[Upon entering a system in the Gamma Orionis Sector Block, sensors pick up readings that reveal debris from a destroyed Borg Probe are in orbit. As you move in closer, sensors read that a single, functioning drone is in the rubble. What happens next? Write a Captains Log entry recounting your actions and the outcome.]
Personal log: Tylha Shohl, officer commanding USS King Estmere NCC-92984
The air is hot, stale and dead. We move in a tight, nervous huddle through pale green underwater light, through the maze of metal that is the Borg ship.
We are, I reflect, at least fully representative of the Federation. I've brought my medical officer and my four assault team leaders with me; so, I and fellow Andorian Nozys Hyhr are at the front, the two humans, Soledad Kleefisch and Dr. Samantha Beresford, in the middle of the group, and the Tellarite Lolha and imperturbable Vulcan Sirip guard the rear.
I don't know what we're guarding against. Normally, aboard a Borg ship, the air sparks and chitters with unseen energies as the Collective talks to itself... but, here, there is nothing. Our breathing, our footfalls on the deck, are the loudest noises, save for some odd creaks and groans deep in the structure. Our footfalls are light. The artificial gravity on board the Borg probe is weak, and getting weaker. This ship is dying, maybe dead already... and we have no idea why.
We round a corner in the twisting, turning corridors, and pause while Samantha takes more readings with her tricorder. Her other hand holds a phaser pistol in an unbreakable grip. "There's a big chamber... about twenty meters ahead," she says. "Possibly a vinculum...."
I nod. The controls of a Borg ship are decentralized - effectively, the whole ship is a node of the Collective - but every control system needs some access points, some traffic control, and the Borg vinculum meets that need. If there are answers, we might find them there. And, then, there's the question of the feeble life signs we detected, somewhere in this area....
We turn another corner. Nozys's eyes narrow and she whips up her phaser rifle to ready, but doesn't shoot. The Borg drone is slumped in a regeneration alcove, inert, looking dead. It's the first drone we've seen so far.
"No life signs," says Samantha.
I sidle forward to look at the body. The front of its chest is scorched and scarred, penetrated in places by weapons fire... "Looks like plasma burns," I mutter, aloud. Samantha comes to stand beside me, her tricorder humming as she records the scene.
"Who else uses plasma weapons?" Lolha asks. "Romulans? Would the Roms do this?"
I shake my head. "Not enough to go on." But I look around. The damage... The Collective doesn't care for the aesthetics of its ships, any more than I worry about the colour of my own brain... but there is scarring on the metal walls, burn marks on the cables and the conduits. There has been a battle here... and the Borg lost. But who won?
We make our careful way forwards, and then I stop. Nozys and I exchange glances. "You hear that?" I ask.
Nozys nods. "Hear what?" asks Lolha, fretfully.
"I... cannot hear anything," says Sirip. Oh, those Vulcan ears: so elegant, but not actually all that good.
I can hear it, faintly, up ahead; a sharp, rhythmic, mechanical noise, a regular popping sound. I take a firmer grip on my phaser pulsewave rifle, signal the others to move forward with me.
No doors on a Borg ship, just an open archway leading to the vinculum... and a scene of utter devastation. The central control node is smashed, half-melted, and around it lie the bodies of drones. The walls of the chamber are seared and blackened, and the signs are obvious: more plasma fire.
And now we can all hear the steady popping sound; my antennae twitch as I locate the source. The noise is coming from the bulbous shape of a Borg plasma turret; a mechanical relay deep inside it is clicking, over and over again, trying insensately to fire the thing, though its energy reserves are long since depleted.
I stand by the turret for a moment, and try to recreate the scene in my mind's eye, to try and understand what it was firing at... and nothing makes sense. I look at the bodies strewn across the floor. Some of them are clutching at each other, as if for comfort... or in combat. Most of them have weapon-arms outstretched. Samantha is scanning, again....
I kneel down by one body, and my eyes widen in shock. The face is blue-grey, one eye concealed by some chunk of Borg machinery, the white of the other webbed with mechanisms... but there is no mistaking the two antennae that spring from the head, even though Borg circuits twine around them like obscene ivy. This was an Andorian. And now... now he is a Borg, and he's dead. And the plasma burns on his chest armour... I look back at the turret. There is no other explanation. Its muzzle is pointed directly at the vinculum's control node.
