Iskander al-Kwaritzmi, Personal Log, supplemental: the situation on the USS Franscini is quickly turning sour. We have encountered the Borg.

The squad of the Redding ran through the dark corridors, clunky in their closed EVs, finding their way to Main Engineering by knowing almost instinctively where and when to turn. Almost sister designs, the interiors of a Parliament and a California-class ships were substantially similar.

They still wore Starfleet uniforms. Iskander keep seeing in his mind the three Borg they had seen from afar. They had been lit scarcely and irregularly by the right sparks of the panel they were dissectioning; yet he had been left with the impression that they weren’t fully assimilated: they still wore uniforms. What did that mean?

Lieutenant Friedrichsen, security officer, moved in front of the group, still the vanguard even in the middle of this disorderly retreat. As they made a turn and the door of Main Engineering came into view, Friedrichsen fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

He cried in pain.

The four other — Commander Siouinon, Lieutenants Sirti-nei-Plex and al-Kwaritzmi, and Ensign Koli — froze in place.

“Don’t get near” whispered in pain Friedrichsen, lying on the floor before them.

“Lieutenant?” asked Siouinon.

“Gravity” he managed to say.

Iskander took out his tricorder and ran a quick scan.

“Roughly four g” he said. He almost felt like laughing. “This is good.”

“It really doesn’t feel good” grunted Friedrichsen. “I’ll have to crawl out of here. My wrist hurts.”

“I mean — It’s not a Borg strategy — but it’s an effective way to keep main engineering Borg-free” explained Iskander.

Siouinon turned to Koli.

“Can you perceive anything?” she asked.

Koli, an empath, closed their eyes and concentrated for a moment. Then they smiled excitedly.

“There’s definitely someone in here! I can perceive nervousness… fear… despair… hope… not Borg!”

Commander Siouinon, for the first time since the beginning of the mission, managed to look relieved instead of contrived. She sighed.

“This is Commander Siouinon of the USS Redding” she communicated on all frequencies. “Let us in.”

Not even ten seconds later, the door of Main Engineering opened and a head lurked slightly in the corridor, extremely careful.

“It’s actual people!” screamed the voice. “We’re safe!”

The gravity was brought back to normal, much to Friedrichsen’s relief, and the Redding team was warmly invited into Main Engineering.

The inside of the room was… chaos. It looked like a rich assortment of materials — crates, computer parts, ODN equipment, all sorts of engineering tools, loads of weapons — had been carried and stapled in unlikely piles in every single available surface of the room, giving it a very crowded and claustrophobic look.

The warp core shone in the middle: Iskander could see that at least four large objects had been attached to it, and he knew what they were without even needing to ask. Explosives.

A crowd gathered to look at the five newcomers: at least forty crewmembers of the Franscini, with uniforms of every section. They looked terrible — tired, malnurished, almost feverish, but with a look of astonished hope in their eyes.

“Hm. Hello” said Therese Siouinon. She always looked at unease in front of a public.

A Lieutenant Commander emerged from the crowd: a youthful-looking and rather petite Vulcan woman, in a yellow uniform whose right arm had been partially burnt: she had rolled it up to hide the damage, and the skin of her arm looked alarmingly green and scarred. The doctor who had healed her had repaired the damage but not spent any resource on cosmetics. Her expression was perfectly normal, and her eyes were steely and determined.

“Please, everyone, resume your activities” she ordered quietly. “You will be updated.”

The sad crew of the Franscini dispersed slowly while the Vulcan and the Redding squad got acquainted. She was named T’Konte, and was the Chief of Operations.

“I am, to the best of my knowledge, the highest ranking active officer” she added.

They found their way to the Chief Engineering Officer’s office. It was rich in chairs, but nobody sat. On the table a bunch of EPS replacement parts had been stored inelegantly, high almost to the ceiling.

“Should we remove our EVs, Commander?” asked Sirti-nei-Plex.

“I recommend you don’t” suggested T’Konte.

Siouinon shook her head inside of the helmet.

