“Are you sure you’re all right, madam?”
T’Pol turned, and realized that Commander Kirk was the only other person besides her still in the transporter room. “Yes, Mister Kirk, I am certain,” she said. “I should thank you for helping Subcommander T’Pring honor the commander’s request.”
“You’re…welcome,” Kirk said, even as he shook his head. T’Pol knew full well that the fear of the ship self-destructing around them while they debated the wisdom of bringing the Romulan aboard was a greater factor than any kindness on the humans’ part. But they went through the ritual pretense all the same.
“And, Lady T’Pol, I want to apologize to you,” Kirk added, unexpectedly. “I…there was no excuse for my earlier actions. I can rationalize them, tell myself that I was thinking of Earth’s best interests, but in reality, I let that man play on my preexisting prejudices. What’s more, even after confirming his claims, I didn’t entirely trust him. Part of me suspected he didn’t have the best of intentions in wanting to get you alone, and…that was all right with me. I put your life at risk for no good reason. You did nothing to deserve…I don’t expect you to forgive me for that, but I am sorry.”
T’Pol considered the rush of words and genuine emotion the human offered, and she was repelled. While she believed his remorse was real, and his apology earnest, they were meaningless. They did not undo a single thing that had been done to her, and would do nothing to make his actions less damaging. And since the man specifically said he did not expect forgiveness, she saw no reason to assuage his feelings of guilt by giving in to this ridiculous emotional, human need for…
“Oh, now, come on. I screwed up more than my fair share of times, and you always accepted my apologies once it got through my thick skull how wrong I was.”
It was different with you, T’Pol protested. The manner in which we typically resolved our disagreements…
“Well, I’m not suggesting you make up with Kirk that way, for Pete’s sake. But that part aside, don’t tell me you didn’t feel better once you decided to accept an apology. No matter how illogical that might be.”
T’Pol stared at Kirk, silent and impassive. He naturally took this as a dismissal of his heartfelt expression of contrition, and started to turn away from her.
“Mister Kirk.”
He turned back, but now his countenance had hardened, his emotions reburied and hidden behind the façade of the serious Starfleet officer. As a faithful follower of the teachings of Surak, she should have left those obscured emotions just as they were. Instead, she probed the recess where they’d been hidden. “What made you so hateful of Vulcans?”
Kirk glared back at her, almost as reluctant to liberate those emotions as one of her own people. Then the restraining walls crumbled. “My wife and my son were killed when a Vulcan patrol fired on their transport, after she had been invited to a scientific symposium on Vulcan.”
“The Galileo,” T’Pol whispered. The tragedy had been the main story on all of Earth’s information services for weeks after it happened.
Kirk nodded. “Yes. Of course, I know you had nothing to do with that, that it was just a tragic mistake. But since then, every Vulcan…” He hesitated, clenching his jaw and looking away from her. T’Pol did not interrupt the silence that followed, but waited for Kirk to finish. “I look at you, and I can’t help but see the murderer of my family.”
“I am sorry for your loss, Mister Kirk,” T’Pol told him. “And I understand. When I look at you, I—”
T’Pol quickly stopped herself, and Kirk turned his face slowly back to look directly at her again. “You what?”
It is irrelevant, she should have said. Because it was. And because she had never told another being the full story. But here, with this human who had just admitted his own anger and hatred toward her and all her people, the words began spilling out of her for the first time…
It was freezing cold in New York City.
T’Pol had known, of course, it would be. After all, it was winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere, and it had been hours since night had fallen in this part of the globe. And both she and Trip had bundled up in layers upon layers of clothing—including a heavy woolen cap that completely covered her ears—over a set of strategically placed sarium battery–powered heatpacks. This ensemble had always sufficed in the past, in those years when they would celebrate the traditional winter holidays at Jonathan’s home a few hundred kilometers farther north. But the winds that blew through the crowded, man-made canyons of Seventh Avenue and Broadway seemed to cut right through to the skin, and deeper, causing her entire body to tense. As another such gust roared past, carrying tiny shards of crystallized water with it, again T’Pol wondered how she had allowed Trip to talk her into this.
