The Partisan

1

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender;
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished...

The funny thing was that originally she hadn't cared enough about the issue to pick a side.

It wasn't that the war didn't concern her.  The war deeply concerned every Q in the Continuum, including the ones that weren't picking sides.  And she was something of an expert on war.  It had been her area of interest, the thing she'd spent aeons exploring, the power of war and conflict between mortals.  On a thousand worlds she was the goddess of war; on a hundred thousand more she'd taken the shape of a mortal and fought by the mortals' side, using no powers aside from her immortality.  That was one of the reasons she didn't want to take sides; she felt that whichever side had her would have an unfair advantage.  She was too used to thinking about mortal wars, about handicapping herself before she participated in them.  It didn't occur to her that whatever side had her would need her, or that she couldn't possibly be advantage enough.

Her oldest friend, her closest companion, was at the forefront of the war, but by itself that didn't decide her.  What was change and transformation to her?  She didn't find the Continuum all that tedious; she liked the stability and couldn't understand why he wanted to shake things up.  She had fought in a million mortal wars, had allowed herself to know pain and even to feel the physical death of the bodies she wore.  She knew blood and chaos.  It was an exciting place to visit but who would want to live there if they had a choice?  Anything was better than bringing that to the Continuum.  And while it was the side that wanted to preserve order that had actually fired the first shot, everyone knew this was because crushing the movement for change, restoring the status quo, would be the only way to keep order.

No, she hadn't chosen sides.  But because of her close relationship with him, his comrades in battle seemed to think she was at least an honorary member of their side, and gave her messages to pass to him, while he told her his plans as if he knew she wouldn't betray him to his enemy, which was true enough.  His plans, of course, were stupid.  She wouldn't have expected differently.  Still, she tried to support him in them, playing along with his idiotic idea that reproducing with a mortal could stop the war, taking the role that she guessed would most likely push the mortal into accepting him.  Unfortunately the mortal wasn't a Klingon.  She knew Klingon women, she didn't know humans; being challenged by a woman who claimed ownership of a man who offered suit didn't, apparently, inspire human women to rise to the challenge and fight for him.

It didn't matter.  It wouldn't have worked anyway.  She could see that before he could.  When he took the human to the Continuum, he gave away their position to the enemy, and she was forced to flee to the Continuum right behind him lest he be caught in a trap or she be trapped on the wrong side of the discontinuity.  They came out in the war zone, where the disruptive effects of the weapons would prevent either of them from leaving, or returning the human where she belonged.  It was a trap.  Her friend hadn't seen it, apparently, but someone had set up a pathway to redirect his emergence into the Continuum here.  At least they had emerged in a shelter.  But battle experience from all the mortal wars she had fought in told her that if they'd been redirected here then the shelter was a trap, and no safety at all. 

She took the specifications for the weapon from his mind and sat down behind a bulwark, focusing on trying to refine and improve the device.  They'd need some serious firepower to get out of here alive.  Amazingly, her friend was still yammering at the human about his stupid plan to have a child with her.  He'd created a translation in the human's brain so that it looked as if they were on the top floor of a mansion, with fires and gunshots outside in the dark woods behind and the fields in front, with the bulwark playing the role of a sofa and neither he nor the human actually anywhere remotely safe.  The warrior goddess stuck her head up over the sofa.  "What are you standing in front of the window for?  Do you want to get shot?"

"There's a discontinuity in the way.  They can't possibly know we're here al--"  And then the "window" smashed in and a bolt struck him, knocking him down, and he cried out.

"Q!" the human shouted.

The warrior crawled around the couch, grabbed her friend and dragged him behind it.  "OW!  Be careful!  I'm hurt here!"

"You could be dead.  What were you thinking?"

He looked at his arm/manipulative function, which was bleeding profusely.  "I think... I'm just going to sit here for a little bit," he said shakily.

The human joined them behind the couch.  "Is there anything I can do?"

"You could be a good little human and help the idiot bandage himself while I try to keep the rest of us from getting shot," the warrior said, coming out from behind her cover and plastering herself against the wall, gun in hand.  Because of the reconfiguring she'd done, the gun looked to the human like an anachronism, a modern day phaser rifle in the midst of the metaphor drawn from her planet's past. 

"Q, please try to play nice with Kathy.  This is neither the time nor the place to do your whole jealousy thing.  Ow!  Watch it!"

"Stop moving your arm, Q," the human said sharply, "and I'll be able to bandage it without hurting it."

"I was never jealous.  I just think you're an idiot for bringing a mortal to the Continuum."

"If it helps any," the human said, "that makes two of us."

More gunfire whistled over the couch.  The warrior whipped around and fired at where the shot came from, then returned to her concealment against the wall beside the broken window.  That hadn't worked well-- the discontinuity in the way, reflected in the metaphor of night surrounding them, blocked her ability to see the enemy's positions clearly.  If she concentrated and made herself fully receptive, the bits and pieces of information that made it across the discontinuity might tell her where at least some of the enemy were.  "We need to get out of here," she said.

"Yes, yes, tell me something new?"  His voice was sharp with pain.  The human was bandaging his arm (which was to say that no such thing was occurring; the human was actually allowing him to siphon a small amount of mental energy from her to knit an emergency patch in his pattern, but as far as she knew she was bandaging his arm.)

"No, I mean this shelter.  We're boxed in; they're moving to surround us."

"You don't know that.  They're on the other side of the discontinuity."

"The discontinuity?" the human asked.

The warrior rolled her eyes.  Her friend, who for some mysterious reason treated the human as a near-equal, answered.  "In the past, anything one Q knew we all knew.  That hasn't been true since shortly before the war broke out.  The discontinuities that rippled through the Continuum after Quinn's death broke down our communication with each other to the point where war became possible."

"Don’t forget that some idiot built a gun."

"I didn't forget that, but it's not relevant to the discontinuities.  How do you know they're surrounding us?"

"Because this is a trap, they had a redirection set to dump you in a spot of their choosing once you re-entered the Continuum.  Didn't you feel it?"

"I did rather wonder why I came out in the middle of the battlefield, yes.  But I suppose a redirection like that wouldn't have worked if I could have sensed it, so they must have set it up to block me noticing it.  Doesn't that mean we're already surrounded?"

"Probably, but I don't think they were expecting me.  None of them have any combat experience."

"Well, then, my glorious Nike, use your vast combat experience to figure out what the hell we do next, because my inclination would be to use this shelter as a base and try to pick them off as they come in."

"A wonderful idea, until they set it on fire to burn us out."

"Nike?  Your name isn't Q?" the human asked.

"Your ignorance is stunning considering the name comes from your species," she snapped back.

Her companion rolled his eyes.  "You were too busy doodling diagrams of warp engines in folklore class, weren't you, Kathy?  Nike was the Greek goddess of victory."

The human ignored the insults.  At least she was reasonably tough for a mortal.  "Do you two have any way to determine the enemy's positions?  If they can burn us out here, then your companion's right, Q-- we need to get out of here.  But if they've surrounded us... Do you have anything equivalent to a horse?"

"No."

"But we do have spyglasses," her lover said, digging around in a drawer.  "Ow.  Find me some binoculars, dear heart?"

"I have a better idea.  Every time I turn around that mortal practically disappears.  You, since you have real combat experience too and since we can't very well get you home if we're dead-- get out there, scout around and report back to me the enemy positions."

"Will I be able to see them properly?" the human asked, obviously biting back her irritation at being ordered around.  "We're in the Continuum.  I thought my ability to see and understand what's going on is depending on you two to translate for me."

"No," her friend said, "I've already set up the translation in your brain.  And yes, you can see other Q, but Q has a point-- they will barely be able to see you.  In the Continuum, you're... what's the word I'm looking for?"

"Insignificant?" the warrior suggested.

"I was thinking infinitesimal, actually, since we're depending on Kathy to be very significant."  He turned to the human.  "I'm sorry for getting you into this, but she's right.  You can scout out the enemy positions and they probably won't even notice you.  Don't get shot.  This--" he pointed at his injured arm-- "would have annihilated you instantly.  They're weapons for Q; you can't even take a glancing blow."

"Can I use them?  If you give me your gun, I might be able to defend myself..."

The warrior snorted.  "No.  As well ask a cockroach if it can fire a phaser."

The human turned to her angrily.  "A cockroach might not be able to, but a mouse could.  And I'm getting tired of your attitude.  I didn't ask to be part of this, and since you claim I can do something neither of you can do, you could try being grateful instead of continually behaving as if I'm beneath your notice."

"You are beneath my notice.  And theirs.  That's why this will work.  And if you want gratitude, go do something instead of talking about it."

She could see the human controlling her rage.  They were more like Romulans than Klingons or Andorians, she thought.  A Klingon would have gone for her throat by now, not that it would have helped.  "All right.  I'll be back."

Once the human was gone, her friend said, "I can't believe you sent Kathy to be a scout.  She's mortal.  They could just think her dead if they see her, they won't even need to shoot."

"So help me distract them."

"Hello?  Injured here?"

"Toughen up.  This is war, Q, not some game."

"I never thought it was a game."

"So why are you sitting there whining with a bandage on instead of helping me shoot at them?"

"Fine," he sighed, immensely put-upon.  "Give me the specs for your gun.  I like it better."

She handed him her gun.  With the uninjured part of his manipulative powers he reshaped his weapon into an identical copy of hers.  "I knew I did the right thing trying to recruit you."

"I haven't taken a side.  I'm just trying to keep you from getting killed."

"You know what, darling?  If you manage to kill any of those Q out there, they aren't going to care that you were just doing it to defend me.  They're going to consider you belonging to my side.  In fact, they probably already do.  So, in fact, you have taken a side.  Better admit it now."

She stared at him.  "This is all your fault."

"Very likely.  Everything always is."  He leaned over the couch, sighted, and fired into the woods beyond the mansion (which weren't woods at all any more than they were in a mansion or the couch was really a couch). 

"That was a terrible shot," she sneered.

"Well, why don't you show me how it's done, Miss I've-Been-Playing-War-With-Mortals-For-Aeons?"

She turned.  She stretched her senses out, not trying to read through the discontinuity directly, but trying to read the bits and pieces of information that got through the discontinuity, and she felt it.  A spike of hate, of anger.  Oh, she knew where that was coming from, yes indeed.  She stuck her head through the window and fired, and fell backward as the recoil hit her a second before the shockwave hit.

She heard the scream, saw the explosion, the brilliant burst of energy tearing loose from the pattern that had contained it for billions of years, and she knew who that was.  Those swirling rays of light and power were her brother-- a Q she had debated with and played with and taken pleasure with and voted with-- a Q who was the God of Lightning on a planet called Skria, where the mortals had blue skin, and green eyes, and built farms of metal spikes to honor their god.  And he would never go there again-- never talk to her, argue with her, laugh with her-- as all that he had ever been, all he'd known, all he was, boiled out in a sudden explosion of chaos where there had been an orderly pattern and now he was not.  Streamers of near-liquid energy ran all over the landscape, congealing in pools.  She stared at the gun in her hand.  Five billion years and she had never taken the life of another Q-- oh, as part of the Continuum she'd voted to remove some of their number from the Continuum to avoid worsening a discontinuity, and that had generally ended up killing them, but she had never in her own person pulled a trigger and watched a Q die.

The one who had created the weapons had done so because he'd thought they were too horrifying ever to be used, that they could be used to frighten the agitants for change into going back to their quiet boring lives and stop trying to disrupt everything.  He hadn't consulted her, she thought, hysteria boiling up.  She could have told him that creating a weapon too terrible to be used never, ever worked.  Sooner or later it would be.  She dropped the gun, curling into herself.  The Klingons would laugh if they could see her, the proud entity who had condemned them for thirty years for failing to be what they should be now fetal and shaking because she'd actually killed somebody.  The one who'd created the weapons had blown himself apart with one after the first shots of the war were fired and three unarmed Q on the side of change had been murdered by Q for order before the crowd had scattered.  She'd thought him weak and stupid.  Now she knew why he'd done it.  She had seen mortals react badly to killing their own kind for the first time but she'd never thought about what it would actually feel like, what it would be to kill a Q and watch the power and potential and memories of billions of years leak away like plasma streaming from a supernova. 

Her friend was next to her.  She looked up at him, mute and furious, expecting any moment that he would mock her for her weakness, laugh at how she'd postured as some great warrior and here she was curled in a ball and she wanted to die because she'd killed her brother.  The Q did not respond to displays of emotional weakness kindly.  She tried to muster a pre-emptive strike, but she was too hurt, too shaken.

