Archer wasn’t surprised, though he was disappointed.
“You have my sincere thanks for continuing to try, Mister Foreign Minister,” he said, shifting in his chair and straightening his posture. “But I’m confused about one thing: The last time I contacted you, you seemed to think you had a reasonable chance of changing her mind.”
“So I did, Captain.” Despite his disciplined emotional control, the lines of despair on Soval’s face seemed to both deepen and lengthen. “But that time has passed. There is no longer any chance that Vulcan will enter the war. I expect those who wish to maintain Vulcan’s isolation to be impossible to persuade now.”
“Why?” Archer said.
“Because someone has perpetrated an unspeakable act of violence on Mount Seleya, Captain. An explosion. As a consequence, all of Vulcan will now oppose our entering the war, not merely the most committed Syrrannite pacifists or the most reactionary isolationists. Vulcan may even close its borders to outworlders.”
“What has happened?” T’Pol asked. Though her emotions seemed very carefully modulated, something about her manner made Archer keenly uncomfortable; her proximity felt like the eerie drop in barometric pressure that often preceded a tornado.
“Surak,” Soval said, pausing as though he had to catch his breath. “The living katra of Surak has just been lost to us forever.” With that he signed off and vanished from the screen, as though he no longer trusted himself to speak coherently.
The thing that Archer found most surprising about this revelation was that it hadn’t surprised him. It had shocked him, but it hadn’t surprised him. He realized only now that he had sensed the violence of Surak’s passing a short time ago, on the bridge, no doubt because of some residual effect of having once held Surak’s katra.
T’Pol stood in the middle of the ready room, her eyes closed while her tightly clenched fists put the lie to any pretense of serenity.
She has to go home, he thought, stunned by yet another new realization. Her world has just suffered an unimaginable cultural tragedy. She can’t stay aboard Enterprise, no matter how much I might need her now.
Though uncertainty about just about everything plagued him, he knew one thing with absolute certainty: Never before had he felt as alone as he did right now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With his latest outing in the Star Trek: Enterprise line, this author would again like to recognize the contributions of the legions who enriched the contents of these pages: Andy Mangels, who collaborated with me on the preceding three Enterprise volumes, as well as on numerous other tomes, both Trek and non-Trek, before that; über-editor Margaret Clark, whose boundless patience, creativity, and enthusiasm kept me on track throughout the many iterations of this book’s plot and the lengthy process of transforming it into (I hope) a coherent manuscript; John Van Citters of CBS’s licensing department, for his keen eye and perspicacious observations; my fellow Pocket Books Star Trek fiction writers, most notably Christopher L. Bennett, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Diane Duane, John M. Ford, David R. George III, Joe Haldeman, Jeffrey Lang, David Mack, S. D. Perry, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Susan Shwartz & Josepha Sherman, and Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, all of whose work became sources of Easter eggs and/or inspiration; Memory Alpha, Memory Beta, and the entire Star Trek internet community, those tireless wiki-compilers whose multitudinous and serried ranks defy enumeration here; the kind and indulgent folks at the New Deal Café (née the Daily Market and Café), where much of this novel was written; Eric A. Stillwell, whose name became attached to a fictional Starfleet captain in the Enterprise series finale, a tradition that continues in this volume; Mike Burch of Expert Auto Repair, whose skillful maintenance of Andy Mangels’s car earned him a billet as Enterprise’s current chief engineer; Doug Drexler and Michael Okuda’s Ships of the Line hardcover, which inspired certain events aboard Columbia, foreshadowed here and realized in detail in David Mack’s astonishing Destiny trilogy; special-effects wizard John Dykstra and designer Andrew Probert, whose names adorned two of my pre-Federation Starfleet ships; S. John Ross, Steven S. Long, and Adam Dickinson, whose The Andorians: Among the Clans fixed the identity of the despot Krotus (“Whom Gods Destroy”) as Andorian; John A. Theise (author of FASA’s two-volume RPG sourcebook, The Romulan War) for Praetor Karzan; Geoffrey Mandel, for his Star Trek—Star Charts, which kept me from getting lost in the galactic hinterlands many times; Michael and Denise Okuda, whose Star Trek Encyclopedia remains indispensable; Shane Johnson, whose The Worlds of the Federation inspired the dragons of Berengaria VII; the copy editor who perished during this large tome’s grueling production process; Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, who brought Star Trek: Enterprise to the small screen; Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens and Manny Coto, scenarists whose televised work created the continuity from which this novel and its two predecessors arose; Gregory Itzin, for his portrayal of both Captain Sopek (“Shadows of P’Jem”) and Admiral Black (“In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II”); the entire regular cast of Star Trek: Enterprise, especially Scott Bakula (for leaping into not one, but two, of science fiction’s most compelling and conflicted heroic roles), and Connor Trinneer and Jolene Blalock, whose portrayal of Charles Tucker and T’Pol created a classic portrait of truly star-crossed lovers; Gene Roddenberry (1920–1991), for having created the entire universe in which I get to spend so much time playing; and most importantly, my wife, Jenny, and our sons, James and William, for both long-suffering patience and inspiration.
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