“Why haven’t they moved against us?” asked Lieutenant J.G. Adrian Cruz as he peered warily out the window, his eyes searching for threats in the darkness beyond. The colonists should have figured out what had happened by now. “If I were in their shoes, I’d be drawing up assault plans right now.” They’d have a significant numbers advantage if they did too.

Sitting against the wall with his hands bound, Administrator Thoss enjoyed listening to the musings of the Starfleet crew. They were so pitiful and had such small thoughts. “But you’re not in our shoes,” he interjected. “You and your kind, you’re too focused on the individual. We have moved beyond that. My people know that, as long as you’re confined to our world, and as long as your ship is immobilized in our skies, there’s nothing you can do to stop us. Why waste the resources to attack when you’re already a prisoner on our world?

“We are prisoners?” That didn’t make any sense. Administrator Thoss and his co-conspirators were the ones in flexcuffs. Lieutenant J.G. Cruz and Admiral Reyes were in control. Or so they thought. 

Suddenly, they heard a light boom. A moment later, the ground shook softly. It was nothing like the 20 gigajoule explosion Lieutenant J.G. Cruz’s team had set off earlier to destroy the vinculum, but it was still unmistakably an explosion.

“Yes, prisoners, now more than ever” chuckled Administrator Thoss. “That was my people ensuring you don’t leave before salvation arrives.” They didn’t understand. They just stood there, waiting for the Andorian to elaborate. “That was your shuttle going boom.” The way he said it, Thoss seemed almost to revel in it. “All you can do now is wait.” He’d been one step ahead of them every step of the way.

“Shut him up,” Admiral Reyes ordered. She was tired of his games. “Gag him or stuff him in a broom closet, I don’t care, but I don’t want to hear him anymore.” Typically, she would not pass up the opportunity to interrogate a subject, but after hours verbally sparring with the administrator, she knew he’d give them nothing of value. At least not quickly. If she separated him from the others though, it was possible one of them might.

As two security officers dragged Administrator Thoss from the room, Lieutenant Syleth Sh’vot approached Admiral Reyes with a tricorder in his hand.

“Doctor, tell me you have an explanation?” 

“An explanation? Unfortunately, not so much,” Lieutenant Sh’vot admitted. He was a geophysicist by trade, not a medical doctor, and although he’d dabbled in biochemistry during his time with the Terraform Command, that hardly made him an expert in Andorian physiology. “I’m no Dr. Henderson, but I can at least confirm they’re physically Andorian. No cortical implants, no cybernetic enhancements, nothing inorganic whatsoever besides the random artificial hip or dental crown.”

“But Administrator Thoss wasn’t just talking in vague worship terms. He said ‘we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.’ That doesn’t sound like a Borg worshiper. That sounds like the Borg itself,” Admiral Reyes noted. “If they’re not Borg drones, how do you explain that?” Frontier Day had taught them that appearances could be deceiving, and she wasn’t willing to look past the possibility the Borg had come up with another modality for assimilation.

“Actually, that I might be able to explain,” Lieutenant Sh’vot nodded. “I did neurological scans of each of them, and they all exhibit the same neuroplasticity and cross-modal reassignment Dr. Brooks observed during his autopsy aboard Salvage Facility 21-J. Whether the vinculum or their machinations came first, I have no idea, but what I can say is that, at this point, long-term potentiation caused by sustained exposure to the Borg interlink frequency has rewired their brains. They’re as Borg as freshly liberated xBs, apart, of course, from the cybernetics.”

“That’s going to make it hard to get anything from any of them,” Admiral Reyes sighed, thinking back to her one visit to the Borg Reclamation Project in the nineties. She’d seen just enough of the xBs during that trip to know how neurologically damaging the voice could be. Those who had lived with the Collective in their head had an incredibly hard time detaching from it.

“So what do we do now?” asked Lieutenant Sh’vot.

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” admitted Admiral Reyes. Even if they could find a way off the planet without their shuttle, then what? Their ship had been disabled by a Borg energy-dampening missile, their communications had been jammed by a Borg subspace transceiver, and they still had absolutely no idea what the colonists were actually up to.

As Admiral Reyes and Lieutenant Sh’vot pondered their options, Lieutenant Balan approached one of the Andorians, the young man she knew to be a sensor operator for the colony. They’d spoken several times prior, and whether inadvertently or not, he’d given them one of their first clues about the vinculum. She hoped another conversation might prove equally fruitful. 

“Hey there, stranger,” she smiled as she sat down next to him against the wall. She didn’t want to come off as though she was towering over him. “How are you doing?”

As he looked at her, she could not help but notice something was missing from his eyes. He looked disoriented and lost. “What happened to the voice?” he asked quietly.

“We silenced it.”

He looked uneasy.

“You are free. Your mind is all your own now.“

The young man blinked, and then he blinked again. “All my own?” he fumbled for the words, trying to process wat she was saying. He’d know the voice from his earliest memories. “Forgive me, but that is a strange concept. I’ve never had a thing of my own. Such a concept is threatening to our collective, and to all that we’re working towards.”

“All that you’re working towards?”

The Andorian opened his mouth to answer, but then he paused as he remembered himself. “Tell me,” he asked, choosing not to directly answer the question. “Why are you doing all of this? Why come to Beta Serpentis III? And why keep at it even at threat to yourself? After you were freed by your men, you could have retreated back to your ship and fled the system, but instead, you went after the machine that talks to us.”

“Whether or not you see it this way, we did it for you, for Thoss, and for all of you who live here on Beta Serpentis III,” Lieutenant Balan explained. She didn’t miss the fact he’d dodged her question, but she knew better than to push. He’d get there when he was ready. “We see you as part of our collective, and we came to serve you.” She intentionally used language that would be familiar to a kid who’d grown up with nothing but the words of worshipers and the voice of the vinculum.

“I was right about you,” the kid smiled, suddenly opening up as his eyes came to life. “As I sat behind my scopes and watched your ships dance across the sky, you reminded me of a hive working for something more. Everyone told me I was wrong, that the galaxy was filled with nothing but self-serving individuals. The voice told me so too. It’s what their grand plan is meant to fix… but I wanted to believe they were wrong.”

Lieutenant Balan nodded, but said nothing. She let him proceed at his own pace.

The kid paused for a moment, summoning up the courage, and then he dropped a bombshell: “I was the one that sent the distress call. They say assimilation is the only way to achieve salvation, but I’m not ready to give myself to the Collective.” There was a deep sense of fear interlaced within his words. “I’m not ready to not be me.”

Lieutenant Balan set a reassuring hand on his hand and coaxed him forward. “Then let us stop it from happening. You all keep saying salvation is coming, but how? What is their plan?”

“We’re building a transwarp gate, and we have a way to summon the Collective through it.”