The original plan had been for them to join Jonathan and his family for this event, but he had called earlier in the day, explaining that Erika had taken ill, and that he and his wife had opted to quietly celebrate the holiday at home. T’Pol had wanted to do the same, but Trip wouldn’t hear of it. “Come on, we’ve been planning this for over a year! The celebration in Times Square is one of the great New Year’s Eve traditions.”
“Perhaps next year.”
“Next year, hell. This is the turn of the century! We have to go!”
“As I understand the Gregorian calendar, 2200 is in fact the last year of the twenty-second century, and the twenty-third does not begin until the year 2201.”
“Eh, don’t give me that nitpicky stuff,” Trip grunted, waving his hand dismissively at her. “New Year’s 2200 is the big one; ask any human.”
T’Pol ignored the jibe. After thirty-eight years of marriage, she had given up trying to either understand or debate what Trip deemed important. If her husband wanted to assign special significance to the date of 1 January 2200, it was best to simply accept that.
“We should go,” Trip continued to wheedle. “We never go anywhere.”
T’Pol furrowed her brow, and turned on Trip. “Go then,” she had told him, her tone almost as frigid as the New York air. “Nothing is stopping you.”
Trip’s face fell as he realized his faux pas. “Wait, now, T’Pol…” he said, but she had turned her back on him at that point, moving into the small house’s kitchen. She ignored Trip as he followed and called her name again, busying herself by flipping through meal cards, though she was not hungry.
She had not exactly been hiding here in Panama City since coming to Earth. She and Trip had visited Jonathan’s home several times, they’d attended Travis Mayweather’s wedding, and Hoshi Sato’s funeral. But at the same time, she tried not to draw attention to herself, being the only alien on a planet that did not want her there. On occasion, she would wistfully remember the freedom they’d had aboard Enterprise, traveling wherever they liked, the Vulcan High Command or the United Earth Foreign Office be damned. But she’d given that up—and much more—in order to stay with Trip, and had done so willingly. For him to then behave as if he were the one to have made some great sacrifice…
Then Trip was right behind her, one hand on her shoulder. “Wife,” he said low into her ear, as he reached around her with his other hand, holding out the first two fingers.
T’Pol sighed and turned as she touched her fingers to his. He occasionally called her by such human endearments as “honey” and “darling,” which were largely meaningless to her. But that word, which carried in it all the weight and significance of the Vulcan marital union that had survived since the Time of the Beginning, never failed to strike a chord deep within her Vulcan heart and soul. “Wife, I am sorry,” Trip told her. “You know that being with you is the only important thing to me.”
“I know, husband,” she said, caressing his two fingers. Then she reached up with her other hand, slipped it around the back of his neck, and pulled his face to hers for a kiss. “We will go.”
“You sure?”
T’Pol raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “As you said, we rarely go anywhere.”
/>
And so, there they were in the middle of Manhattan Island on a late December night, celebrating the approach of an arbitrarily selected second in time, surrounded by tens of thousands of other boisterous, inebriated celebrants. A band on an elevated stage performed something called “splitter,” a contemporary musical style which to T’Pol’s covered ears sounded like the cries of aylakim being eaten alive by a le-matya. The younger revelers in the crowd, however, clearly enjoyed it, throwing their bodies about in an unrestrained manner that T’Pol could only guess was supposed to resemble dance. She and Trip watched their enthusiastic contortions, he with a huge smile on his rosy-red face that, illogically, seemed to warm her. T’Pol allowed herself a rare smile of her own. Trip turned to face her, and the noise and crowd became irrelevant as husband and wife shared this moment of happiness together.
