sitting position, gasping at the pain in his abdomen and chest from the beating he'd suffered.  T'Laren was coming down the hallway, carrying three unconscious Ferengi, in the light lunar-type gravity.  She had one slung over one shoulder and the other two tied together, carrying them by the magnetic cable she'd bound them with.  When she reached Storage Room 2, across the hall from the room they'd locked the other Ferengi in, she opened the door, tossed them in, and locked it.

"Where's Yalit?" Q asked.

"I locked her in one of the crew quarters.  I thought it best to keep her isolated."

"Good.  Why not put them all in crew quarters?  Don't we have anything in the storage rooms?"

"Apparently not any longer.  They're empty."  She reached him and knelt to inspect his leg.  "That does look unpleasant.  Can I help you get to Sickbay?"

"Is there any way you can get me those painkillers before you move me?  Any time the leg even changes position, I nearly pass out."

"All right."  She went over to Sickbay, and came back with a medical tricorder.  "While I'm downloading the medical database to the replicator, I should scan you."

"Don't tell me if I'm going to lose the leg," Q said.  "Just let me go to sleep and wake up without it."

She scanned him.  "Well, the good news is that you may not have to lose the leg.  They shot you on burn setting, not on kill, so most of the damage is to skin and outer layers of muscle.  There are still nerves and blood vessels intact and reaching your foot."

"They'd used the phasers last to burn through the door to the bridge, so I suppose that makes sense."

"That, and it would be easier to take you alive on burn setting.  They would only have killed you if they'd hit your head or heart, whereas a phaser on kill will kill if it hits anywhere on your torso or upper legs.  And disabling you with pain rather than knocking you unconscious is consistent with the things they were saying about you in engineering."

"If they wanted to take me alive so bad, why'd they decide to throw me out the airlock?"

"Perhaps overwhelmed by rage?  Perhaps they wanted you alive so they could kill you more slowly or personally."  She stood up.  "I'll go get you some medications.  I can't actually treat your leg, but I can bandage and sterilize it and give you painkillers and healing accelerators."

"Painkillers first before you touch it, please."

She went to sickbay again and came back with medical supplies.  The painkiller was such an intense relief, he almost passed out again just from no longer needing to struggle against pain.  "Oh, thank you," he sighed.  "That is infinitely better."

"Can you walk now?  With my help?"

Again he tried to get up, but even with the painkiller, shards of agony shot through him when he tried to stand.  "No," he said, gasping.  "Sorry."

"All right.  Hang onto my neck."  She lifted him, one arm supporting his back and the other under his upper legs, almost forming a chair.

He put his arms around her to stabilize himself.  "Oh, you're so butch," he said in an archly campy voice.

"You do realize I couldn't do this in Earth normal gravity."

"I thought a big strong Vulcan lass like you could sling skinny little humans around all day."

"Perhaps, but at two meters tall you are hardly a skinny *little* human.  You still mass 75 kilos."

"Technically, I'm only 193 centimeters.  I thought you people were supposed to be so precise."

She laid him carefully on a bed in Sickbay.  "If I had been speaking to a Vulcan, no doubt I would have used greater precision."

"I'm smarter than a Vulcan."

"And thus you're quite intelligent enough to know that my point isn't affected by seven centimeters in either direction."  She used a sonic shear to slice off his pants above the knee, exposing the damaged leg.  Next she ran a sterilizer ray over the leg, quickly.  Finally she took a long, wide rectangle of gray material covered on one side with thick goo, and wrapped it tightly around his leg, locking his knee in place.  The gray color changed to match the exact color of the unburned flesh right above his knee. 

"What is that?"

"It's a bandage with regenerative gel.  As the burned skin and flesh splits open, the regenerative gel will get into the cracks and speed your healing.  An actual doctor will probably use sonics to remove the damaged flesh and then rebandage you, but my goal is simply to keep the burn from killing the healthy tissue and causing gangrene before you can see a doctor."

"Well, I suppose that's better than gangrene.  Can I walk on it like this?"

"No.  I'll find your hoverchair.  You remember, we packed it because you tired so easily when you first came aboard."

"The Ferengi probably stole it, too."

"The Ferengi most likely to have taken it was Yalit herself, so it is quite possibly in the captain's quarters now.  I'll question her."

"What are we going to do with them?"

"Once you've got a hoverchair, you can come with me to engineering, and help me get warp back on line.  Then we'll go to Miona Station, hire repair techs for the ship, buy more dilithium, download a replicator database, and drop off the Ferengi when we're ready to leave."