“What has happened here, Commander?” she asked, quite aggressively. Her relief of a moment ago had left as quick as it had come.

“Our ship has been invaded by the Borg, Commander.”

“Yes, I know that, Commander.”

“I suggest I summarize the latest events, Commander.”

“Please be concise. I’ll learn of the details when I read your wonderfully-written reports — in a couple of days, after we have saved you.”

Commander T’Konte raised an eyebrow and joined her hands together above her stomach, fingertip to fingertip, palms maybe ten centimeters from each other. Despite being quite short, she commanded an imperious, cold presence.

“The Franscini had been dispatched to retrieve an xB item — a nanomolecular forge scavanged from the Artifact. As we were returning to Starbase 36 the item was revealed to have a subspace beacon. It activated and started transmitting a distress signal.”

“So the Borg came?” guessed Diran Koli.

“Please do not slow down my retelling. A team managed to neutralized the beacon before it could transmit for a long time. It is unknown whether the Collective has received the signal. However, we now suppose that the reactivation of the beacon also reactivated other functions of the nanomolecular forge, including its capacity to create nanoprobes. We are forced to deduce that, during the neutralization and removal, the team was infected with them and a process of assimilation started.”

Iskander took a moment to imagine the horrible fact. He could see in his imagination the team — scientists and engineers – scrambling around a huge, ugly, lumbering Borg machine, trying to find the beacon and neutralize it. They probably had had to put their hands into the thing and take or force cables and chips out. He could almost see the tiny evil tubes grazing their skins, finding their way to the flesh and the blood, and deposit a small load of nanites.

“The assimilation was not detected until the day after, at which point a good section of the crew had been compromised. We sent a distress signal before having to jam communications.”

“Yes! Why did you do that?” asked Sirti-nei-Plex.

“The Borg’s first instinct would have been to assimilate the deflector dish and convert it into a subspace relay!” realized Iskander. “Wait — they managed! That’s why you’re running it in such a way: it’s already no longer a deflector dish! You saturate it with energy so that whatever message it’s trying to transmit is covered by all the random statics of the dish being run histerical!”

Commander T’Konte pierced Iskander with the gaze of her gray, controlled eyes.

“Your speculation is correct. The Borg reached the dish very early and have completely converted it. They did not anticipate that we would run this much energy through it, and therefore their design can’t correct our sabotage.”

“But the Borg could just walk down there and adapt their design, couldn’t they?” asked Friedrichsen, who was still grimacing and massaging his arm through the EV suit.

“And that’s why we are inside of an ion storm!” blurted out Diran Koli. Then, very self-consciouly, they shut up.

Everyone looked at them.

“Well” said tersely Therese Siouinon, “since we are already interrupting Commander T’Konte’s narration, you might as well finish that thought, Ensign.”

“It’s… you said earlier that an ion storm of this magnitude is going to eat through anything less than a shuttle, Commander” continued the Betazoid, a bit shyly. “Any Borg drone who tries to reach the deflector dish by walking outside is going to be vaporized.”

The Vulcan nodded.

“That is also correct. The drones can’t get to the deflector dish — we also blocked the access corridors — and can’t use it to call reinforcements. The combined interference of the ion storm and the deflector dish field also make communications difficult, which inhibit Borg intra-drone coordination.”

There was a short pause.

“Please carry on with the story, Commander” said Siouinon.

“If you’ll stop interrupting me. I will not… bore… you with a chronological account of the areas of the ship the Borg have tried, or succeeded in, conquering, nor of our attempts to fight. We have fallen back and currently occupy only Main Engineering, the Computer Core and the armory. How much the Borg may have secured or built, however, is unknown. We avoid confrontation and can do very limited scouting.”

Commander Siouinon nodded.

“We didn’t come across Borg structures from the shuttlebay to here” she said. “You have been… starving them, haven’t you?”

The Vulcan raised an eyebrow.

“Starving them?”

