It had been a waste of time her staying at the monastery on Mount Seleya, so she had made her excuses and left.
She could have traveled with Soval, but she could barely bring herself to speak to him; and indeed, it was doubtful whether he would have expected her to. He seemed to have aged a hundred years since the last time she had seen him, and it was impossible not to believe that he was worried over far more than the bitter injustice of Jonathan Archer being prosecuted for the deaths of what remained of the crew of the Seleya.
As a member of the boarding party, then, she herself could be prosecuted as an accessory to their eventual deaths. If the High Command could find or even invent the means to convince a jury that the captain had intended those deaths from the start, all three of them could potentially end up accused of murder.
In view of the fact that the searching internal Starfleet investigation had cleared him of any wrong-doing in the matter, proving Archer guilty of such calculated evil would be difficult. But if she agreed – as she would have infinitely preferred to do – to stand her trial with the others, it would not only be she herself who suffered…
T'Les. Why could her mother not have learned her lesson, have refrained from meddling with a cause the High Command already viewed with deep suspicion? How much more would it cost to save her from the consequences of her stubborn folly, and persuade her to abstain from taking wholly unnecessary risks?
It was hardly to be expected that in the circumstances T'Pol would be allowed to travel unescorted. A polite, urbane young government official was waiting with an official flitter when she left the monastery, with an equally polite, urbane young man who was without a shadow of a doubt a member of the V'Shar.
Refusing their company would be both illogical and pointless, so she coldly accepted it. The vehicle was comfortable enough, superbly air conditioned against the burning heat of the evening, and she sat silently back in her chair and reviewed her options.
Remaining neutral was never going to be permitted. She could be a victim with the others or she could act as a tool for the High Command to destroy them. Serving first with the V'Shar and then for a time as a member of the ambassador's suite, she had some slight acquaintance with military law. If she was charged with a crime, she would not be required to testify. Even if she was not charged, she could refuse to testify based on her right not to be forced to incriminate herself by testifying.
The way around that for the High Command, however, would be to charge her and then offer her immunity to testify against the others. Which was effectively what Soval had already warned her was going to happen.
She would not even have to lie. If she stuck to her perceptions of events at the time, the actions of the other members of the boarding party had indeed appeared capable of sinister interpretation to say the least. It was only later reflection that had convinced her that given their characters, Archer and Reed could not possibly have acted in the way she had believed. Given the effect that trellium had on the Vulcan psyche it had been easy to convince herself that she too had been briefly a victim of the madness that had overtaken her unfortunate compatriots on the Seleya; and for all that Phlox's treatment had stabilized her condition to a huge degree, to judge by the carefully controlled reactions of the practitioners in the monastery her mental processes were still extremely disordered by comparison to those of an average member of her species.
But could she do it? Could she repay Archer's trust in her – a trust that was mutual, and that had lately begun to feel like a friendship – by destroying his career? If convicted, depending on the exact crime of which he was found guilty (and even if murder was out of reach, manslaughter would be effective enough to put an end to his Starfleet career), he might well face prison. Worse still, if that happened – assuming the trial took place on Earth and the sentence was served in a military prison there – the extradition treaty between Earth and Vulcan allowed the High Command to wait until that sentence was served and then demand his extradition to face trial there on the same charges, effectively condemning him to be punished twice for the same crime. And going by the well-earned reputation of Administrator V'Las and his cohorts, that was exactly what was intended to happen.
She was divided regarding Lieutenant Reed. She knew, as the captain did not, that Reed had at one time been a member of Starfleet's 'Section 31'. Although his conduct since coming aboard Enterprise had been exemplary, she had remained conscious of that facet of his history; there was still a remote possibility that the Section might have found it useful to place him on board as a 'sleeper', ready to carry out their orders if and when required. She had been vigilant without betraying the fact, but after the years of unstinting and unwavering service even she now believed that Reed was a loyal and obedient officer. Quite possibly he was equally aware of her previous service with the V'Shar but Captain Archer was also aware of it and had not seen it as any cause to dismiss her from his staff. Whether he would feel equally sanguine if he knew his Head of Tactical had been an active Black Operations agent for Starfleet's own 'Department of Dirty Tricks' was a different matter.
True, this was somewhat specious reasoning for having Reed condemned for a crime he almost certainly had not committed. He might have been confused by her instructions – in fairness, she could not even be certain she had given them correctly – or simply made a mistake in carrying them out. Neither of these amounted to anything like deliberately causing the deaths of the Seleya's crew. At worst he could be accused of negligence, and even that (given the extreme stress of their environment at the time) was unlikely to stick. There was little doubt that the lieutenant's defense attorney could and would bring innumerable items of evidence to testify that in ordinary circumstances 'negligent' was not a word in the Englishman's lexicon.
So, she could not justify bearing witness against him when in her heart of hearts she did not believe he was guilty of the crime of which he would be accused. As for whether there was any moral justification for claiming that by virtue of his questionable activities for a quasi-legal arm of Starfleet he was almost certainly guilty of something, that was a fragile defense indeed for what she was proposing to do to him. Especially given her own history as a member of the V'Shar, who were perfectly capable of questionable activities on their own account if the need was there.
The same argument could apply to the captain, given some of his activities in the Expanse: piracy, torture, murder, all carried out with cold deliberation because events gave him no choice. Starfleet had exonerated him of guilt for those actions, because presumably the end had been held to justify the means, but that did not mean he was not culpable for them. She doubted whether he himself would believe so. Still, being punished for a crime he had not committed because he seemed fated to escape punishment for those he certainly had was as morally questionable as Reed's being indirectly punished for whatever unnamed and unspecified activities he had carried out at the behest of Section 31.
But the alternative…
If the High Command was determined on Archer's destruction, could she save him by testifying in his defense?
As the Head of the Science Department she had been obliged to record personal logs on events. She had not done so for some days after the episode aboard the Seleya, but in hindsight she feared that even then the material in it would provide ample evidence of her mental state, including confused half-questions as to whether the captain had been at least partially responsible for what had happened and even deliberately caused it. If he had given unlawful orders to that effect, Reed had disobeyed military law by following them. She could not, of course, testify that any such orders had been given, but she had not been a witness to every exchange between the two men. And by that time her paranoia had been such that she had more than half believed both of them were conspiring to murder the wretched crew of the Seleya. In her mind, the steps from willing to intending to planning had been short and almost inevitable ones. She even remembered accusing the captain of it to his face.
As a witness for the defense she would be dubious at best. True, as a witness for the prosecution she would be equally vulnerable; the Starfleet investigators had had access to the logs and opted to treat hers with the appropriate caution, particularly when later entries testified to her distaste for her previous confusion and her regret at how the trellium had affected her trust in the captain's actions. But if the High Command were determined on a conviction, and made it known through the right channels that a failure to prosecute could negatively affect Earth-Vulcan relations…
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the two.
She rested her head against the window and watched the bare red surface race past. In the light of the setting sun, it was the color of drying blood.
Perhaps it was just as well that Vulcans were not superstitious.