We made it through all 27 chapters of Bless the Beasts.
The story boils down to this. Voyager needs repairs and dilithium. They land in the middle of a planet’s health crisis and civil unrest over a treatment that requires harvesting blood from what turn out to be intelligent sea animals. The crew gets pulled into raids, hostage situations, debates, and a medical breakthrough.
Janeway sits in her command chair. Marima stands beside her watching everything with fascination. Kes runs a tricorder over her. Kim works at ops, fine tuning. He has the projection and channel open to Kolias.
Book: Star Trek: Voyager #7 - Ghost of a Chance
Authors: Mark A. Garland and Charles G. McGraw
ISBN: 0671567985
Chapter 9 picks up in the citadel control room, where wallscreens show a war Torres can barely track. Gardeners grapple with dwarf soldiers. Trees fling explosive fruit at the Andirrim shuttle crawling up the golden road. Adamant bends the whole battlefield like a conductor.
Janeway wants Paris and Kim in the ready room for a debrief. But they are not in sickbay anymore. Torres pulled them out under her authority to work on repairs. Paris walks onto the bridge looking thinner and pensive. He is happy to be back. Chakotay calls him Poocuh with a smile.
Star Trek: Voyager - The Caretaker by L. A. Graf | ISBN 0-671-51914-X
Previous: The Caretaker Revealed in the Barn | Next: Paris and Janeway in the Ready Room
B’Elanna storms into sickbay and drags a protesting Kim out to help with engineering. She tells Paris to report to the bridge for helm checks once he is cleared.
The doctor scans the orange darra meat Kes delivered. He starts running tests with analyzers and replicators. Paris tries to get up but the doctor threatens to use him for experiments too.
Paris wakes in sickbay next to Kim and Marima. He is thrilled to see the doctor. The doctor gives him a mild sedative to calm down.
The sky turns ugly and the storm hits hard. Wind screams, sea churns, lightning everywhere. Sea bats get knocked down. The boat pitches violently and they huddle in the wheelhouse with no control left.
Chakotay shows up in Janeway’s quarters with a moral problem, not a mechanical one. The Kirse use the gardener creatures like draft animals, except worse. They modify them. They kill them when they have to. It goes against everything Chakotay was raised to believe.
A week into the Academy and Kathryn Janeway is already at war. Not with Klingons or some space anomaly. With a food replicator.
Paris shows off a string of crudely made toy darra he found in Assurna’s cabin on the Micaszian boat. Kim thinks they might be decoration but Marima explains the Micaszians used to worship the darra as part of an old cult. She has no patience for it.
If Chapter 9 showed you the Ryol could hurt Voyager’s people, Chapter 10 shows you they can hurt each other in ways that make your skin crawl.
Janeway sits with Tuvok. Borizus admitted he knew Paris and Kim were at sea with Marima. He claims he overheard it in Kolias’s office. Janeway does not buy it. Tuvok used a little tactical deception to get him talking. Janeway lets it slide.
Torres clutches the ligature and almost lets herself think about Chakotay smiling at her for real. She pushes the thought away. Klingon pride and all that. She calls for beam up but her tricorder starts beeping. A signal. Harry and Paris maybe. She cancels the beam.
On the boat Paris tells Marima it is time to come clean about the darra. Are they just fish or are they smart? Marima waves it off. Big stupid fish with useful blood. Nothing more.
Previous: Chapter 8: The Murdered Sun Revealed | Next: Chapter 10: Garai and Linneas Aboard the Destroyer
Chapter 9 splits the action again. On Voyager, Kim just cracked the murdered sun mystery. On Veruna Four, Chakotay is living inside the consequences. Golden uses him to explore oral tradition, Prime Directive guilt, and a reveal so big it reframes the entire Verunan civilization.
Star Trek: Voyager #4 - Violations
By Susan Wright
ISBN: 0671520466
Chapter 16 is the moral center of the political plot. Fee is sympathetic. Janeway still won’t budge.
Kim is spoon feeding soup to Marima on the abandoned Micaszian ship. Paris is trying to figure out how to steer back to Vandorra. Marima perks up enough to give directions. Head toward the sun in the morning.
Torres is on the streets of Vandorra with a wrist beacon hunting the missing ligature. The place feels off right away. People dance in the street but ignore one woman who faints. Two merchants fight over a cab and nobody stops them.
Torres beams down to the planet. Fresh air feels good. She has a molecular tracer on her wrist and a medical tricorder hidden. Phaser too. She follows the signal for the missing ligature northwest.
Kim hates life on the water. Seasick, bad food, wet clothes. Paris eats like it is fine. Marima is getting weaker every day.
Marima drags herself across the deck to sit by Paris. She looks worse. The plague is wearing her down fast. She refuses food and rests in the sun.
