First Officer’s Log, Stardate 50581.6. We’ve been quietly advancing to the fleet rendezvous point, still several days away. No Borg pursuit after the initial break from the hub means we’ve been careful, but yellow alert has been retired for the moment. However, it means for the first time in a long time, we’ve been alone for a full week, with more ahead. Given this bubble of relative peace, I’ve been trying to catch up on administrative tasks that have been waiting. Others have been participating in the storied Starfleet tradition of long warp activities. Annira has prepared a new group holoprogram, and several other senior officers have started up hobby practice throughout the ship. It’s like a small slice of home, which is buoying morale.

The same can’t be said for our… passengers.

The T’l are furious at being confined, but there is little to do about their situation. The crew tries to work at personal projects and group activity, with the Commodore in particular making efforts to be more present amongst the crew at social events. Adams develops a proposal for tracing his wife’s whereabouts around aiding the engineers working on repairing Domino’s former shuttle. Others are participating in Annira’s (with Skrillix’s help) group holoprogram: Paxau resort, a Talaxian beachfront looking out over miles of coastal waterfalls. Federation hydroscoots were added to allow for jetting through the falls in a variety of directions. Talaxians and Mylean holo-characters wander through as tourists, staff, and ‘intriguing characters’, as Skrillix put it. Annira rolls her eyes at any questions on the matter.

The week culminates in a luau thrown by the Commodore, who puts up a version of Trill roasted protein – at least, what passes for it from the stores. But the effort is matched by the rest of the senior staff, who all contribute dishes from their particular homes. As the celebration wears on, Adams notices that Commander Sebastian is being a little more introverted than usual. And a few of the engineering team are more gregarious. A quick, surreptitious scan with his ocular implant confirms verteron buildups on all those acting strangely – the T’l have somehow sprung their containment fields, and have begun possessing members of the crew like PB did when they first met.

The crew acts quickly. Adams contacts Petra and asks her to mask their thoughts from the T’l for now – something Petra’s had to do in the past and is able to do handily. Knowing telepaths are immune to the T’l’s possession thanks to PB, Adams locks the computer’s access to only the Commodore, Adams, and Petra in tandem. A T’l-containment field is placed around the warp core to protect from the T’l simply obliterating the ship. And finally, the crew assembles in Sickbay to prepare their hunt. The EMH provides neural inhibitors that suppress telepathy (and T’l possession), and Chief Hegrom relocates to Sickbay to help via site-to-site transport. Petra and Adams begin sweeping the ship, and the Commodore is summoned to the bridge by Sebastian.

A tense moment where the possessed Sebastian and the duty officers on the bridge inquire as to the computer lockout. Tchang bluffs, leaning hard on her personal friendship with Sebastian to sell the idea that the lockout is intended as a control measure against her and her recent, quiet troubles with alcohol. Sebastian buys it and she leaves, having Chief Hegrom beam Sebastian to the brig as she reaches sickbay. Adams is then summoned to the bridge because of the series of suspicious events, and when he arrives the pretense is over. The three duty officers, led by Barnett, all pull phasers on the security chief and demand he undo the lockout. Pretending to acquiesce, Adams gets into a better position before tackling and throwing Barnett into another ensign, and using Barnett’s phaser to stun the third. Clearing the room solo, he seals off the bridge and assists the EMH in dispersing neural inhibitors throughout the ship.

The T’l’s attempt at a coup resolved for now, and only a dozen officers affected, Tchang has a serious conversation with the beings in their cargo bay about the future. Eqar, the loudest spokesbeing for the T’l, led the incursion and insist upon leaving. Many of the T’l agree to this, but eighteen (who were not involved) ask to stay on with the Odyssey, content with their containment field. PB vouches for these few.

The T’l who choose exile leave Cargo Bay 2 via the external hatch, and move to a nearby binary pulsar to create a new Hollow for themselves. Shaken by the end of the luau, the crew warps away quickly, intent on returning to the fleet.

The conference to discuss the T’l is interrupted by a new emergency. A Borg probe pierces through the gravitational eddies of the Hollow, and is beginning a search pattern. Adams and Hobbs join the ves’Targ to dispatch it, bringing along some syrillium previously used to power the Odyssey. Once close (and using the raider’s stealth circuitry), Adams and Hobbs beam aboard the probe to locate a place for their makeshift bomb. Adams struggles with memories of his time as Borg, and Hobbs is startled by a working drone and drops his phaser – but despite this, they’re able to place the syrillium explosive and beam back to the ves’Targ. As the probe explodes, Adams collapses. Plogh checks him out on the raider, confirms he is stable, and they return hastily to the Odyssey.

There, while the EMH examines Adams’ cybernetics under Plogh’s watchful eye, Adams hazily remembers. He has memories of his vacation – the frontier colony that was assimilated by the Borg. And after some time, he realizes the memories he’s seeing are his wife’s. Still assimilated by the Borg, he tries hard to learn her coordinates from the memories he sees from here before awakening and learning strange news. A Borg distress beacon activated dormant programming in Adams’ ocular implant. Somehow, he has limited, read-only access to the Collective’s will. It doesn’t seem to be dangerous, so for now, it is a unique advantage.

