A/N: I AM SO SORRY. I really hadn't meant for so much time to pass between updates. I was having computer problems. Long story short, I have a new computer, I'm up and running, and I should be able to type for long periods of time without the computer randomly locking up and me losing all my work.
Surak's sayings are courtesy of the Vulcan Language Dictionary.
Spot the reference to TOS and win a cookie.
Pi-maat – family
E ana maika'i no 'oe – You will be fine.
Mai ho'okaumaha – Don't worry.
Dakh pthak. Nam-tor ri ret na'fan-kitok fa tu dakh pthak. – Cast out fear. There is no room for anything else until you cast out fear.
'A'ole. E mai makemake hele. – No. I don't want to go.
Pono 'oe. – You have to.
Na'shaya, to'zot. – Greetings, uncle.
Shiyau thol'es k'thorai ri k'ahm. – Nobility lies in action, not in name.
Sochya, ko-fu.Ki' odva. – Peace, daughter. Have faith.
Chapter Five: A Less than Ideal Homecoming
Archer could hardly believe it. Unless his eyes were playing tricks on him, something was very wrong on Vulcan. He continued to stare at the view screen long after Soval had broken off contact, his eyes glued to the blank screen in front of him, as though hoping that it could offer some explanation as to what in the hell was going on with the High Command. He could understand all of their actions; it wasn't anything new that the Vulcans would want to send their own shuttle to retrieve T'Pol or refused Enterprise's offer of assistance, but Soval hadn't been acting like his usual, pompous self. True, some headway had been made after the incident with the Xindi, but the ambassador had seemed very un-Vulcan. He wondered if anyone else had noticed.
He finally turned to face his senior staff and saw that they were all wearing perplexed expressions, no doubt just as confused as he was. However, there was only one of his officers to whom he directed his question when he asked, "What was that?"
T'Pol just looked at him. "I don't know what you mean."
She was lying. He could tell; T'Pol wasn't as good of a liar as she used to be. Archer turned to Trip. "Am I the only person who saw that?" he asked, using his arm to gesture towards the now blank view screen.
"Ambassador Cranky looked a little nervous there," said Trip, raising one eyebrow. He was smiling, but Archer could tell that he didn't mean it. He was simply trying to break the tension, and not doing a very good job at it. "You think he's hiding something?"
Kamea, half-hidden over by the turbo lift, snorted so suddenly that Archer nearly jumped. "Of course he's hiding something," she said, in a tone that suggested it should have been obvious to everyone; it was her usual tone.
"How do you know?" Archer asked, though he had a pretty good idea what the answer was going to be.
She narrowed her eyes. "He's Vulcan."
Archer chose not to comment. He was certain that Kamea had never met Soval, but he sensed that whatever animosity the girl was feeling was due to her father's relationship with the ambassador, whatever that may have been. He made a mental note to ask her about that sometime.
"That," T'Pol said, her voice unnaturally frosty, "is an unfair assessment."
Kamea shook her head. "Somehow, I don't think so." She wandered towards the center of the bridge but remained on the outside, bracing her hands on the railings on either side of her and leaning forward. "Something is going on – something other than what we've been told. And whatever is happening down there, the Vulcans don't want us to know about it."
Archer nodded in agreement; he'd been thinking the same thing. The Vulcans not telling them anything was nothing new, but somehow this seemed to be something more – something big. Archer had a sinking feeling that whatever was happening to the political structure on Vulcan could completely change the planet as he knew it; this upheaval could lead to a civil war, and how would a Vulcan civil war affect other worlds? The Vulcans were such a huge part of interstellar travel that a political restructuring could send a shockwave through the rest of the galaxy.
Where would Starfleet stand if the Vulcans did dissolve into civil war? Would they side with the High Command, with whom they dealt on a regular basis? And who exactly were these Syrannites who had seemingly suddenly risen to challenge the High Command's power? Would they interfere at all, or adopt a platform of non-involvement like the Vulcans had done so many times? Archer didn't like not knowing the answer, and the only person who could possibly give him information would just breathe the word "classified" and that would be the end of that.
His eyes drifted to Kamea as he realized that T'Pol was no longer the only person to whom he could turn if he had questions about Vulcans. Granted, Kamea hadn't grown up on Vulcan, but she was half-Vulcan and her father had to have taught her something.
"I know nothing," Kamea said before he even got the chance to ask her. She had been looking better of late, but at that moment, she seemed haggard and worn, like she'd been awake all night – which she probably had. Archer hadn't heard whether or not she was still plagued with insomnia; if it were a problem, Phlox would have told him. "I wish I could tell you something, Captain, but I can't."
