Before anyone else could say anything, the audio signal immediately patched through. Thousands upon thousands of voices all said the same thing at the same time, causing Tom’s hair to stand on end.

"We are the Borg. Lower your defenses and surrender your ship. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. You will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Not waiting for a reply, the Borg immediately closed the channel, no doubt realizing that Tom would never surrender.

"Lock torpedoes onto the Borg’s weapon systems the moment you can get a solid lock," Tom stated, trying to ignore the fear that the Borg had just put into him. "The moment they are within weapons range, fire."

"Aye, sir," Ada replied quickly, fear also edging into her voice.

As suddenly as the Borg transmission had cut in, lights and panels began flickering all over the bridge. Confused, and worried, Tom ordered, "Report!"

"I don’t know how, but they’re accessing our computers!" Vendar replied quickly. "They can’t get control, but they’re downloading all of our logs!"

He stood up again from the command chair and moved next to the Ops console. "Stop them, at any cost!"

However, he soon found that they were too late. A moment later, the transmission had stopped…and all logs had been accessed.

"They’ve got them all," Vendar reported solemnly. "Which means…they’ll have the advantage…"

Not letting the situation get his spirits down, he ordered, "Try to keep them from accessing any other memory banks. Do not let them gain access to any schematics of our technology."

"Understood," Vendar replied quickly, getting to work and not stopping for a moment.

"Status of the Borg cube?" he asked Ada, stopping in front of the command chair and looking up at her.

Confusion showing on her face, she looked up at him and stated, "They haven’t moved."

Confusion overtaking his own face, Tom spun around to look at the view screen, and sure enough, the cube was in the same position he had seen it before. "Then we have a moment to…"

Before he could finish, a familiar voice did so for him. "…Consider our options."

Immediately recognizing the voice, Tom spun around to face the source of the voice…and there, moving down from the aft turbolift, was Chris Harriman!

"Captain!" almost everyone exclaimed at the same time.

"Save the welcome backs for later," Chris stated as he moved to Tom’s side. "Permission to reclaim command?"

Tom smiled and nodded, moving out of the way of the command chair. "Of course, Captain…the ship is always yours."

Chris smiled back, then sat down in the command chair. He didn’t even do it slowly…in fact, he had sat down as if he had sat there just yesterday. Tom found that peculiar, considering he had just spent the past two months completely isolated…

Shrugging the issue off, Tom sat down next to him, in his proper chair…the First Officer’s chair.

"Report," Chris ordered.

"The cube seems to be stranded next to the temporal anomaly we encountered," Tom began immediately. "Somehow, it’s doing what we aren’t even close to being capable of doing…it managed to get a transmission through to us, and even managed to download copies of all of our logs."

Chris nodded, then motioned to the view screen. "Ada, what do you make of that armor plating?"

After a moment of speculation, she said, "I’m assuming that it’s probably a dense concentration of Tritanium and Duranium, as well as ablative armor. They’re the most durable metals from our galaxy."

"Well, at least we can get at their weapons array," Chris commented quietly. "Let’s see if we can…"

He didn’t even have a chance to finish. The ship lurched hard from underneath everyone’s feet. Almost everyone crashed to the deck, regardless of how hard they hung on to their consoles. Tom found himself several meters away from his chair, but he quickly managed to crawl back into his chair. The ship seemed to be turning every which way in no particular order, making it very difficult for the inertial dampers to compensate.

After almost a minute of struggling, Chris also managed to make it back to his chair, but his nose was bleeding. "Report!" he shouted above the sound of generators.

"We’re being pulled in by some sort of odd gravitational field that just extended over us!" Vendar replied in a shout. "So’s the Borg!"

"Helm get us out of here!" Tom shouted, used to being the one in command.

"Can’t do it, sir!" James replied, barely hanging onto the helm. "We’re going in too fast, there’s no way we can pull out in time!"

As the anomaly and Borg cube quickly ‘grew larger’ on the view screen, even more fear gripped Tom. Would they be able to survive the extreme gravitational and temporal fields that existed within the anomaly? Guess we’ll find out…

In that moment, the Borg cube was engulfed by the anomaly…and the Dragon was right behind it!

"All hands, brace for impact!" Chris shouted. A moment later, the Dragon also entered the anomaly…

 

 

Chris was once again thrown from his chair. Consoles, light fixtures, and power conduits exploded all over the bridge, one right after the other. Power feed backs were probably occurring all over the ship, and it was leaving the Dragon an absolute mess…

Even the view screen exploded out in a shower of glass shards. However, unlike the last time that had happened, the type of glass used on the view screen was not meant to be able to easily pierce through skin.

