TPol had not been back to Vulcan since the funeral ceremonies for Elizabeth, only a few months ago. Trip had been with her then, his arm still immobilized in a neurotherapeutic sling to treat the wound hed received during the fight against the Terra Prime terrorists. TPol had pushed him away at first, fighting the pain that had threatened to bring all of her carefully suppressed emotions surging to the surface. But their mutual loss of little Elizabeth had eventually brought them closer together in spite of her reticence.

What they had attempted to build between them afterward was torn asunder a short while later, when Trip had taken an assignment for a covert Earth intelligence agency that was connected in some remote fashion to Starfleet. In order for him to infiltrate the Romulan Empire, he had been forced to fake his own death, with the aid of Captain Archer, Doctor Phlox, and Lieutenant Reed. TPol had not been told the truth until later, when Trip visited her on Earth, just prior to Archers speech at the signing of the Coalition Compact.

Trip had given Archer a note for her, and she had subsequently met him in a chamber underneath the stadium where the signing ceremony was being held. There, she had learned of his mission, and had seen that he had been surgically altered to resemble a Vulcan. It was only during their talk that she realized that if he was actually supposed to be a Romulan infiltrator, then the old stories of Romulans and Vulcans being kindred species must be true.

Oddly, TPol found herself unsurprised by the revelation; from past experience, she knew that Vulcan history was teeming with secrets, and that the Romulans were not the only Vulcanoid race to have become separated from the ways of its forebears. The Syrrannite sect had had it easy compared to what she had learned about the Frislen decades agoand about other races, during the time since.

That knowledge of the connection between the Romulans and the Vulcans carried with it an awful burden, however; if the secret connection between the Vulcans and the aggressive Romulans were ever made public, the distrust of other Coalition members toward Vulcan could split the fledgling alliance apart, thus rendering all of its members more vulnerable to dissension from within, attacks from without, and war from either direction.

Trip had assured her that the secret of the Romulan‑Vulcan connection would be safe with him, and that as few others as possible would learn of it. Archer had since discussed the matter with TPol, having come to many of the same conclusions that she had. But they hadnt discussed it as much as they might have before Trips “death, even if Archer had taken obvious pains to leave both Phlox and Reed out of those particular discussions.

Having once worked as an intelligence operative for the VShar, TPol fully understood the need for subterfuge and secrecy in espionage, but she nevertheless couldnt deny that her exclusion from the initial plan to fake Trips death had created a fracture in her relationship with Archer and the others. She had sacrificed everything to join the crew of Enterprise,even resigning her position in the Vulcan High Command. What more could she have done to prove her loyalty to Archer? Shed always admired the captain, even if she did sometimes disagree with his often emotion‑laden decisions. He, however, apparently had felt that he could not trust her quite as fully, and therefore had initially denied her the peace of knowing that Trip wasnt, in fact, gone, but rather was simplyaway.

Archer had tried to become more friendly with TPol since Trips “passing, but she felt that those efforts had sprung as much from his own lack of people close to himan innate loneliness that accompanied any command positionand from his feelings of personal guilt as they did from any specific desire for friendship. She couldnt deny that there was a certain logic to his actions, and she therefore allowed some degree of camaraderie to develop between them as they worked together. But until Trip returnedor she found a way to reconcile Archers betrayal of her trustshe knew that an emotional wall would continue to stand between her and Archer.

That wall stood even higher between herself and both Phlox and Reed. It wasnt as if either of them had reached out very much to her socially anyway, and the distance they both kept from her was consistent with the fact that their spheres of daily responsibility aboard Enterpriseoverlapped either very little or not at all with her own. Only during briefings or interdepartmental meetings were they generally all in one place, and during those times, TPol put forth an extraordinary effort to keep herself on point and focused on ships business.

TPol grasped at the IDIC symbol that she wore on a chain around her neck at all times, even under her Starfleet uniform. The pendant had been a gift from her mother, and it served as a constant reminder of the Vulcan credo, “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. TPol wasthat symbol aboard Enterprise. Certainly, humans of virtually every imaginable color and background served aboard this vessel, but besides herself and Phlox, no other nonhumans were present.

It wasnt that she wanted to isolate herself from others, even taking into account her sometimes ambivalent feelings toward Archer, Phlox, and Reed. TPol had cultivated friends and companions when she had lived and worked on Vulcan. But they were like her, suppressing their emotions, putting logic at the forefront. Only with Trip had she found on Enterprisea human whom she felt accepted her Vulcan attitudes, even if he did not share or necessarily even understand them. To the others, she must have seemed inscrutably alien.

The device attached to her desktop terminal let out three short beeps, pulling TPol out of her morose reverie. The irony behind the fact that she had been preparing to send a scrambled subspace transmission to Denak at the Vulcan Security Directorateand thereby covertly breaking Starfleets communications protocolswas not lost on her. In fact, it seemed somehow fitting, given that the last several years of her life aboard Enterprisehad brought her into multiple secret arrangements, clandestine and covert operations, governmental and religious subterfuges, and more. She hoped that one day in the future, Enterpriseand her crew might resume the pure exploration of the cosmos. Today, however, galactic politics in the known regions of space were simply too unstable to allow for that possibility, and Trips ongoing spy mission in Romulan territory stood as mute proof of that unhappy fact.

She pulled out her chair and sat before the terminal on the desktop, composing her thoughts. She hoped that she could still trust Denak, but until she knew for certain, she remained determined not to give too much away. Tapping the viewscreen, she took note of the tiny digital countdown screen linked to the subspace com‑scrambling device. She had approximately four minutes before her activities might be discovered by anyone monitoring outgoing signals from Enterprise.

The mans face that appeared on‑screen looked significantly more haggard than the one in TPols memory, and sometime in the last several years, Denak had apparently lost an eye and part of an ear. He was standing outdoors on a balcony of some sort, the shifting red sands of their homeworld visible in the distance behind him.

“I am surprised to hear from you, TPol,Denak said. “It has been twenty years since theKishaltriq celebration, has it not?

TPol nodded, knowing that it had, in fact, been longer. But the fact that Denak had mentioned Kishaltriqmeant that he was in a safe position to talk. “I hope you and your wife are faring well, she said. That was her verification response, since they both knew that Denak was not only a widower at present, but was also fast approaching the age when not even the fierce hormonal firestorms of Pon farrcould furnish any real impetus to seek a mate. TPol understood his insistence that she adhere to such time‑honored security protocols whenever they communicated; if either of them were under duress, or not in a safe zone, the personal banter would have seemed innocuous enough to anyone who might be listening in.