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“Good,” she said as she brought them both to a stop again. “But there is another matter that you might not understand at the moment. It is the reason you must act contrary to your instincts and urge Andoria and Tellar not to engage the Romulans directly.”

“I am listening,” Soval said, still highly doubtful but willing to be convinced, if only out of respect for T’Pau’s office.

“I trust you are aware of the new Romulan weapon that can take control of other vessels remotely.”

“I am.”

“Then you may or may not also be aware of the Vulcan fleet’s high degree of vulnerability to this Romulan weapon.”

He nodded. “I presume this vulnerability is a technological analog of the close genetic and cultural relationships we share with the Romulans. Similar genes and memes giving rise to similar technologies, and therefore similar technological vulnerabilities.” He was keenly aware that this issue was as charged as that of the Romulan connection itself; were outworlders, even Vulcan’s Coalition partners, to discover the strange similarities between Vulcan and Romulan technologies, they might begin to ask questions that would inevitably lead to other embarrassing revelations of Vulcan-Romulan relatedness— and do far more damage to Vulcan’s alliances than T’Pau’s address to the Council had inflicted.

“Exactly right,” said T’Pau, resuming her forward motion. “There is a good deal more you need to know about the Romulan weapon, however—specifically the differing degree to which our Coalition partners are vulnerable to it. For example, the Andorian and Tellarite fleets share much of our vulnerability, no doubt because of reverse engineering both societies have sponsored over the years in order to duplicate Vulcan technological refinements.”

Keeping pace alongside T’Pau’s slow, stately stride, Soval was beginning to see where she was heading. “And we cannot warn them of this with complete candor without inviting... unwelcome lines of questioning.”

“Correct. And conversely, ships from Earth and Alpha Centauri have so far proved far less vulnerable to remote-control attacks than those of any other Coalition world.”

Soval found that surprising, given the relatively backward state of human technology when compared to that of Vulcan, or any other nonhuman Coalition world. “That is fascinating,” he said. “We have always seen the Terrans’ technological backwardness as their greatest liability in a galaxy filled with hostile powers like the Romulans.”

“Regardless of the Terrans’ relative vulnerability to one particular Romulan weapon, their essential backwardness has not fundamentally changed,” T’Pau said. “Make no mistake. The Terrans have not yet had enough time to establish a sufficiently robust galactic military posture to counter the Romulans successfully.”

Soval saw no need to be lectured on that subject. He knew very well that the human race had tended to allow its reach to far exceed its grasp ever since their Zefram Cochrane flew his first warp-driven ship. Even far more recently, despite the horrendous shock the paranoid and aggressive Xindi delivered to the human species only two years ago, Earth remained a wide-eyed innocent on the interstellar stage.

With no small amount of regret, he thought, Perhaps they would be in a better position to defend themselves had we not worked so assiduously for most of a century to contain them, to protect them from their urge to charge out into the galaxy before they were ready to face its many dangerous unknowns.

But was anyone ever truly ready for that?

“You have just constructed a strong argument against urging our allies to leave Earth to its own devices against the Romulans,” Soval said. “And I must point out that even Starfleet technology is not entirely invulnerable to the new Romulan weapon’s effects, despite its lesser degree of compatibility either with our own technology or with that of the Romulans.”

“The universe issues no guarantees of survival, Soval,” she said.

“Regardless of the Romulan weapon, we should find a way to aid the Terrans,