Stardate: 44002.3
Wolf 359
It’s coming up on 7 hours since the attack. Making a log hasn’t been my top priority, I’ll admit. But considering I’m a scientist and a starfleet officer, I suppose I owe it to my field and my duty to take the opportunity to observe and record what happened here.
The communication from the Borg Locutus was broadcast throughout the ship, through the PA and cast on every screen. The combat was brief and devastating.
65% of the ship has been destroyed. There’s no artificial gravity in place so we’re using grav boots. There’s only small sections where a few emergency shields have held. But it seems the Borg invaders have little issue with the vacuum between force fields, so they’re able to make better use of the space than us. Eventually all the systems will fail and those force fields will go down.
I was trapped under shrapnel in the science lab and am one of a few survivors on this collapsing ship. We have no communication ability and judging from the wreckage we’re able to see in the distance, few fared much better than the Saratoga. We have no idea what may be going on on Earth, or anywhere else. I can’t let myself think about that.
Once the combat ended (I assume the Cube resumed its course) the Borg put a platoon of Drones on the ship. I’ll include descriptions of the Borg behavior in this log.
There are 8 of us so far who have found one another.
In the first few hours after the attack, I observed the Drones that have been deposited on the ship. I did my best to be stealthy and was able to witness their behavior. But I also discovered (by being ‘discovered’) that the Drones did not react to my presence. I could even walk in their presence, ignored, but as soon as I initiated violence I became a target for assimilation.
I think my scientific background has given me a numbing salve against this experience. I find myself unable to hate the Borg. The Borg are not ‘beings’ to be hated — they’re a force of nature. I could no more hate a tornado or an earthquake or a virus or a swarm of ants.
This is my first time seeing the Borg in person but I think it’s safe to assume that their colony is comprised of a vast array of assimilated individuals, which would provide a spectrum of sizes. But it’s clear that they’ve classified themselves into specific roles — the Drones that have been left behind with us are all very large. And not necessarily ‘strong’ by definition, but *tall* — I’ve even seen a few lanky Kelpians scavenging the wreck. I suppose strength isn’t an issue for an assimilated body. Their purpose is to carry large containers. They are scouring the ship, collecting any technology that’s not secured to the floor, then amassing the spoils in a central location. Padds, tricorders, computers, medical equipment. I’ve seen them carve computer consoles out of a wall and float it down the hallway. They’re separating the useful technology from the shrapnel.
They remind me of leaf cutter ants, preparing and collecting spoils to bring back to their colony. Even the Borg need ‘raw’ materials to sustain their propagation. In this case, we’re the leaves. I think of these large collectors as Mediae Drones — the foragers.
We found that phase weapons don’t work on the Drones so we’re forced to resort to projectile and close-combat weapons. The only effective way we’ve found to eliminate a Drone is to destroy the brain or sever the head, which is quite difficult with the established Drones. It’s clear that large proportions of organic tissue has been replaced by synthetic substance. Severing a Borg spine isn’t an easy task.
More crew must be somewhere because we’re finding victims in varying stages of assimilation. There seems to be a brief period where the newly assimilated Drone is in a vulnerable state, mostly disabled as the technology replaces the victim’s internal systems.
With little hope of rescue before full system failure, we have taken it as our mission to search for our crewmates who are being assimilated and terminate them.
If anyone finds this, know that we cut as many of our crewmates free of their grasp until we were taken ourselves.
Lt. Lian Sun
USS Saratoga NCC-31911