The Aftermath

Of the 40 Starfleet ships that engaged at Wolf 359, just a single vessel survived—and decades later, we still don’t really know which one. It’s never been explicitly confirmed, but offhand mentions in Voyager and an eventual re-appearance in Star Trek: First Contact suggest the USS Endeavour, helmed by Captain Amasov, as a likely candidate. At least one Federation civilian vessel was also destroyed in the crossfire. In all, 11,000 people—Starfleet officers and civilian families onboard the engaging vessels—were either killed or assimilated by the Borg.

As the cube drew closer and closer to Earth—breaching defense platforms positioned at Mars and entering orbit above the planet—the conflict resulted in a Pyrrhic victory for Starfleet when the repaired Enterprise, having recaptured Locutus, used the drone’s collective link to issue a kill-switch command to the Borg, destroying the cube. Picard would eventually be restored to his human self after his link to the collective was severed and he underwent reconstructive surgery to remove the implants given to him by the Borg, but while the threat of the Borg was momentarily halted, Wolf 359’s devastation echoed throughout the Federation; at that point—just years before the outbreak of the Dominion War—it was the deadliest single engagement in Starfleet history.