Tasha stares out of the window at the cacophony of battle. It was unprecedented that a single vessel would be able to fight the entire defence fleet to a standstill, but these Borg are different... much different. Emotionless and relentless, their mission is to assimilate all species into a collective whole. A soulless collective which exists for nothing more than itself.
What will they do when there's no-one left to assimilate?
She shakes her head, her ruminations taking a mental back seat as a green lance of energy almost hits the MacKenzie. Starships and converted runabouts alike are swarming all over the cube. The Wasp Factor they call it. But if they're the wasps, then this cube is the ultimate swatter. The port warp nacelle of the USS Odysseus blows in front of her, the explosion leaving a drifting burnt shell behind.
"Changing course to 132, mark 7," comes Kennedy's voice from her right.
The MacKenzie's phaserbanks are running hot, way too hot for Tasha's liking. The energy expenditure will start becoming a problem soon. The hits the cube is taking are incredible in number, but seem to be limited in their effect. The likelyhood of the Borg's approach to sector zero-zero-one being stopped is decreasing by the minute.
There's only one real chance. And Tasha hopes against hope that they can fluke this. "Kennedy, does that hole look big enough to you?"
He looks hard to their left. The USS Challenger and USS Saratoga are concentrating on a hole that they've managed to punch into the cube's hull. The damage is regenerating before them, but both ships seem determined to keep the wound open. This could be their chance. "Just about. But if it starts closing up any quicker..."
"Do it!" Tasha tells him.
"I'm taking us in," Kennedy says.
"I'm going on record to say I don't like this. I don't like this one bit." Parker's voice quickens from her engineering console as the hole surrounded by corrupted metal looms in front of them.
"Five seconds." There's a shriek as metal scrapes against metal, but the damage is only superficial. "Three... two... one... we're in," Kennedy reports.
Tasha looks all around. She can see walkways, alcoves, enclosed structures. A pulsating green glow flows through almost everything. For the most part there's enough room for the MacKenzie to manoever without hitting anything. Tasha knows from intel gathered on previous away-team missions that the levels are so widely spaced for their own smaller craft to navigate through. It would be inefficient for a vessel of this size to stay and assimilate an otherwise conquered world, so smaller scoutcraft would probably descend to finish them off personally while the cube ploughed on to the next target.
That was the thought anyway. The Vulcans came up with that one, expecting a cybernetic race to follow logic, even if it was twisted.
For an emotionless cyborg species, the Borg seem to possess a supreme confidence. As long as you didn't pose a personal and direct threat to them, drones seemed content to let you stroll around their vessels unhindered. A lot of intel had been gathered. They'd found out that there was no central power-core, but several working together, to create redundancy should one or more be taken out. So that wasn't going to be the way to bring them down.
There had to be a single source which connected the Borg though, which organised and instructed the drones. The Borg essentially constituted a single will, but where did that will come from if no single drone had the capacity to formulate one? Take out that will, cut it out like a malignant tumour and the drones would no longer be able to function.
That was the plan anyway. But finding that source would've been like looking for a strand of hay in a mountain of needles... if it wasn't for the inside connection they have.
"Yar to Enterprise," she says, hoping that the continuous cycling of their communications bandwidth will still be picked up.
"Enterprise here," comes Acting Captain Data's voice.
"We're inside the cube, but I don't know how long the Challenger and Saratoga will be able to keep that hole open for us. Is Captain Picard coherent yet?"
"Standby," Data says, sitting in the command chair on the Bridge. He taps his badge. "Doctor Crusher, what is Captain Picard's condition?"
"I've extracted 80% of the outer implants, but his vital signs are not good. I don't know if I can go any further without killing him," Beverly reports, tension in her voice.
"Does the Captain understand yet what information we require?"
A gasp escapes Picard's lips as he stands in the medical alcove. The contortions of his face convey a roadmap of torture.
"I don't even know if he realises where he is, Commander, he's-"
"NO!" Picard croaks. His head judders as he faces Beverly. "Bev... erly."
"Jean-Luc!"
Picard twists his face in pain. "Inside... calling to me..." He looks at Beverly with sudden clarity. "Destroy her link!"
Tasha nods as the instructions make their way over the comms. "Understood. Proceeding to those co-ordinates now."
"That puts us in pretty deep," Kennedy says warily.
"We've got no other choice," Tasha tells him as the runabout turns and heads further into the cube. The MacKenzie works its way through the maze on silent running, eventually arriving outside a large closed off chamber.
"Is it in there?" Kennedy asks.
"What are the sensors getting?"