The crew finally convenes to discuss the news that the T’l are responsible for countless deaths in the effort to create their Hollow. Opinions vary, but the ultimate result is that the T’l’s actions are past, and they can only be judged on future acts. For now, circumstances have made strange bedfellows and their shared peril is more important than judgement now. The preparations are completed, and after a few days of waiting, the T’l gather and fly into their new home in the Odyssey’s Cargo Bay 2. Privately, PB offers the crew their assistance in temporarily increasing the fleet’s speed in a pinch.

Prepared now for the trip out of the Hollow and deeper into Borg space, the fleet organizes to slip past the Borg transit hub near the far end of the Hollow. The fleet passes through mostly without issue, but the Odyssey’s much stronger warp signature draws two Borg spheres from the transit hub. Drawing on Adams’ earlier plan with the probe, the Commodore and Ensign Barnett fake a power failure to slow and let the Borg catch up. Meanwhile Adams works with Chief Hegrom to use the cargo transporters to beam the remainder of the syrillium ore (along with an overloading phaser or two) split between the two spheres. The monumental task is competently handled by the Tellarite chief and the spheres explode mightily.

The Odyssey splits off to draw off potential pursuit, and after a long warp the ship turns toward the rendezvous with the fleet. On the way, Adams talks to the Commodore about his vision when unconscious, along with the coordinates he learned from them. Tchang confirms the station that his wife is at is only a few months away on their journey. It’s not a significant detour, so with time to plan, Adams starts poring over all the data he can find about the road ahead.

Alone for the moment, the Odyssey moves past the most recent Borg threat. They’re safe for now, but that won’t last long.

Three weeks of preparations for crossing Borg space have been completed in the Hollow. Shuttle missions are sent to collect useful resources from wrecks near the boundary of the safe zone. The Odyssey’s power systems are reverted to their previous fuel sources, now that they’ve been slowly traveling through the dense pockets of energetic particles that are scattered throughout the area. Engineering is also able to expand the ship’s sensors via adapting alien sensors. Security preps both ship and personal weapons for facing the Borg. And Selveth leads the science division in creating a way to bring the T’l with them, trying to invent a subspace suspension field that does not also place T’l into stasis of some kind or another.

The T’l’s representative Eqar has been checking in daily on progress, which has been slow. Selveth and many of the Romulan scientists have committed to the work, but they are inventing new subspace field theory to make this happen, and after three weeks of work, it is clear this is a process that may be harder to manage than initially thought.

PB is determined to assist, aiding the science team as a Guinea pig in order to attune fields to their energy signature. One morning, a test goes particularly awry – the subspace field attenuator overloads and discharges a massive amount of energy, injuring Selveth, Vulmos, and Kemman. Parker and Petra handle triage on-scene, and after emergency care, the three are deemed serious but stable.

The Commodore calls the available officers together. With all the folks read into the scientific exploration in sickbay, the team is hard-pressed to come up with a solution to their dilemma of fulfilling their end of the bargain to the T’l – until Dash reluctantly brings up previously quietly-held expertise in the sciences. He steps in, borrowing Parker as a lab tech, and with some unconventional applications of subspace tech, after a few days, Dash is able to find the missing piece to Selveth’s work and assemble a functional prototype of a field designed for the T’l to use to live aboard in Cargo Bay 2. They make prep to set up the cargo bay to take on their passengers.

Petra has been monitoring the crew and their visitors, offering support to Commander Adams and also to PB. Adams indicates that he will seek her out for help – as soon as this crisis is past. PB, however, confesses concern. After this time observing the Starfleet and Sikarian people, PB isn’t confident that the T’l are a people that they would work with – if they knew the story. Petra convinces the entity to open up, and learns that the Hollow isn’t naturally occurring. Instead, a few hundred years prior, the T’l used their ability to manipulate subspace to kill the stars of a number of inhabited systems, exterminating untold lives to create this astrophysical anomaly.

The commodore gets that information from Petra, along with reports from the shuttle salvage teams that the T’l killed the ships they visited, and the fleet is left with a troubling possibility – the lives they are working on saving may have ended far more in the past. And the fleet may not be anything more than tools to the bulk of the T’l.

Tchang calls a meeting to discuss the fleet’s next move…

The veS’Targ retreats back to the fleet, issuing a warning that several Borg ships are due to cross paths with the fleet on its current course. With the new information, the fleet alters course – and one Borg cube leaves the pack, heading their way.

Now under active pursuit, the crew drops into crisis mode. Dash and the engineering group finish the programming for early-warning scout probes, nicknamed whiskers, and launches them. Additionally, the engineering staff had begun the process of placing some of the myriad alien sensors on the ship’s sensor platforms. While the senior staff organizes a plan to evade the Borg, Petra works with the non-corporeal energy being Adams had found and offered refuge to. The entity (responding to Peebee after suggestion from Petra) explains that a nearby cluster of quantum singularities is a sanctuary for its people, the T’l. With an option to at least get clear of the Borg for the short term, the crew enacts a plan.

