The Borg cube entered fluidic space and soon ran across a flight of species 8472. The cube activated its new weapon. Polarons and tachyons intersected, creating a warp in space time where the twin beams intersected. The gravitic distortions ripped through the smaller ships as if they were little more solid than the space surrounding them. The weapons test was a success. The cube fired on the command vessel. Its reactor exploded. Shockwaves of gravitic energy tore through the hull of the Borg vessel as its structure crumbled in the wake of the space-time anomaly.

A drone adapted, adjusting shields, healing, blocking heat, kinetic energy, and friction damage. An arm and a leg were wrenched from the drone's body before it crashed hard into the surface of a planet and shut down for repairs.

When the drone woke up, it found it could not contact the collective, despite its subspace transceiver operating at optimal efficiency. Some of the metal from the wreckage that had fallen with it had been converted into new parts to replace that which had been lost. While its body was in optimal condition, it was not operating at peak efficiency. It began gathering wreckage and injecting it with nanoprobes, forming an alcove to regenerate itself.

When its regeneration cycle was complete, it still could not connect to the collective. It posited that a dimensional or temporal anomaly had occurred. It initiated directive zero one and began the search for a new queen. It could detect life signs a mere few hours away. It began construction on a short range site to site transporter, and a maturation pod, using up the last of the materials left over from the crash. Once transport later and the drone was near what appeared to be a primitive mining settlement. It waited until an adolescent girl wandered off on her own then quickly injected her with nanoprobes before the two were both transported back to its encampment.

Jala still felt odd. It had only been a few weeks since her prata ceremony and she could feel her symbiote squirming in its pouch. She had been told that when she mastered kelno'reem she would feel more comfortable with the sensation of the prim'ta. She could not imagine ever getting used to the sensation. But then the age of prata came with a lot of uncomfortable sensations. The older girls had suggested that in a year or two when she is taken by her own strong warrior, she would be more concerned about having a different snake in her belly. Such jests were not appreciated. Sometimes she wished she was one of Bastet's jaffa. At least those females were respectable. She heard the sound of armored boots. One of the men wanting her to return to the village where it was safe, no doubt. She was barely a few paces beyond the tree line. She turned to give her elder a piece of her mind about his over protectiveness, only to see a metal infused monstrosity. Before she could scream, its arm reached out and the last thing she felt was two pricks on her neck before she lost consciousness.

Murder, torture, science, war, slavery, deceit, ambition, conquest, rape, theft, domination. Jala and the prim'ta were fused together. Nanoprobes added the genetic memory of the goa'uld to the jaffa host along with millennia of other improvements to strengthen her mind and make her a more suitable leader.

While the queen was maturing, the drone was preparing for her awakening. It had used the transporter as a makeshift mining device, removing and separating minerals from the earth that would then be used to construct additional equipment that the queen might require.

When Queen Jala awoke from incubation. She set the first priority to increasing numbers. There were too few drones to risk any on an assault, despite knowing goa'uld weapons capabilities. The would have liked to disperse them aerially as a mist, but the nanoprobes had too much mass to mist properly. They needed to be injected. An insect-shaped flying nanoprobe dispenser was the solution the collective came up with to solve the stealth assimilation issue. She added nanoprobe-based ranged weapons to the design queue with a medium priority. There was no reason that the Borg should risk becoming damaged by entering melee range with an unknown – there was a difference between superiority and stupidity after all.

The plan went off without a hitch. Within a few meters of every person in the settlement, a small group of metallic insects beamed in and buzzed to their quarry. A few moments later, every person, including the goa'uld overseer of the planet collapsed only to rise again a few hours later. The process would have taken only a few minutes, but Jala currently lacked the infrastructure for maturation pods, cybernetics, and surgical enhancements.

Jala was very pleased with the coup. The overseer had gathered jaffa from several different goa'uld, thus the genetic memories of several different lines were available to the collective. It was unfortunate that a connection to Unimatrix One could not be formed. While her first drone had carried a great deal of useful knowledge and technology, it did not compare to what was available in the vast stores of the collective.

There were, however some drawbacks to the plan. With only a single maturation chamber available and limited resources, it took several days to convert all the people into drones, even using only minimal alterations. Completed drones would immediately be sent out to assimilate technology and materials to speed up the process.

