Still traveling through the Nekrit Expanse, Chakotay and Ensign Kaplan, exploring in their shuttle, answer a distress call from a multiracial colony (that includes humans) on an alien planet while Voyager discovers a Borg cube dead in space. Caught between warring factions, Kaplan is killed and Chakotay fatally injured. The colonists, all ex-Borg, can save Chakotay's life but at the cost of his becoming part of their newly formed "Cooperative."
—statmanjeff