The Snake and the Dragon (Draka final society vs...)

[Junghalli]

The world was silent and dark, much as it had been for billions of years since its formation. The feeble light of its tepid red dwarf sun could barely illuminate the swirling patterns of clouds that banded its bulk. Frozen moons danced around it in the slow, lifeless twirl of ages. There was no life in the system, and there had never been. It had sat in perfect, sleeping quiet since before Earth’s sun blazed hot, its placidity marred only by the weak electrical cracklings and concussions of the gas giant and a wispy kiss of solar wind. And no doubt, for the most part, that was how it would remain until the pathetic little star burned itself out and the endless night of space descended upon it forever.

Today, however, the silence was interrupted.

From a tiny point of vacuum just beyond the gas giant’s outermost frigid moon there came a shriek of hard, heatless radiation like a woman being raped in the night. For a moment the tiny, cold world knew bright day as a harsh, acid glare washed over it, glittering upon its ice encrusted surface like a flashlight over a diamond in a darkened room. The quantum foam itself was being shredded and torn as immense amounts of energy were poured into it from elsewhere. For a single instant an oozing wound was ripped wide in the surface of space and time, and then it was gone. As the swirling energies released by the universe’s violation subsided they revealed a single, small spacecraft bristling with instruments and weaponry.

The energies from the creation of the wormhole echoed through the dead system like a shout in a silent tomb. Not far away an intellect as vast and icy as the great night of space itself heard the cry, and took notice.


Captain Pat Kelly felt the world return to her as the DNS Thor’s Hammer completed its transit of the molehole. It was always disconcerting to have the universe wink out on one as the molehole drive ripped apart the quantum foam and teleported the ship to a whole different star system light years away, but she was always careful to control her nausea lest she appear weak before the Janissary units of her bridge crew. Of course, the conscripts were all Homo Servus, genetically engineered to unquestioningly obey their Drakan masters, but old habits often died hard. The adage was as true for entire cultures as it was for individuals.

“Report” she called out.

“All systems functioning normally Master. No damage or complications from the transit” the Chief Engineer reported.

“The system appears to be dead” Radio reported. “Not picking up any, wait…”

“What is it?” Captain Kelly demanded.

The Janissary swallowed once to clear his throat. A normal human would not have noticed but to Homo Drakensis’ enhanced senses it was as clear as a dinner bell. “Master, I am picking up extremely low-level transmissions in the subspace band.”

“Alliance?” Captain Kelly asked, mildly concerned. While the Thor’s Hammer was still a Gladius class vessel and therefore one of the most formidable warships in the Draka fleet it had been modified for research, and those modifications included removing a good deal of the secondary weapons systems. Of course, any Alliance vessels out this far would probably also be research craft, not warships, and Draka intelligence so far indicated that none of their research classes where anywhere near as well armed as the Research Gladius. It had, after all, been designed to (among other things) subdue the military forces of any inhabited world with a technological level up to that of late twentieth century Earth.

“Doesn’t seem like it Master” the Janissary said. “It’s… not like anything I’ve ever seen. Very low power, and very dense, almost like… a lot of short-range transmitters whispering to each other. The code is very complex, and it doesn’t match anything in the Hammer’s database. When I first heard it I thought it was just a natural burst of radio waves from the gas giant’s Van Allen belt.”

“You can pinpoint the source” it was not a question. Sweat began beading on the Janissary’s brow. He knew what he was about to say would disappoint Captain Kelly, and disappointing the Master could have… unfortunate consequences. “Master, it is hidden behind the gas giant’s second innermost moon.”

“We’ll have to go in closer if we want a better look” Captain Kelly observed. “Helm, take us in on an oblique orbit. And activate the cloaking device. Keep all weapons systems and shields on standby.” There was a chorus of “Yes Master” and she was slammed back in her seat as the Thor’s Hammer accelerated toward the source of the strange signals. A klaxon sounded and the lights dimmed. She knew that, seen from outside, the Hammer’s outline would now begin to waver like a picture fading in water, and in a few seconds it would become all but undetectable. The cloaking device had originally been developed by a now extinct species native to a planet Draka astronomers had dubbed Romulus. As Kelly remembered when the Draka had crushed their military and invaded their home system the Romulans had all committed mass suicide rather than let themselves be enserfed. Oh well, an empty planet was easier to manage anyway…

“Master, we have cleared the line-of-sight of the second moon” Radar announced. “We can now scan the object directly.”

“Do so” Captain Kelly commanded.

The Janissary’s eye twitched nervously as he visibly gathered up the courage to say something he suspected the Master wouldn’t want to hear. “Master, respectfully, if we hit them with radar they’ll detect us. Perhaps it would be more prudent to use passive sensors only.”

“So what?” Pat Kelly said. “We are The Race! We fear no-one! If they fire on us we shall destroy them, and then we’ll follow them back to their homeworld and enserf them, just like we did with the Romulans, the Xindi, the Vulcans, the Andorians, and every other race we’ve ever met. And if you ever question the superiority of the Race in my presence again I’ll have you put in the agony booth for ten hours!”

“Yes my Master” the Janissary said obsequiously. “I didn’t mean to-“

“Then shut up and return to your duties” Kelly cut him off.

“Yes my Master” the Janissary said as he turned subserviently back to his station and began pinging the radio source with the Hammer’s powerful radar. “Master, the unidentified vessel appears to be a cube shaped, roughly 3.2 kilometers on a side.”

Kelly experienced a moment of foreboding. That would make it many times the size of even the Draka’s very largest armed spacecraft. But she pushed it aside. “Initiate a deep radar probe.”

“Yes my Master” the Janissary said. “The vessel seems to be strangely decentralized internally. There seems to be no specific bridge, no central power plant, and no identifiable crew quarters, no identifiable anything really.”

“Passive sensors!” Kelly called out. “What are the power readings on that thing?”

The Janissary at the passive sensor station, a thin, frail-looking woman whose ancestry might have been Japanese, visibly gulped at the question. With her exquisitely sensitive nose Kelly could smell the fear on her. She toyed briefly with throwing her in the agony booth for cowardice, but decided that could wait. There was more urgent business to be take care of. “Off-off the scale Master” the woman finally brought herself to say.

“Master, the cube is changing course!” Radar shouted. “They must have detected my radar probes, they’re heading straight for us!”

“Shall I prepare the molehole drive?” Superluminal asked.

“No!” Kelly ordered. “Drop the cloak and raise the shields and prepare weapons systems!”

“But Master, the power readings are off the scale!” Passive protested. “The Hammer could not possibly win against-“

“Shut up!” Kelly backed the command by turning her dominance pheromones to their maximum. The slight woman visibly swooned as the potent bouquet hit her. “Yes my Master!” she said and turned back to her instruments.

An alarm sounded. “Cloak disengaged Master!” came the report.

“Alien vessel now entering firing range Master. Weapons standing by” Tactical said.

“Hail them” Kelly said.

“Transmitting” Communications said.

Kelly cleared her throat and addressed the radio mike she wore in her ear. “This is Captain Pat Kelly of the Draka survey vessel Thor’s Hammer. You are now subjects of the Dominate of Drakia. You will surrender your vessel and henceforth you will obey every order we give your without resistance or question. You are now our property. If you resist you will be punished.”

After a few moments the reply came back. The voice was strong and eerie, like thousands of people saying the same thing in a harmony more perfect than any human chorus could possibly achieve.

WE ARE THE BORG. DOMINATE IS IRRELEVANT. PROPERTY IS IRRELEVANT. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIP. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

[The Aliens]

Very, very good- excellent characterization of Pat Kelly, and very nice use of imagery in describing the molehole's 'violation' of the universe. Interesting premise, and I'll be following closely.

[Junghalli]

Very, very good- excellent characterization of Pat Kelly

Really, I was worried it might have been too hammy. Of course, she is the namesake of an infamously repugnant troll.

Interesting premise, and I'll be following closely.

Thanks. Yeah, I thought it was kind of an interesting idea. The Draka-the ultimate authoritarian society, vs. the Borg-the ultimate collectivist society. Say what you will about them, drones are all equal (in a really fucked up way of course).

[darthdavid]

This is gonna be great.

[MKSheppard]

mmm, excellent, but how are you going to make it equal? The Borg are remarkably vunerable to KE based weapons, and the Draka, while being wank, are not as stupid as the Federation.

[Junghalli]

mmm, excellent, but how are you going to make it equal? The Borg are remarkably vunerable to KE based weapons, and the Draka, while being wank, are not as stupid as the Federation.

At first yeah, but you forgot the magic word: assimilation. That's one of the things that make the Borg so scary: you deploy X weapon against them and then they assimilate it and produce a better version which they then turn against you (at least that's the way it's supposed to work, but B&B sort of fucked it up along with everything else). Just imagine a tactical drone based on a Draka cyborged to his own uber power-armour.
Also the Draka are the main power in the Alpha Quadrant in this timeline (having conquered the Romulans, Cardassians, and most of the aliens that went into the Federation in the main Trek timeline), and the Alliance is sharing the Beta Quadrant with the Klingons. Thanks to that phenomenon we call tech sharing the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are a good deal more competent militarily here than in Trek, and there's probably been some trickle-down effect of that to the Borg already. They're not quite the Borg we're familiar with (out-universe they were never castrated by B&B).

[Junghalli]

The deck of the Thor’s Hammer shuddered as if the vessel were riding a choppy sea instead of the insubstantial winds of space.

“Master, the alien vessel has locked a tractor beam on us!” the Helmsman cried.

