"Good work, Cormus." Zedd let out a slow breath and turned to the helm. "Lindsy, take us in. His line, exactly."

"His line, exactly, no improvising." Lindsy eased the Dutchman forward and the torn edges of the breach slid past the viewport, and then the dark of the interior swallowed the ship whole, the corridor closing around them, the hull of a Borg cube pressing in on every side. She flew it the way Cormus had flown it, slow and precise, taking the left fork where the right one glowed its distant warning green, and after several long careful minutes the corridor opened out into the dead junction chamber and she brought the Dutchman to a slow stop in the middle of it, the Reach hanging in the dark nearby.

"Station-keeping, all stop." She sat back a fraction, though her hands stayed on the helm. "We're in. Dead center of the chamber, both exits covered, the breach in the far wall's right where Cormus said. This is about as good as it gets inside that thing. I can hold us here indefinitely, and if we need to leave in a hurry I've got two ways to do it." She finally allowed herself half a breath of something that wasn't tension. "Nicely flown, Cormus. I owe you the easy part next time."

Zedd stood in the center of his bridge, in the belly of a dead god, and looked at the dark chamber around his ship through the viewport, and knew the flying was the part they'd just made look easy compared to what came next. "Mei-Lin, lock this position into the computer and keep those live sections mapped, anything deep in there so much as flickers toward us, I want to know before it finishes the thought. Lindsy, hold us dead steady and keep the Reach warm, if we have to run I want to be moving the same second I give the word." He turned from the viewport toward the rest of the bridge, toward the corridor below that led down to the airlock and the team already gathering there. "That's it. We're as deep as we're going to get with the ship. The rest of the way in is on foot."

He tapped his combadge. "Sykes to Ragnar. We've reached holding position inside the cube and we're stable. Get to the airlock and finish gearing up, weapons, environmental suits, all of it, I want everyone ready to board within the ten minutes. Nobody goes anywhere alone in that thing." He released the channel and looked once more at the wall of dead Borg structure beyond the viewport, the way in waiting somewhere out there in the dark.

"Let's go see what somebody else thought wasn't worth stopping for."