Then, for some unknown reason, Trip’s smile faltered. He reached out and grabbed at the knit scarf T’Pol had knotted around her neck with a gloved hand, trying to pull it loose. T’Pol’s smile disappeared as the remnants of a snowball still stuck to Trip’s fingertips melted on the underside of her chin and slid down her skin. “What are you doing?” she asked as she pulled away, a move that only served to tighten the scarf knot against the side of her neck.
In backing away, she bumped against a large man who, judging by the smell of his breath, had been celebrating the coming of midnight since noon. And for reasons known only to him, rather than accepting the contact as an inevitable consequence of having a large number of people in a relatively small area, he opted instead to thrust his elbow out, driving it into the small of her back, and growl, “Watch it, damn you.”
“Hey, pal!” Trip shouted as he caught T’Pol and staggered backward slightly himself. “Take it easy, huh?”
The other man’s expression darkened even further. “You got a problem, gramps?” he asked, reaching past T’Pol and poking Trip in the shoulder.
Before matters could escalate any further, T’Pol turned to face the man and said, “I apologize for bumping into you. It was not deliberate.”
The irritation on the man’s face twisted into a look of confusion. “What’s wrong with your face?”
T’Pol lifted a gloved hand to her cheek. She should have realized, seeing all the ruddy-faced humans around her, that she would have a similar physiological response to the cold—except, in her case, it would manifest in her complexion taking on an emerald hue. That, she understood too late, was why Trip had been fussing with her scarf.
Trip now grabbed her elbow, whispered in a voice only she could hear, “The natives are getting restless,” and started to guide her away from the drunk. T’Pol didn’t argue, nor did she intend to let Trip set their pace in putting distance between themselves and the drunken stranger.
She couldn’t move fast enough, though. The drunk lashed out with his hand as the two tried to escape into the crowd, and his fingers just happened to catch the cap T’Pol had been wearing.
There were gasps, and shouts of “Vulcan!” and “Alien!” The drunk was so stunned that he could only stare at her, the cap fallen from his slackened grasp to his feet. But others stepped up in his place, eyeing T’Pol with suspicion and anger. It had been nearly half a century since the last extraterrestrial had been expelled from Earth, and now, here was one among them, posing as one of them, infiltrating one of their ritual celebrations.
The angry villagers surged toward their monster…
T’Pol paused, and Kirk remained silent, almost afraid to breathe. She had remained expressionless as she told her story, relating it in a detached, Vulcan-like manner. But Kirk could recognize that, far from being emotionless, she was in fact making a concerted effort to hold back the very real pain she was reliving. It was a look he had done his best to perfect himself over the last six months.
“Trip, of course, leapt to my defense,” she continued a moment later. “He put himself between me and the others, even though he was hardly a match for a mob of men a third of his age. By the time the police were able to push through the crowd, break up the fight, and have him beamed to the hospital…”
T’Pol fell silent again. “I’m sorry,” Kirk whispered after a moment, and then, remembering what the Romulan had said in his Vulcan guise, added, “I grieve with thee.”
T’Pol looked somewhat surprised at that, but simply nodded in acceptance of the sentiment. “But that is who I see when I look at you, Mister Kirk.”
“Thank you,” Kirk answered, and then clarified, “for sharing that story with me. I get the feeling that it was not that easy for you.” T’Pol said nothing, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with him.
Kirk turned and started to leave, but paused short of the door. “I think, madam, that the next Vulcan I meet, I will be more likely to see you in them than anyone else.”
T’Pol studied him for a long moment, then dipped her head in what he took as a gesture of gratitude. Kirk smiled back—a genuinely heartfelt, friendly smile.
Christopher Pike stood in the well of the main council chamber, looking up at the grand ivory-white dome overhead, and then letting his eyes fall to the rows and rows of tiered wooden benches that circled the speaker’s dais. The room was rich in history, and its walls seemed almost to echo with the famed speeches that had been delivered here over the centuries, from the Ramatis Choral Debates of five centuries ago, to the founding of the Interplanetary Coalition in 2161. And now, fates willing, history was to be made once again.
