They heard it first, a deep rumble overwhelming the howl of the storm, and then they felt it, the ground shaking beneath their feet. It didn’t last long, but when it stopped, something was different. Administrator Thoss looked at his colleagues. They looked lost. The voice had gone silent. The voice that had guided them for decades, the voice that had been with some of them since birth, the voice that guided them towards their salvation, they couldn’t hear it anymore. 

Administrator Thoss looked up from where he sat, and Admiral Allison Reyes met his stare. She had a satisfied, knowing look in her eyes. She was responsible for it. “It’s futile, you know,” he hissed, his eyes emanating conviction even in the unfamiliar silence. “You cannot stop it now.” Who were these children to try and silence the voice of the Borg? It wouldn’t work though. The voice might be gone, but its words were emblazoned in his mind. They were already in the endgame now. All that was left was to open the door.

“I assure you, I can, and I will,” Admiral Reyes replied firmly, although inwardly she wondered what ‘it’ was. She stared at the prisoners. There was something different about them now. When the explosion had gone off, it was almost like the air had been sucked from their lungs. They looked more disoriented than before, but no less convicted. If the vinculum had just been destroyed, why hadn’t it snapped them from their trance?

Her combadge beeped. “Ma’am, it’s done,” reported Lieutenant J.G. Cruz over the link, able to communicate over the short range between them using a subluminal channel unaffected by the subspace interference emanating from Salvage Facility 21-J. His voice sounded shaky and fatigued. “Sorry for the shakeup, but the team wanted to be certain.” Turning the building into a smoldering crater might have been excessive, but it was also effective. “We’re on our way back.”

“What’s the situation out there now?”

“Honestly, we’re not exactly sure, ma’am,” admitted Lieutenant J.G. Cruz. “Colonists running everywhere, shouting, screaming, a mix of confusion and panic, but so far, we’ve been able to avoid detection.” They’d pulled back nearly a half kilometer from the blast site before blowing it, and that was now working to their advantage. “We’re pretty far from the blast site, and right now, that’s what’s got the colony’s attention.”

“And you’re sure the vinculum is resolved?”

“Yes, there’s no way there’s anything left there,” Lieutenant J.G. Cruz confirmed. “The team took no chances. They used a 20 gigajoule yield to be certain.” That explained the sonic boom and the shaking ground. “And I can’t hear it anymore either.” There was a ringing in his ears from the pressure wave caused by the massive explosion, but the Borg voice had gone silent. It was a welcome change after how unrelenting and unbearable it had been earlier.

“Good job today, Lieutenant,” Admiral Reyes offered. Lieutenant J.G. Cruz had risen to his duty. First, he’d freed them from a delicate hostile situation, and now, he’d used his affinity for the Borg interlink frequency, borne of the cross-modal reassignment caused by his prior assimilation, to find and destroy the vinculum. “We’ll see you soon.”

“Admiral, please be aware that they don’t seem to have been pacified by what we just did,” Lieutenant J.G. Cruz cautioned. Blowing up the facility had worked them into a frenzy similar to how ants got worked up when you knocked their anthill over. “Recommend you tighten your perimeter, just in case.” Once the colonists figured out that a Starfleet team had blown up the vinculum, he could all but guarantee their next stop would be the colonial administration building where Admiral Reyes and the rest of their team was holed up. “We’ll be back to reinforce you as soon as we can.”

Admiral Reyes closed the link and looked around the room. The nine Andorians sat against the wall with their hands bound, while three of her officers kept watch. Up on the roof, a fourth officer had taken up position, their eyes and ears to the outside. The last two hours had been mighty quiet, save for the howl of the wind, but that might soon change.

“Ensign, you stay here with the prisoners,” Admiral Reyes commanded, addressing one of the security officers. Then she turned her attention to the other security officer and the diplomatic officer. “And you two, cover the windows. We may have company soon.” She looked down and checked the settings on her rifle.

As the two she’d assigned to the windows moved across the room, the security officer guarding the prisoner looked over at her. “Ma’am, if they got the vinculum,” he asked, his voice loud enough that everyone, the prisoners included, could hear. “Why are we expecting company? Shouldn’t they be free of their shackles now?”

“We were never shackled in the first place,” Administrator Thoss interjected with a devious smile on his face. “You thought you could free us from the vinculum, but you see, the vinculum was never our captor. It was simply our guide.”

Admiral Reyes looked at the other colonists, hoping she might see a hint of someone who felt different, but she didn’t. They all had the same sort of cold, devoted look in their eyes.

“Fuck!”

The shout of the security officer by the window drew her from her thoughts.

“Ma’am, come see this!”

Admiral Reyes rushed over just in time to see multiple contrails streaking upward.

Up on the bridge of the USS Ingenuity, 2,000 kilometers above the surface of Beta Serpentis III, they saw them too. An audible alert began to blare from the tactical station.

“Vampire! Vampire! Vampire!” shouted the tactical officer, shattering the uneasy silence on the bridge. They had incoming, and they only had a few seconds.

Lieutenant Commander Sherrod Allen, the Ingenuity’s Executive Officer, sat in the center chair. He was already on edge, and before the tactical officer finished calling out the inbound missiles, he was already rising from his chair and barking orders: “Raise shields! Deploy countermeasures!”

“Shields, countermeasures, aye.”

“Helm, bring us about. Evasive act…”

For as fast as they’d reacted though, they were not fast enough. Accelerating to 0.2c, the four missiles covered the distance from the surface to the ship in less than ten seconds. The tactical officer managed to get the shields up in time, but countermeasures had not yet been deployed, and evasive actions had not yet been taken. All four warheads found their mark, striking the ship amidsection.

The impact itself was relatively subtle, not because the shields had mitigated the force, but rather because these missiles did not carry explosive payloads. They carried something far worse. Consoles began to flicker, and then the lights went out. A few moments later, emergency power kicked in.

“Sir, I’m detecting a major loss of power across all ship systems,” reported Ensign Kellan Seltzer from the operations station. “Warp drive, impulse engines, deflector control, shields, weapons, all offline.”

“How?” demanded Lieutenant Commander Allen.

“The signature is consistent a… a…” began the tactical officer, but he fumbled with his words as he rechecked to make sure he was absolutely sure. “A Borg energy-dampening missile.”

Back on the surface, Admiral Reyes looked over at Administrator Thoss. She was sick of the Borg, and she was sick of him. He just smiled back at her: “You’re too late, Admiral. Soon, we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.”