"I think," I say slowly, "this probe... killed itself."
---
We follow the signal on Samantha's tricorder towards the life signs... and we follow a trail of dead Borg drones, all battered and burned, some locked together in attitudes of struggle. One drone has literally torn off the head of another, and the headless carcass has its arm-mounted plasma guns buried in the crater that was its killer's midriff.
It is now more urgent than ever that we find out what has happened. And soon: the systems aboard the derelict probe continue to decay.
"In here," Samantha says, through bloodless lips. We step through the archway -
In a small room, one regeneration alcove is occupied. The Borg drone looks as though it used to be a human male; it is tall and powerfully built, but it's impossible to say how much of that is its original body. Implants and reconstructions have covered most of it; its limbs are swathed in exoskeletal armour, half its head is machinery, the remaining half is grey and lifeless-looking. But it stares as we approach it, and the one visible eye flickers with some sort of awareness. The grey lips move.
"I am Three of Eight, quaternary affix to overmatrix nine zero seven," the drone says. Then the grey face twists with some sort of agony, and its voice changes as it says, "Jonathan Forestal. Commander, science division, USS Calypso. Help me." The drone shudders again, and it says, "I'm Simon Kriegmayer. I need -" It stops.
I turn to look at Samantha. She seems as baffled as I am. "I don't know -" She frowns at her tricorder. "This is the source of the life signs, all right. But these readings - I don't know how to interpret them."
"Whatever killed the rest of the Borg is affecting him," says Lolha. "We should find out what it is."
"I'd need to do a full physical examination, at least," Samantha says doubtfully. "We could try standard liberation procedures, as well."
I look at the drone. The one human eye flickers with motion, but the dead half-face has no answers for me. "Standard isolation process, first," I say. "Burn its subspace transceivers, take out the assimilation nanoprobes. Make it safe." As safe as any Borg can be.
Then I hear something, a faint whistling sound at the edge of awareness... and my antennae stir in the slightest of breezes, riffling the dead air. "Make it quick," I add. "Hull breach, somewhere... the structural integrity is failing."
Samantha has her laser scalpel in her hand. She does a quick, efficient job of butchery. Severed neural cables drop to the deck, twitching like live things. I pull out my own tool set, scan the transceiver nodes, burn them out one by one. There are a lot of them; this drone's brain had strong links to the Collective. The grey face spasms slightly as each node dies. By the time we have finished, the breeze has grown stronger, a hollow wheezing sound filling the dead corridors of the ship.
"Let's move," I say. I slap my combadge. "Prepare to beam up away team and one Borg drone, full bio-safety protocols in effect. Once we're done, transport antimatter demolition charges and sterilize." The probe ship, dead though it looks, can't be left intact; no telling who might come across it in the future, repair it, start the whole loathesome Borg thing up again. "Acknowledged." Anthi Vihl's voice is cool and professional as always.
The air shimmers. The dead room around us fades away in the haze of the transporter beam.
A minute after we transport, the antimatter charges beam in and detonate. The Borg probe vanishes in a million-degree ball of light, then fades slowly away, ionized gas dispersing into the void between the stars.
---
"I still don't know what's happening," Samantha mutters.
We are clustered around the bio-bed in the sickbay, the one that's been rigged as a Borg regenerator... and a confinement cell. Samantha is staring at her psychotricorder, and her face wears a worried frown. On the bed, the Borg drone is a grey-black inert shape, one muscle twitching in the jaw, the single organic eye watching, gleaming....
"Who are you?" I ask it, again.
"Three of Eight," the drone replies. "Forestal. Kriegmayer. Three of Eight. Forestal. Kriegmayer...." The voice tails off.
"As far as I can make out," Samantha says, "it's telling the truth. Each time."
I sigh. "What about... other checks? Objective checks? Was there a USS Calypso lost to the Borg, and was there a Forestal - or a Kriegmayer - on it?" I look again at the drone. "Is it possible," I say, speculating aloud, "that the Collective... transferred the memories of another person into this one? That it - merged - them, somehow?"
