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The Voyager Exile.

When he noticed the smile on Kathryn's face, Chakotay realised she had an idea in her mind, but he had no idea if the idea passing through her mind was a good one or a bad one. As he looked at her beautiful face, Chakotay wondered what she planned to do. He had noticed that ever since he had met her, she was definitely smart enough to twist any situation to their advantage. It looked like this situation would go the same way.

Ever since the pair of them had become lovers, probably one of the best moments in his life. Chakotay had always treated the women in his life with respect and decency, and even when he had first met Kathryn during that mess with the Kazon and the Caretaker when the powerful alien, and she had surprised him by suggesting an alliance to help one another instead of being at each other's throats though he'd been surprised because a fleeter was being generous, he had treated Janeway with guarded respect.

But now things were different. He had come to know her, and although she had come across him at first as a typical, rule-abiding Starfleet officer, he had quickly learnt she was quick on her feet, but it was rare when he had an idea that made sense. Something about the star up ahead had inspired something in her.

It only took Chakotay a moment to guess what it was...

"What do you have in mind?" he asked, curiously; he might have his own theories about what his lover had in mind, but no-one ever said Kathryn Janeway sometimes made sense.

But Janeway turned her attention straight to Tom. "Mr Paris, alter your heading. Take us to the star, but head close to the magnetic instability."

Paris turned around in his seat, his expression tired but still alert. He gazed at his captain with tired surprise, but before he could ask what she had in mind, but one look at her expression made him swivel around in his chair. Chakotay could not blame him, her expression had shifted from a devious smirk to a dangerous glare.

"What do you have in mind?" Chakotay repeated.

Janeway turned to face him. "We're going to bring some sunshine into the Borg's lives," she said before she tapped her comm badge. "Janeway to Torres."

"Torres here."

"B'elanna, we're heading close to the star, towards a magnetic instability. Can you modify the deflector dish to amplify it to destroy the Borg Cube chasing us?" Janeway asked desperately while she mentally calculated how long it would take to modify the deflector dish and whether B'elanna could do it or not.

To her side, Chakotay wasn't particularly surprised by the proposed tactic. As a means of escape, it was risky enough, but against the Borg…

When he was fighting for the Maquis in the DMZ, Chakotay had once led a small group of Cardassian ships into a star, knowing full well the small Maquis ship was incapable of taking on the more powerful Cardassian vessels which had the means of blasting his small ship to pieces.

Desperate, Chakotay had taken his ship close to the star, but his ship was not powerful enough to use Janeway's current tactic. Instead, he had simply made it look like his ship was drifting close to the star while attempting a low power slingshot around the sun. The Cardassians had fallen for it, and he had engaged the warp engines and dragged a large chunk of solar matter in his wake. The Cardassian ships had been destroyed in the blast.

Chakotay had little idea if the tactic would be enough against the Borg Cube. But it was the only one they had.

A sigh came over the line. "Captain, I could have had a bit more time-," the chief engineer said, but Janeway spoke over her. "I know, but I've just had this idea. Can you do it?"

Another sigh. "I suppose so, captain," B'elanna replied. "But I want to check over the deflector systems. We took quite a lot of damage down here, but I think the deflector should be okay."

Janeway quietly regretted pushing her crew like this, but they had little choice. In the meantime, she looked around the bridge and wasn't surprised when she saw that everyone was surprised by her plan. But Janeway was not in the mood to justify it because she knew it would work. The power of a solar flare was extreme enough at the best of times, but during a battle, it could be used to not just overwhelm the shields of an enemy ship.

It had been used before.

During the Klingon Civil War, a captain of a Bird of Prey in the KDF, named Kurn, had lured two other Birds of Prey loyal to the House of Duras close to a star and had triggered a solar flare when he had gone to warp. The two Klingon ships were both destroyed, but the potential of using a star to destroy an enemy ship was a basic strategy.

