The transporter glimmered for a moment, and then Colonel Kira, displaced from her own reality, was standing inside her fear.

As she had expected, the Borg vessel was currently not on what she termed, 'all-systems-go'. A few drones were pottering around, using glowing computer consoles or pressing their prosthetic arms into sockets, but the majority of them stood in their alcoves, quietly regenerating or working within the ship's computer. She glanced apprehensively at each of the drones and decided that they weren't going to launch an attack on her. "Kira to Defiant," she whispered, pressing her comm badge with two fingers. "Transport complete. The Borg aren't in battle mode: I think we're safe for now. Keep a lock on us at all times."

"Acknowledged, Colonel. Don't go spoiling the party for us. Sisko out."

She hoisted her hand phaser and looked to Worf, who was packing a long compression phaser rifle. Two very different weapons, but both effective against the monstrous cybernetic beings they hoped not to fight. "Okay. We stick together for now," she said to the Klingon, her Dax, and two security guards. "Take passives scans only, and don't shoot unless you're absolutely certain that they're after you. Let's move." Memories of reconnaissance missions and raids on Borg cubes came flooding back as four of them formed a defensive perimeter around Dax, who stood there with a tricorder. "This is fascinating," she said to herself. "We haven't taken readings like this before. The Alliance will…"

"The Alliance is on the other side of that rift, Dax," Kira snapped. Then she calmed herself. "Sorry. This whole parallel reality thing is a bit much to accept. Keep taking your readings; if we ever get home, I'm sure the Alliance will appreciate it."

And so they continued on, moving between the alcoves and avoiding the drones wherever possible. Rows of blank faces, monstrous fusions of cold metal and grey flesh. Their countenances revealed nothing, promised nothing, expected nothing. Kira imagined existence as a drone as being one big nothing. She tried not to look at their faces, instead turning her attention to the vacant halls and the eerie green and yellow lighting. It was hot in here (Thirty-nine-point-one degrees Celsius, her training reminded her), and it wasn't long before she began to sweat like an ice cube on a summer afternoon. Strange, she reflected. The drones aren't sweating. She risked a glance the closest Borg, and gasped when she saw distinctive ridges on the bridge of the nose. It was an assimilated Bajoran, probably from one of their smaller attack ships, now transformed into what appeared to be a science drone. She felt like she should offer a prayer to the Prophets or something similar, but after all she had been pulled through, somehow the Prophets didn't seem to be cutting it anymore. She had prayed to them — oh, how she had prayed! — but the war wasn't over. The Borg hadn't miraculously retreated back to the Delta Quadrant. A fleet of magical dreadnoughts hadn't popped out of the wormhole as a blessing from the Celestial Temple. It was disheartening, to say the least, and she often wondered how Kai Winn and the rest of her followers could remain true to the faith in such times as these.

"Kira?" asked Dax, and Nerys had to launch herself out of the ocean of memories. They remained at the edge of her mind, taking a little of her alertness away. "Kira? I think I know why the Borg haven't scanned the Defiant yet."

"What? Why?"

Dax peered at her tricorder screen to double-check her theory, then nodded. "It looks like they were damaged on the way through the rift. Their scopes are off-line, if my extrapolations are correct. The drones have all been focusing their repairs on sensor nodes." She shrugged. "They're blind."

"That explains the regeneration," said the colonel. "Okay. Kira to Defiant,"

"What is it, Colonel?"

"We know why the Borg are inactive. From what Dax tells me, they lost their sensors in the temporal passage. They're regenerating, but we don't know for how long."

Sisko, on the other end of the link, took a breath, then blew it out. "Can you give me an estimate on how long you've got?"

Kira glanced from Dax to the tricorder, and the Trill frowned a little. "Ballpark?" she said with an inquisitive look. Her Bajoran friend nodded in the affirmative, and Dax said, "An hour, maximum. We've probably got way less than that now."

"Did you hear that, sir?"

"I did. Do what you have to do, Colonel, because I'll be beaming you out in fifteen minutes. I'm not taking any risks. If that ship gets back to its home, you can bet your pips that it'll come back with a few of it's big brothers in tow."

But before she could say anything else, Kira was distracted by a low humming that interposed itself over the top of the usual background noises on the Borg ship. A few drones that had been standing in their alcoves lurched forward and turned their heads to study the away team. Worf and the security guards held up their weapons as the drones advanced on them. Kira felt a burst of adrenalin pump through her and she shouted, "Move!" On cue, they scattered down the corridor, followed by three Borg.

"The security grid is back on-line," Dax said unnecessarily.

"Captain!" Kira panted as she ran. "The regenerative cycle is over. They're active again. Emergency transport!"

"We can't, Colonel. The Borg shields are back on-line, and we can't lock onto you. We're trying to focus our sensors on your position: give us something to work with!"

"Acknowledged! Kira out!" She scrabbled around to pull her phaser from its holster and bring it to bear. She heard the methodical clanking of metal feet pounding on metal deck plates, and shivered as the image of the Bajoran drone rose unbidden from her sea of memory. Not like that. I'll kill us all before I'll serve them. Sisko said to give their sensors something to lock onto: she was going to find that something and exploit it. The Borg interceptor was positively buzzing with energy (even though it was a little bigger than the Defiant, it generated a lot of power), and there had to be something she could use to transmit a signal. "Dax, find me a transmitter of some kind," she called across the corridor. To her dismay, there wasn't much corridor left. Time to look for another way out.

"Searching," Dax replied.

"Open fire!" Worf shouted, and the warm air of the hallway was punctuated with phaser bolts. Two of the Borg drones fell, but the third generated a glowing body shield, and the energy blast washed over it like water off a duck's back.

"They have adapted. Remodulate weapons!" the Klingon growled.

Meanwhile, Dax looked up from her tricorder. "Got it," she said triumphantly, then moved to a wall console. "I might be able to hotwire these controls to send out a signal. I'll need time."

"How much time?" barked Kira.

The Trill hesitated, wincing as a Borg disruptor glow crashed into the wall behind her. "Fifteen minutes at the most."

Kira glanced back at the team, and noticed that their phasers were becoming increasingly useless. The Borg would soon compensate for the alternate (alternate for her, that is) universe designs and become impervious to their fire. "That's fifteen minutes too long. We need to get out of here, and fast!" She squeezed off two shots, and flinched when her target contorted in its alcove. The thought of killing innocents always burned a hole in the core of her being, but she knew that the death of a Borg would set its individuality free.

Dax was wandering down a corridor before the colonel had even finished speaking. Her tricorder emitted bleeping sounds of varying pitch and intensity as it located usable signal sources, then other forms of diversion. Finally, she found what she was looking for and yanked the hand phaser from her belt. "Dax to Defiant," she called over the increasing din of the weapons fire. "Get as close as you can to the source of this transmission, and watch out for an energy discharge. Then beam us out as fast as you can."

At that, she held her phaser up and pointed at the ceiling. There was an innocuous-looking pipe running over their heads, about as wide as she was, that was giving off some suspiciously high power levels. She made sure that her tricorder was correct in its readings, then took aim and fired. The beam splashed out against the dull surface of the pipe, but did not pierce it, as expected. Dax thumbed the frequency up to the higher settings in the electro-magnetic band and pressed the trigger again. This time, her phaser shot gashed into the conduit and there was a loud explosion that shook the interceptor. She breathed a sigh of relief as she saw a glowing green force-field appear around the hole. Her strategy had relied on the Borg's low response time: if they had not adapted to the damage, the entire corridor would have been scorched by plasma, and the away team and their pursuers would have been vaporised. The familiar tingle of the transporter took hold of her a few seconds later.