Well this was fun...

Posted on Wed Jul 23rd, 2025 @ 3:57pm by Lieutenant Richard Pierce MD

646 words; about a 3 minute read

Personal Log — Dr. Richard "Popeye" Pierce
Location: Sickbay, USS Jane Addams
Stardate: … Who the hell knows.

If you’re reading this, you’ve either dug it out of my cold hands, or the ship didn’t go up in a glorious ball of plasma. Either way, congratulations. You're now privy to one man’s firsthand account of what it’s like to survive a Borg encounter when Starfleet’s best plans fail in the first five minutes.

Let me start from the beginning. We were part of Admiral Gamelin’s task force—twenty ships strong. Proud, well-trained, loaded with tech, full of pep talks and people ready to give their lives to protect Arcturus.

What we weren’t ready for… was two Borg spheres.

We hit the first one hard, hit it like we meant it. God, the adrenaline on that bridge must have been enough to ignite the air. I wasn’t up there, of course. I was in Sickbay, prepping medkits and running drills, listening to the vibrations in the hull and thinking we might just win this one.

Then the second one dropped in like it had just been waiting its turn. A silent bastard—no grand entrance, no threats. Just physics, gravity, and the quiet terror of inevitability.

What happened after that was chaos. Bridge called down once, maybe twice. "Incoming casualties," they said. I got maybe two people in here before all internal communications died. The next thing I know, the Jane Addams is groaning like an animal caught in a trap, and I can feel us moving. Not in impulse. Not in warp. Something in-between. Something desperate.

I don’t know what Raz did—only that it saved us.

But we paid for it.

We're floating now. Emergency lighting only. Main power’s gone. Warp core’s cold. One of our impulse engines is gone—not offline, not malfunctioning—just sheared off. The hull’s been breached in more places than I can count. If it weren’t for the last flickers of SIF and some manual patches done by mad engineers on morphine, this whole ship would’ve split like a rotten cantaloupe.

Internal sensors? Dead. ODN trunkline’s fried, so the main computer is basically a brick with blinking lights. The only systems still getting juice are life support and whatever little we could divert to ping the void for help. Every power cell we had was routed to keep the air breathable and give us the slimmest chance of being found.

The medical bay is lit by two handheld lamps. I've got maybe seven functional tricorders, most of which I’ve duct-taped back together. Biobeds are mostly non-functional—I'm treating crush injuries with tourniquets and prayers. Half my staff are missing. The other half are doing the work of five people. One of them died stabilizing a plasma burn with their bare hands. Didn't even flinch.

The worst part? I can't even tell who made it off the ship. Or what happened to the others in the fleet. No comms. No logs. No windows, even.

We fought something that doesn’t care that we’re Starfleet. Doesn’t care about treaties or tactics or the clever things we think make us advanced. The Borg aren’t an enemy. They're a force of nature with software updates.

And the thing that gets me?

We still don’t know a damn thing about them.

No demands. No signals. No identity. They came. They adapted. They ripped us apart.

And now… we're bleeding out in the dark.

But here’s the thing. If you're looking for hope in this log—I'm still here. My staff’s still here. Raz is out there somewhere, probably jury-rigging warp coils with chewing gum and half a deck plate. We’re Starfleet. We may be broken, but we're not beaten.

Not yet.

Pierce out.

 

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