“The tractor beam is draining energy from our shields!” the Second Tactical was so alarmed that she neglected to add the honorific “master”. Pat Kelly did not exactly forgive her, but she had bigger fish to fry at the moment. “Shields at ninety five percent” she all but screamed. “Ninety percent” she continued counting down, her alarm mounting palpably with each word. “Eighty-five percent… seventy five percent…”

“If they knew what was good for them they’d have surrendered immediately.” Kelly’s mouth turned upwards into a highly unpleasant smile. The smile of a predator contemplating a limping deer. “As usual, they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. We’ll just have to teach them what defiance of our Will gets you.” The fact that the cubical vessel outgunned the stripped-down Thor’s Hammer by a severe margin did not bother her in the slightest. The triumph of The Race was simply a law of nature.

“Master, shields are down to sixty percent!” Second Tactical shrieked.

Kelly allowed the smile to widen. “Tactical, lock missiles on the source of the beam and fire.”

“Yes Master!” the Tactical Officer bellowed with relief, having spent the past several minutes anxiously awaiting a command in that vein. His hands flew over the buttons and switches of his console and within seconds three nuclear-tipped fusion missiles shot forth from the Hammer’s central launcher.


There was no such exchange of orders within Borg variant 1 cube 6,948,721. There the battle proceeded in perfect silence, interrupted only by the incidental noises of the vessel’s machinery at work. To a human observer it would have been impossible to guess that the cube was doing anything more than gliding sedately through space. The collective consciousness eliminated the need for the frantic press of orders and reports or the blaring of alarms. It united the hundreds of thousands of drones aboard the cube in a common response as smooth as a well oiled machine.

Every Borg aboard the cube was aware of the three missiles eating the distance between their own vessel and the minnow struggling helplessly in the grip of their tractor beam. A hundred thousand grey eyes watched them fly into the rough alien landscape of the cube’s side, trailing plumes of superheated plasma as they came. They impacted against the cube’s shields and exploded in glaring fireballs of nuclear fusion; tiny new suns with lifespans measured in seconds. The vacuum of space conducts energy poorly, but the city-destroying bombs nonetheless managed to transfer enough energy to the Borg vessel’s hull to gouge into it craters hundreds of meters across. The great artificial planetoid shook like a sugar cube in a blender, tossing drones about like ragdolls. Scaffolding and structural elements disintegrated, microfusion reactors exploded like popcorn, and hundreds of drones were sucked out into space, there to drift for the next several billion odd years until their frozen corpses disintegrated under micrometeorite bombardment. Most importantly the tractor beam holding the alien vessel was completely obliterated.

It was no great loss to the Borg. The variant 1 cube was a masterpiece of decentralization, capable of functioning effectively with as much as three quarters of its mass blasted away. The great and ponderous intellect of the collective began its unfeeling postmortem of the minor setback, meticulously analyzing the blast patterns of the alien weapons so that they could adapt.


The Thor’s Hammer soared forward like a panicked horse released from its restraints, the heavy accelerations pushing Captain Kelly back into her chair despite the best efforts of the inertial dampeners.

“It worked Master!” the Helmsman said.

“Damage report” Kelly demanded.

The Chief Engineer took a moment to glance at his instruments. “No damage Master. The weapon seems to have been designed to drain our shields without doing any damage to the hull.”

“What about the aliens?” Kelly said.

“I’m reading damage to about twenty percent of the cube’s superstructure Master” Radar announced. “Master, the cube seems to be rather flimsy from my readings. There’s no armor, no real presentable hull even. It’s just a lot of junk cobbled together around a skeletal scaffolding.”

“Excellent” Kelly said as she rubbed her hands together enthusiastically. “Take us around for another path, launch a full missile spread this time.”

“Master, I’m reading no change in the power readings of the cube” Passive said. “It has so many redundant systems… we barely seem to have effected it.”

Kelly saw no cause for concern. This was a race, and the Thor’s Hammer was definitely winning. A full spread of fusion bombs should be more than sufficient to completely fragment the cube’s structure. Of course, it would be best to leave a small portion of its crew alive so that they could be captured and interrogated. As soon as the coordinates of their home system had been wrenched out of them a conquest expedition could be organized. As the species’ discoverer Kelly would be entitled a large percentage of the plunder. If she played her cards right she might even be made governor of the new planet…

“Launching missile spread” Tactical announced. “Ten seconds to impact… five seconds… three… two… impact.”

“We have detonations” Passive Sensors confirmed. “All missiles have detonated and…”

“Target remains Master” Radar interrupted.

Kelly could smell stark, barely concealed terror bloom in the Passive Sensor operator even before she opened her mouth. “Target is undamaged Master. I’m reading no drop in their power levels… its shields absorbed the full energy of our bombs.”

“What?” Kelly hissed. She felt a poisonous cold rise through her bowels and up her spine. The emotion was so unfamiliar it took her a moment to identify it. It was fear. Not apprehension, not concern, but outright fear. It was an alien and unpleasant sensation, one which her race had rarely if ever felt in the more than half a millennium since they had thrown their absolute domination over the ancestral home of humanity like a dark and smothering blanket. “How can it be damaged by three bombs, but absorb the full energy of twice that many?”

“I-I don’t know Master” Passive admitted. “Their shields seem to have somehow… adapted to our weapons.”

The deck shook and buckled again. “Master, the alien ship has latched another tractor beam onto us!” the Helmsman said.

“Shields at seventy-five percent Master!” Second Tactical shouted. “Sixty percent…”

Kelly considered the situation for a moment. Obviously another missile strike would be fruitless; the powerful explosions would bounce off the alien’s shields like rubber balls. But thankfully the Thor’s Hammer was equipped with other weapons than missiles. The plasma guns and particle beams were less powerful to be sure, but the aliens shouldn’t be adapted to them yet.

“Shields at half-charge!” Second Tactical yelled.

“Third Tactical, blow up that ship!” Kelly said.

The lights dimmed as the Hammer’s power was diverted away into its mighty plasma cannon. A jet of red hot incandescent gas leapt forth from the Hammer’s nose and connected with the alien vessel to satisfying effect. The plasma washed over the tangled jungle of pipes and ductwork that covered the jumbled hull of the cube, eating away at the metal like burning lava. Metric tons of alien alloys flashed instantly to vapor, and the flaming sword of plasma struck deep into the guts of the cube, gouging out an ugly burning wound on its side. If the Hammer hadn’t been several hundred thousand kilometers beyond visual range Kelly might have observed fires smoldering within the messy scar, continuing to burn away at vital machinery until the Borg permitted the vacuum of space to rush into the effected areas and quench them.

“We’ve been released again” the Helmsman said.

“Shields at forty-two percent” Second Tactical said.

The Thor’s Hammer was struck by a mighty fist of poison-green energy. Men would have been tossed about like old trash were it not for the safety restraints.

“What happened?” Kelly demanded. Several Janissaries looked groggily at her. Her superhuman strength and internal biosynthetic armor padding had permitted her to weather the pounding far better than any of them.

“The aliens hit us with some kind of disruptor Master” Passive said. As if her words had been an invocation a second hammerblow struck home, shaking the Draka vessel yet again.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Kelly ordered. “Ship’s status!”

“Our shields are at eleven percent Master!” the Chief Engineer said. “We took two huge hits to our left flank, hull breaches on decks one through six! Both particle cannons on that side are knocked out and the molehole drive is slag!”

As the Hammer struggled to turn a fresh, undamaged side toward the enemy a third blow struck home.

“Plasma cannon and missile launchers are shredded Master!” the Chief Engineer said. “And our shields are down!”

“Restore the shields!” Kelly said.

“I can’t Master” Second Tactical said. “The KE of that blast ripped the generator out of its moorings! It’ll take at least a good hour to repair Master.”

Thor’s Prick up Loki’s Ass, Kelly cursed to herself.


“Master, I’m reading some sort of isolinear built-up on the alien vessel” Passive said.

Kelly’s sensitive ears picked up the whining sound long before any of the Janissary crew. A column of sickly emerald sparkles formed in the middle of the bridge and parted to reveal some sort of cyborg. The thing was humanoid, but covered with a metallic exoskeleton and boasting a vicious-looking prosthetic where its left hand should have been. Its pale flesh was violated repeatedly by wires and implants. A respirator was stuffed in its mouth and both its eyes had been removed and replaced with goggling implants. It began to stride across the bridge with the slow, deliberate strides of a zombie in an ancient horror flick.

“Destroy that… thing” Kelly said. A Janissary took a plasma pistol from his service belt, aimed it squarely at the strange being’s chest, and fired. The blue-hot needle of gas melted through the metal carapace as if it were butter, leaving a neat hole in the cyborg’s chest which a man could have put his first through, and an accompanying scorch mark on the far wall. The cyborg fell to the metal deck with a heavy thud. But no sooner had it hit the floor when a second cyborg appeared, again apparently from thin air. This one seemed less heavily mutilated than the first, with no respirator and a single expressionless grey eye still intact. It began to lurch toward the Helm console. The Janissary shot it too, and it also hit the floor dead.

“Persistent little buggers aren’t they?” Kelly said to nobody in particular.

Sure enough, yet again a column of diseased green formed in the center of the bridge and yet again it parted to reveal a cyborg. Kelly grinned as she took out her own plasma pistol and shot it personally.

Only this one didn’t go down like it was supposed to.

Instead the searing hot plasma was deflected by an energy shield that flickered on to protect the cyborg. The plasma washed over it like a wave of burning gasoline but did not touch it.

The cyborg walked with slow deliberation to the Helm console. The Radar operator tried to stop it, but it simply paused and threw him the length of the room like a wet bean bag. Next the Helmsman himself made an attempt. The cyborg grabbed his head and smashed him against the hardened plexiform window panels, leaving a huge smear of blood there as it laid open his scalp. It’s prosthetic ended in a small, fine drill with which it burrowed through the touchscreen and into the warm guts of the console. The lights of the bridge flickered ominously, as if somebody were randomly throwing switches.

