Careening towards their end, they could now make out the transwarp gate silhouetted against the bright hues of the accretion disk. The monstrosity was a strange hybrid of Borg and Starfleet technology, an amalgamation of parts stolen from Salvage Facility 21-J, stripped from Beta Serpentis III, and forced from the USS Ingenuity. The colonists believed this to be the doorway to salvation, but Dr. Brooks and Commander Lee were resolved to stop them, at any cost.

“Any chance the gate won’t work?” Commander Lee asked hopefully. A prodigious engineer by trade, she knew just how temperamental the technology could be. If that janky construct couldn’t establish and maintain a stable conduit, then they could abort. “It’s not exactly easy science.” Starfleet had spent over a century failing to achieve reliable transwarp capabilities.

“We’re going to find out soon enough,” Dr. Brooks reported as the latest sensor telemetry flashed across his screen. “I’m detecting a significant build up of neutrinos, coupled with an intermittent graviton flux. The gate is coming online.” If the colonists had succeeded in building a stable gate, he and Commander Lee would have no choice but to detonate the warp core of their unarmed shuttlepod to stop the Borg from marching straight into the heart of the Federation.

The pair cast their eyes forward as the gate began to light up. It didn’t fizzle, and it didn’t short. Instead, a blue and white portal began to open. It was a transwarp tear in subspace, and it was stable.

Their fate was sealed.

Dr. Brooks looked down at his console just to be certain, but then he saw something else. Even with the help of the homing beacon to attract them, he’d assumed it would take the Collective some time to respond. He was wrong. “Check your console.” He knew Commander Lee was struggling to come to terms with what they had to do, and he figured it would be more impactful if she saw it for herself. “What do you see?”

“I… I…” Commander Lee stammered as she saw it on her scopes. “I’m seeing multiple inbound transwarp signatures. Two… wait, no… three… fuck, there’s four Borg ships on the other side, coming fast!” She’d never seen a Borg ship on sensors before, and now she was staring at four of them. “If my calculations are right, we have just over three minutes.” In three minutes, either they would be dead, or the Borg would be flooding through the gate. 

“Then we have no choice,” Dr. Brooks said as he looked over at the young woman. His eyes welled with regret that he hadn’t insisted she stay behind. From the moment they had commandeered the Type 17 shuttlepod, he’d been fairly certain how this was going to end. He should have just stunned her with his phaser and rolled her out the back before he took the pod away from Salvage Facility 21-J. But he hadn’t. He’d allowed her to come along, and now she was going to die alongside him. “You ready?”

“No,” Commander Lee’s voice trembled. She’d had two hours to make peace with what was to come, but as four Borg signatures raced towards them through the transwarp conduit, she felt no closer to acceptance than when she’d first climbed aboard the shuttlepod. She was not ready to die. “But it doesn’t… it doesn’t matter if I’m ready. We… we… we have to do it.” 

For her crew on the Ingenuity. For the colonists of Beta Serpentis III. For all those across the core of the Federation who would otherwise wake in the morning to the Borg on their doorstep. They had to do it.

“Increasing matter-antimatter mix to critical levels,” Dr. Brooks reported in a matter-of-fact tone as he coaxed the propulsion system towards the very conditions its safeguards were designed to prevent. “Bring us closer to the gate.”

“How close?”

“So close that if we open the back hatch, we’ll be able to reach out and touch it.” It was probably superfluous. The warp core breach would annihilate the nuclear bonds of every atom within a thousand kilometers, but Dr. Brooks intended to take no risks. Not when they were trading their lives for it.

“Understood,” Commander Lee confirmed, her voice little more than a whisper and her hands shaking as she guided the shuttle towards the gate. They were really doing this. They were really about to erase themselves from existence to stop the Borg. She was really going to die.

Racing towards Beta Serpentis at warp 9.98, the USS Serenity was now within a thousand AUs of the system. They were close enough they could now detect the anomaly forming at the lemniscate of the Roche lobe.

“Sir, I’m picking up a massive build up of neutrinos and a graviton flux typically indicative of a transwarp aperture,” reported the tactical officer nervously. “And… ummm… there’s more…” But he didn’t elaborate. His voice simply trailed over as he worked at the controls. Those readings couldn’t be correct. He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing.

