Marika Wilkarah was a female Bajoran Starfleet engineering officer who served aboard the USS Excalibur during the late 24th century, during which time she was assimilated by the Borg.
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.
Three of Nine (2368)
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 Wilkarah 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 Wilkarah escaped the Collective, but could not break their ad-hoc link, and thus were denied true individuality. In 2376 they sought out Seven of Nine on Voyager in the hopes that she could help them, and discovered her responsibility for the link.
The Doctor, Voyager's holographic Chief Medical Officer, found that the only way they to break the link was to remove the 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 being linked together. Marika decided to spend her remaining time aboard Voyager. (VOY: "Survival Instinct")
Appendices
Background
Marika Wilkarah was played by Bertila Damas.
The spelling of her name comes from the script. It is spelled as "Willkarah" in both the transcripts and at StarTrek.com. Template:St
Apocrypha
Marika is the main character of the story "Brief Candle" By Christopher L. Bennett, in the Star Trek: Voyager 10th Anniversary short story anthology, Distant Shores.
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".