How did Ben and Jake escape Wolf 359?

[Ithekro]

Enterprise was Flagship of the Federation in the cruise line usage of the term.

The Siskos and other survivors were likely picked up by the 40th (or higher) ship that was at Wolf 359 and escaped prior to USS Enterprise's arrival in system. They wouldn't head for Earth since that's the direction on travel for the Borg, so they likely headed for another nearby system. Procyon probably.

 

[Timo]

The big problem there is, why wouldn't they tell Riker?

There's no real reason for them not to, and they'd be obligated by their Starfleet oath to help Riker defend Earth even if they themselves were too cowardly to do so. Heck, even if cowardice is their main motivation, telling Riker would be helpful in keeping Riker engaged with the Borg and hopefully dying in the futile fight.

A lifepod remaining silent is logical. A starship already clear of the mayhem failing to report in is not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Communications jamming, or their comms are out.

Lifepods being silent is logical, but Enterprise not being able to detect them at all is not.

We know there were surviving starships because the fleet was 40 ships or more by the time the Borg arrived. Starfleet lost 39 ships. At least one survived, with more being possible since more ships could arrive in the hours between Hanson's promotion of Riker to Captain and the start of the Battle of Wolf 359. Plus Enterprise was about twelve hours behind the Borg cube due to repair times and speed needed to reach the battle area.

 

[Timo]

Communications jamming, or their comms are out.

Who would be jamming and what? Nothing else is being jammed as far as we can tell.

Losing a battle is no excuse for deserting. Perhaps this putative "surviving starship" hides because otherwise Starfleet would blow her up? But this would mean our heroic Ben Sisko never punched the skipper in the jaw and turned the ship around so that he could die for his king and country.

Lifepods being silent is logical, but Enterprise not being able to detect them at all is not.

Yet if the E-D could see them, what would be the point? The Borg then also could.

We know there were surviving starships because the fleet was 40 ships or more by the time the Borg arrived.

This is the debatable bit, as 40 is a round number and might mean 39. Or even 37, and Hanson got two reinforcements.

Starfleet lost 39 ships.

This is the clear-cut bit. Although it's politically colored, as Satie wants to make Picard look super bad there, so the definition of "loss" might be a bit surprising if revealed to us.

At least one survived

This is the unlikely bit, as we never hear any suggestion of a ship surviving.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Farscape One]

Data did say "power output was negligible" or words to that effect when scanning the battle site. It's possible those 'negligible power readings' could be those escape pods, and given all the blown up warp cores, debris, and radiation, it could have masked any lifesigns. At least, ships passing by quickly like the Enterprise since her main mission was to stop the Borg, not search and rescue.

I think the 'one surviving ship' is sort of insinuated by the VOYAGER episode "SCORPION", when Janeway was reading the Endeavour Captain's log entry about the Borg. As far as we know, no other Starfleet ship encountered and survived the Borg at the point Voyager was lost... only Wolf 359 was known. It makes sense, and it is possible that ship entered the battle at the very end and somehow was able to get away before being destroyed, or it may have even been the one to do search and rescue afterward and that log entry is what the captain feels about the Borg based on the wreakage he saw and testimony from survivors. Either scenario is plausible.

 

[Ithekro]

A single crippled starship, limping away from Wolf 359 isn't going to be of much use to Captain Riker and USS Enterprise. At the warp speeds the Borg cube and USS Enterprise can reach, Earth is a day or two from Wolf 359 (supposedly anyway), but a crippled starship only able to make maybe Warp 4 is weeks away from Earth, and would likely not head in that direction if it is attempting to deliver the wounded to a safe location (Earth is not a safe direction, as that's where the Borg cube is heading).

 

[Timo]

But a ship that cannot make good speed cannot escape the scans or hails of the E-D, either.

And delivering the wounded would not be a priority mission if the ship could make the speed required to escape the Borg / reach Earth. The wounded could be spaced if need be. (In shuttlecraft if need be.)

We have to wonder how many people really did escape Wolf 359. The Saratoga was seen launching three of those big pods, with a fourth whizzing by before the ship explodes (even if it comes from an odd angle and might not be from that ship). That's perhaps two dozen people escaping from a Miranda. We don't see the Borg blowing up or tractoring these pods. Would each ship be able to safely eject about 10% of her crew complement? Would there be later culling, or would all launched pods survive?

Mere "nearly" 11,000 were killed. Split between 39 ships, that is 280 or so people per ship. Perhaps the total complement of something of Miranda size - but most of the ships were bigger, and OTOH a carefully tractored Miranda had verified survivors among verified evacuees. So, was the Sisko pod surviving a fluke, or were there hundreds of pods with thousands of survivors? Just as we never hear of a surviving starship, we never hear of a surviving person who wasn't an assimilee or a Sisko.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tomalak]

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence... It's fairly standard that in military debacles, the dead are remembered, not the living.

Perhaps the footnote to 11,000 dead reads "out of 20,000 personnel involved in the battle."

 

[Lance]

The Borg fire on threats, active starships firing on them. Once the ship is immobilised or destroyed I doubt they care what harmless objects flee them. Even if they have lifesigns onboard, what threat do they pose now?

