Judgement Day: The Partisan

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.