Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

“Captain?”
    “You heard me.”
    “I gave you an order, Lieutenant,” the admiral barked. “Proceed to aperture—”
    “This is my bridge, Admiral,” Janeway interrupted, “and I'll have you removed if necessary. Mr. Paris, take us out!”
    * * *
    They had to hit warp speed to clear the nebula without being killed. Their victory over the two Borg cubes had been quickly slapped down by the sight of the pinwheel, the transwarp hub that so thoroughly dwarfed them, the cubes, and their place in the galaxy. If the Borg had these profound mammoths around the galaxy, then the Federation was already beaten. It was just a matter of time.
    Such was the sour attitude in the astrometrics lab as Seven of Nine described to them the replay of what they had seen and now recorded. Even the image of the hub created a gut-wrenching fear and frustration.
    The admiral hovered in the background, her arms folded tightly across her body. She was angry.
    Janeway didn't care. She would have honesty and completeness, if nothing else.
    Seven had to reduce the magnification six times before the whole hub would even let itself be seen on the large dome-screen.
    “This hub connects with thousands of transwarp conduits with endpoints in all four quadrants,” Seven explained. “It allows the Collective to deploy vessels almost anywhere in the galaxy within minutes.”
    As every heart sank—with the possible exception of the admiral's—Tuvok added, “Of all the Borg's tactical advantages, this could be the most significant.”
    “It's no wonder,” Chakotay said, “the Queen didn't want us in that nebula.”
    “So how do we destroy it?” Janeway demanded.
    She shocked them with this question, but she didn't care. So it was a
big
mission. So what? What else was this ship for?
    The admiral reacted, but Janeway paid her no attention. Whether she liked the idea or not remained a mystery.
    Seven worked her controls and changed the image to display one of the high-tech struts in close-up. “The structure is supported by a series of interspatial manifolds. If we could disable enough of them, theoretically the hub would collapse.”
    Oh, that
really
sounded too easy. Still, it also sounded possible. With the explanation came the thousand questions, primary of which was—why hadn't anybody tried it before?
    Or maybe somebody had.
    “This is a waste of time,” the admiral ground out from behind them. “The shielding for those manifolds is regulated from the central nexus, by the Queen herself. You might be able to damage one of them, maybe two, but by the time you move on to the third, she'd adapt.”
    The captain wasn't annoyed enough to ignore good information, but suggested, “There may be a way to bring them down simultaneously.”
    “From where?
Inside
the hub?
Voyager
would be crushed like a bug.”
    Chakotay got between them before Janeway responded. “What about taking the conduit back to the Alpha Quadrant, and then destroying the structure from the other side.”
    “This hub is here,” the admiral caustically chided. “There's nothing in the Alpha Quadrant but exit apurtures. While you're all standing around dreaming up fantasy tactical scenarios, the Queen is studying her scans of our armor and weapons. And she's probably got the entire Collective working on a way to counter them. Take the ship back to the nebula and go home before it's too late.”
    Before she said anything else, Janeway reached out and grasped the older woman's arm. To Chakotay and Seven, Tuvok and everything within her power, she ordered, “Find a way to destroy that hub.” To the admiral, she said, “Let's take a walk.”
    * * *
    “I want to know why you didn't tell me about this.”
    Admiral Janeway didn't react to the captain's question in any outward manner, but simply walked beside Janeway as they pointlessly emerged from the astrometrics lab and left the officers with their awesome task.
    “Because I remember how stubborn and self-righteous I used to be,” the senior officer said, “and I figured you might try to do something stupid.”
    The captain bristled. “We have an opportunity to deal a crippling blow to the Borg. It could save billions of lives!”
    “I didn't spend the last ten years looking for a way to get this crew home earlier just so you could throw it all away on some intergalactic goodwill mission.”
    Disgusted, Janeway stopped walking and faced her, faced the sickening image of a captain gone sour, a promoted