The Tarkan were an extremely hostile civilization in the Delta Quadrant. The Tarkan were said to take intruder's ships as trophies and then strand the crews on a moon. (VOY episode: "Darkling"; VOY - Strange New Worlds I short story: "Monthuglu")
History
In 2373, the crew of USS Voyager was warned by the Travellers to avoid Tarkan space, a detour that added a month to Voyager's journey to the Alpha Quadrant. (VOY episode: "Darkling")
Alternate timelines
In an parallel timeline where Voyager remained in the Delta Quadrant, Kes accidentally read the mind of one discovered the truth of why Tarkan stole alien ships despite already having some of their own. As it turned out, the Tarkan were afflicted by the Tarkan wasting syndrome, a devastating plague that ravaged the Tarkan worlds for generations. The crews of the Tarkan ships, unable to return home, felt compelled to capture other ships to give themselves room to reproduce and expand their population. Since the disease could lie dormant for decades, they felt the need to spread out their population into as many separate small groups as possible, to minimize the losses if an outbreak occurred.
Many refugees that fled from the Tarkan were taken in by the Vostigye Union.
Later, Kes was close to finding a cure for the disease in hopes of ending the piracy. In 2375, the Tarkan joined several other species in defending the Vostigye home system from an attack by the Voth. (VOY - Myriad Universes - Infinity's Prism novella: Places of Exile)
In 2381 of the First Splinter, following the dissolution of the Borg Collective, the Tarkons (sic) invaded and annexed the Borg Cooperative's planet. Later that year, when Voyager arrived in the system to contact Riley Frazier, the Tarkons declared that peaceful intentions were irrelevant to the Tarkon Commercial Charter, and they would seize Voyager by force. Eventually, Voyager and Achilles were able to outwit the Tarkons and retrieve all the survivors of Frazier's group for relocation elsewhere. (VOY novel: The Eternal Tide)
Appendices
Background information
- The episode "Darkling" and the novella Places of Exile give the species name as the "Tarkan", with no form change as the plural, but The Eternal Tide instead gives the name as the "Tarkons".
External link
- Tarkan article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.
