Star Trek: Voyager: Endgame

those were only the ones in the solar system. Within an hour there would be thirty more, Barclay guessed, rushing here at high warp. They would either be battling Borg or be the cleanup crew.
    On the big screen the aperture glowed like the mouth of hell itself. Between the base and the aperture, eighteen Starfleet ships of various configuration converged and maneuvered into formation. Barclay shivered down a sense of the impending— that was a lot of firepower concentrated on one little area, but would it be enough?
    “Open a channel,” Admiral Paris ordered.
    Barclay almost forgot the admiral was talking to him. He snapped out of his fascination with the screen's alarming tale and pounded the comm panel, then nodded to the admiral.
    “This is Admiral Paris. Use all necessary force. I repeat—all necessary force.”
    One by one acknowledgments shot through the system from each of the Starfleet ships. They were still jockeying for position. It had to be right, or they could accidently graze each other. Was it right? Were they in a good position? Or would accidents happen?
    Barclay's heart pounded in his ears. His eyes were nearly blinded by the brightness of the opening aperture, so much that when he looked down at his controls he couldn't read them. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and fought to see. With one hand he shielded the controls until the readings began to appear in the cloud before him.
    “Sir, there's a vessel coming through!”
    “Identify!”
    “Borg signature!”
    “This is Admiral Paris. All ships confirm visual of Borg infiltration. Target and open fire!”
    Smart, Barclay noticed. Even if the equipment said Borg, the admiral and all those captains wanted to be sure of what they were shooting at.
    Barclay forgot about his console and looked up into the viewscreen. The bright light of the aperture framed a corona around a dark shadowy ball, as if a solar eclipse had come right up to give Earth a kiss. An instant later and the sphere began to define itself, showing hard edges and square shadows, rectangular depressions and mechanicals formations and portals.
    A Borg sphere! Visual confirmation!
    The Starfleet ships opened fire in a bright ballet. The sphere's shields flashed, creating a ghostly blue bubble around the sphere as if the ball were inside blown glass.
    “Phaser fire is not breaching their shields, sir,” Barclay responded. “We can't fight them with conventional weapons!”
    “We can sure as hell try. All ships, reconfigure and continue firing. Deploy photon torpedoes, tandem salvos.”
    The admiral's voice got steadier as the situation grew more dire. That was the sign of a leader!
    Barclay looked at the admiral, just to record this moment in his mind.
    When he looked back to his controls and the viewscreen, he pointed at the aperture behind the flashing Borg sphere and the ships firing wildly upon it. “Admiral, another formation! Another ship!”
    More Borg!
    They couldn't fight
more
Borg. The other Starfleet ships would never get here in time. This was a full-fledged invasion from the Delta Quadrant!
    Barclay almost swallowed his whole head. Good thing he wasn't giving the orders, because he could barely speak.
    “Federation-wide Mayday,” Admiral Paris croaked. “Broadcast emergency alert to every planet. All planetary defenses should prepare for aggressive—”
    “Sir!” Barclay pointed at the screen.
    A streaking body emerged from within the aperture, but not a ship—a single thin line of propulsive trail. The streak lit into the sphere and drilled deep.
    Barclay wanted to glance at the admiral, to measure the other man's expression and see what he should be thinking, but he couldn't pull his eyes away. They didn't know what they were seeing. The Starfleet armada hadn't had that effect—even if their phasers could have produced such destruction, they weren't firing from inside the aperture.
    From far within the bowels of the sphere, an explosion began. The whole sphere engaged in a great burp from inside, ejecting plumes of orange plasma and superheated gas. The sphere's hardware skin became a sheath housing a fireball. A moment later, that fireball blew outward.
    All the other admirals began to cluster behind Admiral Paris and Barclay. For this moment they were only confused spectators of a monumental performance, the utter wrecking of a Borg sphere. They couldn't decide how to act or which orders to give until they had some idea of what they were seeing.