Around every corner, behind every bulkhead, and within every shadow, their demise might be waiting. Any doubts that something nefarious was happening had been erased. Slowly and carefully, phasers at the ready, Commander Cora Lee and Dr. Tom Brooks crept through the interior of Salvage Facility 21-J.

The first order of business had been to get safe. They’d left three bodies dead on the deck, and the station’s surprise occupants were hunting them. Thankfully, the massive superstructure of the salvage depot worked to their advantage, and once they put enough distance between themselves and the shuttlebay, the pair shifted from hiding to intelligence gathering as they searched for clues that might explain explain why the decommissioned station was crawling with colonists from Beta Serpentis III. It was during this search that they found themselves on the upper deck of a large cargo bay, lying flush against the deck as they eavesdropped on a pair of Andorians working below.

“That ship’s arrival changed everything,” one of the Andorians was saying. “Thoss says tomorrow will be the day.”

“The time of our salvation is finally upon us,” the other replied with a sort of reverence in his tone. “After all this waiting, who would have thought a Starfleet ship would be the key?”

“The first good thing they’ve done for us,” the first chuckled. “Well, besides building this facility.”

“We built this facility,” the second reminded him. “They just brought us together.”

Commander Lee and Dr. Brooks looked at each other. The Andorians were clearly talking about their ship, but what did they mean by its arrival changing everything? And what was going to happen tomorrow? It certainly had nothing to do with the spread of icefish and tuber roots awaiting their colleagues down on the surface of Beta Serpentis III.

“We need to get in touch with the Ingenuity,” Commander Lee whispered under her breath. She tapped her combadge again, but it crackled with static, just like it had every time prior that they’d tried to use it since their flight from the shuttlebay.

Dr. Brooks tapped his combadge. The result was the same. It wasn’t a defective combadge. There was some sort of interference jamming up the subspace bands used by their combadges. “We’re going to need more than a combadge and a tricorder if we want to do that,” Dr. Brooks pointed out. Combadges simply weren’t configurable enough to allow him to break through.

“Yeah, I get that, but we need to find a way to alert the ship,” Commander Lee insisted. “They’re clearly up to something, and it doesn’t sound good.”

Dr Brooks knew the Commander was right. Whatever was going on, they needed to give the Ingenuity a heads up. “We’re going to need to hack into a comms relay then.” Such equipment would have significantly more tunable parameters than their combadges, and that might allow them to cut through the subspace interference. The risk with that plan though was that, if the Andorian’s had control of the station’s systems, they’d be sending up a flare with their location as soon as they actively engaged the comms system.

Quietly, the pair slipped back out of the cargo bay and returned to the network of jefferies tubes they’d been using to navigate the station’s interior. The going was slow, but the maintenance shafts afforded them a significantly more cover than moving out in the open. Eventually, as their knees began to bruise from all the crawling, they managed to find their way to a small interior laboratory with a console that had access to the station’s subspace communications system.

Climbing out of the jefferies tube into the room, Commander Lee took a first pass at cracking into the system. However, she came up short. “The encryption here isn’t going to be easy to break,” she warned. It was the top-of-the-line stuff that Starfleet used for its frontier facilities and vessels. “You got any ideas?”

“I may know a thing or two,” Dr. Brooks chuckled as he switched places with Lee and connected his tricorder to the optical port. During his previous stint in Starfleet, he’d spent plenty of time breaking into Starfleet systems. It had just been a requirement of his job, and he’d developed a warchest of techniques before they’d locked him up. “Ah yes, we can get through this.” 

“What’re you thinking?” Commander Lee asked as she looked over his shoulder. Right from the start, he was taking a different approach than anything she’d considered. Not that anything he did surprised her too much anymore after he’d beat the three Andorians to the draw. The spooky scientist had clearly seen a few things in his day.

“First, we slip into the ephemeral quantum memory buffer,” Dr. Brooks explained as he worked the console. “It’s vulnerable because, by its very nature, it can’t be fully isolated, or it wouldn’t be able to accept and process user input. Typically, this buffer is just a storage medium, but I only need it for its qubits.” Dr. Brooks waited a moment and then fired off a second set of routines. “And now, I’m injecting a dynamic variant of Shor’s algo that exponentiates the solver into a higher-order spatiotemporal quantum space via entanglement of the buffer’s qubits.”

“Where’d you learn to do this?” Commander Lee asked. The career engineer had a deep knowledge of modern computation, but at an applied level. What the astrophysicist was talking about was highly theoretical and, as far as she knew from the textbooks, it shouldn’t have been possible due to the laws of physics themselves.

“The better question would be when,” Dr. Brooks winked. Remembering himself and what had landed him in prison previously, he grew serious as he added a caveat: “But it’s probably best not to mention it, and if you do, I’ll deny it.”

There was a coldness in Dr. Brooks’ words that restrained Commander Lee from asking him to elaborate further. And she also knew it was probably better she didn’t ask. There was a horde of angry Andorians hunting them, and now was not the time to debate regulations with a man who clearly didn’t care about them, and who, if she was honest with herself, scared her a bit.

“Alright, we’re in,” Dr. Brooks declared a few moments later. His hands flew across the terminal as he tried to piece together what was going on. “Hmmm, this is curious…”

“What’s curious?”

“The subspace interference jamming up our combadges is massive,” Dr. Brooks explained. “And uncomfortably familiar.” He recognized the signal, except it was distorted and amplified. “Check this out.”

Commander Lee took a good look, but she didn’t see what he was referring to. “It just looks like garbage to me.”

