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Ten thousand deaths. It was not the seven million from the first attack nor the billions that followed from the weapon's deployment, but for some reason this number felt higher. It felt like no other number could reach as high because it was the last number that could be reached.
The extermination of humanity.
That was two days ago. Two days and ten years since he had asked T'Pol to reconsider rejoining her own people and give up a lost cause. It was the logical thing to do, of course. It was not that he could not understand her desire to help the last remnants of a once promising race, but they could not be helped any longer. It was their war and Vulcan promised itself not to become embroiled in interstellar conflicts.
He could remember the day well, when he had stepped onto Enterprise for the last time and found not the human male whose career he had watched ascend with interest over the years just as he had watched his father's before him, but one of his own whose career he had also watched. More than watched, more than fostered. She had turned around, looking at him with a dry defiance in preparation of a perfunctory head-to-toe examination and witty snipe he usually reserved for Starfleet captains, especially the reckless ones.
That uniform doesn’t suit you, 'Captain'.
He had picked up the Terran accent for contractions back then, insidious faults that they were. Her eyes continued to rebuff his stare unwaveringly, but he could see emotions now more clearly than he had seen before. It was a brittle mask she wore, and he knew it more than most, perhaps as much as her mother who had personally asked him to convince her to return home. T'Pol's eyes would soon widen and become glassy when he mentioned Archer and the humans, a testament to the hardships she had endured, one after another, in the Expanse and the strain that any more failures could lead to the destruction of an entire species placed on one's mind whether they were human or Vulcan. Vulcans experienced the same emotions as any other species. They were simply better at hiding them, as the late Doctor Phlox had shrewdly ascertained.
To say it was strange to deliver the customary snipe to a Vulcan wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform was an understatement even for Soval. More so than usual, he found himself unsettled. It did not suit her, but in a way it did. He would never have pegged T'Pol for one to turn her back on the High Command. She had always shown great promise and poise in her duties and her loyalty used to be unquestionable. Perhaps he had overlooked the bit of her that wanted to embrace emotions instead of logic. Perhaps he had been... negligent, about many things. His own mask loosened, his eyes betraying concern, fear for her safety, a slight desperation even and especially when he could see that she wanted to say yes, wanted a way out of the nagging hopelessness of caring for a species whose days were numbered.
Now her remains were scattered across the Ceti Alpha system along with the crew she had come to respect and cherish above her own people. Space seemed darker... silent... these days, even more than it used to be when Vulcans were among the only races in this part of the galaxy with warp capability. It used to be the Vulcans would pick up a lot of Earth chatter on their long-range scanners. Idle, nonsensical, ridiculous, disgusting, sometimes poignant, sometimes quite brilliant, and sometimes pleasant in a way that reminded Soval that their races had not been so different once and yet humanity had been able to pull itself out of destroying itself without the need to repress its emotions. Despite some glaringly distasteful cultural practices, they had held promise, he knew it even when he tried to deny it. Until now.
It was not so long ago, to Soval, that he was walking down the streets of San Francisco on a sunny day with the spires of the Golden Gate bridge off in the distance, walking down the corridors of Starfleet headquarters and catching an officer gushing about how excited she was to be posted on humanity's first deep space mission and that they were 'finally doing this', listening to Admiral-then-Commodore Forrest ream out a couple of reckless pilots for stealing the warp two engine in order to prove a point that humanity was ready and willing to take risks. Taking risks, they had said, was the whole point. As he watched a yellow ball continue to enlarge out of the backdrop of other stars, the lines on Soval's brow deepened.
If they’d accepted our counsel, this tragedy would have been avoided.
But would it have...? The Ambassador's eyes tracked downward, weight shifting slightly on the deck plating as he turned a quarter of the way from the window and paused. The Xindi attacked Earth first and without any prompting from the first deep space mission. His words were only conjecture at the time. No one had ever even heard of a Xindi before the probe appeared over Earth's skies. Archer had not run into any of the five species in what was barely two years of exploring deep space. Even if they had, if what Archer said about someone from the future telling the Xindi that they would be destroyed by humans was true, then it would not have mattered if humanity's warp program had been delayed one hundred days or one hundred years. The Xindi still would have come.
We held back their warp program for one hundred years. A policy which you supported. If we would have helped them develop faster ships, better defenses.
It was neither here nor there, he had thought, at the time. The Vulcans had not known about the Xindi and there were many reasons to keep humans on a slow track of development. They had just recently came out of a terrible third world war, they were highly emotional, reminiscent of the early days in Vulcan history, a well kept secret from the humans. Not only for their sake but for the current stability of this part of the galaxy, the Soval saw the wisdom in curbing humanity's progress until they would take the time to embrace some of their tutors' patience and emotional stability. Grooming them to be trustworthy allies, essentially, was how quite a few saw it, or yet to many others, it was just prevention of one of many unmitigated disasters from occurring that had not already transpired during Captain Archer's 'reckless traipse through outer space'. Earth was had still been far from ready for the grace and responsibility that came with cultivating peaceful and, more to the point, respectful relations with other cultures. Perhaps instead of humans, the Vulcans should have looked into these 'gazelles' Archer had once spoken so highly of. Nonetheless, Soval had made his decision long ago and he stuck by it.