Archer sighed, frustrated not with her but with the situation in general. However, he chose to take out his frustrations on her, as she had quickly proved to be an easy target. Also, it was fun to rile her up. "What good are you, then?"
She offered a shrug as her only response, which was very unlike her. He wondered if something was going on with her, too. He would make it a point to ask Malcolm about it later, since the two of them seemed to spend so much time together. Archer knew he should intervene – relationships on starships tended to muck up the works – but there was technically nothing going on between them, so there was technically nothing he could do about it. Until Malcolm and Kamea's relationship caused a problem, he had nothing to say on the subject.
Actually, he had plenty to say on the subject. He was just choosing not to at this point in time. But how sad was it that everyone on his ship seemed to have found someone but him?
He knew what he had to do, though he also knew it would accomplish nothing. He had to ask T'Pol what was going on. She had already told him about the Syrannites, despite the fact that the High Command forbid it. He knew that she'd had a communiqué from Vulcan prior to Admiral Forrest's announcement, so she had to have at least some clue of what was going on planetside. She was just choosing not to say anything.
There was a lot of that going on lately. Perhaps he should be worried.
He took a deep breath, steeled himself for rejection, and said, "T'Pol, is there anything we need to know?"
T'Pol folded her arms across her chest and stared determinedly in front of her, not meeting his eye, which answered his question better than any answer she could ever give him. "Ambassador Soval has informed you that Enterprise's assistance won't be needed."
Archer cocked an eyebrow. Prevarication wasn't exactly uncommon from T'Pol, but he couldn't remember her being quite so vague before. At least her normal response of "That information is classified," was a clear dismissal. "Is that a 'no'?"
She continued to keep her eyes trained on the back of Hoshi's head. "Were Enterprise involved with the conflict, there would be things that you would need to know, but as Ambassador Soval has refused your offer to help, there is nothing that you need to know. It is a problem for our people. You are not involved."
"We're involved," Trip said, his voice heavy with an emotion Archer recognized but didn't want to name. He didn't want to think about Trip and T'Pol as a couple; he never had. He was still uncomfortable with the whole concept, and the political ramifications of the two of them together would be more than he was willing to deal with at the moment.
Again, it seemed as though everyone on the ship had someone but him. He would really have to work on that. Later, though. He had more important things to worry about. Like the fact that his chief engineer looked as though he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"If you're involved, we're involved," Trip said. Unless Archer was mistaken, there were tears in his eyes. "You think we're just gonna send you off to war without knowing what's going on?"
T'Pol stubbornly refused to look at any of them. Archer noticed that she didn't contradict Trip's claim that she was going off to war. "My welfare is no longer Enterprise's concern, Commander. I have been recalled."
Trip looked as though he wanted to say more, but he kept his mouth shut, returning his attention to his station and furiously pounding the buttons before him. Archer wondered how much restraint Trip was exercising to keep from leaping over his console and taking T'Pol in his arms. If Archer knew Trip at all – which he liked to think he did but lately wasn't so sure – it was a lot.
"It's my concern," said Kamea after a silence. Her voice was so quiet that Archer almost hadn't heard her. She had never been one for outright displays of emotion where T'Pol was concerned, so Archer was surprised that she sounded genuinely concerned. T'Pol must have been shocked as well, because she actually turned in her seat to look at her cousin. "You're pi-maat. I have a right to know."
They stared at each other for a while – a sight quite unlike anything Archer had ever seen. He never thought he'd live to see two Vulcans get in a staring contest. Under different circumstances, he might have found it amusing. But when T'Pol still said nothing, Archer made a decision. He was going to get the truth one way or another, and he was going to get it from the people who owed him most – the High Command. Why should he wait around for the Vulcan shuttle when they had two perfectly good pods on board?
His mind made up, he turned to Trip. "Commander Tucker, ready Shuttle Pod Two."
It was impossible to tell which of his officers looked more surprised at that command. T'Pol's eyes were wider than Archer had ever seen them. Malcolm, Hoshi, and Travis all wore similar looks of stunned disbelief. Trip, however, actually looked pleased with the order.
"Captain?" Trip asked, his voice masking just a hint of uncertainly, as though he thought he had misheard.
Archer crossed his arms, sending Trip a look that could not be misconstrued. His chief engineer grinned and took off to do as the captain had instructed.
"One way or another," Archer said, turning back to the blank view screen, "we're going to get answers."