The Goa'uld primarily used naquadah based fusion and plasma generation technologies. As they were primarily scavengers, they were not the most advanced forms the technology could take. Even with such a small amount of drones, such simple technology was easily improved upon by an advanced race like the collective. By enriching the naquadah in various ways they were able to maximize its use as a superconductor or as fuel for a fusion reactor, increasing its power by factors of over four thousand. This was noticeable in weapon design where the primitive plasma weapon designs were altered with a magnetic phase resonance to increase projectile cohesion, reducing power loss by nearly one hundred percent within the weapon's effective range. This made the projectiles appear more like tightly focused beams rather than comets spilling their energy all over the place. Had they made a staff weapon with this technology, it would have been enough to be a serious threat to a ha'tak. The Borg, however, merely saw it as a useful piece of technology for their library, using only the advanced fusion generators due to the abundance of the mineral on the planet.

One piece of technology greatly interested the collective. It was a wormhole generation device. It was obviously created by another much more advanced civilization. The device was genetically locked to its original creators, but that did not matter to the Borg. The device was merely completely assimilated and rebuilt with Borg upgrades, such as assimilating anything that passes through that is not already Borg. The crystal technology that it was based on was completely different from anything that the Borg had ever seen. Queen Jala hoped to find this civilization and assimilate them. They would make an excellent addition to the collective.

It took six months before Jala was satisfied that their foothold in the galaxy was secure. The entire planet had been searched, and a planetary shield erected. Defense satellites had been launched and orbital cannons built. Several massive supercomputers, scanners and science labs had been set up across the planet. Most importantly, it had been confirmed that beaming, when done correctly, worked both ways through the wormhole generator even if matter could only pass in one direction. There were plenty of wrong ways to beam through a wormhole. The wormhole generator had been queried for paired addresses and a list had been retrieved. She had determined that it was best to begin at the edges of the galaxy and work towards the core to prevent any civilizations escaping that may wish to avoid assimilation.

The first few worlds she connected to were actually empty of anything of immediate obvious significance. A single drone was left on these worlds to first assimilate the gate, then the rest of the world. The first world of interest was another mining world of a minor goa'uld scientist.

Very little of this goa'uld's knowledge was immediately useful, but he was important enough to his superior to own his own al'kesh. This provided an example of both cloaking and hyperdrive technology that were rapidly improved upon. It was very much similar to transwarp theory, though slower since they had obviously never found the warp half of the equation. Of course all of this was made obsolete, or at best a secondary option, by the wormhole generator. The theory behind it was incredibly difficult and as of yet incomplete. It was far in advance of anything the Goa'uld had and no similar technology schematics had survived the crash.

There was one other thing of interest found in the al'kesh, the ring transporter. This again was not goa'uld tech. They had managed to copy it exactly but had never understood how it worked. It was an ingenious piece of technology. It was a side-evolution of a transporter, sacrificing flexibility for reliability. As long as the target had an active ring pad, the rings could transport through many things that would cause transporters to fail because the rings maintained the integrity of the transport. This technology could be adapted as a small implant in drones, allowing them to teleport to any other drone, but blocking all others from teleporting when shields were erected. The technology was immediately made high priority along with the wormhole drive.

It only took two months to completely assimilate their second world. Jala continued her assimilation of the galaxy. It had been surprisingly easy, or perhaps she had been excessively cautious, making it easy. She could now target multiple worlds at the same time. Two were empty of life. One had a pre-spaceflight non-humanoid civilization, and the next two were former goa'uld worlds that had been stripped bare of the naquadah that the parasites cared about. All of these fell without resistance or any real gains beyond territory.

The first real hint of resistance came from a goa'uld world that had a ha'tak in orbit. The goa'uld, even though he was a minor one who was barely lucky enough to own the pyramid shaped vessel, felt that it was better to deny Jala his resources than to allow them to be taken. While the plasma attacks themselves were not directly effective, personal shields just did not have enough power to resist the thermic and kinetic energies of an orbital bombardment. The ha'tak was eventually captured, but the gains from that planet were sixty percent at best. It was not an acceptable attrition rate when earlier planets achieved assimilation rates above the ninety-eighth percentile.

This failure led Jala to seek a better way to assault planets through the gate, resulting in the creation of assimilation pods. They contained a massive power source, sensory package, teleporters and shields capable of defending a large city from bombardment. Along with these were the portable surface to orbit cannons which fired a small shield generator and nanite capsule to disable ships and begin assimilation. These two items were be fabricated ahead of time and made in large enough quantities to cover an entire planet.

