ROTF: Live by the Code Annotations

This document explains the continuity references, allusions, in-jokes, and scientific concepts contained in Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (ROTF:LBTC).   I assume that the reader is familiar with the basic characters and background of the Trek universe.  Readers seeking further information on references to past Trek episodes or movies are advised to consult the Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki.  Information about Star Trek novels can be found at the Memory Beta wiki.

ROTF advances the post-series Enterprise continuity whose previous installments include the novels The Good That Men Do and Kobayashi Maru by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin and The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wing and The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm by Martin. However, it begins a new storyline and stands largely on its own. LBTC continues the arcs begun in ROTF Book 1, A Choice of Futures (ACOF), Book 2, Tower of Babel (ToB), and Book 3, Uncertain Logic (UL).

Be aware that this document contains spoilers for the whole of LBTC and for numerous episodes, films, and novels from all Trek series, particularly Enterprise.  I would strongly recommend not reading it until one has completed the novel, since many of the notes contain spoilers for things not revealed until later scenes or chapters.

Episode and book titles are ENT unless otherwise indicated.  Episode and short-story titles are in quotes, while film and book titles are italicized.

Abbreviations

ENT — Enterprise	TOS — The Original Series	TAS — The Animated Series
TNG — Next Generation	DS9 — Deep Space Nine	VGR – Voyager
TGTMD – The Good That Men Do	KM – Kobayashi Maru	TTN — Titan
TRW – The Romulan War (duology)	BTRW – Beneath the Raptor’s Wing (TRW Bk. 1)	TBTS – To Brave the Storm (TRW Bk. 2)
ACOF – A Choice of Futures	ToB – Tower of Babel	UL — Uncertain Logic
STSC – Star Trek Star Charts	TKAOW — The Klingon Art of War

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Chapter Annotations

Title	I intended the title Live by the Code to have a multiple meaning. It’s largely a play on computer code, but it also alludes to the codes of behavior and morality that the other characters of the novel (Klingon, Starfleet, Partnership, etc.) strive — or fail — to live up to.
Pg.
Cover	Doug Drexler’s cover is a stylized representation of the Vol’Rala’s battle with the privateer fleet over Rastish in the second half of Ch. 6. Doug consulted with me to determine whether there was a scene in the novel suitable for the cover, and I suggested this sequence, though I wasn’t expecting such a close angle on the ships.
Prologue
1	The Vol’Rala was first mentioned in A Choice of Futures as an Andorian ship whose name essentially translated as Enterprise, and it and Captain sh’Prenni first appeared as part of the Ware task force in Uncertain Logic. Making them central players here was based on my feeling that, if I was doing a series titled Star Trek: Enterprise, there should be some kind of an Enterprise in it at some point. I tried to make this opening scene feel like it was the next installment in an ongoing Star Trek: Vol’Rala series, which is why I’m so pleased that the ship is featured on the cover.
	The term “Fesoan-class planet” is meant to represent a Jovian/gas giant planet, based on my speculation in the DTI Calendar Notes that Fesoan (an old term for Andoria proposed in Shane Johnson’s Worlds of the Federation) might be the name of the Jovian planet orbited by the moon Andoria as established in ENT.
	Here is the complete roster of the Ware task force (expanded from the list in the UL annotations):
	Vessel Registry Class Commanding officer Home port USS Pioneer NCC-63 Intrepid (light cruiser) Captain Malcolm Reed Earth USS Vol’Rala AGC-7-10 Kumari (heavy cruiser) Captain Reshthenar sh’Prenni Andoria USS Thelasa-vei AGC-7-48 Kumari Captain Menteshay th’Zaigrel Andoria USS Flabbjellah AGC-6-16 Sevaijen (light cruiser) Captain Zheusal zh’Ethar Andoria USS Kinaph AGC-6-34 Sevaijen Captain Kulef nd’Orelag Arken II USS Trenkanshent sh’Lavan AGC-6-49 Sevaijen Captain Trenev Sharn Andoria USS Zabathu AGC-11-09 Ilthirin (high-speed courier) Commander Finirath ch’Mezret Andoria USS Tashmaji AGC-11-15 Ilthirin Commander Chelienal sh’Regda Andoria
2	I imagined Hari Banerji as a cross between Wilfrid Hyde-White’s Dr. Goodfellow from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Barry Morse’s Dr. Bergman from Space: 1999… as played by Sir Ben Kingsley. His banter with Charas is clearly meant to evoke Spock and McCoy.
	The terms Thalassan and Talish for Andorian races come from the Last Unicorn Games sourcebook Andorians: Among the Clans, also the source of much of the Andorian worldbuilding seen in ENT: “Babel One,” “United,” and “The Aenar.” Thalassans are the TOS-style Andorians with rear-mounted antennae. The sourcebook used Talish as the name for the ST:TMP Andorians with thin, forward-mounted antennae, but I use it here to refer to the dominant Andorian type seen in ENT, also with forward-mounted antennae.
3	The Clan of Cheen was established as a prominent Andorian clan in Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—Andor: Paradigm by Heather Jarman. Lieutenant th’Cheen is presumably an ancestor of Thriss zh’Cheen from DS9’s Mission: Gamma novels.
3-5	The recap covers the events of  “Minefield” and Uncertain Logic.
5	See previous ROTF annotations for background on Arkenites and Alrond.
	The bridge layout is the same as that of the Kumari bridge in ENT: “Proving Ground.” The purpose of the dishes flanking the captain’s chair was unexplained there. The idea of Andorian antennae sensing EM fields is from DS9: Avatar by S.D. Perry. Arkenite magnetic senses were established by me in TTN: Over a Torrent Sea.
6	“Philip Collier” is the alias of Charles “Trip” Tucker on this mission, as established in UL.
7	The I.G.S. Thalisar is named for Thalisar the Last, established in Andor: Paradigm as the monarch who ended the Andorian monarchy and created the planet’s modern parliamentary government.
Chapter 1
11	Lokog, Vhelis, and the SuD Qav previously appeared in the opening of ROTF: Tower of Babel (where I mis-capitalized the ship name as Sud Qav).
	The HomneH is “a club made out of the leg bone of a klongat,” according to Keith R.A. DeCandido, who suggested it to me in e-mail correspondence.
12	Chancellor M’Rek was established in “The Augments,” not “The Expanse” as I claimed in the book’s Acknowledgments. An unnamed chancellor was seen in “The Expanse,” but the name M’Rek was coined later.
	I’m following Keith DeCandido’s precedent by treating “Four thousand throats can be slit in one night by a running man” as an established Klingon saying, rather than an extemporaneous observation of the character who spoke it in TOS: “Day of the Dove.” I’ve always prefered to think of it as the latter, since it’s in response to a line about having only 40 Klingons to fight 400 Enterprise personnel, and the recurrence of fours is rather coincidental otherwise. But both The Klingon Art of War and Keith’s earlier Alien Spotlight: Klingons for IDW Comics portray it as an established saying. Since this novel drew heavily on TKAOW, and since it worked in the context of this scene, I chose to play along.
