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. They then proceed to specifically engage local defenses at Jupiter and Mars (and apparently Saturn as well, as evidenced by that flyby), even though those would not be relevant to the quest to assimilate Earth. The Collective was on Thorough Mode that day, for whatever reason. Perhaps Picard was fighting back and able to fool them into thinking that his "Starfleet expertise" suggested carefully eliminating all resistance - which in practice just meant buying time for the defenders to do something? Or perhaps the Borg wanted to pick as many fights as possible, to assimilate all Starfleet tactics and weapons, before going for the kill and thus depriving the Collective of further gain?
Either way, hunting down every single lifeboat would fit that picture very well...
The Borg did spend a lot of time doing something at Wolf 359 after the battle was over. We saw basically all of it in "Emissary", from the first threats to the last burning starships, yet the E-D was still hours away at that point - and regardless, the Borg were still at the scene when Riker's ship arrived, and not at Earth or even en route to Earth (but en a route marked by subspace eddies the heroes would then carefully follow, without ever suggesting this was the beeline to Earth).
Likely pastimes for the Cube: helping turn wrecks into Borg vessels, "Regeneration" style, and assimilating every last survivor, "Dark Frontier" style...
Timo Saloniemi
