“Is this what I think it is?” Commander Lee asked as she stared at a Borg beacon sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty shuttle bay.

“If you’re thinking it’s the Borg homing beacon we were searching for, then yes, that’s as good a guess as any,” Dr. Brooks nodded. “Residual radiation and emissions suggest this beacon was recently exposed to the vacuum of deep space. It hasn’t just been sitting here with the rest of the debris.”

“Curious,” Commander Lee remarked, thinking back to the mission they’d been on when they received the distress call from Beta Serpentis III. “Now we know why we came up empty in the debris field.” A week prior, Starfleet Communications had detected a Borg homing signal from the graveyard of Wolf 359. Polaris Squadron had been dispatched to locate it and secure whatever Borg technology had been reawakened, but by the time they had arrived, the signal had vanished. “Do you think the colonists brought it here?”

“I doubt it just wandered 1.64 light years on its own,” Dr. Brooks said snarkily. “And then decided this looked like a good parking space.” The colonists of Beta Serpentis III must have detected it and beaten the squadron to Wolf 359. It was curious they’d managed to disable the beacon too, ensuring that neither Polaris Squadron, nor the Borg, could follow. Starfleet had yet to figure out how to do that, so it yet again evidenced the colony’s proficiency with Borg technology.

“Why go through all that effort?” Commander Lee asked as she probed the beacon with her tricorder. “Admiral Reyes said they’re Borg worshipers so maybe they’re planning to use it to call the Borg?”

“There are no transwarp apertures nearby,” Dr. Brooks shook his head. “If they reactivate it, Starfleet will detect it and dispatch a response, just like we did last week. We’d stop it long before the Borg ever arrived.”

“Should we give the Admiral a heads up anyways?”

“Yeah, give me a second,” Dr. Brooks said as he pulled out his tricorder and connected to the remote command module he’d installed in the transceiver array so they could still use it while they moved about the station. “Hmmm, this is odd… The USS Ingenuity is not responding.”

“Do you think they’re having issues with the signal again?” Commander Lee asked. When they’d first underwritten the transceiver’s signal with their own subchannel, it had taken Ensign Seltzer a few minutes to compensate for the non-standard signaling protocol they’d engineered.

“No, it’s more like there’s no receiver trying to pick up at all,” Dr. Brooks replied. “The initial handshake isn’t getting an ACK back at all.” Concern washed across Commander Lee’s face. Had something gone wrong aboard the Ingenuity? “Remember though,” Dr. Brooks reassured her. “This is only a comms relay. There’s a dozen non-catastrophic reasons for a nonresponse.”

“There are also catastrophic reasons for one,” Commander Lee countered. After all that had happened in the last day, it was easy for one to go there. They needed to find out if Ingenuity was ok. She glanced over at an inactive console across the shuttlebay. “If you jack in, think you could access the ship’s sensors?”

“I’m sure I can,” Dr. Brooks confirmed. “But the station will know too, and it will respond in kind.” This wasn’t their first rodeo with the Borg-corrupted computer core. The moment they’d connect to the network, the station would identify their location, and it would dispatch armed synths to stop them. They’d have a couple minutes at best. “Are you suggesting another hack-and-run?”

“I am,” Commander Lee nodded, her mind drifting to her crew. “We get in, we confirm the status of the Ingenuity, and then we get the fuck out.” She walked over to the access panel for a jefferies tube and popped it open. It would be their escape route, like a pair of rats scurrying away. Or gnats. That was how Dr. Brooks had described them earlier. Gnats the Borg would swipe at when close but would waste no extra energy pursuing. At least that was how it had been so far.

It was as good a plan as any, figured Dr. Brooks, so with his rifle slung over his shoulder, he walked over to the console and got to work. By now, he’d become very familiar with the duality of the station’s computer core, part Starfleet and part Borg, and he’d broken through the security perimeter in less than thirty seconds. Fifteen seconds after that, he had access to the sensor grid. He ran a full spectra scan in the direction of Beta Serpentis III. “Well, the good news is that she’s still in orbit,” Dr. Brooks reported. “And I’m registering one hundred and twelve fully organic humanoid lifeforms aboard.” The extra specificity seemed relevant given that they now knew the colonists were messing with Borg technology.

“And the bad news?”

“Well, she’s completely dead in the…” Dr. Brooks began, but he didn’t get time to finish his response. 

The blast from a phaser pulse exploded over his shoulder. 

Dr. Brooks spun around, yanking his rifle from his shoulder and squeezing the trigger as he got it leveled out, spamming suppression fire in the direction the shots had come from without even taking the time to acquire a target first. “Go! Go!” he screamed over the sound of phaser fire as six synths and two Andorians tried to press through the door into the room.

Commander Lee didn’t need to be told twice. She dove for the Jeffries tube. Behind her, she could hear Dr. Brooks exchanging fire with the enemy. Then she heard an explosion as Dr. Brooks threw a concussion grenade across the bay to buy a few seconds for him to climb into the jefferies tube and follow.

It got quiet as Dr. Brooks slammed the hatch shut behind him. He knew the grenade wouldn’t keep the synths and the Andorians busy for long, and he scrambled on his hands and knees down the narrow crawl space, racing to put as much distance as he could between himself and the access port. “Keep going! Go! Go! Go!”