"It's the worst thing," he said, very softly.  "The worst thing any of us have ever done, the worst thing we can do.  And the horror of it all is, no one wants this.  No one wants to do this.  If we could just find a way to prove to them that it doesn't have to be like this.  If we could show them that change can be a positive force, that it doesn't have to destroy them.  They don't want this, we don't want this.  It has to stop."

"I thought--" She tried to pull on her imperious façade, but it did no good because he could see right through it.  "Aren't you going to mock me?  I've fought in a million wars... I shouldn't be this weak..."

"Au contraire."  He let his essence touch hers, neither trying to envelop nor penetrate, simply molding to the edges of her form.  "If you had shrugged this off I'd have used you for everything I could get, for my cause, but I wouldn't have wanted to know you.  That this horrifies you so much just proves you're a Q... and that there's hope for us to get out of this, somehow."

The human returned.  From the human's perspective, they looked as if they were sitting against the wall, his arm around her.  "I hate to break up a tender moment, but I've got the information we need.  There are two in the back and four in the front."

"Did you check the front or the back first?" her friend asked.

"Front.  Why?"

"There're three in the front.  Q here just shot one."

"Well, that makes the odds better, I suppose."

"I have just killed an entity that was billions of years old, that I have known for my entire existence, and all you can say is 'that makes the odds better?'"

"Shh," her friend said, sending her a tenderness and gentleness she'd have never imagined could come from him through the places where their essences touched.  "She's been through it before-- puked her guts out the first time she killed somebody, in fact.  At least we don't have digestive systems."  He smiled.

"I'm sorry," the human said.  "I thought-- You spoke as if you were experienced with war."

"I am.  Mortal wars.  We've never had a war in the Continuum before-- we've never even been able to kill each other like this."

"I see.  It... is different when it's your own species.  I've had to kill humans before.  It's hard.  But it's self-defense here.  They were going to kill you."

"They still might if we don't get out of here," she said weakly, trying to pull herself back together.  Being comforted by a human was ridiculous.  She couldn't possibly be this pathetic.  She got up, helping her friend reconfigure himself for motion as well.  "Let's get out of here."

She could feel the minds outside now.  They were close enough that she could feel their outrage, their grief, beating at her, trying to crush her.  The three of them fled out the back before the hate could be focused tightly enough to destroy the shelter.  "Where are they?" she asked the human, and before the human could even point drew the memory from her mind.  Close enough that they'd know their prey was escaping, call the others from around the front of the shelter.  She looked at her friend.  "We need to move."

He lifted his injured arm.  "I'm open to suggestions.  Kathy can't keep up with us if we go too fast and I'm not in great shape either."

She rolled her eyes.  "Oh, very well."  The metaphor shifted around her as she manipulated the human's mind so as to appear to be a horse.  "Get on, both of you."

"That's a good trick," the human said. 

The human climbed on top of her/entered the carryarea she'd made, and then reached to help her friend, who, despite being injured, didn't actually need and couldn't actually use the help of a human in this matter.  He joined the human.  She knew when she was holding him solidly, when he had joined his energies to hers to let her draw on his power as well as her own.  And then, she ran.

To the human it was a wild, violent gallop through bleak dark woods, dodging around trees, leaping underbrush, clip-clopping through the rushing eddies of creeks.  To her, what the human saw as bodies of water were discontinuities, ripping at her, but she kept going.  Her friend shot at the only Q who was close enough to enter pursuit and managed to injure him.  When the others caught up they'd be able to try this same trick, so they needed to get out of the dead zone and back to somewhere they could teleport from as soon as possible, preferably on the other side of a discontinuity so the enemy couldn't just sense where they were going. 

"Why did they set up an ambush with only six Q?" the human asked.

"Only six Q?" she said disbelievingly.

"Yes.  If they did something to redirect you two here, then they had time to plan this ambush.  Why only six?  The odds are just three to one that way."

"Firstly, they didn't know Q'd be with us, which would have made the odds six to one," her friend said.  "And secondly... Kathy, I don't think you understand Q war.  We don't have massive armies.  We don't have that many Q.  Six Q is an overwhelming number.  If it had been just you and I we'd have had no hope.  Even now, with five to two plus faithful sidekick, this isn't good."

"Oh, I'm your faithful sidekick now?  I thought you wanted me to bear your child."

"That, too."

The human was silent for a moment.  "Q, you said this was a Civil War.  But you keep saying that they represent the status quo and you represent the forces that want change.  Wouldn't that actually make you the Confederacy, not the Union?"

"Well, the Confederacy lost.  Also, they had slaves, and besides, you're a damn Yankee, Kath.  I couldn't expect you to side with me if I was Confederate."

"I'm a Hoosier, not a Yankee. And why did you pick the Civil War at all, then?  Wouldn't the Revolutionary War have made more sense?"

"She has a point.  This was a remarkably stupid metaphor.  For one thing, you're fighting like a guerrilla and they're disciplined.  For another thing, you're fighting for the freedom to make decisions for yourselves, not the freedom to enslave other people.  And I can't believe we're wasting our breath discussing something so pointless as the metaphor you picked."

"You want it to be Revolutionary War?  Fine, fine," he groused, and waved his uninjured arm, manipulating the metaphor.  The costumes the human saw the two of them in changed, although of course the horse she was didn't alter.  "I fixed it.  Happy now?"

"I'd be happier if you just got me back to my ship."

"Kathy.  You've seen what's happening here.  You know what's at stake.  With all that, you still won't help me?"

"Q, you can't have a child as a political statement!  I don't even understand why you think having a child will do any good if you're killing each other, certainly not why having a child with a human would help.  If having a child would really end the war, why don't the two of you do it?  You seemed awfully cozy with each other before, and if you've been together for billions of years..."

"Give or take a few hiatuses of a few hundred thousand here and there," her friend murmured.

"A wonderful idea," the warrior said sarcastically.  "If it weren't completely impossible I might actually consider it.  Q, did you ever mention to this human that we Q don't reproduce?"

"Yes, I did in fact.  I've mentioned it a few times."

"But you do!  The Starfleet records I have on you indicate that two Q mated in human form to produce a girl named Amanda Rogers, who turned out to be Q.  We even mentioned her at the trial."

"That doesn't count," her friend said.

"They think of her as tainted.  Not truly Q.  A mob almost tore her apart right before the war broke out.  That would only add fuel to the fire."

"But then having a child with a human would be even worse!  Why do you think they'd reject a girl with two Q parents but accept a hybrid?"

"Admit it.  It was one of your stupider plans."

"I still think it could work," he said stubbornly.

"I think you two should try to make it work."

"How's that going to happen?" he demanded.  "A human carrying a Q child would still be for all intents and purposes a needle in a haystack.  A Q in mortal form carrying a Q child would be blatantly obvious, and impaired from defending herself-- I don't think a pregnant Q would dare to use the weapons without risking the child, and she'd be a gigantic target to the enemy.  Not to mention, whoever did it would have to put up with so many mortal inconveniences.  Like getting fat."

"Getting shot is better than getting fat?" the human asked pointedly. 

"It still wouldn't prove anything," she said.  "If it were possible to create a child as a Q, to figure out how reproduction worked..."

"You know, now that I'm thinking about that, I wonder--"

Bullets/blasts of destructive force roared over their head.  She whinnied and bucked, throwing her passengers to the ground.  "Q!  Take the human and go!" she shouted, retaking her humanoid form in the metaphor so she could hold the gun.

"I can’t just leave you--"

"You brought her here.  She'll distract you until you get her back home.  Run!"

She fired in front of her, laying down a barrage of covering fire as behind her her friend took the human and fled.  The enemy returned fire.  They all had cover, and there were more of them, and so they could manipulate the landscape, turn the local area of the Continuum itself against her.  Her cover disappeared.  She shot at the closest one, wounding him, and then the one she'd shot before shot her.

Pain exploded through her.  All manipulative functions, all of her powers, were lost in a wave of searing pain.  The weapon fell away from her and she collapsed.  The enemy closed in, one of the three remaining uninjured Q grabbing her, disappointment and anger radiating from him.  She began to laugh.

"Not the prize you were expecting, am I?"

"Where is he?"  He reached into her pattern in such a way as to deliberately cause excruciating pain. 

She screamed in agony, and laughed at the same time.  She was going to die now, she was sure of it.  And that wasn't a pleasant thought, not after five billion years of thinking herself immortal.  But in a sense she'd been practicing for it all her life, living mortal lives, fighting mortal battles, watching them die around her, and experiencing the sensations as the physical bodies she wore were killed.  She could face this.  She was probably better prepared than any other Q in the Continuum to face this.  And now she would never have to watch him die.

It hadn't been fashionable in the Continuum to admit to any great feelings for millions of years.  Grand passion of any sort was terribly gauche, laughable and weak.  She didn't feel weak.  Staring into the face of death, she knew that she loved, as she hadn't admitted to herself or to the one she loved for aeons.  And if her death could protect him, even a short while, so be it.  There were worse things to die for.

The pain subsided and another kind of pain began as he tried to tear through the defenses of her mind, to surround her and enter her and learn everything she knew.  She flung what very little she knew at him to ward him off, still laughing hysterically.  "I don't know where he is.  I told him to run and he did it.  You'll never find him now, especially since you're wasting your time torturing me."

"He'll have returned the human to its ship," one of the injured ones said.  "I heard them talking about it."

"The ship is in a dead zone.  He'll have dropped her off on some planet or made her a small ship or something, and come back to fight.  She wouldn't give him what he wanted so he has no more use for her."  She kept laughing.  "You've lost him!  Good work!  You set a trap, you set up overwhelming odds and he still got away.  Don't you feel like such competent soldiers?"

The eldest in the group said tiredly, "Bring her back to camp.  We'll give him some time to return to the Continuum and then execute her.  That might lure him in."

Unfortunately, it might.  Few Q were any kind of tactical geniuses, having so little experience in needing to be, and her love wasn't an exception.  He could be ruthless when he had to be, but he might not realize he had to be.  She tried to lunge for the gun, to get herself shot, but at five to one they simply and easily immobilized her.

Of course, the execution didn't go as planned.

They actually managed to get together a cohort as large as thirteen Q to witness her death, and shoot down anyone who tried to come to the rescue.  And the Youngest, the Q who had been born in human form, walked right into their camp as they were preparing to execute her and killed three of them before anyone was able to see her.  Apparently her love had told the Youngest about mortals being nigh-invisible in the Continuum, and the Youngest still remembered how to look more or less indistinguishable from a mortal.  He'd gotten five Q together to come to the rescue, plus the Youngest, plus himself, and at seven to ten, since the Youngest had already killed three, the odds were almost even.  One of their number died in the battle that ensued and three were wounded, including the Youngest, but they killed a total of three of the enemy and got away. 

It was a fantastic triumph, and they laughed, and sang, and later when they'd regrouped at a shelter on their own side of the discontinuity, she gave him her emotions, the revelation she'd had when she was facing death as to how she felt about him.  For the first time in more time than even they could easily count, she opened her defenses completely, inviting him to join with her fully.  For the first time in rather longer than that, he agreed.

She had taken sides.

2

I've changed my name so often
I've lost my wife and children
But I've many friends
And some of them are with me

For a time it was glorious.

They had the Youngest, whom the enemy had nicknamed the Deathchild, with her remarkable and un-Q-like ability to simply disappear.  It was more than being raised mortal; the Deathchild had been raised by mortals who'd taught her to hide even the strengths they'd known she had, to be self-effacing, quiet, introverted, all things no Q raised in the Continuum could ever be.  She tried to teach the others how she did it.  The warrior goddess was rather good at it, as she'd expected to be-- she had learned stealth from mortals in their wars-- though none of them were anywhere near as good as the Youngest.  Her lover was hopeless.  His personality didn't lend itself to stealth or secrecy at all.  Still, it was an ability that some on their side had and none of the enemy did.

They had her, and she was familiar with warfare and tactics as few Q were.  They had a philosopher and teacher, a gentle being whose own companion and best friend of billions of years had been gunned down in the first massacre of the war, who had a talent for invention, and when she worked together with him they managed to improve and hone their weaponry.  For a time it seemed as if these advantages would turn the tide in their favor.