	The Qu’Vat Plague which created the ridgeless Klingon variant was established in “Affliction” and “Divergence.”
14	Starfleet zero-gravity (aka null-gravity) combat training was referenced in TAS: “The Jihad” and the film First Contact.
15	Chirurgeon th’Lesinas is intended as an ancestor of Vaacith sh’Lesinas, the science fiction author and DTI advisor featured in DTI: Forgotten History.
19	Similarly, Commander sh’Regda is an ancestor of Captain ch’Regda from The Buried Age. I’m all about the Andorian lineages here. Or maybe it’s just that Andorian names are hard to think up, so it’s easier to draw on precedent.
20	A tup is a Klingon “minute,” equal to 95 seconds.
	Kalun is the third and last of the SuD Qav crewmembers who previously appeared in ToB.
Chapter 2
27	The black-haired woman in the lead is one of Endeavour’s security officers, but I never got around to naming her. Given how Orion females tend to be sexualized, I thought it would help balance things if Gyrai were dealt with by an all-female team of Starfleet’s finest.
	I assume that Hoshi’s hair is shoulder-length because this book takes place in the same year as the alternate-future scenes in “Twilight.” This is also the reason Malcolm Reed has a goatee in ROTF.
	I feel it’s a bit clumsy to have just one scene addressing the escape of V’Las from Uncertain Logic and then abandon it. But it was logical that Endeavour would be following up on V’Las’s escape, and it served to keep the idea of V’Las in play to set up prospective future developments. Making it an impediment to reaching Phlox’s daughter’s wedding helps give it a purpose in this story, however tenuously.
	I’m not sure how “Gyrai” is pronounced, but it’s probably something like “Jeer-eye” or “Zheer-eye.”
29	I very much doubt the “rank/outrank” pun would translate into Orion, but who cares?
30	Yes, these Starfleet officers are straight-up stealing Gyrai’s wealth, but since that wealth was itself obtained through criminal means and they’re giving it to charity (as well as liberating the slaves she “owns”), I can’t see that as objectionable. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Leverage. Anyway, the Borderland has no rule of law, which is why the Orion Syndicate operates there. When in Rome…
	“Altarian marsupial” is the official spelling, though it seems like a typo for “Altairian.”
31	It was “The Augments” which established that the Briar Patch (from Insurrection) had been given that nickname by Arik Soong and was actually the same place as Klach D’kel Bracht (a Klingon place name coined in DS9: “Blood Oath”). The carnivorous Vulcan “briars” T’Pol alludes to are possibly related to the carnivorous desert plants seen in TAS: “Yesteryear.”
33	Haj is Klingon for “dread.”
37	Commissioner Noar was featured in A Choice of Futures.
38	The recap of the Klingons’ response to the Earth-Romulan War is based on events from To Brave the Storm.
39ff	The Keepers of the Throne are basically inspired by the extremist group known as ISIL or Daesh (or “ISIS” as the US media insist on calling it)—and to some extent by the bigoted political factions in the United States who have irrationally called for the persecution or expulsion of the very refugees that are the victims of militant groups like Daesh. This is also the last gasp of the ongoing ROTF story thread of anti-Federation dissident groups within the UFP, with the Lechebists being the last stragglers to wrap up before moving on. One thing I wanted was to show the complexity of Archer’s new chief-of-staff role by giving him a variety of offscreen crises to deal with, West Wing-style, in addition to those featured in the novel’s main plots. It was natural to include Alrond among those situations.
	The Arkonians were introduced in “Dawn.” They’re a fairly aggressive but not unreasonable people who have an unfriendly history with the erstwhile Vulcan High Command. They may show up again in ROTF if I find the right opportunity.
41-42	I’m continuing the trend of naming NX and Columbia-class ships after pioneering ships from the early days of spaceflight. Apollo and Soyuz are well-known. Buran was the abandoned Soviet space shuttle program, while Shenlong is a secretive Chinese space-plane program. Moving into fiction, Ares was a series of crewed Mars missions established in VGR: “One Small Step,” Charybdis was a pioneering pre-warp interstellar mission established in TNG: “The Royale,” Phoenix was Zefram Cochrane’s prototype warp ship in First Contact, and Valiant was the lost early warp ship from TOS: “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” My original, longer draft of this passage identified Buran as NCC-08 and Shenlong as NCC-09. Presumably Apollo and Soyuz would be 10 and 11 (probably but not certainly in that order), Ares and Charybdis would be 12 and 13 (same caveat), and Phoenix and Valiant would be 14 and 15 (same caveat).
44-5	Theta Cygni XII was one of the civilizations destroyed by the flying parasites in TOS: “Operation — Annihilate!” This is presumably the first step in the Federation’s discovery of that “wave of mass insanity,” which they would later backtrack to Beta Portolan and Levinius V. I assume the infected Cygnians left in sublight sleeper ships because they don’t reach the next world in the chain, Ingraham B, until 2265.
Chapter 3
47	Though Robert Fletcher’s costume notes reprinted in The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture identify the flabbjellah as a combination weapon/musical instrument, it doesn’t specify what kind of weapon it is. The movie prop is rather hard to make sense of, but a throwing club or truncheon seemed like the most reasonable possibility.
51	Travis may be exaggerating a bit to underline his point; he’s been inside the Ware twice, but he was only conscious for part of the second time.
53	Qam-Chee was established as an ancient Klingon city in DS9: “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places,” and as the 22nd-century Klingon capital in Kobayashi Maru and the Romulan War novels. Doctor Kon’Jef is also from Kobayashi Maru.
54	The House of Palkar was established in TNG: Diplomatic Implausibility as a House with a long, noble tradition, and also as the ancestral line of Kurak, the Klingon warp-field specialist from TNG: “Suspicions” and the chief engineer of the IKS Gorkon in the eponymous novel series.
55	Kobayashi Maru established that “all but one” of the Klingon High Council members “were male,” but did not name the sole exception. I coined “Alejdar” as a name with a similar pattern to Azetbur, the chancellor who succeeded her father Gorkon in The Undiscovered Country. I remember coining the name a long time ago for an unused Trek story or proposal, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.
56	The Pheben system is from TNG: “A Matter of Honor.” The farming colony there was established in the Gorkon series.
58	The qeS’a’ is The Klingon Art of War. I didn’t specify that outright because it probably hadn’t yet had a Terran edition at this point, and thus wouldn’t yet have been given that English name.
	And Antaak joins the long tradition of Star Trek doctors to say that they are “a doctor, not a” something, alongside McCoy, Bashir, the Voyager EMH, and Phlox himself (though his was “I’m a physician, not an engineer”).
