"How many people did you kill!" Michael screamed, her phaser not wavering from her prisoner's head.
"The question you should be asking," the prisoner replied, "is how many did I save?"
"How can you call destroying the Federation 'saving lives'?" Michael growled. "Every starship, everywhere, destroyed in an instant!"
"Exactly!" The prisoner hissed. "Every starship. All of them."
"You sound almost proud of yourself!" Michael yelled, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Her long search to find the source of the Burn had concluded... With a man. An ordinary human-looking man who not only made no secret of the fact that he'd caused the Burn, but almost sounded proud of it.
"...171 million," the prisoner mumbled.
"Excuse me?" Michael asked.
"One hundred and seventy-one million," the prisoner said. "Give or take a few thousand. That's how many were killed by the Burn. But billions, trillions even were saved."
"By destroying the Federation?" Michael asked, frowning as her prisoner groaned with frustration.
"Ugh, will you PLEASE look beyond your precious Federation?" The prisoner snorted. "It survived. It was limited, but it survived and will regrow. Do you know who didn't survive?"
"Who?" Michael asked.
"The Borg," the prisoner said.
"The who?" Michael asked, flinching as the prisoner's eyes were filled with a fury that eclipsed even her own.
"...You cannot be serious, right?" The prisoner spat. "Haven't you wondered why there hasn't been a single Borg incursion since the Burn? When the entire galaxy is otherwise spread out, scattered, unable to defend in numbers?"
"Who are the Borg?" Michael demanded.
"I- I just-" the prisoner angrily stammered, before a calm look descended over his face. "...I knew there was something about you. You're not originally from this time, are you?"
"...How do you know that?" Michael asked.
"Well, firstly, anyone who's been alive in the last 825 years will have heard of the Borg," the prisoner replied. "Secondly... My people have an affinity with time."
"What do you mean, an 'affinity'?" Michael asked.
"...I really do have to spell it out for you, don't I?" The prisoner sighed. "Okay, from the top. My name is Rodcot Bramtel. I am a member of a species- well, an endangered species called El-Aurian. We were known throughout the galaxy as a race of listeners, always observing, never interfering. Much like the Federation, in a way. People even assumed that 'El-Aurian' meant 'to listen', but that's not the real translation. A closer approximation would be 'born beyond time', or 'timeless children', or- well, a dozen other meanings. 900 years ago, I watched as my entire species was decimated by the Borg."
"You still haven't explained who the Borg are," Michael stated, her grip on her phaser loosening as Rodcot spoke.
"They're not a 'who', they're a 'what'," Rodcot spat. "They are a cancer that spread throughout the galaxy, assimilating whatever they wanted without mercy, without pity, without even caring about the civilizations they destroyed. My homeworld had a population of three billion people. All gone. All wiped out in less than a day."
"You're lying," Michael sneered.
"Don't believe me?" Rodcot asked. "It's simple maths. One Borg assimilates a person, there are two Borg. Then two Borg assimilate two other people and you have four. Eight, sixteen, thirty-two... Start with eighty thousand Borg and you end up with billions very, very quickly. And if you kill them it doesn't matter. Kill them down to the last Borg and they just start again. Two, four, eight... You can't destroy the Borg, you can only set them back. But set them back and they will always keep coming. Unless you kill all of them, every single stinking one at the same time."
"...The Burn," Michael whispered.
"Exactly," Rodcot said. "It wasn't just dilithium it affected. If I could have tweaked it to avoid rendering dilithium inert, don't you think I would have? But there wasn't time. All that fancy technology the Federation loves... To the Borg, it was candy. And they were on their way to gobble it all up. I had the means to stop them once and forever. So I ask you this, Commander Burnham: faced with the choice between watching not just the Federation, but all life in the galaxy be assimilated, and stopping the Borg at the cost of innocent lives, what would you do?"
"I'd have found another way," Michael confidently replied.
"D- have you listened to a word I've said?" Rodcot yelled. "There. Was. No. Other. Way! And I was not about to watch the galaxy go the same way as my homeworld."
"...So why did you call me here?" Michael asked, finally lowering her phaser. "To confess?"
"No," Rodcot whispered. "Because I know I can't be forgiven for what I did. But if I had to do it again... I'd do it in a heartbeat. No, I called you here to show you this." Michael frowned as Rodcot handed her a PADD, on which was a waveform she'd never seen before.
"What's this?" Michael asked.
"A Borg interlink frequency," Rodcot replied. "One of them survived, somewhere. And where there's one-"
"Two," Michael whispered. "Four, eight-"
"Sixteen, thirty-two..." Rodcot continued in a dark voice.
"...So how do we stop them?"