“It’s accessing the mainframe computer!” the Chief Engineer said. “No, that’s impossible Master… you and I are the only ones with the password…”

Kelly heard a rising growl that she recognized as the Hammer’s engines starting up. Her exquisite hearing could discern clearly the coughs and hacks and whines of severe battle damage. Without further consideration Kelly unbuckled herself from the Captain’s chair and charged the cyborg. Apparently utterly engrossed in its operation it paid no attention as he slammed heavily into it, grabbed its chin, crushed its jaw in her hand, and effortlessly snapped its neck. It feel to the floor, its face a ruined mess and its spine probably broken as well.

“It’s locked us out!” the Chief Engineer screamed unbelievingly. “The ship has been set on autopilot… on an intercept course with the cube!” he slammed a first into the console. “Fik, it won’t even respond! The bastard’s cut off access to the computer!” Kelly noted that this was the second time today that a Janissary had failed to address her properly, but under the circumstances it hardly seemed to matter. She admitted to herself that, at the moment, things looked extremely bad.

That was her last thought before the world around her dissolved into a swirl of light.


For a second the world became a cancerous green haze, and then the haze dissolved and she found herself in a place of pipes and wheezing machinery. Exposed circuit boards twinkled in the walls like vibrant constellations. The space was dimly lit, and it was all the incidental light of circuits and computer screens and fiber-optic cables. There seemed to be nothing actually devoted to producing light for its own sake. There was no furniture of any kind either, and no true walls or floor. Just an endless jungle of pipes and wires around a bare skeleton of metal rods and planks. The air reeked of oil and a lower, fouler scent like slowly spoiling meat. This was a place of pure machinery, with no concessions to its organic inhabitants. Indeed, things humans took for granted had obviously never even been considered in the design of this… mobile planetoid of metal (she presumed that was where she now was). This ship was pure machine, right down to the soul.

All around her the strange cyborgs went about their silent errands, lurching about like stiff caricatures of human beings. Some of them rested in niches upon the wall like grey birds or fantastic metal insects.

Six of the things surrounded her, and she instantly went into action. Her fist connected solidly with the face of the biggest cyborg, destroying it with a wet crunch. Two of them advanced upon her and she crushed both their jaws at the same time and then snapped their brittle necks. She ran past the remaining three, decapitating one of them with a karate chop as she went. All around her the walking corpses stirred to life. They turned their heads toward her, forgetting whatever other tasks had previously occupied them. Some stepped out from their niches like preying mantises, others jumped down from the level above. Her plasma pistol was useless, but she killed dozens with her bare hands. Still, eventually they subdued her beneath sheer numbers. It helped that, while slow, their cybernetically enhanced strength approached her own. She felt their metallic hands close around her like unbreakable irons. They dragged her to an open space. Her breath faltered as her she realized what she was seeing.

Stretched out before her, at least a hundred decks deep, was a vast canyon of metal. She wondered if she might not have somehow been transported to a planet after all, for it seemed impossible that such a monumental open space might be contained within a spacecraft. The canyon extended for kilometers in front of her and hundreds of meters to her sides. Its bottom was all but invisible. Her genetically superior Drakan eyes picked out thousands upon thousands of cyborgs crawling through its dimly lit depths like swarms of spiders. The plank of grid metal upon which she stood had no railing, and her head swam with vertigo. While she was trying to regain her equilibrium a tremendous voice boomed forth.

CAPTAIN PATRICIA KELLY

It was very much like the voice she had heard over the radio link. A sound like a great chorus of many thousands of voices, saying the exact same thing in the exact same pitch and intonation, synchronized in a way that no human singers, no matter how skilled, could possibly have achieved. But here it was much louder. It seemed to issue from all around her, from the depths of the chasm and the sky above, like the commands of an irritable god.

CAPTAIN PATRICK KELLY YOU SPEAK FOR YOUR PEOPLE

For the second time today Pat Kelly experienced an unfamiliar emotion. She realized acutely that what she was confronted with was an entity of vast dimensions. She had a feeling of being an ant beneath a man’s lifted book, held in the power of a thing so vast it made her seem utterly insignificant by comparison. She fought against the emotion. It was totally antithetical to everything principle the Draka held dear. They believed in no gods, no superior beings. They were the greatest living things in the universe, the most powerful, the most deserving. They were its rulers, and all others either bowed to them or would bow to them when they learned their place. But as much as she tried to deny it she couldn’t help the awe she felt before this tremendous and utterly alien presence.

“I have nothing to say to you” she said. “Torture me and I’ll resist you with every ounce of my strength.” Actually, among the gifts engineered into Homo Drakensis was the ability to consciously turn off pain. It came in handy.

STRENGTH IS IRRELEVANT the great voice boomed. YOU MUST COMPLY.

“This will gain you nothing!” she felt ridiculous speaking to the great voice in a commanding, contemptuous tone but it was second nature to her and it made her feel better. “Eventually the Draka will find you, and you’ll be punished for your actions here.”

PUNISHMENT IS IRRELEVANT.

“Brave sentiment there. But we’ve heard it before, and it never holds up when your family is impaled in front of your eyes and you’re slowly flayed alive. Why don’t you just make this easier on yourselves and surrender now? The Race always wins, superior Will always triumphs in the end. Fighting it is only prolonging the inevitable, why not save yourselves the trouble and the pain?”

BRAVERY IS IRRELEVANT. WILL IS IRRELEVANT. PAIN IS IRRELEVANT. WE WILL ADD YOUR DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN.

Pat Kelly wondered in irritation just exactly what, if anything, these Borg didn’t consider irrelevant. Aloud she said “if you think Will is irrelevant you’ve got a very painful lesson to learn. It’s what separates the dominators from the submissive. And you will submit to us, just like every other species eventually.”

DOMINATION IS IRRELEVANT. SUBMISSION IS IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED INTO OUR COLLECTIVE.

The cold, corpse-like hands of the cyborgs began pushing her back away from the railing. Off to the side of one corridor she could make out something like an operating theatre. Several cyborgs were gathered around one of the tables, and there was a man on it. She couldn’t see his face, but his scent was unmistakable. It was the Chief Engineer of the Thor’s Hammer

One of the cyborgs appeared to be amputating his arm with a laser built into its prosthetic hand. Kelly saw that he was naked, except for plates of what she recognized as an incomplete Borg exoskeleton. The smell of blood wafting from him was so powerful there was no question that extensive surgery was being performed. One of the cyborgs operating on him paused in some unseen maneuver just long enough for Kelly to get a good look at its face. Its skin was the same chalky white color as all the others, and where its left eye had once been there was now some sort of sensor, but it was-she-was still recognizable. It was the Hammer’s CMO-or to be more precise what had once been the Hammer’s CMO.

Bile gurgled in Kelly’s throat as she realized what fate the Borg had planned for her. In an instant she began fighting off the Borg that held, smashing in their faces and breaking their bones. She clawed her way out of the tangle of drones driven by an emotion that would have been very familiar to many of the Draka’s victims over the centuries: the conviction that she had absolutely nothing to loose. Death was infinitely preferable to what waited for her on the Borg operating table, indeed it was the only remaining available option. Without even a second thought she leapt into the yawning chasm within the Borg cube. Her last sight was of passing deck after deck after jumbled deck, so many that she wondered if she would ever find that bottom.

Of course, eventually she did.


For a few minutes the world was a watery blur. Kelly was aware of a dull ache in her back but it was muted and cottony, as if felt from behind the gauzy barrier of a strong anesthetic. She blinked and her eyes cleared… and she found herself looking up into the pallid faces of a half dozen Borg.

Instinctively she tried to spring to her feet, to fight her way out, but her body refused to obey. She was completely paralyzed, unable to so much as move her mouth, let alone her limbs.

Impossible, I couldn’t have survived, could I?

No, there was no way she should have been able to survive that fall. Her biosynthetic armor might have afforded her some protection, but not enough to let her survive what had to have been a fall of at least several hundred meters.

She noticed the cyborgs seemed to be working on her. One of them was holding a Borg prosthesis, and he bent over and there was a clicking sound and then whirring. The angle at which he attached it would correspond to her left arm. Slowly, a horrible realization began to dawn in her mind.

One of the cyborgs tightened something on the side of her head, and an abhorrent whisper filled her mind.

Death is irrelevant…

[NecronLord]

mmm, excellent, but how are you going to make it equal? The Borg are remarkably vunerable to KE based weapons, and the Draka, while being wank, are not as stupid as the Federation.

Traditionally, the borg beam you aboard sans-weapons and armour. Not much of an advantage there if they send ten thousand cubes. And frankly, I hope these are TNG borg, and not Voyager idiocy. Though, back in the day, the borg could beam through the Enterprise's shields without incident...

[The Aliens]

Wow- you use imagery extraordinarily well, and your characterization of the Borg hearkens back to the sort of terror they imposed way back in 'Q Who?'. Your dialogue on the ship and the way everything seems to work is very 'Star Trek' in feeling, which can be taken as either compliment or insult depending on your aethsetic sensibilities, but I personally find it works very well. Excellent work.

[darthdavid]

Good work.

[Junghalli]

Wow- you use imagery extraordinarily well, and your characterization of the Borg hearkens back to the sort of terror they imposed way back in 'Q Who?'.

Why thank you.
I love the Borg more than any other SF species really, they're just so big and scary. Sitting through what B&B did to them was pure torture for me. I definitely want them to be that way here: they're the Draka's long-overdue comeuppance and trust me, they've got a lot of suffering and pain to answer for.

