Kobayashi Maru - Michael A. Martin [19]
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 Enterprise overlapped 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 was that 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 Enterprise a 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 Enterprise had brought her into multiple secret arrangements, clandestine and covert operations, governmental and religious subterfuges, and more. She hoped that one day in the future, Enterprise and 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