Saeihr Kharth thought she’d weathered everything the galaxy could throw at her. From the roughest thugs of frontier settlements when she was only a teenager, to bloodthirsty Klingon warriors boarding her ship as an officer, to time-displaced Jem’Hadar refusing to stand down at Izar. She’d faced demons in the flesh and in her heart, and even those in the minds of others.

When the Borg drone set one slow, deliberate foot on the deck of the derelict, she knew nothing she’d seen or done had prepared her for that moment. ‘Get that thing switched off!’ she barked at Cortez, and heard the knife-edge of hysteria in her voice.

‘I’m trying – the thing’s sprouted nanite tubes and is clinging on like a damn limpet –’

‘Then screw it! Leave it, and we go!’

But beside the engineer, Thawn raised her forearm to read the display on the tricorder built into her suit. ‘The door we came through’s sealed. Systems are emitting a jamming signal. I can’t raise Endeavour or even the Excalibur.’

‘Commander…’ Qadir raised his rifle as the drone turned to face them. The red dot seared through the shadows of the long corridor, slicing through darkness sharper than the dancing lights of their torches, which shuddered in the chaos.

Don’t shoot it, Kharth thought. It might be responding to anything. It might be heading to repair something. It might ignore us. Shoot it, and it won’t.

The drone took a step forward.

‘Fuck!’ she yelped, and before she knew it, she’d squeezed her rifle’s trigger, a decade’s training and discipline out the window at the merest whisper of a drone’s attention. Her shot struck true, taking the drone in the upper chest. It staggered, stepped back – and fell, hitting the deck with a thudding clang.

The sound echoed and rattled through the corridor as if to make the bulkheads themselves shudder. And as it faded, sinking further into the darkness, further into the stretches of the derelict they had not reached, an answer came with a heavy, metallic footstep.

Then another. And another.

In the silence between the footsteps of drones, Cortez breathed, ‘Oh, shit.’

‘Excalibur to away team. Come in!’ Lindgren’s sensors had been silent one moment, steady with the drift of the wreckage, the gentle pulse of the one power signature. Then everything had gone wild. She didn’t know Borg sensor technology, but she knew jamming signals when she saw them. Enough to know what would happen when she flicked channels. ‘Excalibur to Endeavour, do you read me?’

The silence of space this time bore an eerie hiss. Lindgren answered it with swearing. Then she reached from the pilot’s controls to the comms systems and brought up the full connection settings display. Boosting the power would probably get her in touch with Endeavour but wouldn’t help her with the away team. That would take breaking the jamming itself.

‘Narrow the band,’ she muttered. ‘If it took Thawn…’ She checked the comm records. ‘Eighty-seven seconds to reach them from breaching the door, that’s a hundred metres, hundred-ten…’

If that was still where they were. If Thawn had moved at a predictable speed in hostile territory. If narrowing down the away team’s location could even help her break a jamming signal from a Borg derelict.

Her eyes flickered to the canopy, and the wreckage that held her friends hanging above her. The Excalibur was locked in a synchronous drift, and though she knew they both tumbled through the cosmos amidst a sea of Borg skulls, to her eyes and heart, the world was fixed. ‘Closer,’ she muttered, and reached for the flight controls.

‘…if we enter the debris field, we need our deflectors up,’ Athaka explained, looking like he’d appreciate fusing with the deck. ‘There’s too much out there, sir.’

‘We don’t have a transporter lock yet,’ said Valance, swinging into the captain’s chair. ‘Fix that problem first. We can lower shields long enough to beam them out and take impacts on the hull for a matter of seconds.’

‘Why is it we need Rosara to save Rosara,’ exclaimed Beckett, stood over Shepherd near the aft and throwing his hands in the air. There was more panic in the young man’s voice than Valance appreciated, but she understood the sentiment. The best person to break through Borg interference for a transporter lock was one of the very people they were trying to rescue.

‘Kally!’ Logan didn’t look up from his controls. ‘I’m sending you some frequencies Borg use for their systems communications; you might be able to piggyback a signal off that? Airex – piping you some of the shield harmonic calibrations they use to block out sensors.’

