“Scorpion” is episode twenty-six of season three of Star Trek: Voyager and the season finale.
The episode opens with two Borg cubes giving their usual threat. Before they can finish it, both are utterly destroyed in not much more than a second. A single Borg cube was able to destroy the entire Federation fleet at Wolf 359 with barely a scratch in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”. Another ploughed through most of the defences in First Contact with only slightly more damage. Some unknown force has now just effectively one-shot killed two of them.
Captain Janeway is in Leonard da Vinci’s workshop. She’d like a corner, a bench to work on her own projects. She would find his company inspiring. Da Vinci prefers solitude. He’s working on a clockwork arm and Janeway starts helping when it stops. She notices his flying machine plans, and the machine itself. The captain suggests that da Vinci model it on a hawk, not a bat or a sparrow. Da Vinci is now interested. They could work on a new machine together. Perhaps Janeway would like a bench to work on? Then Chakotay contacts the captain – she’s in a holodeck of course – saying she needs to come to engineering.
He and B’Elanna have bad news. Their long-range probe stopped transmitting. B’Elanna thought it was a problem with the communications – until she checked the last few seconds of the probe’s telemetry. Which show Borg cubes approaching, then a Borg drone working on it. They are finally approaching Borg space.
Voyager‘s senior staff are briefed. There are thousands of Borg systems and there’s no going round the territory. There may be a way through; a probe has detected a narrow corridor of space devoid of Borg activity. It’s been nicknamed the Northwest Passage. The passage has intense gravimetric disruptions coming from quantum singularities. Meanwhile, Tuvok has reprogrammed the phasers to give them a chance, Harry is looking for transwarp signatures and the Doctor has analysed the Borg corpse they acquired in “Unity” and is coming closer to understand how they assimilate others to create a medical defence. Neelix is working on their supplies. With the probe being captured, the Borg know they are there.
Voyager preps a lot of stuff and the Doctor and Kes are looking at the Borg’s injection tubules that inject nanoprobes into the bloodstream. The Doctor doesn’t think the probes can be shielded against, so the aim is to enhance the immune system to slow down the Borg attack. Kes is looking at the Borg’s arm when she suddenly gets a vision of dead Borg drones stacked in a pile.
Tuvok enters the bridge and says that Kes is unsettled and uncertain. She’s had several telepathic visions of the death of Borg and the destruction of Voyager. Possibly a premonition. Harry detects transwarp signatures closing from behind. Voyager gets knocked out of warp from the subspace turbulence caused by 15 Borg cubes. 14 of them blast past; the fifteenth scans Voyager then leaves. That is not normal behaviour. They now have definite evidence they’ve entered Borg space.
Janeway is in her ready room reading up on the Borg when Chakotay enters. The Northwest Passage is still clear of Borg activity. According to his calculations, neither of them have eaten since last night. Join him for dinner? Janeway isn’t hungry. She’s been reading the personal log entries of all the Starfleet captains who have encountered the Borg, from the moment Q flung the Enterprise into the path of the first cube in “Q Who” to the massacre at Wolf 359. Voyager doesn’t know about the events of First Contact. Janeway is concerned that they may have to turn back.
The power signatures of the 15 cubes that passed Voyager have terminated. Janeway orders Tom to set a course to where they are. Every cube is in pieces; a force that, from everything Voyager‘s crew know, could possibly destroy every fleet in the Alpha Quadrant, shattered in minutes. One weapon signature detected is Borg. The other is unknown. Tom asks what could do this to the Borg and Harry says maybe they could be an ally. There’s something attached to one Borg vessel and it’s organic in nature. The biological is impervious to Voyager‘s technology, so the captain orders Chakotay to lead an away team.
Chakotay, Tuvok and Harry beam aboard the Borg ship. The drones ignore them, being dead, malfunctioning or repairing the cube. Harry comes across the stack of bodies that Tuvok recognises as being from Kes’s vision. The biological melted right through the Borg hull and a drone is trying and failing to assimilate it. They realise the biological is a ship.
Voyager has found an enemy of the Borg that can destroy entire fleets of cubes in minutes at most. An enemy more dangerous than the Borg is rather worrying. Enough so that Janeway comes up with a dangerous idea.
The story continues in season four and “Scorpion, Part II”.