It was a time of passion, of horror and of hope.  They waded through rivers of diffuse energy that had once been Q, they killed those they had once loved, and they reminded themselves desperately what it meant that they were alive.  The emotional bleakness and ennui of the Continuum for the past several million years had lent itself to being jaded, sophisticated, detached from any feelings except ironic amusement.  That was gone now.  They became closer to one another than Q had been to each other for geological epochs.  They blotted out the horror of the deaths they caused, of their own fallen comrades' deaths, in experimenting with every way of sharing pleasure they could think of, with as many of their comrades as wished to share.  But she and her lover reserved the intimacy of actual joining for each other alone, not out of a desire for monogamy or faithfulness but simply because neither of them could bear to be that vulnerable to anyone else.

The Youngest commented on it at one point, laughing.  "You know, it must be impossible for the Q to reproduce in true form, because I'm absolutely sure that with all the different ways you two have been fucking you'd have figured out how to do it by now, if it could be done."

Her lover lazily threw a small ball of energy at the Youngest, who giggled and ducked.  "Have some respect for your elders, child.  You're obviously just envious."

"Of course I am."  The Youngest reached out a gentle tendril of energy to lightly touch the bond between them.  "I was raised on all kinds of soppy human romantic stories.  I always wanted to have what the two of you have, but I always thought it wouldn't be possible in the Continuum.  And now I see it in you... but I still don't have anyone for myself, not like you two.  And I'm so much younger than all of you that I probably never will."

She felt her lover's surge of fierce protectiveness toward this child.  He'd always seen her as a special project of his, since he'd been the one sent to bring her into the Continuum (or kill her, but they mostly tried not to think about that anymore), and when she'd betrayed her mentor, a Q on the side of order, to bring him the specs for the weapon, turning what had been a slaughter into actual combat and giving their side a fighting chance, he'd been enormously proud of her.  The knowledge that she was also their most skilled and ruthless warrior, with her invisibility trick and the fact that she alone wasn't killing the brothers and sisters of billions of years, that she had managed to completely desensitize herself to killing Q by thinking of them as the ones that had killed her parents in her infancy, and that she was used to dealing with the thought that she could die... well, all of that was just icing on the cake.  He thought of her as the daughter he had never had, would probably never have, now.  The plan to change the Continuum by having a child had fallen completely by the wayside; it was obvious that things had gone far too far for that.

"Cheer up.  When all this is over, we'll have to engage in some of that sordid mortal procreation your parents were so fond of; we won't have enough Q to keep the Continuum functioning properly if we don't.  And after a few hundred years, the age difference between you and a Q born thirty years after you won't make a bit of difference.  Someday there'll undoubtedly be someone you can be this close with.  Who knows?  You might even find a mortal.  Once we're in control we won't look down on such things."

"Speak for yourself," the warrior said archly.  "I've never found them all that good in bed."

"That's because you only take the form of warrior species, and once you've seen one of them, you've seen them all.  You need a sophisticated mortal, someone who can expand their mind to encompass truly alien concepts, who can combine skill in war with diplomatic abilities."

"Who's bald, and French," the Youngest added cheerfully.

Her lover lobbed another tiny ball of energy at the Youngest.  This time she caught it and ate it.  Eating was not done by civilized, mature Q; this was the equivalent of sticking out her tongue and wagging it.  "Am I wrong?  Come on, can you tell me I'm wrong?"

"It hardly matters any more."

The sudden melancholia threatened to overwhelm him.  She had never understood why or how he had such strong feelings for his precious mortals, but she knew that he'd found it very painful that the whole time they'd been fighting this war, the enemy had staked out a permanent ambush on his favorite human, and when he'd tried to recruit an old enemy to help him get through on the grounds that bygones needed to be bygones in the face of such an overwhelming threat, the old enemy had, predictably, spit in his face and refused on principle.  He hadn't seen the human since the war broke out, hadn’t even been able to get a message through, since his second favorite human was still wandering around very far from her home, unable to communicate what she knew with the humans back where she came from.  And sending her back to them was no longer an option since the enemy had taken to staking her out, too. 

The warrior goddess pulled her lover to her, letting her edges overlap with his, letting him feel her fierce emotion as an antidote to his sudden ache.  "If we live you'll see him again.  If we die, what does it matter?  We have each other and we will until we win or die.  Right now what else do we need?"

"If you two are going to have sex now, could you give me some warning so I can go hide my eyes?"

"Amanda, privacy is such a human concept.  You're never going to get used to this being a Q thing, are you?"

"If I did, would I be so good at shooting other Q?"

"Good point."

She smiled wryly at the exchange between the two.  "Go hide your eyes, child," she said.  "I'm planning to fuck him now until we're both so senseless we forget who we are.  Since you don't want to be a Q and sop up the energies on the side, you'd better go put on a blindfold like a good little human."

"I think I'll go take watch."

"I think that's an excellent idea," she said as the Youngest departed.  And then her lover was inside her and she in him and they were falling together, condensing into a single point, a single being, and she had no more attention to spare for the Youngest, or anything else.

But the Q were no longer immune to entropy.  It didn't last.

Sheer numbers were on the enemy's side.  There were too many Q who were uncommitted, but hated her lover and had for hundreds or thousands or millions of years.  He'd never been good at making friends.  There were too many Q who'd be uncommitted except that they saw the Youngest as a taint on the purity of the Continuum.  There were many Q who were simply terrified of change.  If the overall tenor of the Continuum hadn't been conservative, clinging to the way things were and had always been, there wouldn't have needed to be a revolution to bring change. 

There was also the fact that the enemy was accustomed to working within a structure that was hierarchical and disciplined.  The forces for change were the forces for chaos, the tricksters, disruptors, and devil's advocates, the really independent thinkers, the anti-authoritarians.  She tried to whip them into some semblance of an army, but by their nature they were ragtag, argumentative and undisciplined.  They sometimes listened to her lover, more often than they listened to anyone else, because he'd been at the forefront of most of the events that had led to the war and because he had excellent credentials as far as commitment to fighting the forces of stagnation.  They pretty much never listened to her-- they knew she had taken sides for love and not ideology, and they saw her as a small pocket of authority in their chaos that they could rebel against right here and now.  The forces for order created plans and stuck to them; the forces for change couldn't make up their minds what they were doing and would very rarely take orders of any sort.  So they were at a disadvantage, and it grew.

One by one they were whittled down.  They weren't the only ones with a Q who understood tactics, weren't the only ones with a Q who could work on inventing newer and deadlier weapons.  The enemy didn't have anyone as deadly as the Youngest, but she was only one Q and the physically weakest one in the Continuum at that; the same skill that allowed her to sneak around in the Continuum so well prevented her from actually firing the weapons as often as another Q could without needing to rest.  They suffered defections, and betrayals, and then the enemy got the trick to torturing information out of Q down and one of their number was captured and forced to reveal where all the others were.  Four of their number were killed then.

They started having to be ruthless.

She pioneered the technique of eating dead enemies, taking enough of their essence in that they could masquerade as those enemies to the senses of other Q, for a short time at least.  The Youngest was horrified and refused to do it, but then, with her invisibility trick she didn't need to, and she was raised by a species that abhorred cannibalism.  The others understood the necessity, and perhaps on some deep dark level of their minds even reveled in it. Before the Q had formed the Continuum, they had fought one another by devouring rather than with weaponry; if they had any instincts left this tapped into the darkest of them. It was the oldest way for their kind to triumph over an enemy.

Of course, the enemy quickly publicized that they were doing this, and many uncommitted Q, who'd never had to face the horror of killing another Q in the first place, found it a sufficiently disgusting and horrific concept that they joined the enemy to restore "order" to the Continuum.  Uncommitteds who'd previously simply ignored them started broadcasting their location to the enemy.  They picked up and ran, and picked up and ran, and picked up and ran, until finally one day her lover just shot the uncommitted who'd betrayed them, ripped her corpse apart, and draped them all in her energies, hiding them when the enemy came through.  The warrior consumed enough of the uncommitted's body that she was able to impersonate her to the enemy, and with all the others huddled under piles of the uncommitted's energies, all the enemy could see was the one Q they expected to see.

It was a turning point.  They had never before killed an unarmed Q.

The enemy learned to detect the trick, learned to tell the difference between the energies of a dead Q and a living one.  The next two to try it were killed.  A new trick was needed.  There were seven of them left when they came upon an enemy out scouting, the same enemy who had tortured a friend into betraying them and gotten four of them killed.  They held him down, and her lover ate him alive, devouring enough of his living pattern that he could successfully masquerade as the torturer. Since the torturer was still alive, the energies her lover took reflected that and did not look dead. He got into their shelter and killed the three Q there, and because the torturer was linked to the energies her lover had stolen, he was able to see his friends gunned down without mercy, as he had arranged for their friends to be.  Afterward the torturer wasn't useful anymore, so they gave him the mercy of killing him.

She found her lover afterward obsessively combing through his energies, finding anything that didn't belong to him and expelling it violently.  Some things that did belong to him were getting ripped off as well, and energy was leaking from the holes in his pattern, but he didn't seem to notice, or care.

She caught him, not-quite immobilizing him.  "Stop.  You're hurting yourself."

"I can't.  I can't."

"You did what you had to do.  You avenged our fallen friends."

"I.  Ate.  A Q.  Alive."  He teleported away from her and re-emerged not very far.  "I had to do that?  Who said I had to do that?  I said? You said?  Who are we?  I ate a Q, alive.  And made him watch while I killed his friends."

"Because he ripped our brother apart, alive.  Because he tore down all our brother's protections and forced a joining and may as well have eaten him.  And then he used that information to kill four of us.  What you did was justice."

"No it fucking well wasn't.  It was revenge.  And I can't.  I can't go on like this.  I can't be this.  I can't."  He began the obsessive, destructive grooming again, raking through himself so hard he was damaging his own pattern.  "How did this happen, Q?  How did we... We wanted things to change.  For the better.  We never wanted all this death, all this destruction, and now, what?  What do we do?"

"We keep fighting."

"For what?  We can't win... we lost as soon as we turned into monsters.  As soon as they turned into monsters.  We are all fucking monsters, how can we take over the Continuum without damning it forever?  How can anything good ever come of any of this?"

"How can we let them rule the Continuum?  They became monstrous before we did.  We were only responding to their tactics."

"It's not enough.  We should have been better than they were.  But I thought we needed to be ruthless to win.  But this is too far.  Too far by far... I can't do this.  I can't be this.  We can't be this."

"What choice do we have?"  She grabbed him, trying to hold him relatively still.  "Listen to me.  You're not a monster.  There comes a time in any war when people have to do horrible things, because you don't win wars by being advanced, civilized beings.  You win them by being as ugly and dirty and vicious as you can be."

"I wanted," he said softly, "to save the Continuum.  Not destroy it."

"There's still time.  It's the way of any war.  Once this is over people will want to forget.  They'll just want it to be over, to get past it.  We can still put the pieces back together, if we can just destroy enough of the ones who're committed to hating us.  If we can just win."

"Can we call it winning if we do things like this to achieve it?"

"That's what winning is.  No war was ever won without atrocities committed.  Did you think we'd be immune?"

"I was hoping we'd be more advanced than this."

"If we were we wouldn't be having this war, would we?"

He laughed bitterly.  "Oh, very true.  Very true."

She tried to reach out to him, to caress him.  He jerked away again.  Too late she realized that the way the Q touched each other for joining, or even simply to share pleasure, was enough like the way they devoured each other that he couldn't bear it.  He couldn't tolerate anything but self in his pattern right now, and she wasn't sure how tolerant he was being of himself, either.

"Don't touch me.  Not... now."  He laughed again, and this time it had an edge of hysteria to it.  "I had no idea.  I've been a mortal, a human, covered with skin flakes and sweat and all kinds of disgusting bodily fluids, and I thought I was filthy then.  I had no idea.  I had no idea what being filthy was."

"Q--"

"Don't tell me this was necessary.  Don't tell me I had no choice.  Don't tell me I'm doing the right thing to win.  Just... don't talk.  At all."

There was nothing she could do.  She left him to his misery, helpless to help him.

He was not the only one who had been horrified by what he had done.

There were now seven of them, and they traveled together for the safety of numbers.  If any others who followed their cause lived, they never received any sort of communication from them or any evidence they were out there. As far as they knew, a faction that had once numbered close to a hundred Q was down to seven.

