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Seven years ago,Bowers thought. Then the realization hit him and he stared at Vaughn. My God, he was there.

As if rousing himself from a dream, Vaughn opened his tricorder and pointed toward a narrow breech in the hull. “Let’s go. What we’re looking for is in there.”

The transponder signal!Bowers had almost forgotten about it. Nog glanced at him, looking worried. Sam knew that entering the wrecks of two deadly Federation enemies in one day had to be fraying the engineer’s nerves. But he also knew Nog had proven time and again that he was made of sterner stuff than he himself realized. Nervous he might be, but Nog would never fail to come through when the situation required it. Sam watched him steel himself and follow Vaughn through the breech, with Bowers bringing up the rear.

Once again relying on wrist lights to navigate the dark, dead interior, the away team half-climbed through the bowels of what had once been a Federation starship. Familiar corridor configurations had been transformed by Borg technology that seemed to have invaded every square meter of the ship. Unlike the wreckage of the Dominion craft, animals and plant life had not encroached on the interior of the Borg ship. Maybe the conditions inside wouldn’t sustain anything long enough to allow life to thrive; it was cold in here, and there was an almost antiseptic taste to the air. Or maybe the animals just knew instinctively that they should stay away.

Nog narrowly sidestepped the inert body of a drone—a Vulcan, Bowers guessed, judging from the distinctive size of the skull—collapsed over a Borg interface panel near engineering. Bowers paused to see if there was any indication of what had been displayed on the panel when it ceased to function, but the surface was dark. Vaughn stopped for nothing, not even when Nog reported that there was a faint energy reading inside the engine room. They pressed on, past more Borg corpses and ruptured conduits, following the commander’s tricorder.

Vaughn stopped outside a door. It still bore a label that read SHUTTLEBAY, but without it, it might have been impossible to tell what the room’s original purpose had been. A labyrinth of corridors and catwalks lined with Borg regeneration alcoves greeted them as they pried the doors open. Most of the alcoves were empty, but a few were occupied, the drones still plugged into the ship’s systems, their organic remains long since decayed within their inert cybernetic shells.

Vaughn ignored them all, his pace picking up as the signal on his tricorder grew stronger. Nog showed Bowers the reading on his own tricorder: another energy signature, very faint, but matching the one he’d picked up in engineering. The conclusion was obvious. Something back there was still trickling power to something in here.

Vaughn disappeared around a corner. Cursing, Bowers and Nog rushed to catch up. While they marched, Sam made some quick adjustments to his phaser, setting it to cycle randomly through different frequencies with each shot. He gave it to Nog and then made the same modifications to the engineer’s phaser. If one or more of these drones suddenly came to life, he wanted to be as ready as possible. Every shot would count.

Vaughn had stopped in front of an occupied regeneration alcove down a long catwalk overlooking the gutted remains of the shuttle maintenance bays one level down. Wondering idly if the Borg had jettisoned the shuttles or cannibalized them for raw materials in their assimilation of the rest of the Valkyrie,Bowers heard his heavy footfalls rattling the framework of the catwalk as they reached the commander. Vaughn was passing his tricorder over and over the drone in the alcove, which Bowers saw wasn’t decayed like the others. It looked dead, but showed no evidence of decomposition. A hairless chalk-white face obscured by invasive prosthetic enhancements was mottled with charcoal-gray rivulets, the telltale sign of a circulatory system saturated with Borg nanoprobes. Like its dead companions in the room, the drone was plugged into the the ship’s power grid through its regeneration alcove, but a telltale light winking dimly by the interface port showed that power was still being fed into it. A thick layer of dust covered the drone and every surface of the alcove. My God,Bowers thought, has it been here like this for two years?

“This is it. This is the source of the transponder signal,” Vaughn said quietly, his eyes never leaving the tricorder, as if he feared missing some vital detail.

No, it’s more than that,Bowers realized. He’s trying not to look directly at the drone.

“You mean…this was once a Starfleet officer?” Nog asked.

“Most of these drones were,” Vaughn said absently. “Though only DNA scans will tell us for sure. This one, however, I can confirm without a scan.” Vaughn snapped his tricorder closed and tapped his combadge. “Vaughn to Defiant.”

“Defiant. Dax here,”came the reply. “Commander, where are you? Your signal is weak.”

“We’ve found what we were looking for, Lieutenant. But we need Dr. Bashir. Have Chief Chao home in on my signal and beam him to these coordinates immediately.”

“Acknowledged,”Dax said. “Anything else?”

“Stand by. Vaughn out.” Turning to Nog, he said, “Lieutenant, begin a tricorder sweep of the ship. I want to know if there’s any indication of active subspace links to the collective. Then start scanning this alcove—its construction, its operation, its power source, everything. I need you to become an expert on Borg technology as quickly as possible.”

Nog’s mouth dropped open, but all he could get out were the words “Aye, sir” as he reset his tricorder and went to work.

When the call came from the bridge, Bashir allowed himself a private sigh of relief at the knowledge that the big mystery of the last few days was about to end. And none too soon. Separating his desire to know what was going on from his personal relationship to the ship’s fully informed first officer had been difficult enough. On the one hand, he knew better than to ask Ezri about any ship’s business that Vaughn didn’t see fit to loop him into. That was Vaughn’s prerogative as ship’s captain, and Bashir wasn’t about to make Ezri’s role as X.O. harder by attempting to draw the information out of her. He wouldn’t have succeeded anyway; Ezri took her transfer to command too seriously to let anyone undermine it, least of all Julian.

On the other hand, as Defiant’s chief medical officer, being asked to operate in an information vacuum was a sure way to put lives at risk. He couldn’t prepare for something if he didn’t know what he was likely to face. The fact that knowledge capable of minimizing the risk to the crew was being withheld from him was troubling enough, but it didn’t take a genetically enhanced mind to know that the continuing secrecy was itself contributing to a notable rise in anxiety among his shipmates. And that, Bashir knew, was dangerous. Anxious people made mistakes.

And although Bashir had only a rough idea about conditions on the surface, just knowing that answers awaited him on the other side of the transporter beam gave him a burst of energy that had him nearly running into the bay. He ignored the raised eyebrow Chief Chao shot at him as he bounded onto the platform and gave her the order to energize—ready, he believed, for whatever lay ahead.

Of all the settings he had imagined beaming into, the heart of a Borg ship wasn’t one of them.

Though his mind intuited immediately that the danger must be minimal or the commander wouldn’t have ordered him to beam down, nevertheless he experienced an instant of cold fear when his eyes focused on the distinctive technology surrounding him. Lit only by the away team’s wrist lights, the ship took on an extra dimension of terror. Bashir had never encountered the Borg before, but he’d read enough reports, and attended enough briefings and medical conferences about them, to hope he would never have to.

Still, Julian’s irrepressible curiosity had been piqued the instant Vaughn had started explaining the detection of the transponder signal, the away team’s mission, and what they had learned so far. Bashir hung on every word, the whole time running calculations in his mind about the effect this knowledge would have back home. Even after several small-scale attempts to invade the Federation had failed, the Borg remained a cause for serious concern. If they ever got it into their collective mind to attack en masse, it was all over. Fighting off a single Borg cube had consistently proven costly; fighting off a full scale assault might not even be possible, especially if it happened now, with so much of the Alpha Quadrant still rebuilding its forces in the aftermath of the Dominion war.