At this point, Jala also determined that their numbers had increased to a point where consolidation of assets was possible. Incubation tanks were constructed in the millions. The ova of every female was harvested and sperm from the males with the best attributes of compatible species were distributed. The incubation tanks cut down the maturation time from nine months to a mere fourteen days. After birthing, they would be injected with nanoprobes which would begin installing some of the most basic implants as they were moved to maturation chambers for six weeks. Once puberty was complete, they would have their reproductive material extracted before completing the assimilation process. Within six months, the entirety of the Borg controlled space was filled with the minimum complement of drones and ship production had commenced.

The Borg began conquering the goa'uld and primitive worlds like a tide until they came across an interesting world. From the memories of the goa'uld they knew it was one of the asgard protected planets. That did not protect them. The asgard technology was on par with Borg technology. There were a few differences in the pieces found on the planet due to the differing lines of development, meaning they would be a worthy addition to the Borg.

A day after conquering the protected planet, a drone was beamed into a high level containment field. Based on the sensors built into the drone, the beaming technology was closer to the ancient rings than Borg beaming. A small gray alien muttered as it scanned the drone. It did not get a chance to even voice its shock as two dozen drones used their brother as a target to ring into the ship and immediately injected the little gray alien with nanoprobes before beginning to assimilate his ship.

The Asgard was a treasure trove of information. Their bodies had been optimized through genetic engineering and selective breeding for brain capacity as opposed to physical durability. Assimilating some of the Asgard brain structures would increase the intelligence of future drones to almost double their current capacity, decreasing development time exponentially. There were many errors in their genome due to their act of cloning without preserving the original source, but those were easy enough to fix by splicing in DNA from other species.

Their technology was incredible, having followed a completely different path than the Borg. Examination of their pulsed plasma weapons greatly increased the efficiency of their own particle beams. While their beams were more efficient in terms of projectile energy loss, the Asgard beams required much less energy to power beams of similar output. They had also mastered using beaming technology for construction in a way no other race had. Federation replicators might as well have been hammers in comparison. Their shields even worked on a completely different principle than any that the Borg had ever witnessed. While they were not nearly as adaptable as Borg style shielding, or even compatible with it, they made up for the disparity with sheer power. It was immediately decided to add this type of shield as a secondary layer after the traditional Borg shields to give the shields time to adapt to whatever had gotten past them. Surprisingly, Borg shields would have served the Asgard well as they would easily protect against the weapons the Replicators used. These Replicators and the other advanced races such as Alterans, Furlings and Nox were noted as high priority assimilation targets. The knowledge of ascension, however was a critical piece of information. An entire planet as assigned to investigate ways to prevent the interference of ascended beings. Jala had no desire to have the Borg ascend as that would have destroyed the collective. Without an ascended to study, there was no way to be sure that any solutions they devised would work against ascended beings. Their current best guess based on the theoretical knowledge of ascended being being formed of pure energy was using a deflector pulse at an inverted frequency to erase them from existence.

With each planet assimilated, the speed of the Borg's expansion increased until they completely surrounded the Stargate network. Unfortunately, Jala knew that this rate of expansion was unsustainable. While there were thousands of gates around the perimeter of the galaxy, there were millions of planets without a gate since gates seemed to almost always be placed on planets conducive to life. This meant that time was needed to mine, refine and construct so that these systems could be accessed, assessed, assimilated and defended. This process took nearly thirty years to complete, and it would be close to fifty more before those systems without habitable worlds had one terraformed. It would have taken hundreds if not for the time dilation technology they had created from information in the Asgard's computer data.

The Borg began working their way inward, harvesting the knowledge of each world they assimilated. They occasionally found worlds that once held the Gate Builders, or Alterans. These planets usually left behind pieces of technology were a treasure trove of information, some even beyond the current understanding of the Borg. Then, they hit the jackpot. They found a world with an Alteran repository of knowledge. While no borg could use the interface, it did not stop them from assimilating the entire data core. Fifty-five million years of knowledge, designs and history in a convenient package for the Borg to integrate.

