Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

role here. “We're not here to engage them. Let's have full impulse speed on our heading. Ignore the cubes.”
    Easy to say, and in fact critical now as two more cubes were born from the fumes of the inner nebula to join in pursuit.
Voyager
rolled past them and engaged in a race to the death.
    “Tuvok?”
    “Integrity holding at ninety percent.”
    She gripped her armrests. “Maintain course!”
    The shaking suddenly stopped, replaced by giant green scanning beams washing over the ship's hull.
    The admiral checked a console and nodded as if to herself. “They're looking for ways to adapt,” she said. Clearly she expected this.
    Janeway cast her a glance and started to speak, but her intentions were swallowed as the Borg cubes all fired at once and the ship shook violently.
    “They're firing simultaneously!” Chakotay called over the noise. “Focusing on a single section!”
    An alarm went off on Tuvok's station. “Port armor integrity down to fifty percent!” he called. “Forty percent!”
    The whine was deafening.
    “Mr. Paris, attack pattern alpha-one!” Janeway ordered. “Target lead cub and fire transphasic torpedoes.”
    They heard the armor split apart, exposing a launch mechanism. If only it would work! Untested, unproven—
    The nebula lit up. Torpedoes blew free of their housings and collided with the first Borg cube. Janeway expected something a little better than the usual
poof
of smoke and sparks against the cube's outer mechanicals. She got much more.
    An explosion of a level met only by the collisions of spatial bodies rocked through the nebula, washing
Voyager
up on her nacelles and blowing the other two cubes back the way they'd come.
    Bright white clouds edged with neon green made an enormous gouted fireball behind the ship, then another, and another.
    The cube had exploded!
    Exploded!
    Well, damn—the admiral was a nice little old lady after all!
    If only they could see the look on the Borg Queen's face right now! A blown-up cube!
    Janeway kept her head. “Target the second cube.”
    The second hit was as effective as the first. The next cube broke through the fireball of the first, only to be struck corner-on with the starship's second salvo.
    Possibly because of proximity, the second explosion was more ghastly and glorious than the first.
    “The third cube is retreating!” Harry Kim shouted, overcome with whatever he was feeling.
    Disbelief, probably. Such untempered joy was rarely the profit of
Voyager'
s contacts with the Borg or anyone else. There were always costs.
    At this moment, though, everything went their way and they were soaring!
    “Distance to the center?” Chakotay asked.
    “Less than one hundred thousand kilometers,” Seven answered instantly.
    On her last word the ship blew out of the gassy wall of the nebula into a clear center, a huge area of empty space fenced off all around by more thousands of cubic kilometers of poisoned yellow vapor.
    Voyager
became tiny again. Not because of the clearing or the vapor, but because of the structure turning before her. Before them in space hung a Borg colossus, a pinwheel of Olympian proportions spreading its extensions out, out, out beyond the range of the sensors to bring to the screen. Like some elephantine toy made of a billions pieces, the pinwheel might as well have been a display of fireworks gone solid and with a crust of circuitry bolted on every inch. At the end of each conduit was a glowing transwarp aperture held open by huge struts.
    No one had ever before seen such a gargantuan structure—or such was the bet Captain Janeway made with herself, despite the presence of her future self, who clearly was not so surprised. Yet even the admiral stared with rekindled awe.
    “What the hell is it?” Janeway demanded in a warning tone.
    “Mr. Paris,” the admiral said instead, “alter course to enter the aperture at coordinates three-four-six by four-two!”
    “Belay that!” the captain snapped. “I asked you a question! What
is
it?”
    “The road home.”
    “It's more than that,” Seven broke in. “It's a transwarp hub.”
    Janeway's memory awakened with a jolt. “You told me once there were only six of them in the galaxy—”
    “That's correct,” Seven responded.
    The captain swung to the admiral. “You knew this was here, but you didn't tell me! Why?”
    “I'll answer all your questions once we're back in the Alpha Quadrant.”
    “Take us out of this nebula!”
    Paris turned to them both.