The Borg’s Most Powerful Weapon Comes From Forgotten Star Trek Race

By the time the Borg attacked Earth in Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard was well aware of their many weapons. He had been on the receiving end of a nasty Borg attack in “Q Who,” and he was later assimilated into the Collective before being rescued by his crew.

But what Picard couldn’t figure out was how the Borg Queen survived her Cube blowing up in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”.

Eventually, Star Trek: Voyager revealed that the Borg can simply create a new Queen when the old one is killed, and effectively having an immortal evil genius leader is a powerful weapon in and of itself.

As you might expect, though, the Borg Queen would rather avoid getting killed in the first place. And it wasn’t until Star Trek: Picard that we realized that she had an entirely different weapon, one that could help her survive almost anything.

In the first season of Picard, the title character visits a derelict Borg vessel whose reclamation is being overseen by the ex-Borg Hugh. Soon enough, Romulans are chasing Picard and Data’s daughter Soji, and Hugh takes them to a “queencell” aboard the Cube.

This room has a spatial interjector that they can use to transport themselves up to 40,000 lightyears, and Picard uses it to take himself and his young charge to Nepenthe, where Riker and Troi live.

Hugh explains to Picard that this technology was basically the Borg Queen’s secret weapon, something she could use to transport herself away (sometimes far away) in the event of an emergency.

Picard himself had no way of knowing about it because the Borg acquired this technology after he was rescued from the Collective. In a fun callback to an earlier show, the technology the Borg have stolen comes from a race that appeared in only a single episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

In the Voyager episode “Prime Factors,” Captain Janeway encounters the Sikarians who use their spatial interjector technology to visit faraway worlds, all to pursue pleasure.

She hopes the tech could get her crew home, but it doesn’t really work: not only are the aliens hesitant to share the technology, but when some Voyager officers steal it and try to use it, they discover it won’t work with their ship because the tech uses the planet’s mantle as an amplifier.

They couldn’t make that tech work without the planet, but after assimilating some Sikarians, the Borg found a workaround to turn this tech into their own hidden weapon.

While it’s not overtly offensive in nature, we think this tech is the Borg’s ultimate weapon because it can transport one or more people half a galaxy away at a moment’s notice, allowing for infiltration and sneak attacks galore.

Plus, it allows the Queen to make quick escapes–between this and her ability to be resurrected after death, she is borderline immortal. So immortal, in fact, that we’ll be downright shocked if we never see her or the Borg ever again after their apparent demise at the end of Picard.