To be fair, Hugh actually said they were the only Romulans assimilated to his knowledge, and didn't rule out others. Also, as Crazeywok said, the Cube from Voyager that had Romulans was disabled. It's still possible that their presence was the reason for that. Orun might not have been like "the afflicted", but it's still possible that the condition was due to peculiarities with one or more of the individual Romulans from the Shaenor. I can't comment on Romulan drones in First Contact, I only remember hearing about, and seeing Klingons being used for the first time.
But how old was Jurati in 2385? Her early 20’s? Unless the character was meant to be much older than Pill’s real age (34), or some kind of prodigy a la Wesley Crusher, then I don’t see her as a suspect. That happened because of a space storm, not because the Romulan was on the cube.
Was that proven? Or did they just thing it a space storm? Beyond that, the cube disconnect was 2384. The synth attack was 2285.
I half expect Janeway saw the way the wind was blowing and took off on a Delta quadrant exploration to get the hell out of town.
CHAKOTAY: Riley? What are you? Are you Borg? RILEY: We were Borg. CHAKOTAY: You mean you weren't just kidnapped. You were assimilated by the Collective. RILEY: At Wolf 359. I was a science officer aboard the Roosevelt. Five years ago, our ship was damaged by an electrokinetic storm. The next thing we knew, our link to the Collective was severed. We were free! We could think for ourselves again, remember our names, where we'd come from. Seems pretty definitive that the cube they were on was damaged by the storm. There's no implication that the assimilated Romulans had anything to do with it, unless those Romulans were just being tight lipped and the malfunction just happened to occur coincidentally when the storm hit. Not very likely.
Jurati would be old enough, however that is based on the idea that she was a sleeper agent placed there by the Zhat Vash or this Cabal of 8 we keep hearing about.
Not really buying that. Before the synth ban, there would have been many other people more qualified than a 20-something year old Jurati that the Romulans or whoever could have coerced.
Yeah true but that also makes her the perfect candidate, no one would suspect her, I certainly didn't consider her a prime suspect until last week when it became clear that she knows more than she is letting on. We assume that is based on what Commodore Oh told her but it may go back further than that. What exactly did Jurati do that makes her think she needs to atone, or has she gone full zealot after just one conversation with the Commodore.
In The Last Best Hope, she as first student then partner of Maddox played a critical role in encouraging him to continue to experiment with artificial intelligence despite the push to build the synths, even giving him some tech. Did she give him a positronic neuron, even?
She is clearly up to her neck in it but the last episode does indicate that he finished what they started together and she seems to have a problem with that. Possibly due to what the Commodore told her, the thing is killing him doesn't undo any of it and that makes it an odd move for her to make, she didn't even bother to question him.
One possibility is that she thinks that what happened merits death. Another possibility is that she thinks he might have to die to keep him from continuing his work.
She said that she needs to atone, not that he needs to atone which would indicate that she has done something wrong. Plus why kill him before they have the location of the so called nest, he must know where it is if it actually exists. He is clearly a busted flush and there is no danger that he could continue his work, at this point he is no threat to anyone and Jurati was taking a huge risk killing him in such a blatant way, it may just be that the Commodore doesn't want him sniffing round after the cabal any longer. I do hope Maddox death doesn't get glossed over by the others, as it is all kinds of suspicious.
My guess – and I'm sure I'm wrong, but what the heck – is that the cube was crippled by the same mysterious knowledge that motivated Agnes to kill Maddox. The Romulans are hiding some terrible secret, something so awful that people will murder to cover it up, and Borg cubes that absorb it collapse.
Didn't she say that her key contribution was another thing that she had to atone for? In that her work was achieved with Maddox, it would imply shared guilt. Too, what better means of atoning would there be than to kill your collaborator who—you would believe—could go on to enable other horrors? She might have tried to convert him to her cause had she been able to communicate to him the secrets, but I wonder if even that would be possible. How top-secret are those secrets?
Its possible that someone on the Romulan ship was Zhat Vash but that would mean the whole Collective would then find out which doesn't appear to have happened. Something is being hidden but its precise nature and who would gain/lose from its release remains to be seen. If anything my first thought would be that the Borg assimilated someone or something very different to what they were expecting, a synthetic humanoid is one possibility as it would be a classic case of software incompatibility. Blue Screen of Death strikes again.
No she listened to what Maddox said, then waited until Picard was gone and said that it was just another thing she has to atone for, perhaps she was talking about having to atone for what she was about to do along with whatever it is she did in the past, trigger the attack on Mars for instance which would indicate she was an agent for another player from the start. It will be rather silly if everyone just carries on without at least some suspicion, Picard leaves Jurati with Maddox and a minute later he is dead.
That could make sense out of what's-her-face calling Sjoi "the destroyer." If she's the type of entity that caused the cube to collapse.
That was my take as well. It can't have been one of Maddox creations though as he had not perfected them yet. Which means it had to be another type, probably the kind that made the Zhat Vash what they are in 2399. It plays well with the whole differences between Vulcans and Romulans, these very early synths were created and one side supported them while the other rejected them and left Vulcan.
Unless of course what ever happened to that ship was due to Romulans being Assimilated before. Perhaps some new preventive measure was created and given to Romulan Citizens (possibly without their knowledge) as a test. It apparently worked, but with unforeseen results.