Janeway and Tuvok question Borizus in the brig. She bluffs hard. Long prison time far from home. No return ever. He starts to crack. Says it is all Kolias fault. He just followed orders to get medical tools.
Chapter four is the moral collision the whole book has been building toward. Vok shows up within the hour, jerky and agitated, nothing like his calm first meeting. Janeway tells him Kayla collapsed near golden flowers. The Doctor traced it to a biological contaminant everyone has been breathing.
Book: Star Trek: Voyager #6 - The Murdered Sun
Author: Christie Golden
Year: 1996
Previous: Chapter 2: The Akerian Empire and the Wormhole Debate | Next: Chapter 4: Sun-Eater Revealed and First Combat
Kim and Paris wake up to a guard yelling. New work detail. Marima is already up. They get led to a smelly fish hold. Bloody aprons and gloves wait for them.
I picked up The Black Shore because I wanted a self-contained Voyager adventure that felt like a long episode, not a galaxy-spanning epic. Greg Cox delivered exactly that. One planet. One trap. Seventeen chapters of slow-burn dread that ends in a full crew crisis.
Torres finishes the recast with the fresh alloy. Borizus helps her move the parts to the fabricator and then to the main engineering bay. The casings fit perfectly into the conduit cradle. She welds the last connectors and feels a small thaw toward the guy. He brought the metal and stuck around through the process. She tells him it might have worked out better than she thought after all the earlier headaches.
Paris wakes up on the Micasz ship with a lump on his head from the fight. The guards now keep the two officers from feeding duty. Kim watches the darra outside and worries. If they do not eat they will start eating each other. He sneaks below, fills a bucket of the wriggling spiderworms, and heads for the deserted bow on tiptoe. The darra are already gathering and moving closer as if they notice him. He swings the bucket to pour when Assurna’s long jointed arm blocks him. She grabs the bucket and slams it down.
On the Micasz vessel the darra gather around the ship at feeding time. Paris and Kim toss buckets of squirming spiderworms over the side. The creatures churn the water with their tails as they eat. Marima drags herself on deck to help even though she is shaking badly. Her knees buckle in several places. She collapses again with her eyes rolling back. Harry catches her head in his lap. Paris calls to the guards for medical help for the lord councillor’s daughter. The guard just grunts and turns away. Paris shoves the issue and gets slugged hard. He ducks and lands solid hits on the alien’s face and neck before the big Micaszian slams him across the deck. Paris’s head hits something and he blacks out.
Janeway is done with protocol. She sends Kolias packing and tells Chakotay and Tuvok to cancel all shore leave. Find Paris and Kim now. She also wants Borizus, the engineering guild head from the reception, brought up for a private talk. He looked like he had something to say before Kolias’s daughter interrupted.
Torres has had it with the guest engineer. Jovic from Vandorra keeps poking at controls in engineering. One wrong tap and the inertial dampers could slam the whole crew into the walls. She warns him twice. On the third time she calls security and has him hauled out.
Book: Star Trek: Voyager #7 - Ghost of a Chance
Authors: Mark A. Garland and Charles G. McGraw
ISBN: 0671567985
In the dim bar Paris and Kim try the local drink. Marima, Kolias’s daughter from the reception, slides in and buys them another round. She asks about their ship and travels. They dodge the tech questions.
Harry Kim is wide eyed in the market. Tall Sardalians everywhere, strange music, warm gems for sale. He buys pendants for his mom and girlfriend. He is thinking about home and all the stories he will tell.
Janeway stares at the viewscreen and sees why everyone is hooked on this planet. Vandorra looks clean and green with nice buildings and parks. The people move slow and look a little gaunt though. Kolias’s collapse still bothers her.
The plaza on Vandorra is pretty. Orange leaves, fountain, tall locals in silver outfits with braids and tattoos around their golden eyes. Chakotay and Tuvok arrive by transporter. The Sardalians act like this happens every day even though they claim to be a regular stop for other freighters.
Star Trek: Voyager: Ragnarok
By Nathan Archer
ISBN: 067152044X
Chapter 5 slows the pace, literally. Janeway orders impulse as Voyager nears another system. Neelix mutters that if she insists on crossing the cluster, she could at least do it faster. Nothing alive out here except the Hachai and P’nir, and you will not get supplies from them.
Voyager is in trouble. The dilithium isn’t recrystallizing right and power levels are dropping fast. Torres gives them maybe twenty six hours before warp capability is at risk.
Star Trek: Voyager: Ragnarok
By Nathan Archer
ISBN: 067152044X
Chapter 4 might be the hardest chapter in the opening stretch. The last system had boiled planets and stripped metal. This one used to have a habitable world. Now it has an asteroid belt and three gas giants.
Voyager is stuck in the Delta Quadrant. Seventy thousand light years from home. They need dilithium to keep going. That’s how this story starts.