Parker checks her screen and touches the panel a few times. "I can't get an accurate reading. There's some kind of shielding in place even our improved sensors can't get through."
"I'm going to have to go in there and plant the explosive," Tasha says finally. She gets up from her seat and grabs a compression phaser rifle, then carefully takes the warhead out of its mag-container. "Beam me over," she declares, going to the platform.
Parker looks nervously at her. "Good luck, Commander."
Tasha nods as the Ensign activates the transporter.
Rematerialising in a corridor, she quickly looks left and right. No drones. Ahead of her lies a door leading into the central chamber. She runs over, looking over her shoulder every couple of seconds. Just before she gets to the door a drone suddenly swings around a corner behind her. She swings the rifle up and pulls the trigger. Sparks fly from the drone as the beam hits. But another turns the corner just as it falls. Tasha is quick on the trigger, but they're appearing faster than they fall. Three are slowly advancing on her by the time the rifle's beam hits adapted shielding.
"Shit!" She powers the rifle up to full and turns it on the door, melting a hole in it. Running, she leaps through the hole into the chamber.
And there it stands. Innocent looking, but the hub of the Borg's collective link. The amplifier which allows all cubes to maintain contact over such vast distances. And more importantly maintains contact with the will of the Queen. It had been a revelation, but made sense that a hive or hivemind would have a Queen to control it.
Tasha runs over to the amplifier and sets the warhead for a delayed detonation. "Say goodbye to your Queen," she whispers as she attaches it to the column. She turns round and sees several drones have followed her inside. The leadmost one is barely twenty metres away. She reaches underneath her rifle and activates the quantum phase rotator. If torpedoes could be fitted with them, Starfleet didn't see any reason why the same couldn't be done with handheld weapons. Only the heavy compression rifles carried them at the moment though. Tasha was warned not to waste this advantage, but it's now or never.
She fires a continuous stream, the drones exploding in a shower of sparks and electrical fire. She runs back to the door, but sees more drones beyond it and her rifle is showing as nearly empty. With the last of its power, Tasha shoots at the ceiling, bringing it down and blocking the drones' path. It won't for long, but hopefully long enough to get the hell out of here. She isn't sure if the shielding around this room will interfere with the transporter's confinement beam, even at this relatively close proximity, but she's got nothing to lose now. If she has to die, she'd rather have her particles scattered by transporter than be assimilated. Smacking her badge, she transmits to the MacKenzie. "Beam me up, now!"
"There's too much interference, I can't punch through," Parker calls outs.
"Rerouting power to the transporters," Kennedy says, manipulating the controls. The platform immediately starts to whine, putting a humanoid figure together bit by bit. It takes a lot longer that it should, but eventually the figure becomes recognisable.
As the last vestiges fade away, the reconstituted Tasha immediately runs to her chair and checks the chronometer. "Let's go, we've barely got two minutes before detonation," she yells. Lieutenant Kennedy fires the impulse engines and the runabout speeds off.
Striding forth from a quickly dissipating column of light, a drone approaches Parker. Tasha whips round, grabs her empty rifle again and rams the butt of it into the drones head before it can grab the engineer. She smashes the weapon against the drone again and again until it stumbles back and falls. Reaching down, she grasps its nutrient cables, but the drone snaps its hand around her throat. Coughing she tugs on the cables, feeling them giving way, but can't quite rip them from their grips.
Kennedy leaps up from his seat and grabbing a spanner brings it down on the drone's face, smashing the eyepiece. He drives it down again, heavier this time, pushing through the jagged metal and into the eye socket behind. The drone shudders and loosens its grip on Tasha. She gasps for breath, then yanks hard on the cables. They tear open, spewing forth milky liquid as the drone spasms violently, then lies still.
"Someone help me over here," Parker yells in a panic. She's at Kennedy's navigation console, struggling to control the MacKenzie's flightpath around the twists and turns in this maze.
Kennedy drops the spanner and relieves her, his fingers flying over the console at an impressive speed. Tasha takes her Tactical seat once more. "Borg sphere closing," Kennedy reports.
"I see it," Tasha calls, firing dorsal phasers at it, more as a distracting manoever than anything else. She notes the fluctuation in the shields that must have given that one drone its shot. Kennedy had emptied their reserves and then some to get her aboard. She does what she can to patch the fluctuation as the runabout and sphere play cat and mouse at several hundred miles an hour.
"How long do we have?" Parker exclaims as the hole in the cube's exterior becomes visible again.
"Enough," Tasha replies, but she doesn't know for sure. This is going to be touch and go.