In addition to herself, her lover, her partner in weapons development, and the Youngest, there were two other trickster-types, one older than her lover and one younger.  The younger one was more of a clown than a trickster, a good-natured creature whose interventions on mortals had never held any of the malice her lover was capable of.  The older one had taken up manipulating other Q after he'd become bored with mortals and had done such things as proposing that her lover be kicked out of the Continuum as part of an elaborate plan to prevent him from being executed. 

The last of their number was one of the older Q, known for being a fertility/love/mother goddess on many worlds and for having acted as an older sister to many of them, and she was horrified by what they had done to the point where she was insisting on quitting.  "If this is what we have become, we can't go on.  Someone has to stop this.  Someone has to do something."

"And you're just going to stroll up to their camp, knock and say politely 'Hi, I'm surrendering, could ya please shoot me?'" the oldest trickster said sarcastically.

"What else am I suppose to do?  We ate someone yesterday.  Alive.  We don't-- we can't stand for that kind of thing."

"He deserved it," the warrior said coldly.  "He invented the tortures that broke our brother.  If anyone deserved to be ripped to bits while living and part-consumed, that would have been him."

"No."  Their older sister negated that frantically, as if she felt that the harder she broadcasted her 'no' the more it would become true.  "No, no.  No Q deserves that.  Ever.  Ever."

"No Q deserves to be tortured to death either.  Didn't stop him," the clown said.  "You don't seriously think that getting yourself killed is going to prevent it from having happened, do you?  'Cause that's about the only good reason I can see for what you're doing."

"I don't intend to die.  I intend to surrender."

"Which tends to mean they'd kill you," the warrior said dryly.

"No.  Someone needs to try to negotiate.  This war has gone on too long.  They have to want to end it as badly as we do.  Maybe they'd be willing to listen.  Maybe they're tired of seeing people die too."

"And maybe they'd just torture you for everything you know," the warrior said.  "We can't let you do it."

"What are you going to do to stop me?  Shoot me?  Maybe eat me too?"  She aimed this particular vitriolic comment at the warrior's lover.

"No.  We won't shoot you.  Or eat you.  Though tying you up and sticking you in a comet does have some appeal."  His voice was tired, but he stood in their sister's path with no sign of wavering or letting her through.  "You think we've become monstrous?  How do you think I feel?  I did it.  But surrendering at this point isn't the answer."

"There are too many dead," the teacher/inventor said softly.  "We'd be spitting in the faces of all those who died for our cause to let go now."

"They're dead.  They don't know what we're doing.  We're alive, we have the power to try to stop this.  And I'm so tired.  We can't live like this."  She reached out to him, pleading.  "Someone has to try.  I don't care if they kill me.  I'm willing to die to stop this.  And they have to accept a surrender.  They have to want this to end as much as we do.  We are them, we were them.  They all know me-- I helped them, I taught them when they were young and everything was new-- if anyone can do this I can, and I have to try."

He considered a long moment.  Finally he said, "These are the conditions.  You open yourself up to us.  Completely.  And we rip out every memory you have that might betray us.  All our safehouses, all the techniques they haven't learned yet, all our little tricks to keep them from knowing what we're doing.  We'll take it all.  And you'll go to them open, with the marks on you of what we did.  If they can see you know nothing anymore maybe they'll just shoot you cleanly rather than torturing you to death.  It's the only thing I can do. Take it or leave it."

Their sister shuddered.  What he had just demanded was almost worse than being eaten alive.  The Q had a horror of losing their memories, of losing any knowledge.  But then her pattern firmed and radiated resolve.  "All right.  If it has any chance of ending the war.  I'd rather you commit atrocities on me with my consent than on other Q without theirs."

"You can't go!" the Youngest pleaded.  Their oldest sister had been a personal friend of the Youngest's parents, and had a good degree of affinity with and interest in mortals in general and humans in particular, so the Youngest had turned to her as a mother figure to replace the mentor she'd betrayed to join their cause.  "They'll kill you!"

"They know me.  And I doubt they'll kill me. The novelty of a Q actually giving up and surrendering has to be good for some points," she said wryly.

"I doubt you can do anything to stop this war.  And they probably will kill you.  But I know better than to stand in your way," the teacher said.  "I'll direct the removal, if you're willing.  I think I can be more precise than these others."

"All right.  I accept."

Of course she fought them when it came to it, and it took all five of them to hold her immobile and keep her shields from coming up while the teacher surgically removed her memories.  No Q could endure a violation like that and not fight back, even if she accepted it as necessary.  But she couldn't fight five of them, so the surgery was done and they left her, weaponless, naked and bleeding, her mind open and vulnerable, in contested territory, and fled. 

They considered her as good as dead.  So when she returned some time later, they were overjoyed. Of course they had removed any memory of their safehouses from her, so they were the ones who found her, wandering in contested territory, and they were thrilled.  She told them that the opposite side was just as tired, just as disgusted with the war as they were, and was all too ready to try to hammer out some sort of negotiation.  She told them that the uncommitted Q were still uncommitted, not willing to allow either of the warring factions to take full control of the Continuum, and that the only way to bring all the pieces back together was for the seven of them to return to the enemy camp, under flag of truce, and try to negotiate something.  The warrior outright refused, but not because she disbelieved their older sister, more because she was suspicious of the enemy.  All seven of them would not go.  Her lover agreed with her, but was perfectly willing to live up to his responsibilities as their honorary leader and go, and since he was well known to be too stubborn to negotiate well, he asked that their older brother, the older trickster, go with him.

The sense of relief that the war might finally be about to end was so overwhelming that the warrior, like the rest of them, clung to their sister's words, desperate to believe.  But the oldest trickster was better accustomed to trying to deceive and manipulate other Q than any of them were.  When their leader turned to him and asked for him to join him in the negotiation, he probed their older sister harder than any of them had thus far.

"No!  She's not-- it's a trap!"

Their sister had apparently had thoughts of her weapon in readiness to be created in her grasp.  She blew the older trickster apart with a single shot.  The warrior only managed to hit her in the transportative faculties, preventing her from running, and then the youngest trickster and the teacher tackled her, pinning her down.  The shield she'd had up dropped in the struggle, and the youngest trickster screamed hysterically as he saw what she had become.

Her pattern had been permanently, irrevocably altered.  The enemy had committed the most horrible crime that any Q could imagine on her-- worse than torturing people, worse than eating them alive, worse than removing memories, worse than anything.  They had apparently taken advantage of her vulnerability and the fact that she'd signaled truce by leaving her mind open to them by rewriting who she was, overwriting her pattern, twisting her out of shape inside.  Humans would have called it brainwashing, but it was far far worse than that from a Q perspective.  It was the closest they had to a concept of undeath, of damnation, of being transformed into abomination.  They had destroyed who she was, cored out her essence and replaced it with something loyal to them, draped in her skin.  It would have been easier to accept if they'd literally killed her and worn her skin, but they hadn't been merciful enough to kill her.  They had changed who she was.

The Youngest had her weapon out, but she couldn't stop shaking at the sight of what had been done to her mother-figure.  The warrior wanted to fire her own weapon, wanted to release her older sister from the horror of what had been done to her, but that same horror overwhelmed her and she remained frozen, unable to fire.  "I can't..." she whispered.

"It's my responsibility," her lover said, his tone harsh and low.  "I let her go.  I sent her to this."

She wanted to say No, she chose this, she argued for it, she wanted you to let her go, but she couldn't.  Their sister had never expected this, or she would not have gone.  Torture, death, she'd been willing to face those things.  Not this death-in-life.  Not being turned into something she was not.  Not this.

"They'll destroy you all!  There's no point to fighting, you may as well just give up and die!"  what was left of their sister screamed.  "You know what else, when you're dead they're going to lock down the dangerous races.  Your precious humanity's on that list, little brother.  They're going to lock them down as soon as you're gone, and you're all doomed.  You can't stop them!"

"I'm sorry," he said, and signaled the younger trickster and the teacher that they should let go.  They teleported to a safe distance.  The thing their sister had become tried to remanifest her weapon, but she was injured, slow.  "I'm sorry--" he said again, his voice breaking, and he shot her.  At that range it was instantaneous.  Energy burst forth, covering them as the energies of the brother she'd shot already covered them.

He curled into himself and began to cry, brokenly.  "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

The two younger ones were in no better shape.  The younger trickster was still screaming, howling his defiance at the death of two older siblings as if cursing at the universe would actually change anything, and the Youngest had taken back her birth form and was curled as a human in a crumpled heap, crying the way humans did, full of matter-based mess and unpleasant sounds. 

The warrior stood with the teacher/inventor, wondering why she could not weep.  He had wept himself out when his companion had died and had nothing left, but why couldn't she cry?  She'd failed to see what was happening, she'd let their older brother be killed because she hadn't been paranoid enough, because she'd wanted to believe.  Their brother was dead and their sister had been tortured into a thing before they'd given her death.  Why couldn't she cry?

After that they lived like hunted animals.  The enemy had been tracking them from the moment they found their sister, and nearly caught them.  They had to run, and run again.

"We need high ground," the warrior said.

"You may have noticed, there is no 'up' in the Continuum.  I realize this may have escaped your notice, having only lived here oh, five billion years or so?"

"Not literally 'up', don't be an idiot.  We need somewhere defensible, somewhere we can turn and make a stand."

They'd been making use of dead zones, where no teleportation was possible because the death of Q there had disrupted the fabric of the Continuum too badly.  It was a sad commentary on the war that there were so many such zones.  This had never been an ideal solution, since the dead zones blocked their ability to teleport out as much as the enemy's ability to teleport in. 

What she proposed, now, was another new idea.  She suggested that they take control of and situate themselves on top of a node-- one of the centralized distribution points for Q power and knowledge.  The disruption caused by a node prevented anyone from teleporting close to it, but unlike at a dead zone, Q at a node could leave any time they wanted to.  At the node, their powers would be amplified, they'd have some limited ability to choke off some of the power feeding to their enemies, and because anything any Q did with the power from a given node was recorded in that node like a snapshot of that Q's mind and memories at that time, they'd have the ability to spy on their enemies without the discontinuities getting in the way.  The disadvantage was that prolonged time at a node would tend to cause Q to fray and begin to dissolve into the Continuum as a whole, but right now there was no wholeness to the Continuum and the pull of any given node would be less strong, survivable for a great length of time.

So they fell back, letting the enemy herd them in the direction they wanted to go.  Both sides expended energies on keeping barriers up as they passed through live zones, preventing the enemy from teleporting straight into their midst.  They exchanged fire several times but neither they nor the enemy forces actually hit anyone.  The node was unoccupied, which she thought meant that the enemy had not thought of this first.  They were plainly thinking of something else.  Brief scouting sorties by the Youngest-- who was the only one who dared leave the group to scout, now that they had no dead Q to disguise themselves with-- revealed that a very large number of enemy forces were converging on them, perhaps as many as fifteen or sixteen.  For all they knew perhaps that was all the remaining enemy; after all, they'd been whittled down to five, and while they could sense vaguely that there were maybe 600 Q or so left the majority had always been uncommitted.  This would be the final showdown, one way or another.

And they were going to lose.

She realized it before they even reached the node, though by then they were close enough that escape was impossible without breaking through enemy lines.  Once they had taken it, and the enemy's sphere contracted to surround them, the others realized it too.  They had a highly defensible position-- but if they left it, the enemy would take it and read from it what their plans were, where they had gone.  It would be virtually impossible to prevent the enemy forces from being able to teleport in force to exactly wherever and whenever they went, reading their precise coordinates out of the node-- just as this close to the node, they could read everything the enemy did, but as outnumbered as they were it only meant they couldn't be surprised, not that they could win.  And because once the enemy took the node they could follow them to a precise point in the time outside the Continuum, there wouldn't be any way they could get a head start.  In the Continuum their own time was linear, but they moved freely in the time outside the Continuum and that was the only direction there was any escape in. 

In other words, they could barricade themselves at the node, but after that there would be nowhere else to go.  And with fifteen Q surrounding five, even the extra power that being at the node gave them wouldn't necessarily save them.

"I want you," her lover said to her and the inventor, "to figure out how to destroy the node."

The inventor was confused.  "Destroy... a node?  It's part of the fundamental structure of the Continuum.  I don't think it can be destroyed."

"I didn't think it was possible for individual Q to kill others, but someone found a way."  He paced restlessly.  "This was a trap.  The only reason they let us take such a strategically important spot was that it was bait.  They knew the advantages would lure us here and that once we were here there'd be nowhere we could go.  We can't make any plans without the node recording them-- we can't even run.  Once we leave here they'll come in and they'll know exactly what we're going to do."  He knew this, of course, because it was the enemy's plan, which, given that the enemy was connected to this node, was being recorded here.  They all knew this, but he'd been the first one to see any way out of it.