64	“Cytogenic” means “causing cell birth” and “cytolytic” means “causing cell dissolution.” This is my attempt to rationalize how the Qu’Vat virus could alter body structures in a matter of moments as seen in “Affliction” and “Divergence.” In reality, as Phlox says, changing DNA doesn’t change body structures that are already in place, any more than redrawing a blueprint will automatically alter a house that’s already been built from it. So I felt a bit of additional justification was called for. (And bits of this virus’s code may have gotten out into the galaxy and become part of other infections that could cause similar rapid anatomical changes, like the disease in TNG: “Genesis,” for instance.)
65	The ja’chuq was established in TNG: “Reunion,” and I found it a handy way to justify stretching out the selection process for M’Rek’s successor to the rather ridiculous length of time that this story required. As you’ll see, it’s not the only excuse I used for dragging out the process.
Chapter 4
68	Tyrellians are established in TNG: “Starship Mine” as a species with members in Starfleet in the 24th century. It stands to reason that this book’s events are the beginning of a closer relationship with that species. Star Trek Star Charts places Tyrellia in the region of space which I see as Ware territory, on the far side of Romulan space from the core of the Federation.
70	Kera and Phinda were established as the moons of Tellar in The Worlds of the Federation and have been invoked in Tellarite oaths in the literature since TOS: Prime Directive by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Later works have confirmed that they are Tellarite deities.
	The Rigel backstory between Williams and Kirk occurred in Tower of Babel.
75	My portrayal of Denobula’s climate and weather is based on research into the ancient supercontinent Pangaea and the climate it would likely have had. See “Pangean megamonsoon” [sic] on Wikipedia.
79	“Vesena,” the spelling I’ve used throughout the book for Phlox’s first wife’s name, is apparently a typo from the closed captioning of “Stigma,” where she’s first mentioned. The name is spelled “Vesna” in the script and pronounced that way by the actors. My apologies for not catching the error. Perhaps “Vesena” is an alternate transliteration.
80-82	Phlox gave the referenced statistics about his family in “A Night in Sickbay.” It took some doing to make sense of the numbers. To summarize, the number of “relationships” would be the number of possible combinations of n family members taken 2 at a time, so we want n!/2!(n-2)! = 720 (where n! equals n-factorial, e.g. 4! = 1x2x3x4 = 24). The closest I could come was n = 39 giving 741 relationships, and I had to subtract 21. That turns out to be the result when n = 7, so I just had to establish that 7 of the 39 family members had no relationships among one another. It was necessary to limit it all to “second-tier” relationships at the furthest (spouse’s spouse or spouse’s other children) to keep the math under control. After all, each of Phlox’s wives’ six additional husbands would have two other wives, each with two other husbands, and so on. (Assuming that each individual shares only one spouse with each other same-sex individual, which always seemed to be the implication.) In theory, you’ve got an unlimited daisy chain of marital connections. Limiting it to two degrees made sense, since presumably each wife would spend a fair amount of time with all three husbands, so Phlox might see his wives’ husbands relatively frequently and thus see them as members of the immediate family. But you’d be less likely to see those second-tier wives or third-tier husbands or more distant spouses, except at big gatherings.
	So I broke down the family as of 2152 to include: Phlox, 3 wives, 6 co-husbands, 3 of Phlox’s non-estranged children (plus 2 estranged), 8 children of other spouses, 7 spouses for his own children, and 11 spouses for the other children, thus getting to the requisite 39 members. For the present (2165), I upped it to 9 children of other spouses, 9 spouses for his own children, and 14 spouses for the other children.
	I came up with the following table for Phlox’s family, naming them all ahead of time since I didn’t know how many I’d mention in the book. Italicized names are for members not in attendance at the wedding. Names in bold are mentioned in the novel; underlined names were established in canon. Other names should be considered unofficial placeholders (and at least a couple are puns), so Memory Beta editors are advised not to create entries for them.
	Wife 1: Vesena (named in “Stigma” as Groznik’s wife) Husband 1: Plett                         Son: Kornob (lives on B’Saari II)                                     W1: Yuul (B’Saari)                                     W2: Rhola (Denobulan)                                     W3: Sheel (B’Saari)                         Daughter: Filoona                                     H1: Broos                                     H2: Starg                                     H3: Tresc (married post-2152)             Husband 2: Groznik (named in “Zero Hour”)                         Daughter: Vorra                                     H1: Samok (Vulcan)                                     H2: Moulx                         Daughter: Indaura (named in “Zero Hour”) Husband 3: Phlox Daughter: Billin (surgeon) H1: Khrul H2: Nalepp H3: Remmis Son: Vleb (potter) W1: Seyami W2: Ghalis W3: Pherdal Wife 2: Feezal (quantum optical engineer) Husband 1: Bybix Son: Rabb (lives on Tiburon) W1: Tuann Mensin (Tiburonian) W2: Bel bim Gruuv (Tellarite) W3: Dworra Sindar (Tiburonian, married post-2152) Husband 2: Phlox Son: Tullis (formerly estranged) W1: Vurika W2: Minnis W3: Zelfa Daughter: Vaneel (biochemist) H1: Thesh (married post-2152) H2: Hong Sun-woo (human, married post-2152) H3: Pehle Retab (Antaran) Husband 3: Kovlin Daughter: Rempal H1: Grenn H2: Morren (married post-2152) H3: Dresp (married post-2152) Wife 3: Nullim Husband 1: Phlox Son: Mettus (estranged since 2143 or earlier) Husband 2: Gerrif                         Son: Pellon                                     W1: Bennol                         Daughter: Doulin (under 13)             Husband 3: Kullo                         Daughter: Blonx                         Son: Kronna (under 13)
	Note that in A Choice of Futures, Phlox implied on p. 60 that his third wife and her second husband had some sort of experience with adoption, though he was interrupted mid-sentence. This could mean that Pellon, Doulin, or both were adopted, although Phlox says herein that Nullim “had” Doulin, a usage that generally implies genetic parentage. But Phlox also said adoption was commonplace among Denobulans, so they may not make that same distinction.