“What?” shouted Captain Lewis aggressively. He needed to break his crew of their annoying habit of reporting something without reporting what the something was. It wasted far too much time. He looked over at the tactical officer, noting the man looked absolutely horrified as he fixated on his scopes. “Lieutenant, what is it?!”

“It’s the Borg, sir,” reported the tactical officer. 

His words cut through the bridge like a knife through butter. Everyone grew silent. The sailors of the USS Serenity knew intimately what the Borg could do. Most of them had been over Earth on Frontier Day. 

“I’m detecting four Borg transwarp signatures incoming from the far side of the transwarp aperture,” the tactical officer continued. “The beacon must be attracting them.”

“How close are we?” Captain Lewis asked. If they could get there before the Borg did, maybe they could destroy the gate. At least, that was what he hoped.

“Three minutes.”

“And how soon will the Borg cross through?”

“Two and a half.”

They were already at max warp, but they were going to arrive too late.

“Red alert!” came the call from Captain Lewis as a warrior’s expression washed over his face. Combat didn’t typically bother him. In fact, he almost sought it out. But combat with the Borg was something different altogether. Even the aged spook had hoped he’d never have to face them head on. “All hands to battlestations!” 

The Borg were coming, and they weren’t going to get there soon enough to stop them. 

As it so happened though, they didn’t need to get there first. Unbeknownst to Captain Lewis and his crew, two of their colleagues from Polaris Squadron sat aboard a Type 17 shuttlepod directly in front of the gate, preparing to commit the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the Borg would never reach Beta Serpentis.

Aboard the shuttlepod, alarms began to sound. 

The shuttlepod’s safeties had rightly identified that the core was approaching critical. Dr. Brooks ignored them, simply urging more fuel into the reaction and watching as the cascade continued to build. He glanced momentarily out the front viewer. They were now so close to the gate that they could see the individual conduits lining its surface, and in the middle of the gate, the blue and white of the open transwarp conduit continued to pulse.

And then, they crossed the threshold. 

Dr. Brooks looked down at the power sensors, confirming the positive feedback cycle of matter-antimatter annihilations was now at the point where the byproducts of the reaction were themselves enough to fuel the impending explosion.

They’d passed the point of no return.

“Warning. Warning. Warp core breach imminent. Warning. Warn…”

“Computer, silence all alerts.”

Dr. Brooks leaned back in his chair, accepting the inevitable. In mere moments, it would all be over in a flash of blinding light as the matter-antimatter reaction annihilated the shuttle, the gate, and the two of them. Without the gate, the transwarp tunnel would collapse, and the door into the heart of the Federation would close before the Collective could arrive. That was all that mattered.

“Cora, I am sorry it came to this.”

The old man reached out and grabbed hold of her hand, trying to offer what comfort he could in those final moments. He could feel her shaking, but she said nothing. 

She had nothing to say. She was going to die.

On USS Serenity, a red hue had subsumed the bridge as the Duderstadt-class light cruiser charged forward at max warp. At operations, Lieutenant Commander Eidran spotted a faint energy signature on his scopes. It appeared to be right on top of the gate. “Sir, I’m detecting something at the gate.”

“The transwarp conduit?”

“I mean yes, there’s that, but no, this is something else. It’s registering as a Type 17 shuttle.” There was a hint of confusion in Lieutenant Commander Eidran’s voice. Why would an unarmed passenger pod be sitting at the mouth of a transwarp aperture? But then he noticed its energy signature. It was growing impossibly fast, or at least, it was growing impossibly fast for safe operations. There was only one explanation he could think of for the massive energy build up. “And her warp signature is cascading towards a breach.” He checked a few more readings to confirm it. “She’s going to blow.”

Captain Lewis smiled, a strange reaction in the midst of the crisis, but he knew instantly what was happening here. The Ingenuity had been rendered incapacitated, but someone had come up with a way still to stop the Borg. They’d turned the shuttlepod into a matter-antimatter bomb. 

