From: mercutio@europa.com (mercutio) Newsgroups: alt.fan.q,alt.ql.creative,alt.startrek.creative Subject: NEW: Homeward Q (ST:Voy/QL) Date: 20 Jun 1995 23:23:24 -0500 Message-Id: The characters in this story belong to Paramount and whoever does Quantum Leap, not to me. Blah blah blah lawyers coming to get me, aha aha blah blah. In case you were wondering, this is a crossover between Star Trek Voyager, Q, and Quantum Leap, and was written entirely as an excuse for me to get Al and Q to meet. Homeward Q Sam was trying to cure cancer and save a baby from a burning building, while simultaneously keeping the lovely young ingenue from trying to kiss him. But it was no use. Even as he emerged from the smoldering building, baby clasped in his manly arms, the cure for cancer neatly written down on a piece of paper folded into his back pocket, she ran up, threw her arms around him and kissed him. As her lips touched his, Sam leaped. He opened his eyes to find himself standing inside a futuristic ship's helm, something so advanced, it must be a movie set. Everyone was staring at him. "Q! Get off my ship!" Having an advanced mind, and a quick grasp of details, Sam immediately realized he was floating three feet in the air. As soon as he realized that, he crashed to the ground, head hitting the floor, much to the amusement of everyone around him. "Oh, boy," Sam said, as he slipped into unconsciousness. **** [Stirring martial music begins. Voiceover provided by Ziggy.] These are the voyages of Samuel Beckett, who stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and was instantly transported to the Delta Quadrant. [Computer graphic of little manta ray ship gliding through space, effortlessly banking around a figure of a man being accelerated.] Our continuing mission, to seek out new life, to boldly find the leap home. **** Al stepped out of the door, cigar in his mouth, banging the handlink, which seemed be having its own problems about operating this far into the future. Sam, sitting on a table in Sickbay, was entirely happy to see him. "Al! What's going on?" The holo-doctor looked over at him, an expression of annoyance on his face. "You're omnipotent, and incapable of having amnesia. Therefore, you must be doing it only to waste my time, which I do not appreciate. If you would shut me off, which would be a kindness far beyond your abilities, since then at least I wouldn't have to listen to your drivel." Al looked over at the doctor. "Who stuck a burr up his butt?" Sam ignored Al, looking at the doctor. "How do I turn you off? I don't understand." The doctor rolled his eyes. "Omniscient, hah! You say, 'Computer, end program.'" Experimentally, Sam tried it. "Computer, end program." The doctor vanished, and Al looked over at Sam with an expression on his face of 'Don't try that on me, buster'. "What am I doing here, Al? And who am I? This can't be something from my own lifetime." Al looked at the handlink. "You wouldn't believe the guy we've got in the Waiting Room, Sam. He's loonier than the looniest nutcase we've ever had. Although he *is* a snappy dresser." "Al..." Sam said, warning Al with his tone that he was at the end of his patience. "If you want to believe the nutcase, you're a god." Sam rubbed his temples, tiredly. "Oh, boy." Captain Kathryn Janeway came striding through the door, stopping dead as she took in the sight of Q sitting on a table in Sickbay, talking to himself. What was going on? Janeway ignored the apparent discongruity, and took a seat opposite him, leaning forward earnestly, hands clasped together. "Q, I don't know what you want with us here, but I ask of you, whatever it is, please send us home." Sam stared back at her, struggling not to glance at Al. "Why would you want me to send you home?" Her eyes got, if anything, more of a puppy dog look in them. "I know you have the power to send us home. Q, we'll play your games, whatever they are, but please, we do want to go home." "Don't we all?" Sam said softly. "Then you will?" Janeway said, a expression of hope dawning in her face. "Sam..." Al said warningly. "She's good-looking, I admit, but now isn't the time to fall for women in uniform. You don't have the power to do what she wants." "I know," Sam said to Al, before addressing the captain. "I can't do that." Her face fell. "Then I ask that you state your business with this ship. We are far from home, and while we have nothing but time, our plight is too serious for games." "Business?" Janeway stood up. "I'm not going to play games with you, Q. I can't get rid of you, and I can't do