	As of 2152, there were 26 marital pairings, so I needed another 16 to get to 42 romantic relationships per “A Night in Sickbay.” I considered including extramarital interactions, which Denobulans are fine with, but cross-marital pairings (e.g. Nullim sleeping with Bybix or Feezal with Groznik) would only get me 38 relationships in all. I decided to disregard those as third-tier pairings and instead follow John Billingsley’s suggestion that Denobulans were “known bisexuals,” counting the 19 possible same-sex pairings among the listed Denobulan spouses (assuming that the non-Denobulan spouses were all heterosexual—an assumption I wouldn’t normally make, but I needed to simplify things somehow) and then eliminating three by assuming that Kovlin was strictly heterosexual (excluding potential pairings with Phlox and Bybix) and so was either Broos or Starg (the only other option that would let me cancel just a single potential pairing of co-husbands, since there was no third husband yet as of 2152). Math aside, I felt it was important for Phlox, a canonical series regular, to state outright that he was bisexual. This book is not lacking in LGBT characters — in fact, though I didn’t plan it that way, it has at least one character for every letter of that initialism (L: Zoanra zh’Vethris and Ramnaf Breg; G: Grev, Admiral Krell, and Dr. Kon’Jef; B: Phlox and implicitly most Denobulans; T: Morgan Kelly). But I wanted at least one of them to be a TV series regular, because it’s high time that happened. And it’s consistent with John Billingsley’s own perception of the character. You’ll note that I haven’t made any allowance for same-sex marriage in this convoluted scheme, however. If Denobulans are fine with same-sex relationships, why omit that option? I figure that since they’re so open and non-exclusive about sexuality, and so peripatetic in their residency and relationships, marriage would probably be defined more as a procreative partnership than anything else—specific to male-female pairings, but serving a limited role and not excluding other emotional, sexual, or social partnerships. Besides, the triple marriages ensure that each spouse of the opposite sex comes with two co-spouses of one’s own sex anyway. The difference between being a man’s husband and being his wife’s co-husband would be essentially a technicality, since they’re all part of the same marriage. So it made it simpler just to accept the latter terminology as standard—and good grief, did I ever need to make it simpler.
82	The B’Saari were established in “Future Tense” as the first alien race the Denobulans contacted. “Affliction” established Tiburon as the host of an Interspecies Medical Exchange conference attended by Phlox in 2149.
85	I wrestled with the question of how Denobulans could juggle living with so many spouses and spouses’ spouses and so on, until I realized that their sleeplessness resolved the question by leaving them no need for homes to return to every night. Thus there’s no issue of who cohabits with whom; they just go where they will and get together when they will.
	But I couldn’t find an evolutionary reason why Denobulans would not need sleep. Star Charts puts Denobula around the star Iota Boötis, a wide binary whose A component is a type-A7 white star and whose B component is a K1 orange dwarf. If Denobula is around the more amenable B star, then night would be relatively bright (when its orbit took it between the two stars), but not day-bright. And A would only be up at night for half the year. But then I remembered that the series established that the Denobulans had genetically engineered themselves in unspecified ways. It made sense that their sleeplessness would’ve been an engineered trait, or at least an enhancement of a relatively diminished need for sleep. Their tendency to hallucinate would fill the role served by dreams in other species, a way of organizing and preserving memories while the brain rests.
89	Enterprise never specified how long Denobulans lived. I decided on early 80s as middle age, suggesting a life expectancy of 150 or more. Other tie-in authors seem to have assumed a greater life expectancy. Seekers 4: All That’s Left by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, set in 2269, features Ensign Tropp, a Denobulan medic who’s supposedly the same Dr. Tropp who serves aboard the Enterprise-E in novels set in the 2370s-80s. And yet Tropp doesn’t seem particularly aged in the TNG novels. Also, IDW’s Flesh and Stone comic shows Phlox himself alive and well in (again) 2269, interacting with Dr. McCoy and looking no older than he did 115 years earlier (although the comic is not in continuity with the novels). So perhaps I underestimated Denobulan longevity—or perhaps they’ll employ further genetic engineering to extend their lifespans sometime after 2165.
Chapter 5
92	A ship emerging from warp should have its momentum unchanged because it isn’t actually accelerated by a warp field; rather, the field alters the geometry of spacetime around the ship. This is also why there’s no time dilation in warp drive, basically. As for Breg’s maneuver here, I’m assuming that the gravitational forces that form the warp field can be dispersed asymmetrically enough to cause an unbalanced gravitational pull in a particular direction—although, since the ship is itself generating the field, there’s a certain bootstrapping element there that I didn’t really consider and may not entirely make sense. Still, it sounded cool at the time.
95-97	Here I’m foreshadowing the Andorian reproductive crisis that comes to a head in the 24th century, as depicted starting in DS9: Avatar and continuing through to The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses. I’m suggesting something that I think was implicit in those books, that the Andorians’ shrinking population and growing focus on their commitments at home explains why there are progressively fewer of them in Starfleet in the 23rd and 24th centuries. Since I’ve made the Andorians such a major part of Starfleet in the early years, it’s probably a good idea to begin explaining why that doesn’t last.
Chapter 6
106	I devised the process behind Denobulan weddings to correct my own mistake. In DTI: Watching the Clock, I referred to Clare Raymond attending a Denobulan wedding and wrote, “With three husbands and three brides, the ceremony alone had taken over a day.” I was assuming there would be a lot of different permutative pairs to account for. But when I started to work out the details for this book, I realized it wouldn’t be that complicated—not to mention that the numbers don’t work out, because it’s not three men marrying three women, but each individual having three spouses who each have two other spouses, for ten in all (limiting it to a given individual’s first- and second-tier relationships). Three men and three women would come out to a maximum of five distinct weddings, if two Denobulans were taking three spouses each, including one another. So I needed to work in the “voting” and speeches and approval of the other spouses and family members in order to justify a daylong ceremony.
	Buddhist weddings are actually fairly informal ceremonies, considered personal and secular matters because the religion does not require marriage. Still, I was able to find information about certain traditions which can be read about at http://www.buddhistmatrimony.com/articles/wedding-customs-buddhist.php.
111	Phlox’s parenting philosophy is inspired by my father’s philosophy in raising me and my sister. I always appreciated that he gave us the freedom to find our own paths instead of trying to mold us in his image. He would never even tell us how he voted or what his religious beliefs were, so as not to stifle our freedom of choice. Although I think I nonetheless ended up with largely the same views on those matters that he held, or at least that are common in my family.
112	My take on Denobulan family names: The structure is (Given name)-(maternal surname)-(paternal surname). Phloxx-tunnai-oortann (the full name given in the series bible) gets the “tunnai” from his mother’s side and the “oortann” from his father’s. So in Vaneel-zalleen-oortann, “zaleen” represents Feezal’s line. In Mettus-sollexx-oortann (p. 306), “sollexx” represents Nullim’s line.
118	As usual, I’m trying to be aware of orbital physics in plotting out space battles, rather than making the usual TV/movie mistake of treating ships as just hovering in fixed positions—or the perennial Star Trek mistake, going back to the original series, of treating a ship in orbit as beside a planet rather than above it.
119	Vol’Rala’s maneuver at the end of this page’s first paragraph—rising upward through the lines of the descending Klingons and disrupting their formation—is presumably the moment that’s represented in a stylized way on the book’s cover. Realistically, the ships would be immensely farther apart than shown, though that wouldn’t be very visual.
122	In ACOF, I established that the Andorian battle cruiser’s warp nacelles were inboard and stacked atop each other in the center of the ship. However, other sources have treated the boxy pods atop the cruiser’s “wings” as its warp engines. I decided to split the difference and treat the pods as secondary warp propulsion units.