“We found signs of teeth on a gravitofluidic manifold. That puzzled me until I remembered that the gravitofluid is rich in lithium, which the Borg need to convert the organic host into a cybernetic drone — there are even reports of Borg Queens having to eat lithium-based batteries. And, in general, a Borg drone needs a lot of metal to convert their body, or even just to grow a cortical node. You have tried to contain the assimilation process by denying them any sort of nurishment, haven’t you?”

Iskander had read that report. While the details of the encounter were heavily classified, it clearly told of a Borg Queen (no less) in an almost completely human body, incapable of transitioning to her cybernetic self until she had — somehow? — obtained all the material she needed from a deceased Borg body.

Because, at the end, the Borg were not magical. They couldn’t convert a human body into a drone with just a handful of nanoprobes: they still were, like anyone else, subjects to the laws of physics. Eating was a desperate measure, to be sure, but effective nonetheless.

“I would not use words like nurishment or starve” corrected T’Konte. “They are imprecise — the Borg’s drive to convert organics into cybernetics is not comparable to our instinct to feed.”

Commander Siouinon looked at her with little patience.

“If I must accept your imprecise metaphore, we have been starving the Borg” answered the Vulcan.

Iskander nodded. Now the presence of all the material inside of Main Engineering made sense: they had been hoarding every single ship component that the Borg might have easily used as raw metal for their cybernetic conversions.

“The Borg that we encountered were still wearing Starfleet uniforms” remembered Sirt-nei-Plex. “So that’s why! They do not have enough metal to… grow… their exoplating.”

“Couldn’t the Borg just use the walls?” argued Friedrichsen. “They’re made of metal.”

“Duralloy and carbon fiber? They can” replied T’Konte. “But they need specific metals — lithium, rubidium, vanadium, several rare earths — that are not readily available in the structure.”

“They could use the replicators maybe?” tried then Friedrichsen.

“We destroyed every single replicator on board” replied T’Konte. “Alimentary or industrial.”

That explained why the crew in Engineering had looked so… hungry. It was not only the Borg that was being starved.

“Nice” said Friedrichsen appreciatively. Both Siouinon and Diran looked at him with a certain reproach.

“And the Borg need energy, right?” remembered Sirti-nei-Plex. “That’s why the ship is almost entirely devoid of power! Everything they do needs energy. How can they regenerate for hours into their alcoves if they don’t find a power source for it? And I guess that they can’t even correctly develop their cybernetic components without energy.”

Iskander remembered reading also about the first encounter with the Borg that would later come to be called Hugh: the crew had had to build an energy port for him to recuperate, and he would probably have died without it.

“Correct” nodded the Vulcan. “They have tried to access our power grid, and we have been mostly succesfull in denying it.”

“The Borg are still growing in power” remarked Siouinon. “They are merely slowed down. They will find energy sources, or create them. You may have hoarded all valuable metals in this room, but a Starfleet ship is still rich in resources. You may use high gravity and bricked-up corridors to block them, but they’ll adapt. And you — the crew of the Franscini — can only grow weaker.”

“A logical conclusion, Commander.”

Friedrichsen, a security officer at heart, smiled.

“So,” he asked, “how do we defeat them?”

Now everyone was staring in disbelief.

“Defeat?” said, simultaneously, the two Commanders: one cold and logical, the other one with clear surprise.

“We do not defeat the Borg” said T’Konte.

“Not without a fleet or Picard or Hansen or Janeway” opined Siouinon. “Not without waiting for them. Not without sacrificing even more of the crew of the Franscini.”

“Logic dictates we must evacuate” added T’Konte. “The safety of the crew can’t be further compromised. Yet, the continued existence of the ship is an imperative.”

That sentence stirred Iskander. He couldn’t help but to think of his father’s old ship, called to reinforce the battle lines for the approach of the Borg Cube at Earth. Iskander didn’t know what had specifically been ordered to the ship — he could have, but he feared the answers — so he imagined that, at some point, someone had made a call that the continued existance of the ship and of its crew were not, compared to Earth, an imperative. A cold calculation, almost Borg-like, in his mind. But the determination not to sacrifice the Franscini… was that rational.

