Harry Kim and Chakotay Uncover the History Linking Verunans to the K'shikkaa
Book: Star Trek: Voyager #6 - The Murdered Sun
Author: Christie Golden
Chapter 11 is where the history starts clicking together. Not all at once. Not with one big speech. But the pieces land hard enough that you feel the shape of something huge forming.
On Veruna Four, Tom Paris is teaching starship tactics to eighteen Verunan pilots in what might be the strangest classroom in the Delta Quadrant. He has a display console showing Voyager, a shuttlecraft, and the six Guardian escort ships to scale. He walks them through shield positioning, Janeway’s plan to carry the ships inside the concavity, and three scenarios for what could go wrong.
The questions they ask are sharp. A few stump him. He admits he needs to check with Voyager. But these pilots are not pretending to understand. They get it.
Then Kaavi finds him afterward and calls him a good teacher. Paris deflects. She watches the Voyager graphic on screen and says she cannot imagine anything so large. Paris, without meaning to, starts talking about flying the ship like riding a tiger. Coiled muscle and power, smooth keypads, effortless response. He catches himself blushing when he realizes how much he said.
Kaavi does not mock him. She says she has only flown twice, on the scout ship before its final mission. She has not yet known the joy of maneuvering Conviction. She understands his pleasure. Then she says something that hits like a slap: she is sorry he finds her people repulsive.
Paris wishes he were back in his New Zealand prison cell. It would be more comfortable than standing in front of someone this smart and decent while feeling like the biggest lout in the universe.
He manages an apology. Kaavi accepts it, then the grief pours out. Where is the hope Viha Nata preaches? Veruna Four is dying by the hour. The Akerians stole their children’s future. She should be flying with a mate and a child, not tinkering with ancient ships in a desperate hope of earning the right to die defending her world.
Paris does something I did not expect from him this early in the book. He puts a hand on her arm. He points at the busy technicians, the gleaming Conviction, the Starfleet engineers in black and gold. The hope is here. Chakotay and Nata are at the First Place. Maybe the enslaved Verunans know something that will help when they rescue them.
He wipes her tears. He tells her she is a pilot in a world where that job barely existed until days ago. Some people never get a chance to make a difference. She smiles. For the first time, Paris thinks of a Verunan smile as a smile, not a grimace.
Meanwhile, inside the colony ship, Chakotay and Nata pass the Sentinel’s test. The hologram declares Nata a true Viha and grants access to the great ship Soul. They run down a corridor lined with dead ancestors because five hours is not a lot of time.
The command center is staggering. A ceiling five hundred meters up. Balconies everywhere. Hundreds of consoles and what look like inactive engines stretching hundreds of yards back. Nata realizes her ancestors, the K’shikkaa, valued technology far more than the simple life she chose.
Chakotay pushes back gently. They abandoned the ship because it stopped meeting their needs. Technology and nature can coexist.
Getting the systems online is another story. Chakotay tries everything. Vocal commands. Verunan touch commands. Nothing works until he notices Nata clutching her Viha amulet. The pendant shape matches a diamond indentation on a pentagonal console. Five Vihas. Five panels. Five amulets.
They slot the amulet into the fourth console. Click. The system hums to life. A Sentinel hologram appears, solid and clear. “Greetings, Viha. How may I be of service?”
The computer reports it has been four thousand three hundred twenty-seven years since anyone spoke to it. Nata asks how the K’shikkaa came to Veruna Four. The answer lands like a punch: the sun in the K’shikkaan system was dying. A supernova was inevitable. The Soul was the first planned colony.
“A dying sun,” Chakotay says. “It seems your people have come full circle, Nata.”
Up on Voyager, Harry Kim has been doing the other half of this history homework. Janeway finally convinced him to sleep once, but otherwise he has been buried in the Akerian ship’s computers since this crisis started. By the time Chakotay calls in, Janeway already knows Kim has found something startling about the Akerians. She is holding it for the senior staff briefing.
That is the parallel that makes Chapter 11 work for me. Chakotay is pulling Verunan history out of the Soul’s archives. Kim is pulling Akerian history out of captured military data. One side shows a people who fled a dying star in a colony ship escorted by six Guardians. The other side, we know from earlier chapters, shows a military empire that discovered a concavity, harvested technology from a dead civilization, and fed that concavity by murdering suns.
The Soul’s computer even drops a bombshell at the end: five Viha amulets together can engage the launching sequence. This ship can fly. Nata looks like someone whose death sentence just got reversed.
Paris asks Kaavi what a tiger is on the walk back to Conviction. Torres catches his eye and grins. He hopes word does not spread that Tom Paris is soft on lizards.
History is not just backstory here. It is ammunition. The Verunans are not native to Veruna Four. The K’shikkaa were refugees once. Kim’s research is about to tell the crew something that reframes the entire conflict. And the Soul’s tutorials are about to make B’Elanna Torres very happy indeed.
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