Kathryn had read that account of Kurn's strategy by chance. The Klingon Civil War was an easy subject to get information about especially for a high ranking officer like herself. She had read those accounts after the war had ended, and information about the Romulan's aid for the Duras had come out.

But the next time she had heard about a solar flare being used was when the Enterprise had fought against the group of Borg who had retrieved Commander Data's insane and malfunctioning android brother, Lore. The Enterprise had been trying to outrun the more powerful Borg ship, and they had taken refuge near a star. With the Enterprise's metaphasic shielding failing and the hull temperature and the radiation from the star threatening to overwhelm the ship and her crew, the Enterprise was forced to trigger a solar eruption.

The idea was still sound, but her method would be different.

Janeway was shaken out of her thoughts when the comm line chirped. "Torres to bridge," B'elanna's voice came over the line. The moment she heard the other woman speak, Janeway knew she was not going to like what the other woman had to say; she had known B'elanna long enough to know there was bad news.

"What's wrong, B'elanna?" she replied tersely.

"The navigational deflector systems took some damage during the attack. The dish itself is okay, that's not the problem. The problem is if we try this, the deflector could be burnt out. I was afraid of this. But I think I can modify the phasers instead to do the same thing while we go to warp and trigger a solar eruption from there."

Janeway had always been amazed by B'elanna's technical acumen. To be frank she sometimes found it strange the other woman was able to think of things that could get them out of trouble. In truth, B'elanna took what she knew about the crisis going on, and tried to think of a way out of it, but Janeway had a feeling, telling from B'elanna's tone, she knew what she was speaking about due to experience. It wouldn't surprise her in the least if B'elanna during her Maquis days had followed Kurn's tactic. It wasn't a difficult tactic to perform, but Janeway hoped the Borg didn't have countermeasures…

They needed this to work.

"Get it done," she ordered at last and she looked over at Chakotay. She wasn't surprised he looked surprised she was even considering using this type of tactic since she had never used anything like it in the past but knowing it would help them with the Borg.

Sitting down she leaned over the space in between their chairs and whispered, "When did you use this tactic?"

"Years ago, just after the Maquis had been founded. B'elanna and I were part of the same crew. We lured in a small fleet of Cardassian ships into a star's corona, making it look like we were drifting towards it by chance, and then we went to warp. We destroyed the ships," Chakotay replied.

Janeway shrugged her shoulders. Personally she had never liked the Cardassians - rescuing that injured soldier didn't count - but truthfully in a battle like that, she would like to think she would have used whatever dirty tactic she could think of to defeat them, and she was doing it now with an enemy who made the Cardassian Union look like they weren't even trying.

"I hope this works," Janeway replied quietly, but she was overheard by Chakotay.

The Maquis first officer knew from bitter experience many of his new lover's ideas were sometimes badly thought through. Sometimes he wondered if Kathryn even had any idea how her plans would work out while she was trying desperately to get them back home. Sometimes she had come up with plans that were evidence of her ability to think on her feet. The insane plan she had come up with to make the alliance with the Collective was an example, although she had in the past come up with ideas and plans that were better thought out, and they had won through sheer luck.

But ever since the damage Voyager had sustained since that attack where the warp core had been damaged and B'elanna had been forced to practically gut the entire system out for all it was worth in order to get an idea the damage and what urgently needed repairing, he knew Kathryn had been trying to wean herself off of making those insane, rash plans and taking things slowly.

However, this plan was a desperate one. He could hear it with her last words, she was worried that she was going to be responsible for their deaths or their assimilation. Thinking about assimilation made Chakotay shiver, and he knew he was only thinking that way because of everyone in the Alpha Quadrant knew about the Borg's methods into acquiring cultures and technologies, but the idea of everything that made him who he was being torn away from him, his mind being added into a Collective mind, unable to interact or even to think for himself while his body was reduced to a zombie state…. It made him feel ill, and he decided if the Borg did board Voyager, he would kill himself. He would never allow himself to become a drone, especially after experiencing a collective mind when Riley and Orum fitted him with the neural transceiver which they'd placed in his spine so they could heal those injuries he had sustained when he and Kaplan had arrived on that planet. At first, the experience had been amazing since it had allowed him to experience life from the perspective of others, and they had become closer as people… Only for Riley and the other desperate members of the cooperative to foul things up when they'd hijacked him, forced him to shoot B'elanna, and endanger the lives of the crew with a reactivated Borg Cube.

