Marika Wilkarah

Marika Wilkarah was a female Bajoran Starfleet engineering officer in the 24th century. She was married, and she and her spouse both served aboard the . Wilkarah was one of the many individuals to be assimilated by the Borg, but was eventually freed.
The Excalibur survived an attack by the Borg during a night shift sometime prior to late 2368. Several members of the crew, including Wilkarah, were assimilated in the encounter. As a Borg drone, she was a member of Seven of Nine's unimatrix, where she was assigned the designation of Three of Nine, Auxiliary Processor of Unimatrix Zero One.
In 2368, a Borg sphere crashed on Planet 1865-Alpha, an uninhabited planet in the Delta Quadrant. The drones Two of Nine, real name Lansor, Three of Nine, Four of Nine, real name P'Chan, and Seven of Nine, were the only survivors. Their link to the Borg Collective was temporarily severed, allowing them to regain their individualities. 
P'Chan, Lansor, and Marika intended to hide so that they would not be found when the Borg came to retrieve them. They went their separate ways. However Seven of Nine, terrified of her new-found individuality, hunted each of them down and forcibly interfaced with each of them using her assimilation tubules. She caused the left parietal lobes of their brains to be transformed into interlink nodes that linked them together in an ad hoc collective, then erased the act from their memories. She then led them back to the crash site, where the Borg retrieved them.
Eventually, P'Chan, Lansor, and Marika escaped the Collective, but they could not break their ad hoc link, and thus were denied true individuality. 
In 2376 they sought out Seven of Nine on the in the hopes that she could help them, and discovered her responsibility for the link. While retrieving their memories, P'Chan, Lansor, and Marika fell into a coma.
The Doctor, Voyagers holographic chief medical officer, found that to wake P'Chan, Lansor, and Marika from their coma they needed to be reintegrated into the Borg Collective. The only way to wake them up was to break the link by removing their interlink nodes. However, this would kill them within a month. Seven and The Doctor decided to perform the procedure, knowing that they would prefer a short life as individuals to rejoining the Borg Collective as drones. 
Marika, glad to be aboard a Federation vessel again, decided to spend her remaining time aboard Voyager. She told Seven that while she could not forgive her actions, she did understand why she did it. ()
== Appendices ==
=== Background information ===
Marika Wilkarah was played by Bertila Damas. 
The spelling of her name comes from the script, which is also spelled as "Willkarah" in the . In an earlier draft of the episode's script, this character was originally a Human by the name of "Marie Wilkerson".
=== Apocrypha ===
Marika is the main character of the story "Brief Candle" By Christopher L. Bennett, in the 10th Anniversary short story anthology, Distant Shores, which reveals that she was the child of Bajoran refugees and never actually lived on Bajor itself, eagerly hearing the stories of the other Bajoran crewmembers about their changed world. During this storyline, she develops a relationship with Harry Kim, who initially doubts the practicality of such a bond given his knowledge of her imminent death until he is convinced by Neelix to give it a shot regardless by citing his own time with Kes as precedent. Marika eventually gives her life to stop a rift in space created when the multi-spatial probe entered a transwarp rift created by the Voth (an event referenced in ) in the hope that the information the probe can provide will help Voyager recreate transwarp technology to accelerate its journey home, with Harry telling her that the transmission was successful when in reality the message was just gibberish.
Her capture by the Borg is seen in the short story "Making a Difference" in the New Frontier anthology No Limits, but does not explain her survival of the destruction of the Borg cube. "Making a Difference" erroneously places Marika's assimilation in 2369, the year after she was seen as a drone in "Survival Instinct".
=== External link===
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Category:Bajorans
Category:Starfleet personnel (24th century)
Category:Starfleet operations personnel
Category:Former Borg drones