"Yes," she said.  "Yes, of course.  If we destroy the node, they won't have the information to follow us.  We'll be able to sit here, lure them as close as possible, and then blow the node and run for it and they'll have lost us."

"So. Figure it out.  It's probably our only chance.  I have a plan, but I'll need what I do to be concealed from the node for it to work, and the only way I can think of to do that is to destroy it."

It was a standoff.  The enemy couldn't teleport directly into the node and they knew exactly where the enemy was at all times, so they couldn't linear-transport themselves in either.  They were impairing the flow of power to the enemy, while amplifying their own.  So the enemy couldn't just charge in, even with force of numbers.  But while Q didn't sleep and didn't need to resupply, so ordinarily a siege would be useless, in this case the node would destroy them itself if they stayed in it long enough, so the enemy had eternity to wait them out.  Plus, they knew the enemy was calling for reinforcements.  Fifteen to five wasn't quite enough to burn them out, not with the power differential they'd created, but if the enemy could get maybe six more Q, they could muster up enough power to simply hate them to death, disrupting the Continuum in this location with nothing more than pure directed malevolence.  Time was on the enemy's side.

And the best she and the inventor could come up with wasn't good enough.

"You want the good news or the bad news first?" she asked.

"Oh, by all means, good news first.  I may not decide to shoot myself if I hear there is good news, at all."

"We've found a way to blow up the node.  And when it goes, it'll take any Q attached to it with it.  We'll know what we're doing and can detach in time; they won't.  We can take out all fifteen of our friends out there at once."

"Wonderful!  Splendid!  Did I mention lately that I love you?"

"Don't get too affectionate.  You haven't heard the bad news."

"The bomb can't be set remotely," the inventor said quietly.  "A Q has to be linked to the node to trigger it."

He saw the implications instantly, as all of them did.  They could escape, kill all the enemy waiting for them and hide themselves from any other enemy forces that might still be out there.  But one of them had to die to do it.

"Oh.  Well.  You're right, that's not nearly so good."

"I'll do it," the Youngest said immediately.

"You will do no such thing," their leader said.

"It should be me.  This whole war is half my fault anyway."

"And as the other, bigger half of that fault I'm telling you no.  You didn't ask to be born, you didn't ask for the Q to be bigots, and you're one of the best fighters we have, as well as having one of the strongest moral centers.  I'm not going to allow you to do it, and that's that. End of discussion."

She could sense that he didn't intend to let any of his people die.  "So that's it then.  We don't do it.  We fight our way out."

"If we could fight our way out, dearest, we'd have done it by now.  Besides, there's something I think we need to do, and we can't do it if the node stays active.  No, someone has to bell the cat, and as the person who for some mysterious reason you've all been listening to despite my abysmal leadership failures, I'm hereby announcing that it's going to be me.  No arguments."

"The hell it is!" the youngest trickster said, horrified.  "We can't lose you!"

"Oh, you most certainly can.  All of us are expendable, Q, that's what war means.  And I'm the one who's brought us to this point, so it's really only fair."

"No."  The warrior sent a negation over and over like a headshake she couldn't stop.  "No, you are not going to do this.  You're not going to die on me.  I won't allow it."

"And do you have a better alternative?  Perhaps you think you should be the one to do it, and leave all of the others vulnerable to every weapons upgrade the enemy thinks of?  Leave no one alive with your tactical experience?  Oh, wait, maybe you want to kill him?"  He pointed at the inventor.  "Because helping you create the weapons that have kept us alive so far is completely useless to the cause.  Oh, yes.  That's intelligent."

"No!  No one has to die.  We have time-- we'll figure something out, some way to trigger it remotely--"

He touched her gently.  "There's no time," he said softly.  "You know that as well as I do.  It's either all of us, and probably damn few of them, or one of us and all of them.  I like one of us and all of them better than all of us and few of them, don't you?  I mean, it's simple mathematics."

"No," she said again, desperately.  "It can't be you."

"It has to be.  Because I can't let it be any of you."  He let his defenses down slightly, and she could see, could feel, how unutterably tired he was, how deep the despair had gone, how horror at what he'd become had turned into a dull throbbing ache and he kept going now not because he thought they could win but because he didn't know what else to do.  "Billions of years... and a few years of war have been longer than aeons.  I'm just so tired, Q.  And it's better this way.  Because if I don't die now, sooner or later I'm going to freeze up, or give up, and since you're all so stupidly depending on me that'll probably get you all killed.  I told you already.  I can't go on like this.  I can't be this."

"And we can?" the Youngest asked harshly.  "I didn't volunteer so I'd do you any favors, Q!  We've all turned into monsters, we're all tired--"

"No.  You're human.  In your heart you were never killing your own.  That's why you were so good at it, and it's why you can live through this."  He turned to the trickster.  "You can come up with the creative solutions, think outside the boxes.  You can take my place in that regard-- you're the only other one here who was with the cause from the beginning."

"No," the younger Q said, almost a wail.  "No, I can't.  I can't be you."

"Don't be me.  Frankly, it sucks.  It's sucked for quite some time.  Be yourself, but think imaginatively."  He turned to the inventor.  "You still want revenge, don't you.  They haven't paid enough for your companion's death."

"I will keep fighting. Yes."

"And you.  Sweetheart--"

"No!"  For the first time in aeons she was crying.  She hadn't cried for the first Q she'd killed, she hadn't cried for how her sister had been raped and destroyed.  She was crying now.  "You can't do this.  I can't go on without you.  Please."  She grabbed him, pulling him to her, embracing him as if she could hold him immobile and stop him.

He hugged her back, fiercely.  "No," he whispered.  "You and I both know that the only thing that's ever been able to drag you down is me.  Once I'm dead you'll be invincible."

He let her go.  "Besides, I haven't told all of you my new plan.  I've had an idea, to set something up.  But it won't work at all unless we blow the node.  They'll find out about it and the whole point is supposed to be that they don't find out."

She stared at him, sensing the skeleton of the plan in his mind.  "You think getting help from a mortal will do any good at all?"

"You heard what our sister said.  They're scared of humanity.  If they're scared, then maybe humans can do something.  And this particular guy has a track record."

"You're going to kill yourself so you can resurrect a human?  That's your great plan?  That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in five billion years!"

"Of course it's stupid.  But it's stylish, and that's the important thing."

The youngest trickster laughed.  "Oh, dying is okay if it's stylish?"

"Well, since we're all doomed anyway, we might as well go out in style."

"What is this plan?" the Youngest asked.

They looked at each other.  The Youngest had the weakest defenses of any of the Q.  If she were ever captured she'd have no hope of holding anything back.  "It's need to know only," the warrior said.  "You don't need to know, little one."

"That's ridiculous!  You're talking about a human-- I know humans. I was human.  You need me."

"Not for this," her lover said.  "But I'd like you to do what you can about stopping the blockade they're going to enact, once this is over.  We'll-- well, you'll-- have freedom of movement then.  Maybe there'll be something you can do to save the humans from what's coming."

The warrior was more interested in saving the Q.  Or maybe destroying them all.  At this point that might be saving them.  But the Youngest could be reached by an appeal to her foster species' welfare.  "All right.  All right... I'll try."

"That's all I can ask," he said.  "Are we ready to do this thing?"

"Not-- not yet," she said.  It was a lie.  "We need-- we need to refine the bombs."

"No, you don't.  It's sweet to want to spend more time with me, but we don't have time.  Make the bombs, hide my trail from the enemy so they don't know I'm gone, and... we'll do this."

"It can wait... can't it wait?  Just a little while?"

"Maybe it can... but I can't."  He let her see then that he was afraid.  "I... I don't want to go on like this.  But dying doesn't really have all that much appeal either when it comes right down to it... I have to do this.  Now.  Before I lose my nerve."

She didn't say yes.  She would never say yes, to this.  She looked away.  "I've never been able to stop you from doing what you want," she said dully.

"That's the spirit.  I do love you, you know."

"But it doesn't matter," she whispered.

"No, unfortunately not.  The universe doesn't seem to give much of a damn what we want anymore.  Very inconsiderate of it when you think about it."

"Very," she agreed.  "Go.  Before I lose my nerve and stop you."

He went.

They maintained shields, preventing the enemy from probing them.  The enemy would know that one of them had left, but not who.  They waited, as their leader completed the task out in the mortals' universe that he'd intended, as they finished setting the bomb that would change the Continuum forever, once again.  And when they got the signal, they concentrated all the power the four of them were able to draw out of the node to force an opening in the enemy's teleport shielding, allowing him to come in.

Of course, the enemy had expected it.  It was the obvious reason why one of them would have left the Continuum in the first place, to get behind the lines and shoot a pathway through the sphere.  It was also the only way back in to the node from outside the Continuum, since teleporting directly into the node was impossible.  So they were all ready.  She and the other three laid down covering fire, enough to prevent the enemy from being able to simply blast him apart-- but by the time he made it through their sphere and into the node, he had been hit so many times that it was nothing but sheer willpower keeping him alive.  The wounds were fatal, and his mind was fragmented, confused, his memories of what was going on badly disrupted.  He wouldn't be able to do what he needed to do without help.  This, too, had been planned for.

She bent down and kissed him, giving him a small piece of her essence.  In his confused and injured state, he tried instinctively to take more, to consume her, but she was easily able to stop him.  Each of them came after that and gave him a piece of themselves.  None of the others had ever joined with him before, but it didn't matter.  He was dying; he didn't have the luxury of maintaining his self-integrity, since with so many holes in him there was no such integrity left.

When they were done there was still not enough of him to live very long, but he was aware enough to remember what he had to do.  He could not focus communication, but he couldn't keep anyone from reading his thoughts, either.  They swirled around chasing their tail, an ouroboros of grief and fear and desperation, clinging helplessly to the only hopes he had left.  That the four lives, the four freedoms, he was buying with his own life would continue the fight, and maybe, someday, win.  That the fifteen of his former brethren he'd be killing were enough of the backbone of the enemy to break its hold on the rest of the Continuum.  That if all else failed the human he'd just resurrected would somehow find some way to do something.

None of them were very good hopes, but he was dying, so she didn't tell him so.  She laid her energies against his for a moment, giving him her emotions in a controlled feed so he wouldn't see her grief or despair.  Only that she loved him, only that she, the warrior goddess who had honored mortal bravery all her life, was desperately proud of him.  Only that she would lead his movement when he was gone, and try to win this war, in his memory.  Not that she had no hope that she'd succeed.

She felt his pain and fear ease, felt his desperation and resignation transmute to acceptance, perhaps even hope.  He smiled at her, weakly.

"Goodbye," she whispered, and the four of them flashed out. 

They disconnected from the node almost immediately-- from the mortal universe all nodes in the Continuum could be reached, though within the Continuum the discontinuities prevented fluid node switching.  Still, even on a different node, the fact that a bit of her essence was still in him meant she could continue to see what he saw, feel what he felt.  She saw the enemy swarm in, felt their radiating malevolent triumph as they saw the leader of the resistance dying at their feet, apparently abandoned by his people.  She felt him send them wordless mocking laughter.  And then he triggered the bomb.

She felt nothing after that.

She felt nothing ever again.

3

An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in the garrett
Then the soldiers came
She died without a whisper

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on
The frontiers are my prison

When they regrouped, the Youngest was no longer with them, and the lockdown had happened.  The new rulers of the Continuum had found the bits of their essences that they had left with their leader when he died, and in the absence of authoritative information from the node, assumed that they had all died, that the five of them had immolated themselves to avoid being captured and to destroy the fifteen of the enemy pursuing them.  They had promptly declared victory and set out to make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again, that no species could be allowed to interfere with the security and the pristine pureness of the Q Continuum, throughout all eternity.

The Borg were destroyed, divided back into who they had been and sent to their original homeworlds.  Since in most cases those original homeworlds were dead ruins that could no longer support much life, quadrillions of former Borg died of starvation, thirst, suffocation or exposure.

The Zalkonians, the Ocampa, any other species where some individuals but not all had spontaneously mutated into a powerful energy form, they were all placed in lockdown in their solar systems.  However, few of these had spread beyond their solar system in the first place, and the entity known as Suspiria was permitted to go with her personal set of pet Ocampans back to the creatures' original homeworld, where she would help them adapt to their ruined planet. The El-Aurians were permitted to continue, as most had either been killed by the Borg or killed just now by the Q freeing them from the Borg and dumping them on their lifeless gouged-out homeworld, and the survivors were deemed an insufficient threat, at the end of their evolutionary significance.  The Travellers were allowed to continue but were forced to yield their apprentices of dangerous species. 