‘We’re entering the field,’ Ensign Fox warned from Helm.

‘Steady as she goes,’ Valance called. She wanted to yell at the young officer to blitz them through the wreckage to get there in time. Disturbing the debris field only bore the threat of more chaos, though; the last thing they wanted to do was unduly wake up anything else. ‘We’ve got to do this right.’

‘There’s no way we can carve through the bulkheads in anything less than ten minutes.’ Kharth’s eyes swept across the stretch of Borg ship, as if the corridor bore secrets of how this place could become anything other than their tomb.

Stood at the rear of the group, facing the darkness, Qadir shifted his feet. ‘They’re coming.’ The glow of his helmet light and HUD cast his dark skin in a sickly, sallow hue of terror as the footsteps thudded.

The AIP was a boxy shape a foot long and had looked to Kharth like nothing more specific than a ‘Borgy cuboid.’ But after it connected to the system, nanite tubes had sprouted to latch it onto the tall display of the Borg interface. Directly above it, symbols that had once been a pale green now flashed an urgent, angry red.

Cortez was already crouched over it with a plasma torch, its light casting jagged shadows. But the moment one nanite tube was sliced through after long, thudding seconds of heat, another sprouted. ‘Son of a…’

‘We blow it up,’ said Thawn, which was how Kharth knew she was panicking. Thawn would normally never suggest brute force. ‘You’ve got charges, right, Commander? If we blow this thing up…’

‘It’s right on top of the power source!’ Cortez snapped. ‘That kills us all. Work on the Borg systems, try to turn this damn alarm or whatever we tripped off!’

Thawn turned to the display with wide eyes, obviously at her wit’s end in even beginning to interpret such a display. Kharth opened her mouth to make a suggestion she didn’t have before Qadir’s voice cut in, low and cold and level.

‘Commander.’

He could not be calm, Kharth thought as she turned to see a pair of red lights slice through darkness. No, it was not control that made him sound level. This kind of measuredness came only from standing at the very edge of terror.

‘Miracle workers?’ Kharth growled at the two operations officers behind her. ‘Time to earn your name. Qadir, you know the protocol – rotate frequency every shot.’

But Cortez and Thawn were arguing, not coming up with solutions, and when the first drone stepped into the edge of the ring of light, Kharth found that same calm Qadir had. Terror still reigned supreme, fizzing through her veins and thoughts, but with it was acceptance.

This was it. She’d doomed them all.

Then came the faintest crackle in her helmet’s comms. ‘…Lindgren to away team.’

Hope surged, but Kharth knew it was likely a false dawn. ‘Away team here. We’re cooked, Lieutenant; if you can’t pull us out now, you gotta get clear.’

‘Understood!’ Lindgren didn’t sound like she was actually listening, frantically running on automatic as she spoke. ‘Patching you through to Endeavour now!’

The drone took another step forward. Kharth fired. It fell. At once, she flipped her rifle to change the frequency, work that took several critical seconds, as from behind it advanced another.

‘Endeavour to away team.’ Valance’s voice was clipped, and Kharth found her attention fading away. The ship would beam them out and they would live, or it would not and they would die. The captain’s words were irrelevant. ‘What’s your situation?’

It was Cortez who answered. ‘The AIP commanded the section to lock down, Captain! We’re sealed in here, and drones are coming. I can’t end the lockdown or remove the AIP.’

‘We’re on our way and trying to get a transporter –’

But Valance was cut off by deeper, urgent tones. ‘Cortez, Logan. Forget about the AIP for a sec. You need to disconnect the tertiary access node from the power. The system should register that as the end of the intrusion unless it gets contravening instruction from central control – but it’s disconnected so that should be okay.’

Qadir opened fire on the next drone, which staggered and fell. Another followed in its wake, and Kharth was still hammering on her own rifle’s buttons. ‘Keep it up!’ she urged him.

‘Right,’ Cortez breathed from behind. ‘Power connectors, power connectors…’

‘You should see a panel at the bottom of the display,’ Logan said. ‘Crack it open.’

Qadir’s next shot splashed harmlessly across the drone’s chest with a ripple of emerald shields. The young officer lowered his rifle. ‘They’ve adapted.’

