‘They just took out a patrol ship,’ Kharth breathed as she watched a small dot wink out on the short-range sensors.

‘At least it was one of Vortiss’s,’ said Logan, but his expression made it clear this was only the tiniest of mercies. ‘Other ships are getting the hell out of the way.’

‘Of course they are. A Starfleet ship’s barrelling towards Teros and just blew someone up.’ A sick sort of dizziness was threatening to overtake her. If Borg had taken control of Endeavour and were set on a rampage, she wanted to pretend there was no imagining what they’d do if they got to Teros IV. But that wasn’t true. She could fully imagine it. ‘We have to do something. They’re going to bombard the surface.’

‘Or figure out how to assimilate them, too. If it hasn’t already happened down there.’ Logan stepped back, scrubbing his face with his hands. ‘Have they tried to get in here?’

‘Tried, but not too hard. If they could lock out the rest of the ship, they have some command codes, but it’d take time and effort to override mine. I guess we’re not top priority.’ That, at least, stirred something in her other than helpless fear. ‘We can make them regret that.’

‘They don’t regret anything,’ he pointed out. ‘Remember, those aren’t your crewmembers any more. They stopped being those folks once the nanites took over.’

She turned to him. ‘You came back.’

‘I got lucky. Nobody came and rescued me, there was no white horse, no cavalry. Any favour you can do them is to stop their bodies and minds being used for further atrocities.’ He’d faced every adversity even discussed in the days since their meeting with a twinkle in his eye, but now his gaze was cold.

That coldness helped. She felt it seep into her bones, and where there wasn’t blinding terror, there was strength. Kharth straightened. ‘How do we do that?’

He let out a slow breath as he thought. ‘Borg are still biological. Especially now – no sign of implants; whatever happened in them looks like just nanites, not full assimilation.’

‘So they still need to breathe.’ Kharth turned back to the conference room’s main controls. ‘But I’ve got no access to any bridge controls. Can’t flood it with anesthizine gas from here. I’d have to get to a control panel, hope it works, and get a solid five seconds. And the moment we open that door, they’ll hit us with heavy fire.’

Logan grimaced. ‘We could try to flank, hit an access hatch, come at them from two directions. But even if they haven’t brought in reinforcements, we’re heavily outnumbered.’

‘We won’t be able to turn the ship’s systems against them. I’d be shot before I could turn the pumps on.’

‘If we could do something to stall them even for a few seconds…’

‘Then we could just shoot them,’ she pointed out. ‘We’ve got two phasers and a very small window of opportunity to do anything. We can see what they’re doing but we’ve got no control of anything outside this room. We can use anything we can get to on the bridge, but we need to get there and we need the time to do something.’

‘We know the systems, but so do they,’ Logan mused. ‘And if we try to turn on a system from here, if they have control of engineering, they might just switch it off. Remember, they’re connected – every Borg on the ship will know what we’re doing the second even one spots us.’

Kharth swore. ‘Then I think,’ she said after a moment’s consideration, ‘this isn’t a time to be clever.’

This definitely isn’t clever. She was crammed in a Jefferies Tube, only a narrow hatch blocking her from the bridge, the beating heart of the Borg takeover of Endeavour. But sensors said they had mere minutes until the ship reached Teros. It looked like nearby vessels were fleeing their approach, but the people on the planet couldn’t run. They’d be defenceless.

Some things were more important than cleverness. Kharth shut her eyes, blocking out all treacherous senses as she popped the hatch no more than a centimetre and hunkered down to listen. The hubbub of voices met her, all overlapping and repeating, a verbalisation of the connection between these new, biological drones all subsumed somehow by the Borg Collective. Logan had been right. There was nothing of personhood left in them. That would make this emotionally easier, but not physically.

She heard the hiss of the doors to the conference room. Heard Logan’s too-loud, too-confident call of, ‘Hey, fellas.’ Heard the air get consumed with weapons fire. And moved.

Her grasp of the phaser had been iron-tight, but she wasn’t holding it by the grip. Her finger hit the power button, and it whirred in her hand as she shoved the hatch open, half-rose into the bridge, and hurled it. It soared through the air, up, up, and her timing had to be perfect.

Then it detonated, and she didn’t stick around to confirm as she ducked back down into the hatch. An overloading phaser’s explosion wasn’t enough to harm more than a cluster of people and certainly wouldn’t take out a bridge. Not on its own. But its explosion was enough if positioned properly to rupture a coolant valve.

Kharth pressed the rebreather to her face and kept a solid grip on the hatch. Logan should have closed the doors to the conference room again. The coolant should suffocate the crew quickly enough that they wouldn’t make it to her hiding spot. Otherwise, she was now unarmed.

Then she heard the thumps of bodies, heard the swoosh of Logan reopening the conference room doors, heard a couple of phaser blasts as he finished off anyone conscious, and heard him call out, voice muffled by his rebreather, ‘Clear!’

