The support from the others at Vokas’s table, and more than a few of the patrons elsewhere in the crowded establishment, was vocal. Many eyes now locked on Tobin, Phlox, and Iloja with open hostility—in a cool, controlled Vulcan way, of course, yet Tobin had seen predatory animals stalking their prey with the same dispassionate intensity.
“Maybe we should leave,” Dax suggested to the others. “I-I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Nonsense,” Iloja countered. “This is just starting to get interesting!”
“I’ve been in situations like this before, on Earth,” Phlox told the Cardassian exile. “I feel that discretion would be the better part of valor, as the humans say.”
“I was forced to flee from a fight once,” Iloja told him. “Given the choice, I never would have left.” His steely eyes darted back and forth. “Look around, my friends. We are not alone here.”
Indeed, not all the heated debate came from the V’Las loyalists. The mostly younger Vulcans who stood with T’Zhae and the Syrannites were well represented here, too, and several now subtly interposed themselves between the loyalists and the offworlder trio, wordlessly offering their protection and support. After a few moments, the proprietor of the debate house, a dark-skinned older female, stepped to the stage. “All are welcome here,” she intoned firmly, “to speak and to listen. So it has always been. And so it shall remain.” She gestured toward the two uniformed members of the city reasoning force who flanked the establishment’s entrance. The message was clear: Disruption would not be tolerated.
But Vokas was determined to save face. “Then I do not choose to stay where those who threaten the true Vulcan way are welcome.” He stormed out, most of his supporters joining him. Soreth looked undecided about whether to join them. Eventually he chose to retreat to a corner near the exit, studiously averting his gaze from the trio of offworlders. Yet many of the reformists nodded approvingly toward them or raised their hands in the Vulcan salute. Tobin made a feeble effort to wave back, while Phlox nodded graciously in acknowledgment.
“There, you see?” Iloja said. “Stand your ground and others will stand with you. If only . . . some I knew back home had possessed a fraction of this courage. Excuse me.” He wandered off to speak with the reformists, basking in their fervor.
Even with the tension broken, the loss of one of their party made Dax feel exposed, and he shrank into his seat, looking around nervously. “You can relax, Tobin,” Phlox said with restored cheer. “We’re welcome here.”
“Here, maybe, for the moment. But on Vulcan?” He shook his head. “I came here because I wanted to come someplace peaceful. Someplace safe. Instead I show up just in time for a revolution.”
“Admiral Archer and Captain T’Pol may still find a way to prevent that.”
“Even so . . . Oh, maybe I should just go home to Trill. Maybe it’s a bad idea for any . . . any Trill like me . . . to leave the homeworld at all. There’s just too much danger.”
With an understanding look on his face, Phlox leaned closer, speaking softly. “I understand, Tobin. Being joined is a great responsibility.”
Dax stared, flushing with panic. “You . . . you know?”
“Don’t look so surprised. I’m an expert in xenomedicine and I’ve been around the quadrant once or twice. And as a medical man,” he reassured the Trill, “I’m well-practiced at confidentiality.”
Dax sighed, shoulders sagging, and spoke even more softly in response, aware of the Vulcan ears around them—though it seemed most of the crowd had congregated around Iloja, whose raucous storytelling would drown out anything Dax said. “Then you understand what I’m afraid of,” he told Phlox.
“I understand a host’s obligation to protect his symbiont. But my understanding,” the doctor went on gently, “is that a host also has an obligation to provide the symbiont with a wide range of experiences that it can pass on to future hosts. It seems to me it’s not easy to do that without facing a little danger now and then.”
“Then maybe I’m just not a very good host,” Tobin sighed. “It’s all right—maybe the next one will be braver or better.”
“Physical bravery isn’t the only source of worth,” Phlox assured him. “You can do great things as an engineer, as a scholar, as—who knows? Returning to Trill may indeed be the right path for you, Tobin—so long as it leads you to new challenges. If you go home only to retreat from further challenges . . . well, not only will that not serve Dax, but I don’t think it will serve Tobin very well either.”