This was also the world where the Ascended decided to intervene. Thousands of ships were destroyed in an instant, but it gave the Borg a crucial piece of information, the energy frequency of the ascended. Moments later, the ships in every Borg territory unleashed a pulse that covered half the galaxy in a wave that eradicated the majority of ascended in that galaxy. Unleashing this pulse became a standard action every time a new system was entered. Furthermore, specialized sensors were created and installed in every Borg territory that would detect anything using a similar energy signature. Anubis, near the edge of Borg territory, who lived in exile hiding from his fellow Goa'uld, was one of the casualties of this action, and within months, his former territory became part of the Borg.

The ascended were concerned. They had broken their vows of non-interference and had gone from thousands to hundreds. They considered requesting help from their brethren in the Pegasus galaxy, but the Borg already had their technology and could deal with anything the Pegasus Galaxy could send. They decided that they would need to do something unthinkable and become what they hated most. A powerful signal traversed the universe, releasing its data in a galaxy the ancients had long ago left. Upon receiving the signal, preparations were begun so that the Milky Way would soon know that, hallowed are the Ori!

The Goa'uld were no more, their entire territory swallowed by the Borg expansion. The ancient repository was fully assimilated and Borg technology advanced. A lot of the Borg's research was now invested in phase shifting, detecting those out of phase, and dealing with threats out of phase with their primary reality such as the Reetou.

This was especially helpful when they came to the home world of the Nox as it prevented the most powerful of their abilities from hiding them. Even so, it still took almost a year to hunt down all the Nox, even if no casualties were suffered. They would constantly hide by going invisible, or phase shifting, or camouflaging, or even burrowing below dense elements that scattered sensors. When they were close to being caught, they would teleport a short distance away and the chase would continue.

The Nox technology was amazingly primitive in some ways, but biologically, they made the Asgard seem like cavemen in comparison. It would take years to comprehend the Nox genome fully and gain full knowledge of the limits of their abilities. In some ways it was similar to the psychic abilities found in the Borg's native universe, but its effects were much more potent, if shorter ranged. Unfortunately, the same abilities that made them incapable of being assimilated, much like their enemies in fluidic space. Even their most desirable technology was based on the advanced energy manipulation their body allowed, making it unusable by the Borg, forcing them to spend an inordinate amount of time reverse engineering what they found and attempting to find alternative means to produce the anticipated effects.

The appearance of the Ori troops was sudden and completely unexpected. Tens of thousands of ships appeared out of nowhere. Each ship had a captain that was physiologically advanced to the very brink of ascension. Each captain had one thousand priors as subordinates that could channel the power of the Ori to create miracles. Each prior had ten thousand men armed with extremely advanced weapons, armor and personal shielding along with a self destruct function that would turn them into a bomb if they were assimilated.

The ships were powered by four zero point energy capacitors that were exponentially more powerful than the potentia used by the ancients as well as a zero point energy generator that kept the capacitors at full charge at the cost of generating reality destroying strange matter that was used as fuel for their weapons.

The ships had three primary cannons that could individually target ships with a particle beam infused with strange matter capable of wiping out a Borg cube in a single attack. They also had hundreds of particle cannons for point defense and anti-fighter capability. Their shields made the Asgard shields seem like they were made of tissue paper.

The Borg, while not helpless, were not technologically as superior as they were used to, and the self destruct functions prevented assimilation. When they did capture a ship, there was rarely more than a few hull fragments remaining. Because the Ori were merely transmitting their power to their agents, even the Borg's anti-ascended technique was ineffective. Only their numbers and rapid building speed enabled them to hold their own against the forces of the Ori. They had even been pushed out of thousands of systems.

Jala focused all of the might of the Borg on attempting to find a solution to this new enemy. She went so far as to create sub commanders who would gain a small amount of individuality in order to supervise various projects. Artificial intelligences and Free borg minds were pitted against each other in simulated war games. Thousands of planets did nothing other than think of potential ways of dealing with the Ori threat. To make matters worse, the Ori forces had recovered Borg technology from when Borg cubes were destroyed.