anything to you, but I can refuse to take part. You have the run of the ship, because I can't stop you, but that doesn't mean anyone will cooperate with your sordid amusements." She turned and left the room, leaving Sam and Al behind her. Al pursed his lips and whistled. "She is *mad* at you, Sam. I wouldn't want to have that lady angry with me. " Sam turned on Al. "Just tell me what I'm here to do." Al looked at his handlink. "Ziggy doesn't have any data on this time period. All we have to go on is what the captain told you, what this Q is telling us, and ship's gossip." "You've been roaming the halls, listening in on conversations?" Al smirked. "You can learn a lot that way." He looked back at the link. "Ziggy says there's a 65% chance you're here to send these people home, a 10% chance you're here to save the universe from a threat or threats unknown, and a 2% chance that you're here to fall into bed with a Commander Chakotay and that feisty balding engineer, B'Elanna Torres." Sam stared levelly back at Al. "You can't be serious." Al shrugged. "That's all we have to go on. This isn't the twentieth century, you know." "Oh, boy." **** Q opened his eyes. One minute he had been about to play a grand joke on the stranded crew of the NCC Gilligan's Island, and the next, he was *waking up* here, in some barbaric experimental laboratory. The concept of waking up was what had Q spooked. He didn't sleep, so there was no need for him to wake up. The only other time he had was when he'd been, ever so briefly, mortal. Waking up implied all sorts of nasty things about his current situation. He looked down at himself. He was wearing something ugly, in an unflattering white. How colorless. With a small twist of his powers, he turned it to the wine red color he preferred. Or tried to. Nothing happened. He was, once again, powerless. He looked up, raising his head to the ceiling. "Q!!" A woman trotted through the door, and looked at him. "He's awake," she said to someone unseen. "Notify the admiral." *Admiral?*, Q thought to himself. Was Picard an admiral now? He was sadly out-of-date on the little events of mortal lives which they found so engrossing. After a few minutes, a short, dapper man, dressed in nothing a Starfleet admiral would ever consider wearing, came through the door. "Who are you?" they asked simultaneously. Al gestured to Q. "I asked you first." "I'm Q. Now that your tiny little brain has no doubt been enlightened by this information, what am I doing here?" Normally, they didn't give out a lot, or any, information to the various people who inhabited Sam's body. But this was an unusual case, and Al needed the person sitting on that table to be as cooperative as possible. "Watch it with the tiny little brain comments. I'm Admiral Al Calavicci. And you've been Leaped into by one of our scientists." Q narrowed his eyes. "I've been possessed? Telepathically invaded?" Al shook his head. "He's got your body, and you've got his." Q looked down again at the body he wore. He went over to the one-way glass and looked into it, studying his reflection. "Not one I would have chosen, but I suppose it'll do. The clothes have *got* to go though." Al tilted his head. "You don't like those?" Q looked over at Al, surveying his lemon tie and lime jacket with forest green velvet lapels. "You're obviously a man of taste and distinction. Would you wear this?" Al grinned at him. "Not in this life." "Exactly." For a moment, Al studied Q. He needed information from this joker desperately. But he sensed that Q would not be an easy person to get information from. Usually, the people arriving in the Waiting Room were disoriented, frightened, and sometimes even peeing their pants. This one was cool as a Georgia sunrise. Unusual methods were clearly called for. "C'mon, let me show you something." Minutes later, in his quarters, Al knew he'd found the right motivator. Q was rummaging through the contents of Al's wardrobe with great delight. "This is priceless!" "Glad you think so." "And this..." Q pulled out Al's Navy uniform, carefully wrapped in plastic, but still hanging there. "I don't think the color does anything for you." "My feelings exactly." Q pulled out a handful of ties, and started going through them. "You said your scientist is in my body." "That's right." Q held up the tie to his chin and looked critically at it in the mirror. "He probably won't be able to use my powers. I wouldn't even be surprised if the captain has him in the brig by now." "He's in Sickbay." "Really?" Q asked, showing no signs of interest, other