Kel Province, Vulcan
“Our numbers are still small,” Commander Zadok reported with dissatisfaction. “For every loyal Vulcan who speaks out in our favor, several more remain in the thrall of the Federation. Even now, we have not done enough to win support.”
V’Las kept his hands folded serenely before him, admitting no weakness. “It does not take large numbers to win a world, my friend,” he said. “A small group can triumph with sufficient dedication—and sufficient strength. You have served us well in that regard, Zadok. If not for the ships and weapons your loyalists managed to rescue from T’Pau’s purge, we would have no chance now.”
Zadok acknowledged V’Las’s praise with a nod. “Yes, Administrator. We stand ready to strike as soon as you give the order.”
“Employing violence at this stage would be reckless,” Professor T’Nol protested. The thin-faced academician sat at the monitor bank along one wall of the austere command bunker, surveying the broadcast and data channels to assess the state of the public mind. “Granted, we have the numbers and weaponry to succeed in a coup of Vulcan itself. But what of the Federation? Al-Rashid will not tolerate a loss of federal control over one of his member worlds.”
“Let Starfleet come,” Zadok said. “Their weapons are inferior, for T’Pau did not share our best armaments with Earth. And their sensors and computers are largely of Vulcan design, meaning we know how to subvert them. This is what we have spent the past decade preparing for.” Indeed, Zadok had acted cleverly on his own initiative over the years, working with fellow loyalists to falsify the dismantling or destruction of warships, fighters, and weaponry and to stow them in secret High Command depots on outposts throughout the Nevasa system. V’Las was grateful for that, for he himself had been in no position to lead the resistance.
In fact, he had originally had no intention of doing any such thing. After his mission to foment war with Andoria had failed, he had feared that if he remained on Vulcan, the investigations into his actions as a High Command minister and administrator might expose his years of collusion with the Romulans—and perhaps even his parents’ true identity as Romulan sleeper agents embedded on Vulcan more than two centuries ago.
The Rihannsu had declared war on their ancient enemies as soon as the first Vulcan ships had intruded on their territory, for they had feared what the Vulcans might do upon learning their true origins as the Sundered, they who had marched beneath the sigil of the raptor’s wing before their voluntary exile. They had hidden their identity behind a new name for their empire—Rom’ielln—and defended their borders fiercely, rebuffing all contact. In time they had learned that the Vulcans had embraced a philosophy of nonviolence and sickly intellectualism, but their disgust at what a once-proud warrior race had degenerated into had made them even more determined to repel the Vulcans, and so the war had dragged on for a hundred years, mostly cold but with periodic bursts of violence to remind the Vulcans that the Rom’ielln meant business.
But then—so V’Las’s parents had explained to him—Praetor Sartorix had come to power and argued that, by provoking the rising influence and militancy of the High Command, the Rihannsu were pushing the Vulcans to become more Rihannsu-like themselves. Thus, in a fit of optimism, Sartorix had conceived a subtle plan for reunification. The empire already had sleeper agents working to undermine Vulcan from within, but now Sartorix ended the war to get the Vulcans off their guard
, then gave the sleepers a new mandate: guide the Vulcans back toward their true nature so that the Sundered could be rejoined once more. The aggressive Andorians had made a perfect enemy to rally the Vulcans against in the ensuing decades, and V’Las had continued his parents’ efforts to exacerbate tensions with Andoria until Vulcan was drawn into a great conflict that would surely reawaken its people’s warrior spirit.