“That’s because it’s been bandpassed and amplified into a higher subspace spectrum,” Dr. Brooks explained. “Let me downscale it.” He worked a few filters and compressed it back to a lower band. She still looked confused, but he shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Not many people would recognize it. “It’s a Borg neural interlink frequency.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

Dr. Brooks ran a few more calculations and came to a scary conclusion: “Here. Or more accurately, somewhere within this facility.”

“Can it…”

“Assimilate? No, in boosting it into our regular subspace bands, it’s become bungled as shit.”

“So what’s its purpose?”

“In order to connect the Collective across the vastness of the galaxy, Borg ships use incredibly powerful subspace transceivers,” Dr. Brooks explained. “We’ve never been able to replicate them in a lab, but my best guess is that someone on this facility has figured out how to use a transceiver stripped from the Wolf 359 Cube as a sort of subspace jammer.”

Suddenly, they heard the hiss of the laboratory door as it slid open. By tapping into the station’s systems, they’d alerted the station to their presence.

Commander Lee, already on edge, was first to the draw this time, her phaser leveled at the door as a synth stepped through. It was a utility model typically used for basic maintenance and repairs, but it wasn’t here to fix an EPS relay. It stood in a tactical stance, sweeping towards them with a Starfleet-issue phaser rifle.

Commander Lee didn’t wait to see what would follow. She squeezed the trigger before the synth could get them in its sights. A blast of high energy nadions tore through the automaton, short circuiting its motor functions. It collapsed in the doorway, and the phaser rifle fell beside it.

Dr. Brooks rushed over and pulled the synth inside, allowing the doors to shut. He then lifted up the phaser rifle, checked its settings, and threw it over his shoulder. It would be far more useful than the sidearm he’d been using up to this point.

“I don’t understand,” Commander Lee stuttered as she looked down at the motionless synth. “This is a C300.” She knew the model well. It was a low cost utility model. “It shouldn’t have the capacity to take up arms.”

“Starfleet R&D said the same about the synths at Utopia Planitia,” Dr. Brooks pointed out. “Look how that turned out for them.” Ninety two thousand officers, crew and specialists died as a result, and Starfleet spent the next decade and a half cowering in fear.

“No, that was different,” explained Commander Lee. “The A500 model in use at Utopia Planitia was an independent automaton. The Tal Shiar needed only to imprint rogue subroutines within its neural processor to corrupt it. The C300 architecture is completely different. It relies on a central processing unit, in this case the station’s main computer core, to coordinate its actions. Think of it like an appendage of a larger system rather than a synthetic lifeform on its own.”

“Then the answer seems obvious enough,” Dr. Brooks replied. “It’s not just the colonists that are hunting us. The station is hunting us too.” He pulled out his tricorder and began scanning the synth. Although its motor functions had been short circuited, he knew there’d be imprinting on its memory cores from the last instruction sets it had received before Commander Lee shot it.

“You’re saying the colonists of Beta Serpentis III have weaponized the synths?” Commander Lee asked nervously. What were two Starfleet officers supposed to do with a horde of Andorians and an entire station hunting them?

“Not exactly,” Dr. Brooks replied as he finished analyzing the result of his scans. The results confirmed his suspicions, suspicions he’d had since his initial scans of the shuttlebay. “Check this out.” He passed the tricorder over to Commander Lee while he narrated what was on the screen. “I ran a decompiler to reverse engineer the grammar that generated the instruction set. Typically, you’d expect to see a consistent grammar in the resultant machine code. Except here you don’t. Here, you see two distinct grammars.”

“Yes, I recognize one of them,” Commander Lee noted. “It’s the standard isolinear ASM.” As a career engineer, she knew it well. It was the same symbolic machine code used in practically every modern computer core used across the fleet. “But what is this second one? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That’s because it’s Borg,” Dr. Brooks replied ominously. It was the second Borg signature he’d seen in as many minutes. Things were starting to add up, and not in a good way.

Commander Lee’s face became ghost white. “Are you… are you sure?”

“Positive,” Dr. Brooks confirmed. When the Borg came to Earth, he’d spent the better part of the crisis trying to crack this exact byte stream. “I’d recognize it anywhere after Frontier Day.”

“Wait, so you’re saying the synths have been turned into drones?”

“Something like that,” Dr. Brooks nodded. “It’s fascinating, really.”

“That’s one word for it,” Commander Lee shivered. “I think I’d use a different word: terrifying.” Not only were they being hunted by an unknown number of aggrieved Andorians, but an assimilated station, and all the synths it had at its disposal, was also hunting them. “Do you think the colonists know?”

“With how involved they seem to be on this station, absolutely,” Dr. Brooks offered. While snooping around, they’d observed no less than a dozen Andorian colonists working on various systems and equipment. If the station didn’t want them there, it would have dealt with them. “The question we need to answer is who is in control: the colonists or the station?”

“I don’t think I’m following,” Commander Lee admitted, stammering to articulate her thoughts. None of it made much sense. “The colonists are certainly hostile, but they aren’t… aren’t Borg… are they? They seem very… very Andorian.”

“Yes, their behavior appears very normal, all things considered,” agreed Dr. Brooks. “They are not behaving at all like the drones we fought over Earth.” Even though those drones had been remotely assimilated, there’d been certain characteristics to their movements, dialogue and actions that didn’t match the Andorians here. “But if they did not serve a purpose to whatever the hell this station has become, the station would eradicate them. They’re working together.”

“The way you talk about it, it’s like you’re saying the station is alive?”

“That’s because, if these readings are correct, it is,” Dr. Brooks replied with an undertone of awe in his voice. “That’s the beauty of the Borg.” Yet again, he found himself impressed by the Collective and what it could do.