123	I discussed the Balduk in the Ch. 14 annotations for Uncertain Logic.
Chapter 7
126	“Dear Doctor” mentioned Denobulan kaybin bars as a place where one could find intimate companionship, and “Doctor’s Orders” elaborated on the kaybin district. Memory Alpha interprets this as a place name, the Kaybin District, but from its usage, it seems clear to me that it was instead meant to be the Denobulan equivalent of a “red-light district,” an area where sex-industry establishments are concentrated. I had in mind the legal, regulated red-light districts of places like Amsterdam or São Paulo.
130	Denobulans’ climbing ability was established in “The Breach.”
138	The Enlesri’s syndactyl forefeet are based on the feet of a chameleon.
139	The Arkenite anlac’ven was established in FASA role-playing game background materials. The explanation there was that they needed help balancing because they had evolved on floating ocean platforms of some sort and that somehow made them unstable on solid ground. This explanation has been referenced in the Seekers novels, but I find it unconvincing—how could a species evolve on what sound like artificially constructed platforms? So instead I came up with the magnetic-field explanation for TTN: Over a Torrent Sea and stuck with it here.
141	The Arkenites’ cultural emphasis on debt and obligation was established in Vanguard: Declassified—“The Ruins of Noble Men” by Marco Palmieri.
148	My intent was to give Dr. Lucas some actual interaction with Endeavour’s crew during his fill-in stint as CMO, but I never found the room for it. So it ends up being no more than a bit of plot mechanics, unfortunately, and Lucas effectively disappears after this.
Chapter 8
155	I was tempted at various points to put in romantic beats between Reed and sh’Prenni. After all, Malcolm has never had much luck with the ladies, and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to change that. But I realized that this was the wrong occasion. I felt it would undermine sh’Prenni as a character if I put her in the stereotyped role of the male captain’s love interest. I wanted the audience to care about her as a captain trying to do the right thing and protect her crew, rather than as a lover that Reed was in danger of losing, because the latter would make it about him instead of her. So it felt right to keep their relationship on the level of friends and fellow captains, although with a slight subtext of something more that might have been.
Chapter 9
163	The Krim is named for the figure of Klingon history/legend who, according to Keith DeCandido’s Alien Spotlight: Klingons and The Klingon Art of War, actually was the running man who slit four thousand throats in a single night. Krim will be mentioned again later in the book.
	I initially assumed that raktajino was the Klingon word for their native equivalent of coffee. But TrekBBS poster loghaD explained to me that, according to Marc Okrand’s Klingon for the Galactic Traveler, raktajino is a human beverage derived from raktaj, a Klingon blend of qa’vIn (a potent, genetically engineered strain of Earth coffee beans) and ra’taj liquor, and named as a blend of raktaj and cappuccino. So raktajino probably hadn’t been invented yet at the time of this book, so I rewrote the passage with qa’vIn and worked in a bit more explanation of that for the benefit of the readers.
167-8	The simple bombardment tactic favored by B’orel’s commanders is the same one seen in the bombardment of the Qu’Vat colony in “Divergence,” again reflecting the tendency in TV and film to portray ships in orbit as simply hovering in place. Again, I’m trying to reconcile that with a more realistic approach to orbital motion and battle tactics that take advantage of orbital physics.
170	Laneth’s father Garjud is named in honor of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, who created Laneth in “Divergence.”
173ff	The events of the Battle of Cheron as described here were depicted in To Brave the Storm.
Chapter 10
179	Kaltar is a nod to Kor portrayer John Colicos’ other great sci-fi villain role, Baltar from the original Battlestar Galactica. This Kor is the grandfather of Colicos’s Kor, of course, but I still wanted to homage the actor somehow. I considered calling the elder one “Kor, son of Kolikos,” but that would’ve been too on the nose.
183-4	The bit about the Martian colony drafting its legislators is a nod to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, probably the greatest Mars-colonization epic ever written. Maybe it’s just an in-joke, or maybe the Trek-universe Martian colonists were intentionally emulating Robinson’s political proposals from the novels.
Chapter 11
204	I didn’t originally intend for Grev to be gay. It’s just something that happened to show up in his interactions with Sam and that I decided to run with.
	As for Sam, I was originally going to have him say “I wish I could return his interest, but I’m just not interested in men.” But then I thought it would be more fun to have him say “I’m just not attracted to Tellarites.” That leaves it more ambiguous, and makes it more about a future society’s priorities and preoccupations than our own.
206	Beta Lankal was established in TNG: “Redemption II.” Why a Klingon system would use a Greek-letter Bayer designation is unknown.
209	Da’Kel was established in TOS: Cast No Shadow by James Swallow as a system in the Mempa sector. Narendra, of course, was the site of the Enterprise-C’s destruction in TNG: “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
	A jar is a Klingon “month,” 40.56 days. So the ja’chuq has lasted about two months by this point. I was uneasy about how much I had to drag it out, but I couldn’t think of a way around it. In Uncertain Logic, the two plots were separate enough that I could present them out of chronological order and allow one to take longer than the other, but here, the Ware and Klingon plots interacted too much to allow that, so the High Council intrigue had to be stretched out to keep pace with the other plots.
210	Ramnok’s bright eyes are meant to hint at a similarity to Gowron from TNG and DS9. But I’m not sure if Ramnok can actually be an ancestor of Gowron’s, since Gowron was, in Worf’s words in TNG: “Reunion,” “an outsider who has often challenged the Council.” Memory Alpha interprets this to mean he was an outsider on the Council, as in a member of a minority faction within it, but I think Worf’s line means that he wasn’t from one of the Houses that already held Council seats. Still, it’s possible that Ramnok could be an ancestor of Gowron’s if their House had once been on the Council and then lost its seat. Such upheavals can’t be uncommon in Klingon politics.
217	“Reehansa” is, of course, a corruption of Rihannsu, the Romulans’ true name according to Diane Duane’s ’80s novels, an idea reintroduced in the Mangels-Martin ENT novels preceding mine. Sangupta has no idea that the “Reehansa, or something like that” are actually the Romulans, so he just assumes they’re from “near” Romulan space. T’Pol and Tucker know better due to Trip’s espionage work in the Mangels-Martin novels, but they can’t tell anyone.
222	To be honest, the only reason I had Trip and T’Pol’s bond go away in UL was to avoid having their bond kick in while T’Pol was in trouble (because I was telling the two plots out of chronological sequence at that point and it would’ve confused matters). But I realized I could use that lack of connection as a story device, then further realized that their bond as portrayed in the show was quite anomalous, something that had never been depicted in Vulcan characters before. So it occurred to me that maybe it was a freak phenomenon to begin with and shouldn’t be permanent. More importantly, I felt it was too much of a magic convenience for Trip and T’Pol. It made it too easy for them to be content with their current status quo, and I wanted to shake them — especially Trip — out of that, so as to motivate events going forward.
Chapter 12
230	Note that, if the Klingon crisis hadn’t required Shumar to abandon his search for the Theta Cygnian sleeper ships, then the destruction of Ingraham B 100 years later and the near-destruction of Deneva 2 years after that might have been averted. Darn those Klingons…
232	The Romulan War novels only specified that Gardner had favored mass production of the Daedalus class. The suggestion that the Marshall class—an early ship class designed by Rick Sternbach for the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology in 1980—was also used in the war comes from Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman. Although that book’s version of the Earth-Romulan War is completely incompatible with the novels’ version, I thought it would be nice to include a nod to this aspect, at least.