Kennedy's flying manages to evade most of the sphere's fire, but the runabout has been rocked several times. The latest hit ruptures a main plasma conduit. As the cabin starts filling up with acrid smoke, Parker runs over to patch it up. "Ten seconds," Kennedy yells.
A muffled, but loud explosion is heard from behind them. Christ, this is going to be close!
Smashing through the exterior of the cube, where the hole wasn't quite large enough, the MacKenzie leaps back out into the lightshow that is system Wolf 359, just as the chasing wall of flame engulfs the sphere on their tail. The flames dissipate fast in the cold, hard vacuum.
At first, nothing seems to have changed. But then it's noticed that the cube's regeneration efforts are slowing down, and in places already halted. The Starfleet onslaught renews as word goes round that the MacKenzie has made its strike. The Borg's return-fire becomes uncoordinated. Without the will of their Queen guiding them, they no longer have the capacity to make collective decisions.
A squadron of ships led by the USS Venturer swoop in, meticulously taking out each pinpointed phaser array. The tide is turning.
And then... catastrophe!
What no-one could know, not even Picard, was that there was a failsafe built into every cube. In the unlikely event of being compromised and cut-off from the rest of the collective, a self-destruct mechanism would automatically activate.
"Are you reading this?" Tasha asks.
"I am, but I wish I wasn't," Kennedy replies. "Permission to get us the hell outta here, Commander."
"You don't need my permission, Mike. Go!"
It seems some other ships have also spotted the buildup as they start breaking off their attack, but for many it's far too late. With a cataclysmic explosion, the entire cube fragments, the force of energy involved ripping subspace wide open. What ships aren't flashfried are being pulled towards a new hole in space.
More warning alarms go off as the shockwave careers into the MacKenzie. The entire runabout is shaken like a rag-doll.
Tasha looks at the ship's status. "We're not going to pull away on impulse. Go to warp, we'll rendezvous with the Enterprise later."
Kennedy shakes his head. "Love to, but it's not working!"
Parker runs back to her console. "The shockwave has collapsed our warp-field. There isn't enough power left to get it back," she reports helplessly.
The MacKenzie's acceleration slows and stops. Then with increasing speed, it starts reversing towards the hole, unable to combat its irresistible pull. The threesome watch horrified as starship after starship collapses into a single point of light at the event horizon.
"We're going to die." Parker looks as if she's barely holding back tears.
Tasha looks at her in sympathy. After what they've achieved, for it to end like this? They've taken the Borg, only for the Borg to take them from beyond the grave.
She stares at the hole as it starts to fill the window, then something clicks in her mind. Blinking, she moves over to Kennedy's flight control console and starts tapping instructions into it. The MacKenzie starts to tilt.
"With all due respect, Commander... what are you doing?" asks a wide-eyed Kennedy.
"I read somewhere. There's a single point of entry where the gravitational forces won't pull you apart," Tasha says hurriedly as she works. "Like being in the eye of a hurricane."
"As I recall, no-one's been crazy enough to try and prove that theory," Kennedy tells her.
"No time like the present," Tasha quips. "Unless you have a better idea?" She stops for a moment to look at him.
"Hell with it!" Kennedy says finally and joins Tasha. "Thusters at one-quarter, angle of entry decreasing to zero degrees. You sure you remember where to hit this thing?"
"Pretty sure!"
"Pretty sure? Christ!" Kennedy exclaims.
"Sixty seconds to entry. Kick impulse to 120%. We'll need the speed when we come out."
"Done!"
The MacKenzie hurtles towards the inky-blackness of the subspace tear. "Forty seconds to entry." Tasha winces as she sees the USS Hyperion collapse at the horizon. She hasn't seen the Enterprise yet and only hopes it was far enough away. "Thirty seconds."
Parker yelps as a piece of Borg debris slams into the side of the runabout, causing a series of explosions.
"Lena?" Kennedy asks, still working on their flightpath. "LENA?" he shouts when he gets no answer.
Tasha turns to see the engineering panel a smoking ruin. Ensign Lena Parker's body lies buried under rubble. Tasha closes her eyes, saying a quick prayer for her, then turns her attention back to the hole. She sees Kennedy's face screw-up as he also sees the body.
"Stay with me, Mike. I need you here," Tasha says firmly, acting as a verbal splash of cold water. Kennedy unclenches his fists and forces himself to keep working. "Ten seconds. Five... four... three... two... one..."
And the MacKenzie starts to stretch, longer and longer as it plows into the centre of the hole, before snapping out of reality altogether.