The breach in the cube's flank was big enough to fly through, which told you something about whatever had done it. Lindsy had found a way in an hour ago, a ragged wound torn deep into the hull where something catastrophic had punched its way in or out, and she'd spent that hour easing the Dutchman along the underside of the cube toward it, hugging the structure so close that the hull nearly scraped, staying in the one dead angle the cube's weapons couldn't reach. Now the breach yawned in front of them, dark and jagged, the edges of it peeled back like torn metal, and past it was the inside of a Borg cube, and nobody on the bridge was in a hurry to be the first to say what they were all thinking.

"That's our way in." Lindsy studied the opening, her hands light on the helm. "It's tight, but the Reach could make it and honestly so could the Dutchman if we're careful, and I'd rather have the whole ship in cover than sitting exposed on the outside waiting for that thing to remember it has weapons. But I'm not flying blind into the inside of a Borg cube on a maybe. Mei-Lin, I need to know what's on the other side of that hole before I put us through it."

"Working on it." Mei-Lin had her sensors pushed as far into the breach as they'd go, which was not as far as she wanted. "The interference in there is ugly, all that dead structure and the pockets that are still live are throwing my returns back at me scrambled. But I'm reading a corridor past the breach, big one, the kind of internal channel these things use to move drones and material around. It's mostly dark. Mostly. There are sections deeper in still drawing power, and I can't tell you exactly where until we're inside and I've got line of sight." She looked up. "It's wide enough for us. It's not straight, though. It bends and branches. If we go in, we go in slow, and we go in behind Cormus."

Zedd nodded at that. It was the sensible order and he'd already half-decided on it anyway. "Cormus. Take the Reach in first. You're smaller, you're more maneuverable, and if something's waiting in there I'd rather it find you than find all of us at once." A beat. "No offense."

"Plenty taken, Cap. I'll add it to the list." But Cormus was already up out of his seat and pulling his gloves on, the grin in his voice not quite reaching the tightness around his eyes, because he'd flown into a lot of bad places and even he knew this was a different kind of bad. "For what it's worth, this is exactly the sort of thing the Reach was built for. Tight spaces, no room for error, somewhere nobody sane wants to go. She'll love it. I'll hate it. We'll manage."

The Reach dropped out of the shuttlebay a few minutes later and slid ahead of them, small and dark against the torn opening, running lights doused, and then it was through, vanishing into the black of the breach, and for a moment there was nothing on the bridge but the sound of everyone waiting.

Cormus's voice came back over the comm a beat later, lower than usual, the voice of a man talking quietly in a place he didn't want to be overheard in even though nothing living was supposed to be listening. "Alright. I'm through the breach and into the corridor. It's big in here, bigger than the scans made it look, and it's dead quiet. Lights are out, most of it. There's power somewhere deep, I can see it glowing green way down at the far bends, but where I am it's dark and it's cold and nothing's moving." A pause, the hum of the Reach's engines the only sound. "Corridor runs straight for about two hundred meters then it forks. Left branch is darker, colder, reads completely dead on my board. Right branch has power in it further down, so we don't want that one. I'm taking the left. If I don't come back you'll know I picked wrong."

He went quiet for a while, working deeper in, and Mei-Lin tracked the single point of his signal crawling into the dark. "Signal's degrading," she murmured, already reaching for the fix. "Boosting the relay through his transponder now, using the Reach as a repeater so we hold the line around the bends. There, that's better, we've got him." On the display the Reach's light steadied, deep inside the cube now, threading the dead left fork.

"Okay." Cormus again, and something in his voice had eased a fraction. "Left fork opens up into a chamber, big one, some kind of junction where a few of these corridors all come together. It's dead. Really dead, no power, no heat, no movement, and it's wide enough for the Dutchman with room to spare. There's a hull breach in the far wall of it too, so if this whole thing goes sideways there's a second way out. Cap, this is your spot. It's deep enough to be in cover, dead enough to be safe, and it's got two exits. I'm holding here. Bring her in slow, follow my exact line, and I'll talk Lindsy through the fork."