The algorithm of this disruption field is so familiar, it feels like a lifetime ago I stared at it till it burnt into the back of my skull. Why then, can’t I remember where I’ve seen it before? The frequencies shift and cycle, like shadows beneath the surface of a filthy pond. A flash of code breaks its way out, pushing itself upwards towards me but as I reach out to grab it, it’s gone. Sucked back beneath the dark currents. Then another, pushing against the surface tension but never quite breaking, a great open mouth desperate to speak. I can see the depths of the water, dark and thick with weeds; branches as thick as tree trunks that grasp at the feet of revelation and drag it down to the green depths.

I have seen this code before. I can hear it crying out to me.

The infernal noise of this decrepit transport doesn’t help my concentration. It sounds like it’s going to split open at any comment and cough us up into the atmosphere of Pamack Base. Like some rusted metallic balloon ready to pop, forgotten in the corner of the room. I doubt anyone would notice us if it did. The remains of both the transport and its foolish pair of passengers would be little more than a pleasant series of barely perceptible flares in the thin atmosphere of the planetoid. Only marginally brighter than the momentary blips on the sensor arrays of the passing ships.

At least I would be with Eyma.

Would she reach for me as the air is sucked out of the erupting hull? Would she leap from her chair nearby at the pilot station in one last desperate grasp for my hand? Would she wish to spend that last moment with me? We’ve only spoken a bit since the rest of the team left us last night for the auction, mostly confessions of possible feelings and confusing thoughts. Whispers of possibilities slipped from cracks in our respective shields, hanging on lips with light kisses.

I could have kissed her till the sun collapsed, till the ground beneath us was broken to stardust and wanting nothing more.

I want to reach out to her, to get another glance at her dark brown eyes, but a broken transport hanging above a dangerous pirate base is hardly the place for romantic overtures. Instead, I turn my attention back to the disruption field and its great swirling mass of meaningless data but all I can see is her eyes. So dark and deep I could sink forever.

Zaya once told me that love distracts, it fumbles the mind and blurs every choice. She’d taught me several lessons that night aboard Nestus. We had spied each other in the lounge, both of us unable to listen to Maine weep over T’Sal’s passing through the bulkheads any longer. She told me that love can only ever confuse the matter as it twists and flexes you, upending your beliefs and pushing against your limits. She had suddenly seemed so Cardassian for a moment, so focused on duty above self, so committed to the greater mission. As she swilled her Kanar I glimpsed the life she had almost led, one where her realisations of self would never have been allowed. She would have been a dutiful son of Cardassia or else a curious anomaly. She refused to be either and thus had chosen to love and eventually found herself turned from her home. I thought at the time she had been warning me away from romantic entanglements but I see now the opposite was true.

We must love, to test the boundaries. To question the limits. To see what is beyond.

Even from beyond the grave Zaya continues to teach me lessons.

My breath catches in my chest as a realisation washes over me, sucking my breath from my chest as easily as it threatens to rush from the creaking transport.

The Unimatrix. The Sphere. Exodus. 

My fingers feel like they are weighed down with neutron stars, I can barely lift them to enter a command sequence that begins to bubble up from the recesses of my mind. I had spent hours quietly working in the corner of Helios’ bridge attempting to pierce the disruption field that hid the secrets of Unimatrix Zero. I had been so close before they had fled into deep space, taking my friends with them.

As each block of code begins to crack, my mind begins racing the computer to break the algorithm open and peer inside. I settle strings of data into neat rows as the picture becomes clear, a jigsaw my memory was screaming at me to solve. The same familiar form, the same pattern of cycling frequencies, the same digital signature of pulsing green.

I complete the puzzle seconds before the lazy computer core does and as the completed sequences appear on my screen, I’m already reaching for the comm link. Eyma opens her lips to protest as I go to warn the away team but the command is already given. Outside of the ship, invisible streams of electromagnetic energy leap from the dark hull of our borrowed transport. They race faster than thought towards the nest of bio-mechanical vipers on the surface of the planet.

The algorithm twitches angrily on the screen as my code-breaking clashes against it, piercing its dark surface tension with my hard-won realisation. It stretches and strains as I push my wits against it. But true to form it, it takes the punishment and as ever, it adapts.

The comm-link opens to a cruel hiss of static.

They are deep within the disruption field now.

My loved ones are beyond my reach.

But not Eyma’s.

With a word she is already altering our course, plunging us headlong like a blazing star into the atmosphere, plummeting towards the surface. The transport groans but it must hold.

No more kisses are upon our lips, only a single terrifying word that whispers with a million voices.

“Borg.”