The one that really angered her, though, was the blockade on the humans.

Humans were politically very important in their little corner of the galaxy, and removing them would destabilize the rest of the species there more than the removal of any of the other species-- except possibly the Borg, and the Borg really were dangerous.  The thing that galled was not that humans were important in their petty little way but that they were so damn unimportant.  Oh, a few had spontaneously evolved to higher stages of being, but the numbers were infinitesimal in comparison to the size of the human population as a whole.  Despite what her lover had thought, they just weren't that advanced, or that interesting, or that dangerous.  Yes, they'd inadvertently triggered the war by allowing a Q to kill himself, but that had really been the Continuum's fault for letting them make the decision.  Yes, they'd seduced two Q into abandoning their responsibilities, trying to live as mortals without pushing their powers away, and having unauthorized offspring, but those two were going to find a way to screw up sooner or later.  Otherwise they just weren't significant enough to be worth blockading.  It was spite, pure and simple, and it was spite directed at a Q who was dead and beyond being able to tell that they were spiting him. 

She found that repulsive.  But then, she found pretty much everything about the enemy repulsive now.

The Youngest had probably gone to fight the blockade of her foster species, as their leader had suggested before he died, and had probably been killed herself, judging from the fact that the blockade was still most decidedly up.  In any case, if she lived there was no way to contact her; they had only ever stayed together by literally staying together, since the enemy's strength of numbers had more or less allowed them to hijack communication within the Continuum.  So now there were three of them left.

She had nothing left in her but hate and anger.  She was indifferent to her own continued life, except that being alive allowed her to continue to fight.  She no longer thought they would win; she just wanted to kill as many of the enemy as possible before they took her down.  Her companions noticed, but taking care of her emotionally wasn't their job and they were both as damaged by the war as she was.  At this point they'd follow her into hell if it gave them a chance to get revenge.

For some time they laid low, returning to the Continuum to do research on new weaponry.  When they finally developed node bombs that didn't need to be triggered by a living Q's will, she almost broke down and wept.  It had been possible, after all.  But it was too late.  All she could do now was use the new bombs to avenge him.

Believing their enemies to be dead, the new leadership of the Continuum hadn't put any sort of controls on the nodes.  They'd been more concerned with consolidating their power, pulling the Continuum back together and reshaping it in their image.  Moving quickly, the three of them planted four bombs at four nodes, set to blow the moment they disconnected from the node.  The Continuum had started to heal, the discontinuities caused by the hate and the deaths and the disagreements fading now that the Q who were left could draw themselves together.  The four blown nodes sent cracks through the Continuum, shattering it again, diminishing everyone's power and killing twenty-three Q at once, the largest body count of any action during the war.  The fact that twenty of those twenty-three had in fact been uncommitteds who had never raised arms against any other Q no longer mattered.  The uncommitteds were also the enemy, because they had let the enemy win.  There were no more innocent Q, if there ever had been.

The forces for change had become the forces of chaos, quite literally.

The Continuum leadership quickly moved to protect the nodes.  They couldn't, however, send agents to protect the node whose position in the Continuum corresponded very roughly to the location of the Organians in mortal space.  The Organians were suspicious of the Q-- a civil war on such a scale had never occurred in any of the Powers' species-- and had requested that no Q approach their space.  The new leadership of the Continuum, devoted to order and following rules, agreed.

The forces of chaos didn't need to listen to the rules.

There were six Q, all uncommitted, attached to the node near Organia when they blew it.  In addition, the massive instability caused by the destruction of the node spilled out into mortal space and destroyed the Organians' sun.  It served them right, she thought, for being such hidebound creatures that they insisted on continuing to live on a planet.  The Organians found this terribly upsetting-- none of them had been or could have been killed by something like a supernova, but they had had great sentimental attachment to their home solar system, and while they could rebuild it it would take some time.  This, needless to say, left them thoroughly pissed off at the Continuum, not quite comprehending the concept of "rogue Q" since rogue Organians were more or less impossible.  In other words, the mission was a complete success.

Embarrassed in front of the other Powers, the Continuum stepped up its efforts to find the three of them.  They had to switch nodes constantly, as whatever they were attached to was still recording everything they did and now the Continuum had agents monitoring the nodes, looking for them.  They took up eating, not for disguise but for energy that would be unrelated to a node.  The suns they devoured had no inhabited planets but that was less because they were actually avoiding inhabited planets than because most of the suns they ate were blue-white giants at the Core and the Core was full of far too much radiation to support a lot of matter-based life. 

They were clever, and careful, and knew how to look small. But the resources of the entire Continuum were being brought to bear on finding them, and while the damage done to the Continuum had forever destroyed its omniscience, still, the Q were formidable at finding things out.  Time and again they were ambushed, barely staying one step ahead of their foes.  The uncommitted Q considered them terrorists and would offer them no help-- not that they expected any.  But even so, they were run to the ground, exhausted.

They hadn't been able to manage any sorties in some time.  They needed time, needed distance from their enemies.  She took them to Betazed, where a haunted, broken woman tended a bar.  The woman had been the enemy of her lover, once, what seemed to her now like a million years ago.  And her lover had gone to the woman, asking for a distraction so he could reach a certain human who was being watched by the enemy. And this certain human had been the woman's dear friend.  So she had refused. 

The woman was an El-Aurian adept.  They had certain powers over time, powers the Q did not entirely understand and could not duplicate.  As a general rule these powers seemed only to involve being able to perceive changes in the timeline, and that was mostly all the Adepts used them for, seeing their other uses as anathema.  However, they did have other uses.  Among them, an El-Aurian Adept could, to some slight extent, control destiny, influencing the behavior of anyone who came in contact with the goal they were directing the universe towards, including Q.  They could create pocket dimensions outside time which were invisible to Q perceptions and which, apparently, Q could neither break into nor break out of.  And they could protect their thoughts, hiding them from powerful telepaths, including the Q.

What her lover had wanted from this creature was for her to create a pocket dimension for him to meet with his favorite human and recruit that human's help in his ridiculous plan to conceive a child in order to prove the value of change.  What the warrior wanted from her now was to create a pocket dimension to hide the three of them in from the rest of the Continuum, for a short while.  She knew well that the woman was unlikely to agree easily, and she didn't have very much time to convince her.  Any other hope would have been better.  But there was none.

The El-Aurian was cleaning glasses, back turned to the bar, and didn't turn around when the warrior flashed in, wearing her preferred, default Klingon form.  "Haven't you people done enough damage?" she asked bitterly.  "Leave me alone."

"Oh, yes, you'd like that.  You've always wanted to be left alone.  Even when your involvement could have saved your dearest friend and the species that saved your miserable little life, you wanted to be left alone."  She flashed in front of the woman, physically interposing herself between the back table full of glasses and the El-Aurian's hands.  "It doesn't work like that."

The woman threw up her hands in a warding gesture, stepping backward out of such close physical proximity, and she felt the faint pull of the woman's power starting to press against time.  "Oh, grow up," she said sharply.  "I'm not here to hurt you.  I need your help."

"Why should I help you?" the El-Aurian almost snarled.  Her eyes narrowed.  "Is this another one of his games?  Because I'm not interested in playing.  I told him my answer already."

"Oh, yes, you did," the warrior said, softly, leaning into the woman's space.  "And because of that--"  She lunged forward suddenly, grabbing the El-Aurian physically and shoving her up against the bar-- "he's dead.  And your darling favorites are in hell, the man you swore was more to you than friend or family very likely dead or insane.  And a billion of your own kind were freed from the Borg and then killed, because the people currently in charge of running the universe do not give a damn whether any mortal lives or dies, so long as their precious superior skins stay intact."

The woman's emotions shifted, from rage and fear at being pushed into her own bar to slowly dawning horror.  "You... you're saying he's had nothing to do with this.  With what they're doing?"

"If you call dying in a desperate and failed attempt to stop it nothing, why then yes, he had nothing to do with it."

"So they exiled him again?"

She flashed away from the woman, reappearing on the customer side of the bar, so she might be slightly less tempted to commit physical mayhem.  As infuriating as this creature was, she was also the rebel Q's best hope.  "You stupid, stupid creature.  They did not exile him.  We're having a war.  And we're losing."

The woman's eyes narrowed.  "He mentioned a conflict."

She laughed bitterly.  "Oh, that was so much like him.  Downplay everything in front of the mortals.  If he'd told you it was bloody combat and your friend was the key to his best plan to stop it, would you still have refused to help?  Did you want him dead so very badly that you deliberately refused, knowing your refusal was all you needed to set into motion to make sure he'd die?  Or was it all of us you wanted dead?  Did you see the bloody genocide, the death of over a third of our people, and snicker that it was our just desserts for what we'd allowed to happen to your kind?"

"Over... a third?"  the woman whispered.  "He... I didn't know.  He said nothing about this.  What about Shyovan?  Did she--?"

"Dead.  Mind eaten from the inside out, transformed into something else, sent behind our lines to betray us all, and now dead.  I hope you're really happy with this, Adept.  You can't take a step in the Continuum anymore without walking in the pools of blood.  And the people who are winning?"  She smiled brightly.  "It's so good for you that your people were already mostly murdered by the Borg, because otherwise they'd have broken the treaty and put you in lockdown just like they did the humans."

The woman's brown skin had taken on an ashy color, as if all the blood that animated it and warmed it had drained away.  "I swear to you, I saw none of this.  I didn't even know there was a war.  And if I had I'd have thought he'd be on the wrong side, with all his gratuitous meddling and chaos-causing."

"You know what?  Your planet was very, very orderly after there were no more people, or buildings, or trees to mar the nice neat clouds of dust.  The annihilation of existence is very orderly.  No muss, no fuss. Life is a balance between chaos and order.  Did you forget?"

"I thought the elders of your people were advanced.  I never imagined you capable of having a war.  Or of him being on the wrong side from the ones who'd destroy out of vitriol and spite.  I thought beings like that were rare among you Q."

"Not nearly as rare as they should have been," she whispered.  "Not nearly as rare as I believed for billions of years."

"Ancestors," the woman whispered.  "Ancestors, what have I done?"  She shook her head.  "Every other time he showed up he tormented Picard.  When I realized that others were guarding Picard, that he couldn't get in, I thought it was for Picard's protection."

"But he told you otherwise.  And you didn't believe him."

"Because he lied to me!  He lied to me constantly!  He spent four years doing nothing but telling me lies-- how was I supposed to believe him this time?  Why didn't one of the ones I trusted come?  Shyovan-- I assume she had to have been on your side-- or Derith--"

"Derith was on the side of the enemy."

"Derith would never have stood for putting an entire species behind a barrier because they might someday be a threat."

"Derith's dead too.  We killed her."

"Ancestors."  The woman pulled out a bottle and poured a glass from it.  "This is... unbelievable.  How did any of this happen?"

"One of your precious humans ruled that a Q who wanted to kill himself should be allowed to.  And that ripped all the old schisms open again, and the effect snowballed, and people panicked, and then some old fool created a weapon that one Q could use to kill another Q on the grounds that the very idea was so horrible it would stop the conflict.  See how well it worked."

The El-Aurian drank deeply from the glass she'd poured.  "And do you think Picard could have stopped this?"

"I have no idea.  Personally I doubt it.  But he thought so.  He came to you for help in stopping the war, and as usual with every other time he's asked for your help, you spat on him."

"Look, I'm not going to speak ill of the dead, but as far as I knew that was the first time he ever asked me for help, and if you know something different then maybe I've been misunderstanding what's been going on the whole time, at least some of it.  He didn't tell me anything that would make any rational being want to help him.  He told me that it was a matter of great importance and the consequences would be on my head if I didn't help him, but not what the consequences would be, or why I should perform an act I've always considered just shy of anathema to help a person who stood there and mocked me when my entire civilization was destroyed."

She was so tired.  She could feel the pressure of the Continuum, the enemy's minds searching for her, scanning the universe, and the "we're-not-here" semblance she and the others were maintaining could only work so long.  The warrior sank down onto a stool in front of the bar.  "He was such a fool," she whispered, the voice of the Klingon form she'd defaulted to harsh and almost breaking.  "He told you nothing.  He told his human nothing.  He probably told the human he died for nothing, too.  Why did he involve mortals if he was too proud to actually tell them the truth about what was going on?"

