Disclaimer: This writer has no claim of Star Trek or any of its characters or names. He only claims ownership of his own ideas and story line.

Chapter 9

Back To The World Of The Living

When Nina Lansing opened her eyes it was like she had been living in a dream world. Her head hurt and she felt very weak in her legs and arms. She looked around and saw that she was a hospital or sick bay. The last thing she remembered was the battle at Wolf 359 on the Tombaugh. The Red Alert alarm went off and then everything after that seemed like a blur; or a bad nightmare.

Two men and a woman dressed in odd looking uniforms came in and stood beside her bed. The woman looked like someone in a position of authority. The man in the tan shirt and pants spoke to her:

Capt. McDaniel asked: Can you hear me? Nina then said: Yes! Where am I? Capt. McDaniel said: You are in sick bay onboard the Hancock. I am Captain McDaniel, this is my first officer Commander Marsha Williams and this is one of our ship's doctors, Dr. Boyd.

Nina asked: Hancock? I am on a construction vessel? McDaniel snorted and said: No, you are on the United States Navy's Flagship.

This shocked her because she began to think that she had somehow gone back in time. She said: "United States Navy? Can you please tell me what year this is?"

Captain McDaniel said " It is the year 2402, why do you ask?" Nope, the year was right, maybe a little late, but this was definitely off from what she remembered.

She asked "can you please tell me what has happened to me? I don't remember a whole lot." The captain spoke to her and said "you don't remember saying that you are Borg?" Nina's eyes widened welled up with tears. She said "What…I said I am a Borg am I a Borg now?" The doctor could tell that she was genuinely agitated by her vitals readings on the monitor above her bed. He spoke to the Captain and said "I think she is scared." McDaniel told her to calm down that she was no longer part of that. He informed her about the Nano virus that she had been given. She asked "when did Star Fleet come up with that?" "Star Fleet?" McDaniel asked…"what's that?" Nina said "Star Fleet is what gives you your orders. It is based in San Francisco."

Captain McDaniel and Commander Williams gave each other a puzzling look, and then he said "I've never heard of Star Fleet, and I have been in the Navy since I was 19. Furthermore I take my orders from CTF." "What is CTF" Nina asked? Marsha Williams broke in and said "CTF stands for Command Task Force. It is based in San Francisco, California. It commands the entire fleet just as NORAD commands Earth's Defense Forces.

These people sure did talk funny, Nina thought. CTF, NORAD, United States Navy. She asked "What kind of ship am I on?" Williams replied "You are on a star carrier. The newest and largest in the Navy. It has Faster than Light propulsion."

"Oh my," she thought "they are just now getting around to warp drive?" How effective could they be against the Borg. "You say this is a star carrier, so what does it carry?" "It carries fighters and shuttle craft" the captain replied. "Fighters? What kind of Fighters?" she asked. At that moment Dr. Boyd broke in and said "that is quiet enough she needs her rest." He injected something in her IV and she went back to sleep.

When Nina awoke she began to look around the room she was in. She could hear people talking, someone was laughing and two other people were talking in a low voice. She looked at her hands and arms. They were milky white like someone who was dead or in bad need of a tan. She could see many of her veins, and she could see where implants had been. As she sat there looking at them, she heard a voice say "You should recover nicely you know." She looked up and it was Dr. Boyd. His smile seemed to calm her nerves. He then touched the spikes on her forehead and said "but I don't know how to get rid of these." She chuckled and said "I tried to file them off when I was little, but my mother stopped me telling me it would hurt. Dr. Boyd began inspecting the spikes and said "I've never met a human with a forehead like this." Nina said "that's because I am not fully human, I am only half human. I am also half Ktarian." She continued "my mother is human, but my father is Ktarian." She explained "they are both…or rather were…Star Fleet officers serving aboard the Potemkin when they met, fell in love and got married.

Captain McDaniel came in and saw Nina awake and said "Good, you're awake! How are you feeling?" "I'm fine, I think" Nina replied. "Are you up for a short visit?" McDaniel asked. Nina thought for a couple of seconds and said "sure." The captain pulled up a chair and sat down and said "You asked what a star carrier is and what we carry," he said "I'll tell you what, you tell me all that you know about these Borg and I will tell you everything you want to know about the Hancock. Nina chuckled, and McDaniel asked "what's so funny?" Nina said "nothing, it's just that the last ship that I knew of named Hancock was a construction ship which had limited weaponry." McDaniel looked and said "well I don't know anything about that, but there have only been four other ships to bear the name Hancock in the US Navy, one was a 19th century frigate, the second was a troop transport, the third was a WWII air craft carrier and now this one. And there was a Spruance Class destroyer that had the name USS John Hancock in the 20th century. But none of them had limited weaponry of their day. So what can you tell me about these Borg?