Approaching a singularity while the Borg are still pacing them, the Commodore takes the helm for a dangerous maneuver – the ship drops out of warp and ejects the salvaged shuttle equipped with explosives to scatter debris. Dash attempts to activate the explosives but they fail – so the backup plan is activated. Adams fires a torpedo at the salvage, detonating it and scattering the debris across the face of the singularity. And while the explosion takes off, the Odyssey warps away again, giving the impression to their pursuers that they just exploded in the accretion disc of the anomaly.

Safe for the moment, the fleet regroups inside the ‘Hollow’, as Peebee had taken to calling it. Soon after, the crew is attacked on the bridge by another of Peebee’s kind. After damaging several consoles, Peebee is beamed directly to the bridge, and the crew learns more about the situation.

The T’l’s Hollow has become the last bastion for them. They cannot travel fast enough to escape Borg space, and the implacable cybernetics have been absorbing the T’l into their ships, seemingly assimilating them. Initially, the defender is uninterested in the fleet’s plight, but as the two groups discuss their common plight, a plan is formed. The Hollow spans a few hundred light years. This gives the fleet a breather for a time in Borg space as they travel it – and at the far end, the Odyssey will have set up space aboard to ferry the last hundred or so T’l away from the Hollow, hopefully to find somewhere new to exist in peace.

Peebee is identified as the reason the Borg found the T’l, and its people are uninterested in welcoming the exile back – the situation is too tense to fully unpack this revelation, but discovering their passenger may be the reason its people are in peril leaves the crew uncertain how to proceed with Peebee for now.

The fleet has some precious time, but they remain hidden in the territory of an implacable enemy, and now are responsible for a hundred more souls besides. As they prepare to ferry the T’l, the Borg outside continue to consume life nearby.

While engineers pore over the wreckage of the salvaged alien shuttle, the computer records are downloaded for Commander Adams to review. Having heard of a psychic impression of the Borg associated with the shuttle, Adams takes personal interest in what the shuttle saw, and discovers that the shuttle had been chased by Borg ships – smaller ones than the cube that attacked the Federation at Wolf 359, only a little larger than a runabout – and tried to escape via the subspace distortions near the planet it crashed on. Adams, confident they are now either on the edge of or within Borg space, immediately meets with Tchang and Sebastian, who are preparing Sikarian officer candidates for their assignments throughout the fleet.

The meeting sets a plan in motion – a meeting with the council of captains is arranged, though the trio meet privately with Goull ahead of time. The captain of the Miton is often a contrarian, and in this situation the Starfleet commanders believe it best to head off dissension. Commander Adams reveals to the Sikarian captain that his scars come from significant personal experience with the Borg, and that he knows what he is talking about when they bring their plan of action to the council. Reluctantly, Goull agrees to cooperate.

With the morale-building ceremony of Class 100’s graduation looming, the council opts to share information, but use the new threat as a means of preparing emergency fleet procedures with the new officers – something that had been ad-hoc until now. Additionally, the Odyssey’s scientists come up with two potential options for increasing the fleet’s sensor range to keep one step ahead of Borg scouts. Using the warp capable probes in the ventral pod as sensor platforms that move with the fleet, and using some of the alien technology collected during their trip to attempt to adapt it to the ship’s already-impressive sensors. Regardless, with the fleet’s stealth its only true protection, the Commodore orders both plans investigated.

The ceremony arrives aboard the Posel, and Commander Sebastian provides a speech to the new Sikarian fleet officers. As the event turns into a party, Commodore Tchang takes aside the senior staff and passes out official promotions for Sebastian, Annira, Petra, and Dash, recognizing their efforts keeping the fleet afloat for the last two years. During this, Commander Adams watches a mote of light cross through the bulkhead and pass into Eudana. The former Sikarian leader was there supporting a protege who was joining the Marce’s crew. After confirming what he saw via sensor scan from the Odyssey, Adams informs the Commodore, who confronts Eudana. The mote, seemingly controlling Eudana and recognizing they had been spotted, departs the Sikarian and races away. Tchang takes Eudana to the Odyssey’s sickbay, while Sebastian continues to occupy the party-goers. That leaves Adams to track the seemingly intelligent mote of light. Finally cornering it within a Sikarian, they’re able to talk briefly and Adams convinces the being to leave his current host. Separate from a host, the being (made of verteron particles) is slowly dissipating. After working out a means of communication via the being’s telepathy and with the Commodore’s permission, Adams escorts the being aboard the Odyssey, and learns more about it. It was part of a community of its kind that had been attacked and absorbed by the Borg, not far away. This one, possibly the last of its kind, is running from them and came here to hide.

Adams and Selveth determine there isn’t a good method available at the moment to preserve the being outside a host, but there is time before the mote is in mortal peril. Selveth vows to find a method to preserve it, Petra is suggested as an interpreter for the being as a fellow telepath, and Adams returns to the bridge as the ves’Targ, the fleet’s forward scout, returns with news – the Borg are ahead, and heading this way.

To be continued…