He never wanted to go through that ever again, and he wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Listening to Kathryn whisper that sentence… It was worrying because it showed him she was trying to change her ways, but she was also a bit more with it now since she was likely worried her ideas about how to fight both Species 8472 and the Borg might cause serious damage to Voyager, and it might also result in the loss of a large number of the crew. Kathryn and he had sworn to get their full crew home, and while it was actually impossible to do since they were travelling through space no-one in the Federation had ever reached before, and there would be attacks and aliens would be gunning for them, either for their organs, their technology, or their ship, only a few members of the crew had died - only one or two at a time, though that was nothing compared to just how many lives had been lost since the Caretaker had lassoed them into this godforsaken quadrant where there were no rules and they were on their own.

As they approached the sun, Tom's console chirped in alarm - Chakotay knew that whatever it was the pilot had picked up just now was not going to be good; although he hadn't had the exact best impression of Paris when they had first met, and he had considered him to be nothing more than a waster who was just looking for someone with a large wallet to pay his bar bills and to cover up the debts he was accumulating, he knew Paris was proficient enough to tell when things were not good.

"Captain," Tom said, "I'm picking up three other Borg Cubes, moving right towards us."

"Damn," Kathryn whispered before she asked in a louder voice, "How soon before they come close?"

"We're entering the star's gravitational field now, but the other three Cubes are much further behind our first one," Tom reported, "but they are going to warp one just to catch up. They've used a warp pulse only, they're not travelling in a warp field."

Janeway heard, and ignored, the sounds of gasps around the bridge. There was nothing wrong with going to warp in space, but in a solar system where there was a collection of stellar bodies like planets, moons, and asteroids, it was a problem. Warp travel meant the ship would be travelling at very high speeds, making the chance of a collision extremely likely. There were also the trace elements laden inside asteroid and meteorite dust; the navigational deflector was designed to prevent those dust particles from allowing one of those particles of dust to hit Voyager when travelling at such high speed the impact alone would have enough momentum to punch a hole into the ship.

All Starfleet cadets and anyone who had spent a good portion of their lives working and living out in space quickly learnt of the old stories of how the United Earth starships and cargo vessels which had been launched before Jonathan Archer had sat down with the local races, and formed the beginnings of the Federation, and received some serious damage to their hulls because they had travelled deeper and deeper into the solar system so fast they all suffered some damage. Janeway had lost count of the number of hulls she had seen during her history courses at the Academy with breaches in them caused by grains of dust.

But the biggest risk ships faced when they went to warp inside of a solar system was the gravity of the different bodies. In the vicinity of a planet, the gravity would distort the warp field, though it was possible to use the gravity to slingshot the warp ship away from the gravitational mass of the planet. In busy systems where there would be sub-warp ships moving around, a warp field would destroy anything smaller. For a ship like Cochrane's Phoenix, which had luckily only travelled a few million kilometres away from Earth in order to send up the flare to the Vulcans to spark the journey where Earth would rise out of the ashes of the Third World War, and move into a more peaceful future, it hadn't been a problem; Cochrane had not needed to travel too far away from Earth in order to attract the Vulcans' attention by breaking the light barrier.

But other the years there had been a few accidents, and that had led to more advanced computers to help navigators and pilots ensure they didn't crash into anything that could potentially cause severe damage to the ship.