He didn’t know whether his father had been assimilated, but if he had, the odious drone that would have become him would have perished at the destruction of the Cube. That was no comfort. Either that, or a cold horrible death in the vacuum of space.

The word of the Redding chief science officers shook him out of his reverie.

“Why is it an imperative?” grunted Siouinon. “I say we leave the ship behind. The Borg are going to activate their beacon and get reinforcements, and they’ll probably just take the ship and go away without causing further problem. The loss of a ship to assimilation is a nuisance.”

“The rest of the crew must be saved” retorted coldly T’Konte.

“Right. We detect only like 80 of the crew on board. Where’s the rest?”

“More than 200 had become possibly compromised by the Borg. Anyone at suspition of having been in contact with Borg nanoprobes has been beamed.”

“Beamed where?” asked Friedrichsen.

Iskander, a transporter specialist, had no problem in connecting the dots.

“Nowhere, Friedrichsen! They are in the buffers of the transporter!”

“Correct” nodded T’Konte. “Given time, we can rematerialize them in safe conditions and prevent any assimilation. Yet the transporters must remain powered-up for the whole time.”

“How did you get 200 people into the transporter?” wondered aloud Sirti-nei-Plex.

“The Franscini specializes in humanitarian assistance, evacuations and colonial settlement” said Diran Koli automatically. “It’s got a large number of transporter rooms.”

“Hence if we lose the ship we’ll lose the 200 crewmembers you have… stored… in there” contemplated Siouinon. “This is highly inconvenient.”

“Just to be sure… with the 80 crew that our tricorders can pick up, that’s roughly 300. If the crew manifest can be trusted, there’s roughly one hundred unaccounted for” remarked Diran Koli, softly.

T’Konte looked at them with cold, gray eyes.

“The Borg tried to adapt to what we are doing to the deflector dish.”

“Yes, and?” asked Friedrichsen.

Siouinon sweared softly.

“They tried to modify again the deflector dish” she reasoned. “They walked out and tried to reach it to modify it further and send their distress signal.”

“In this ion storm? They’d have been vaporized” gasped Sirti-nei-Plex.

“They were vaporized” corrected him coldly T’Konte. “Unconnected Borg drones are not clever. We thought that the ion storm would dissuade them, but they are determined and self-sacrificial to an illogical degree.”

Hundreds of barely assimilated Starfleet crewmembers walking out into an ion storm? thought with horror Iskander. It was monstruous, yet he could see the determined, desperate, uncreative mind of the Borg directing them to this pointless action. They had ceased being trained, resourceful Starfleet members: they had one and one drive only — connecting with the Collective, calling the Collective, joining the Collective, or die pointless in the attempt.

There was a loud band outside.

BORG! BORG! screamed Iskander’s mind. He knew that everyone had the same reaction: through the helmets of their EV suit, he could almost smell the panic. He could imagine Borg drones, half-assimilated and crazed and starved, smashing through the doors.

T’Konte raised two eyebrows, looking almost concerned for a moment, and went to the door of the chief engineer’s office.

“Lieutenant Kirrinakis” she called. “Report.”

“The seal on an EPS coolant conduit has exploded, Commander” screamed Kirrinakis from somewhere in Main engineering, her voice remote.

Everyone relaxed slightly.

“You four” said Siouinon to her squad, “go and make yourself useful. There’s a coolant leak to repair. The crew of the Franscini is exhausted.”

“Aye, Commander” said Iskander, breathing hard, pretending not to have just had half a heart attack.

“While you do, the Commander and me are going to cook something up” promised Siouinon.

“Cuisine is not a priority” remarked T’Konte.

“It’s a… I… The four of you! Make yourselves scarce! Out!”

In some way, Iskander was happy to do that. He couldn’t fix the problem that was the Borg, he couldn’t come up with a plan. But he could fix coolant leaks. He was good at it. And, he might die, but at least he’d die doing something he was good at.