• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Though she still wasn’t exactly sanguine about the prospect of leaving her captain’s side, T’Pol knew that she wouldn’t have to do so during Enterprise’s months-long voyage to and past her homeworld. And she also felt fairly certain that he was probably right about her having a better chance than any other Enterprise crew member of changing T’Pau’s mind—slim though that chance might prove to be, given the strength of the administrator’s will.

“Logical,” she said, already beginning to plan how best to approach Vulcan’s new leader, who would almost certainly be back in her office in ShiKahr by the time Enterprise reached Vulcan. “I accept your assignment. Assuming, of course, that T’Pau does not reverse her decision before I arrive.” Despite all logic and precedent, she still fervently hoped that the administrator would soon reconsider her actions.

“Never underestimate the power of Vulcan stubbornness, Commander,” Archer said, grinning as he walked over to his desk and toggled open a channel on the comm unit.

“Archer to bridge.”

“O’Neill here, Captain.”

“Please amend our course slightly, Lieutenant. Until further notice, I’m planning to make a quick stopover at Vulcan on our way back to Earth. Archer out.”

“Acknowledged.”

The meeting concluded, her course of action resolved, T’Pol bid the captain good night and stepped back out into the E deck corridor and began making her way through the nearly deserted, night-illuminated corridors toward the turbolift positioned nearest her quarters on B deck.

What if T’Pau remains intractable? she thought as she entered the turbolift. In that event, she would have to leave the ship, regardless of how badly the captain needed her at his side.

Could the Coalition go on if Vulcan’s estrangement became permanent? She was finding it difficult to remain positive in the face of such a grim scenario.

Once back in her quarters, T’Pol stared out the large oval port at the distant, uncaring stars. She picked out a specific pinpoint of light that lay almost directly along Enterprise’s present heading now that Lieutenant O’Neill had evidently implemented the captain’s order for a course adjustment. The ship’s present speed, which the streak distortions of passing stars revealed to be approximately warp five, had blue-shifted the pinpoint from its normal orange to a hot, yellow-white brilliance.

The ancient Vulcans had called this object Lanka-Garukh, after the Night Flyers, the sibling nocturnal birds of prey from some of Vulcan’s oldest myths. The humans knew the very same star—actually a visual binary pair as observed either from Vulcan or Earth, twin co-orbiting orange dwarfs rendered indistinguishable now by Enterprise’s current extremely distant vantage point—by such names as Bessel’s Star, Piazzi’s Flying Star, and, most recently and commonly, 61 Cygni.

Cygni, in their constellation Cygnus. How ironic that the humans named those stars after a bird they consider both beautiful and graceful, she thought. She wondered if the porcine Tellarites who hailed from the binary system’s primary habitable world would find the comparison flattering or insulting, though she thought it likely that not many of them who worked outside the rarefied cloister of academia or diplomacy were even aware of it.

But it didn’t matter. At the moment, T’Pol regarded the humans of Earth and the Centauri settlements, the Andorians—and, yes, even the Tellarites—as a good deal more graceful than her own countrymen.

Perhaps the Coalition will ultimately lose Vulcan as a member, no matter what Captain Archer and I do to prevent it, T’Pol thought as she imagined herself floating freely amid the stark beauty of the silent, far-flung stellar fires that lay so far beyond the window. But whatever happens on Vulcan, the captain can still count on me. Just as Earth can still rely on the Alpha Centauri colonies, the Andorians, and even the decidedly unswanlike Tellarites.

Assuming that Vulcan’s present course of action had not already