"Oh."  A horrifying thought suddenly hit Q, and he sagged back against the medical bed.  "Oh, no.  We can't do that.  We have to kill them.  Or at least Yalit and the engineers."

"Why?" T'Laren frowned.  "If this is about revenge -- "

"No."  He closed his eyes.  "No, I don't -- I don't *want* to kill anyone else.  But Yalit knows far too much about transwarp."  He opened his eyes and looked at her.  "Quite aside from my entirely selfish reasons to not want to anger the Q Continuum, the Continuum is *right* about this.  Someone inventing dynamic transwarp right now will play holy hell with the power balance of the Alpha Quadrant.  I *can't* let her go with that knowledge."

"There's another way.  We don't have to kill her, Q.  We can erase her memories."

"She's not accessible to your telepathy."

"I'm well aware of that.  It's a psychological technique.  Mindwipes of specific traumatic events used to be done fairly often as a treatment for post-traumatic stress.  The technique has fallen out of favor, but it's possible to use it to wipe out learned knowledge as well as experiential memories."

"Can you administer that?  You're a counselor, not a psychiatrist."

"I was trained by Starfleet Intelligence.  Yes.  I can administer the technique.  But once Yalit is under and suggestible and her mind is prepared for erasures, you will have to be the one to tell her what to forget.  The way it works is that we use drugs, light patterns and a specific tone to induce a state where the subject will forget everything that is spoken to them.  The PTSD survivors would usually tell the story of their experience, in detail, and the story would be recorded and played back to them when they were in the erasure state.  In this case, you'll explain to her what you explained to her before, and that will cause her to forget it."

Q smiled maliciously.  "Oh.  Well, that's very helpful.  I really didn't want to *kill* any more Ferengi, but... I could really enjoy erasing Yalit's memories."

"I'm not suggesting this so you can have revenge."

"No, of course not.  It's the merciful thing to do.  We can protect the galaxy from the knowledge she tortured out of me, and still spare her life.  It's a great idea."  His smile got bigger.  "The fact that it's also a perfect revenge is just a bonus."

"We killed almost her entire family.  Isn't that vengeance enough?"

"No." Q lost the smile.  "That was war, T'Laren.  I wouldn't have killed them all just to get revenge.  If I'd known how it would make me feel to kill mortals now that I am one, I wouldn't have wanted to kill *any* of them for revenge.  I did that, we did that, because we had to.  And yes.  Beaming people into space, or blasting them to bits with an overloading phaser... those are really ugly ways to kill people.  But when you're outnumbered ten to one, you have no *choice.*  You don't have the luxury of clean one-on-one battles.  We couldn't have won any other way."  He shook his head.  "We'd have had to do it if she'd treated us perfectly well but still planned to kill or enslave us.  It wasn't revenge.  Whereas erasing everything she forced me to teach her... *that* will be fun."

"I think all of this is tragic, actually.  She accomplished so much in her life, overcame so many obstacles... and then she threw it all away to commit a criminal act, and lost more than half of her children and grandchildren."

"More than three-fourths.  *Profit Margin* had fifteen Ferengi on it before I blew it up."

"How did you do that with the transporter and my hair, anyway?  I'd meant to ask you."

"I converted it to antimatter with the transporter, and then beamed it over there."

Her eyes went wide.  "I didn't know that was possible."

"Neither did the folks on Starbase 56 until I pushed them into figuring out how to do it."

&&&

The hoverchair turned out to be in the captain's quarters, along with a sizable quantity of gold-pressed latinum, perhaps 20 bars of it.  Q demanded enough stimulants to keep him up and awake long enough to mindwipe Yalit and fix the warp drive, and under the circumstances T'Laren couldn't refuse him; he was right that he was needed for these things.  But she didn't like the look of his leg, and she would much prefer that he rest until they got to a doctor.

First they repaired the warp drive.  Getting it back on was easy; Yalit had just uncoupled a safety, without which *Ketaya* would not go to warp.  The damage to the nacelle was harder to deal with, but Q showed her how to reroute force field projectors in the hull to temporarily replace the damaged portion of the strut, so they would safely be able to warp long enough to get to a place they could get real repairs done, like the station up ahead.

Then they had to confront Yalit.

She was lying on the bed in her cell, her hand clenched around handfuls of shiny metal jewelry that some of the Ferengi guards T'Laren had seen had worn, sobbing.  When T'Laren, and Q in the hoverchair, entered the room, she looked up, eyes red, wet and ringed with dark circles of sleeplessness.