Nina thought and said "Starfleet first encountered them about 40 years ago when an entity called Q sent the Enterprise into the Delta Quadrant. That alerted the Borg to Earth and its allies. Since then the Borg have mercilessly invaded the Alpha Quadrant, even going back in time and trying to stop the flight of the Phoenix by Zephram Cochran in 2063. The only reason Cochran was able to launch the Phoenix and give us warp drive was because the Enterprise followed them back in time and foiled their plans."

McDaniel looked at his first officer and said "Zephram Cochran never launched the Phoenix because a plane from the Eastern Alliance destroyed it. Most of his warp drive plans were saved, but not all. When we tried to use them on the Forrestal, something went wrong and killed around 300 people. We benched faster than light propulsion until we came up with the Albecurri Engine which is what we use now. The Enterprise is just about finished, but not quite; it will be the second ship to have FTL propulsion."

Nina looked around and thought that maybe she had ended up in some kind of alternate universe. Maybe she was in a universe where Earth did not advance as it did in the one she came from. This began to worry her because she didn't know how being in an alternate universe would affect her, and she didn't know if she would ever be able to go home again. She had heard of the mirror universe theory, and had read how Captain James Kirk had ended up in one. She asked: "Have you ever heard of the 'mirror universe' theory?" McDaniel smiled and replied "We've heard of it, but we've never had any proof of it. Why do you ask?" "Because" Nina sighed "that is the only possibility that I can think of for our different accounts of Cocharin's Phoenix in 2063. We had one starship Captain, a James Kirk, who experienced…" "James Kirk" Marsha Williams broke in "did you say Captain James Kirk, a starship Captain in 2262?" Nina looked puzzled and quietly said "Yes." Marsha asked "have you ever heard of a story of this Captain Kirk intervening in an effort by one of his own people who were trying to help a people called the Comm overcome a people called the Yang?" Nina had read the account, it was classified as "Incident at Omega 4." She answered "Yes, I have read the account." Marsha then asked "did this account mention a tribal leader by the name of Cloud Williams?" Nina responded in the affirmative, and Marsha said "that man was my grand-father. We are the Yang."

How could this be, Kirk's account said that when they left the people were nothing more than savages and that was a little more than a hundred years ago. She said "how is such possible? When Kirk left the Yang and Comm were a little more than savage people with no technology, and that was only 140 years ago?" McDaniel asked "how long does your account of earth say it took to develop faster than light drive?" Nina thought and said "well, we developed it in 2063, but we had ships in space far earlier than that." "And so did we" McDaniel broke in. Up until the year 2014 we had space shuttles in space and were building a space station. However, in 2014 we went through WWIII, then in 2190 WWIV began and it ended in 2262. We weren't ignorant, we were just beaten down by war. After the war ended, and governments reestablished and nations rebuilt, we took the technology that we had in the past and started from there. We started looking to space in 2262, and it didn't take all that long before we were able to put a man back in space. In 2262 there were 3 billion people left on earth and once we got organized it didn't take any time at all for technology to re-emerge. It has taken 100 years for us to get to FTL on our ships and we only have one active FTL drive ship, and one other that is nearly finished.

Nina laid there and thought and suddenly realized that she was talking to a people that she had only read about. She quickly said "our people have often wondered how your planet turned out, I guess now I know." "But about the Borg, they are a race that we don't know anything about their origins, but they are part machine and part biological. They don't procreate, so they conquer other cultures and assimilate them to their own." She continued "I was assimilated at Wolf 359 when the Tombaugh was part of a forty ship fleet that attacked a Borg cube." It destroyed nearly every ship. It assimilated the Tombaugh and took it back to the Hive along with everyone on board.

"Each drone has shields" she said, "that modulate. You can kill them until they adapt then you have to find a different method." "They all speak at the same time, think at the same time, think the same thing. They are in perfect unison. There is no individualism in the Hive." "They really are a hard enemy to overcome. So how did you do it?"

McDaniel said "the Captain of the Saratoga destroyed her own ship. When 8 nuclear reactors all went off at once it caused an explosion that nothing could handle. We can't even get close to ground zero because of the radiation. Dr. Osborn came in and said "that's quite enough, she needs her rest." "Of course" McDaniel said "I need to be on the bridge anyway, we are about to get underway to go home, but I'll see you later."