While it was amazing the Borg were using warp to chase Voyager into the star's corona, Janeway and the others had to admit that the Collective probably knew what they were doing; they had been assimilating and adding similar technologies to their own for so long they were probably able to be more precise with their sensors than Voyager was. The upside was it was clear the Cubes were not taking any chances. They knew they couldn't survive if they crashed into the sun, though they would probably not make such a dangerous mistake.

They're being cautious, Janeway realised to herself. They have either been severely damaged like us, and they're forced to travel slowly, or they don't want to be snagged by the star's gravity.

Either way, she didn't care because Voyager was now close to the star, and they were close to the magnetic instability. "Prepare the phaser," she ordered.

"Aye, captain," Tuvok replied as he got to work.

"Torres to bridge. We're ready now Captain," B'elanna called up; Janeway closed her eyes in relief, delighted by B'elanna's excellent sense of timing.

"Fire when ready," she ordered.

On the viewscreen, which was immediately set up to show the sensor return picked up from the phaser strike against the sun, they watched as the phaser beam lanced the surface of the sun.

"Mr Paris, prepare to go to maximum warp," she said.

"Aye, captain," Tom replied, getting to work at once; from where she was sitting at the command chair, Janeway could clearly see for herself he was setting the destination systems for random, but she wasn't going to say anything. This kind of manoeuvre was tricky enough as it was, and besides, they could alter their course again later. If this worked.

"Mr Tuvok, is the Borg nearby yet?" Janeway asked.

"Scanning…. the Cubes are closing directly behind us, Captain."

"Align our warp field for the instability," Janeway ordered once she'd acknowledged what her friend had just reported, "standby to engage on my mark….. Mark!"

The view screen had been a blend of black from the vista of the local space and the bright yellow-gold from the glare of the sun, but the moment she had given her order, the vista charged as the warp field stretched local space and the subspace layers, and the ship jumped into warp, immediately breaking the warp barrier in a flash of blue-white light.

The Borg Cubes had been closing on the Starfleet ship as it had headed into the star's gravitational pull. If the Borg were capable of individuality and they had the ability to question, or make guesses, they would have asked themselves or one another what motive the crew of a starship would have in hiding in a star's gravity, or they may have even deduced what the Federation ship they had easily identified as the Intrepid-class ship that had been detected some time ago when its probe had been assimilated by another Cube was trying to do.

Fortunately for the crew of Voyager, the Borg did not bother with questioning the unpredictabilities of emotion or individuality. The Borg, however, was desperate. Their long-range scans had indicated that this ship had somehow managed to attack Species 8472… and prevail.

The Borg were desperate to win in their conflict against the extra-dimensional life form they had unwittingly unleashed upon the galaxy. They were desperate; they were losing a lot of ground, and much of their territory to the aliens. Millions of Borg drones were being destroyed, though the mind of the Collective group mind did not really care about their loss considering the group consciousness would contain all of their experiences forever, so it was irrelevant if their bodies were destroyed in the process. The assimilation of the USS Voyager would allow them to understand what this weapon was, and it would also have an influx of new drones who would add to their own.

However, the Borg Collective was more than aware their ships were heavily damaged. Many of them had barely managed to survive the war as it was, and they were still suffering from severe damage. They went in after Voyager, but their ships were still regenerating; the exotic energy the extra-dimensional aliens used for their beam weapons was incredibly difficult for the Collective to deal with, and the repairs took time.

The Borg were aware Voyager was moving directly over the magnetic instability on the star, but they didn't question it nor could they do anything about it since they were still quite a distance from it and the ship. They were aware of Voyager firing its phaser at the magnetic instability, they couldn't do anything about it, and they didn't question it. When Voyager went to warp over the instability as the phaser beam became even more unstable and it created a solar flare, the Borg Cubes tried to escape but the attempt was futile as the solar flare surged upwards from the instability on the star, destroying the ships instantly after overloading and overwhelming the shields.