than the tone in his voice. "Whyever for?" "He lost consciousness when he hit his head on the deck." Q looked at Al then. "Clumsy of him. He could have gotten down on his own, after all." He set down the tie, discarding it as not nearly garish enough. "And feeling pain. So human. I'll probably have to rebuild the body from scratch when I get it back." "What do you mean, so human?" Al asked, unable to restrain his curiosity. "My dear man, I'm *Q*," Q said superciliously. At the complete look of noncomprehension on Al's face, he stopped. "What time period am I *in*?" "The late twentieth century. Sam usually travels within his own lifetime, but he isn't now." "He is in his own lifetime. He's there and he's alive, isn't he? Or were you under the delusion that physical form was in some way related to the reality of existence?" Q retorted, trying to absorb the time referent. The white outfit with the uniform cut had seemed unfamiliar, but Q hadn't realized that it was meant to be a *real* uniform. Very shortsighted of him. These people were disrupting the fabric of time. Which was something very close to one of the powers of the Q. Where in the multiverse was he? For a moment, Q dimly recalled something, some experiment, some project one of the Q had been working on, but then the memory was gone. He only had a limited mortal brain to hold his memories now, after all, and it wasn't even the one he'd started with. Q concealed his dismay with flippancy. "I'm a god by your reckoning. And your scientist is playing with things he doesn't understand." "Well, he doesn't have a choice, not if he's going to fix whatever it is he leaped in there to fix. And you'd better hope he can, because otherwise, you won't be getting home." Q flicked a hand at Al disdainfully. "If he were able to use the powers he now has, and I assume he still does, since I do not, then he could simply put us back." Q picked up an orange tie with blue paisley accents. "Either way, there's nothing I can do about it now." **** Al stepped out of the glowing doorway, then caused it to shut down behind him. Sam was sitting in a chair in the dining hall, a orangeish alien bending over him. "You *like* the food?" "It's delicious," Sam said. "Although I don't recognize the spices." "Kes! Here's someone who actually *likes* my cooking!" Neelix bent over Sam again, not about to let a satisfied customer get away, even if he *was* a potentially deadly superbeing. "I have other things you can try." Al looked at Sam, amused. "He's not the one you're supposed to go to bed with, Sam." "I know that," Sam said petulantly. Neelix scuttled back. "All right, all right. But remember, whatever you want, Neelix can provide." Al stood next to Sam, looking down at the remains of dinner on Sam's plate. "You don't have to eat that, you know." "I didn't exactly have a choice about it, Al," Sam whispered urgently. "No, I mean, according to Q, you shouldn't be having any bodily needs at all. He thinks it's some sort of psychosomatic reaction. You think you should have biological functions, so your body's reacting by producing them for you." "So I'm only hungry because I *think* I'm hungry? Al, things don't work that way." "Q is very convincing," Al said. It was an understatement. Seeing the way Q had reacted to hunger, food, and the natural processes following thereafter had more than persuaded Al that Q had little or no experience with them. "Sam, you need to believe this. If you don't have these powers, we're stuck with Q for the rest of your natural life. And Gooshie is going to make that even shorter than it was originally intended to be." "So lock up Gooshie," Sam said, slightly annoyed. "Al, you can't expect me to believe I'm a god." "Sam, you have to believe it." Al's face took on a serious expression. "You can use these powers to come home, Sam. I believe this Q, and he says you could use them to stop leaping. You could finally come home." Sam looked at Al, trying not to feel the despair those words engendered. Al was very persuasive. The cynical way Al viewed most everything made his statements here more believable than if they'd come from anyone else. But it didn't help. Sam had spent too much time hoping that he might go home, that he might leap back into his own body. A chance to go home meant even more disappointment when it failed. "All right, Al. I'll try." **** Sam stood on the bridge, watching the frenzy roil around him. "We're being drawn into the anomaly!" "Damn! Engineering! Torres, is there anything you can do?" "I'm trying, Captain, but it's no use. The