Kamea had been nervous before. Nerves were nothing new to her. Nervous she could handle. Her first day of high school after her classmates found out she was half-Vulcan, she was nervous. Her first day of classes at MIT, she was nervous. The first day she tried to pass as completely human, she was nervous. But this feeling growing inside of her stomach was something entirely different. It went way beyond nervous. She would have given her left arm for nervous. She was convinced that her stomach was eating itself – at least, that's what it felt like. She couldn't quite explain the way her insides were gurgling, threatening to explode, and she didn't entirely want to, so she put on the brave face she was so used to wearing and climbed on board the shuttle pod with everyone else, hoping that halfway there the captain changed his mind and turned it around.
What in the hell had the captain been thinking, inviting her to come along with them? He only wanted her there so that she could try and sense what was going on with the High Command – why they were lying to Starfleet about what was really going on. Come on, Archer, she thought, do you really need a telepath to tell you that? She didn't want to go to Vulcan. Why would she want to go to Vulcan? Why was she going to Vulcan? Why couldn't she jump off the shuttle pod now, before they left the ship and while she still had the chance?
But she lost her chance to escape as Travis guided the pod out of the docking bay and into open space. She was really going to have to work on her timing.
Malcolm sat next to her in the pod, a much different scenario from the last time the two of them had ridden down to a planet together – and she was hoping that their trip to the planet would turn out differently as well. She liked having the use of her arm back. But she was glad for Malcolm's presence. He was calming, soothing, and she was about three steps away from insanity, with or without him there. So it was a good thing he was there.
No doubt about it. She was definitely going crazy. It was her father. He was driving her crazy. She had to get him out of her head.
"Have you ever been to Vulcan?" she asked, hoping that her voice didn't sound as frantic as she imagined it did.
Malcolm nodded slowly, as though lost in thought. "Once, a long time ago, but all I got to see was the Earth embassy."
Kamea swallowed hard, fighting down the nerves as they threatened to crawl up her throat and into her head. "Is it nice?"
He smiled. "Not really. I think they were trying to discourage humans from visiting."
She gave him a half-hearted smile, recognizing his attempt to cheer her up. "Sounds about right."
The tension that permeated the ship had sneaked aboard the shuttle pod. Archer and Travis sat in the front, having a very loud discussion about water polo, which Kamea assumed was to cover up the rather stony silence emanating from the middle of the pod, where T'Pol and Trip sat side by side, very purposefully not speaking to each other. They were also very purposefully not touching each other and not looking at each other, seated several inches apart in similar postures – arms crossed, jaws clenched, eyes boring holes into the door.
Malcolm looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that made her feel ridiculously flattered like some silly lovesick teenager, and she hadn't felt like that for a really long time. It made her feel like she wasn't some hybrid freak that would never belong anywhere; it made her feel like she could find a permanent place on Enterprise.
It scared the shit out of her.
She turned her face away to hide the fact that her cheeks had turned dark red and said, "Stop doing that."
Malcolm played dumb. He was quite good at it. "Doing what?"
She grunted. Her cheeks burned. Damn that man and his gorgeous blue eyes. It was unfair. Eyes like that should be illegal. "You know what. Stop it."
"Are you nervous about going to Vulcan?" His voice was soft and serious, and her heart melted instantly, as it was wont to do when he used that particular tone.
"Nervous?" she asked, and she couldn't help but notice that the word came out squeaky and uncertain. She cleared her throat, but it didn't help at all. "Of course not. Why should I be nervous about meeting the people who banished my father and denied all knowledge of my existence?"
Malcolm laughed softly and bit his bottom lip. She licked her lips unconsciously; he had no idea how irresistible he looked when he did that – or maybe he did and that was why he did it so often. "You sound bitter," he said.
"Bitter?" Kamea shifted her position, trying to move away from him and the warmth he was giving off, trying to free herself from the grip of that tide of emotions that threatened to engulf her every time she was near him. "Of course not. Bitter is an emotion. I'm Vulcan. We don't acknowledge emotion."
He sighed and loosely draped his arm around her shoulders. She stiffened automatically; he had never done anything like that before. True, they slept together every night, but they were alone. Never had he been so overt in public – although no one else in the pod was paying attention to the two of them. "They can't deny what's right in front of their face," he said.
She snorted without meaning to. "Sure they can. They're Vulcans. Denial is what they do best." She raised her voice. "Isn't that right, T'Pol?"
T'Pol exhaled loudly through her nose, but said nothing. She didn't even look at Kamea.