But then the Kir’Shara had been rediscovered despite the sleepers’ decades of effort to efface all archaeological evidence of its existence, and its words had discredited the selective reinterpretations of the Analects they had used to guide Vulcan in a more militant direction. Defeated at the cusp of his ultimate triumph, his spirit broken, V’Las had sought to leave the planet with his Romulan contact, Major Talok. Even knowing he might face torture or execution for his disgrace, he would rather have died with the dignity of his Romulan birthright than endure the insipid kindness of Vulcan rehabilitation—or risk betraying the secret he had been trained his entire life to preserve. But Talok had implied that V’Las would still be needed to further the Romulans’ efforts on Vulcan, that his failure was only a delay in their plans. Reassured that he was still of value, V’Las had remained on Vulcan and submitted to their mockery of a justice system—pretending to concede his errors and accept rehabilitative counseling in order to preclude too deep an investigation into his past.
The following year, however, the Romulans had launched their conquest of what had hitherto been Vulcan-controlled space, and V’Las understood that he had been used. The war he had been instructed to foment against Andoria had been meant not to awaken Vulcan’s warrior spirit as he had been taught, but to distract and weaken the High Command sufficiently to negate it as an obstacle to Romulan expansion. Indeed, the dissolution of the High Command upon V’Las’s failure had served them even better, leaving the region wide open for invasion. Reunification with Vulcan had never been their goal . . . unless it was through the forcible reabsorption of a broken, conquered Vulcan people as subjects of the empire.
Still, V’Las had struggled to convince himself that his ancestral people were worthy of his loyalty—that their deceit about the true objective behind his rise to power had been necessary to ensure he could not reveal the truth under interrogation. With that in mind, he had chosen to flee Vulcan; now that the government was sufficiently preoccupied with the war, his disappearance should draw little attention. He had done what he could to sow suspicion of his assassination by Romulan or Andorian agents, then clandestinely made his way off Vulcan and eventually to Romulus, hoping to prove himself to his true people by bringing valuable intelligence about the state of affairs on Vulcan and what it would take to ensure they remained out of the war.
“What we must do,” T’Nol was now saying, “is act to subvert the Federation from within. Archer is the one they follow, and we have already done much to discredit him for his role in the Kir’Shara fraud.” V’Las suppressed a scoff. T’Nol was so committed to her lies that it seemed she’d even persuaded herself of their truth. That was why it had been so easy to convince her that the Anti-revisionist volunteers that Zadok had sacrificed in the bunker raid had actually been murdered by the Starfleet force. “If they lose faith in him, then they will lose faith in his favored followers such as al-Rashid. Then we can work over the next several years to build support for a candidate of our own to challenge and defeat al-Rashid in the next election. You, perhaps, Administrator.” She tilted her head. “Although I understand if you consider it more important to retain your power base on Vulcan. Perhaps another candidate could be chosen, one with experience in the Federation electoral process.”
“You mean yourself,” Zadok scoffed.
“If the administrator deems it the more logical choice,” the professor replied primly.
“Our goal is to stand against the Federation, not sell out to it.”
“I thought you were a strategist, Commander. With one of our own in place at the heart of the Federation, we could enact policies that would weaken federal power and allow the maneuvering of Vulcan into a central role. Why rebuild Vulcan astropolitical dominance through force when we can do it through politics?”
“Your plan would take too long, T’Nol,” Zadok insisted. “More offworlders come to Vulcan every year. More young Vulcans, detached from our traditions and subject to alien influence, are born every year, and more of our esteemed elders and defenders of tradition die every year. If we wait too long to take back control of how our youth are educated, we may lose our chance forever.”
“Three years is not an undue interval to wait, Commander. If we wish our recovery of Vulcan to succeed, we must first remove the Federation’s ability to retaliate. Strike now and it is a certainty that Starfleet will come in force to reconquer Vulcan for the Syrannites.”
V’Las laughed, drawing a scandalized look from T’Nol. “And would that be such a bad thing, Professor? You know your history. When has the military occupation of an unpacified populace done anything but create even more intense resentment for the occupiers? If you want to discredit the Federation, what better way than to make them the face of oppression?”
Zadok was nodding. “I see. It is logical. The more we compel Starfleet to crack down upon the populace, the more Vulcans we convert to the cause of armed resistance.”
