Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

us out of here!”
    But Paris had anticipated the obvious and was already turning the starship in a stomach-bending loop downward and under the cube, around and toward the outside of the nebula. Within the first second the nebula gases swarmed in to cut the two vessels off from each other.
    On the sensor graphics, the Borg cube's trajectory ran in nearly a straight line, a completely different angle from the vector
Voyager
had just taken.
    “Full impulse!”
    Paris's voice was hoarse. “Impulse two-thirds . . . full impulse.”
    Every heart pounded. Their thud racked Janeway's mind. She gritted her teeth and felt her cold hands on the rail. Five seconds . . . ten . . . the nebula parted and belched them out.
    “Aft viewers,” Chakotay anticipated, and brought up several angles of the nebula as they ran away from it.
    “Tom, vector one-eight.”
    “One-eight . . .”
    The ship turned upward and to port. He knew what she was after—to completely change course again in a random direction so their trail would be harder to trace. Every ship had emissions, and those might prove a problem. She might have to shut the impulse drive down and let the ship drift to create a cold trail. Also dangerous . . . momentum could be hard to build, and she might need it.
    “Are they in pursuit?” she asked, breathless. “Did they see us?”
    For several seconds, no one answered. If there were any hints on any dynoscanner, it could pop up almost anywhere. For such big beasts, the Borg cubes could be shockingly stealthy.
    Tuvok was the first to dare a conclusion. “There's no evidence that the cube detected us.”
    No evidence. That meant nothing at all. Just because no evidence was found didn't mean there weren't reams of it tucked under covers.
    “Where is it now?” Chakotay asked.
    Janeway touched the nearest comm. “Astrotelemetrics, have you got a location on the Borg cube? Seven?”
    “Yes, Captain, I triangulated on it as it passed. It's now almost three light-years away.”
    “How could they have not seen us?” Paris asked. “We came within ten meters of their hull!”
    “The Borg wouldn't knowingly risk a collision,” Tuvok told him. “The radiation must have interfered with their sensors as well as ours.”
    Harry Kim turned to Janeway. “If they can't detect us, we should go back!”
    “I wouldn't recommend that,”
Seven said from belowdecks.
“My analysis of the tritanium signatures suggests there were at least forty-seven Borg vessels in the nebula.”
    “We can't just give up on those wormholes!”
    “Oh, yes, we can,” Janeway inflicted before this went too far in the wrong direction.
    “What if we tried to modify the—”
    She raised a hand. “Sorry, Mr. Kim. You may be the captain someday. But not today.”
    They didn't know what she meant. She felt the scouring gaze of every crewman. They wanted to go home, and they wanted to run away. The fear of Borg assimilation had become very real and immediate for
Voyager'
s crew. Visceral reactions told them to run for their lives.
    But run where?
    Then, there was the other side of the coin. A herd of angry bulls lay between them and a chance to get home before they were all too old to care. They wanted to go in and take their chances.
    Why couldn't they just have a stroke of luck without the baggage?
    Forty-seven Borg cubes . . . forty-seven . . .
    * * *
    “How're you feeling?” Tom Paris escorted his unhappy wife from sickbay toward their quarters before boing back on duty.
    “I feel put upon, strangled, and insulted.”
    “Come on! Who insulted you, B'Elanna? You haven't talked to anybody but me and the Doctor—”
    “The captain,” she grumbled. “Confining me to sickbay during red alert. Me! Sickbay! I'm the chief engineer!”
    “Not this week, you're not.”
    “Why isn't this baby born? What takes so long? She's ready, I'm ready—we should just use the transporter.”
    Rather than argue with her, he cleared the door of their quarters so she could waddle right inside without pausing. She hated to pause. The momentum was hard to get going again.
    She went straight to the only chair in which she was comfortable these days. He provided leverage, and soon she was seated, looking like a pressure cooker about to explode.
    He smiled, but ruefully. There wasn't exactly joy in his anticipation, though he found some amusement in her. He flopped down on the edge of the bed and stared at their four feet generally mixed up down