"It did not."

"Did they have specialized roles in the breakout attempt? Is there any reason to believe they've faced a comparably scaled resistance in the past that would have given them experience with prison breaks?"

Lucien has to pull out his datapad to get this much detail.

"No specialized roles, it wasn't a very well planned attempt - if they had succeeded at breaking out of containment they would have been left floating in space with no means of transit - they passed an escape pod without paying any attention to it."

"We think they've faced substantial resistance before - they have tech that disrupts communications between ships that we think was copied from tech meant to disrupt an earlier version of their hivemind."

"How many kinds of people are among their hosts? Do they invent anything of their own?"

"At least 36 different species, probably over a thousand."

"We don't know of them inventing anything of their own."

"Why such a gap between the estimates of species?"

"We only see the species we know are assimilated here and the ones that are most common around the otherside of the wormhole. They control a lot more total space and we think most species won't be very common." 

She nods. "- subspace isn't instant, right?"

"It's not, it's a few days between here and your planet by subspace messaging."

"It's possible to do better with wormholes but those are a weird ex-ception."

"So - are they really all one hivemind, or - multiple sort of fluid ones?"

"Hm, I think it's reasonable to think of them as multiple hiveminds but for purposes of interacting with them it's often better to imagine them as one hivemind - any two groups of Borg you meet will have a chance to exchange at least a couple of rounds of messages between when you meet them, just because of how warp travel is slower than communication."

"Right, but you can block the messages - I know you said it's expensive, but if that got cheaper -"

"Yeah, though right now blocking the messages requires placing them in expensively shielded rooms. If we had a way of preventing communication on a more massive scale without having to capture them that would be a big improvement over the current sit-uation."

"It apparently wouldn't make them less hostile but it'd at least make them - stupider."

"Yeah that seems likely."

"I'll need to keep reading." Sigh.

"Do you want any recommendations on specific sub-jects? Or more people to talk to I suppose." 

"I'd appreciate both, thank you."

"Just on Borgs in general?"

"And on what's known about previous conflicts they've had and what they do in territory they control."

Here are some books and Borgs experts to talk to about the Borg. On Graft's advice Lorica is not poked about things and is instead given time to process and figure out what she thinks about the Borg.

Lucien impulsively estimates how many lives might be saved if they had better weapons from Isabella's ship or genetic tech from her DNA. It's hard to guess at exact numbers, but it still makes him cry for a bit. Still, he can't force Isabella to make up her mind any faster.

Eventually she finds Lucien to tell him that if she's taken back to Samaria she can try going aboard the Jehovah to ask if it's even possible to safely study or remove its weapons, but she bets it isn't.

"We can leave right away!"

"We do have some plans for taking the weapons even if the systems resist us - we have a bunch of different tools that might work."

"Well, the thing is you mustn't damage the ship, because we need everything else it can do, and also that it's currently got those weapons pointed at my planet, so you also mustn't, ah, startle it."

The number Lucien was crying about last night was way higher than the population of her planet, he doesn't say. It would be really sad and bad either way.

"We could focus on evacuating your planet maybe?"