Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

you who underestimated
us.”
    Like bullets from a machine gun, transphasic torpedoes punched through the Borg hardware and kept delivering destruction on a long powerful trajectory. Violence erupted through the Queen's consoles. Sparks rained around them from destructive collapse high in the Unicomplex. The cry of a billion confused Borg blew through their minds like wind.
    The transwarp hub, in all its gargantuan lordliness, began to collapse on itself as if dragged into a huge gravity well.
    Near the admiral, the Queen's mechanical body jolted and convulsed in weird microcosmic empathy with her planet-sized counterparts. Her shoulder sparked. Like a piece of a store-bought plastic doll, her arm blew off and fell to the floor, leaving nothing but a nasty tendril dangling from the socket that once had fed her circuitry.
    She didn't react to her arm's little dance, but instead the Queen tilted her head and brought in a floating screen with a picture of a Borg sphere.
    “Sphere six three four, they can still hear my thoughts.”
    She focused on the image, then closed her eyes and strained to send a telepathic command.
    The admiral, nearly helpess in her half-Borg state, watched with a churning delight at the Queen's trouble. A disease, a plague, a virus—something so basic that it couldn't be out-thought.
    Lovely.
    Around them the entire complex began to shudder and spark, beautiful in its horror of destruction. Some things really were gorgeous as they blew themselves to molecules . . . suns, clouds, storms, Borg cubes . . .
    Admiral Janeway indulged in her final moments by completely enjoying her long-planned revenge on the Borg, their “unbeatable” Queen, and their plans to assimilate the galaxy like a disease. Now they had the disease.
    A shot of pain racked the Queen's body again and in an almost burlesque sideshow way one of her legs fell off. She grabbed a console to steady herself and glared at the admiral.
    “Captain Janeway is about to die,” she threatened. “If she has no future . . . you'll never exist . . . and nothing you've done here today will happen.”
    But there was pleasure in possibility. The admiral noted that the Queen's voice was losing its aural stability. As explosions tore through the complex around them, the Queen's body pulled itself to pieces like the finishing sequence of some kind of Frankenstein story.
    In the admiral's assimilated mind, still clinging by virtue of the virus to a tincture of humanity, she enjoyed the invigorating sight of Borg cubes, Borg spheres, and the transwarp hub being chewed by crawling brushfire all through the systems. Drones scrambled everywhere, helpless, in their brainless effort to continue doing their jobs. They didn't know they were about to die. Insects stumbling everywhere, still tending the nest while the grass burned around them. How ironic!
    There were disadvantages to linking every being, every circuit and brain cell, every eye and voice being linked inextricably. To the glories of the swarm would come a unified death. Admiral Janeway was glad to share their end with them. Rather than waste away in an unhappy future, she would have a hero's finish while doing heroic things. Her crew would live now, and the Borg would suffer damage possibly irreparable.
    Their ambitious Queen was dissolving before her eyes. The Collective was being consumed in a giant meltdown.
    And I did it. I always knew I would.
    * * *
    “Full power. Continue firing. Take out as much as you can! Concentrate on the connective junctions! Seven, show them their targets!”
    “I'm having trouble holding course,” Paris warned as the ship bucked to starboard and whined in an attempt to compensate. “Permission to transfer power to specified thrusters.”
    “Do what you have to,” Janeway said. “Don't wait for orders. Keep us on a heading to the Alpha Quadrant.”
    “That's my point—it keeps changing!”
    “Seven, help him! Identify and shut down the systems that are confusing the helm.”
    “Aye, Captain.”
    “Aft armor is down to six percent,” Tuvok called.
    Kim spoke at almost the same time. “Hull breaches on decks seven through twelve!”
    “Evacuate those decks. Shut down all unnecessary systems. Tell the crew to batten down and hang on!”
    Paris was sweating by the pint. “I can't stay ahead of them, Captain!”
    The ship endured a hard bang.
    “The armor is failing,” Tuvok reported.
    Chakotay grabbed the rail and called to Seven, “Where's the