"I... don't see how, sir," says Samantha, thoughtfully. "Nor why. The Borg generally don't care about the individual lives they absorb... why would they do something like that?"
She stares ruefully at the psychotricorder. "I doubt that machine holds all the answers," says Soledad Kleefisch in her soft voice.
"Indeed," says Sirip. "I might, if necessary, attempt a mind meld -"
We all stare at him. "Are you out of your pointy-eared head?" Lolha demands.
"This drone is no longer connected to the Collective," Sirip points out, mildly.
I shake my head. "But he still has a head full of memories of being part of the Borg," I say, "besides whatever other identity confusion is going on. No. The risks are too great."
Sirip nods. "It was not something I was anxious to try."
"We need to try something," says Samantha. "Whatever is going on in his mind, it's not helping his body. If it wasn't for the Borg implants regulating his metabolism, his production of stress hormones would be damn near off the scale. I don't think we can run the risk of removing any more of the implants, at this stage."
I look down on the forbidding grey-black form of the drone, and wonder what to do. Would I want to live, like that? But standing orders are to reclaim and liberate people from the Borg, wherever it's possible... and, besides, this is our only clue to what happened on that probe. "Set the bio-bed to run the Borg's regeneration cycle," I tell Samantha, finally. "Let it... sleep. And let's go over whatever other evidence we have."
---
Time passes. Messages hurtle across subspace to the Federation's central databases, messages that take appreciable time, even at subspace speeds... King Estmere is a long way out on the fringes, many light-years from the nearest Federation base - and, we thought, light-decades from the Borg front. So what was a solitary probe doing, out here? And what happened aboard it? Questions, I think wearily to myself, staring at a PADD in my ready room. Questions, and no answers.
The answers we do get... confirm some things. The drone's physical characteristics and genetic coding match Jonathan Forestal, the science officer aboard the USS Calypso - and the Calypso is one of the many, many ships missing, presumed lost to the Borg. But there is nothing, yet, on the other name....
And there are more chilling details coming in. Samantha Beresford's scans were necessarily hurried and incomplete, but they yielded enough information to identify some of the dead Borg: more members of the Calypso's crew. The Andorian we found was, once, a Lieutenant Commander named Thereb Ysihl. I can't help feeling I remember the name from somewhere... I try to remember where or when we might have met....
Then my communications console chimes. Incoming message. I hit the button to accept, without noting the code giving the call's origin... and only then does it register: there is no code.
The face on the viewscreen is a familiar one; a sandy-haired human face, undistinguished except for the scar that runs down its right side - a bad scar, worse than my own, an obvious scar, that you're meant to notice. So what, I always wonder, is it meant to distract me from?
"Hello, Vice Admiral Shohl," says Franklin Drake. "It's been too long."
I stare wordlessly at the face for a moment. I don't believe for a second that it's his real face; I'm not at all convinced that "Franklin Drake" even exists, except maybe as a cover and a hologrammatic disguise, for one person or many people, working for an organization that almost certainly isn't called Section 31. "So he's one of yours," I say, finally.
"Who is?"
"Forestal... or Kriegmayer. Whoever it is that we've got. Our records say Forestal, but if you people are involved -"
"Well," says Drake, "both of those names raised... alarms, in some quarters, when you started asking after them."
"So what is your involvement?" I ask, shortly.
Drake smiles. "I hope you're sitting comfortably, Vice Admiral," he says, "because I'm going to tell you a story. And you're not going to like it."
He tells me a story. I don't like it.
---
I march into the sickbay, motion to Samantha Beresford. "Drake called," I almost spit the words. "Wake him up."
Samantha's hands move on the console; the drone twitches on the bio-bed as the regeneration cycle ends. "So," Samantha says, "I suppose you want to be alone?"
"Drake said, make sure there are no witnesses," I say. "So - please, stay. Maybe we should get the whole crew in here."
Samantha shakes her head, a wry smile pulling at her mouth. "You realize he knows that's how you think?"
