'Captain, we are picking up some strange emissions off our port bow.' 'Please, specify, lieutenant,' the captain clearly wasn't impressed with such an imprecise report. 'I can't tell, sir. It's. something I've never seen before. It's radiating from some sort of anomaly, half a light year away.' 'Half a light year!' That certainly got the captain's attention. 'Why didn't our sensors detect it before?' 'It seems it just appeared, sir,' the tactical officer replied, working his controls furiously to gain as much information as possible. Just as the captain got up to see the tactical display for himself, something else appeared on the bridge itself. At first, it was a blast of light. As soon as it dissipated, the crew saw a young woman in a Starfleet admiral uniform, standing casually right beside the helm. She had rather unkempt, black hair, big, bright eyes and looked about twenty years of age. Maybe twenty five. Definitely too young to be a captain, much less an admiral. The captain was evidently thinking the same thing. 'Who are you?' He asked. 'How rude!' The girl puffed up her lips in pretended affront. Her eyes remained playful. 'Can't you see the rank?' She asked, moving closer to the captain. 'It would be nice if you reported properly, captain!' The captain gestured for his tactical officer to continue with his analysis and then, slowly, he turned to the girl. 'You're Q,' he stated plainly, instead of coming to attention and reporting to the admiral as the girl had suggested. Everybody on the bridge, except the lieutenant at tactical, just stared at her. She raised her eyebrow and whistled. 'I must admit I am impressed, captain. How did you know?' The captain just shrugged his shoulders and sat back in his chair. 'Q are known for appearing out of the thin air in exactly the way you did. This,' he pointed his hand broadly towards the tactical station. 'This anomaly isn't, by any chance, your doing as well?' The girl laughed out loud. 'I see that Starfleet training has improved considerably since our last meeting,' she said. 'Oh, by the way, I expect Captain Janeway has finally made it back to the Alpha Quadrant, the poor woman?' The captain wanted to say something but the girl snapped her fingers and suddenly she was right in his lap. Before he could react, she touched his face, moving her fingers along his temple and down to his chin. 'Oh, my,' she purred. 'Aren't we handsome?' The captain took her firmly by the arms and stood up, pushing her gently away. 'That's quite enough,' he said calmly. 'Are you a friend of this young Q who bugged the Voyager crew?' The girl laughed again, not in the least discouraged by the captain's reaction. 'Actually, I am his daughter. You're forgetting that in the Q Continuum time is a very different concept. I came here to observe humans for myself. I couldn't believe my father when he told me how dull you are.' The captain rolled his eyes and sat back again. 'You should have believed him,' he said calmly and it sounded like a threat. The girl was about to say something but she was interrupted by the tactical officer. 'Sir!' He began, alarmed. 'This anomaly now looks like a wormhole of some kind. It's pulling us in.' 'Shields up!' The first officer exclaimed but the captain stopped him casually. 'Belay that order,' he said. 'Sir?' 'Whatever it is, she created it,' the captain explained calmly, pointing at the Q girl. 'We will not be entertaining her,' he added firmly. 'No red alert, no shields. In fact, I want you all to stand down from your posts and do nothing. Is that clear?' The people looked puzzled but they were a well trained crew. They all moved away from their respective consoles and just stood or sat there, watching their captain. He announced: 'All hands, this is the captain. Abandon your posts. I repeat, abandon your posts until further notice. Do nothing. Captain out.' The Q girl giggled devilishly as the ship approached the anomaly. Slowly but inevitably they were being pulled into the mouth of the unknown. Several alarms throughout the bridge went off but the captain only shook his head in response to a few questioning looks. Everybody just waited silently. The atmosphere was tense but the captain knew he could count on each and every one of them. He knew that everything now depended on their obedience and was certain he would have it. His crew trusted their captain. They trusted him even when the first consoles began exploding and plasma beams ran widely throughout the bridge. They trusted him when the helmsman and then the chief of operations went down struck by the exploding conduits. They kept on trusting him when the bridge filled with smoke and, already suffocating, they heard the computer: 'Warning. Life support system failure. Hull breach on deck one in five seconds. Four. Three.' The people were struggling for breath, crawling on the floor but nobody made a move towards their instruments. 'Two.' The crew members were dying painfully on all decks as the ship was being pulled in and crashed by enormous gravity inside the wormhole. 'One.' 'All right!' The Q girl shouted over the noise of cracking bulkheads and exploding circuits. She snapped her fingers. And everything went back to normal in a flash. There was no damage to the ship, nobody was injured and the wormhole was gone. 'My father was wrong,' she said, disappointed. 'You are even more boring than the Kirtans from Tan Delta VI.' The captain, who had managed to stay in his seat throughout the whole experience now looked at the beautiful girl and said quietly: 'Good. Now get off my ship.'