Your dialogue on the ship and the way everything seems to work is very 'Star Trek' in feeling, which can be taken as either compliment or insult depending on your aethsetic sensibilities, but I personally find it works very well.

That's good, I geuss.
Characterization was really hard for me in this story and I think it's probably the weakest point. I like working with pre-FS Draka better to be honest: they're just normal humans beings who were raised in a really fucked up society. It's easy to get into their heads. After the Final Society... I don't really know what they should be like as characters, so I pretty much just piled on the ham.

[Junghalli]

CHAPTER 2

Commander Towns ran through the corridors of Base Delta Epsilon as fast as he could, which for a Drakensis was damn fast. His harsh features were drawn into an expression of severe annoyance, his cold grey eyes searching the passers-by like a predator’s. Servus and alien Janissaries alike drew as far away from him as possible, for a pissed off Commander Towns was known to do… unpleasant things to anyone who caught his eye. If he was really in one of his moods the unfortunate wretch didn’t even have to do anything to merit his wrath-on Delta Epsilon his word was law and that was sufficient reason for him to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Even the Vulcans went out of their way to avoid him, not from fear (they were incapable of such an emotion, naturally) but out of simple common sense.

Two massive hellhounds saluted him as he approached the entrance to the base’s control center. Scowling, he allowed them to administer retinal scans and take fingerprints. Hellhounds were massive, vaguely humanoid beasts created to be the expendable cannon fodder of the Dominate. As far as their role went they were quite similar, in fact, to the defunct Dominion’s Jem Hadar. They were not imitations of the Jem Hadar, or visa versa. The two societies had, completely independent of one another, stumbled upon nearly identical solutions for the problem of finding loyal expendable manpower to fill the ranks of their armies. A prime example of the principle of convergent evolution in action.

These hellhounds were the very latest, most advanced model, as yet still restricted to Krypteria bases and not yet ready for full-scale deployment. Like their predecessors they were immense beasts, more than three meters tall, covered with black fur striped red. Their snouts were full of massive protruding fangs like those of Klingon mastiffs, and razor-sharp talons tipped their thick fingers. Cruel slitted eyes stared out from the fearsome masks of their faces. They had tripwire senses, lightening reflexes, and strength that made the Draka themselves appear puny by comparison. Naturally, they were programmed for perfect loyalty. The latest generation was also venomous and was rumored to possess rudimentary telepathic abilities. A casual observer might consider such security to be overkill, but Towns did not.

A little over twenty years ago a Draka expedition had come upon an Earthlike planet almost completely deserted, save for tiny populations of children. Further investigations revealed that they were the only survivors of a disastrous experiment in life-prolongation undertaken by the world’s inhabitants, whose civilization had fallen several decades before the Final War on Earth. The planet’s ecosystem was saturated with the resulting deadly pathogen, making it unsuitable for colonization.

It was, however, nicely obscure, and its very uselessness made it the perfect place to put the Krypteria’s main weapons research facility.

The facility sprawled over nearly a kilometer of space in low orbit of the now completely abandoned green and blue world; a vast ungainly conglomerate of modules and fusion reactors and scaffolding. Particle beam turrets, plasma cannons, and missile launchers bristled from it like the spikes of a cactus, and it was protected by no less than fourteen redundant shield generators, each one protecting a small section of the station. The whole thing operated under continuous cloak. A Tzen’kethi or Tholian starship could pass right by it and never detect a thing (the Alliance, with its highly sophisticated anti-cloak sensors, was admittedly rather more of a worry). Within its well-armored research modules the best minds of half a dozen conquered worlds were held prisoner and forced to work on the latest generation of weaponry that would allow the Dominate to smash the impudent Alliance and Klingons and the annoying Tzen’kethi and Tholians once and for all. Word had it one Vulcan researcher had even made limited headway into producing a shield capable of stopping the Alliance’s new phase cloaked missiles, which had hitherto frustrated all attempts to develop a countermeasure.

Towns strode into the immense control module of Base Delta Epsilon, brushing his hand through his buzz-cut hair in the way he always did when he was in a foul mood. The Janissaries made a point to watch their instruments with absolute concentration when he did that. He could smell the fear wafting off them and for a second his annoyance was alleviated.

“Now, what was so bloody urgent you had to get me out of bed?” he snapped. “I haven’t slept for the past week you know! And if this is another false alarm… well, you remember what happened to the last guy…”

The technician in question had begged for death five minutes into the punishment Towns had concocted for him. He was pleased to note the fear-smell thickening.

“Master, We’ve definitely picked something up entering the system” one of the Janissaries said. “We can’t identify it but the warp signature is massive. Either it’s fleet or… or it’s damn big. I mean really, really big Master.”


To the conventional sensors of Borg variant 1 cube 6,948,721 the system appeared empty, its only usable planet completely uninhabited. But the anti-cloaking sensors the Borg had recently assimilated from Species 6842 betrayed the telltale presence of a large cloaked structure. Detailed analysis was impossible due to the cloak, but the characteristics of the cloaking field itself matched those utilized by species 8274-Homo Drakensis.

The memories and experiences of Pat Kelly, and virtually every Janissary under her command, were now part of the Collective. Analyses suggested that Species 8274 had a surfeit of potentially useful biological and technological characteristics. To the Borg the imperative was clear. Species 8274 would be a valuable addition to the Collective.

Deep within the black heart of the Borg, below the cool equations and commands, hidden beneath the swirling melting pot of mutilated and digested souls, the ancient hunger pulsed. In those unseen depths the wings of the long-dead being which had originally created the thing that had become the Borg beat the frigid winds of data in a furious hurricane of purpose.

The engines of the Borg ship surged with power, and the cube moved inexorably toward the little cipher on its sensors.


“Should I scan them Master?” the Radar operator asked.

Towns considered for a minute. Using radar would reveal the base’s position.

“Do it” he said. “And if it isn’t a Dominate ship launch the Dominance and the Scimitar and have them reduce it to space dust-just to be on the safe side.”

“Yes Master!” the Janissary said, hoping he wouldn’t screw up and give Towns an excuse to throw him in the agony booth.


Along with being a research facility Delta Epsilon was also a testing ground for prototypes. There were usually several of the newest and best vessels the Dominate had docked at any one time. It was standard procedure to keep at least one in operating condition. That way, should any vessel accidentally stumble on the system and somehow discover the base’s existence it could be easily destroyed. Powerful subspace jammers on the station made sure that any pleas for help would go unanswered, as well as interfering with the operation of the warp distortion drives used by most alien species (but not the molehole drives used by the Draka and the Alliance).

Currently undergoing its final series of performance trials was the prototype for the new Scimitar class dreadnought. The immense vessels were over seven hundred meters in length and groaned beneath the weight of sixteen disruptor cannons, fourteen plasma emitters, eight missile launchers, and a particle cannon that could supposedly slice any known vessel clean in two (with the possible exception of the neutronium-hulled planet-killer the Alliance had supposedly destroyed about twenty years ago). Also docked was a far more prosaic vessel, the Hellion class light destroyer the Dominance.

Acting Captain Timothy Jones was honored to command the first battle-test of the new Scimitar class. He was practically jumping out his chair with anticipation as the magnificent war machine closed the distance with the alien intruder. A huge, boyish smile creased his clean-shaven perpetually young face.

“Time to intercept?” he asked cheerfully.

“Another five minutes Master” said the Helmsman, who had already been asked that three times in as many minutes.

“Readings on the alien?”

“It’s one ship, not a fleet as we first thought” Radar reported. “Cube shaped. Master… it’s the size of an asteroid! More than twenty kilometers square!”

Timothy Jones experienced a moment of trepidation when he heard that figure, but he banished it. The new Scimitar was almost three times as powerful as the Dominate’s previous heavyweight; the Severance class. It was designed to take on the heavy cruisers of the more technologically advanced Alliance one-on-one and win easily, compensating for their superior maneuverability with its sheer firepower. Its particle cannon would burn through anything.

“We’re coming up on the intruder vessel now Master” the Helmsman reported.

“Put it on viewer” Jones commanded. The Scimitar’s bridge was buried beneath thick plate armor, and as a consequence it had no windows. The advantage of that was the viewer could zoom in on targets arbitrarily. In most ships a space battle left you staring into empty stars unable to see the enemy, and reliant upon the reports of your subordinates to know what was going. Jones liked this new feature; when he got command he was going to recommend it for all new ship classes.

The viewscreen blinked on and the star field was filled with a massive, hulking mountain of metal slowly rolling towards the Scimitar. It appeared to be not so much a ship as a tremendous pile of junk scrapped together and crushed into a cube shape. He laughed.

“Thor’s Prick, who built that piece of shit? It looks like something somebody pulled out of a garbage compactor! I bet it’ll come apart with one hit!”

“Yes Master” one of the Janissaries agreed subserviently.

“We’re being hailed Master” Communications reported.

“Well, this’ll be amusing if nothing else” Jones reflected. “Put it on.” A powerful, eerie voice came over the Scimitar’s speakers, sounding disturbingly like thousands of people chanting at once.

WE ARE THE BORG. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. YOUR CULTURE WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

“Put me on” Jones addressed his micro-pickup. “This is Acting Captain Timothy Jones of the Scimitar. We are The Race. You will submit to our Will. We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own and may or may not fuck your biological distinctiveness halfway to death, depending on how good looking it is if you know what I mean. You’ve got the whole service thing backwards. And, oh yeah, resistance really is futile, you’ve just got it backwards again.” He turned to Third Tactical. “Fire a missile.”

The missile launched itself from the Scimitar and slammed into the cube-ship. Jones smiled like a kid in a candy store as the nuclear warhead detonated, the explosion temporarily obscuring the cube behind a bonfire of radiation.

“No effect Master” Visual reported. Jones frowned; so much for his prediction.