"Captain's log:- Stardate 51001.2

We have managed to escape the Borg and Species 8472 on the same day, but the damage the ship has sustained is nothing compared to the threat now posed to us by the Collective. They have almost certainly found out we have a weapon against their new enemy, something they cannot produce. The next time we may not be so lucky. For the time being, I am meeting with the senior staff to decide on ways of preventing destruction… or worse, assimilation as we try to survive out here."

Looking around the meeting room table while she sat at the head because she was physically too tired to stand, Janeway was quiet for a moment as she thought about the recent events. Her mind was also fixed on her own log recording. The last attack had made her wise up, made her see the Borg were not only aware of their weapon, but they were going to assimilate them if they caught up with them.

She wasn't sure if she was looking forward to this meeting or not. She didn't like the thought of going over old ground by coming up with plans, but because they hadn't been able to make the old ones work didn't mean anything new wouldn't.

"We have managed to survive both the Borg and Species 8472," she said when she realised she wasn't going to be getting anywhere by thinking about her log and its implications. "I'm open to other options on how we can protect ourselves."

"I've been thinking about that, Captain," Tom said, leaning forward in his chair as he took in the rest of the senior staff, "we could try something like the Crimson Death."

"The what?" Chakotay asked, his brow furrowed in confusion as he looked at Tom with puzzlement in his eyes.

"The Crimson Death. It's a weapon in some 20th-century comics - I can't remember the details, but basically, it showed a kind of alternate timeline where humans on Earth had been more proactive in primitive spaceflight, and missions into the solar system were more of a reality. Anyway, they also encountered aliens, and one of them used something called the Crimson Death. It is basically like acid which works in the vacuum, an atmosphere or in water. When it makes contact with the hull of a ship, it eats away at the hull, and explosive decompression takes care of the rest. I was thinking we could use the same principle of spreading the nanoprobes out into space, let them interact with the outer layers of the bio-ships and let them do the work," Tom explained.

Janeway thought about it, her scientific mind going over the practicalities and the potential drawbacks. "It sounds…interesting, Tom," she admitted slowly, "but how would we spread the nanoprobes around a bio-ship?"

Tom looked down, showing that he hadn't thought about that, but Harry came up with the idea. "What if we put the probes into a small canister, and either blow it out into space with an airlock, or we could transport the canister near a bio-ship."

B'elanna shook her head. "No. The bio-ships move too rapidly. Our transporters wouldn't be able to get a positive lock to beam it close enough."

Harry looked deflated the idea wasn't practical, but then he whispered, "We need something just as strong as an antimatter explosion.

Janeway sighed. "Our problem is while the high-yield weapon works, I don't want to be dependent on just one. I want us to have several other weapons capable of fighting the aliens."

"What?" Chakotay asked as he looked around the room.

But Harry didn't have a clue, but B'elanna did. "A nuclear explosion."

Janeway looked at the chief engineer seriously. "Could we use a nuclear blast to spread the nanoprobes?" she asked, her mind racing as she thought about using the nuclear blast to spread the probes outwards, allowing the nanoprobes to increase in number by converting energy into matter with the same programming changes, but she didn't know just how robust the probes were.

"I think so," B'elanna replied slowly as her own mind raced, "I would need to check the nanoprobes over, see what kind of radiation they are vulnerable too; I doubt the bio-ships would have too many problems in a radioactive environment. They are just as much at home in our universe as well as they are in theirs, and our universe is full of different cosmic radiations. I'll have a look after the meeting."

"Good," Janeway replied, though she wondered how they would be able to create nuclear weapons capable of devastating the Species without them relying on their torpedoes. The problem with creating nuclear weapons was they required special raw materials to set them up, but more than that they were extremely dangerous; if one of them exploded on Voyager, the internal structural integrity system may not be enough to help, and many if not all of the crew would be killed. "But I'm still thinking about Tom's idea, about spreading the nanoprobes around; now I've had some time to think, I think we can use the transporter."

"How?" Tuvok, who had surprisingly silent as he listened asked her curiously. Janeway did wonder why Tuvok was being silent, but she decided to wait until later to figure it out.