233	The Vegan debris disk was established in ACOF as containing the ruins of an ancient starfaring civilization, making it a useful material and technological resource. The trade deal with the Vissians (from “The Cogenitor”) is implied by the fact that Starfleet begins using photonic torpedoes (in “The Expanse”) not long after the Vissians were established as using photonic warheads.
234	I have no explanation for why the Silver Armada is called that. I was writing so quickly by this point that it was a very improvisational process.
	Superterrestrial planets, or super-Earths, are rocky worlds larger than Earth—a category that doesn’t exist within the known Solar system but has been found to be fairly abundant among extrasolar planets (and it’s possible that the Planet Nine currently theorized to exist deep in the outer Solar system could be either a superterrestrial world or a Neptune-type giant). Due to their high gravity, super-Earths would be likely to have very dense atmospheres. A really massive one would probably hold onto enough hydrogen to approach being a gas giant, but Pegenor is presumably on the small side, only a couple of times more massive than Earth. Its larger size probably means it would take longer for its core to cool, hence the heavy vulcanism that keeps its atmosphere laden with carbon dioxide and volcanic gases.
237ff	While it was always my intention that the Ware’s abduction of living beings to provide brainpower was a spontaneously evolved adaptation rather than the creators’ intention, my initial proposal merely said that “its builders surrendered too much autonomy to its subsentient computers, and became so dependent on the Ware that they lost the knowledge and ability to control it.” But I came to realize that this was something of a Luddite cliché that conflicted with my own beliefs about the positive benefits of technology, and that it would be better as a commentary on current events to turn it into an allegory for the damage done by corporate greed and shortsightedness, the long-term cost of putting the profit motive above all other considerations.
	It was also important to me that the Ware remain completely mindless, its evils the consequence of unthinking, drudging compliance with its programmed directives, in order to maximize its contrast with the Borg. There are, after all, a lot of similarities between them, so I wanted as many differences as I could arrange.
240	Rey’s explanation of conscious awareness is based on the “attention schema” theory of psychologist/neuroscientist Michael Graziano. As Graziano explains it, “Attention is a data handling method by which some signals in the brain are enhanced at the expense of others. According to the attention schema theory, when the brain computes that person X is aware of thing Y, it is in effect modeling the state in which person X is applying an attentional enhancement to signal Y. Awareness is an attention schema. In that theory, the same process can be applied to oneself. One’s own awareness is a schematized model of one’s own attention.” Essentially, our awareness of our own attention allows us to redirect it as needed in response to external and internal stimuli. The mind deals with the world by creating a model of it, and it needs to include itself in that model in order to assess whether it’s paying attention to the right things. I suspect this self-monitoring is why we tend to imagine an “inner voice” speaking to us, the kind of inner duality that Deanna Troi described to in “Lonely Among Us,” or to have a sense of a higher presence watching over us. (I used to fantasize as a kid that I was narrating my life to a TV audience, but I figured that was just daydreaming. Now I think that was the analogy I formed for my inner sense of my mind observing itself, being both watcher and watched.)
	Tucker’s cagey “Not that we know of” is a nod to Abramson’s line to him in UL about having met androids.
241-2	And here’s my refutation of the idea of “Intelligent Design,” the fallacious assumption that a complex design requires a sentient designer. On the contrary, all it really needs is selection pressure to favor one form over another. Conscious design is merely one kind of selection pressure, but trial-and-error functionality is as well. Nobody has to decide that a round wheel will roll better than a square one; it just will.
243ff	I had to do a fair amount of research to figure out the right computer terminology to use, since electronics and computers have always been my weakest subject in the sciences. The technobabble about “kernels” and “root privileges” was mostly added in revisions, and I’m still not sure it’s entirely accurate.
Chapter 13
249	Gantin is named for a figure mentioned in The Klingon Art of War, Gantin the Mighty, who earned Kahless’s respect by refusing to betray his sworn allegiance to Kahless’s enemy. So even though he was on the wrong side of history, he is remembered for being honorable. Perhaps Deqan had that in mind when he chose the ship for Worik’s mission.
252-5	I originally intended to show the debate among the Partnership leaders. But by this point, I had already done a couple of scenes of the Partners debating stuff and there was another coming up. To avoid repetition, I chose instead to focus on one character’s inner struggle with the decision, which I felt made it more personal and poignant.
255	It was always my intent to show that the Monsof were more intelligent, and less subservient, than they appeared. Their lack of verbal fluency is not due to a lack of overall intellect; they simply haven’t achieved the particular mutations that gave humans the ability to form fully grammatical language. But they can communicate a great deal nonverbally, to those who have experience reading them.
256	Travis doesn’t know the hundredth of it because, of course, Abramson is Flint/Akharin the immortal (from TOS: “Requiem for Methuselah”), and is about 4,000 years old.
256-7	The difference in resolution between Ware transporters and replicators is the same principle that applies to the Federation equivalents in the 24th century, and is the reason living beings can’t be replicated or transporter-cloned (except in rare circumstances).
260	In the first draft of Tower of Babel, the Klingon captain in the opening scene was Korok from “Marauders.” But I decided the coincidence was too great there (since he was involved in the same events as Reed and Mayweather), so I changed Korok to an original character, Lokog. This is why their names are so similar. But this story gave me a chance to use Korok at a greater remove from any former Enterprise crew, and it made sense that he might be in the same situation as Lokog, since they were basically the same character.
	The tricky thing was rationalizing the conceit of “Marauders” that deuterium was something that could be mined from a planet’s interior, rather than extracted from the abundant quantities of hydrogen and water (vapor, liquid, or solid) available just about anywhere in the galaxy. It was VGR: “Demon” that first screwed up the portrayal of “deuterium” in the Trek universe by treating it as essentially a liquid that was rare in space and mined from superhot planets (the kind that realistically would’ve outgassed all their hydrogen, including the deuterium isotope, long ago). This is because the rare substance was originally scripted as dilithium, but the producers made an arbitrary decision to change it to deuterium because they liked the joke of the ship “running out of gas.” I pretty much choose to disregard “Demon” entirely, but “Marauders” isn’t quite so ridiculous, because at least it portrays deuterium as a flammable gas, which, being an isotope of hydrogen, it would be (in molecular form, anyway). I just had to explain why it would be in underground deposits and preferable to the alternatives. Celebium is an imaginary radioactive element from TOS: “Turnabout Intruder,” so I could give it arbitrary properties like producing deuterium as a decay product. (Radioactive atoms decay by shedding protons and neutrons from their nuclei or splitting into smaller nuclei. A deuterium nucleus is one proton and one neutron. I’m not aware of any real decay process that results in deuterium nuclei, but I suppose it’s theoretically possible.)
