The crew meets former Borg drones who want to restore their community.
While scouting ahead in a shuttle, Chakotay and Ensign Kaplan are attacked on a planet. Kaplan is killed, and the wounded Chakotay is cared for by Riley Frazier, the leader of a community called the Cooperative. He learns that the planet is populated by former Borg drones, cut off from the Collective by an electrokinetic storm, whose rival groups now fight over scarce resources. Meanwhile Voyager investigates a derelict Borg cube.
The Cooperative links Chakotay to their shared mind to heal him, and they ask Janeway to reactivate a device on the cube that would join everyone on the planet into a new collective and end the violence. Janeway refuses, but the Cooperative uses its link to Chakotay to make him do it. The cube is destroyed, and Chakotay later questions the morality of what they did.
