The Battle of the Ages

Prologue: Strange Visions

Pipes. Pipes and wiring everywhere, all with a silver metallic look. They were everywhere, all around him, they seemed to be alive.

At once Captain Jean-Luc Picard knew where he was as he walked into a familiar space, still harshly silver, and stared into a face which he knew all to well. He was in the Borg Queen's main archive, located in a top secret place. The room may have been familiar, with its cold and dank atmosphere, but the equipment and electronics were all new to him. To his right he saw a flat and hard bed with green wires all around it and needles jutting up through various, but obviously well-thought out, places. At the tip of the bed was a sort of head band with green electrical currents running around the edges of the band. To his left he saw a chair that was reminiscent of the old electric chair, but instead of being made out of wood, it was constructed of twisted steel and metal. Plastic pipes protruded from the arm rests, apparently see-through, and made to support whatever was meant to sit in that chair, but for what reason? Up at the tip of the chair, where the head is obviously supposed to rest, there were what appeared to be long (about one foot long) and bendable screwdriver looking mechanisms. All of this in addition to a dark green glow, electrical current, flowing throughout the chair. The only other oddity of difference that he noticed was the piping above him. Certain sections of it were not green or grey or silver, but rather they were of a dark red nature. Red was a color that was not commonly associated with the Borg, so this was indeed unusual. Strangely, Picard recognized that shade of red, but couldn't quite place it.

"Welcome, Locutus," shot a voice that seemed to be coming from everywhere. It was a voice Picard knew well. He stood in silence assome wires and electronics came together to form the queen of the Borg collective. In her usual sultry and seductive way she approached him and leaned in, coming abnormally close to Picard's face as if to kiss him. Instead of kissing him, she blew very softly onto his lips, which sent a cold chill down his spine as hundreds upon thousands of memories flooded through his brain. After about ten seconds she pulled back and looked at him for a while, with that seductive half-smile on her face.

"You will be mine soon…once more and we shall be joined together again," she whispered softly.

She started to walk around him slowly, as if examining him.

"See anything new," she asked of him?

Picard stood in silence, pondering the question.

"Oh come on Locutus," she snapped, "give me some input. Or is it too much for your frail human brain to process?"

After a little while, Picard finally opened his mouth: "Why am I here?"

"Your petty little brain's capacity has palpably reached its limit," she said in apparent disbelief, "Why do you even ask the question, when you know why it is that you are here?"

Feeling more determined, Picard replied: "Can't you understand? Locutus is gone, finished, a thing of the past. I refuse to give into you little mind games."

"Don't be so sure of yourself," she replied in her usual tone, "Whether you refuse or not is no longer up to you, for I hold the ace in this particular situation and you will soon find out that there is a fate awaiting you that you cannot, even in your wildest of dreams, attempt to prevent or stop from coming."

She forced a twisted smile and waited for his response.

"What is all of this," he asked after a while?

Pleased with the question, she replied: "I am sure that by now you have heard of the microchips that are becoming standard regulation for every Starfleet officer to have implanted. It activates as soon as one is assimilated or comes into any direct contact with our neutralizers and rids that person of all of their past memories that might give us any information or any advantage over Starfleet. Quite ingenious I must say, even by my standards. These new devices you see around you in here are a new breed of torture, only the most brutal. They are designed to tap into the brain of the vessel with which we contain and to extract key memories in order that the person might remember something. But for that we need a certain access code for the chip… One that I know that only you and select others hold. It is said to be indecipherable, we shall see about that."

With that Picard started to grow faint, and started to stumble from his dizziness. The last words he heard were: "You will surrender to us soon", as he woke up in his quarters from the evident dream that he had just had. Or was it a dream?

He sat up in his bed and realized that he was sweating profusely from head to toe. He sat and pondered what he had just heard for a while, attempting to determine whether or not it was a dream.

Then suddenly without any warning, his communicator beeped and in came commander Riker's voice which said:

"Captain Picard, we need you down here in the bridge immediately. I really think that you need to hurry up and take a look at this, Riker out."

With no second thoughts, Picard darted out of the door and headed towards the bridge. He was hoping that this did not have anything to do with the Borg. He grew more and more nervous as he entered the turbolift and headed upwards for the main bridge. Once he had arrived he had found everybody's eyes fixed on the screen in front of him. What he saw almost made him stumble back into the turbolift. There was an evidently alien ship passing by that did not look the least bit familiar.

"This ship is unlike anything that we have encountered before," came Data's voice from the 1'st Officer's chair. "The amount of nitric acid and fluidic substances that they appear to be trailing as well as the ship's excellent hull design suggest that they are not from anywhere around here."

"How did they get here so fast and undetected" asked Picard?

Apparently everybody else was just as confused as he was as they sat in silence.

"Scan them," ordered Picard.

"Already tried," replied Commander Worf, "But their shielding system is so powerful that our scans are being completely reflected."

"Well there's something that we already know about them, that would mean that our scans aren't completely useless," said Picard with a tired smile that made Worf grimace.

After determining for sure that this was a race not yet contacted by humans, Picard made the ultimate decision.

"Open a channel, let's attempt to make first contact," said Picard, who was very excited.

He glanced around the bridge and was surprised to see that there was nobody that felt his same feelings of excitement. The brooding ship had successfully cast an ominous shadow on the crew of the Enterprise and left them feeling very uneasy and nervous. Feeling somewhat disappointed, Picard gave the official order.

"Make it so."

What neither Picard nor anybody else there knew was that that one signal would actually signal the beginning of the biggest event in the history of mankind.