261	Of course, the third party that trained the miners was Archer and his crew, but Korok never discovered that.
262	And my thanks to Umplor for letting me patch up a plot hole that I overlooked until I got to this scene. Again, my process was very improvisational.
Chapter 14
267	The full name of Shumar’s ship should really be rendered as United Star Ship Essex, which is what the U.S.S. stands for. But there are strict rules about how we’re allowed to render ship names and titles, for trademark reasons or something.
	The listed “precepts of a warrior” are eight of the ten from TKAOW—in order, precepts 2, 3 and 5, 4 and 6, and 8 and 9. Followed in the next paragraph, as explicitly stated, by precepts 1 and 10. I left out only #7, “Leave nothing until tomorrow.” Maybe I’ll get around to that one later…
	I admit, it’s awfully contrived that we’ve seen countless Klingon stories where nobody ever mentioned the precepts of the qes’a’ and now we have one story that has multiple Klingon characters repeatedly quoting and paraphrasing it. All I can say is that Keith DeCandido knows Klingons a lot better than I do, and TKAOW was very helpful in getting into their mindset, especially given how quickly I had to write.
270	Worik is correct that he will be remembered as a coward; that’s how TKAOW characterizes him.  Perhaps I’m going against Keith’s intent here by redeeming Worik, but it seems to me that what a Klingon historian would see as cowardice might well look very different from a human perspective. And it’s not uncommon for people’s historical reputation to differ from the reality. I like the contrast of the two different works portraying the same event in such different ways.
Chapter 15
291	The Essex was established in TNG: “Power Play,” which gave it a crew complement of 229 at the time of its destruction in 2167. This was difficult to reconcile with the NX-class Enterprise’s complement of 83, especially when the Romulan War novels established the Daedalus as an older class. I resolved the discrepancy by giving the Daedalus class a cramped, submarine-like interior to fit more people into a tight space. While 229 is around the maximum it could hold, I establish here that some mission profiles demand fewer personnel than others.
292ff	My assumption from the start was that using the Ware would let me do space-battle action without having to contend with my distaste for having my protagonists kill people. But as I got into scenes of battle with Klingons, such as this one, I realized they were heading in a direction I wasn’t comfortable with. My favorite Star Trek action scene is the opening sequence of “Divergence,” a tense, thrilling, danger-fraught sequence that’s driven by problem-solving and feats of daring to save lives rather than fighting and killing. And I enjoyed how much the climaxes of both Avengers movies focused on the defense of innocents. So I chose to follow those examples and build action sequences like this one around rescue operations and creative problem-solving, keeping the more violent stuff in the background.
	Paris taking over the helm is partly a nod to the role of her descendant, Tom Paris of Voyager, but also an excuse to avoid having to invent a new character to fly the ship.
	My reason for making Morgan Kelly transsexual was quite simple. “Power Play” had established Morgan Kelly as Essex’s security chief but hadn’t specified the character’s gender. I was unable to decide whether to make Kelly male or female, so I decided, heck, why not both? At least, sequentially both. I decided that Kelly would be female now to balance out the other two canonical Essex characters, Bryce Shumar and Steven Mullen. But Michael Jan Friedman’s Starfleet: Year One had previously portrayed Morgan Kelly as a redheaded woman, and I wanted to make my version distinct from that one. So mine is a black woman who used to be a man. (I assume she’s the sibling of Crewman J. Kelly from “Vox Sola.”)
	I hope it’s clear that the paradox of Kelly being more aggressive is not about her gender (i.e. expecting women to be less aggressive than men, which would be silly) but about her comfort with herself (i.e. expecting peace with oneself to make one more peaceful).
293	Realistically, energy beams in space would be invisible, so I prefer to assume that viewscreens create false-color images, or at least amplify faint images to naked-eye visibility.
296	My assumption is that phase pistols/cannons and phasers are the same technology differing only by elision over time, like cellular telephones vs. cell phones and motorcars vs. cars. Ditto for photonic and photon torpedoes. I’d originally planned to attribute this shorthand to Val Williams in Tower of Babel, but I felt it would be small-universe syndrome if Captain Kirk’s great-grandmother were given credit for the word “phaser.” I was more comfortable letting a more minor character coin the term, although my intent is that Kelly is just relaying slang that’s already in use among armory/security personnel (hence her abashment about letting it slip into her on-duty reporting).
297	The use of a warp impact to detonate Coridan’s dilithium deposits occurred in The Good That Men Do, as the opening salvo of the Romulan War.
Chapter 16
315-16	Antocadra sh’Thyfon is a loosely anagrammatic tribute to Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana, creator of the Andorians. It’s not the only anagram name among the crew; I derived “Reshthenar sh’Prenni” roughly from the letters of the names Shatner and Pine, since I imagined her (at least initially) as sort of an Andorian Kirk for an Andorian Enterprise.
317	Captain O’Neill is presumably Donna “D.O.” O’Neill, established in several ENT novels by David Stern and Andy Mangels & Mike Martin as Enterprise NX-01’s night-shift watch commander, and based on a Pocket Books staffer of the same name. Groll is presumably a Tellarite captain, but is not based on any existing character. I don’t like it when 100% of the references in a book are to people and things that have already been encountered in the extant TV shows and movies. It makes the universe feel unrealistically tiny. There has to be a larger reality beyond the slice of it depicted in existing works, so I always try to seed references to unseen things alongside the familiar Easter eggs.
	Captain La Forge is an homage to David Gerrold’s TOS novel The Galactic Whirlpool, which mentioned a Captain George La Forge commanding the USS Detroit in the early days of Starfleet. George La Forge was a real-life quadriplegic Star Trek fan who died in 1975. Gerrold commemorated him in Whirlpool, and TNG’s Geordi La Forge was named in his honor. In-universe, the Captain La Forge mentioned here is presumably Geordi’s ancestor.
319	TAS: “The Infinite Vulcan,” set in 2269 or so, said that “[t]here’s been peace in the Federation for over one hundred years.” I suppose that’s not strictly incompatible with a brief UFP-Klingon war in 2165, but it seemed like a good idea at the time to establish the technicality that this war was never formally declared.
Chapter 17
328	Honestly, I’m not at all satisfied with my excuse for why the shutdown signal could only affect one system at a time but the destruct signal could spread more widely. After all, the shutdown signal was also co-opting the Ware’s own mechanisms in its own way, so the stated distinction is unconvincing. It’s what I needed for the sake of the plot, but I regret being unable to justify it better.
331	Val Williams has a lot of traits that Jim Kirk later inherits, and we see here that a tendency to tear or lose her upper garment in action is among them. I employed a similar homage when writing Emerald Blair in Only Superhuman, but since this book is part of a less adult-oriented franchise, Val has another layer on underneath.
