The Tokath Reawakening Traps Harry, Kes, and the Away Team

Mosaic
By Jeri Taylor
ISBN: 0-671-56312-2

Previous: Phoebe Intervenes at Kathryn’s Sickbed

Chapter 21 pays off everything the underground storyline has been building. The away team reunites in the chamber where Harry and Kes were almost cooked alive. The Tokath wake up. Jal Sittik learns what hubris costs. And on Voyager, Janeway gambles the ship to rescue a Trabe doctor who knows why the Kazon will not leave this planet alone.

The teams merge

Harry and Kes watch the chamber wall shimmer open the same way it did when they entered. Tuvok, Neelix, and the battered away team pour through. LeFevre is scratched and bleeding. “They are right behind us.”

The opening seals. Doorless chamber again.

Harry suggests leaving while they can. Tuvok says he hopes this room is sanctuary. They have awakened another nemesis.

Kes breathes, “The reawakening.” The winged hologram returns. Kes listens telepathically while the crew stares.

The messenger assumes the time has come. Thanks whoever entered. Hopes some of his kind remain to witness the Tokath reawakening. If not, the visitors should stay here. It is the only safe place.

Greta Kale shows torn sleeves. Creatures were clawing through gelatinous walls. If they had been fully free, they could have ripped the crew apart.

Sittik’s triumph becomes a grave

On the surface, the ground sinks in four triangular wedges, forming ramps into the underground cavern. Sittik expects Federation soldiers to charge out. Silence. Dust. Insects swarm again.

He bellows for surrender. Nothing answers. His men fire into the pit.

Movement at the bottom. Rising. Not climbing. Ascending.

Not Federation.

Brown parasectoids nearly half a meter long hover in the dust cloud, mandibles gleaming, jelly dripping from their shells. Sittik orders fire.

They shriek. More rise from the pit no matter how many fall. The air turns foul. Globs of corrosive liquid hit Sittik’s face and eat into his skin. His men writhe around him.

A Tokath drills into his abdomen and tears out his intestines. Kosla’s imagined reward vanishes in a red haze. Oblivion is all he wants.

Trakis sends a hail

Aboard the Kazon ship, Trakis finishes a necropsy that found no intelligence in the Tokath brain. They are instinct-driven, dangerous, untrainable. Like feral dogs.

He piggybacks a message on a low subspace band near the warp core emissions and hails Voyager.

Janeway answers. Trakis, Trabe physician, requests asylum. He can explain why the Kazon want this planet and why they are trying to destroy Voyager.

Janeway notes transporter range, offline phasers, and the need to drop shields. Trakis says he is in a lab near the starboard ventral airlocks.

Then B’Elanna reports phasers restored. A microfracture in the PDM crystal. Janeway orders battle stations and tells Paris to take them out of the nebula.

Rescue under fire

The Kazon do not answer hails. They power weapons. Voyager trades fire while closing distance. Janeway tells Paris to tuck under the enemy ship’s belly “like a baby kitten trying to nurse.”

On signal, shields drop. Transport locks on Trakis. A massive blast buckles the dorsal hull. Conduits explode. But the transport completes.

On the Kazon ship, Nimmet confronts Trakis with a knife, smug about intercepting the hail. Trakis blocks the slash with the dead Tokath’s belly and ruptures its poison sac into Nimmet’s hand.

The room shimmers. Trakis staggers onto Voyager’s chaotic bridge.

Janeway grabs his jacket and steers him into a chair. “I am not leaving my crew. Tell me what you know.”

The myth is real

Trakis speaks fast while the ship shakes. The Tokath are real. He examined one. Parasectoid, vicious, adaptable to air, water, even space. For centuries they kept this planet safe.

The Krett, a telepathic flying humanoid species, loved them. When a plasma eruption threatened all life, the Krett could evacuate but not take millions of Tokath. They embedded the creatures in hibernation chambers and left, hoping to return. Hostile space destroyed the Krett over time.

The Kazon-Vistik found a surviving Krett colony, heard the story, slaughtered them, and took the last Tokath specimens. Trakis’s patient died under Kazon mishandling.

Maje Dut thinks Voyager wants the Tokath too. He will never let Janeway near the surface.

Trakis urges retreat to a Trabe world. Janeway refuses.

Then Paris and Chakotay report activity from the planet. Organic readings. Millions of life signs rising through the ionosphere.

On screen: a brown miasma lifting into space.

Trakis whispers, “Captain, those are the Tokath.”

Closing thoughts

Chapter 21 is the explosion the book has been winding toward. The heat chamber, the melting walls, the holographic messenger, Trakis’s necropsy, Sittik’s bombardment: all of it was the same event seen from different angles.

Harry and Kes accidentally started a planetary reawakening. The away team is now told the chamber may be the only safe place on the planet. Sittik dies horribly for a prize he never understood. Voyager gets phasers back just in time to take damage rescuing Trakis.

And the Tokath are not a Kazon weapon yet. They are a swarm leaving home.

Taylor ends on a cliffhanger worthy of a season finale. Janeway wanted her crew back. Now she may have to save them from the planet’s own ancient defense system.

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