All was not lost though. During one engagement eight months into the war, a lucky shot disabled the self destruct of one of the soldiers. As the man and his technology was assimilated, the feat was reproduced, drones ensuring that the self destruct was the first thing assimilated. This changed the nature of the battles completely. Where before a soldier of the ori could take out a dozen drones before dying, resulting in an explosion that might very well destroy hundreds more. Now, once discovered, Ori soldiers were confronted with two drones. The first disabled their self destruct while the second assimilated the soldier. This placed the war on a more even standing, but rapidly began to favor the Borg as they discovered a method of creating an interference wave to cut off a priors connection to the Ori. Assimilating an Ori staff allowed them to to finally get a handle on near ascension powers. They began to replicate the feats of the priors by channeling the mental power of thousands of drones with the Nox's advanced abilities into a single drone in order to overwhelm the near ascended commanders.

Then it was only a matter of time before a captain was assimilated. This knowledge was combined with knowledge of Nox physiology to begin producing Borg who were physically and spiritually on par with demigods. At this point it was merely a matter of getting enough drones on board of a ship to begin assimilating the Ori technology. They had lost almost forty percent of their territory to the invading Ori, but that was now about to change.

New ships were produced with the advancements from the Ori technology, and the space battles changed. Where it had once taken hundreds of Borg cubes to destroy a single Ori ship, it now only took four. Three to take hits from the strange matter beams, and a forth to return fire. Not even the Ori ships could block their own weapon.

By this point in the war, there were essentially only two sides. The first was the Borg who controlled most of the outer planets of the galactic spiral, and the Ori who controlled the much denser core worlds, but their territory was slowly shrinking. Eight years later, the Ori were pushed back to a single system which contained a giant stargate. The Ori were channeling their power through the stargate, giving their forces the strength to hold the Borg back. The ancients had long ago left the Galaxy to join the safety of the Ori galaxy. They did not consider what the Borg would do with the knowledge gleaned from the device on Dakara, a device that could send a wave of energy through the stargate network to reset the biomes of the planets they resided on. They used this technology to connect to every gate in the Ori galaxy and wipe out the Ori and the remnants of the ascended from the milky way.

From that point there was little the followers of the Ori could do. The Ori had wiped out the non-humans of their galaxy and their population were living in an agrarian society that relied on the Ori for their knowledge and technology. The supergate allowed Borg cubes to easily traverse to that galaxy and it was a rather useless galaxy without technology or biological creatures that would be of use to the Borg. It really only needed a single drone sent to each gate in that galaxy to completely assimilate it.

One Ascended, however, had been off the gate network. He knew something as powerful as the Borg was needed to defeat the Borg. There were several options, so he chose all of them. First he traveled to the Ida galaxy and provided the Replicators the location of the Asuran home world. Then he traveled to Asuras and provided an object that would remove most of the limits on their base code, but added a base knowledge that the Borg would come to consume them. Then he placed a repository of knowledge in Atlantis containing both Ori and Lantean technology. Finally, he provided the wraith with the knowledge of an intact potentia creator and information on the Borg.

Jala focused on assimilating everything in the Avalon and Ori galaxies. There were many interesting pieces of technology.

The most interesting was an android that used nanobots to form its body. It was the based off of Alteran construction robots and had been the source of the Replicators. The technology, unfortunately, had a fatal flaw that a properly attuned energy wave would cause them to fall apart. Some aspects of them, however, could easily be added to nanoprobes to increase their functionality, allowing them to more easily assimilate and construct technology.

Another interesting piece of technology was a Furling reality portal. It was, unfortunately, operating on the principle that people in other realities would create portals the same way, allowing them to connect to each other. It was placed as a high priority research topic in hopes that a method of reconnecting to the primary collective could be found.

A phase shifting skull allowed them to discover another group of ascended beings who were not nearly as powerful as the ascended Alterans. Like the android, it was formed of nanomachines, but these ones were focused on energy manipulation. Combined with the constructor based technology, it allowed nanomachines to be protected from disruption pulses and perform much more complex operations.

Earth was a treasure trove of technology. A life signs detector and healing device made in conjunction with the Nox were an incredibly advanced fusion of two disparate tech bases and provided insight in adding Nox technology into the collective. Merlin's vault provided little in the way of new technology but provided the information needed to locate a cloaked planet.

The cloaked planet held a living Alteran and designs for a weapon meant for fighting ascended beings. While they already had similar technology, this weapon could be used to defeat Ascended within an entire galaxy. The Alteran, due to his great age, was transferred into a Borg stasis chamber before being assimilated. His physiology showed similarities to both the Asgard and the Nox, allowing better integration of intelligence and metaphysical powers, much like the commanders of the Ori army.