"I can't say I'm surprised."

If only he had involved her from the beginning, so she could have advised him.  Except he'd tried and she'd refused to take sides.  If only she hadn't refused, if only she'd taken the threat seriously.  It seemed no one had taken the threat seriously enough.  Not him, not her, not any of the mortals he'd contacted.  "Will you help us now?"

"Do you know you've got company?"

She nodded, and gestured.  The other two manifested into corporeal form.  "What's the deal?" the youngest one left asked.  "Will she help us?"

"Ask her."  She pointed at the El-Aurian.

"Tell me why.  What is the war about?  Who's fighting it?  What will you do if you win?"

"It's about the freedom to think for ourselves instead of being controlled by the Continuum," the young trickster said.

"It's more than that," the teacher/inventor said.  He sat down on the stool next to the warrior.  "As time has gone on the Continuum has become more and more rigid, while those whose role in life was to try to question and push boundaries had to become more and more extreme.  Some of those extremities verged on or went into genuinely criminal behavior, which were punished harshly.  Executions, exiles from the Continuum, condemnations to mortality, imprisonments... In essence terror tactics.  Some of the punishments were well-deserved.  Others, plainly trumped-up charges.  Telling people that they will be permitted to keep their unauthorized offspring if they live among mortals, but that using their powers while living among mortals is punishable by death, and then sending a tornado to kill the offspring, forcing them to use their powers to save their child and thus forfeit their own lives... it was a setup, and it was set up in such a way that even many of those who would have approved of giving Q the freedom to reproduce had to vote to remove their powers and let them die."

"And I'm supposed to approve of the side that 'verged on genuinely criminal behavior'?  When I was the victim of that kind of behavior?"

"Under the terms of the treaty he owed you no warning at all," the warrior said harshly.  The part of her that had died with him twinged with pain and grief.  "Nothing he did was against our laws, that time."

"My friend is somewhat biased in our deceased friend's regard," the teacher said.  "But she's right.  What the people currently in power would have considered the appropriate thing to do would have been absolutely nothing at all.  No warning.  Not even a vague one intended to cause you pain.  Some of your kind lived, and some of those lived because of the warning he gave.  Did you know, after he died and they took official control of the Continuum, they broke the Borg apart?  They could have restored your world, your civilization, when they put the people back.  But they did nothing except send the people home... to a radioactive, ruined wasteland where the dust from the Borg attacks had kept any sunlight out, kept anything from growing, for a century."

"I knew that.  Yes."  The El-Aurian poured herself another drink.  She was shaking, very slightly, but blocking her mind so the Q present couldn't read her thoughts or emotions.  "They're still better off dead than Borg."

"Yes.  But it would have cost our enemy nothing to restore the planet before sending the El-Aurians home.  If they wished to undo the Borg they could have restored life to ten thousand worlds, let fallen civilizations thrive again, save lives.  It would have cost them nothing except the minimal consideration needed to think that mortal lives are worth saving.  They let your people die, suffocating on dust, starving, their minds broken and tormented from a hundred years of being Borg, for nothing.  No reason.  They just didn't care.  Multiply that by ten thousand."

"We would have preserved the El-Aurians," the young trickster said eagerly.  "I mean, we'd have preserved all the mortals.  Mortals are interesting.  And really, how hard is it to fix a planet before you send people there?  They even did that with the humans, they gave them an extra moon and a new planet and everything.  But they couldn't be bothered to do it for you."

"We stand for change, for growth, for individual freedom.  They stand for fear, for reactionary fascism, for trying to impose a uni-mind on a species that rejected that path billions of years ago and doing it by killing everyone who disagrees with them.  They put every species they thought might someday be a threat to them in the next hundred thousand years into lockdown, except for your kind, because after they broke up the Borg and let a billion die the remaining few thousand survivors don't seem significant to them.  That's why we came to you.  You may be one of the few beings left in the universe who can help us," the teacher said.

"And if you don't, I will tell you the consequences," the warrior said.  "Because you refused to help my lover when you had the chance, every Q you knew as friend is dead, every human you knew as friend is trapped, every other being you knew as friend is about to be embroiled in the war that will break out when the Federation, lacking humans, falls, and people who have so little concern for mortals that they let a billion of your own people die are running the universe.  Help us hide from them, and maybe, just possibly, we might be able to reverse the damage you've done.  If we win, we'll free the humans, maybe even go back and fix your planet so your people don't die.  If they win, no one will be permitted to evolve to threaten them, throughout eternity.  And if you don't hide us, they'll win."

"I didn't know," the woman whispered, staring into her drink.  "He never told me."

"You know now.  Help us."

"All right."  She looked up.  "All right.  Stand in the middle of the room, together."

"They're very close," the warrior said.  "I doubt you need to keep us hidden more than a tenday or so."

"Two tendays, then the box will open and automatically release you.  If your friends are here waiting for you, you might have some element of surprise, if you keep track of how much time is passing in this universe.  I know you can count a timeflow you're not bound to."

"Yes," the inventor said, "we can.  Thank you.  We're very grateful."

"Once we win," the young trickster said, "I promise, we'll do something about what they did to your people.  That's... that's just wrong.  We'll do something to fix it."

The warrior wondered dully how the youngster had managed to hold onto any of his idealism.  He was the only one of their group to be in the original movement, the last survivor of the faction for change that the faction for order had tried to suppress, and thus started the war.  Even if the Youngest was still alive she hadn't been in the movement at the very beginning.  It blinded him, she thought; he genuinely believed they could win.  She remembered being that naïve once.  It seemed like a very long time ago, though.

"I appreciate the thought, but I'm not doing this so you'll save my people.  They were dead from the moment the Borg took them in the first place.  I'm doing this so you'll save the universe from what your Continuum's turned into. If you can."

She gestured, and time turned inside out, and they were nowhere and nowhen, anchored to nothing.

In the darkness there was absolutely nothing to do.

There was no sensory input except what they could provide each other, and there was nothing new in that regard that any of them had to offer after billions of years of sharing the same Continuum.  It was painfully difficult to hide their thoughts and emotions, here, and their thoughts and emotions were uniformly dark.  They were siblings in battle, forged together in fire, but every little thing they didn't like about each other could no longer be repressed in the close proximity and the lack of anything to do except bitch at each other.  They deliberately staged arguments about nothing important because that was the one form of entertainment the Q could always fall back on, but there were too many important things to argue about and it didn't help.  By the time the universe outside opened to them again and let them free, they would have welcomed a bloody gunfight with enemy lying in ambush, just to break the monotony.

But there was no one there.  In fact there was no bar left, only a blasted ruin.

The Q could read the imprint of past events on time, and this was what had happened, what they saw:

Their enemies had come to the woman in force, seven of them, to be sure of overpowering any rebel Q they might find.  They had seen plainly that the trail stopped at the woman; they knew what her powers could do.  They demanded she reveal where she had hidden the rogue Q.  The woman had refused, shielding her mind.  But these had grown accustomed to torturing their fellow Q for information; to rip apart a mortal's mind to get at information underneath shielding was something they were perfectly willing to do.  They began.  And the woman moved to create another lockbox, to trap the seven Q outside any universe with meaning to them indefinitely.  And they had lived hair-trigger for several years of war, and they had learned fear, and none of the Q had ever been comfortable with the notion of mortals that had the power to harm them.

One of them had acted.  The woman and her entire establishment had been vaporized, annihilated far more thoroughly than they'd needed to, destroyed so completely that there was no bringing her back.  The others had chastised that one, and they had left, knowing that they had lost the trail, knowing that without the El-Aurian to tell them what she'd done with the three rogues they would never figure it out. 

In the present, now, the young trickster wept for the woman.  Neither of the other two did.  The warrior didn't know and didn't care why the inventor didn't weep; for herself it was because she didn't care.  She hadn't liked the El-Aurian much anyway.  Besides, no one's death could possibly matter very much to her anymore, not even her own.

They made good use of the mortal's sacrifice.  It wouldn't be long before their enemy picked up their trail again, but the fact that there were only three of them left had made the enemy somewhat complacent.  A Convocation had been called, a meeting of the entire Continuum-- or entire surviving Continuum, in this case-- and although they were not of the Continuum any longer they were still Q.  They still heard the call, still knew the way. 

So they dropped down straight into the Convocation with their weapons and shot as many Q as they could, some of them elders of great age and power, before the startled Q could return fire.  Then they fled, though not quite in time.  The young trickster took a fatal wound, though it would take some time to kill him.  So they hit another node, not a very well-guarded one, and killed the one Q guarding it, and they left their friend there with a bomb, to die the way his beloved older brother, their leader, had died.

She rather wished she could feel something about that, but it was probably better that she couldn't.

They'd successfully killed nine Q with the element of surprise on their side, including two elders, specifically two of the major instigators of the crackdown that had led to the war.  The enemy was no longer being complacent in any way.  They couldn't return to the Continuum right away and they had to make absolutely minimal use of their powers.  So they stayed in mortal forms, her as a Klingon, him as a Vulcan, and they used the same forms of transportation that mortals would use while they made their plans.

They were two of a kind.  Both had lost their loves to this war.  Both had nothing left to live for but vengeance.  They shared pleasure with each other, the violent overpowering physical passions that the mortal bodies they wore were capable of, and gave each other's mortal bodies pain and ecstasy so they would have something to feel.  Sometimes they shared pleasure as Q.  But they never joined.  Their loves were dead, but they were hollow inside, and there was nothing worth joining with inside them. 

The young Sibrinan actress turned, smiling, as they entered her dressing room.  "Hello!  I didn't hear you... come..."  She trailed off as their other-nature became apparent, and her own other-nature flared within her.  The warrior was impressed.  She had only caught the faintest whiff of Douwd before coming here.  It had been a guess, albeit an educated guess, as to what the Sibrinan really was.  And even now, most of the creature's power was held in reserve, deep within, where it was not at all obvious how much of it there was.  If she hadn't been Q, and well-acquainted with all the capabilities of the various Powers of the universe, she might well have thought the Douwd a match for her.

"Why are you here?" the Douwd asked, defensive shield firmly in place.

"Stand down.  We mean you no harm, Douwd," the warrior said.

"My name is Sit'ka.  Unlike you, we actually use them. And I have heard reports that trouble me, about your kind."

"They're all absolutely true," the inventor assured her.  "And that's why we're here."

"Because the reports are true?"

"Because they are true, and we've come to ask for your help in doing something about it."

"What help could you possibly need from me?"

"We want your help in fighting the Continuum," the warrior said.

This was plainly not what the Douwd had expected.  Her aura radiated confusion.  "My... help?  How can I help to do that?  And why... who are you?"

"Obviously, we're Q," the warrior said.  "But the Continuum has torn itself apart in civil war.  We're the last remnants of the side that lost.  Now, consider the reports you've heard.  What do you think that means?"

"She's a Douwd, not a mortal, Q," the inventor said.  "For the sake of all, don't patronize her."  He spoke gently to the Douwd.  "For the aeons of the Continuum's existence we struck a balance between being that which you are and that which the Organians are.  We encouraged conflict, disagreement, but we were continuous as you are not.  There has always been a balance between the rights of the individual Q to live life as they please and the need for the totality of the Continuum to enforce order and control.  That balance was tipping back and forth, rocking, and then one of our number killed himself.  To many, this meant that change was vital, was necessary, or we would all die of boredom.  To many more, this meant that change was fatal and would kill us, that individual rights must be subsumed to the needs of the Continuum as a whole.  And the schism exploded, and we have had a war."

"And we've very much close to lost," the warrior added.

"Now, the majority of the Continuum was still not drawn into this conflict, but they are afraid.  All of them are afraid.  And in their fear the ones who want to stop all change have sought to infect the others with their fear, so that they will agree with anything the faction-for-order seeks to do to protect the Continuum.  They slaughtered most of us.  They put every species they considered a future potential Power into lockdown to prevent their evolution.  If they fear the future Powers, what must they think of the Powers that exist now?  And if they fear the Powers that exist now, who will they most fear?  United, orderly, unified entities such as the Organians or Melkotians?  Or independent, free-thinking entities such as the Douwd?"

"But... we're peaceful.  We hold killing and fighting to be anathema.  Why...?"