Kamea turned to Malcolm. "I'm feeling very loved right now. I'd hate to leave this little love bubble I've constructed for myself, so I think I should just stay here on the shuttle pod while the rest of you go off gallivanting on Vulcan."
Travis turned around in his seat to face them. "We'll be landing in a few minutes, so take all necessary precautions."
Kamea froze. They were landing already? How could they be landing already? Why did Travis have to be such a damn good pilot? No. No. No. No. No. She took a deep breath, then another one, and then another one, but it wasn't helping. She began to rock back and forth, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until Malcolm tightened his grip around her shoulders and stroked her upper arm.
"E ana maika'i no 'oe," he said in her ear. "Mai ho'okaumaha."
"Who said I was worried?" She tried very hard not to feel comfortable in Malcolm's embrace. "You're getting good at that. You should tackle Vulcan next."
By the time they landed, no one was talking. It was the second most uncomfortable trip in a shuttle pod Kamea had ever had, but she'd only had the two, so that wasn't saying much. Travis guided the shuttle pod to a soft landing; Kamea glanced outside and saw nothing but sand. Then she felt her throat constrict and it became difficult to breathe. She stumbled backwards back into her seat. Malcolm was at her side in seconds.
"Kamea? Are you all right?"
She shook her head, suddenly dizzy. It was weird – the sudden sensation of a lot more people than she was used to. She looked around the shuttle pod, but it was just the six of them, so whoever was intruding on her thought processes was coming from outside. She gestured at the window with her head. "They're pissed off," she said, looking pointedly at Archer.
He looked right back at her, and she knew immediately – he'd been hoping to piss them off. He wanted them to slip up and admit to what was going on, why they'd had to hightail it to Vulcan to bring back someone who was no longer a member of the High Command. It was futile; the Vulcans would never admit to anything.
There was a buzzing in the back of her brain, almost as if someone were trying to read her thoughts. She knew the Vulcans had limited telepathic abilities, but they were limited – no where near the kind of power they would have to possess to even brush the surface of her brain – so the buzzing had to be coming from somewhere else. And she knew from where it was coming, and the thought ate her up inside.
Her father's voice echoed in her ears, faint and faraway, but every word still came in loud and clear. Dakh pthak. Nam-tor ri ret na'fan-kitok fa tu dakh pthak.
She was not afraid. She wasn't. For her to be afraid, it would have to mean that she actually cared what these people thought about her, and she didn't care. It didn't matter to her what they thought.
Oh, who was she kidding? Of course it mattered, otherwise her stomach wouldn't currently be eating itself.
A familiar blackness was creeping in front of her eyes – the blackness that usually signaled a total loss of control. Usually it was from anger, but this time it was fear, a fear so enormous that it was going to swallow her completely unless she did something about it. But what could she do? The blackness only served to frighten her all the more; her heart beat wildly in her chest, and panic started to overtake her.
"'A'ole," she said, groping blindly for the front of Malcolm's uniform. She grasped something – it was Malcolm, she could tell by the smell – and pulled him forward. "E mai makemake hele."
She felt him grip her by the shoulders and shake her, just a bit. "Kamea, pono 'oe."
There was a heavy silence in the shuttle pod – a silence of uncertainty. She could feel everyone's eyes on her without seeing them, and she could feel the confusion and the frustration they were feeling with very little effort. The uncomfortable silence was broken when Trip said, "Since when do you speak Hawaiian?"
Malcolm's voice almost disappeared as he turned to face the others. "Since Kamea doesn't speak English when she's delirious."
No one said anything, and in the silence Kamea felt Malcolm grab her legs and lift her from the floor and into his arms. She tried to protest – she may have gotten one or two good smacks in before her head began to throb and she went limp in his arms. She wasn't supposed to fight this, she knew that. But she planned on doing so. If she could find the strength to lift her head, she was fully prepared to bite people. She had sharp teeth.
Even with her eyes closed, she could tell when they stepped out of the shuttle pod. For one, she could identify the changes in light behind her eyelids. For another, the smell of the desert was unmistakable. Also, the difference in temperature was pretty obvious. The cool, climate-controlled atmosphere of the ship was replaced by blistering heat so suddenly that, had Kamea been standing, she would have been knocked over. Malcolm, for one, staggered almost as soon as the two of them walked out of the pod.
She tried to turn her head in the direction from which she knew they were coming, but she couldn't. It didn't matter. They would be here soon enough.