"Come to kill me like you killed my boys?" she snarled through her tears.

T'Laren shook her head.  "We don't kill unarmed prisoners.  We will release you and your surviving family on Miona Station.  But to do that we must remove your knowledge of transwarp.  Q and I will perform a procedure on you to eliminate your memories of transwarp, and then we can release you."

"No."  Yalit sat up and shook her head violently.  "Kill me.  I'm not gonna cooperate with you.  You killed my *boys*... my poor little boys..."

"Oh, boo-hoo for your poor little boys," Q said harshly.  "Your poor little boys who wanted to drug an innocent woman so they'd have more fun raping her?  Those poor little boys?"

"They only wanted to fuck her!"  Yalit snapped.  "You *beamed them into space!*"

T'Laren drew a sharp breath.  But Q didn't wait for her to speak on her own behalf.  "Where they took less than a couple of minutes to die.  What you *planned* to do to T'Laren, what you would have done if I'd never demanded that you help her or if I hadn't been able to help her myself, would have killed her, slowly and in agony over *days*, because you didn't *know* that she needed a mindmeld."  He floated his chair forward, advancing on Yalit.  "But that wouldn't have mattered.  We weren't planning on escaping and killing you all just because of what you did to T'Laren and what you made her do to me.  But you were going to kill us both, weren't you?  Or at the very least, sell us off into captivity we would never escape from.  It came down to us, or them."

"I never said I was going to do that!  I told you we'd let your woman go!"

"Oh, don't *lie* to me, Yalit.  Why would you have told me she was going to the Bolian homeworld when in fact she was going to Miona Station?"  He threw his arms in the air, and then leaned forward in his chair.  "But let's give you the benefit of the doubt.  Let's assume that, after you *kidnapped* me for supposedly trying to damage your scientific reputation, you were perfectly willing to return T'Laren and me to the Federation, because you were too much of a *moron* to realize that as soon as we told anyone that you had T'Laren drugged to facilitate raping her, your reputation would be *permanently* destroyed and you would be blackened as a criminal, slaver, trafficker and rapist.  So which is it, Yalit?  Were you going to kill us, or was I right about every unflattering thing I said about your intellect?"

"All right!"  Yalit shouted.  "Yes, I had a merchant lined up for your girlfriend who was going into Romulan space anyway, and the Roms pay a lot for captive Vulcans.  And I had a buyer from the Ceuli lined up for you."  She grinned viciously.  "You were wrong, you know.  I told the Ceuli what bids I'd gotten from the Roms and the Cardies for you, and they were *more* than happy to beat it."

Q rolled his eyes.  "They're not that rich.  If they could beat the Romulans' bid, it's probably because they were going to kill you and take their money back as soon as they had me."

"Maybe, maybe not.  They were eager to pay.  Fell all over themselves thanking me for catching you for them.  You must have *really* pissed them off.  What'd you do, blow up their planet?"

"Gave them shapechanging powers, actually.  For which you can see they've been eternally grateful."  Q made a dismissive gesture.  "That's not the point anyway.  You were willing to see me killed horribly because I *insulted* you.  You were willing to not only let your own sons rape T'Laren, who never did *anything* to you, but you were willing to sell her into slavery, rape and forced impregnation, apparently for the high crimes of being female and my friend.  You didn't have to kidnap us, you didn't have to commit a crime against us that the Federation would find unforgivable.  You chose to do those things, and that's why your sons are dead.  I may have been the weapon, Yalit, but you pulled the trigger."

"Come with us," T'Laren said coldly.  "We will be at Miona Station in four hours.  The mindwipe will take at least one."

Yalit shook her head.  "No.  You can kill me if you're gonna. I'm not doing anything to help you."

"That is unfortunate," T'Laren said.  "You have five remaining male descendants on this ship.  If you do not cooperate, I'll have to start killing them."

Yalit went pale.  "Who's left?"

"I don't know their names," Q said.  "It's the three goons you had with you in engineering and the two that shot me in the leg."

Her lips moved, as if reciting names under her breath.  "You bitch," she finally breathed at T'Laren.  "You absolute bitch."

T'Laren examined Yalit for a moment, controlling the urge to commit violence.  *She* was a bitch?  "Do you know the difference between Ferengi and Vulcan women?" she said finally.

"We're better in bed?"  Yalit said snidely.

