THE ENTITY HAD KNOWN THAT AT SOME POINT IT WOULD run across them. But it did not wish the contact. It did not wish it at all, but it had a duty to perform.
The Borg cube was all but destroyed. Holes gaped in its side, through which open space was visible. Sparks flew, lights flickered, and it tumbled through space with a randomness and wildness that would have appalled its makers, had they been able to express such a thing.
The Entity hesitated, ruminating. The Borg were implacable in their purpose: to assimilate and plunder the knowledge of other species. Such a single-mindedness—and the term, with them, was quite literal—had made them almost invincible. Almost. Though on occasion, wit and courage and determination had foiled them.
There was no doubt in the Entity’s mind, if such it had, that if the bad things, the mutated dark matter, had found one Borg cube, it had infiltrated all of them. To one degree or another, every Borg ship in the quadrant, or even elsewhere, would be affected at this point. What the Entity was now regarding was merely an infected ship in the later stages.
If it were only the destruction of the Borg that was at stake here, the Entity knew, its decision to help them would be a harder one to make. But there was so much more. Certainly, the Borg would be destroyed, but the dark matter that had been their downfall would linger on, waiting for something more innocent to infect, perverting even the space in which it existed. It would eat away at the fabric of this universe. No matter who benefited, it must needs be contained.
So the Entity descended upon the hurtling Borg cube, enveloping it into itself with a care the ruthless creatures did not deserve. It felt the hive mind trying to assimilate it even now, their multiple thoughts condensed into one powerful demand: We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.
But the Entity was unique, and knew it, and far beyond even their frightening comprehension. It brushed aside their attempts to make it one of them almost as an afterthought, a distraction to its true task, which was to purge them of the wrong things that would have been their ruination.
Through its connection with the ship, it knew where the other cubes were, and departed. Again and again it enveloped a cube, purged it, and moved on. Their numbers were almost uncountable, but the Entity partially existed outside time and space and the vast distances were nothing to it.
It was done. The Borg were cured. They would not contaminate others they assimilated with the mutated dark matter, though some might feel that Borg assimilation was something worse. It was not the Entity’s place to decide such things. It merely had a task, a task far greater than any single individual’s needs: a task that would save or doom everything, from the smallest microbe to beings nearly as vast as itself.
The Borg were cured, free to pursue their own task. It did not sit well with the Entity, and it puzzled over the moral dilemma as it drifted to the next place where the wrong things dwelt.