Survival Instinct

[Schrodinger's Hat]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here largely because I'm a jerk and I like to argue. The difference between Hanson's comment and Satie's could just be a matter of Hanson rounding the number up for simplicity's sake. For that matter, when he mentioned the forty ships, he was talking to Riker before the battle. It's entirely possible that even if he was calling in forty starships that one of them suffered a malfunction on the way or just otherwise couldn't make it for whatever reason.

Then again, it's just as possible that one of the starships at the battle bugged out after it took enough damage to leave it combat ineffective. For that matter, considering the Borg tendency to destroy ships one by one, it's also possible that the last starship standing decided to run for it. Actually, now that I think about it, both scenarios would neatly cover the issue of the missing escape pods. My understanding of the Borg objective in that fight was that they didn't want to destroy the fleet. Rather, they wanted to batter their way through so that they could reach and assimilate Earth. If one of the ships in the fleet was no longer a threat, or disengaged from battle, they'd probably let it go. If the escape pods or shuttles had no warp drive, the surviving vessel could circle back, collect survivors, and be long gone before the Enterprise got there.

[Mark]

Well, here's what we KNOW. Said character was serving on the Excalibur, and was assimilated. This means that Excalibur encountered the Borg at some point, and survived, as we KNOW the ship served in Picard's picket fleet. The regular Borg didn't invade again until the time of First Contact, which (now here I could be wrong) at the time of her assimilation hadn't happened yet. So my only logical deduction is that it was Excalibur that survived Wolf 359, which COULD explain why it was still without a senior staff, and being repaired.

Please, can anyone find fault with my logic here?

[Schrodinger's Hat]

I can't see any holes in that argument. It fits rather nicely with what we know and would explain how we ended up with an assimilated crewman from a ship we see again.

There's another option - one that lets both Endeavor and Excalibur get away after a fashion. As Mark pointed out, Excalibur shows up in Picard's picket fleet absent a command crew and in the midst of a repair cycle. It's possible that she wasn't destroyed during Wolf 359 and yet didn't quite survive either. She could have been damaged to the point where her crew was forced to abandon ship. If she was crippled the order might have been given. She'd just be one big target if her engines and weapons were knocked offline. If she'd been boarded, then there would be plenty of opportunities for the drones to pick off a crewman or two in the chaos. Again, once the ship's no longer a threat, there's a chance that the Borg would ignore her and move on to other targets.

The Excalibur would be out of the fight, and yet still potentially salvagable. After the battle Starfleet would need to replace their losses as quickly as possible. Repairing a ship that was wrecked and yet not destroyed might just be faster or less resource intensive than building a new one from scratch. At the same time, the repairs would be extensive enough to keep her in the body-and-fender shop until Picard pulled her out to go hunting cloaked Warbirds.

'Course, personally, I prefer Mark's theory. It's got fewer "ifs" to it.

[Sionnach Glic]

Personaly, I take the view that the ship that survived Wolf 359 was a medical ship. It would have attended the fleet, thus being included in the initial count of ships sent to intercept the Cube, but wouldn't have been involved in the battle itself, thus explaining why there was one ship not destroyed. It would also explain how Sisko and co managed to escape the battlezone without being assimilated or picked up by the E-D. The medical ship could have been prowling around the perimiter of the engagement and picking up escape pods.

[Mikey]

I happen to like Mark's theory a lot. However, I will just point out that in the absence of a registry number, there's no guarantee that the two Excaliburs are the same ship. Starfleet does have a history of recycling ship names.

[Graham Kennedy]

Have to say, I always figured that "forty" was simply a rounding up. But sure, why not have a ship survive? For all Hansen's "they survive or we do" speeches, you have to wonder why they wouldn't at least try and retreat after the first twenty or thirty ships were destroyed.

[Teaos]

I have no problem with Hansen rounding. I always hear in war docos that there were thousands of ships at Dunkirk, I would be shocked if there was either 2, 3 or 4 thousand ships and not 2,999 ships ect.