“The Dominance is firing a salvo Master” Communications said. The frown deepened: this was supposed to be his kill dammit! He saw a flurry of missiles strike the cube, causing it to momentarily disappear behind a blazing nova of thermonuclear fury.

“No change in the cube-ship’s power levels Master” Passive Sensors noted.

“No apparent structural damage Master” Radar concurred.

Jones grinned. “Shall we up the anti? Fourth Tactical!”

“Yes Master!”

“Fire the particle cannon!”

“Yes Master!”

The lights dipped and brightened as the Engineering crew stoked the chained miniature sun imprisoned in the Scimitar’s reactor. Everything went dark as almost the full power of the mighty ship’s engines was diverted into a particle beam projector running the entire length of the spacecraft’s central axis. The monstrous weapon drank terawatts of power straight from the seething reactor core and channeled it into a terrible sword of sculpted lightening that could have laid waste to entire cities. The awesome spear of pure energy stabbed outward and easily sliced through the cube-ship’s shields, carving effortlessly into its metal entrails. The hull of the cube-ship peeled back from the unimaginable energies like the drying flesh of a soft fruit as the beam pierced layer after layer of hull plating as if it were nothing until at last…

“Good god!” Jones exclaimed. “Is that…”

“Yes Master” Radar confirmed. “The beam ate a hole directly through the vessel, from one side to the other.”

Jones’ smile grew even wider. “Now that we’ve cut him an asshole let’s give it to him straight up the ass! A full alpha strike right into that hole!”

“But Master, the main cannon needs time to recharge” Fourth Tactical protested.

“Well then fire everything else dickheads” Jones said.

“Yes Master!” First, Second, Third, and Sixth Tactical exclaimed enthusiastically. Plasma beams and disruptor pulses tore into the vulnerable, bleeding wound on the alien vessel, causing a flurry of sickly green explosions as they ignited some unwholesome gas. The Dominance contributed its own particle cannons to the barrage, cutting the opening wider and wider with needles of pure electricity. Then the crowning blow: dozens of missiles slammed home, surely destroying the vessel utterly.

Timothy Jones blinked. The missiles had detonated and the cube-ship was… still there.

“Master, our fire no longer seems to be having any effect.” Passive said.

“How can that be?” Timothy Jones demanded. “We knocked their shields down like they weren’t even there! No way they could have re-established them!”

“Master, their power grid seems to be completely decentralized” Passive suggested. “Their shield grid may be equally decentralized. Our fire may have just knocked down the local sub-shields for the sections we destroyed and left the rest of the shield grid intact.”

“Master!” Visual shouted. “The cube-ship is firing on Dominance!… Master, the Dominance, it’s… gone.”

“Master!” Visual cried out. “The cube-ship has locked some sort of tractor beam onto us!”

“Master!” Fifth Tactical added. “The beam is leaching energy off our shields somehow. Shields at ninety five percent… ninety percent… eighty percent… seventy five percent…”

“Evasive maneuvers! Get us out of here!” Jones roared, panic beginning to wiggle at the back of his brain. The Scimitar’s engines roared with power and the ship lurched wildly, but it was unable to break free. Suddenly a great fist seemed to slam into it.

“Master, the cube-ship hit us with disruptor fire!” Visual yelled.

“Shields down to thirty-five percent Master!” Fifth Tactical said. “Thirty percent… Twenty-five percent… twenty percent… fifteen percent… ten percent… shields have failed Master!”

“Master, the cube-ship is hitting with some kind of laser!” Visual said.

“They’ve sliced off the engine mount master!” the Chief Engineer amended. “They’re reeling us in like a fish on a hook!”


“Master, I’ve lost contact with the Scimitar and the Dominance” Communications reported. Towns chewed his pale lip furiously.

“How long until the intruder reaches weapons range of the station?” he asked.

“Only another half hour at most” Third Passive reported. “They’re decelerating at a furious rate… I’d say they’ve got inertial dampeners almost as good as the Alliance, if not better!” At the mention of the word Alliance Towns’ lip curved south in a dangerous scowl. He knew it was irrational of him, but he always took the Alliance’s technological superiority to be a kind of personal affront. None of those fucking bushmen should have even survived the final unification of the Draka’s planet of origin, but here they were a bloody galactic power. Well, there was always hope that would change soon.

“Prepare for attack” he said after a few moments of reflection. “And tell the hellhounds to be ready to repel boarders.” He paused for a moment. “Tell them to be ready to implement full Wildfire procedure if they have to.”

There was a chorus of “yes Master” and throughout the base sirens began to blare.


The Borg held the Species 8274 vessel securely in a tractor beam. Tactical drones were beamed over to neutralize all resistance. The great buzzing collective mind waited for the remaining crew members to be terminated or assimilated and finally reeled the craft in. It had inflicted significant damage on cube 6,948,721. Whatever weapon it had used to gouge its way clear from one side of the superstructure to another might well make a valuable addition to the Collective’s arsenal. The loss of the engine mount was unfortunate, for the molehole drive was one of the more promising technologies Species 8247 had to offer. It much faster than warp or transwarp, and it could potentially free the Borg of the strategic liability of transwarp hubs. It was of no great concern: there would be many molehole drive craft to study in the future.

Its immediate task complete the great, icy intellect of the Borg turned its passionless attention to the problem of overcoming the defenses of the cloaked facility. The information taken from the brain of the newly assimilated drone that had only recently been Timothy Jones confirmed the wisdom of the earlier decision to search this apparently lifeless system. The facility was an important weapons research platform for Species 8274, and would undoubtedly be full of potential useful technologies to assimilate. The new drone was also intimately familiar with the defenses of the installation, which would help greatly.

The whispering voices of the Collective reached a consensus, a sound like autumn leaves being blown on a strong wind.


“Master, the intruder vessel is launching long-range missiles!”

“Fik, the bastards know we’re here. They’re trying to force us out of cloak” Towns growled. “Well, there’s no point in staying cloaked anymore, is there? Lower the cloak and raise the shields!”

Alarms screamed as the cloak fell away from Base Delta Epsilon like a blanket, revealing its naked form to prying eyes. Within seconds dozens of independent shield generators flared to life. The first missiles struck like hammers. Unwholesome green energy surged across the shield grids. The missiles were not nuclear but seemed to operate on some more arcane principle Towns couldn’t guess at and didn’t particularly care to.

“Return fire!” Towns ordered.

Dozens of missiles sprang forth from silo modules all over the station and soared across the cold black sky towards the onrushing Borg cube. They splashed across its shields, burning it with the energy of half a hundred miniature suns, but the Borg were thoroughly adapted. The cube’s shield grid was barely even strained by the heavy barrage. For some time the station and the cube remained at an impasse, flinging long-range missiles at each other to little effect. Then the cube entered orbit. It pulled up to the station as if intending to dock. To those with access to windows it was a terrifying sight, enough to drive fear even into the hearts of the Draka themselves. The view was filled by a grey, oppressive cliff of metal. Pipes and conduits snaked across its surface and deep down where you most definitely did not want to look eldritch light filtered out like swamp gas.

“All right, let’s take the initiative” Towns said. “Hit them with everything we’ve got!”

At his command every weapons mount on that side of Base Delta Epsilon swiveled to face the Borg cube and let fly. Missiles plowed into its shields, thrown from such close range that they didn’t even need their guidance systems to hit it. Gasses as hot as the outer layers of some stars washed over its hull. Needles of electricity stabbed deep into the heart of the cube, piercing through deck after deck and filling its interior with blackened scars. This close the plasma needles and particle beams were hot and focused, doing maximum damage. The Borg hit back with strobing flashes of disruptors. Slowly, meticulously, they swept over every weapon mounting and reactor module on Delta Epsilon. Grappling beams locked on, draining power from the station’s shields and transferring it to the cubes power grid to fuel the very weapons that were pounding the shields apart. It was a gesture that the Draka would have appreciated, if they had been aware of it. To the Borg, of course, it was simply the most efficient way to proceed.

The Borg went about their task with the grim, unhurried pace of those utterly indifferent to their own individual survival. One by one Base Delta Epsilon’s shield generators failed, and one by one every turret and cannon and missile launcher was clubbed into a shapeless lump of melted slag.


Kojikun could hear the station disintegrating around him. The shrill shrieking of multiple alarms assaulted his ears. Working as quickly as possible he waved magnets over the glittering banks of computers, erasing years of work with a few seconds of electrostatic disruption. He felt a vague sorrow for all the investment of time and sweat and blood that he was destroying, but the Alliance couldn’t be allowed to get its hands on the data. At least he assumed it was the Alliance attacking the station. Nobody would tell him anything, which was hardly an unprecedented state of affairs. As a lowly Servus working on a top secret project he was used to being kept in the dark.

“I’m done” he said, handing the magnets back to the huge power-armored hellhound. “It’s all erased.” His thin hands trembled as the intimidating creature took the magnets from him. It surveyed the computer bank for a minute, then raised his gun. The milling slave technicians and laborers flinched and covered their ears as it swept the machinery with its pulse rifle. The computers exploded, sending sparks and bits off metal flying. Kojikun screamed as the sharp shrapnel impacted his frail, scrawny body but the hellhound took no notice. The jagged bits glanced easily off the hardened alloy of its power armor.