She swung into the bridge and found the young officers unmoving on the deck. ‘Stun them all,’ she told Logan, stood in the doorway, and tried to not think about what harm she’d done these people already. Her shipmates. Borg. Inhaling coolant was not the same as inhaling anesthezine. ‘I’m going to block off that leak and seal the bridge.’

He went person to person as she worked at Thawn’s console, bringing up a forcefield to stop the coolant piping into the chamber, locking all doors, shutting down all turbolifts. ‘They’re everywhere,’ she confirmed through gritted teeth. ‘How could this happen?’

‘We figure that out after we stop them.’ Logan pumped a stun blast into Athaka, and looked at her. ‘Teros?’

‘I’m setting us a course out of the system,’ she said. ‘And locking down all weapons.’

‘They’re going to try to get back in here.’

‘I know.’ She waved a hand at her console. ‘Get to the internal sensors – figure out where they are, start putting up forcefields, start transporting them into brig cells, wherever you find them.’

‘On it,’ said Logan, vaulting over the railing to reach the Security console. ‘That’ll take a while.’

‘I know, I know –’

Thunk. Thunk.

Her head snapped around to the turbolift doors. ‘They’re already here.’

Logan raised his phaser. ‘They could have been watching us, they could have – don’t matter.’ He tapped a few quick buttons of the phaser and blasted the doors.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Welding the damn thing shut. Lock down the transporters, I’ll get the other doors.’

She nodded, but reached to grab Griffin’s phaser, and worked the Ops console’s controls with one hand as she levelled the weapon at the hatch of the Jefferies Tube she’d come through. ‘They’ll get in any way they can.’

They could weld the doors shut, and eventually, the thudding at the turbolift stopped. But every time she tried to lock out a system, someone, somewhere on the ship, tried to bring it back on. The Borg couldn’t access the bridge controls, and with every heartbeat, Endeavour rushed away from Teros, but every time Logan raised a forcefield, someone shut it off. Every time he beamed them to the brig, they opened the cells. Every time she stopped them from transporting to the bridge, they tried again.

Then there was a hiss from the door to the captain’s ready room. Logan’s head whipped around. ‘They got in there. And they got tools.’

Kharth couldn’t recognise the equipment by sound, but she knew the bridge’s defences. ‘Then we’ve got a few minutes.’ She opened her mouth for the next order or idea, but nothing happened. ‘I can’t lock out these systems completely; I’m not the CO or XO. ‘They’ve got the codes to override me if they get in here.’

‘You can’t activate the self-destruct,’ grunted Logan, and her heart lurched as he said the unspoken. They could not allow the Borg to take control of Endeavour.

But she didn’t know how to stop them.

‘We – we beam those Borg out,’ she stammered at last. ‘Scramble for every second we can.’ But this time, when she reached for the transporter controls, they didn’t respond.

‘They adapt. It’s what they do,’ said Logan in ashen tones. Then he turned to her. ‘If they get in here, I need you to do something.’

She saw his eyes flicker to her phaser. ‘It’s not over -’

‘I know they’re attacking folks, but there’s no telling if it stops there.’ His voice shook. ‘If they get in here, I want you to crank that phaser’s setting to max an’ vaporise me. I won’t go back.’

Her mouth went dry. Then she looked back down at the controls in front of her. ‘If they get back in here, I’m venting the bridge and slagging the controls.’

‘It’ll only slow ‘em down.’ But he didn’t sound like he disagreed.

‘Isn’t everything we do just about slowing a bad thing down?’ She found a desperate laugh scrape the back of her throat. A white-hot streak began to show in the ready room door, and the metal shrieked at the pressure and heat of the tools breaching it.

‘Fuck,’ breathed Kharth at last. ‘I didn’t think it’d be Borg that got me.’

Logan gave a wry scoff. Then, ‘Thanks, Kharth’ he said, and looked at her again. ‘For fighting. Feels better that we fought. Sometimes that’s all we got.’

The shrieking of tools stopped, and Kharth braced herself, hand on the controls to bring down the airlock behind the viewscreen, grip on her phaser iron tight. They had to be done breaking the metal free. Soon the door would be pulled open.

Soon.

Soon.

…surely.

But the next sound that came after the thundering silence was not the collapse of their last defences and the onslaught of their assimilated comrades. It was the lightest tap on the door, and it took Kharth a good few seconds to realise what it was.

Knocking. Light, almost deferential knocking. Only then did there come a voice.

‘Commander? Commander Kharth?’

The voice was small, confused, but clear. Not the overlapping words of the Collective speaking through the mouth of not an individual but an extension of its will. She knew that voice; it belonged to one of her young security team leaders.

‘Jain!’ called Kharth, knees threatening to buckle. ‘Is that you?’

‘…Commander, I’m – we’re in here. What happened?’

She looked at Logan, terrified and suspicious, as he turned back to the security console and checked the data feeds. Only when he looked at her, wide-eyed and confused, and gave a small nod did she dare to breathe.

‘It’s stopped,’ he croaked. ‘No idea how. It’s stopped. It’s over.’