The USS Voyager was adrift. A catastrophic failure in the bio-neural circuitry had left them with barely functioning life support, and the ship’s dwindling power reserves made warp travel impossible. They had weeks, at best, before systems started shutting down.

  B'Elanna Torres wasn’t a hero. She wasn’t a captain or a chief engineer. She was a pragmatist. And pragmatists survived.

  Deep within Cargo Bay Two, she stared at the silent, dormant form within the incubation alcove—the Borg infant, a remnant of one of their countless encounters with the Collective. The crew had debated what to do with it for months, but with Voyager on the brink, no one had checked in on it for days.

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  She had spent hours in sickbay analyzing the Borg’s regenerative fluid—organic compounds rich with nanoprobes designed to sustain damaged drones. The composition was... compatible. Almost perfect for the bio-fuel cells B’Elanna had been desperately trying to refill.

  B'Elanna knew what this meant. It wasn’t murder. It was necessity. The Borg had taken from trillions across the galaxy. Perhaps, for once, the equation could be reversed.

  She didn’t report her findings. She didn’t ask for permission.

  With steady hands, she deactivated the stasis field and made the first incision.