The station was alive, and it was hunting them. As the corrupted computer core dispatched more armed synths to their location, Commander Lee and Dr. Brooks had to abandon their endeavor. There was simply too much heat. They’d be no help to anyone if they were dead. Their call to the Ingenuity would have to wait. The pair retreated from the lab, crawling on their hands and knees as fast as they could to vanish back into the maze of jefferies tubes and maintenance shafts that lined the superstructure of Salvage Facility 21-J.

When they’d put enough distance between themselves and the lab, Commander Lee finally spoke again: “What now?” She was feeling disheartened by the reality of the situation. How could the two of them be expected to fight against an entire space station?

“We can’t leave, and we can’t call home, so we’ve got only two choices,” Dr. Brooks noted. “We either hide and wait for help, or we investigate and figure out what the hell is going on… and I’m not a fan of sitting on my hands.” One thing he’d learned over the years is that if you wanted to survive, you had to fight for your own destiny. You couldn’t wait on others.

Commander Lee thought back to the conversation they’d eavesdropped on earlier. The colonists were up to something, and their plan clearly involved her ship. “We investigate,” Commander Lee agreed, knowing the safety of her crew might depend on what she and Dr. Brooks could figure out. They couldn’t just steal away in some dark and forgotten corner of this haunted station while they waited for a rescue that might not ever come. “If you’re right about those subroutines embedded in the computer core, then that’s as good a place as any to start.” 

“The computer core?” Dr. Brooks asked warily. He appreciated that Commander Lee had not suggested the hide-and-wait option, but a visit to the station’s computer core would be fraught with danger. “Typical Borg systems do not have a central point of weakness, but in this case, the Borg routines are mapped onto a Starfleet system. Contrary to the Borg, we love to build central points of weakness, and the computer core may be exactly that.” While that made it an attractive option, there was a catch. “The Borg subroutines will certainly recognize this though, and that means it will take a heavy handed approach to protecting it.” With the weaponized synths, it would be all but suicide for them to just march in there.

“I agree,” nodded Commander Lee, enjoying the fact that, for once, she was ahead of the veteran scientist. “But that wasn’t what I was going to suggest.” Dr. Brooks looked at her curiously, waiting for her to elaborate. “I think it’s time we pay a visit to the salvage bays that house the debris from Wolf 359.”

“Start at the source?”

“Exactly.”

“I like that idea.” The only alternative Dr. Brooks had come up with was capturing and interrogating one of the Andorians, but he knew they wouldn’t give up the plan easily. Andorians were stubborn, and fanatics clung to their convictions. There were ways to force even the most stubborn and convicted to give up their plan, but he doubted Commander Lee would have the stomach for what that would take. “The old scrap heap won’t be particularly important to the now-possessed station, but it could contain clues for us so let’s give it a shot.” If that plan failed, he could always propose an enhanced interrogation.

Together, the pair hashed out their plan. It started with securing schematics for the station, and that meant accessing the computer network again. Commander Lee and Dr. Brooks located a terminal in a corridor with easy access to a wide range of jeffries tubes to facilitate a quick retreat. They knew the computer system would respond with synths, just as it had when they’d gone to the lab, but they didn’t need much time to find a single file. 

They were in and out fast, taking less than two minutes to secure the file, and they disappeared back into the network of jefferies tubes long before any rifle-toting automatons could arrive.

“I can’t help but feel like we’re playing a game of cat and mouse,” Commander Lee remarked once they were safely hidden once more within the maze of maintenance shafts. Given the odds they were up against, she felt a sense of exhilaration that they’d actually pulled off the heist.

“It’s always been a blind spot of the Borg,” Dr. Brooks offered. “Because it is used to such incredible redundancy, the Collective has always been somewhat blind to the little things. You and I, we would have dispatched security forces into every jefferies tube to hunt down the intruders, but the Collective thinks in terms of the overall system, and unless it figures out that we are a real threat, it will not pay us much heed.”

“So why send synths at all?”

“It’s like when a fly is buzzing around you. You swat at it because it’s in reach, but if it buzzes away, you don’t really give chase. Too much effort for too little reward.”

This weakness allowed Dr. Brooks and Commander Lee to make their way down thirty decks into the bowels of Salvage Facility 21-J’s without incident, besides some bruising developing on their knees from all the crawling. 

As Dr. Brooks climbed out of the tube into one of the storage bays, his knee cracked, reminding him of his age. His mind still loved this stuff, but his body was reminding him he was getting too old for it. Not that he had a choice given their present predicament.

The young Commander Lee had no such problems, but what struck her was the cold and the darkness. This section of the facility was not meant to be hospitable. It served a purely utilitarian purpose: to house the debris of the Borg Cube destroyed at Wolf 359. The bay’s size caught her by surprise too. It was huge, nearly the length of a football pitch, and the Borg debris that littered the deck cast long shadows in the low light.