There was a horrible sound of metal ripping and tearing. The lights dipped and dimmed and at last went out entirely. There were screams and despairing groans from the crowd. Sweat dripped down Kojikun’s light brows. It almost sounded as if the station were being physically ripped apart, as if some kilometer-tall giant was tearing it into pieces with hands the size of starships. After a few seconds the emergency lights came on, creating little islands of bright illumination in the new darkness. Kojikun thought he could feel the deck shifting beneath him. Perhaps it was his imagination, or perhaps the artificial gravity was failing. Some men tried to push their way out of the room, but the hellhounds trained their guns on them and refused to let them pass. He wondered miserably if they would die in this place, left here to choke when the oxygen ran out. He knew the Draka did not value the lives of their servants highly. Until now he had accepted that and it didn’t bother him very much, but now that he was faced with possibility of being left behind on a dying space station… if the hellhounds suspected the same thing they gave no sign. Their minds were simple things and they did not care what happened to them. As far as they were concerned all they had to do was obey orders and the universe would take care of itself. Kojikun envied them.

There was a sparkle of light in a dark corner, and some sort of cyborg came shambling out. Kojikun’s terror increased by several factors. It wasn’t the Alliance attacking the base after all, this was… something else. Something much worse. One of the hellhounds shot it with its rifle and the thing fell dead, a smoking hole blown in its chest. A second cyborg materialized and the hellhound shot it as well, but the beam was deflected impotently of some kind of personal shield. The hellhound seemed to hesitate for a minute, then signaled to its fellows. They raised their rifles, but not at the cyborgs. Their guns were pointed at the Servus.

A horrible tickling spread between Kojikun’s shoulder blades. In the end the hellhounds’ orders were not to protect him. They were to destroy him, just like he had destroyed the databanks, in order to deny this new enemy any valuable knowledge he might have.

The hellhounds’ guns began to fire, and hot flesh and blood and bone fragments began to fly. Kojikun was shot in the stomach and felt his belly explode, shredded guts dangling from the horrible gaping cavity like a hideous fetus. In the last seconds before he died he saw the hellhounds disappearing in sparkles of green light.

[The Aliens]

Excellent chpater, as usual- especially:

Deep within the black heart of the Borg, below the cool equations and commands, hidden beneath the swirling melting pot of mutilated and digested souls, the ancient hunger pulsed. In those unseen depths the wings of the long-dead being which had originally created the thing that had become the Borg beat the frigid winds of data in a furious hurricane of purpose.

Damn good metaphor. However, I have a few suggestions, including finding a different simile for fusion missiles than "miniature sun". It gets repetitive, and there are other effective thgins you can use. Also, the usage of names from the board are kind of... jarring. Breaking the 4th wall works in some instances, but naming main charcaters after trolls and banned users kind of distracts from the overall dark feeling of the piece. Look for some random name generators, they can help greatly. Other than that, another excellent chapter, and I eagerly await your next.

[darthdavid]

Excellent chpater, as usual- especially:

Deep within the black heart of the Borg, below the cool equations and commands, hidden beneath the swirling melting pot of mutilated and digested souls, the ancient hunger pulsed. In those unseen depths the wings of the long-dead being which had originally created the thing that had become the Borg beat the frigid winds of data in a furious hurricane of purpose.

Damn good metaphor. However, I have a few suggestions, including finding a different simile for fusion missiles than "miniature sun". It gets repetitive, and there are other effective thgins you can use. Also, the usage of names from the board are kind of... jarring. Breaking the 4th wall works in some instances, but naming main charcaters after trolls and banned users kind of distracts from the overall dark feeling of the piece. Look for some random name generators, they can help greatly. Other than that, another excellent chapter, and I eagerly await your next.

ON the troll names I half agree half disagree. On the one hand they do jar a bit but on the other it's funny as hell seeing them ripped to shreds.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Why didn't the alliance help the Vulcans and Andorians and stuff? Are they a federation-redux with refugees from all our favorite Trek powers?

P.S. Why didn't they use the cannon to cut the ship in half, instead of a single localized shot?

[Junghalli]

ON the troll names I half agree half disagree. On the one hand they do jar a bit but on the other it's funny as hell seeing them ripped to shreds.

I'll try to lay off a bit, but the troll killing will not cease until I find a way to put Arminius in there. That guy was born to be a Draka. Man his name even sound good with the Dominate's Roman-based military ranks!
I'll try to round it out a bit by putting some regular board members in there to (Pablo Sanchez as an Alliance admiral for instance). I think I'll make Arminius a Draka General (or would that be Strategos, must look up their ranks again...) so renouned for his brutality that even the other Snakes can't stand him.

Why didn't the alliance help the Vulcans and Andorians and stuff? Are they a federation-redux with refugees from all our favorite Trek powers?

They're being their usual selves. This fanfic is a direct sequel to Drakon, the premise being that Sterling's Draka series is set in the Trekverse, just one where Earth history happened differently. Remember, these are the guys who had it in their power to curbstomp the Draka repeatedly and failed to do so, long after they should have known better. Look up the thread on FTL in the Drakaverse (http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=70979) for a particularly appalling example.
As for the political situation I'll give you a quick rundown. Vulcan and Andor are subject worlds of the Dominate. The Romulans are decimated. Their homeworld population all comitted mass suicide rather than surrender after the Draka invaded their system and blasted Remus with a Shiva Bomb as a demonstration (a Shiva Bomb BTW uses the same technology as the Genesis device in the mainline Trekverse, but only destructive effects, the planet that comes out the other end is a seared mass of melted rock). A few Rommies still exist on major worlds in their empire that were conquered by the Snakes, but for the most part the Draks found it more efficient to just nuke their colonies from orbit and then establish their own base on the other side of the planet. They later did the same thing to the Ferengi and Cardassians, both species got sent the way of the dodo.
The Alliance has mostly concentrated its expansion in the deep Beta Quadrant, which is mostly uninhabited aside from the Klingons, who they have an alliance with. Their homeworld core encompasses a lot of the planets we know from regular Trek: Betazoid, Omega IV, Bajor etc. Recently they tangled with the Dominion, but since this B/AQ is a good deal more militarised than regular Trek the Founders went down hard. Most of former Dominion territory was liberated and is now part of the Alliance.
I'll be bringing the Alliance and the Klingons into the picture in a few chapters, don't worry.

Why didn't they use the cannon to cut the ship in half, instead of a single localized shot?

When he said that the Scimitar's cannon could cut anything known in half the Draka had never met anything the size of a Borg cube.

[Junghalli]

CHAPTER 3

Borg cube 6,948,721 limped into the Rubicon system at warp four; a crawling pace by its standards. It had taken significant damage during the assimilation of Base Delta Epsilon. It no longer looked so much like a cube as a kind of comical cube-shaped doughnut; the Scimitar’s particle cannon had drilled a huge hole clean through it. Bomb craters pocked its surface and its interior was marred by deep wounds inflicted by the needling thrusts Base Delta Epsilon’s cannons. It was still by far the most powerful vessels in the quadrant, and its magnificent redundancy guaranteed that the loss of performance was minimal, but clearly it would require reinforcements to assimilate Species 8274.

There was no transwarp hub in this portion of the galaxy and the highways of twisted space the Borg used to traverse their own domains were few and far between here. Reinforcement from other parts of the Collective would therefore be a difficult proposition. But that was not a problem.

If the Borg had pride they would have felt it over the design of the variant 1 cube. It was an autonomous, far-ranging research vessel designed to spread Borg presence throughout distant areas of the galaxy. Effectively it was a self-contained world, complete with cloning facilities for the production of new drones to see it through its often centuries-long missions. It was designed to assimilate entire worlds all by itself. Worlds that could then be turned into Borg hives capable of turning out cube after cube after cube.

Worlds like Rubicon IV.

The natives of Rubicon IV; Species 7426 (the Edo), were a peaceful, indolent people looked after by an orbiting AI which they worshipped as a god. They had no weapons and no military, and their world had been easy prey for the expansionism of Species 8274. Species 8274 had simply destroyed the AI God with nuclear missiles, set down a small garrison, and gone on to greater conquests. Species 7426 was easy to control, and no major commitment of resources had been necessary to hold the system.

For the purposes of the Borg it was a perfect arrangement.

Cube 6,948,721 settled into a low orbit of Rubicon IV and transmitted the Borg’s standard message, inviting the inhabitants into the harmony of the Collective. When the message was returned by fire from Rubicon’s planetary defense network the Borg simply put a long-range missile into the middle of the Species 8274 base. Green energy washed over a city-sized area around the base, creating a temporary lake of lava fifteen kilometers across. Rubicon IV was now utterly defenseless.

The largest communities came first, but in time the Borg made their way to every village and hamlet on the planet. The Borg erected giant concentration camps into which the planets population was herded to await assimilation. Some Edo fled into the wilderness, but that did not save them. The sophisticated sensors of the Borg cube obsessively scanned every square centimeter of Rubicon IV’s surface, beaming anything that looked even vaguely humanoid directly into the sprawling, bustling assimilation centers. For weeks the Borg surgeons worked night and day, imprisoning Edo after Edo in Borg exoskeletons until finally, after nearly a month, the entire world population to the last babe in arms was Borg.

Now the real work could begin.

Machinery of almost unimaginable power was constructed and set to breaking open the crust of Rubicon IV. Vast open-pit mines were torn in the earth, wherein titanic Borg machines labored around the clock to rape the planet of its resources. Above the mines construction machines the size of mountains were lifted into the sky by the unceasing labor of millions of assimilated Edo, who now bent their backs to the despoiling of their own world with the efficiency and tenacity of worker ants. Brooding Borg citadels were raised to the heavens now stained grey by the funeral pyres of Rubicon IV’s extinguished biosphere. The night became bright with the sick radium sunshine of arcane forges. Within another month the world the Edo had known simply no longer existed. In its place was a barren rock, lava weeping over a rocky desert surface beneath an oily polluted sky. Hundreds of Borg construction cranes soared into the stratosphere, and below them cubical mountains 3.2 kilometers on a side were beginning to take shape.

[NecronLord]

The snakes loose a colony and don't notice for months?