anomaly's more powerful than we are. Our shields are holding for the moment, but I estimate that we'll be torn apart by the gravitational stresses in less than 36 hours." All eyes went to Sam, where he stood in the doorway of the turbolift, trying not to blink stupidly. "Q! This is your doing!" "Excuse me?" Sam asked. "How could I have caused *that*?" He pointed at the swirling pink and purple blob on the screen. "As easily as you breathe," Paris said snidely. "But I forgot. You don't need to breathe, do you?" "I don't have anything to do with the anomaly." Janeway looked at Sam with a bit of pleading in her manner. "If you didn't cause it, then surely you must have known of it. You let us be drawn in here for your own purposes." Horror dawned on her face. "You did this because I refused to play your games!" Sam held up his hands, trying to defend himself. "Captain, you misunderstand..." "He's going to stand right there and laugh as he watches us be destroyed," Paris said bitterly. "Q to the end." "That's enough, Mr. Paris," Janeway snapped. She turned on Q. "You have us at your mercy. What are you going to do about it?" Sam knew he had to get out of there before he exposed himself as being a fraud. "I'll let you know." He stepped back into the Turbolift and let it take him away. **** "He's failing, isn't he?" Q asked lazily, now gorgeously attired in a deep red smoking jacket with a matching red and black plaid tie. "Can't you give him any help? How do these powers of yours work, anyhow?" Q shrugged elegantly. "How do you tell your hand to wave? How do you tell your eyes to blink?" "We're running out of time, Q. We've got to get these people home before the anomaly destroys their ship." "You can't avoid the anomaly," Q said. "Even if he manages to get them home, what happens will happen." Al stared at him in frustration. "Can't you make any sense?" "Oh, you'd like for me to spell this out for you in neat little sound bites, wouldn't you? Well, the universe doesn't work that way, my friend." "You have to make it work that way then. I understand you used to be good at that." Q nodded slightly, acknowledging the hit. "Do you have a way of contacting this scientist of yours?" "Sure. I just step into the Imaging Chamber, and bingo, I'm there, wherever Sam is. I'm just a hologram, but I can see him, hear him and speak to him." "I suppose I could come with you and try to talk your lost lamb down," Q drawled with the air of one who's being very much put upon. Al's brows furrowed. "That's not possible. I'm tuned to him. I'm the only one who it'll work for." Q shrugged. "And I *am* him. You people are so backwards, you probably still think the earth revolves around the sun." Al stared at Q, then spoke to thin air. "Ziggy, will it work?" "Seventy three percent probability that it will, Admiral. However, there is also a thirteen percent probability that it will fail and either one or both of them will be lost." Al stared at Q, considering. "There is also a one percent chance that *you* will be affected by the failure of this attempt, Admiral." "Thank you, Ziggy," Al said in a put-upon tone of voice. **** Sam greeted Al's reappearance with great relief. "Al! You've got to help me!" Out of the doorway stepped a second figure. Sam boggled as he saw his own self, but a strangely altered self. Not only did this Sam Beckett hold himself different -- like a posturing peacock -- but he was also dressed very differently as well. Much like... *Al*. Sam looked at Al. "You've created an evil twin of yourself, haven't you?" "I like to think of myself as the evil one," Al said smirking. "Don't you like the effect?" Sam shook his head. "I should have known you'd do something like this. I suppose everyone's seen me in that getup." "*And* we have pictures," Al said smugly. Sam groaned. "Now I *know* I don't want to go home. I'll never live that suit down." Q plucked at his lapels. "Whoever you are, you have no taste. This is a lovely color." Sam cast a long-suffering glance at Al. "Can you help me, Al? We've only got six hours left before the ship collapses. And everyone thinks I'm the only one who can save them. I've been hiding out here in the cargo bay for the last half a day. You don't know what it's like." Al, who had been a POW, shook his head. "That's what we're here for." He looked at Q. "You're on." Q turned to Sam. He cared about this far more than he was willing to admit openly. He *wanted* his powers back, and didn't like being stuck in this form, with all the attendant indignities. However, he wasn't going to *say* that. Not