"As you have seen, Vulcans can be compelled to need a lover's body, or die.  In nature, however, this is a burden men carry; women usually only endure it when bonded to a man.  So, consider.  Our men will literally die without the use of our bodies, and yet they have never enslaved us as yours did you.  We have never been, as a class, property of men, never been treated as wombs without minds, never been forbidden education or in fact any profession.  Do you know why?"

"Do I care?"

"Because we are not traitors to our own," T'Laren said relentlessly.  "Because we do not sacrifice other women's bodies for the amusement of our men.  Because we stand together."  She loomed over Yalit, who shrank back on the bed.  "In the days when we made war, Vulcan women might freely kill other women who were enemies of our tribe.  But we did not let our men take them captive and rape them.  We did not ally with our men to subjugate other women of our own tribe.  And thus we were never slaves like you."  Now she was bending over Yalit as the woman cringed.  "Because you did what you did to me, you and your sisters are slaves.  Because Ferengi women will betray other women to curry the favor of men, you will never be free.  Every terrible thing that happened to you at the hands of your men is your fault for being a traitor, you and all your kind."  She stepped back.  "Tell me, Yalit, did your daughters have the opportunities in life you won for yourself?  Did you even *have* daughters?  Or did you abort them all?"

"It's none of your business!" Yalit said, panic in her voice.

"Every time I think of what your sons wanted to do to me, I long to take a knife and slice them open slowly.  Q may be sickened by violence, but..." Very deliberately, very coldly, she smiled, knowing the effect a smile on a Vulcan had on most people.  "The drugs you gave me have made me *like* it.  Please, refuse my request.  I will be sure to tell your sons that you knew the consequences I had promised to you for them, and you refused me anyway, as I gut them and bind them with their own innards and hang them from my shower head to drip their blood into my bathtub."

"No," Yalit whispered.

"Then you will cooperate with the mindwipe."

"Yes."

"Very well."  She backed up another step.  "Get up."  Yalit didn't.  "You will walk, or I will carry you."

Q winced.  "Did you have to use that *exact* phrase?"

Yalit climbed slowly off the bed.  "I'll walk," she said dully.

T'Laren marched Yalit in front of her all the way to sickbay.  Behind her, Q made an expression of amazement.  "Really, T'Laren.  I had no idea you could be so *vicious.*  Color me impressed."

She looked at him.  "Don't be.  You are a better person for flinching at murder as you do.  I don't *like* having such violent desires, but until I am fully recovered from *pon farr*, this is who I am."

In sickbay, she made the preparations, strapping Yalit to a chair, administering the drug, strapping a headset with brain wave inducers to the woman's head and covering her eyes with it.  And then she couldn't find the headphones.

"Q, I may not be able to do this until we get to Miona Station and I can download the full replicator database."

Q shook his head.  "We can't go to Miona Station, T'Laren."

"We have to.  We need to take on a replicator database, or we'll have nothing to eat but emergency rations."

"If we can download the database without physically touching the station, fine.  But we're going to have to repair the transporter and transport the Ferengi, because we *cannot* dock."

"Why not?"

"Didn't you hear what Yalit said about the Ceuli?"

"That she planned to sell you to them, yes."

Q took a deep breath.  "The Ceuli are shapechangers.  They can turn into anything made of matter in a liquid or solid form.  If we dock, they could impersonate someone to get aboard, they could get in through the air exchange vents, there are any number of ways and we can't protect ourselves.  She already made arrangements with a Ceulan buyer, so the buyer probably already knows I'm coming in on a ship called *Ketaya*, and I can't change our ID beacon without looking like a smuggler.  If we dock there, they *will* get aboard and they *will* kill me.  So I want to fly by, drop off the Ferengi, and get away before the Ceuli aboard realize I'm not going to dock."

"Well, I had made arrangements for us to be met by Starfleet Security on Kyreer, and since Anderson is expecting us there we can arrange to have a doctor with access to your medical records waiting for us.  But aren't we much too far from Kyreer?  Even if we remained on the same heading when we were hijacked, we've been captive for a week.  We should have been to Kyreer in three days.  And most likely, we didn't stay on the same heading."

"Yes, but with a few bursts of transwarp I can get us back there in two, three days at most from here.  If we have emergency rations, I say we do that."

"I thought transwarp would blow the crystals."

"No, we can safely run for ten minutes at a time, the way I have it configured now.  We do ten on, half an hour off, and we'll cut our transit time to a third."

"I need headphones to finish the mindwipe on Yalit.  We can't bring *her* to Kyreer."

"I have headphones in my room."