[Junghalli]

The snakes loose a colony and don't notice for months?

Who said they didn't notice? Sure they noticed. They sent a frigate to check it out, and it disappeared, and then they sent a bigger ship and it disappeared, and then they sent a flotilla and a couple of damaged ships came back to report that somebody's been doing some pretty major renovations to Rubicon IV. Remember, this is a construction site for Borg cubes were talking about here, it's going to be a fucking fortress.
The Draka are in such deep shit I almost do feel sorry for them.

[NecronLord]

Humm. Fair enough.

Though I think Daleks vs the Draka would be slightly more amusing for my vile tastes, simply because the former are the latter done right.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Excellent. Your use of imagery is very good, and you manage to make the Borg into a genuinely frightening entity very effectively.

So what are the Draka planning to do about this latest development? (after pissing themselves and realising that their character shields have officially been switched off)

[Junghalli]

Excellent. Your use of imagery is very good, and you manage to make the Borg into a genuinely frightening entity very effectively.

Great! I thought my description of what the Borg did to Rubicon IV was one of the better parts of the fanfic, stylistically. I wanted to really capture the grandeur and horror of the Borg at their best.

So what are the Draka planning to do about this latest development? (after pissing themselves and realising that their character shields have officially been switched off)

At this point they have no idea what's happening. They think the destruction of Base Delta Epsilon was an Alliance attack, and the Draka leadership is taking this as the perfect opportunity to deal with the Alliance once and for all.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to their ludicrously arrogant asses, the Borg are buisily turning Rubicon IV into a planet-sized cube factory... Things are starting to get really interesting.

[Junghalli]

Admiral Marina O’Leary sat in the perfect darkness of her tiny, cramped cabin. The battlecruiser Sarmatian had few windows, for the obvious reason that most of it was covered with thick plate armor to augment the shields. One wall of the cabin curved slightly, testifying to the fact that beyond it lay the vacuum of space. The interior was so dark that even her enhanced night vision could barely make out anything, which was good. She could think without distraction; an eccentricity among the Draka. For the most part they were not taught to think; they were taught to react. But then, Admiral O’Leary had been different since, well… she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Having witnessed the Final War and its consequences had something to do with it, undoubtedly. Most Draka alive today had seen only the positive attributes of war; the victories, the wealth accrued by conquest, the glory and prestige important officers could garner for themselves by being brilliant or just bold. Witnessing the lean, cold times as the Earth struggled to recover from the damage done to it by nuclear winter put things in a rather different perspective. Or perhaps it was simply a factor of living time. One did not experience six centuries without undergoing some growth. Even by Draka standards she was very old.

She was interrupted by the buzz of the intercom. She tapped a command into her perscomp and Sarmatian’s Molehole Comm. Technician appeared on the screen.

“Master, you have a message from Home Base.”

What is it now? she thought to herself in irritation. “Put it through.” When she saw the man who next appeared on the screen her eyes almost flew out of their sockets.

“Dominarch!” what had she done to merit the attention of somebody that high-up.

“Admiral” the grey-haired, severe-faced man on the other end said. “Eight weeks ago an-important base, the location is classified-was destroyed. A week after that we lost contact with our garrison in the Rubicon system. A light frigate was sent to check out the situation there, it has not returned. The base was under continuous cloak Admiral.”

O’Leary thought it over. “There’s only two species in the known galaxy that can see through our cloaks: the Klingons-and the Alliance.”

“Correct” Dominarch Romus confirmed. “As of 0300 Zulu time today the Dominate of Drakia is officially at war with the Alliance and the Klingon Empire. I want you to assemble a task force and hit the following targets; we’re downloading them to you now. Have these ships assemble in the Juret system, it’s real close to Alliance territory.” he smiled thinly. “I’ve been waiting for a long time to deal with the Alliance once and for all. We all have. Out.”

The screen died. Admiral O’Leary left her darkened cabin and headed to the bridge to begin making the necessary preparations.

[Junghalli]

Passive Sensor Operator Ed Hardwood was bored. The USS Freedom was on routine patrol, orbiting the Klingon colony of Araxis, leaving him precious little to do. Like most Klingon and Alliance colonies in the Alpha Quadrant Araxis had originally started out as a military base, and the colony had grown from the civilian support personnel and later military men who had fulfilled their terms of service but saw no particular need to go anywhere else. It was close to the homeworld cores of both the Alliance and the Draka Dominate, and therefore was ideally positioned for cloaked Klingon vessels to strike deep into Dominate territory in the event of a war. As such the world was extremely valuable to the Alliance-Klingon axis, and merited joint protection.

His boredom vanished as he noticed a powerful surge of energy. It emanated from a point just inside the orbit of the innermost of Araxis’ three moons, very close to the Freedom’s present position.

“Sir” he said to Captain Frank “I’m reading a huge buildup of energy. It looks like a molehole opening sir, or maybe several moleholes. Very close to our present position.”

“Klingon?” Frank asked, mildly concerned.

“Negative, it’s too weak to be Klingon” Hardwood said. “But it’s-inefficient-by our standards, they’re putting a lot more energy into it than an Alliance ship has to.”

Hardwood could see Captain Frank’s eyes bulge. There were only three species in the known galaxy that utilized this type of drive system. So if it wasn’t Alliance, and it wasn’t Klingon…

Captain Frank was just turning around to issue the order to raise shields when the blazing energy signature lifted to reveal a Draka task force. The lead ship fired two nukes, the first one striking the USS Texas and reducing it to space debris. The second missile slammed into the Klingon destroyer Obliterator, splintering it along its spine.

“Sir, I’m reading eight Spectre class frigates, six Hellion class light destroyers, three Hoplite class heavy destroyers, two Allegiance class battlecruisers, a Severance class dreadnought and two Aegean class troop carriers!” Radar read off.

“Raise shields and open fire!” Captain Frank shouted. Thankfully Tactical had already raised the shields without needing to be prompted, for no sooner were the words out of his mouth when a Draka nuke exploded against the Freedom, knocking instruments and weaponry off its hull like scales from a fish.


“Sir, the Texas has been destroyed and the Freedom has suffered heavy damage!” Radio bellowed.

“What about the Klingons?” Admiral Pablo Sanchez asked.

“They’ve lost the Obliterator” Radar said. “Bonesplitter and Eviscerator have taken severe damage.”

“Sir, the Challenger has been destroyed” Radio said. “And the Los Angelos… “

“They’re concentrating on our missile ships” Sanchez mused. “Their plan is to cripple our long range fighting capabilities, then cut us to pieces from a distance. There’s no way they could have gotten this close with molehole drive… they must have jumped in-system hours ago, using one of the moons as a shield, and then done another micro-jump putting them straight on top of us. Whoever’s doing this he’s damn good at it… Radio, tell them to concentrate on the Spectres.”


Admiral O’Leary was pleased to see that her micro-jump maneuver had paid off. The Alliance and Klingons had been caught completely off-guard. It had been a risky maneuver, for there was a high probability that one or more vessels of Task Force Sarmatian would miss the outer moon entirely and rematerialize in open space, where its emergence would be a brilliant beacon to Allied sensors. Never much of a gambler O’Leary had, of course, had a back-up plan for that scenario.

“The Kingfisher and Kenai have been destroyed Master” Radio reported. “And the Dragon has been crippled.”

“Excellent, they fell for it just as I planned” O’Leary said. Klingons, by their nature, would want to go after the command ship first, so standard Drakan tactics for dealing with them usually involved heavy reliance on the small and inconspicuous Spectres, goading the ridgeheads to blast the heavy capitol ships while the little boys did the real damage. But the Drakan high command had a marked tendency to underestimate Klingons. By in large, they bought the popular image of the ridgeheads as Neolithic throwbacks; creatures with brains still stuck in the middle ages but who somehow managed to cobble together spacecraft. The Klingons were aware of their own tendencies, and how they could be used against them. To be perfectly honest many of these anti-Klingon maneuvers were so comically simple even a child would see through them, let alone a competent military commander. Her own plan had been simple too, but it turned the normal Drakan tactic on its head: it encouraged the Klingons to waste their ammunition on the small and nimble missile boats.

“Have the Spectres fall back behind the Allegiances” she ordered. “Make it look like we’re trying to conserve our assets instead of moving the Allegiances forward.”

“Yes Master.”

“Sir, they’re retiring the Spectres behind their big battlewagons” Radar said.

“They’re trying to shield them from our fire” Sanchez concluded. “Tell them to ignore the battleships and keep up the pressure on those missile boats.”

“Yes sir” Radio said.


Marina O’Leary watched the Allegiance class cruisers Turrent and Paladin move slowly toward the tight knot of Allied vessels on her tactical display. The Spectres gathered behind them like fleeting minnows, trading shots with the Allied missile ships. The Captains of those ships were performing perfectly, making it look as if the Spectres were firing from behind the shelter of the big guns and therefore distracting the Allies from the danger the big guns themselves presented.

“Move the Sarmatian up to wingman’s position of the Turrent” O’Leary said. Sarmatian crept forward into position, just three hundred kilometers behind the Turrent.

“Move the cruisers up to six hundred kilometers of the Allied front ranks” O’Leary commanded. “Have the Spectres edge up behind us until the last minute. Move the Hellions up between the Spectres and us to create a second screen.”

“Yes Master” Radio said.

The Drakan formation smoothly rearranged itself on the tactical chart and slid up to within virtual point-blank range of the Allied fleet. Believing the Draka to be shielding their missile ships between a double screen of cruisers and destroyers the Allies eagerly closed with them. O’Leary waited for the range to close to within a few hundred kilometers.

“Now!” she cried. “Implement maneuver Vanguard Theta!”