"I could wear out my life trying to second-guess Section 31," I say, "or I could just go ahead and do what I think's right." I walk up to the bio-bed. "You. Listen to me."
The one human eye turns in its dark socket. I take a deep breath. I've been told what to do.
"Apple green," I say. "The sound of glass breaking, honey on brown bread, a left hand in a right glove. Override."
For a moment, there is no reaction: then the still form on the bed shudders like someone on the edge of sleep, and awareness comes into that one eye. The drone raises his head, looks at me. "Andorian," he says. "So... a Starfleet ship?"
"USS King Estmere. I'm Tylha Shohl. And you are -?"
"Simon Kriegmayer." The eye closes, opens again. "Listen. First thing you do is, tell Drake it didn't work."
"What didn't?" Samantha asks. The drone glances at her, looks away again, fixes his gaze on me.
"The personality overlays," he says. "It's - sort of a combination of neurosurgery, hypnotherapy, and some stuff about the Vulcan katra that I don't think we're meant to know about... certainly not to use like this."
"So Jonathan Forestal... wasn't real? Just a cover identity?"
"More than that. A cover personality. The idea was, if I was... assimilated... then Forestal would be taken over by the Borg, but I - Kriegmayer - would remain free." A spasm passes over his face. "It didn't work. The Collective is too... too loud. A billion voices inside my head. It drowned out... every part of me."
"It must have done something, though." I'm speculating aloud, now. "The Collective knew something was wrong with you... they isolated you for study...."
"On the probe, yes," the drone - Kriegmayer - says. "It detected something, but it couldn't work out exactly where the problem was. So it detached me and all the former crew of the Calypso... some standard drones, too. Once we were out here, with access to the main body of the Collective severely limited - well, that's when things started to go wrong. That's when I started to regain some sort of control - but the others...."
"You triggered some sort of - defense reaction, I'd guess. Something that turns the Borg against defective drones. But the probe wasn't sure which parts of it were defective... so it tore itself apart from the inside."
Kriegmayer nods. "A sort of mental auto-immune disorder. We'd hoped to get something like that happening inside the Collective as a whole... but it won't work. Too loud. And the Collective will have learned something from what happened... it'd be harder next time...." The voice fades to a whisper, then comes back sharper. "There won't be a next time. Tell Drake I quit."
"Wait a minute." Samantha's face is slowly clouding with anger. And all I can do is confirm her worst fears.
"Yes," I say, "Section 31 set the Calypso up. To be assimilated by the Borg." I look down on Kriegmayer. "In order to get their agent in place."
"Forestal didn't know what he was doing," Kriegmayer says. "I knew... the guilty knowledge... that's all mine."
"How many others?" Samantha demands. "This is one filthy Section 31 idea - how many others are out there? How many people? Damn it," she puts a hand to her suddenly pallid brow, "how do I even know that I'm really me? It could be any of us -"
"It could," Kriegmayer agrees, bleakly. "The process is - complicated. Expensive and difficult. But they might use it... wherever they see a need. I don't know. Maybe I'm the only one. Maybe there are hundreds. I don't know. You must understand, they wouldn't tell me. Operational security, need-to-know... I was part of this thing, and I didn't know." His voice is choked. "Jonathan Forestal was a good man. So were the others, the crew of the Calypso...."
"What happens now?" I ask.
Samantha shoots me a troubled look. "Drake won't let this get out," she says. "No way...."
"You can't prove anything," Kriegmayer says. "I'm just a liberated Borg drone with a bizarre fantasy. That's the story that'll get out, that'll be believed. No need for anything dramatic, no heroic death arranged for you and your ship.... I am so damned sick of this."
I look down on him. "You signed up for it. At the start."
"I thought it was right," Kriegmayer assents. "If it had worked... maybe I'd still think so."
The end justifies the means; the motto carved on the black heart of Section 31. But Kriegmayer is suffering, clearly: his soul ravaged by guilt just as his body is ravaged by the Borg prosthetics. "I don't know what to do with you," I say. "I'll... give Drake your message. Beyond that... I don't know."
---
Franklin Drake's face is uncharacteristically sober. Perhaps it is a real face, after all.