If we would have helped them develop faster ships, better defenses.
He could almost hear her voice standing next to him as clearly as he heard it that day she stood with the four blaring silver pips and gaudy yellow stripe on navy blue. Those terribly flamboyant uniforms! Soval squeezed his eyes shut, willing away the sudden flare of annoyance. But her accusing tone remained crisp and clear. She had been speaking in the past tense, but at the time, it had been almost a year since Enterprise had gathered a convoy of six thousand humans fleeing the destroyed colonies. Did her tense preclude the months after the destruction of Earth and its colonies? The seven million killed by the probe before that? It took only a few weeks in dry dock for ships to be retrofitted with shields, weapons. It took only a few days to travel to Earth from Vulcan with a fleet of ships helping to protect the humans and defend the alien lives, some Vulcan, that had been lost in the cataclysm.
A policy which you supported.
The three bright stars of his home system, plus the distant Sirius B, in succession outside his window caught his eyes like four bright pips. A sharp swish of silk rushing against silk was followed by a tug at the collar of his robes.
Your emotional attachment to Archer is clouding your logic.
Maybe it had enhanced it.
The Ambassador shook his head and looked over at the chronometer. It was already a few minutes before his meeting and instead of passing the time in mediation, he had allowed his thoughts to wander. T'Pol. Even in death, she was constantly challenging him, pinging him with these little phrases causing him the tiniest micro-fracture in his beliefs. She was young, she had not yet lived to see the things he had seen. But then, he had never seen what was in the Expanse... Bah, he did not need to. Non-interference had universal application no matter what emotional hardships were endured. No matter what cost to others, it was the noblest thing a species could do, giving others the freedom to develop along their own... paths... He turned away from those distracting stars and the window entirely, walking a few paces toward his desk, his fingers brushing the surface and coming to a stop beside a meditation lamp.
We held back their warp program for one hundred years.
Glancing back at the chronometer, Soval continued to walk out of his quarters, russet doors shutting as silently as they had opened for him.
Afterword
It would not come all at once, but over the next few weeks and months, Soval would return to these thoughts. Mediation proved effective at blocking them, at first, but over time, they trickled back into his mind, sometimes during the sessions and sometimes in dreams. T'Pol's words had stuck with him through it all, despite the logical decision to keep Vulcan out of Earth's fight. He had ridiculed her uniform, minimised her feelings for the humans and Archer because minimising feelings was the logical way. Yet all the logic of his past choices still did not answer why he could not stop associating bright objects with pips nor bright colours with the gaudy yellow on-nearly-purple --was it purple or navy or dark indigo? For it seemed to be either depending on the lighting. Soval never asked.
Was she right? Did we help kill billions of lives? Could I have helped to save them within acceptable risk? Were they... were the humans right about taking risks, about risking Vulcan's safety in order to prevent a larger catastrophe? What if the Xindi did not stop with Earth and eventually targets other 'threats'. If Soval had thought humanity was volatile, these Reptilians and Insectoids, from what the logs of Enterprise documented seemed about as stable as liquid Trellium-D. When did non-interference become so... unsettling... to him? Was the answer truly 'never', as extinction was part of the natural consequence of finding one's own path?
It must have been his subconscious perpetuating an irrational guilt. For the first time, in the fifth month after the massacre at Ceti Alpha V, Soval admitted this and feeling that this must be the case, made a mental note to increase the time spent meditating, relegating the past back to where it should stay. In the past, over, done with... repressed.
In the ninth month, the High Command had made contact with a new human colony who had built bunkers in caves of topaline ore, safe from becoming detected by the Xindi's sensor sweeps. Systematic and ruthless exterminators, Soval mused at how humans used to root out termites from their homes back when they were still building them from wood. By word of mouth, Soval learned that it had originally been Archer's idea one day at the colony to create an underground bunker for extra precaution. It was also said that he had continually proposed this idea over the next month, perhaps why it even survived the obliteration and had taken root in the minds of what must be the last human settlement. Archer recalled the last mission before becoming infected with the parasites and when Soval checked the records, apparently he and a Xindi Arboreal named Grelik hid in a similar cave system while hiding from Reptilian seekers.
Just today they had received report of Xindi activity closing in on the system only seven light years away from Vulcan space. If the Xindi new about the cavern system, surely they would send shock troops to root out the humans. Contact had been a very tenuous decision, but at Soval's urging, the High Command, sent 'scientific survey ships' to 'study' the gas giants of the star system. Now it appeared that they had drawn the Xindi's attention nonetheless and that the Ceti Alpha sacrifice was going to be in vain.
"Sir?" A young Vulcan man's voice cut into Soval's thoughts. The ambassador looked up at his aide. "You... called for me."
Now he remembered the conversation quite differently. He had ridiculed her uniform, her choice to remain with the humans, ridiculed humanity, thought only of his protégé's safety and stood by while she and those he had grown to foster and mentor were slaughtered.
Soval steepled his fingers.
"Get me the High Command."