“Yes Master!” the Tactical Officers said as they began feeding juice into their weapons.

The Allegiance class was a decent missile ship, but most of its destructive power was tied up in its beam weapons. It fielded twelve disruptor turrets, two big bi-directional plasma guns, and a huge particle cannon not dissimilar from the one that had been mounted on the experimental Scimitar. Like the Spectre it had chiefly seen action against Tzen’kethi raiding fleets, and they were very leery of closing range with it. But O’Leary’s maneuver had successfully fooled them into getting within point-blank energy beam range in an effort to take down the Spectres, which they mistakenly believed to be the true backbone of the task force.

The three cruisers opened fire all at once. Immensely powerful particle beam slashed through the Allied fleet, carving Alliance and Klingon ships into pieces.


“Admiral, they’ve opened fire with particle lances!” Visual shrieked.

“The Klingons report they’ve just lost half their fleet to particle lance shots!” Radio exclaimed. “We’ve lost the Anchorage sir… and the Kodiak!”

Sanchez watched numbly as the lead cruiser scratched the Alaska with plasma beams, damaging its reactor severely.

“Full retreat!” he ordered

“But sir-“ Commander Daystrom protested.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a choice Commander” Sanchez said. “We’ve lost too many ships, we have to retreat and regroup. Araxis should be able to hold out-hopefully.”

The bedraggled Allied fleet gathered itself together and disappeared into knots of twisted spacetime. This wasn’t good. The war was just starting, and the Alliance had just lost the first battle.

[Junghalli]

Marina O’Leary splashed cold water over her face, gasping momentarily as it hit her skin. She hadn’t slept for several weeks now, and she was beginning to feel rather tired.

“Hope you don’t mind me intruding, mon capitan” a rather impish sounding voice said. She turned out of the tiny head with the kind of speed only a Drakensis could manage. Standing near her cot was a superficially unimpressive looking man wearing a well pressed black Captain’s uniform.

“What do you want now Q” she said irritably.

“I see you’re your usual cheerful self” the omnipotent being said with his usual irritating laconic wit. He tossed her something. She caught it reflexively and held it up in her hand. It was a cube, made out of a bunch of bent copper wires and painted black. It looked like something that might have come from the American republic during its last years. She examined it for a few moments and put it down on the low table that, aside from the cot and a single chair, was the only furnishing her cabin could accommodate. Even for Admirals starships were unavoidably cramped.

“Well mon capitan, aren’t you going to ask me about it?” Q said.

“I haven’t been a Captain for the past fifteen years” O’Leary said.

“Oh, I am sorry” Q said with exaggerated gravity. “I really should try to keep more up to date, your little years do pass oh so quickly.”

“I thought it was ‘centuries’” O’Leary said. That was the phrase she’d heard about fifty years ago; the first time Q had showed up on the bridge of O’Leary’s then command, the Allegiance, dressed in the garb of voortrekker and toting a Ferguson rifle…

“Those too” Q said.

O’Leary looked at the cube. “Well, are you going to tell me about it, or are you just here to find a new way to waste all that time you apparently have?”

“It has a rather interesting history” Q explained. “It’s a toy. It belonged to a woman named Annika Hansen as a girl.”

“I’ve never heard of her” O’Leary said.

“No, I’d be surprised if you did” Q said as he inspected his fingernails. “She never existed.”

“What are talking about?” O’Leary asked, remembering just why Q was such an exasperating being to be around.

Q smirked. “Ah, you Drakensis may think you’re an improvement over good old Homo Sapiens, but you still think oh-so three-dimensionally. Annika Hansen never existed here.”

“You’ve still lost me” O’Leary said. “Either explain to me what you’re saying or if you’re so powerful go conjure up something else to keep yourself entertained.”

“Really, you know I remember a certain Japanese officer who said something very similar to me, oh, it must have been three centuries ago.”

“There were no Japanese three centuries ago” O’Leary said. “That was already three hundred years after the Final War.”

Q snapped his fingers. “I never did tell you about the Temporal Wars, did I?”

“You mean one of those meaningless things you always make infuriatingly confusing references to?” O’Leary asked.

Q shrugged theatrically. “Don’t blame me just because your tiny brain can’t grasp the concept. Anyway, it’s an interesting story, I think you’ll like it. It all started it with the original timeline of course. The one that came directly from the Big Bang. The one where humanity never made into space until seven hundred thousand years in the future, and by that time the galaxy was full of already established civilizations that didn’t want competition.”

O’Leary remembered a certain incident that had occurred when molehole drive was first being developed. “Timeline-you mean an alternate universe?”

Q smiled like a parent who had just watched an infant say its first word. “Very good, there may be hope for you yet. Anyway, in this timeline there were being called the Eternals, who started out with the rather ambitious goal of finding the best of all possible universes for humanity. They went back to the Big Bang and all up and down and around the history of the universes, tweaking and nudging things to create a humans-only universe.”

“It didn’t work I take it” O’Leary said.

“Oh they succeeded eventually.” Q winked. “After a couple of thousand tries of course. I’m going to let you in on a little secret mon capitan: time travel always leads to temporal paradoxes. You go back in time, kill your grandfather, you don’t exist anymore, that sort of thing. The universe has a couple of ways of dealing with them, but the most common is to just split in two. There’s a kind of mini Big Bang effect, which creates a big pocket of spacetime so the new alternate timeline can happen. The rest of the universe stays the same, as if nothing happened.” Q made a show of picking lint off the red dragon symbol stitched to his sleeve. “The Eternals made a couple of thousand of these pockets, most of them about the size of a galaxy, some bigger, some smaller. And then of course in a lot of them new groups developed which had their own problems with the way their universe had turned out, and inevitably some of those got their hands on time travel technology and tried to change history to suit their own preferences, and then of course the new timelines they created had their own such groups and-“ he threw his hands up dramatically “I’m sure you can guess how the whole thing eventually ended up.”

“Insanity” O’Leary said. “So this cube-thing is from a different universe?”

“I thought you’d appreciate it” Q said. “You see Annika Hansen would later serve under a certain Captain Kathryn Janeway. After the Empire came and conquered her galaxy in one timeline the Janeway of that timeline became obsessed with using time travel to prevent it from happening. But no matter what she did the timelines she created always lead to contact with the Empire. She ended up eventually creating a good several thousand timelines where that happened, always a little differently each time, and of course in some of those timelines other people got the same idea and added even more to the mess. Of course each failure only made her more determined. At some point she got the idea that if she could somehow make humanity vicious enough they could defeat the Empire in battle.”

“Did it work?” O’Leary asked, mildly interested. She had no idea where Q was going with all this.

“No way to tell, the culture she ended up producing was so virulent we Q put its galaxy under quarantine because we were worried about what it might eventually turn into if we let it spread too far. That meant cutting off any connections to different galaxies or timelines. By the way, it may interest you to note the culture in question is called the Dominate of Drakia.” Q’s smile widened as he contemplated the irony. “Think about it mon capitan, doesn’t your own history strike you as a parade of improbabilities? Doesn’t it seem the least bit odd to you that the British Empire essentially treated the Drakia colony as if it were an independent country? Haven’t you ever wondered how a ludicrously overextended empire with a severely inefficient economic system managed to not only survive but thrive for so long? Did you ever pause to contemplate the logistical problems involved in the Dominate, with its Citizen population of seventy million at the time, brutally crushing all resistance across the entire Eurasian continent in World War II? Didn’t you ever stop and wonder what was going through the Alliance’s leaders’ heads when they had molehole drive and you didn’t, but they failed to capitalize on their obscene strategic advantage? Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder how one puts a bunch of American ex-patriots and Boers into a blender and comes out with super-Nazis? The hand of Janeway is all over your timeline! You and the rest of the Draka owe your very existence to that psychopath ten times over!”

“Yeah, this is all very fascinating” O’Leary said sarcastically. “Is that what you came here to tell me? Boy, you must really have time to kill in the Q-Continuance or whatever you call it.”

“No” Q said gravely. “I’m here to deliver a warning. The Q-Continuum has decided that your species has spread too far.”

“You’re going to stop us from exploring the galaxy?”

Q laughed harshly. “We’re going to stop you from existing!”

O’Leary looked straight at Q. “Genocide? How ethical.”

“Considering everything the Draka have accomplished in the field of suffering and death you hardly have anything to crow about.” Q said. “But no, we’re not going to kill you. The Great and Powerful Q-that would be my boss, has decided to simply-shall we say, introduce you, to the Borg.”

“Who?” O’Leary asked. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“That’s because you’re fighting the wrong enemy” Q said. “It was the Borg who attacked that Draka base, and your garrison on Rubicon IV.”

“So the Borg are an alien species?” O’Leary demanded. If Q was telling the truth this was vital information that had to be presented to the Dominarch at once. “Tell me more? What are they like? What’s their military strength? How many worlds do they have? How many ships? How many troops? What are their tactics like? What are their weaknesses-“

Q raised a finger to stop her. A contemptuous smirk was on his face. “Don’t bother. If you have anything to tell the Dominarch tell him to take the advice the Oracle gave the Greeks when the Persians invaded: ‘why stay ye, doomed ones?’ The Borg are like you in many ways: they’re the ultimate users. They only care about what they can take, and now that my boss has been so kind as to point that one stray cube in the right direction they’ve identified you as something they can consume. If you want convincing of what they’re capable of send a flotilla to the Rubicon system. They’re building up their strength now. When they’re ready they’ll attack and they’ll do it in overwhelming numbers. So you run along now. Go run off to the Magellanic Clouds. Or maybe Andromeda, ‘cause I’m not even sure how safe they’ll be over the long term.” And with that he disappeared in a flash of light.

A cookie to anyone who can name all the different books and fanfics referenced in Q's speech!