“Captain.”
Pike turned to face Ambassadors Hedford and Tarses, joining him at the foot of the high marble podium. They exchanged hellos, and then Hedford turned, as Pike had, to take in their surroundings. “Kind of gives you an idea how the early Christians in Rome felt, just before the lions were released,” she observed as more and more delegates filled the seats.
Pike studied her face, looking for some hint of irony, and finding none. “You think it’s that bad?” Pike asked, looking up again and studying the attendees a bit more critically.
The conference had almost been canceled outright in the wake of the Kuvak’s destruction, and it was only after the Enterprise had returned to Babel with proof of outside interference that it was agreed the summit should go on as planned. However, one didn’t need a high esper rating to tell that the mood of many of the participants had shifted.
“The delegates are concerned,” Tarses said, diplomatic as always. “We’re being blamed, rightly or wrongly, for drawing the Romulans back onto the galactic stage. We lost a lot of the goodwill we started out with forty-eight hours ago. Whether or not we can earn that back…”
As Tarses trailed off, leaving that question to dangle just above their heads, Jim Kirk joined the group. The two ambassadors both greeted the commander’s presence with rather undiplomatic expressions. Pike couldn’t really fault them, all things considered. But Babel Security had decided—in the interests of diplomacy, of course—to drop any charges stemming from the Romulans’ theft of security codes, and the worst official offense Pike could think of to pin on him was unauthorized absence. However, the fact that Kirk actually wanted to be witness to this event was reason enough, in Pike’s mind, to temporarily forgo any punitive measures against him. “How did it go, Number One?” Pike asked him.
“Pretty well, I think, considering,” he answered.
“How did what go?” Tarses asked.
Kirk hesitated slightly before telling the ambassadors, “I spoke with Councillor Sarek, to express my personal apologies to him.”
“You did what?” Hedford’s eyes grew huge, outraged that the Starfleet officer had once again interjected himself into her diplomatic realm. She looked over Kirk’s shoulder to one of the foremost tables, where the Councillor and Subcommander T’Pring were now seated in close conversation.
“I felt I owed it to him to explain myself, face-to-face,” Kirk said.
Tarses scoffed. “I’m sure he found the sentiment utterly illogical.”
“Yes, he did,” the commander confirmed. “But…”
“But?”
“Well, he told me that he had visited the Romulan in the Kumari brig,” Kirk said, the beginning of a grin pulling at the corner of his mouth, “and that he couldn’t have faulted his own son for making the same mistake I did.”
“Well, his son was banished from Vulcan twenty years ago,” Hedford pointed out, “so that’s not saying very much.”
Kirk shrugged and continued, “He seemed really fascinated by his look-alike. Almost…excited by his existence.”
“An excited Vulcan?” Tarses asked, one eyebrow raised.
Before Kirk could respond, though, a high chiming noise rang out, filling the chamber and echoing back down from the dome. Pike turned to note a uniformed Ithenite—the sergeant-at-arms, he guessed, or the equivalent—holding a small bell and striking it as he climbed the dais. Pike and the rest of the Earth party moved to a small table at the side of the floor as a tall, birdlike Skorr then took the podium. “Attention, all present: this special session of the Interplanetary Coalition Diplomatic Council, called for the purpose of the consideration of a petition by the government of United Earth and its Commonwealth Colonies, will now come to order.”
There followed what Pike took for ritualistic invocations, some parliamentary procedures, and a reading into the record of the official petition from Prime Minister Winston. Just as Pike’s mind had begun to wander, the entire chamber was on its feet, clapping and making other sounds and gestures of welcome as T’Pol appeared from a side doorway and made her way to the dais.
She looked uncomfortable, but not overly so. As she reached the podium, she gave the assembly a slight nod of appreciation, and the ovation faded. She paused, looked out into the crowd, and began to speak.
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