"Then why did you let me spend twenty minutes looking for them?"

"Because you only just told me now it was *headphones* you wanted!"

She did not sigh.  "Can you get them for me?"

"I'm in a hoverchair, T'Laren."

"Yes, so you cannot be left alone with Yalit.  If she were to get loose, she could actually overpower you in your weakened state."

Q did sigh.  "*Fine.*"

When Q was gone, T'Laren walked over to Yalit.  "Are you still conscious?"

"I'm going to throw up," the woman mumbled.

"You might.  This won't affect the procedure."

"You should kill me.  I'm going to make you both pay for this."

"I do not kill helpless people for making insubstantial threats."

Q came back with the headphones.  T'Laren hooked one end to the computer and the other end over Yalit's large ears, which they barely fit around, and then gave Q a microphone.  "This is directional.  You speak into it and it will transmit what you say to Yalit's ears, over the tone.  Your headphones aren't large enough to block out room noise from Ferengi ears, so I'll bandage her head to seal the headphones in and block her ears, and leave the room to reduce the noise.  Simply say something into the microphone, and Yalit will forget whatever you say.  You must go into detail on concepts, though; saying 'transwarp' might cause her to forget the *word* transwarp, but the concepts will remain until you describe those."

She showed him how to activate and deactivate the tone and images that would put Yalit in the erasure state, and finished bandaging up Yalit's head.

"While I'm doing this, why don't you go pull up an engineering manual on a padd and fix the transporter?  What I had you do to it before effectively breaks it for any purpose that's *not* a weapon."

"Very well.  That's a good idea."

"And I'll probably have to do this to the three guys from engineering, too.  I don't *think* they were smart enough to understand much of what I was teaching them, but I don't want to have to explain to the Continuum why me underestimating a Ferengi's brain led to war in the Alpha Quadrant."

"Yes, but after Yalit is done.  I don't want them in contact with her in any way until we drop them off.  They still outnumber us."  T'Laren broke off the ending of the last bandage and fastened the edge.  "I'm going to engineering.  Try not to enjoy this too much."

"That's a hopeless task," Q said, sounding amused.

&&&

When she was gone, Q turned off the images and the tone, waited a moment until Yalit's slumped posture changed to a tenser, more upright one, and picked up the mike.  "Testing, testing.  Yalit?  Can you hear me in there? Hellooo, little troll..."

"Just... get on with it," Yalit mumbled.

"Oh, I will.  But I want you to know exactly what I'm going to do."

"I heard... her explaining.  Know... how... it works."

"But there's something you don't know," he purred into the microphone.  "T'Laren thinks I'm just going to take away transwarp.  But after everything you've done to me, and her... I don't think that's *nearly* enough."

"What..." She sounded frightened.  Good.  Her fear delighted him.

"I'm going to take away *math*," he whispered into the mike.

"What... no!"  Yalit started thrashing in her bonds.  "No!  You can't!"

"I can.  When I'm done, you not only won't be a physicist anymore... you'll be *innumerate.*  What will that do to your business acumen, I wonder?"

"Please!"

"Tell me, Yalit.  When I said 'please', when you held a neurowhip over me, how much attention did *you* pay to it?"

And as she struggled, he flipped on the tone and images.  Within seconds, she quieted, her jaw going slack and her head falling back against the chair.

Q began with transwarp.  He described to Yalit, in detail, the principles he'd been forced to explain to her before.  Then he described how regular warp drive worked.  Then he recited the multiplication tables with factors 0 through 20, and the squares of 0 through 20, and the associative property, and the commutative property, and all of the division operations that were inverse to the times tables he'd already recited, and some axioms of geometry, and then all the addition tables for numbers 0 through 10 and the corresponding subtraction operations.

He turned off the images, but not the tone, leaving her to return to consciousness but effectively deaf to the outside world.  "I'm done here, T'Laren," he said over the coms.  "Take her back and get me the engineers."

T'Laren retrieved Yalit, who was dazed and stumbling, and came back with the three engineers, marching them at phaser point.  She hooked all three of them up together by scanning Q's headphones into the replicator and then replicating two copies, so all three could be connected to the same program and Q wouldn't have to repeat himself.  Two of the engineers were the two men who had held Q down in Yalit's office so she could beat him.  Taking math from them, too, would take too long.  But after he was done wiping out transwarp, Q unplugged the third engineer's headphones -- this one hadn't actually done anything in particular to harm him, so he wasn't going to do more harm than he needed to -- and whispered to the other two, "Your mother is Yalit.  You love your mother.  You respect your mother.  You do everything she tells you to," before finally releasing them.  He had no idea if that was going to work, but if it did... let Yalit deal with the poisonous misogyny of the Ferengi directed at her from men she thought she had under her control, men she actually cared about.  That would be a good start on what she deserved for her willingness to let her sons rape a woman who'd done her no harm.