Malcolm tightened his arms around her, and she was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of anger – more intense than anything she had ever felt, and Kamea had felt a lot of intense anger, lots of times. But never anything like this. It was almost as if the person in question was bottling up his anger, letting it simmer below the surface where it would fester and grow and explode.
"What is the meaning of this?" said a voice that Kamea did not recognize. But the flat, emotionless tone could only mean that the Vulcans had confronted them, as she had expected. Archer had probably expected it, too. "What are you doing here?"
Her tongue was thick and fuzzy, but she managed to say, "I told you they were pissed off."
"Captain Archer, we told you that we would send a shuttle for T'Pol," said another voice, a voice that Kamea had heard before, but only in her dreams – a voice she had learned to loathe with every fiber of her being.
Her eyes snapped open. Whatever lead weight had been holding her down lifted instantaneously. Her head was no longer throbbing, her tongue was no longer heavy. She tried to sit up in Malcolm's arms; he was so startled that he dropped her, but she landed nimbly on her feet and stood to face the Vulcans.
There were a dozen of them. They all looked the same – like her father. Dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair. Everything about them was dark. They were all dressed the same, wearing robes that gave Kamea the impression they were heading off to the Jedi Council meeting. They all had the same haircut. Their faces were blank, their eyes were cold, their anger was palpable. There was condescension in their nonexistent tone and fear in their empty eyes.
They were walking contradictions, these people who touted their logical society yet acted in a completely illogical fashion. These people who had ruined her father's life, banished him from his home, barred him from even communication with his friends and relatives. Her father had accepted their decision with dignity, and they had treated him like lower than scum. They had ruined her own life – denied her the one thing in the world she had wanted above everything else, besides a normal life, which was unfeasible. They refused to acknowledge her, even when they knew she might be in danger. They were arrogant, self-serving bastards who were so pretentious it made Kamea sick, walking around like they were so much better than everybody else.
And there he was, in the center. Soval. He looked just as distinguished as ever, with his salt-and-pepper hair and crow's feet around his eyes. His face was familiar, not because she knew him as the Vulcan ambassador to Earth, but because he had a lot of her father's facial features. If she squinted, she could almost pretend that he was her father.
She stood as tall as she could. "Na'shaya, toz'ot."
Words could not describe the dirty looks all of the Vulcans gave her. It was weird – a dirty look without a look. She could tell what they were thinking even though it wasn't obvious in their facial expressions. Her eyes flicked back and forth between them, studying their reactions. She felt about two inches tall.
Soval was thunderstruck. "I beg your pardon?"
He and the tall, really angry-looking Vulcan took a step forward, and Kamea reacted automatically. She flinched, took a step back towards Malcolm, and put up a barrier – practically without even realizing that she was doing so. Soval and the angry-looking Vulcan slammed into the barrier.
Trip screwed up his face in confusion and turned to Malcolm. "What did she say?"
Malcolm shrugged. "How the bloody hell should I know?"
T'Pol stared at Kamea with slightly widened eyes. "How could you possibly know?"
Kamea kept her eyes on Soval, who was pressing against the invisible barrier with more than a passing interest. The first signs of recognition were beginning to appear in his dark eyes. "Fal-tor-plak," she said.
Now the Vulcans gave her looks of mistrust, of suspicion. She knew she was suggesting a radical idea, something that none of the Vulcans standing before her would ever condescend to admit to. But there was no other explanation, no possible explanation for what was happening to her – the voices in her head, the dreams she kept having, and her nightmares, among other things.
T'Pol shook her head firmly. "That's not possible. A katra is not something that can just be passed from one Vulcan to the next."
"It is possible," said Kamea. She still wouldn't look at T'Pol. She knew what her cousin would say and she really wasn't in the mood to hear it at the moment. Idle skepticism was one thing, but T'Pol's mind was about as closed as anything, which was odd, considering everything. "It is completely possible. If you could just open your mind one fraction of an inch, you might realize that." She finally turned to look at her cousin. She had never felt more frustrated than she did right then.
Okay. So that wasn't entirely true. But they didn't have to know that. Kamea said, "I thought that you, of all people – "
"T'Pol is right," Soval said. "It is not physically possible to transfer a katra from one Vulcan to another."
Kamea lowered the barrier and walked toward the Vulcans as calmly as she could. She stopped directly in front of Soval, as close as she dared get to him. "You told Starfleet to reject my application."
His face was impassive, but his eyes betrayed him. "You assume much."