After a good fifteen minutes scurrying through the shafts and junctions that lined the superstructure of Salvage Facility 21-J, they finally felt safe to slow their pace. “That was faster than last time,” Commander Lee noted. This wasn’t their first time fleeing through the network, but the other times had been pre-emptive before the synths arrived. This time, their response had been far more swift.

“They’re evolving,” Dr. Brooks observed.

That thought made Commander Lee shiver. “What were you saying about the Ingenuity when we got interrupted?”

“She’s dead in the water,” Dr. Brooks clarified. “No matter-antimatter emissions from the warp assembly, no plasma exhaust from the impulse reactors, and barely enough energy across the deflector to keep the space dust at bay. Her signature suggests she’s on emergency pow…”

Once again, he didn’t get to finish his sentence, but this time, instead of phaser fire, it was just his combadge chirping. The physicist looked down at it confused. The combadge used a subspace carrier wave, and the entire band was presently being flooded by interference from the Borg subspace transceiver. The Ingenuity had not figured out how to cut through it, and based on their latest scans, he suspected they had bigger issues at the moment. So who was hailing them? There was only one way to find out. He tapped the badge.

“Brooks, go.”

“Dr. Brooks, good to hear your voice again.”

“Forgive me, Admiral,” Dr. Brooks replied, a look of shock washing across at the sound of Admiral Reyes’ voice. “But how are you calling? We tried to relay through the Ingenuity again, but she is not responding. It looks like she is dead in the water.”

“One of the colonists was so gracious as to show us how to keep up with the modularity of the boosted interlink frequency,” Admiral Reyes explained. “But yes, as far as the Ingenuity goes, your understanding is correct. She was hit by a barrage of Borg energy-dampening missiles. The colonists fired them shortly after we destroyed the vinculum.”

“I gather that destroying the vinculum did not have the intended effect then?” Commander Lee frowned as she jumped into the conversation alongside Dr. Brooks.

“Unfortunately not,” explained Lieutenant Sh’vot, her Chief Science Officer, from next to Admiral Reyes. “Functional neuroplasticity after decades of exposure to the vinculum has rewritten their neural pathways so fundamentally that, now that we’ve silenced the voice, they’re essentially fresh xBs.”

“Just like the dead dude up here,” Dr. Brooks remarked, drawing a glare from Commander Lee. Even after spending a day with him, the flippant way Dr. Brooks referred to the deceased Andorian still bothered her. The Andorian, for all his flaws, was still a Federation citizen and living being. Or at least he had been until Dr. Brooks stabbed him.

“Yep,” confirmed Lieutenant Sh’vot, clearly less perturbed by the casual reference to the deceased than Commander Lee.

“While the science is interesting,” Admiral Reyes interrupted, bringing them back to the matter at hand. “We have a time-sensitive situation. One of the colonists here, a young man who seems to have retained his individuality better than the others, has shared with us what the colony is planning. They’re building a transwarp gate so they can bring the Borg straight to Beta Serpentis III.”

“A transwarp gate?” Dr. Brooks mused as the gears in his head turned. “That’s no easy feat of engineering.” He knew better than most. In the early eighties, he’d actually worked on a few attempts to create one, but all he succeeded in doing was killing a few test pilots. “How close do they believe they are to completion?”

“According to our friend, they took us hostage to accelerate the procurement of the last few items they needed to complete the gateway,” explained Admiral Reyes. “He says they’ve got everything they need now, and if they stick to the plan, they’ll be activating it by morning.”

“By morning?” gasped Commander Lee. “Did he tell you where?”

“Yes, he provided coordinates,” Admiral Reyes replied. “I’m sending them over now.” 

Dr. Brooks looked down at the coordinates as they came across. They referred to a position within the Roche lobe of the binary star at the center of the Beta Serpentis system. The intense gravitational shear and electromagnetic radiation made it an excellent place to hide something, and that’s likely why they hadn’t detected it when they entered the system.

“What we can’t figure out though is how they’re going to summon the Borg once they activate the gate,” continued Admiral Reyes. “Our young friend said they had a way, but he didn’t know how.”

“Well, as it turns out, we might be able to fill in the blanks there,” Dr. Brooks replied. From the moment Admiral Reyes had shared that they were building a transwarp gate, he knew where this was going. “While we were stalking around the station gathering intelligence, we came across what looks to be the Borg homing beacon from Wolf 359…”

Admiral Reyes saw it too. She finished his thought. “And they’re going to activate the gate and use the beacon to lure the Collective in.” In mere hours, they might be staring down the gunports of a Borg Cube. “Tom, with Ingenuity dead in the water, and with us stranded on the surface, I’m afraid that once more I may be asking a lot of you.”

“I understand, Allison. We’ll get it done. Brooks out.” 

Commander Lee looked over at Dr. Brooks. She didn’t understand. What did he mean that they’d get it done? 

“Follow me,” Dr. Brooks instructed as he turned around and headed back down the jefferies tube towards the shuttlebay they’d just left. “We don’t have a lot of time.”