Folding his arms across his chest, Miguel said, “Why don’t you just start up your own Terra Prime cell, then? I hear they’re looking for a new leader now that Paxton is in jail.”

Bert reacted with speechless incredulity, as though he’d just been slapped across the face. “My God, Mike. Is that what you think of me? That I’m some sort of racist isolationist?”

Miguel regretted his words the instant they’d left this lips. After all, hadn’t Terra Prime wounded Bert as well? The death of the half‑Vulcan child that Paxton’s terrorists had created, in part, from Trip’s flesh, was no doubt also still an open wound.

“You tell me, Bert,” he said, trying to shift to a more conciliatory tone. “Look, I know you’re in pain. But here we are, among thousands of people who’ve come from all over the planet–a lot of them are even from otherplanets–to celebrate the arrival of the future.”

A future that just might make your family’s sacrifices worthwhile,he thought. He knew he couldn’t utter the thought aloud–at least, not yet.

Bert merely fixed him with another hard stare that seemed to last for hours.

Finally, Bert’s expression softened. “I’m sorry, Mike. I know you’re just trying to help. I guess I’m just not in the mood to celebrate. At least…not yet.”

Miguel nodded, and gave Bert a gentle hug. He knew that the grieving process always took time, just as it had for Bert after Elizabeth Tucker died in the Xindi attack. And he understood that some wounds could tear the scabs right off all the older ones.

But he also knew that there were only two directions in which one could look: forward and backward. As he tried to focus his attention forward, onto the distant stage from which the future was to be summoned today, he noted that Bert had turned in his seat, to resume staring in the direction of the three Starfleet officers.

Backward, at least for now.

Miguel sighed. It was likely to be a very long afternoon.

The box in which Malcolm Reed found himself seated was so high that he half expected to succumb to explosive decompression at any moment. Or at least a real gully‑washer of a nosebleed.

With Hoshi Sato and Travis Mayweather seated to his right, he looked below and saw a carpet of seats and boxes, occupied by both ordinary civilians and official delegates from worlds across the sector and beyond, spreading downward and away into apparent infinity.

And just beyond lay the stage, which supported the raised, brightly spotlighted dais where galactic history was to be made beneath an impossibly distant backdrop of blue‑globe‑and‑laurel‑leaf Earth flags, complemented by the multicolored banners and symbols of three other worlds. Unlike the stadium’s multitude of seats, boxes, and viewing stands, the dais remained empty as yet. The air seemed charged with anticipation.

But not quite enough to ameliorate Reed’s annoyance at the all but cosmic distance that separated him and his colleagues from the dais from which their captain was to give his address.

“Are you certain these are the right seats?” Reed asked no one in particular.

“Yep,” Mayweather said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above the murmurs of the not‑quite‑settled crowd.

Reed harrumphed under his breath. “They don’t seem very ‘VIP’ to me.”

“I’m sure the admiral wanted us to have a view that took in the scopeof the occasion,” Hoshi said with what might have been the merest ghost of a smirk.

Reed wasn’t quite certain whether or not she was being ironic, although he had assumed that Admiral Gardner had put them up here as a passive‑aggressive way of punishing both Captain Archer and his command staff for having attempted to intervene in the Coridan Prime disaster rather than proceeding immediately home to Earth, per Gardner’s initial orders.

“From this distance you can’t tell an Andorian from a Tellarite,” he grumped.

After Phlox conducted Trip’s grieving parents toward one of the VIP boxes, Archer returned to his ancient, crumbling dressing room to finish making the final preparations for his speech, for better or worse.

When he opened the door, he found a black‑robed male Vulcan waiting for him.

“Can I help you?” he asked, wondering how his visitor had gotten past the security personnel who had been hovering nearly invisibly nearby ever since Archer and his crew had arrived at Candlestick.

Archer’s jaw dropped like an anchor when the Vulcan responded with an incongruous ear‑to‑ear grin–and spoke with a voice that he had half expected never to hear again.

“Cap’n, it’s me.It’s Trip.”

Archer’s bemusement quickly gave way to a broad smile of his own. He walked over to his old friend and grabbed him in an unself‑conscious bear hug.

“Easy, Captain. In spite of how I look these days, my ribs are still only human.”

Archer released him and took a step back, studying his old friend’s surgically altered features, his dark hair, prominent brow, and upswept eyebrows. Most striking of all were Trip’s elegantly tapered pointed ears. He doubted that Trip’s own parents would have recognized him, but he also had the grace not to utter that particular thought aloud.

“So you’re a Vulcan now,” Archer said with a wry smile. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, Trip…but why are you here?”

“I figured you’d be nervous about delivering your speech, so I won’t stay long. Written it yet, by the way?” Trip’s grin broadened.

Archer made a mock frown as he picked up the padd that contained the text of his speech, along with an intimidatingly vast amount of source material drawn from the historical records of four planets. The device now displayed the surprisingly profound words, first uttered centuries ago, of Shallash, the second Liberator of Tellar; Archer was determined to find a way to work them into his own presentation somehow.

“Still working on it,” he finally said noncommittally.

“I came to wish you luck, Jonathan,” Trip said. Archer couldn’t remember the last time Trip had addressed him by his first name, but he knew that his old friend had more than earned the right. Besides, Trip was no longer his subordinate. He was simply a friend, and an ally.

Trip reached into his black robe and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which he placed carefully in Archer’s hands. “I also came to ask you to deliver this to T’Pol before you give your speech,” he said. “I’d tell you to knock ’em dead, by the way, but that would probably be in poor taste. So how about ‘break a leg’ instead? I’ll be watching.”

With that, Trip turned and exited through the same door Archer had used to enter. Still carrying his padd, Archer tucked the note into his jacket, then followed Trip’s footsteps back out into the corridor.

He wasn’t a bit surprised to find no trace of his friend.

Raising his padd to resume his eleventh‑hour revision of his speech, Archer walked down the corridor and entered a backstage anteroom adjacent to a staircase that led upward to the raised speaker’s dais on the auditorium’s wide stage.

Looking up briefly from the padd, he saw that T’Pol and Phlox were already awaiting him there, the latter offering a broad smile, the former bearing a disapproving scowl. Once again, T’Pol strode up to him and began adjusting his collar, making him feel like a little kid who’d just been caught sneaking away to the playground while still dressed up in his Sunday best.

“Please stand still,” she said sternly. With an involuntary roll of his eyes, Archer complied while still trying to see the text on his padd.

But T’Pol evidently wasn’t quite finished upbraiding him. “If you hadn’t waited until the last minute, you would have had time to memorize your speech.”

His gaze still on the scrolling text, he murmured, “You sound like my ninth‑grade teacher.”

Archer glanced away from his display and saw that Phlox was examining a padd of his own. The doctor seemed quite impressed by whatever he was reading.