335-6	There’s a certain symmetry to the fact that Kirk’s ancestors began their relationship on a collapsing bridge, isn’t there? I was aware of the resonance with Kirk’s death scene as I wrote this, though it wasn’t premeditated. I had to resist throwing in an overly on-the-nose bit of foreshadowing like “No way am I going to die on a lousy bridge!”
Chapter 18
338ff	Once again, I chose to structure the following sequence around rescue rather than combat. Continuity demanded that the Ware be utterly destroyed to explain why the 23rd-century Federation didn’t possess the advanced technology it offered. But I couldn’t bring myself to make the Partnership’s fall too cataclysmic; I wanted there to be a ray of hope. So I found ways to spare as many lives as I could.
348	I hope you all hate me at this point. I wanted to create an original crew for Vol’Rala that was as compelling and likeable as any of the prior TV or novel crews, to make you want to see their adventures continue for a long time—and then cruelly yank the rug out. I wanted their fate to really hit hard. For myself, I’m disappointed that I won’t get to write them again. I’m amazed by how richly they came to life as distinct characters in just a few scenes. Maybe knowing their fate in advance motivated me to make the most of them in every scene.
	But leaving their fate unportrayed was not meant to leave an out for their survival. As Banerji says later, they wouldn’t stop fighting as long as there were others who needed their help. It’s just that I’d had them say everything that needed to be said, and showing the actual mechanics of their destruction would have been an anticlimax, certainly on the printed page. And it probably would’ve been too painful to write, and unnecessarily harsh to read. Better to go out on a more positive note.
Chapter 19
349	It would, of course, have been ideal to include Phlox in this briefing somehow, but it just wasn’t feasible.
	Yes, the Golden Gate Bridge is named for the Golden Gate Strait, which is named in turn for the main ceremonial entrance in the walls of historical Constantinople. It wasn’t named for the bridge’s color, as some people assume. In fact, the color of the bridge is orange vermilion, a shade that was chosen for its visibility through the San Francisco fog.
	I never got around to establishing what the Tyrellians look like. This is not unprecedented; Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire mentions a Tyrellian aboard the USS Robinson, Sivadeki, but never depicts her directly. Tyrellians may be human-looking, since TNG: “Starship Mine” established that there were five of them in the Enterprise-D crew, but most Starfleet background extras on that show appeared human.
350	Note that Star Charts portrays the region of space containing Balduk and Tyrellia as being occupied by a “peninsula” of Klingon territory. The events of this book are the origin of that branch of the Empire. (Never mind STSC’s inclusion of Klach D’Kel Bracht in that territory; the book was published before ENT identified that name with the Briar Patch.)
352	And here I’m trying to account for the strange lack of robotics in the Federation.
354	I wanted the name of K’Vagh’s father to be based on one of the roles played by the late James Avery, who portrayed K’Vagh. He’s best known as Uncle Phil Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and I first came to know him as the voice of Shredder on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and as Winslow in the Linda Hamilton/Ron Perlman Beauty and the Beast, and as the voice of Sir Bryant on The Legend of Prince Valiant. However, none of those names could be suitably tweaked into a Klingon-sounding name, so the role I went with was James Rhodes/War Machine on the ’90s Iron Man cartoon, hence “son of Wor’maq.” (Oddly, Avery was replaced in all three of those animation roles by Dorian Harewood at different times, even though the two actors sound very little alike to me. I’ve never known why that was.)
357	Antaak will indeed go on to research cures for the Qu’Vat virus, with unfortunate results, as seen in Excelsior: Forged in Fire by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels.
358	When I consulted with Keith DeCandido on this scene, I hoped he would give me more details to flesh out the fight beyond the first paragraph, since I felt I’d kind of cheated by only summarizing the rest in vague terms. But according to Keith (who’s an accomplished karate instructor), I’d inadvertently gotten it right, since the middle of a fight often feels like a blur to the participants as adrenaline and/or fatigue take over. He did help me with the details of the final strike, though.
359-60	Laneth’s favoring of pragmatism and victory at any means over honor is meant to presage the more treacherous Klingons of the original series. In TOS, the Romulans were the honorable ones (or at least the older generation was) while the Klingons celebrated treachery and deceit. That first began to change when The Search for Spock was rewritten to substitute Klingon villains for Romulans without actually altering anything else about them (which is also how Klingons ended up with Birds-of-Prey and cloaking devices), and then got embraced by TNG to justify the Klingons being Federation allies. Other works that address the TOS-era Klingons’ disregard for honor include TOS: In the Name of Honor by Dayton Ward and Seven Deadly Sins: “The Unhappy Ones” by Keith R.A. DeCandido.
361	This is the second time in ROTF that I’ve offered an explanation for the lack of an Enterprise between NX-01 and NCC-1701. I hadn’t planned on having two different reasons for that, but once I knew what Vol’Rala’s fate would be, it seemed to take priority over the reasons expressed earlier in ACOF.
Epilogue
367	The portrayal of the Alpha Centauri system here is consistent with what I established in The Buried Age. It’s believed that any planets of Alpha Centauri might be quite arid because the heat from two suns would have vaporized all the water and other volatiles (liquids and gases) in the system in its early days. However, the gravitational influence of Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star orbiting the A-B pair at a great distance, may have sent enough comets inward to replenish the volatiles, at the trade-off of a relatively heavy bombardment rate which could cause multiple extinction events.
	The deadly arthropods of Centauri VII would presumably include the Centaurian slug seen in the 2009 Star Trek movie.
	Flint in TOS: “Requiem for Methuselah” possessed the Creation lithographs of Taranullus of Centauri VII, although the episode was ambiguous on whether he was actually their creator. But I didn’t realize that last part when I plotted this book. It’s not explicit that he was Taranullus, but he certainly could have been.
368	Akharin is, of course, correct about bioneural circuitry, which will not see a revival until the 2370s in Voyager.
	Akharin was born in Mesopotamia in 3834 BCE. The wheel, it is currently believed, was developed in Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE, originally as a means for making pottery, then adapted for vehicles three centuries later. So, in the words of another engineering genius, “how do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” It may, however, have been invented independently on the Eurasian steppes. See http://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html for more.
370	The notion that The Creation of Adam included a representation of the human brain was proposed by Dr. Frank Meshberger in 1990, and though the idea was initially met with skepticism, it was corroborated by later study showing that certain details in the painting exactly mapped to anatomical details of the brain. It’s still not absolutely certain if this was Michelangelo’s intent, but Akharin may have been in a position to know, having been living as Leonardo da Vinci at the time the Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted. The two contemporaries rarely interacted directly, but Akharin/Leonardo would probably have been in a position to hear things through the Renaissance grapevine.
	Akharin will, of course, eventually purchase the planet Holberg 917G, where he will call himself Flint and pursue the creation of the perfect woman, as seen in “Requiem for Methuselah.”
371	TNG: Immortal Coil by Jeffrey Lang established that Akharin/Flint would be the mentor of Noonien Soong, Data’s creator. So it would take a couple more centuries before he makes good on his promise to guide Arik Soong’s heirs.