“Precisely, my friend.”
T’Nol looked between them with disbelief, then fixed her eyes on V’Las. “This is what you have intended all along. The entire purpose of our coup is to invite Starfleet occupation. Have you considered the cost to the Vulcan people?”
It was all he could do to restrain his rage at the insinuation. The last time he had attempted to undermine the Vulcan people, the Romulans had thanked him for the intelligence and advice he had offered . . . then interrogated him with an invasive mind probe, a brute-force technological substitute for the telepathic skills the Romulans had lost through some quirk of mutation, environment, or history. They had scanned his brain with sufficient brutality to reduce him to permanent catatonia or death—if he had allowed it. But sleeper agent or no, V’Las had spent his entire life mastering the mental disciplines of a Vulcan—not the telepathic ones, of course, but the skills for knowing and regulating one’s own mental state. V’Las had retreated within his own mind to save his sanity, allowing the Romulans—his people, his nation, his betrayers twice over—to believe he was a mere vegetable until he had lulled them into sufficient complacency to permit his escape.
V’Las had wandered the fringes of the empire after that, a man adrift without a homeworld. His Romulan loyalties had been a lie, nothing but a trick to manipulate him. But he had begun to realize that by birth, and by a far more ancient and fundamental ancestry, he was Vulcan. It had been his Vulcan strength that had allowed him to endure the treachery of the Romulans, to survive and triumph even as the Star Empire buckled under its own undisciplined aggression and fell to defeat. Ironically, the lie he had been trained to propagate against the Vulcan people had proven to be the deeper truth: Vulcan was superior, powerful, unbeatable. Vulcan was his salvation and his true home.
And so he had realized he must return to save Vulcan—from itself and from the aliens who profited from its pacifism. He would return to complete the mission he had started long before, but now with conviction: to bring Vulcan back to its martial destiny, to make it strong enough to crush any who challenged its superiority, whether Andorian, human, or Romulan.
Yet it had not been until after the war’s end, in that window before the completion of the Earth outposts guarding the newly created neutral zone, that V’Las had finally been able to escape Romulan space. The swift emergence of the Federation soon thereafter had given him pause, forcing him to keep his distance from Vulcan until the conditions were right. But on reaching out to the world of his birth, V’Las had found he still had dedicated supporters such as Zadok, loyal warriors who had served as his agents on the ground an
d laid the foundations for his eventual return. Plus fools like T’Nol who could be easily manipulated.
Reminding himself of that, V’Las moved closer, facing the professor and holding her gaze sympathetically. “Have you not spoken eloquently, Professor, of the cost to the Vulcan people if we do not resist the Federation and their Syrannite puppets? Of the cost to the Vulcan soul if we allow the words of the Kir’Shara to enfeeble us and lead us into mental perversion?” She fell silent, considering his words. “As you yourself just said, there is value in playing a long game, a strategy that will take years to play out. My strategy may well take decades, and yes, individual Vulcans will suffer in its execution. But that hardship will be a crucible that will burn away the disease of pacifism and reforge the Vulcan race into the mighty weapons we once were.”
His words made her uneasy. “Before Surak, you mean. Before logic saved us.”
“Yes, logic saved us, but pacifism may doom us! Vulcans survive, not by denying the aggression within us, but by disciplining it, directing it logically and wisely. This is what Surak truly taught. Not Syrannite sentiment, not the emotions of empathy and grief, but the cold, pure discipline of reason. Imagine what we could achieve as logical warriors, our power controlled and mastered and used more effectively than ever before. The galaxy could not stand against us!”
T’Nol contemplated this for a long moment. “A long game,” she finally said. “I begin to understand. This is the reason for the contingency plan you assigned me.”
“Exactly. It will not be easy to repel Federation occupation. But we will be ready to create a new scandal that will thoroughly discredit the occupiers and the Syrannites once and for all, and then Vulcan will be ours!”
Star Trek: Enterprise - 017 - Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic Page 24