after the way he'd made a fool out of himself the last time, blubbering over the simplest of things. He really did want his powers back. So much so that he'd have attempted to teach a Klingon mathematics to get out of this. "Have you been able to make any use of my powers?" Sam shook his head. "As far as I can tell, I don't have any powers." "Have you *tried*?" "Of course, I tried." Al looked at Q, a little worried now. "Maybe he didn't get them." "This isn't a fruitcake we're passing around," Q snapped. "He has to have them. They're not inherent in a bodily shape; they should have passed with me, if this were possible at all. But somehow I was bumped out of my body by your puny mortal contrivings, and I *know* I don't have my powers." "That's not logical," Sam said. Q turned on him. "Look, you were suspended in the air when you arrived here, right?" Sam nodded. "I'm not likely to forget." "Well, did you fall immediately, or as soon as your limited human brain realized you couldn't possibly be hanging there in the air and reasserted human concepts on yourself?" Sam stared at Q. "Al, he's right." "He is?" "I didn't fall right away. There *was* a second when I was just hanging there." Q shrugged. "My point." "So you could do it then?" Al asked hopefully. "I've been *trying*, Al. It just doesn't work." "You have to *believe* in it, Sam." Sam's posture was that of a totally frustrated man. "I *can't*. Everything in me tells me that the universe just doesn't work that way. You can't make a wish and have things happen. I'm a scientist. I *know* better than that." Q started laughing. "It's all magic and tricks of the light to you, is it? As if everything that can be known about the universe could be encapsulated in your neat little facts and numbers." Al was searching desperately for any means of rescue. "What if we hypnotized you?" Sam was ignoring him, focussing entirely on Q. "Are you saying it isn't magic? That it's something else? Neither factual or fictional?" "Believe what you will," Q said blithely. "Your beliefs have no effect on the nature of reality. Not as long as you continue to resist the powers within you." "Use the force, Luke," Al quipped. Sam glared at him. "That isn't funny, Al." The admiral shrugged. "Funny is where you find it. C'mon, Sam. *Try* to believe in it at least. You don't have any other choice. Ziggy says this ship isn't going to hold together another six hours, no matter what that sexy engineer with the receding hairline said." Sam looked back at them, willing to try anything. He'd done stranger things, admittedly. "What should I try for?" "Click your heels three times, and repeat after me, 'There's no place like home'." Sam manfully ignored that. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was no visible change in their surroundings. His expression deflated. "It didn't work, did it?" "Let me check." Al hit his handlink a few times, then stepped back through the doorway, taking Q with him. A few seconds later, he reappeared. "You did it, Sam! We're in orbit around Earth!" "You realize I'm going to get credit for doing a good deed," Q said grumpily to Sam. "If I ever get myself back at all." "Yeah, well we all make mistakes," Al said sarcastically from behind him. "Then why haven't I Leaped?" Sam asked. "Sam!" Al said, suddenly remembering. "You can use the powers you've got to put yourself back! Do it now, before it's... too late..." he added, as the characteristic corona appeared around Sam, and he Leaped. Q stood in the empty cargo bay, and watched them go. He was himself again. With a thought, he reversed the damage the scientist had done to the body. Give them power, and they inevitably chose to be mortal. Q couldn't understand that at all. He could, of course, stop the Leaps, but now that his mind was no longer divided and his consciousness confused, he knew that they were part of an experiment by another member of the Continuum. And Dr. Beckett and Admiral Calavicci seemed well equipped to handle it. For mortals. Now about this business of having done a good deed... Q snapped his fingers gleefully and went on about his business of creating merry hell in the universe. **** The disorientation faded, and Sam knew he'd Leaped. But to where? He looked up at the huge freight train lumbering towards him. He was tied down in its path, helplessly staked out, with no way to escape. "Oh, boy." -the end- ---mercutio@europa.com--- "With the first link, a chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." -- Picard, ST:TNG, quoting a fictional judge, The Drumhead