"We store them inside canisters like was suggested. But when the bio-ships attack, we beam them as close to the bio-ship as possible, and the canister functions like a mini-transporter and transports the probes close by the ship."

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. "I think I see the idea," the hologram said, "the moment the canister is close to the bio-ship, it releases the nanoprobes in a cloud, transporting them into space."

"Exactly," Janeway smiled, but then her smile dimmed. "But what about the Borg? I doubt the same trick would work for them."

Tuvok moved in his chair. "Captain, some time ago, Starfleet Security came up with a projectile weapon known as the TR-116. It was designed to operate in energy-dampening fields, or radiogenic environments where an ordinary phaser would not work."

"A projectile weapon?" Harry repeated. "You mean it uses bullets?"

Tuvok looked surprised he needed to even explain the principle since everyone knew about such weapons. "I believe that is what I mean, Ensign," he said, "but the design is in the main computer. We could reproduce it, and modify it to work against the Borg."

"What if they adapt?" Chakotay asked.

Tuvok nodded in agreement. "I understand, but I was thinking of adapting the rifles ourselves with a micro-transporter that would dematerialise the bullets on the firing end, and then they would rematerialise close to the drones before they realised what was going on. I will admit the idea does come with potential drawbacks, but it may just work."

Janeway nodded. Personally, she was uncertain if the idea she had just listened to would actually work against the drones, but she had to admit the idea of using projectile weapons would be something she would need to see for herself. "Alright," she nodded, "assemble a team to research ways of ensuring the bullets to this weapon are not adapted too."

"Aye, captain," Tuvok nodded, his expression making it clear he was busily thinking about how one would go about adapting a hail of bullets against an army of drones without the Borg adapting.

There was not a shred of doubt in Janeway's mind the Borg would try to beam directly onto Voyager. They had just tried to follow them into a star for god's sake, and it was likely they had detected what Voyager had done before that Cube had chased them into the solar system where it was destroyed along with a few of their friends. The Borg Collective knew they had a weapon capable of fighting the aliens they were fighting in a war, so they were probably desperate to assimilate them.

Janeway had no intention of letting that happen to them. She had not spent the last three miserable, hard, but amazing years result in their assimilation. She wanted her crew to survive, and that was why she was holding this meeting in the first place.

The meeting went on for over three hours and in the end, all of the senior officers had come up with some radical ideas for defeating the Borg and Species 8472. Not all of the ideas were entered around weapons and defences, though there were a number of good ones. Harry Kim, in particular, had been thinking about his original, and truly nasty experience on the Cube where he had nearly met his end, and he had asked if maybe they could experiment with some kind of armour that mimicked the immune system of Species 8472 so the Borg would not be able to assimilate them.

The rest of the staff had to admit it was a good idea, and the Doctor promised to help them look into the possibilities.

In the realm of Fluidic Space, the aliens were telepathically monitoring their forces in normal space. The aliens were delighted with the progress of the war, and the losses the Borg had suffered as a result.

"We are nearly ready to implement the plan to shatter the Collective."

"Good. I look forward to hearing the screams, and the confusion of the Collective. What of our invasion plans?"

"We have despatched scouting parties into different parts of the galaxy. One race, known as the Voth, are millions of years older than the Borg. They believe they have proprietary rights over a large portion of this part of the galaxy, but what they think is irrelevant to us since we not 'endotherms' as they refer to warm-blooded races."

"Warm-blooded? What is that?"

"I do not know. It must be some form of stupidity in the other universe."

"When do we begin the attacks on other races?"

"Not until we have dealt with the Borg. We need to focus our efforts on them, and then we can begin finalising our plans. What do our scouts say about the other powers in this galaxy?"

"One portion of the galaxy is controlled by something known as "the Dominion." It is apparently controlled by a race of shapeshifters and is policed by a race of genetically-engineered warriors. We know where the shapeshifting race is located, we can destroy them in one go. Our strategists are currently working on the final plans…"

Until the next time...