That, of course, didn’t change a thing, since the glass shards were propelled at the crew due to gravitational fields. Thankfully, the field around Chris was pressing him to the ground, so very few shards hit him, and when they did, they had slowed enough that they didn’t hurt him. A few deck officers, however, were injured.

Suddenly, the gravitational forces stopped, and everything finally settled down. Chris noted with some annoyance that another power conduit had been ruptured, but this time, someone managed to shut it down right away.

He moved back to his chair as everyone else moved back to their own. "Damage report."

"We’ve got hull breaches all across the board," Vender began. "Forcefields are in place and holding. Main power is off-line, but auxiliary is running at optimum efficiency. Injuries are still being reported all over the ship, and about twelve people are missing, presumed…presumed dead…"

Chris shook his head, angry that he let those people die. They should have backed off the moment they saw the Borg cube…but no one had thought of that. They had been too fascinated with the whole situation.

"All stop," he ordered. "Begin scanning the region."

Vendar immediately went to work…only to stop a moment later. "Sir, three vessels just…umm, they just appeared."

Chris frowned, confused at her statement. "What do you mean they just appeared?"

Confident in herself, she stated, "I swear they weren’t there a minute ago, and now they’re well within range of our long range sensors."

Great, first contact…and who knows how far back or forward in time we are. "Hail them…let’s show them that we aren’t hostile."

Vendar keyed in the command, but a moment later, shook her head. "No response, sir…in fact, I see nothing on their ships that use subspace!"

This greatly interested Chris. He stood up and moved to one side of Vendar, Tom on the other. Both looked at the readings and frowned. "That’s peculiar…" Tom commented. "Even here in the Kalium Galaxy…we’ve never seen any species that didn’t use subspace for something on their ships…"

"Wait!" Chris interrupted his musings. He pointed to a part of the ship and asked, "What’s that?"

Vendar keyed in a few commands, bringing up a full sensor schematic of Chris’s object of attention.

"It appears to be some sort of an array," she stated as she looked over it and ran a few other scans over it.

Chris looked to Tom and asked, "Now doesn’t that look familiar to you? The configuration of that array?"

Tom smiled and nodded. "Indeed it does…it looks like someone has managed to successfully create a communications array that uses hyperspace!"

"Exactly!" Chris stated as he moved away from the console. Back on their days on the Enterprise, he, Tom, and Sarah had all been working on trying to create such an array…and they had succeeded, but Starfleet R&D had deemed it inefficient compared to subspace communications. However…the plans were still in the computer data banks.

He tapped his comm badge, and said, "Harriman to Tarkent…Kalia, how long would it take you to configure our secondary communications array to hyperspace?"

"Hyperspace?!?" she asked, bewildered. After a few moments of pause, which Chris thought was used to access the information on the computer, she said, "Well, with all the repairs we have going now…probably an hour."

"Make it your priority above all else…otherwise you might not have a ship left to repair," he ordered. "We need to establish communications with these people. Harriman out."

"Sir, the smaller ships just launched three support craft each!" Vendar stated in an alarmed voice. "They’re approaching fast."

"Ada, tactical report," Chris replied to Vendar’s report. "How much of a threat to they pose?"

"From the looks of it," she began, "they use some sort of rudimentary deflector shield technology. Very much like our own…but not nearly as effective." She paused for a few moments, so Chris turned around to see what the problem was. He found a bewildered smile on her face. "You aren’t going to believe this, but they seem to use laser batteries as their primary weapons!"

Surprised, Chris let out a small laugh. "Then I guess we must be in the past," he concluded. "No one we’ve encountered in the Kalium Galaxy had anything like lasers."

"The fighters appear to use a form of this, but a little more effective," Ada continued her report. "Further more, the largest of the three vessels appears to use…some sort of ion weapon." Surprise on her face, she looked up at Chris. "If they could get just one blast from that weapon through our shields, they’d completely fry all of our systems." She looked back down and continued her report. "They also all have some sort of warhead weaponry. The warheads don’t use antimatter at all…instead, they use some sort of…explosive." Now she looked fearful as she looked up. "If those fighters each fired just two at us, those twelve warheads would be enough to take down our shields! Just one from the big ship would be enough to turn half of a nacelle into slag!"

At first, Chris had expected they would be able to easily defend themselves…however, this warhead device was dangerous. He turned around and sat down, fear edging into his mind as well. "Then let us not show any aggressive moves."

An alarm sounded on Vendar’s console, which caught Chris’s attention. "Captain, I’ve located a Transwarp conduit with a Borg signature. Bearing one-one-oh mark two."

Glad that something finally went right, Chris smiled. "Thank you, Vendar…keep a sensor lock on it at all times."



Star Trek Dragon graphics and written material copyright Jon Wasik. Star Trek is a registered trademark
of Paramount Pictures, a Viacom company. No copyright infringement intended