At the conn, a flash of concern danced across the Vulcan flight controller’s face. “Sir, should I redirect our trajectory?” Lieutenant Selik asked. Traveling at nearly 5,600 times the speed of light, if they waited too long to pull away, they could get caught in the shockwave of the matter-antimatter explosion. “If we continue our approach, I cannot guarantee our safety.”

“You can never guarantee our safety,” Captain Lewis countered quickly. He had other things on his mind. “Eidran, is that shuttle unmanned?” He was fairly certain a Type 17 shuttlepod’s autopilot could not be programmed to do what it was doing. The safeties would prevent it.

“I’m detecting two lifesigns aboard,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran replied.

Captain Lewis frowned. It wasn’t in his DNA to leave a man behind. For all he knew, the two people aboard that shuttle were members of the USS Ingenuity’s crew. And that meant he owed it to them to try and save them. He tapped his combadge. “Engineering, I need more juice, and I need it now!”

“I’ve been pushing the core to its limits the last two hours, Captain,” came the warning from Lieutenant Commander Sharpe over the comms. “I can’t give you any more safely.”

“Then don’t be safe!” Captain Lewis snapped. “Blow through their limits. Ride this bitch to the edge of possible, and past it if you have to. Lives depend on it.” He didn’t even wait for a response. He just tapped his combadge off and turned back to Lieutenant Commander Eidran. “Can we hail them?”

“Not through the subspace interference.”

His mind racing at a million miles a minute, Captain Lewis began to form a plan in his head. “Are their shields still up?”

“Yes.”

That was problematic, but he still had a plan. It was gutsy, but it could work. They were going to push the ship to its limits, and it would take perfect execution, but it was possible. “Eidran, I need you at tactical.” For all his struggles as a first officer, Ekkomas Eidran rose through the ranks behind the targeting controls. No one aboard was a better shot with the phaser array. “And Selik, I’m going to need some more of your crazy flying.” The Vulcan had already bested the Jem’Hadar, but now he was going to need to best the laws of physics themselves.

Down in engineering, Lieutenant Commander Sharpe was doing his part too. He’d taken Captain Lewis’ orders to heart, pushing the engines past their limits, edging right up against the threshold that could push the Serenity’s own core to critical.

Meanwhile, on the Type 17 shuttlepod, they’d already blown way past critical. Now, as they watched energy levels continue to climb, Cora Lee squeezed Tom Brooks’ hand. Any second now…

Suddenly, the shuttlepod shook.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Dr. Brooks, releasing Commander Lee’s hand and spinning back towards his controls. That didn’t feel like the beginning of the end.

And it wasn’t. 

A Duderstadt class vessel had just emerged from high warp with impossibly fast deceleration, pushing its inertial dampeners, deflectors, and structural integrity to their limits so as to not waste any extra time on their approach. It wasn’t the first time the USS Serenity had been ridden to the edge, nor would it be the last.

The first shot had connected, Lieutenant Commander Eidran expertly compensating for the superluminal deceleration, and with only one additional follow up shot, the carefully modulated nadion beam arcing from the USS Serenity’s bow shorted out the shuttlepod’s shields.

How were they here? Dr. Brooks asked himself. And what the hell were they doing? Suddenly, the cockpit around Dr. Brooks began to vanish. The last thing he saw was the readings on the shuttlepod showing the core had breached.

From the bridge of the Serenity, the moment the shuttlepod’s shields fell, Captain Lewis made the call: “Execute! Execute! Execute!” 

A massive matter-antimatter explosion rippled out from the shuttlepod. It evaporated the shuttlepod instantly, and the transwarp gate a millisecond later. As the shockwave raced towards the USS Serenity, Selik slammed the throttle forward, Sharpe pumped every last ounce of juice into the engines, and Eidran redirected all remaining power to the shields.

The ship shook. Hard. Both from the shockwave, as it slammed into their shields from behind, and from the accretion disk, as the deflector struggled to repel the dense stellar material. Klaxons sounded, EPS relays shorted, and crewmen were launched from their feet, but then it was over. A silence settled over the bridge as they realized they’d done it.

Captain Lewis tapped his combadge: “Transporter Room 1?”

“I got them, sir. I got them both.”