“I cannot help but feel like this place is possessed,” Commander Lee whispered. It didn’t help that the remnants of the Cube still glowed a deep green, even after three decades. “Where do we…”

Holding his tricorder in one hand, Dr. Brooks cut her off with a wordless gesture, his finger pressed over his lips. She looked at him as he held one finger up, then pointed at both his eyes, and then gestured towards the far side of the bay. She understood. They weren’t alone. Somewhere deep in the bay, out of sight, someone else was there.

Dr. Brooks slipped the tricorder back into his utility belt, readied his phaser rifle and began to advance through the debris. For a moment, Commander Lee considered suggesting they pull back, that it wasn’t worth exposing themselves, but Dr. Brooks was too far ahead already. He was a man on a mission, and he wasn’t turning back. Nervously, she drew her sidearm and followed.

After what felt like an eternity tiptoeing between the blacker than black sheet metal, conduit and circuitry that had once been part of a Cube, Dr. Brooks drew to a stop behind what looked like a regeneration alcove. 

Commander Lee came up alongside him and peered around the corner. A mere twenty meters from them, she saw a massive Borg enclosure, larger than any of the other debris they’d passed thus far, and in much better condition too. Standing in the middle of it was an Andorian working at an active Borg console. “What is that?” Commander Lee asked in the quietest of whispers, cognizant of just how close they were to the Andorian.

“Looks like a core command junction extracted from the Borg Cube,” Dr. Brooks replied as he thought through possibilities of what was going on. “And an Andorian who looks far too acquainted with it.” The Andorian looked as natural working at the Borg console as a Starfleet officer working on the bridge of the USS Ingenuity, and that level of fluency made Dr. Brooks very nervous. The colonists were not new to this stuff.

“What’s the play?”

“Cover me from here,” Dr. Brooks instructed as he handed her the phaser rifle he’d commandeered from the synth down in the lab. “If he so much as turns towards me, drop him.”

Commander Lee looked down at the phaser rifle to check its settings. Dr. Brooks had set it to full strength. When she looked back up to inquire if he meant to kill or to stun, it was too late. The scientist was already moving stealthily through the enclosure. All Commander Lee could do was sight in her rifle and wait. What the hell was he doing?

Dr. Brooks’ footfalls were silent, and his breathing slowed as he approached his target. This was nothing new to him, and it showed in his slow, measured movements. He drew closer. And closer. And closer. All the while, the Andorian just kept working at the console. He had no idea what was about to happen.

Through her sight, Commander Lee still didn’t know what Dr. Brooks was up to either. She watched as he drew so close he could have reached out and tapped the blue skin on the shoulder, and then his hand rose from his belt. Only then did Commander Lee realize the scientist was holding a knife.

In one smooth motion, Dr. Brooks brought his hand to neck level and slit the colonist’s throat. The Andorian began to turn, shocked as he struggled to breath, but Dr. Brooks simply took a second pass with the knife, diving it straight into the Andorian’s sternum to make sure the job was done. 

The Andorian collapsed onto the deck.

Commander Lee gasped as she rushed into the enclosure. “What the…” she stammered as she looked down at the dead Andorian lying there at Dr. Brooks’ feet.

“Relax, Commander,” Dr. Brooks assured her nonchalantly, unphased by the blue blood that had spattered his uniform. “You were going to have to shoot him otherwise. This was simply easier and quieter. No risk of an energy discharge tripping the station’s sensors.” He casually shoved the Andorian’s dead body out of the way to get better access to the console. “Come over here and help me with this.”

He was right, she knew, but there was something so much more personal and ruthless about the way he’d gone about doing it. Trying to recompose herself, she drew up alongside him. “What are we looking at?”

“The source of the signal that’s jamming our combadges,” Dr. Brooks explained. “This enclosure is in better shape than the rest of the Cube because it’s a heavily reinforced central plexus. It includes one of those long range high powered neural interlink transceivers I was telling you about and…” Dr. Brooks looked around the large enclosure, but he didn’t see what he was looking for. “And usually, it would house a vinculum, although I’m not seeing one here.” It had probably been taken away for study elsewhere.

“So can we cut the jamming signal?”

“I mean we could, but that’s not a good idea,” Dr. Brooks answered. “This storage bay is isolated from the station’s systems by design, meaning this enclosure shouldn’t be able to talk to the rest of the station… but if we cut the signal, they’ll notice it stopped, and they’ll know we’re here.”

Commander Lee looked down disappointedly. She should have thought of that. “So what’s the plan then?”

“Well, it’s an active comms system,” explained Dr. Brooks. “Which means, if we can figure out how to operate it, we should be able to interlace a secondary signal within the carrier wave.”

“As a way of calling the Ingenuity!” Commander Lee smiled.

“Exactly.”