Kamea laughed – a great loud barking laugh that erupted from her mouth almost without her control. "'Assume' nothing. My father confronted you, and you didn't deny it. You went to the admiralty and – "
"Do you mean to tell me," one of the Vulcans in the back said, "that you believe you are Vulcan?"
Duh. She bit her tongue to keep from saying it, instead tucking her hair behind her ears – a characteristic that not even the Vulcans could deny.
"What you are suggesting," the angry-looking Vulcan said, "is impossible. Vulcans and humans have never reproduced. You are not Vulcan."
Not this again. Her entire life, she had to deal with this – with disbelief, with suspicion, with doubt. She was used to it. But she was tired of it. "Shiyau thol'es k'thorai ri k'ahm."
"Do not presume that merely quoting Surak will convince us that you are who you claim to be," said the angry-looking Vulcan. "You have no scientific proof to substantiate your claim."
Archer cleared his throat, and all eyes turned to him – save for Kamea's, who could not take her eyes off of Soval. "She doesn't. We do."
The angry-looking Vulcan scoffed. "Preposterous. No Vulcan/human…coupling…has ever produced offspring."
Kamea hated the way he spat out the word "coupling" as though the very notion were an insult. She started forward, pulling her arm back, but Malcolm appeared from out of nowhere to restrain her in the nick of time. He held her wrist firmly and pulled her back against him. "You don't want to do that," he said in her ear.
Her upper lip curled in a snarl. She was so upset that she didn't even bother to notice how close Malcolm was. "Oh, I so do."
V'Las ignored her, marching over to Archer and getting as close to being in his face as a Vulcan would allow. "Captain Archer, this is most unacceptable. You were asked to remain on your ship."
Kamea broke free of Malcolm's hold with very little effort, though she took great care not to do him physical injury. She couldn't believe that she was being brushed off like that. She had been anticipating this meeting – this "homecoming" of sorts – for more than half a century, and it didn't seem as important to them as it did to her. How could they ignore something that was right in front of their faces? Yes, they were Vulcans, but they weren't blind. What did they think had happened, she had gotten her head stuck in a rice picker as a child?
"Actually," Archer said, "Soval told us that it wouldn't be safe for us down here. He never said we couldn't come."
She had told Malcolm that they wouldn't accept her, but she had secretly been hoping that they would. After all, she wasn't some object they could just dismiss because they didn't want to believe it. She was flesh and blood, a living, breathing human being. She had feelings and emotions and the fact that the Vulcans were just completely ignoring her was really starting to piss her off. If there was anything she hated, it was being ignored.
"We came to offer our assistance," said Archer. "It's the least we can do."
Just who did they think they were? They weren't the chosen people of the universe.
"We don't require your assistance," V'Las said. "You landed without permission. According to Vulcan protocol, we could have your entire crew arrested for violation of our treaty."
"You can't arrest us," said Trip. "You didn't tell us we couldn't come, you just suggested we don't."
"This is ridiculous," said V'Las. He turned to another one of the Vulcans. "Tavok, arrest the humans."
Tavok was shorter than the rest of them, and though Vulcans didn't show their age in the same way that humans did, Kamea could tell that he was younger than the others. He waved his arm, and a group of Vulcans that Kamea had not noticed before surrounded Malcolm, Archer, Trip and Travis. One came at her, but she dropped into her ready stance. She was more than willing to fight to the death.
"Just try it," she said.
"Kamea," said T'Pol, who was now standing next to Soval. "Do not attempt to fight back."
Kamea glared at her cousin. "It is not in my nature to go quietly."
T'Pol sighed inaudibly. "Perhaps, just this once, you should go against your nature."
It was too horrible to even think about – the idea of simply stepping back and allowing the Vulcans to arrest her and the rest of the Enterprise crew. Kamea hated to think of what would happen to her in a Vulcan prison, though she had no idea what a Vulcan prison was like. She hadn't even known that Vulcans had prisons. They probably didn't; they'd just be put in some holding cell, but still, she loathed to think of what they would do to her.
Sochya, ko-fu. Ki' odva.
She sighed and relaxed, letting the Vulcan take her in to custody. He bound her wrists in irons, which she tested out of habit. They were weak, and could easily give if she applied enough strength – obviously designed to restrain humans and not Vulcans. As their Vulcan escort led her and the others away, she turned to look at Soval and V'Las. She prodded into their consciousness, just a little, to see if she could tell what they were thinking – but their brains were muddled, a mass of confusion, and Kamea could not tell one thought from the next.
One thing, at least, was for certain – this had not been the homecoming she'd anticipated.