‘I’ve got it,’ Kharth growled, raising her phaser. ‘Change frequency.’ But there was another coming behind it, and they were altering their phaser frequencies slower than the Borg could adapt.

Behind her, Cortez was working as Thawn handed her tools. ‘Panel open!’

‘There should be three conduits: a thick one holding steady and two thin ones pulsing. One is pulsing once every point-seven-five seconds, the other every point-five seconds. You want the point-five one; find its connector and yank it.’

‘That won’t, uh, electrify me to goop?’

‘Pull it!’

Kharth slung her rifle and reached for the toolbelt of her EV suit and the tel qalanq shortsword strapped across it. Only the darkest of thoughts had seen her bring it, preparing so unwillingly for this kind of worst-case scenario that she hadn’t truly considered the implications. Now, she drew it as the next drone stepped forward.

There was a fizz, a clatter, and a yelp from Cortez. The red light of the display flashed wildly, turned steady and green, and then a faint ringing Kharth hadn’t realised was even sounding through the corridor faded.

‘Jamming signal’s down!’ called Thawn. ‘Doors are unsealed!’

But the drone still took another step forward.

‘Go!’ Kharth barked, and stepped into a combat stance. Her eyes did not leave the Borg. These things were slow but not useless, and they were tough. She had to get this right.

‘Sir -’

But Cortez grabbed Qadir by the elbow. ‘Let’s go, kid. I got this thing.’ The AIP was tucked under her arm.

The drone took one more step, and as she heard the thudding of boots of her retreating team, Kharth slid to the side. It turned, raising an arm, and now she was up close. Now she could see the pallid face encased in stygian steel, the searing red light swinging over her, but the pale, near-white organic eye locked on her with no less intensity. She could see the shape of the nose, the cheekbone, the jawline, but there was nothing left of a person to find.

Which was not precisely true, because her blade found the throat when she danced back the other way and swung. Black ichor spurted as she pulled the edge free, severing cables connecting chestplate to headpiece as it came out, and the Borg staggered, its arm falling slack.

Kharth did not wait to see if it fell. Reeling was enough to give her time to turn and run.

She could see the other three ahead of her, thudding in EV suits that were ungainly at the best of times. A fourth shadow fell across them, and the swirling corridor flashed with the bright light of a phaser blast, Cortez swearing as she fired to drop another drone.

They were ten metres from the doorway when Thawn raised her forearm and hammered a control, and the panels opened before them. The forcefield holding in the atmosphere gleamed, still, but beyond them was spinning space, the blackest void where there was, at least, no Borg –

And, rising before them, the Excalibur with her aft hatch wide open.

Qadir, Cortez, and Thawn were through first, leaping into oblivion to be carried another five metres or so – dangerously, impossibly close for the shuttle to have flown to the wreckage – before landing. Kharth was closer behind than she’d thought, her fight taking only heartbeats that had felt like a lifetime, and though she saw a drone in the alcove between her and the exit jerk, she was past it before it had taken so much as a step.

She crashed into the cargo bay of the Excalibur at full speed, landing in a bundle almost on top of Qadir. Cortez had already positioned herself by the hatchway, and smashed the control panel to seal it shut. ‘Go!’ the engineer yelled towards the cockpit. For a moment, Kharth wondered why they needed to race. Then the thought of drones hitting the hull occurred, and she slammed her eyes shut.

Moments later, they were clear, though, and Lindgren’s voice rang out. ‘Everyone alive back there?’

Kharth fought to sit up, chest heaving. ‘All here! Present!’ In the background, she heard Lindgren reporting this to Endeavour, but was distracted by Thawn pushing away from them, scrabbling desperately at her helmet.

Cortez popped hers, face sallow, and stared at Kharth. ‘That,’ she gasped, ‘was close.’

Kharth could only work her jaw wordlessly, could not even manage a nod. Beside her, Thawn pulled off her helmet and hurled it to one side. Then she fell to her hands and knees on the deck, shuddering, and threw up.

Amid the retching, Kharth found her voice. ‘Too close.’