&&&

When they reached Miona Station, T'Laren forced the Ferengi at phaserpoint to get on the transporter platform.  Yalit and four of them went willingly enough, but the last one balked when he saw Q at the controls.  "I'm not getting on any transporter he's operating!"

"Oh, for the sake of all that's holy."  Q rolled his eyes.  "If I wanted to transport you into space, or turn you into antimatter, or transport your head off, I'd have *done* it already."

"No!  I'd rather be shot!"

"As you wish," T'Laren said, and stunned him.  As the four men and Yalit reacted with expressions of horror, she said, "He's stunned.  Pick him up and put him on the platform with the rest of you, or I will change my phaser setting to 'disintegrate' and shoot him again."

With bad grace, two of the Ferengi picked up their brother and carried him to the platform.  "I'm going to remember this," Yalit said, her face dark with helpless rage.

"You do that," Q said.

"I *will* make you pay for this."

"Attempting to make Q pay for slights against you is why your family now numbers five, not thirty-five," T'Laren said coldly.  "You do not have enough descendants left to afford to come after him again."

"Good-*bye*, Yalit," Q snapped, and activated the transporter.

As soon as they were gone he looked at T'Laren.  "Get to the secondary control center in engineering and warp us the hell out of here before Yalit finds her Ceulan buyer and tells them to go after us.  I'll catch up with you in a few minutes and start nursing this sucker through transwarp bursts."

T'Laren nodded.  Q's hoverchair didn't move as fast as she could run, and the damage to the bridge had thrown off automatic control, so they couldn't go to warp from inside the transporter room.  She bolted for engineering.

When Q finally caught up, he looked awful, gray and tired.  "Are you sure you're up for this, Q?" T'Laren asked.  "You look unwell."

"My painkillers are wearing off.  If you can get me some more... and one of those emergency ration things.  I'm starving."

"We have had a *very* stressful day, and a very long one, with little food, and you're injured.  I think you should sleep tonight, and we can use transwarp in the morning."

"I think the sooner we get to Kyreer the sooner I can have medical attention from a doctor who's not out to kill me, and the faster we get away from anywhere near the Ceulan homeworld, the more secure I'll feel.  Get me painkillers and stimulants.  And food."

"That's really not good for you.  The painkillers and stimulants, at least; I'm sure the ration bars are an excellent idea."

"I know, but do you know what would be really, really bad for me?  Having a shapechanger transport over here, eviscerate me and rip my heart out of my chest.  That would be *extremely* bad for me."  He sighed.  "I'll do this maybe four, five hours, and then get some sleep the next time the meds wear off, all right?"

"All right."  She wanted to reach out to him, to hold him, to show her appreciation for everything he'd done in the past week and her understanding of how hard it had been for him, especially everything that had happened today.  But after what she'd done to him, she felt like she didn't dare touch him unless he explicitly invited her to, ever again.

Q smiled tiredly.  "Cheer up, T'Laren.  We're alive, we're free, we have the run of our ship again, no one's beating us up or poisoning us, and even emergency rations can't possibly be as bad as some of the stuff the Ferengi fed us.  You and I single-handedly beat 35 Ferengi and escaped captivity.  That's impressive, don't you think?  Really, things could be *much* worse."

"Yes, of course.  I'm just concerned for you."

"Well, go get me my meds and then there'll be much less need for concern."  Q punched in a sequence on the engineering console.  "Transwarp burst in three, two, one.  Blast off."

The sound of the engine changed, but without viewscreens there were no other visible signs that they were moving faster than regular warp would allow.  "Don't blow up the ship while I'm gone getting your medication."

He actually grinned.  "We're footloose and fancy-free, heading for a planet where I can annoy people and they won't try to kill me or torture me for it.  Why would I want to blow up the ship?"

"Of course, annoying people with impunity is a critical issue for you."

"Of course."

She headed for sickbay.  He was holding together remarkably well, considering all they'd been through.  But she didn't know if the connection between them would be as resilient as he himself was.  They'd have to talk about what had happened.  Later.  After his leg was better, at least.

Maybe much later.

*end Part IV*