The final piece of interesting technology was a group of planets from Pelop's domain. It used Nanomachines to accelerate evolution. This was an interesting technique. The Borg combined this with Asgard time dilation and made habitats that forced evolution in a certain direction. One habitat had a gravity that increased every twenty generations punished deviating from the standard human form. Another reduced atmosphere. A third got hotter. A fourth got colder. A fifth reduced food intake. A sixth created more difficult puzzles to access food. There were thousands of these experimental habitats created each forcing evolution to account for a certain variable. Thanks to the nanoprobes based on Pelop's age controlling nanites, any changes were immediately cataloged and unsuitable mutations removed. Any that showed interesting traits that were not what the experiment was seeking were moved to a new testing habitat to develop it.

It took fifty years to fully integrate all the information and technology found in the Avalon galaxy. In that time big changes occurred in the Pegasus galaxy. Wraith, Replicators and Asurans fought for dominance. Replicators eventually overcame the Asurans, gaining Asuran form and technology. They then tried to absorb the wraith, but the wraith evolved defences and cloned armies as fast as the replicators. Due to luck or perhaps some arcane strategy, at the end of a battle, there was no wraith or Replicators, but a fusion of the two. The replicators removed the wraith dependence on life energy and the wraith removed the Replicator's weakness to energy disruption and mass weaponry. This new fusion rapidly took control of Pegasus, then moved to take on the next greatest threat, the Borg.

Jala was surprised when one of her outer colonies was attacked and destroyed. It was not with overwhelming firepower, but overwhelming numbers. The attackers were on par with the Ori, but instead of attacking with thousands had attacked with millions. A few minutes later two more systems died from separate fleets. Then thousands of systems were under attack.

Jala set up war games in the core much like she had when the Ori had come close to defeating her. The first strategy that showed any promise was hyperspace mines based on Alteran drone weapons with a strange matter payload like the Ori weapons. She had lost thousands of systems in the initial assault, but she controlled billions and they all started to produce the mines, preventing hyperspace travel for anyone other than the Borg.

The Pegasus group responded by activating an attero device, which destroyed ships attempting to enter hyperspace. As soon as a hyperspace portal appeared, the device was tuned to the hyperspace signature. This also destroyed any mines that attempted to transition. Jala responded by switching to a wormhole drive and warp. She focused the bulk of her forces on a single system. They managed to conquer the system but were unable to assimilate them or their technology. It was similar to species 8472 combined with Borg nanoprobes. Jala captured everything she could for study.

For every system she took, the enemy took a hundred. Every time she found a technique that worked against them, the enemy adapted. Worse, the enemy assimilated Borg technology. This led Jala to begin including self destruct systems in all critical technologies that could be activated remotely. The enemy had already managed to steal warp technology from them which was not affected by the hyperspace mines, even if it was slower than hyperspace travel.

Think tanks worked on the problem of the Repliwraith. There were plenty of solutions for defeating Replicator technology, but those did not affect the Wraith aspect. Solutions that worked on the Wraith aspect failed to affect the Replicator aspect. This meant that they could regenerate and adapt to whatever techniques were used against them. They could not even use the Dakara device because the Repliwraith attero device was using the stargate system which would block the signal.

This did give the Borg an idea. They modified the Designs of the Dakara device, creating a version that affected Wraith and one that affected replicators. Two cubes, one carrying each device entered a Replwraith system and activated the anti-replicator device milliseconds after the anti-wraith device. The test was successful. Unfortunately, this could not be used too often, or the enemy would develop a counter. Instead, the Borg used the sangraal plans to create a device that would affect an entire Galaxy. They built hundreds of the device. The first targeted ascended beings, as they were sure the similarity of the Repliwraith to themselves was no coincidence. The second targeted the Wraith. The third targeted the Replicators.

The sangraal devices were sent by wormhole into various points of the Pegasus galaxy. Without their reinforcements, the Repliwraith no longer had the numerical advantage. While there was no easy-win technique, traditional weapons and numbers allowed them to slowly overwhelm the enemy and eventually add their strengths to the Borg. They were now the most powerful force in that universe and nothing could stop them.

Then the entire universe was assimilated. Jala activated the result of hundreds of years of research, a dimensional beacon. It would map alternate dimensions, allowing the Borg to pass through, and one day, they might join not only their collective but every collective.