This. The Borg (at this point) had a single objective: getting through to Sector 001. Even with Locutus providing tactical information, they still had little to no interest in actually engaging anything that wasn't a threat. The fleet were clearly muscling up. The escape pods were basically off the radar.

 

[Timo]

What would make the sessile defenses at Jupiter or Mars a threat to the mission of assimilating Earth (if that even was their mission), though? The Borg carefully engaged those defenses anyway, making short work of them. Engaging the futile fleet at Wolf 359 was a choice as well, when the Borg could simply have decided not to stop.

Heck, holding Sisko's ancient tub in a tractor beam for significant plot time already showed that the Borg do care. They had massive interest in everything for a change.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[marsh8472]

Some weak ship came by and picked them all up would be my guess

 

[Maurice]

I just hated that scene in Emissary because the Borg just grab the Saratoga, cripple it, and hold onto it for-fucking-ever until it blows up, which they don't do to any other ship that doesn't have Sisko on it.

 

[Tomalak]

I just hated that scene in Emissary because the Borg just grab the Saratoga, cripple it, and hold onto it for-fucking-ever until it blows up, which they don't do to any other ship that doesn't have Sisko on it.

Isn't that what they do to the Enterprise? They make no serious effort to destroy the Enterprise at any point in BoBW.

 

[Maurice]

Isn't that what they do to the Enterprise? They make no serious effort to destroy the Enterprise at any point in BoBW.

Same problem. The heroes get plot armor and everyone else dies. It's be easier to buy this is they did it to more ships in the Wolf 359 battle, but they are clearly swatting them aside on their way to Earth, so why hang onto a crippled ship that's going to blow up in minutes anyway? In the story there's no reason for them to hang onto it, they could have just let it go and it could be tumbling away as Sisko tries to get out before it blows. But nooooo...

 

[Timo]

I don't quite see the issue. What reason do we have to think that non-hero ships would have gotten a different treatment in general?

We already have two starships that get grabbed and cut to pieces, in two different contexts. Both have plenty of time to evacuate if that's their wont. We also have the aftermath of Wolf 359, where many ships are not blown up - they are more or less intact hulks, carved to pieces and with lifepod hatches open.

No, the Borg weren't swatting the fleet out of the way on their trip to Earth. They didn't need to - they could simply have flown to Earth nonstop, utterly ignoring the fleet, just as they did in ST:FC. Instead, they stopped and apparently painstakingly assimilated the fleet. And spent a good while doing it after the blink-and-you-miss-it fighting part was over, so that when the E-D arrived, the Cube was still in the vicinity. And the Borg didn't stop there, either: they "swatted" things that certainly didn't stand between them and Earth, such as Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

Why this would be has been speculated on many times. Perhaps Picard conned them into thinking this would be a good idea, when in fact it was pure stalling in the hopes that somebody would figure out a way to resist. Figuring out the logic isn't necessary for pointing out that Sisko wasn't really given special treatment.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crewman6]

But trying to block the Cube would be futile: blockades in space don't work. If the Borg did not wish to fight Starfleet at Wolf 359, they could simply have warped around or through the fleet and continued to Earth. This would just have meant that they would face the fleet on Earth orbit, then, possibly hampering the assimilation operations (if any were intended - it's not as if the Borg did anything of the sort when actually reaching Earth, after all).

That the Borg killed those 39 ships is already a case of them going after something that's not a threat.

The fleet positioned itself between where the Borg were and Earth. The Borg were going in their typical straight line. Warping around them isn't their style. Since they weren't threatened by the fleet, they just plowed through them (like the "mars defense perimeter" drones) and kept going. But destroying escape pods might have meant going slightly out of their way, wasting time. So they didn't bother.

 

[Timo]

Hmm. What we see in the DS9 episode, and hear in the TNG episode, is them bothering. They bother to stop (which they didn't do in ST:FC). They bother to ask pretty please for the Feds to surrender and offer their necks for a dose of nanoprobes. And then they bother to hold ships in tractor beams and carve them out one by one. And then they bother to fly a corkscrew path so that they can visit all the planets in the Sol system before settling on Earth orbit. On which they apparently just politely sit and wait, even though the heroes just moments before said they'd be 27 minutes late, and even after the Borg coffee break are 2 minutes late.

Going for the lifepods would be doubly apt, then. It matches their general trend of bothering, and it matches their specific action of engaging Starfleet assets that are not on their path or an obstacle to them.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JohnPrast]

They were picked up from their pods by https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Ahwahnee_(NCC-71620) before Enterprise arrived

 

[Tomalak]

They were picked up from their pods by https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Ahwahnee_(NCC-71620) before Enterprise arrived

More likely the Ahwahnee was heavily damaged and in no condition to pick up anyone, but was later salvaged.

 

[Timo]

...If we want to believe there was an Ahwahnee at the battle, we are free to do so. We may also decide there was a USS Mickey Mouse there to do the rescuing and subsequent cowardly withdrawing. Absolutely nothing precludes us from doing so.

But if we want to back this up with evidence, that is, pseudo-facts from the Trek universe, then we can at best say that yes, there was an Ahwahnee there (because a wreck by that name was filmed and shown even though it's impossible to read the name in the eventual episode), but no, she didn't rescue anybody because we see her dead.

Timo Saloniemi