"We owe Simon a lot," he says, after a long pause. "I'd like to see he's properly taken care of. We're not monsters, Tylha."
"No," I say, "just people who know how to act like them. I don't know if that makes you better, or worse."
"You're a military officer." The face on the viewscreen regains its sly look: or is that just my imagination? "You've sent men out to die - you know that sacrifices have to be made, sometimes. For the greater good."
I say nothing. He might be right... but I remember Thereb Ysihl, now. Two years below me at the Academy; a bright young thaan, cheerful, a scion of one of those old Andorian military families... like my exec, Anthi Vihl. A quirk of fate, a shuffling of papers at Starfleet Personnel, and he might have been the one at my side on the command deck, and Anthi might have died with Borg implants wrapped around her soul. Did he deserve to be sacrificed like that? For the greater good?
"In any case," Drake says, after another long pause, "we'd like - I'd like - to do the right thing for Simon, at least. Come on, Tylha, you've seen him. Don't you think he's suffered enough already?"
"I honestly don't know," I say. "But there's one thing I can tell you. He doesn't think so."
---
Samantha Beresford's readings confirm Kriegmayer's wretched state. If he were still human, he would be virtually catatonic with stress-related illnesses. The Borg implants, though, hold him together, regulating his glands and hormones, keeping him intact in a prison of icy sanity. He is lying in the bio-bed, at the end of another regeneration cycle, his eye fixed firmly on the ceiling above, when I see him next.
"I don't know what to do," I tell him. "Officially, you're a Starfleet officer - we will do whatever we can. But I just - I just don't know."
I turn to go. From behind me, Kriegmayer says, "I do."
I turn back. He is sitting up, his eye intent on me now. "I'll need your help," he says. "It'll have to be you, or someone like you. Please."
"What can I do?"
"Did Drake tell you everything about how this thing works?"
I shake my head. "I very much doubt it."
He nods. "I can build a new persona... a new me. Reconfigure the personality overlay, is the technical term." His face is haunted, the one eye pleading. "Don't you see? It's the only way out. Kriegmayer is guilty, Forestal is... a fake. A new me... Three of Eight. Use the rudimentary personality of the Borg drone as a springboard to a new identity. Because being a Borg drone... an ex-drone... is the only way I can be innocent, ever again."
"But it'd just be another fake," I object. "Anyone - Drake, for instance - could bring you - um, Kriegmayer - back." My head is spinning with trying to follow his identities; I can't imagine what it must be like for him.
"That's where you come in," he says. "Drake must have told you how the sensory cues work."
"Yes," I say, slowly. "I name sensations, the words evoke memories in you, and those memories form a code that unlocks...."
"And you're an Andorian," Kriegmayer says, and his eye glitters with expectation, with pleading. "You have sensory memories that I don't have, that I can't have. Use those. Lock the door on Kriegmayer, and throw away the key."
My head is still spinning. I don't know what it means, for him. Absolution? Forgiveness of sins? Or death? Or maybe both? Does Simon Kriegmayer deserve forgiveness, or death? Does a new person deserve life?
I look at the pleading half-face, and I make my choice.
"Ever drink Dh'syara tunnel wine?" I ask.
"That stuff!" He pulls a face. "No way. I know how it's made."
"The light on Andoria's snows by planet-rise," I say. "A cup of warm tunnel wine. The taste of a thunderstorm far off, in my antennae. The feeling of intimacy, shen to zhen." I speak the last word with every ounce of authority I can muster. "Lockdown."
His eye closes. For a moment, I think he has stopped breathing. He sits on the bed, silent and still.
The door of the sickbay hisses open behind me. "What just happened?" Samantha demands. "His readings... his stress levels just suddenly dropped. Like you flicked a switch...."
I think I've just killed two men. Or no men. It all depends on your point of view.
The drone opens his eye and stands up, smoothly, efficiently. The voice that speaks is calm, measured, not Kriegmayer's... not quite. "I am Three of Eight," he says, "formerly quaternary affix to overmatrix nine zero seven, now a free agent. I would like to offer you my services. If accepted, I will serve loyally." The one eye glistens with unshed tears. "I have no wish to betray... ever again."
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