"Because they need someone to be afraid of," the warrior said.  "Right now it's us.  They don't dare fight a war on two fronts.  When we're dead, though, they're going to need to invent an enemy to keep the uncommitted Q afraid and willing to turn to the ones who've fought a war for protection.  And everything I can see indicates that the Douwd are number one on the enemies-to-be list."

"I see," the Douwd said softly.  She looked at her hands.  "You realize, there isn't any way I could persuade the Douwd as a whole to mobilize against the Continuum.  I'm finding it very hard to believe that you, one of the oldest of the Powers, even had a war.  Such a primitive thing to do.  I know you're sincere, but there's no way I could persuade enough Douwd to put together anything that might resemble... what?  A mortal army?  Some sort of war force?  We are Powers.  We've never needed such things."

"Neither did we.  Until we did."

"We're not asking you to mobilize the Douwd," the inventor said.  "We know that'd be quite impossible.  We're asking you to join us, and fight by our side.  We know how the Douwd feel about killing.  Believe me, I felt the same way, until they destroyed my companion of three billion years for having the temerity to refuse to give up his right to be an individual.  I don't want to see such things happen to the Douwd.  Our civil war was terrible enough.  If we can keep harrying them, they won't dare extend the war beyond the Continuum's borders."

"It goes against everything I have been taught to believe," the Douwd said.  "But I have also been taught to make up my own mind.  I see your sincerity, and I have already begun to fear your people.  I will kill, to protect the Douwd and the universe as a whole, if it must be done."

"It must," the inventor said.

"Then I'll join you.  But I do have a concern.  Won't they use the fact that a Douwd is fighting them as an excuse to begin this war on my people?"

The warrior laughed.  "Illusionist, why do you think we went to a Douwd first?  Your abilities at disguise are even better than ours.  We think you can fool them into thinking you're a Q, or at least, not recognizing what you are."

"Then I agree.  I'll go with you."

The Douwd were biologically very similar to the Q, their major difference being that they lacked a Continuum and thus were less powerful.  Fiercely independent creatures, they reproduced at need, trained their children rigorously in ethics, and then let them go.  It largely worked; the Douwd had never needed to exert the level of control on one another that the Q always had. 

The warrior hadn't lied; she believed quite truly that this would make them the Continuum's first targets.  The existence of the Douwd proved that individuals of the Powers could lead free, self-regulated lives.  If they had been willing to kill a hundred Q to keep the Q from seeking the same, how could they not target the Douwd, eventually?

They had long ago lost the ability those of the Continuum had once had, when the Continuum was whole, to create a linkage and connect other species to the Continuum, make of them new Q.  But the Douwd were already so similar, it was easy to do.  She and the inventor connected the young Douwd to the power of the Continuum, making her, for all intents and purposes, a Q with the life experiences of a Douwd.  The Douwd were even better mimics and shapeshifters than the Q, if such a thing was possible; the young one could impersonate particular Q without having to eat them first if she was drawing energy from the Continuum.  And when she wasn't, she was smaller than Q, not as invisible as mortals but not at all dependent on the nodes, able to fire the weapons and able to disguise her movements from the Continuum in a way no born Q really could.  It made the young Douwd tired and very hungry to fire the weapons while not connected to the Continuum’s power nodes, but she could do it. 

This made her phenomenally valuable to them, and it made the warrior decide to seek out another Douwd.  Sit'ka had been a lucky accident; she hadn't even thought of the fate of the Douwd until she'd sensed one so dimly on the world where she and the inventor were hiding.  Now that she was thinking of it, though, she knew of another Douwd who'd proven willing to kill.  Her lover's pet humans had encountered him. 

On Delta Rana IV, Kevin Uxbridge refused to let them into his home.  The shadow he'd constructed of his dead wife clucked at him, insisting that it was good to see new people after so long, and she'd never turned anyone away from her home.  The warrior, impatient with being forced to listen to the chatter of a created thing, said bluntly, "We're here to see a Douwd, not a pretense of a human.  Send her away."

"And if I don't?  I won't let you take her from me."

"Kevin, what are they talking about?" the shadow asked, its voice pitched to convey anxiety.  "They can't send me away!"

"If she were alive, she would be gone," the warrior said brutally.  "All that has preserved her is the fact that she's not real.  All of the actual humans in the universe have been sent back to Earth."

Kevin Uxbridge dematerialized the shadow of his wife with a thought, angrily.  "It's no concern of mine."

"So it doesn't matter to you that her people, people just like her, people just like the ones she died to protect, have been imprisoned on Earth."

"It matters," he ground out.  "But there's nothing I can do."

"Yes, there is," the young Douwd with them said.  "I've been doing it."

"Why?"

"Because they haven't just kidnapped the humans, they haven't just destroyed the Borg and left the people they de-assimilated to die.  They're going to be going after the other Powers.  And I think they will start with the Douwd."

"Why?" Uxbridge asked.  "We're no threat to them."

The inventor explained to Uxbridge the same thing he had explained to Sit'ka.  Uxbridge, however, was not interested.  "I will not kill," he said.  "Not to protect the Douwd.  Not to save the humans.  Not for any reason."

"Your moralistic posturing is a little hollow," the warrior said.  "You already have killed.  Billions.  To avenge a human who was already dead."

Sit'ka projected shock and horror.  "What?"

"The Husnock," Uxbridge said softly.  "One of their warships destroyed this colony, and the woman I loved.  So I..."

"Killed.  Them," Sit'ka whispered.  "How... how could you..."

"Because high morals are all very well and good, but when terrible things happen to good people who didn't deserve it, who you loved, and you have the power to do something, you will," the warrior said.  "Pacifism is useless in the face of violence.  War should be a last resort, but if you're faced with people who want to kill you, and all diplomacy has failed, it should be a resort."  She paced around the older Douwd.  "You could have destroyed the Husnock warship," she said.  "About 300 people would have died, then.  But no.  11,000 people, including your greatest love, had to die because you wouldn't kill.  Until you did."

"I was... enraged.  I was weak... and I have never stopped paying for it."

"You haven't paid for it at all!  What you're paying for is letting her die!" She stalked up to his face.  "You sit here with the shadow of your love, hiding from any who could pass sentence on you, wallowing in your guilt.  You have done nothing of any value to anyone.  You haven't paid!"

"You're already a killer," the inventor said softly.  "Do you think you can undo the death on your hands by vowing never to kill again?  It's already too late.  By standing and doing nothing as tyranny consumes the universe, you hold far more culpability for death than if you killed to stop it."

"Do you think that because I failed once, that would make it right for me to fail again?" Uxbridge asked angrily.  "I will not kill.  I failed in my principles once.  And I am tainted by that forever.  But that does not make it acceptable for me to fail again."

"We could give her back to you," the inventor said.

The warrior held the breath she didn't need to breathe.  It would be very difficult to do what the inventor was suggesting, not because resurrecting the dead was all that difficult for Q power, but because drawing the power to do it would attract the Continuum's attention.  She wasn't sure winning the Douwd to their cause was worth it.

But her partner was continuing.  "All you've been able to do is recreate a shadow.  I can pull her essence out of time, give her back her life, not as a created thing but as herself.  And then what?  What do you think she would think of your refusal to do anything to help her people?"

"She wouldn't know I had the power to do anything."

"She'd learn, when the Continuum took her by force and threw her back to Earth to drown in the teeming trillions of her people trapped there, without you.  She'd understand, at the least, that you were never human.  Would you do anything then?  When they came to take her, would you try to stop them?"

"I would hide her.  But I wouldn't kill."

"Would you hide them?" Sit'ka asked. 

He turned to look at the younger Douwd.  "What do you mean?"

"I have fought a battle in their war, and killed.  But what they need as much as allies in battle is someone to hide them from their enemies.  Would you do that?"

"I don't see how I could.  Q are far more powerful than..." The younger Douwd dropped her semblance, then, and the older one saw what she had become.  "They've given you their power!"

"Access to their power.  Yes.  It's not the same thing-- I'm not bound to it as they are.  I can connect to it and disconnect from it at will.  But when I'm connected... they can't tell me from a Q.  Can you?"

He studied her.  "You're small, for a Q."

"We've had smaller," the warrior said.

"Then, no.  You look like a small Q."

"They're like us, Kevin.  But they're not used to being able to deceive each other.  An illusion that would never fool a Douwd will get you close enough to a Q to kill... or to distract, if that's the goal.  They're not as specialized in the art of illusion and disguise as we are."  She approached him and took his hand.  "I won't ask you to kill.  But I will ask you to help me, and help them.  For the sake of the Douwd, for the sake of the humans.  Is that within your moral compass?"

Slowly he nodded.  "Yes.  I won't take a life.  But I'm willing to work to preserve it.  If my illusions can protect you in your war..."

"When it's over, if we and you survive, we can bring her back for you," the inventor said softly.

The Douwd looked at him hard.  "Do either of you actually expect to survive this?"

"Not particularly," the warrior said.

"I've done too much.  I'm more afraid of eternity living with what I've done, and without Rishon, than I am of dying.  As much as anything else, that's why I will help you.  But don't tell me what you'll do when we all live through this.  We all know better."

"One can have hope," the inventor said.

Once in the Continuum, the older Douwd proved as invaluable as his younger species-mate, in a different way.  He would not carry the weapon.  They made him memorize it in case he needed it, but he insisted he would never materialize it, never use it.  It didn't matter.  He could fully impersonate Q if given the memory of their pattern, and of course both the inventor and the warrior knew the pattern of every living Q intimately, as well as all the dead ones.  He could weave illusions out of the stuff of the Continuum that no Q could penetrate while distracted; a quiet mind and time to focus could uncover his deceptions, but they were quite willing to keep the enemy from having either.  Sometimes he impersonated dead Q and harangued living enemies in the voice of the dead and while they were panicking and trying to penetrate his disguise the two rebel Q and the young Douwd could easily shoot them down.  He didn't seem to have a moral problem with luring Q into situations where they could be killed, only with actually pulling the trigger.

The younger one, on the other hand, had no trouble pulling the trigger, and was nearly as deadly as the Youngest had been.  This gave the warrior an idea.

Douwd weren't Q, but they could use Q weapons.  El-Aurians were mortal, but their Adepts could destroy the Q.  What if it was possible to reconfigure Q weapons so creatures like El-Aurians could use them?

What if it was possible to reconfigure the weapons so that any mortal could use them?

It was a thought so audacious, so overwhelming, she could barely believe she'd had it.  But the Klingons' mythology was all about killing their own gods.  What if that were possible?  What if she could make a gun, or a bat'leth, or whatever, that mortals could use?  The fact that they had been able to bring that human to the Continuum at all meant that mortals could function in the Continuum with an appropriate translation metaphor.  And if that were possible...

...then an army of four could be an army of four hundred, easily, and overwhelm the Continuum through sheer force of numbers.

And then she remembered her lover's last plan, and the human he'd resurrected and left in stasis.  What could such a mortal do, if he had weapons that could be used against the Q?  She wasn't all that fond of humans in general, but she knew war heroes.  She had attached herself to thousands of them, standing at their side in battle.  She knew what such a mortal could do, in combat.

Oh, if only it could be possible!

This time the research went slow.  They were able to spend very little time in the Continuum, which was where they needed to be to do the research.  The two Douwd were good companions, but they couldn't help with research that involved studying the structure of the Continuum itself.  And the older one's skill at weaving illusions and disguising them all only went so far.  After all, the Q had spent billions of years creating and breaking illusions themselves. 

They had sorties, and a fair degree of success at doing things like killing agents looking for them, but the two Douwd refused to help them blow up nodes on the grounds that it would take the life of uncommitted Q.  To the warrior that was the point, but she had to bow to the will of her new allies.  So most of the time their life consisted of sending the younger Douwd to scout and having the older one conceal them in an illusion-pocket while the two last rebel Q worked on making a weapon that mortals could use.

And then the younger Douwd was killed.

And the Douwd who would not kill broke in his resolve, manifested a weapon for the first and last time, and shot down three enemy Q before they brought him down.

The warrior could not afford to have the enemy learn that her mysterious allies had been Douwd.  She and the inventor retrieved the two bodies, the torn and broken energy-patterns, and departed with them under fire, both of them sustaining injuries.  Then they ate the bodies in their entirety so no one would find them and realize there had been Douwd helping them.  In doing this, in incorporating their essences into her, she learned how the Douwd managed their disguises, and learned how to mimic a mortal so thoroughly that she was near-invisible to other Q, the same trick the Youngest had learned. 

The day they fin